Al Barile Is Dead. Long Live Al Barile.
His band SSD changed my life. For the better? For the worse? Yes.
Last night Al Barile, founder and guitarist for hardcore stalwarts SSD, died after a long battle with cancer. My heart goes out to his wife Nancy Barile.
“These are the best years of your fucking life.” He was shouting at me. But his shouts were supposed to be like those scenes in movies where someone gets slapped just to get them to stop the hysterics. The hysterics in this case were probably some long extended woe-is-me bit of which I might have been guilty as charged.
“You’re around the greatest number of people your own age than you’ll ever be again, you don’t have to to be at work tomorrow morning and you have little or no outstanding debt. What are you complaining about?”
Forty-two years later I can safely say that he was wrong about most of that but one thing he was very right about was the amount of free time. But also, as it was, the way I chose to spend that free time was life-affirming to say the least. I went and saw as much music as my eyes and ears could hold.
And while I used to laugh at Deadheads following “their” band around the country I was thrust into a position where that “free” time allowed me the luxury to do the same. But there’s embracing music widely, which I did in seeing everyone from Klaus Nomi, John Cale and The Ramones to Rose Royce, Tom Waits and the Jacksons, there’s also the much deeper embrace. The kind where you do, indeed, follow one band around, the goal being to see them as many times as humanly possible because this kind of greatness, whatever was the substance of that greatness, needs to last you the entirety of your life.
There were just a handful of bands I did this with. There were only a handful of bands I wanted to do this with: Bad Brains, X, and the reason why we’re all here today, SSD.
Now in the pantheon of bands I’ve seen, I may have seen a lot more Minor Threat shows (but Whipping Boy, my band, was playing with them, so in my filing system this didn’t count), as well as shows with Negative Approach, Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks (my first show ever was with them and causally connected to Keith Morris being a mensch) and Fear. But these had more to do with proximity issues. If I was in town and they were playing, I was going.
But if Bad Brains, X or SSD were playing I’d be traveling to see them. Different cities, different days, it was creepy enough that at one show John Doe from X saw me before they started playing, sort of smiled but more than anything cocked his head and mouthed “what the fuck?”
In those pre-9/11 days flying around on stolen airplane tickets was my jam, so I jammed when and wherever I could.
But out of those three bands the only one I had the temerity to approach in any real pre-Internet way was SSD. Specifically Al Barile. And in the way things worked in those days letters were jetted back and forth across country and Al was as solid of a person as solid could be.
If Whipping Boy was lucky enough to play Boston, despite getting ripped off by promoter Billy Ruane, which Al told me was going to happen, it was because of Al. If I got in free to see them, it was also because of Al. If I got a care package with stickers and shirts? Al.
In fact all of the cats in SSD were collectively helpful. It was one of them who told me that my continual kvetching about Billy Ruane was going to possibly lead to legal action against me. It didn’t stop me. Nothing but Ruane’s death did that. But I appreciated the gesture.
Over the years, in an offhand way, I posted some blog reference to the fact that if you loved a band you manifested that love by being willing and trusting enough to follow them wherever they were going. So when I mentioned SSD’s 1984, How We Rock, lambasted at the time as a confusing AC/DC tribute record, and expressed my love for it, I heard from Al again.
He thanked me for “getting it” and we started up again, as though no time had passed. Except it had and while the Internet made it easier, his illness had made it harder. But I paid it forward any way I could and when Nancy Barile had written a great post I asked her if she could/would expand it into an article for the now-defunct website I used to be an editor for.
I remember Nancy telling me about him standing up for some woman when he could barely stand when she was being taunted by some MAGA types.
She did, maybe even more than once. She also helped me to identify all the juice in the above photo from the first riot show I ever went to (pictured up top): Dicky Barrett, later of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Michael Gira from Swans, my friend Pete whose father used to sing for The Coasters.
After that show but before the riot, Springa the singer’s photographer brother, came up to me geeked about the photo above. It was pre-digital so he couldn’t have seen it already but he knew he had captured a moment of unbridled joy at SSD opening with their song “Glue” which had become emblematic of so much of the spirit of early hardcore to me.
Got to stick together, gotta stick together, gotta stick together like glue…the crew…
In a later quote Jeff Nelson from Minor Threat had expressed some sort of dismay that SSD had identified themselves as a “crew” but this underscored tensions that were rife in both early punk, as well as hardcore. The middle class disdain for working class ethos. I felt it to a lesser degree when hanging around the Beastie Boys but it was there in aggressive evidence with certain elements of the DC “crew”.
To SSD et al’s credit though this didn’t faze their love of the DC scene and, in fact, the only cross words I had ever been exposed to were between elements of NYHC and Boston that had much more the flavor of a minor family feud.
That’s neither here nor there though because I woke this morning to the news that Al had died, hours after a post he had made where he had said that he had almost died.
I don’t like obits and I don’t like to write them and if I can get out of writing them, I will, but with Al Barile, much like with Willy Loman, it felt to me very much like attention must be paid. And not some generalized tribute. A very specific one because Al was a real one.
Even with cancer eating away at him Al was in the streets protesting some shit during the first Trump administration. I remember Nancy telling me about him standing up for some woman when he could barely stand when she was being taunted by some MAGA types.
Textbook definition of walking it like he talked it? Al Barile.
And through these I can make believe that today never happened. But it did and in the end I just feel lucky that I’ve been able to participate and the fact that Al hung on as long as did is an object lesson in that shit some of us only just sang about: POWER.
So with the news and the tone and the timbre of a generally shitty mise-en-scène courtesy of the aforementioned Trump, I’ve been playing SSD all day, all of that sledgehammer glory, memories of Al looking like a kid at Christmas when he got to meet his heroes from Cheap Trick (and hats off to them for being open to this happening), of Springa telling me that time he witnessed a stoning in the wilds of Massachusetts, of Nancy telling me that my show memory was faulty because she recognized the first generation of SSD shirts on Dicky at the riot show…now memories.
And through these I can make believe that today never happened. But it did and in the end I just feel lucky that I’ve been able to participate and the fact that Al hung on as long as he did is an object lesson in that shit some of us only just sang about: POWER. And any and many instances in my subsequent life when I’ve been a hard head facing down the more powerful I’ve recalled this, and done the mighty right thing.
So I love you Al. And I’m hoping you at least knew that, or guessed it, before you died.
Shows have been added!!! Get tickets HERE. Plus SUPERSONIC in Birmingham at the end of August, as well as London right before then! Did we mention the US? Well, that’s there too. When? Sometime this summer. Still waiting on final confirmation, but no more questions about when in the US. It’s a done deal.
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.