First
of all, an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact
is based upon the abstraction
Real Enemy “Life with the Enemy”
MINDCURE record review
These comments are sure to be welcomed by ten or 12 people,
a large number given the times under which we live and the gravity of the
matters under discussion. But then again, in some circles I am considered an
authority. An authority on being ridiculous. Fortunately, my handful of readers
are incredibly attentive and enormously influential.
For immediate release:
I’m sorry to hear that Bill Slam died. That’s
too bad, there are plenty of people I’d trade for Bill Slam. I remember being
heckled by him. It shows how in touch with PGH I am huh?
It’s good record. The songs are great. It’s fun to listen
to, I remember a couple of these songs. Vince remixed it, he did a good job.
This okay.
I remember some of
these songs. WRCT had “on the literary volunteers of america” on a cart, and if
I remember correctly that was a snippet of cassette tape on a cartridge the
size of an eight track. CMU remember was high tech-and they would make these
“carts” as they called them for local bands so they could easily play’em
without having to cue up a record. When bands played live on JP Cheesethrust’s
show they would often make commercials for WRCT.
Punk rock in America: well first it started as a movement (Real
Enemy) then it turned into a business (DOA) and finally it became a racket (the
DK’s suing each other)…and this album is a recording from the days of the heroic
struggle: art under dictatorship of the proletariat! …this is practically
a people’s recording, samizdat indeed.
It’s a historical reflection. The abyss gazed back and a
hardcore band from PGH played at CBGB’s on Hegel’s Birthday. I heard the future
singer for 99 Cents went with them to NYC thus giving the journey an additional
occult significance, the PGH boys make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj…and we
were such boys then, we were so young but not too young to realize that history
could be manipulated hence the reason for having Erik on the trip. Erik was
like a medieval scriptorium making sure that every local gig was recorded. Paralleling
samizdat the tapes would be passed out by scribes like Bob Mullins, thus
perpetuating the post-Fluxus mail art urge. A direct cross over from Coum
Transmissions, is drug use body modification along the lines of the Viennese
Aktionists?
blah blah everyone should learn how to code…hard to explain
what a different world it was in 1983. There’s no way a listener in 2013 can
hear this correctly or authentically, it’s like Wittgenstein’s talking lion-we
wouldn’t be able to understand him,
it…so
you can’t really hear this. You have no idea what it was like to have to fold a
piece of paper in exactly the right pro-portions to get it to fit inside a
cassette box. Let alone the way they had to lay it out the text by hand.
Listening to a cassette only release in 1983 was a mystical experience. You
were holding something that was produced in such a short quantity, my guess 200
were made? They paid for this too-it had a sticker over an actual custom length
cassette, it wasn’t just a TDK that was taped over. I wonder how much it cost
to make. There’s a thought, someone should post a catalog from some 1983 tape
manufacturers so we can feel superior and advanced.
Where are the conversations? Where are the interview tapes?
On the original Real Enemy cassette in between the songs there were interviews
with the band, real Warholesque conversations. I’ll never forget Vince and the
tale of the poisoned hamburger (sounds a children’s book)-so that’s edited out,
that sucks. I recall the MRR review said that it was “thoughtful”. There’s a
card that says I can go online somewhere and punch in numbers I can get the
music on the record digitally sent, or transferred, oh, it’s more digitalize it
myself-these hardcore records you can’t leave cos the songs are so short and
then there’s so many you mistitle them anyway--how much did it cost to get
those little cards made? They pressed a 1000.
I thought this was gonna be on clear vinyl? Regardless I am fucking
crushed that the interview segments from the original tape aren’t on this
record. That fucking sucks.
Real Enemy were PGH’s first hardcore band. Their cassette
was released on vinyl recently.
The drums were mounted like a anti-aircraft gun (Vinny
telling me that I had to hear Tank/I didn’t want to hear Tank, not then, not
now, not ever. I did wanna hear more about the hamburger he was eating and how it
made him sick, from the Real Enemy demo tape, Mike was familiar w/ collage
editing and he wisely inter-spliced spoken word segments between the songs. RE
were PGH’s first hardcore band. Somehow they became Half Life. Vince was in the
Pb with Lee from the Bats, for a while he was in White Wreckage but I don’t
remember who else was in that band. The second if not simultaneous hardcore
band was Poisoning with the Bendik brothers Joe John & Gary (?) and they
became Savage Amused with like half of Flak (Alan)-there was another band
too-Society’s Victim, they had one song: “nailed to a cross” yeah that was Bill
Morris-but I didn’t really know those guys. (At this point Carsickness were
just like too old & too stupid, for having such a big name they sure were
unimaginative, sorta like the Suburbs out in MN, I always personally liked Boat
Boy & Greg but when the Cynics started-well, they were always just awful,
that whole garage psych thing is just so unimaginative though they were good
people. Oh yeah Michael had that pop thing “the Beating” for a little while. And
that one time in that club around the corner from Union Square when I went to
say hello Greg didn’t remember me-I was like okay Michael remembered me though. He has class. Who else? The Five
thought they were gonna be so big when they moved to Boston-Boston! They
shoulda moved to Baltimore & met No Trend (oh yeah reptile house yuck:
early punk art rock, then they had that rod is my co-pilot rip-off band umm
spankmoney maybe? had like three awful drummers and then there were those
cassette only twisted Maryland suburban bands-asbestos rockpyle, I guess they were cool)(wasn’t Rude Buddha from
Baltimore? Did they finally just give up? I liked the song “you excite me” I
think Reid is like Frank Black’s gardener or something). Sometime during the
first Bush presidency I was leaving my girlfriend’s apartment in Center City.
It was right on the trolley line, not far from Dirty Franks. Philadelphia was a
wild place in the late eighties and early nineties. Cue the Dead C soundtrack.
(Didn’t Lisa Suckdog live there too?) You shoulda been there: Right on the
payphone by my girlfriend’s place, like around Pine Street-someone stuck a full
page advertisement sticker for The Five. This long one sheet had like two
reviews on it, it was an ad for their last record. It was juxtaposition between
a good review in MRR and one in some straight new wave waitress rag. The copy read:
who but THE FIVE could be extolled in these two disparate rock magazines (I
guess because the Five were so bland they could appeal to anybody)…seeing this
sticker, this intrusion on my space in faraway Philadelphia. It really flipped
me out, I was like “why is there a Five sticker on the payphone? I use that
payphone to call upstairs when I get here. Does somebody know I’m here?”
(Twenty years later I meet up w/ da Blooze Explosion and there’s a Half Life
roadie, of course there was which was cool y’know, I was just surprised tho
didn’t touch & go buy my dinner w/ Don Cab? Did I have dinner w/Don Cab I remember
hanging out with the promoters, oh yeah I remember that-it was new year’s
right? I gotta turn off this Real Enemy, this is getting too weird, like bad
flashbacks y’know?) I never saw another one anywhere else in Philly. I usta go to
Bolc’s Tavern down on Front Street, that place was dark and cool, it had a “no
punks” sign in the window, &1.25 rum & cokes. There was some local news
report on the evils on punk rock and they used a clip of a cute chick with
spiked hair (what was her name? somehow we knew her) and this cute chick with
like pink hair is smoking and listening to a record and it’s the Five’s “act of
contrition”. They showed the crucified hand spinning around on the turntable. Punk in PGH was a media event, precisely
because it wasn’t and it was so obscure. Now all of us can put our own spin on
it. I called up the Five when they were on a PBS pledge drive. That’s right,
they cut away and said here answering phones and there were the Five all
dressed to the hit with the big hair going and the trench coats and the announcer
is reading this card saying that the Five are PGH’s premiere punk voodoo new wave
band of the year or something. And I just couldn’t resist y’know-there they
were, there were the Five TRAPPED. I had them in my sights. So I called and
asked if it really was the Five and they said yeah and then they hung up on me.
It was as if I was participating in real life. I was a person picking up a hand
held device and punching some nodes, a code. Then at the other end a signal
developed. The person answered the phone. I asked a question outside the realm of logic.
They were trained to break up at any resistance. Not to forget that Vinny’s “scene death”
t-shirt inspired at least two Th’Inbred songs. Last I heard he was into like
kung fu or witchcraft or something else. He was always weird. Last time I spoke
to Mike I was partying in a Spartanburg Holliday Inn with the future road
manager of the Melvins. Those days passed man, those days the door was opened
and the wind appeared-cos those days it was all about all about writing about Royal
Trux, (U shouda been there man: the whole Dash Snow Ace Frehley Vienna
Aktionist scene) I remember Mike saying that he had all their records, except
they were still sealed. He’s another weirdo. BTW In terms of comparing the
importance or historical validity of PGH vs. WV punk, it’s pretty much a dead
issue, there was no validity in either side, one band using a skull as a logo
vs. a band using the SI. It’s the same scene death t-shirt. I’m
sorry that Marsha, the owner of the Underground Railroad, is gone.
About sixty miles south of PGH down route 88 parallel to the
monoghalhea there lies California, Pa. There’s a small dirty university there,
hiding amidst the hills. 99 Cents went to school there. They were their own
words underlining their own world. Fred Hate he played bass and guitar (later
of the notorious State College band Khadafy Youth, a group that made a demo but
existed almost purely as media manipulation slash provocation). Chore Boy on the
other bass and guitar they would switch. And Larvis K Gravis on drums, Tom
Dimunzio now makes experimental music to a large degree of success in SF. They
were trying to be a cross between the Swans and the Nihilistics. There was
nobody like them. Perhaps because the singer, Bob Mullins was a post-industrial
wizard who used the postal service as a means to stay in touch with all the
foreign (IE: all) hardcore scenes. He was a skinny Frankenstein w/ no hair and
a deep understanding of alienation. He lived in a rickety Victorian house, his
parents were biology perfessors and the basement was filled with dead animals
in jars. Bob saw hardcore as the continuing of an American tradition of
dissent. There were times when I’d pick up the phone and Bob would be there. We
talked during a 3.5 Richter earthquake. He saw hardcore through an occult lens,
the Xerox media and the mail were his lover and helper. He had a very gnostic
vision of an oppressive superstructure crushing humanity. He lent me jack
London’s “iron heel” and I gravitated towards mortifying the flesh. What cannot
be underestimated is that Bob maintained an extensive correspondence and
amassed a huge record collection. He was constantly trading tapes and he
encouraged the same. I was already writing to punks worldwide by the time I met
Bob but he really opened it up for me. This
guy Erik usta tape all the gigs. He wore a large homemade TG button. He
actually saw the Los Angeles TG dis-concert where TG were on the marquee as
“modern concert”.
Greg from the Cynics
told me to buy the Germs. He marked down all the T-Rex records when I saw I was
gonna buy them. I saw Mike point out to Jeff that Psychic TV had a song called
“oi skinhead” or skinhead moonstomp, he was pointing at the those who do not
cover. Jello told me about a record pressing company to use, he was wrong about
that too. Once Genesis said after meeting Jello that he couldn’t believe
someone that stupid was in such a big outspoken band and it wasn’t until I met
Jello that I knew Genesis was oddly prescient. I once name dropped Jello to a
millennial and she didn’t who Jello was. I told her that it was a box top they
used to convict the Rosenburgs, it split in different places. When you put back
together it became commoditized into object code, it became a code. It became a
lunchbox.
There was another band that played the Banana at least once with
99 Cents. NO SCABS from Oakmont-I really didn’t understand that crew. Did they
all live in a commune out in Oakmont-they made these psychedelic hardcore
tapes, weird day glo stuff. They had a tape where they chanted “alligator in my
neck” in a round. ALL, i-gator in my neck-alligator in my neck, chanted over
and over and I saw this weird acid freak out and this chick spinning on the
floor while that cassette played over and over. What was the story? I remember
the late CJ. I remember that his was hovering between two rooms at this house,
he was standing between the doorway and he just looked so spooky I guess I knew
he was here to go. Mullins disappeared around this time too. It was twilight in
California. California Pennsylvania that is. Bob lived in this old Victorian
House, it had these tall gables. I knocked, he opened the door and was bone
thin, he was wearing a red tattered bathrobe and clutching a mug of some sorts.
“Y’know I get sick sometimes Jim” and he quickly closed the door on me.
Probably two or three months later I tried again and his mother, or at least an
older woman at the house told me he went to LA to write for the movies. I was
like, well what’s his address? And she closed the door on me. Bob had a friend,
can’t think what his name is with curly black hair, he was a cool guy-one of
Bob’s biker friends, I got him on the horn and he told me the same story,
except that it was a story and he thought Bob was in the hospital. He called me
once about six or seven years later. He wrote the lyrics for my favorite Half
Life song “revile” (tho “mongoloid” was good too). I saw the first Half Life
show at the new group theatre, Reid Paley used the urinal next to me, I
remember when Half Life was playing there was guy slamming while waving a large
wooden crucifix around, punk rock! (I met a girl that night, I remember that
now, Jesus this is therapeutic!) Half Life got their name from the first song
the Swans played at the banana. I remember Mike had the set list up on his
wall. I started collecting set lists cos Mike & Erik did. It was always
history to them. And he proves it too with the liner notes. Inside the album
jacket is a big Real Enemy poster and when you fold it out Mike tells the story
of his life. And it’s pretty good. He does a good job describing the atmosphere
of hardcore then. And Real Enemy sound pretty good too. This is a great record.
And I appreciate the mention. (Some of these songs, man I remember these, Real
Enemy in my brick size WALKMAN, one of the songs is some proto-metal jam:
variety in the U s of A and then Mike sings about government poisoning my food.
I hadn’t thought about that. One of the songs is about not conforming and being
like everyone else. How bourgeois. But
wait, some of us were bourgeois.) What else is there to say? It was a long time
ago. I’m glad to see these guys are
still all the way alive. First of all, an abstraction is made from a
fact; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstraction.
