Punk Grudges 4 Punk Grudge Holders!
45 year old beefs, refusal to let go of said beefs and America turns a questioning eye to Jello Biafra and Ian MacKaye while asking: why?
Trump is everywhere, all the time, for most of the time. Every day a new outrage so there’s only one Trump solution to the Trump problem and that’s to turn the Trump volume waaaay down. A Trump substack every day is no one but Trump’s idea of fun. So Trump titration? Here? Yes, always. Just FYI.
When the FIGHT book came out the first reading for it was at some art space in San Francisco. Vale from RE/Search Books was also on the “bill” and we were standing around shooting the shit. Tom Hallewell from Denver, Colorado had turned me on to RE/Search and I’d been an avid reader, eventually forcing an introduction and now was a known associate of Vale and the RE/Search crew.
The event organizer came up to us and asked if there was anything we wanted or needed before the show start and I asked for a small glass of red wine, if he had it.
Vale’s head snapped around. “Wine?!!?” His looked accused. “I thought you were STRAIGHT EDGE.”
“I’m 45 years old Vale,” I said to a guy who used to dance around naked in San Francisco parks high on LSD according to rumor.
“Well Jello is still straight edge!”
“If you think a small glass of red wine makes you an alcoholic I might suggest you get out more,” I smiled, he shrugged and the evening went on without a hitch, drunken or otherwise.
But still this Jello Biafra thing. That is, him as a standard bearer of something/anything significant. In a weird turn of events Biafra was one of the first people I came to know when I moved from New York to California.
[H]is wife Theresa had just left him [Biafra] for Frank Discussion from the Feederz, and if ever there was going to be a time that I felt like we were friends that would have been it.
After a crazy night at the Mudd Club in New York where I’d met a San Francisco transplant, she had turned me on to the Dead Kennedys and suggested I look them up when I got out west. Which I did. A subsequent meeting that ended up having me over at Biafra’s house on any number of other occasions.
It was there that I met Geza X, Howie Klein, Winston Smith, Tim Yohannon and any number of local and not so local luminaries. Biafra held court and I held my tongue. A state of affairs that got Whipping Boy, my band, on the Not So Quiet On the Western Front album, me singing backing vocals on some Dead Kennedys’ songs, Steve Ballinger, Whipping Boy co-founder, doing some art work for them, and Klaus Fluoride producing two Whipping Boy records.
And when I started publishing The Birth of Tragedy Magazine, Biafra was one of the first people I put in it with a timing that was eerily effective for getting the best interview out of him that I’ve ever read. You see, his wife Theresa had just left him for Frank Discussion from the Feederz, and if ever there was going to be a time that I felt like we were friends that would have been it.
He was open and candid in a public facing way that’s rare for him. No agitprop, no hectoring, no political posturing. Just a guy trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong.
Some time after this I got home though and there was a message on my refrigerator: “Call Biafra.” He had apparently called and so I called him back. We chatted for a few minutes and then…
“Hey,” he said, “what do you WANT?”
And in that moment a sudden burst of rage from me. His tone and timbre had pissed me off: “Hey…YOU called ME! I’m returning YOUR call.”
He got quiet and then realized, out loud. “Oh. I was calling Eugene Chadbourne and I guess I got your numbers confused.” Then the phone line went dead, as did any interest I had in maintaining this connection. The last conversation I had with him had him asking me to ask Ian MacKaye “what he’s doing with all of that Dischord money!”
I literally had not thought of him but for two noteworthy occasions. An OXBOW show with Sahara Hotnights at the Bottom of the Hill. He showed up at the merch table and very much wanted a copy of An Evil Heat. For free. I told him the best I could do would be to give it to him wholesale. He hemmed and hawed, you see the record was out on Neurosis’ label Neurot, and as he felt that they knifed him in the lawsuit with the rest of his band, he just could NOT bring himself to pay for it.
Which was fine.
Until I turned around and back and saw the CD and him missing. Which made me laugh. What didn’t make me laugh though? Someone suggesting to him that he have me on his podcast and him demurring because, according to reports, I was a member of the NRA.
Which was not fine.
I was not a member of the NRA and never had been. An avid gun collector, yes, but not politically aligned with any gun advocacy group. I had to laugh. And then an interview with East Bay Ray talking about the reconstituted, but Biafra-less Dead Kennedys.
“Iggy left the Stooges and had a career – ditto Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground or Morrissey with the Smiths. Where’s Biafra’s solo career?” Ray asked in an interview in Guitar World magazine. A finer point had never been made.
Something that came to mind — the what the fuck of it all — when I had gotten an email with a clip attached and a note: “You seen this?”
It was a clip from a documentary on Midwest hardcore and an interview with the aforementioned Ian MacKaye wherein he complains about a show Whipping Boy had played there with Minor Threat. Apparently I had volunteered us to play the show for free BUT after we played and saw how many people showed up we asked him for $100. Which he gave us.
Sans threats, or the brandishing of weapons. Then 45 years later he described it in the documentary as “fucked” and I thought back to Biafra’s question regarding what MacKaye had done with all of that Dischord money. Specifically in light of MacKaye still being pissed off about $100 45 years later.
I liked Ian, always, even more so than Biafra. Biafra I had been trying to like (and there’s a reason he’s been dismasted by so many so-called friends like Frank Discussion, or the Butthole Surfers or Flipper). MacKaye I had genuinely liked though. So much so that I’d be glad to pay him back his $100 with interest if that would make him whole.
But it all brought me back to a conversation I had had with Brian Sheklian from Grand Theft Audio who was putting together a hardcore series. He was calling every hardcore band of note from the first class of hardcore, 1980 to 1984, and decades later old wounds were still wounds and sometimes had become new wounds.
Old grievances were not nearly old enough to get anybody to agree to anything which is precisely why GTA is no more.
Then an epiphany that came to me as shockingly sure as anything that announces itself like thunder: we’re all fucking crazy. Only explanation that makes sense when none of our grievances and grudges are dimmed or dulled by the passage of time. We’re all classic examples of a generation that won’t let things go and that’s to our credit, as well as our detriment.
So when I was doing Black Face with Chuck Dukowski and he quit partially because MacKaye threw shade at the name, I didn’t ask why. When John Joseph asked me to stop playing peacemaker between him and Cro-Mags founder Harley Flanagan, pre-stabbing, I didn’t ask why. When Harley and the recently deceased Al Barile got into an online beef over some 40 year old shit and I tried to intervene, I also didn’t ask why.
Because, to borrow a line from Hyman Roth, this is the business that we’ve chosen.
So thank and fuck you for reading this far! It’s truly appreciated/hated.
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"Dismasted". A+.