All posts by jruland

SST 385 Good for You Life Is Too Short to Not Hold a Grudge

SST

Format: LP

Is Mike Vallely a good singer?

That’s the question that kept coming up while I listened to one of the last albums in the SST catalog: Good for You’s 2013 debut LP Life Is too Short to Not Hold a Grudge(SST 385). Pro skateboarder Mike V was infamously named the singer of Black Flag in early 2014, but he had been kicking around SST since 2003 when Black Flag reunited for its poorly received Benefit for Cats. During that misguided comeback, Vallely performed a few sets with the band, much to the confusion and consternation of Black Flag’s fans. 

Many people believe Black Flag was goaded into reuniting a second time in 2013 after Keith, Chuck, and Dez formed FLAG with Bill Stevenson and Stephen Egerton of the Descendents and started ripping shit up. 

But Jordan Schwartz, who moderates an SST page on Facebook, saw Good for You play in 2013 in front of a very small crowd and he believes that the underwhelming response to his new record Life Is too Short to Not Hold a Grudge was Ginn’s main motivation for getting Black Flag together again. 

The problem with Vallely singing Black Flag is that sonically, physically, pretty much every category one can imagine, he comes across as a poor man’s Henry Rollins, a comparison that flatters neither party. But in Good for You, Vallely provides a better sense of what he can do, and I have to say I’m a fan. For one thing, he actually sings, which complements Ginn’s repetitive riffing on the record. 

By this point, Ginn had released so many records by his various “bands,” which were essentially studio projects where Ginn played multiple instruments in a variety of styles none of which were hardcore punk, that the public had more or less tuned him out. But Ginn seemed to think he was on to something with Good for You, a name that can be read as a passive aggressive putdown and whose initials are GFY, i.e. go fuck yourself. 

By 2013, SST was mostly putting out new releases in CD format, but Life Is too Short to Not Hold a Grudge came out on wax in two versions: black and white. I have the white vinyl and the type on the cover is embossed—a level of care that’s pretty remarkable considering that SST was just a shadow of its former self at this point. 

But I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room. The thing that Good for You is best known for isn’t Vallely’s singing or Ginn’s guitar playing but the theremin.

Yes, Greg Ginn, the wizard of American hardcore, let the spooky-sounding wail of the theremin get its hooks into him.

In 2012, Ginn played a theremin-heavy set as The Royal We in a tent at Coachella and somehow managed to clear the room. From that point on Ginn was undaunted. It didn’t matter if he was playing as The Royal We, Good for You, or Black Flag, he was going to bust out his theremin.

The theremin was invented by a Russian scientist while conducting electromagnetic radiation research. He moved to New York and may or may not have been kidnapped by Russian spies and sent to a labor camp. The instrument never really caught on in the United States but was used to great effect in early science fiction films, such as Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The theremin is featured on a number of songs on Life Is too Short to Not Hold a Grudge, especially on Side 2. On “It’s Just Business,” “Dreams,” and “Blaze of Glory” Ginn busts out the theremin in the spot where one might expect to hear a guitar solo. Overall, Life Is too Short to Not Hold a Grudge is mellower than many of Ginn’s “guitartechno” experiments and while I kinda like it the record ranks near the bottom of my SST collection.

I don’t have an issue with the theremin per se, but to my ears it all sounds the same. There’s only so much you can do with the instrument. Call me jaded, but if you want me to get excited about a theremin you have to set it on fire during a theremin duel accompanied by an enormous Tesla coil.

This post was originally published in slightly different form at Message from the Underworld.

SST 188 Screaming Trees Invisible Lantern

SST

Format: Tape

Many, many books have been written about the Seattle sound but one of the things I’ve always found fascinating is how one hundred miles to the east in tiny Ellensburg, Washington, the Screaming Trees created the template for everything that followed.

When I pop in my tape of Invisible Lantern (SST 188), which was released in 1988, I hear hints of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana, but I also hear elements of the Sonics, the Wailers, and the Ventures—three garage rock titans of the Northwest.

It was this garage rock influence that vocalist Mark Lanegan demonized in his 2020 memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep. Lanegan was surprisingly candid with regards to how he felt about those early Screaming Trees records released by SST. He slagged everything from his bandmate’s physical appearance to the Screaming Trees’ sound. He does it early and he does it often—even as he glosses over a lot of the band’s early years:

“The Trees, on the other hand, were always fighting: fighting each other, fighting fans and promoters and bouncers, fighting to find a direction. Three records in, we still didn’t know what the fuck we were. We had no identity beyond our notoriety for our unhinged live show.”

Harsh? Lanegan was just getting warmed up.

“Our records were a shitty mishmash of half-baked ideas and catchy tunes derailed by the stupidest of lyrics. I fucking ached when I thought of all the opportunities we missed as we churned out shit record after shit record.”

A lot of people I talked to in the Northwest for Corporate Rock Sucks were caught off guard by Lanegan’s vitriol. While they were willing to accept Lanegan’s unflattering comments as his version of the truth, no one saw them coming, which made them all more hurtful.

Well, Invisible Lantern is not a shit record. Screaming Trees’ third studio album was the band’s fourth recording with producer Steve Fisk, an exceptionally talented musician and audio engineer who went on to work with virtually everyone in the Northwest.

When Fisk moved to Ellensburg to run a recording studio, Gary Lee Conner realized he’d been handed a golden opportunity. The extremely prolific songwriter and guitarist made the most of it by cranking out a series of fuzzed-out records drenched in frenzied feedback. Screaming Tree’s SST catalog sounds cohesive to my ears. The band was raw but Gary Lee Conner was miles ahead of his mates.

The main takeaway from Invisible Lantern is that Gary Lee Conner is just a ripping good guitar player. Riffs, hooks, melodies—he can do it all. He knows what made ’60s garage rock great. Lanegan knocks these songs as being derivative of that era but what I think he means is that he felt it was passé to be playing that kind of music in the mid-’80s. On that count I think Lanegan was wrong. Screaming Trees—along with other SST acts Das Damen and Dinosaur—were ahead of their time, playing loud, fast guitar rock to audiences who mostly weren’t ready for it. (The Lemonheads played a string of dates with Screaming Trees and Dinosaur and Evan Dando insists there was never more than thirty or forty people in the room.)

Songs like “Ivy,” “Invisible Lantern,” and “Even If” all capture the spirit of what Conner was striving to achieve.  “The Second I Awake” is a total shredder that might benefit from a more energetic performance by Lanegan (just saying). But his laconic vocals are perfectly suited for “Grey Diamond Desert.” 

While listening to the song last night, Nuvia called out from the next room: “Is that Nirvana?” No, but yes. It’s everything that made the music of the Northwest great.  

One last word about Lanegan’s rift with Screaming Trees. When I talked to Lanegan for the book, I asked him if there was a follow-up memoir in the works. He said no, but that his upcoming poetry collection, Leaving California from Heartworm Press, was the sequel. So I ordered it and was very intrigued by one of the shorter pieces in the book called “Poem for G.L.C.” Here it is in its entirety:

Although you were hard
On me

I am sorry
For my discourteous
Portrayal

Of you

I realize now
That most stories
Are much better

Left untold

Interesting, no? I wonder if Gary Lee has seen it (or if he even cares).

This post was originally published in slightly different form in Message from the Underworld.

SST 085 Painted Willie Live from Van Nuys

SST

Format: LP

Although Hüsker Dü’s departure from SST has often been characterized as a huge loss for the label, the success of New Day Rising (SST 31) and Flip Your Wig (SST 55), released eight months apart in 1985, were a boon. Those records helped SST expand its roster of artists and its reputation as indie tastemakers.

Not surprisingly, many of the initial signings came from SST’s circle of friends in the South Bay. For instance, D.C.3, Overkill, SWA, and Würm all released records in 1985. Some of the new projects were directly associated with the Black Flag touring enterprise. Black Flag had been taking SST artists out on the road for years, but bands like October Faction and Tom Troccoli’s Dog were engineered by SST to serve as opening acts and were made up of members of Black Flag and its road crew as a way to save money.

But that wasn’t the only reason. Greg Ginn, who was in both October Faction and Tom Troccoli’s Dog, loved to play guitar. He believed his performance in Black Flag improved when he had a chance to warm up first. A short set with October Faction or Tom Troccoli’s Dog kept Ginn sharp when it was time to unleash Black Flag.

That’s all well and good, but there wasn’t a natural audience for records by October Faction and Tom Troccoli’s Dog. The music was both improvisational and experimental and stood apart from the rest of the catalog. That’s neither here nor there. I’m not going to judge the quality of those records (yet). But fans tended to lump this new crop of SST releases together as house bands. That, my friends, is a shame because one of SST’s new signings in 1985 is often unfairly included in this group: Painted Willie.

I’m writing to say: this travesty must end now.

Like the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, and Hüsker Dü, Painted Willie was a hard rocking trio that consisted of Vic Makauskas on guitar, Phil Newman on bass, and Dave Markey on drums. Before I get into why I love this band, let’s get into the many reasons why Painted Willie is not an SST house band.

First and foremost, Newman and Markey were in a punk band called SIN 34 all the way back in 1981 that was fronted by Julie Lanfeld. SIN 34 played with all the big punk bands of the era, appeared in a bunch of comps, and were featured in fanzines and magazines—none of which had anything to do with SST. SIN 34 had that quintessential LA sound: fast and trashy with a touch of menace. 

Markey wasn’t just a musician, he also founded the zine We Got Power with Alan Gilbert, Jennifer Schwartz, her brother Jordan Schwartz, and Kim Pilkington. Based out of Santa Monica, We Got Power covered all the major SoCal bands of the early ‘80s.

But wait there’s more. Markey wasn’t just a musician and a zinester, he was also a filmmaker with a passion for making his own projects. These included a horror movie in 1980, the hardcore punk document The Slog Movie in 1982, and a narrative feature about a band of teenage runaways that rise to fame called Desperate Teenage Lovedollsin 1984.

While Markey was making movies and zines, Newman started his own recording studio in North Hollywood called Spinhead Studios where he learned how to engineer and produce records on the job. It was here that Painted Willie emerged while Newman and Markey were living in the studio.

Bands, zines, films, studios. That’s an impressive list of achievements by any measure and it was all accomplished independent of SST. I don’t want to be completely disingenuous: there were plenty of points of intersection. We Got Power interviewed Black Flag and filmed Henry Rollins’s first show with the band, and Black Flag’s music was included in many of Markey’s films. 

The biggest difference between the We Got Power crew and the SST crew is the way that their many projects featured collaborations with women. Woman were both at the front and behind the scenes in all of Markey’s projects. SIN 34 was one of the first female fronted hardcore bands. Jennifer Schwartz and Kim Pilkington had a hand in all aspects of We Got Power’s creation and production, and both played starring roles, alongside several other dynamic women, in Markey’s movies, namely Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and its sequel Lovedolls Superstar.

SST’s entire vibe was decidedly masculine with limited collaborations with woman. 

That’s a lot of throat clearing for a discussion about a six-song EP. Painted Wille’s Live from Van Nuys (SST 085), its follow up to the full-length LP Mind Bowling (SST 057), were both released in 1986.

I think Mind Bowling is the superior release, but what makes Live from Van Nuys so fascinating is the circumstances surrounding it.

Live from Van Nuys was recorded during a short break from Black Flag’s final tour: the In My Head Tour with Gone and Painted Willie. Everyone knows how grueling those Black Flag tours were. The hardships preserved in Rollins’s tour diary, Get in the Van, is one of the reasons why Black Flag is as respected as it is today. But it will never cease to amaze me all the things that Ginn and his crew got done during the short breaks during this tour, which included making a second Gone album and recording Live from Van Nuys.

Of the six songs on the EP, just one appears on Mind Bowling: the cover of “Little Red Book” that the LA band Love popularized in the ’60s. After months on the road, Painted Willie had the songs down cold so there isn’t a clunker in the bunch, but for me, “Little Red Book” is the standout track on the EP. It just sounds like they’re having fun, which isn’t a feeling one usually associates with the ’86 tour.

The EP is in 12” format and its covers feature photography by Naomi Petersen. (My copy didn’t come with any inserts.) The back cover includes an interesting element: the entire itinerary for the In My Head Tour. The album was recorded March 7, 1986. Rollins didn’t write about that day in Get in the Van, but according to the itinerary, Black Flag was scheduled to play Palo Alto the following day. Record an album one day, drive 500 miles and play a gig the next. All in a day’s work for the hardest working band in punk rock. 

The end of the itinerary is also interesting. Henry Rollins played his last gig with Black Flag on June 27 in Detroit. According to the itinerary, Black Flag was scheduled to play another show in Grand Rapids, and then four more the following month in San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Those shows never happened. I love speculating in counterfactual outcomes and I can’t help but wonder if a final swing through the cities where Black Flag was beloved might have resulted in a different ending for the band.

But probably not. 

According to Markey, the In My Head Tour was a way to wrap up one project while launching another. Gone didn’t quite pan out the way Ginn hoped, which allowed him to focus on SST, which resulted in a period of unprecedented expansion and growth for the label. 

Markey documented the In My Head Tour in his film Reality 86’d. You can watch the film in its entirety (who knows how long it will be up before it gets taken down again), but be careful, the experience just might make you a Painted Willie fan…

This post originally appeared in slightly different form in Message from the Underworld.

SST 012 Black Flag “TV Party”

Black Flag, SST

Format: 7″ single

Notes: I *think* this is an original pressing due to the Unicorn logo. There was such bad blood with Unicorn that SST would never willingly put out a record with Unicorn’s name or logo on a repress, but maybe this is a bootleg. IDK. IDC. My copy is barely playable and the original art is long gone.

However, I find it interesting that Side 1 with “TV Party,” which was recorded in 1982 with Black Flag’s third drummer, Emil Johnson, was recorded after Side 2 with “I’ve Got to Run” and “My Rules” in 1981 with Black Flag’s fifth drummer, Bill Stevenson.

Confused? Read on…

[The following appeared in the Sellout Edition of PssSST!]

You know who knows something about selling out? Henry Rollins, that’s who. That sounds like a set-up for a put-down but I promise you that it isn’t. I think Henry Rollins is one of the most fascinating writers of my generation.

Henry Rollins has been called a sellout pretty much his entire career. Everyone knows that before Rollins was Rollins he played in the band State of Alert prior to joining Black Flag. When he played Washington, DC, with his new band for the first time, his old friends in the scene called him a rock star and a sellout, which affected him deeply. Here’s what he had to say about it in Get in the Van:

“I learned something that night that stuck with me. I got shit from some of the people I thought were my friends. They told me that I had become some kind of a rockstar. The fact that I left Washington DC and came back in this “big” band was a sell out. Some people I knew treated me strange. It hurt at first, then I realized something. You’re going to do what you’re going to do and that’s all there is. That’s all you got and that’s that. From that night on I figured they can go get fucked.”

This is the Rollins I love. Vulnerable, reflective, assertive. He uses his intellect to protect his feelings and forge a new way of being in the world. This is a place that some people struggle to reach all their lives. The entry is dated December 3, 1981, nearly forty years ago. Rollins was 19.

When Rollins was in SOA, he had a job as a manager of an ice cream store, an apartment, a bank account, and a record player with a record collection, but he gave up all of those things to be in Black Flag. The band’s bare bones touring operation is the stuff of legend, largely because of Rollin’s diaries from those days, but the conditions at SST HQ weren’t much better. It was a vagabond existence where things like shelter, food, clothing, heat, etc.—things Rollins had taken for granted—had to be negotiated almost every single day.

The life he led as a member of SOA was cushy compared to his life in Black Flag, and yet Rollins was a rock star? No, Rollins sacrificed everything to be in Black Flag. The sellout wars are battles of perception and Rollins learned earlier than most that it’s a war you cannot win. The things you do matter. The things others say do not.

Rollins wasn’t the only one who was accused of selling out. After Black Flag released “TV Party” Ginn was asked by We Got Power if the band had sold out. This question was a bit thornier because of Black Flag’s entanglement with Unicorn, a label with a distribution deal with MCA. The song, which Black Flag re-recorded for the single, was co-produced by people attached to Unicorn, such as Daphna Edwards, who ran the label, and Ed Barton, who’d worked on many of War’s hits. The single’s lyrics differ slightly from the version recorded for Damaged, mainly to update the TV shows and schedules referenced in the song. (When Dallas moved from Friday to Wednesday night, Black Flag was on it!)

But the reason why people thought Black Flag was selling out with “TV Party” had nothing to do with Unicorn’s major label affiliation and everything to do with the way it sounded. The song is humorous and references pop culture. Also, there’s a clap track, which is always weird. When a punk band puts a clap track in a song it’s fair game to ask, “What were you thinking?”  

“I think TV Party is hilarious,” Ginn told We Got Power. “And if we would not do it because we might think we might get some criticism, that would be selling out, rather than saying, ‘Well, we’re gonna do what we like.’

But the questions about selling out kept coming. Rollins came to despise doing interviews. He hated the way fanzine interviews were stripped of context or magazine articles always had an agenda. He just wanted to say what was on his mind, but doing interviews made him feel like he was selling himself out.

Is it any wonder he threw himself into spoken word? Rollins’s “talking shows” provided a platform for Rollins to tell stories in his own way without editorial oversight. He could write his books and go on tour and he didn’t have to answer questions about selling out ever again.

And then this happened.

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Message from the Underworld.

SST 134 Sonic Youth Sister

SST

Format: LP

Notes: This is the original cover that, despite the band’s disclaimer “cover photos from public domain jacked by sonic matrix,” had to be recalled due to copyright violations on two of the images: the Disney photo on Side 1 and the Richard Avedon photo in the top-left corner of Side 2. The quote from

  • EPSON MFP image

Corporate Rock Sucks

Books

Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records is coming April 12, 2022, from Hachette Books and is now available for pre-order.

PRE-ORDER
Print: Amazon | IndieBound | Bookshop | Vermin Enterprises
Ebook: Kindle | Nook

A no-holds-barred narrative history of the iconic label that brought the world Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, and more, by the co-author of Do What You Want and My Damage.

What is SST? Greg Ginn started SST Electronics in the sleepy beach town of Hermosa Beach, California, to supply ham radio enthusiasts with tuners and transmitters. But when Ginn wanted to launch his band, Black Flag, no one was willing to take it on. Determined to bring his music to the masses, Ginn turned SST into a record label. On the back of Black Flag’s relentless touring, guerilla marketing, and refusal to back down, SST became the sound of the underground.

In Corporate Rock Sucks, Jim Ruland relays the unvarnished story of SST Records, from its remarkable rise in notoriety to its infamous downfall. With records by Black Flag, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, and scores of other influential bands, SST was the most popular indie label on the planet until a tsunami of legal jeopardy, financial peril, and dysfunctional management brought the empire tumbling down. Throughout this investigative deep-dive, Ruland leads readers through SST’s tumultuous history and epic catalog.

Corporate Rock Sucks features over 50 photographs–many published for the first time–from Linda Aranow, Alison Braun, Edward Colver, Fred Hammer, Wild Don Lewis, Naomi Peterson, EJ Porter, Paul Rachman, and SPOT. Implementing interviews with the label’s former employees, as well as musicians, managers, producers, photographers, video directors, and label heads, Corporate Rock Sucks presents an unauthorized narrative history of the ’80s punk and alternative rock scenes, and shows how the music industry was changed forever.