Busking Against the Apocalypse

Darin Bauer

Recently I saw the Santa Cruz, California hard core blue grass band Blackbird Raum, play at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California. I sent Maximum Rock n Roll magazine a one page synopsis comparing the hardcore grass roots blue grass revival to the 1990s Gilman punk zeitgeist bands Operation Ivy,(members of whom would rejoin to become Downfall, and later Rancid, and The Classics of Love,) and Neurosis. For the uninitiated this is extremely high praise. I can give the appraisal. I wrote my MA urban studies thesis about my volunteer workin the late eighties and nineteen nineties at the Gilman Street punk venue. Infact after three years of sitting on thesis revisions I’ll receive my MA from the San Francisco Art Institute. In what I called I have a lot of photos to send you, meant for the non-profit volunteer run Maximum Rock n Roll, I stipulate the importance of this new cross-over of punk and what some people have referred to as ‘hobo-core,’ as something that might even someday replace electricity and help save the earth from the totalitarian corporate oligarchy. Visitors toNew Orleans, and other cities must have some clue as to what the new wave of punk has become, a kind of folk incarnation of traveler kids. Maybe you have given some money to a busker on the street whose raw folksy yarns and yarls somehow may have touched your hearts in an integral fashion. Wayward souls they are, however most folks shy away from labels, I’m just putting out the information and giving easier to understand definitions.

If nothing else Operation Ivy, similar to Blackbird Raum can pack the house andalso create massive sing along audience participatory activity which lends unity and solidarity amongst the sub-culture. Both bands practice(d) a lyricalurban analysis within their methodological ethos and grassroots participatory actions are likely survival based. Both share an anti-establishment philosophy. Lots of dancing, and slam dancing happen(ed.) Try Operation Ivy lyrics;

Officer

“Do you have to force yourself with power and controlDo feel a need to live your life playing up a roleIntimidating people with your wall of sight and soundYou and your kind destroy our undergroundAll the happiness that you have destroyedAll the brutal tactics that you always employAll the fucking bullshit when will it ever stopThe comparison is obvious: you're just a fucking copOfficer - you act like an animal, you're out of controlOfficer - what the hell is wrong with youWear a tie if you want to wear a uniformJoin the army if you want to conform

Tough guy big man do what you canWhatever you destroy we'll create it again”1

Now try Blackbird Raum’s song Belmont, keep in mind their album was released in 2013;

“Terrified women are flooding the offices.One’s leg is crushed beneath a heavy iron gate.People are vanishing Leaving only their shoes.Unanswered textsSilhouettes burned into the wall.

Legions of mindless cops now arrive, loudlyBeating their batons against their shields.Why’s everybody looking at me like there’s Something fundamentally wrong?Don’t walk on me like the half frozen pond.”

I got enough tear gas at Occupy Oakland, I was there to witness many examples of police brutality, I photographed constantly during Occupy. Conversely in 1988 I was a high school skate punk in Berkeley. Anti-authoritarianism is a thread in the punk / blue grass fusion.

When doing my ethnographic research for my MA thesis I ran across the band Rising Appalachia, a band named after the environmental group. This band isfrom New Orleans and is a fusion of all kinds of sound, and as punk rock as I think they are [I’ll be 41 this year btw,] they actually appear more steam punk than anything else, which isn’t to say they aren’t ardent professional musicians. I had the misfortune of spending $20 on them at 1015 Folsom for theOdessa Fest, and they had played that morning at three am so their set was brief, worse, they weren’t head lining it was techno night for the youth within the drug and sex culture of the city. If you have heard them you’d knowwhat I mean. They played well considering that this wasn’t their target demographic, although it’s kind of hard to tell the difference and its weird how bourgeoisie these kids pimp their retro 70s / future steam punk. When I saw Rising Appalachia at Gilman it was to a group of twenty to thirty people, andit was a tame audience, respectful, and they played a long set, it was likely the best performance I’ll ever see of them. That’s another thing, I have been to hundreds of music venue events in the Bay Area in my life, I followed the punk bands in the 1990s from high school to college, but enough about me and my musical proclivities. I’m going to copy from my thesis regarding Rising…

“Time isn’t a rock. Punk rock takes time to develop. Punk has created many new transformations. The band Appalachia Rising2, or R.I.S.E. is an example of grunge / bluegrass, steam punk, or hobo-core, if you will. I would say they

1 The song Officer appeared on the Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll compilation Turn it Around released in 1988.2 http://www.risingappalachia.com/.

are steam punk rhythm and bluegrass. You might also seem to think so because this Georgia band hits the issues and sounds like something you could hear on KPFA3. With a sexy jazzy / rap acoustic or acappella vibe, and a very hardcoreappearance, their vimeo video is on their website, you actually expect to hearlyrics like this. “…get the fuck out your car, walking’s good for you; follow blindly is that what you do?”4

Or try their rendition of Bill Withers, Sunshine on Vimeo. Banjos! Nothing is more Steam Punk than that. Rising Appalachia is named after the ecology movement of the same name. Although they are independent, it is no surprise that they play at Burning Man and similar festivals. R.I.S.E. can be followed on MySpace andutube. Appalachia Rising to me typifies what a Gilman band should be in this day and age. Actual hard-core musicians playing and being HARD-CORE! You really won’t want to miss them.”5

Even though I couldn’t enjoy the acoustics at 1015 Folsom, they still rock. Their show at Gilman Street was much better. 924 Gilman is a volunteer run all ages punk rock music club that was founded in 1986 by Maximum Rock n Rollfounder Tim Yohannan. MRnR was initially a fanzine, and it grew into a radio show, a more mainstream underground punk magazine, a punk club, and also eventually they for a time had a record store and hangout near 16th and Valencia, The Epicenter Zone, which was also volunteer-run, and for the record operated similarly to Berkeley’s Lookout Records record label and store. The 1990s basically stole the can-do spirit of the 1970s and invented DIY. All of this was kind of amazing at the time. Gilman doesn’t allow sexism, racism, homophobia or fucked up shit at their club. Those are more or less the official rules, and since their inception a two dollar annual membership card explains the entirety of their isocratic notions, and their door price is merely a low five to ten bux. Isocracy was a Berkeley favorite (band) that was on Lookout! Records during the Bay Area punk zeitgeist of the 1990s, it means a kind of unrepresented mass of autonomous individuals that operates on the basis of essential freedom, somewhat similar to utopianism, however more reminiscent of anarchistic chaos theory, also suggesting the possibility of a consensus group or process. Although the namesake Isocracy itself was used as a zany in your face antic as an extension or evolved formation of the chaos performance art of The Gilman Mindfuck Committee.

“Martin Sprouse: [Infamous punk author and publisher.] …The Mindfuck Committee was another cool thing that I wish would have stuck around. Trying to make the shows interesting, trying to mess with things. One thing they did was talking about Apartheid in this really interesting way. Everyone got a South African passport, and people would randomly get arrested during shows.

3 http://www.kpfa.org, California listener sponsored radio from Berkeley.4 Scale Down, from R.I.S.E. (Rising Appalachia) Evolutions In Sound: LIVE, self-published 2007-2008.5 Artist statement and Thesis Abstract: http://darinorsteven.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=15 AND http://darinorsteven.blogspot.com/2013_02_01_archive.html respectively. My blogspot site is oftena work in progress.

Kind of performance art, kind of political. A lot of great ideas but really hard to implement. Most people just wanted to watch Neurosis play.6”

I first saw Neurosis perform at Gilman, although I have seen them at leasta couple of dozen times. I saw them play with Christ On Parade, at the West Oakland Phoenix Ironworks in 1987, an amazing show, they had just released their album, Pain Of Mind7. Neurosis is a pioneer of punk cross over, they sound metal, hardcore, punk, old school, tribal, and new wave also, in ways that are sometimes difficult to explain to the untrained ear. I’ve seen Neurosis and Christ On Parade perform with Crash Worship, holy shit. Crash Worship was like Steel Pole Bathtub, tribal electronic noise, that pulsed rhythmically and was so fucking loud, but when you went outside to breath or something you might as well have been in the future apocalypse or the planet Mars, you were magnetically pulled back into the dance sooner than you left sometimes, these bands definitely had relevant metaphysical properties that even superseded therave scene at the time. There was a lot of dancing, it was really ethereal, surreal, hyper-real, and visceral. Although much of it was defined as slam-dancing.

Here’s Neurosis’s Bury What’s Dead, from their Pain of Mind album, an album reminiscent of old school UK political punk bands such as The Subhumans;

“undermine the system that brings destruction(wake up and bury what's dead)our lives are the cancer to their oppression(wake up and bury what's dead)

[ch.]if you think the reason we are hereis to fight our brothers and sisters and loversyou must realize it's ourselves we fear

do you feel the tension in our land?(wake up and bury what's dead)from the hate zone to the high rise all built by man(wake up and bury what's dead)

[ch.]

distrust authoritythe only rules are your ownspilling blood for a piece of dirt(wake up and bury what's dead)shows what a human being is worth(wake up and bury what's dead)

6 Gimme Something Better, Silke, Tudor, Penquin, 2006. This was a quote in my thesis also.7 1987 Alchemy Records.

[ch.] “

Now compare with Blackbird Raum’s Bury The Record from their False Weaver’s8 album,keep in mind that this is not thrash as much as it is hardcore punk/bluegrass;

“A contagion, bury the recordThat’s the year the plague swept in,Bury the recordThe cloud of the stench, of the carcases,Of the summer heatI can explain so muchOnly so muchThis is why I’m here, to impressImpress in you the need for all these thingsDon’t make that face at meRemove this sourpuss glazeFrom your countenanceBuried in the sky or in the earth,Face down or standingLife is one force, grossly changing, Cold eclipsingThis year’s murdering ground is the soil of future lives”

Rather than seething screeching guitars at feedback ranges previously not know to human existence with tribal drumming from a professional drummer on a professional rock percussion set and with synthesizers and keyboards, [Neurosis,] BBR is using an accordion, pump organ, harpsichord, pump-action shotgun, banjo, guitar (acoustic,) fiddle, a wash-board and wash-board bass. Both bands encompass anti-establishment sentiment within a sub-cultural ethos,both bands maintain anti-corporate/oligarchic/hegemonic stances. That is to say they both fully inhabit the radical left’s sentiment against capitalism. Comparing the early works of these two bands does not end here. Let us also try BBR’s Grudge Against the Epitaph again from last year’s album and compare it again with one from an older Neurosis.

“The wolves were thinning in skins, sheep had known they were living in. The wolves were thinning in skins, hunger coming to know them again.

I don’t fucking believe this.I just want to go home.You were supposed to feed me.Just leave me alone.I’m falling to dust.There’s nothing I can do.

8 Recent album released in 2013 through Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club in San Francisco.

Sleep under dunesSong of terrapin shellLined with the tinder mossA craft of living coal”

The cosmetic dream ethos of BBR is more a postulate here against hunger or poverty, the analogy here perhaps is that the machine [perhaps a machine run by coal or fossil fuels,] is a caustic source of incredible destruction. Communities, friendships, people, all suffer when dreams die due to political devices such as greed or avarice, gentrification or when jerry-rigged political assimilative activities occur. The desperation in Grudge Against the Epitaph, is quite apparent. In the still Reagonomic and Thatchereque world of 1987 Neurosis came up with the song, United Sheep on their Pain of Mind album.

“follow the sheepas the wolf drives the sheep to slaughterstand with the wolfas the sheep at each othercrumbling at the rootsfearing of the wolflove your fellow sheepas you march straight in to deathfollow the sheep to unity.”

Neurosis’s song is more Orwellian, their band members older than I, and arelikely familiar with the Vietnam era in a manner that I was more sheltered to.Their variation on using wolves as a metaphor within a sub-cultural clime against the grain precedes the invasion of Kuwait by some years, although the Falkland incursion and El Salvador was still at the time an active ingredient of salient agitation. Other songs by Neurosis spell out more disillusionment, however I can only guess as to the source of familiarity with an anti-militaryindustrial complex consideration here. The following is a still earlier song lyric from the English punk band Subhumanz.

“There’s bombs going off in Belfast, there’s a war in Vietnam, there’s a TV documentary, to help you understand,The other channel is better, it doesn’t tax your mind, relax in the ignorant bliss of it, as man destroys mankind…”

Dissent is the thematic that I am trying to represent. While we cannot socialize health care or social services in this country, or produce jobs or save social equity such as job placement and food stamps, the war in Afghanistan is current. The oil tubes will be secured there. The opium will bedestroyed, so Monsanto and the Pharmaceutical companies can use their productsto turn human DNA into a hybridity / bioroid formation. Pollution and deforestation continues, our privacy is constantly jeopardized by our

government, debilitating debt enslaves people around the globe, oil companies and big business prevent solar energy and electric vehicle domination, yet we are victims of our own decimation with climate change systemically also.

When the United States bombed Japan, this country was repaid by a burgeoning competitive industrial corporate investment schism that almost upended economic functionality in this country. Let us not fool ourselves, that’s what this country did to itself. The ongoing ‘joke’ if you can call it that during the Iraq war was that bombing ‘them’ to the stone ages wasn’t so difficult to do, ‘they’ weren’t too far from that point to begin with. Not only is that a prime exemplification of institutional xenophobia, I should sayit is far past time for western civilization to look in the fucking mirror. The charm and low real estate value of the rust belt was particularly an inventive period for a punk resurgence in the 1990s, but in the vapidity of the post-bubble / post-bailout nothingness in its wake, this vacuum runs on faith, and high hopes, the kid with the stolen car battery, Mohawk, leather jacket and boots, amp and guitar playing on the street corner has been replaced by his nieces and nephews, and in so doing they somehow have invoked the spirits of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Sid Vicious.

Blackbird Raum @ 924 Gilman, Berkeley, California, 1 17 14.

Previous: Bluesman Coyote Patrick Polk with east bay punk iconoclast Eggplant, Occupy Oakland. Following: Occupy Oakland band protesting militarization efforts of OPD, 2013. Justice for Oscar Grant Band plays @ Oakland Superior Court, (this decade.) Oakland band Embers playing infamous Hellarity Squat in Emeryville, this gig was happening during Occupy. Oakland’s Sour Mash Hug Band at the San Jose Blackbird Café December 2013. Punk Rock Joel’s Birthday @ 924 Gilman featuring performance by Babyland, (this decade.) Rising Appalachia @ the 924, (this decade.) Buttflap and the Aggressive Pitbulls @ Hellarity performance also around the time of Occupy. 924 Gilman is in trouble with rising rent; its warehouse zoning predates rent control, go see a punk band.