Gods look down
The feeling of driving across the country in a van with five other guys, stopping in every city to play, sleeping on people’s floors, watching the sun come up over the desert as I drove, it was all too much. This was definitely where I belonged.
Dave Grohl
In late 1987, as they toured America’s West Coast in support of their third album Banging the DC hardcore veterans Scream were interviewed for their first maximumrocknroll cover story. With its title inspired by Revolution Summer’s Punk Percussion Protests, Banging the Drum was Scream’s most socially conscious, politicised release to date, and writer Elizabeth Greene was keen to tease out the messages behind powerful new songs such as ‘Walking by Myself’ and ‘When I Rise’. ‘Are there any political issues that are especially important to you?’ she asked the band.
‘Apartheid,’ said singer Pete Stahl.
‘Censorship,’ said his brother Franz, Scream’s guitarist.
‘We’re kind of worried about nuclear war,’ added Pete.
Scream’s 18-year-old drummer, touring nationally with the band for the first time, chipped in with an answer of his own: ‘The drinking age,’ he replied.
Dave Grohl was just 17 years old when he joined America’s last great hardcore band. Bruce Springsteen once sang of learning ‘more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in similarly, three years in Scream’s Dodge Ram van would provide Grohl with the finest education he could ever wish for. In a wonderfully evocative phrase which neatly illustrated the feral, lawless nature of the mid-eighties underground touring circuit, an ex-girlfriend once memorably claimed that Grohl was ‘raised in a van by wolves’: 25 years after joining Scream, Grohl still regards Pete and Franz Stahl as family.
Scream hailed from Bailey’s Crossroads, VA, a rural no-horse town built around the intersection of Columbia Pike and Virginia’s Route 7. The area owes its name to the fact that P.T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, proprietors of a circus they grandly billed as The Greatest Show on Earth, parked up their menagerie in the area in the off-season. Pete Stahl remembers his hometown as ‘very Southern, very rural and somewhat segregated … Norman Rockwellish in a way’: many of Stahl’s contemporaries on the DC punk scene simply use the epithet ‘redneck’ to describe the area and its residents.
Like Dave Grohl, the Stahl brothers had music in their bloodline: Arnold Stahl, their lawyer father, managed a popular rock ’n’ roll group called The Hangmen who were the toast of Georgetown society parties in the mid-sixties. In February 1966 the band’s ‘What a Girl Can’t Do’ single knocked The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ from the top of the Virginia/Maryland/DC pop charts: that same month the Stahl kids got their first glimpse of rock ’n’ roll’s capacity to incite mayhem when local police were summoned to shut down The Hangmen’s in-store performance at the Giant Record Shop in Falls Church after 2,000 screaming teenagers laid siege to the store. Franz Stahl bought his first guitar from the same shop ten years later.
Scream formed in 1979, though their story truly begins in 1977, when 15-year-old Franz first started jamming on Hendrix, Skynyrd, Kiss and Funkadelic covers in local garages with two J.E.B. Stuart High School classmates, drummer Kent Stax and bassist Skeeter Thompson. Soon enough, the teenagers were turned on to garage rock and punk via two cult radio programmes, WAMU’s Rock ’n’ Roll Jukebox and Steve Lorber’s WHFS show Mystic stomping standards by The Seeds, The Sonics and The Kingsmen were then added to their repertoire. The group were still searching for a sound and direction of their own when they first stumbled upon Washington DC’s nascent hardcore scene. Upon seeing Bad Brains lay waste to the capital’s basem*nt dives, the scales fell from their eyes: in the rasta-punks’ searing electrical storms Scream saw rock ’n’ roll’s future. To Pete Stahl, H.R.’s crew were nothing less than ‘the greatest f*cking band in the world’.
‘The first time I saw them [Bad Brains] was at a Madam’s Organ show and it scared the hell out of me!’ he told maximumrocknroll in May 1983. ‘I’d never seen a band like that. I just walked in and Doc, Darryl and Earl were just kind of back against the wall, and it was real crowded and dark, and all of a sudden H.R. just busted through the back of the crowd. It was just an intense feeling, just the tension and excitement, and as H.R. exploded through the crowd they exploded into their song! It just blew me away.’
Skeeter Thompson was equally mesmerised. Previously, the bassist had considered that he was the only black kid in the nation in thrall to punk rock: witnessing Bad Brains’ righteous ferocity at close quarters was revelatory.
‘One day Pete came over and said you’ve got to see this band,’ recalled Thompson. ‘When I first saw them it was just like, “Man, I want to do that!” So much power!’
Scream’s earliest performances took place at keg parties – or ‘beer blasts’ – in the basem*nt of the house the Stahl brothers shared in Falls Church. Shows at Scream House, as the property was soon known locally, were spectacularly messy affairs. Starved of entertainment options in rural Virginia, every hesher, jock, pot-head and freak within a ten-mile radius would turn up on their porch on party nights. The Stahls’ basem*nt floor would be awash with blood, sweat and beers long before the night’s ‘official’ entertainment was scheduled to begin. Inspired by Pete Stahl’s memories of his first Bad Brains show, Scream gigs always started with a violent explosion of energy: Stahl would crash through the tightly packed crowd like a raging bull, shunting beers and bodies to the four walls, and the band would kick in with concussive levels of volume. The room would duly erupt in a flurry of fists, elbows, swear words and screams. It was not uncommon for these shows to end amid squealing sirens and baton charges, as the Fairfax County police department piled in mob-handed to break up brawls.
‘It was laughs Franz Stahl. ‘Kids didn’t know what the hell to make of us. They were used to listening to Zeppelin or Foghat or the Allman Brothers, and what we were playing just freaked them out, it would put everybody on edge. It would get completely out of hand.’
‘Our music really pissed off a lot of the jocks and rednecks,’ agrees his elder brother. ‘It was pretty wild. At the start people either laughed at us or wanted to kill us. But soon they started to get into it, attracted by the energy of what we were doing.’
Hardcore’s bush telegraph soon carried reports of Scream’s chaotic basem*nt parties to Dischord House. Before long, Ian MacKaye and his friends stopped by Falls Church to scope out the scene. Their presence incensed territorial local jocks, and a confrontation ensued. Recognising the DC crew as kindred spirits, the Scream team backed up their punk brethren. Predictably, fists were soon flying. When order was restored, the bloodied but unbowed Dischord and Scream House crews forged an immediate alliance, and MacKaye pledged to find his new friends slots on hardcore shows in the city. The curtain dropped on Scream House’s infamous parties soon afterwards: ‘We couldn’t afford the cleaning bills any more!’ Franz Stahl laughs.
Despite MacKaye’s endorsem*nt, usually taken as gospel within the Dischord family, the DC punk community didn’t immediately embrace Scream. In a scene notionally populated by the marginalised and disenfranchised, they were genuine outcasts, a racially mixed, blue-collar rock band wholly uninterested in kowtowing to codified musical, philosophical or sartorial scene norms. This nonconformist mindset caused confusion and hostility: to Capitol Punishment fanzine Scream were simply ‘a bunch of jocks trying to be punk’.
The quartet’s début show in DC could hardly have been more disastrous. Booked alongside Bad Brains and Minor Threat on a fifteen-band bill at the Wilson Center on 4 April 1981, the Stahl brothers, Thompson and Stax found themselves playing to an empty room when their potential audience walked out of the room en masse as the opening chords of their set rang out. Further humiliation was to follow at a 9 May show with Minor Threat, S.O.A., Youth Brigade and D.O.A. Again, the band had barely set foot on the stage of H-B Woodlawn High School when the audience melted away. To lose one crowd may have been regarded as misfortune, to lose both was a genuine kick in the teeth for the young Virginians. But for encouraging words from scene elders Ian MacKaye and Jello Biafra (in town with D.O.A.) Scream may have abandoned punk rock at that very moment.
‘We were feeling pretty down,’ remembers Pete Stahl, ‘because we wanted to be in that scene: we identified with it and dug those bands and felt this was our natural home. So to have everyone diss us like that was pretty harsh. But Jello came up to me after we finished playing and said, “You guys are great, don’t worry about what happened.” He gave me his address and told me to send him a demo. That was a really sweet thing to do and it meant a lot.’
‘Having people turn their backs and walk out was fairly typical of the DC scene early on,’ admits Franz Stahl. ‘But them snubbing their noses at us initially just gave us that much more of a drive to smoke these guys every time we played.’
‘The first time Scream played nobody cared because they were better than all of us!’ says Brian Baker, then playing in Minor Threat. ‘They were a fantastic band, with fantastic musicians and great songs. There wasn’t really a backlash against them, but trepidation was raised from the minute they started to play. Initially people thought they weren’t cool because they had moustaches and they didn’t wear the “approved” regalia and they lived twenty miles away … and twenty miles in teenage terms is hours away. But then the moustaches disappeared, and someone bleached their hair and someone else bought a leather jacket and suddenly it was, “Hey! Now they’re one of us! Come on in!” After that they were revered by all of the Dischord people.’
In January 1983 Scream’s Still Screaming album became the first full-length release on Dischord. Produced by the band, Ian MacKaye, Eddie Janney and Don Zientara at Inner Ear, three decades on it stands up as a thrillingly urgent, impassioned and powerful collection, mixing up scratchy, Gang of Four-influenced punk-funk (‘Hygiene’), loping, spacey dub-reggae (‘Amerarockers’), Clash-style rock ’n’ roll (‘Piece of Her Time’) and thought-provoking, razor-sharp hardcore (everything else) to stunning effect. Pete Stahl lays out his band’s manifesto on the fierce ‘We’re Fed Up’, referencing his band’s past while keeping both eyes firmly fixed on the future: from the basem*nt / We’re from underground / We want to break all barriers with our sound / We’re sick and tired of f*cking rejection / But we’re not down ’cause we got a It’s a ferocious statement of intent.
Given the mix of apathy and outright hostility they faced at their earliest DC shows, it was unsurprising that Scream began booking shows nationally even before the release of Still In Putting DC on the Map (a booklet included with the 20 Years of Dischord box set) Ian MacKaye notes that Scream were the first act on his label to be paid ‘royalties’, when Dischord stepped in to help them pay for a van repair and a tour-related phone bill: this little detail speaks to the band’s proud reputation as inveterate road dogs. No DC band was more committed to taking their music to the people.
‘We didn’t really have time to think about whether anybody accepted us or not,’ says Franz Stahl, ‘we wanted to play the world and we couldn’t believe that there was this network that was already out there. DC wasn’t that big and you could only play the 9:30 Club so many times. We got out of there pretty quickly.’
The responsibility for booking Scream shows fell to Pete Stahl. He remembers his band’s earliest national tours coming together on a somewhat ad hoc basis – ‘You’d phone someone who was a friend of a friend in another town and they’d say, “Okay, this guy is going to be at this record store between twelve and two and he’ll help you put on a show”’ – but over time he built up ‘The Book’, a comprehensive database of phone numbers and addresses for record stores, promoters, venues, fanzine writers, DJs, record labels and bands in every state. For all Stahl’s meticulous planning, however, touring the nation was rarely predictable: on the road a certain ‘Wild West’ mentality prevailed. On more than one occasion the band found themselves literally staring down the barrel of a gun.
‘We had a couple of shows where we had guns pulled on us,’ recalls Franz Stahl. ‘Once in Pennsylvania we didn’t get paid and the guy pulled a gun because basically Skeeter was trying to kill him. Another time we played in New Orleans and this crazed redneck came storming into the club with a shotgun, saying, “Any y’all feel like being punk rock here?” This huge biker named Ace just stuck his hand out, whipped the shotgun out of the guy’s hand and said, “We’re not having any of that here.” That could have ended badly.’
‘You’d play a lot of crazy shows in those days,’ agrees Pete Stahl. ‘You’d have cops trying to shut down shows, there’d be tensions with skinheads – we had a black guy in the band, remember – and fights were pretty common. But we always got by.’
‘Most of the confrontations we had were with drunks, people who just happened to come to the club for a drink and got stuck with us,’ says Franz. ‘But Skeeter was a big, cut dude and my brother was afraid of no one, so they’d shut down situations pretty quick. Pete was never scared to jump in the middle of potential fights. People would just back away saying, “These motherf*ckers are crazy.”’
Following the example set by Minor Threat and Faith, in spring 1983 Scream decided to flesh out their sound with the addition of a second guitar player. Their new recruit could hardly have been more at odds with the DC punk aesthetic. Robert Lee Davidson – better known by his nickname ‘Harley’ – played in a Judas Priest-influenced metal band called Tyrant, and first met the Stahl brothers while dating their sister Sabrina. Every bit as stubbornly independent as his new bandmates, the candy-floss-haired, studs-and-leather-wearing metal-head made absolutely no attempt to tone down his look to assimilate into the DC scene, horrifying elitist punk purists. This secretly gave Pete and Franz Stahl no small amount of pleasure.
Whatever his perceived sartorial shortcomings, Davidson was an undeniably gifted guitarist, and his fluid, technical hard-rock style helped Scream tap deeper into primal rock ’n’ roll sources on their superb second album, 1985’s This Side The new guitarist’s metallic influences are most evident on ‘Iron Curtain’, a not-entirely-convincing Aerosmith-meets-Judas Priest headbanger replete with squealing guitar leads, but elsewhere This Side Up swaggers and slams with a confidence and agility of which Bad Brains themselves would have been proud.
The rollicking ‘Bet You Never Thought’ could have fitted seamlessly onto The Clash’s London the title track is an exhilarating tangle of Buzzco*cks guitar and air-punching PMA it rained so hard I thought the roof was gonna give / But now today’s so bright, just wanna let it all while the soulful ‘Still Screaming’ matches shimmering minor key reggae with skronking jazz saxophone. Elsewhere, ‘I Look When You Walk’ has a sexy garage rock groove, and album-closer ‘Walking Song Dub’ mixes arty, experimental found-sound collages with booming dub basslines, cut-and-paste vocal loops and a whistled melody line. Within a scene hovering dangerously close to self-parody in the mid-eighties, This Side Up was a genuine revelation. In 1997 Dave Grohl nominated it as one of the most significant albums of his adolescence.
‘This is the album where Scream went from being a hardcore band into being a rock band,’ he told England’s now defunct Melody Maker magazine. ‘They sounded like Aerosmith and I loved that. I liked the fact that they had long hair, that they weren’t straight edge and that they played this kinda hard-rock/hardcore thing. It made me realise there was a place for me making music.’
With a superb new album to draw upon, and with their sound bolstered by Davidson’s muscular fretwork, Scream quickly acquired a reputation as one of the punk scene’s unmissable live draws. When the quintet came through Boston in April 1985, Suburban Voice editor Al Quint declared their set at the Paradise ‘the best set of the year, so far’.
‘The perfect combination of speed, power and melody,’ Quint wrote. ‘The new songs combine those attributes and more. Pete Stahl has charismatic stage presence, able to draw people together, while the band’s versatile, uptempo sound, spearheaded by a two-guitar blitz, keeps on coming. The band’s newer material has been lumped into the metal classification, but it’s coming more from a late sixties hard-rock style – bands like Ten Years After, Steppenwolf (especially their 10-minute jam of “Magic Carpet Ride”) or Blue Cheer have influenced their newer material. Scream are definitely in the top echelon of American bands.’
In autumn 1986 Kent Stax reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to leave Scream. Having recently become a father for the first time, the drummer felt that he could no longer commit to the band’s arduous, loss-making touring schedule. He promised, however, to stick around until the band found a suitable replacement. To this day Dave Grohl maintains that he never imagined that this opportunity would fall to him. When he first made contact with Franz Stahl Grohl’s ambitions were modest: he simply hoped to score a jam session with his favourite local band so he could brag about it to his friends. In conversation with Stahl, he mentioned his stints in Freak Baby, Mission Impossible and Dain Bramage and explained that he was a huge Scream fan. When Stahl asked Grohl his age, the 17-year-old drummer claimed to be 20, making the assumption that a nationally touring rock band wouldn’t be interested in auditioning a rookie teenager. Stahl promised to be in touch.
As an emerging talent on the DC scene, Grohl wasn’t a complete unknown to the members of Scream. Franz Stahl had seen Mission Impossible play at Lake Braddock, while both Stahl brothers and Skeeter Thompson had witnessed an early Dain Bramage show at dc space. Pete Stahl’s memory of that particular night tallies with Reuben Radding’s account of playing with Grohl: ‘All I remember is everybody staring at Dave and not really watching the band,’ Stahl says. ‘Everyone was like, “Wow, this kid is really good.”’
Given the instant impression that the young drummer had made that night, Franz Stahl’s decision not to schedule an immediate audition for Grohl was mystifying, though the guitarist now admits that he has scant memory of the pair’s first phone conversation. In fact, Grohl only secured an audition for Scream after calling Stahl a second time. The delay proved to be to Grohl’s advantage, however. In the interim period he obtained Scream’s demo recordings for what would become the Banging the Drum album and he had taught himself the drum parts to every song. When the drummer arrived for his audition at Scream’s rehearsal space, situated beneath an Arlington ‘head’ shop, he felt confident and ready. Grohl would later describe the next two hours of his life as ‘heaven’.
‘Franz was the only member at that first audition,’ he recalls. ‘He was one of my heroes, and he just looked at me and said, “Alright kid, let’s see what you got …”’
‘I said, “What do you know?”’ recalls Stahl, ‘and he said, “Well, I know the first record.” And then he blew through twenty songs with a fervour I’d never seen before. As soon as we were done I immediately got on the phone with Harley and Skeeter and said, “You guys have to f*cking come down here, you have to check this kid out.” To be honest, he had the gig after the first song.’
Grohl was asked to sit in on two or three full rehearsals with Scream before he was formally offered a position in the band. He now faced a difficult decision. He could join Scream, and ditch Radding and Smith, his two best friends; or he could pass up the opportunity to join one of his favourite bands in the world and remain in limbo with Dain Bramage. He drove around Alexandra in his VW Bug for a week listening to Led Zeppelin III while pondering his choices: finally he phoned Franz Stahl and apologetically declined his offer. With a guilty conscience, he then confessed to Reuben Radding and Dave Smith that he had been tempted to stray.
‘I remember him saying how he was massively flattered but that it was more important to him to see things through with Dain Bramage,’ recalls Radding. ‘He said that he thought we were more original, and that he wasn’t so psyched about being just a drummer after being in a band like ours that was such a collaboration. I was dark, but relieved.’
Scream were not the only band interested in securing Grohl’s services in 1986. That same year the drummer received an offer to join ‘Scumdogs of the Universe’ Gwar, a Richmond, Virginia-based heavy metal collective whose outlandish sci-fi monster costumes and gory, over-the-top theatrics made Kiss look like The Osmonds. A local hard rock band called Wizard enquired about his availability too. And following the dissolution of Embrace, Ian MacKaye also called, inviting Grohl to Dischord House to jam with bassist Joe Lally in a new project that would become the brilliant, iconoclastic Fugazi. By then, however, Grohl had spoken to Franz Stahl again, to tell him that he had reconsidered his decision to join.
Reuben Radding learned of Grohl’s change of heart only after overhearing mutual friends discussing his defection to Scream. Later that same day, Grohl called to confirm his decision. By his own admission, Reuben Radding was ‘devastated’.
‘I both could and couldn’t understand his decision,’ he admits. ‘I was pissed off and I stayed pissed off for a very long time. We had done a lot for Dave already, especially Smave. He used to drive Dave around, fix his drums … he sacrificed a hell of a lot. We loved Dave tremendously, but I didn’t think I could trust him after that happened. Trying to talk him out of it wasn’t in my head.’
‘Dave was definitely torn as to what to do,’ recalls Larry Hinkle. ‘I remember thinking that he should have stayed with Dain Bramage, and I told him that. Scream was definitely cool, but Dain Bramage were up and coming, and they had a different sound than what was going on at the time. But he had already made up his mind.’
With cruel inevitability, finished copies of Dain Bramage’s I Scream Not Coming Down album arrived at Reuben Radding’s house just weeks after Grohl’s decision to quit the band. Listening to the album did nothing to elevate Radding’s spirits; indeed it added to the sense of disappointment he was already feeling. Compared with the demos his band had recorded with Barrett Jones, Radding considers I Scream Not Coming Down ‘flat’ and ‘lifeless’: ‘The performances are not as comfortable and confident as the stuff we did before,’ he says. ‘The number of ways that the record doesn’t sound like us are numerous.’
Nonetheless, I Scream Not Coming Down is not without its merits. The influence of Led Zeppelin is evident in the album’s most powerful tracks ‘Drag Queen’, ‘Stubble’ and ‘Flicker’ (not least in the subtly tweaked ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ bass line in ‘Flicker’) but Radding’s imaginative, non-linear guitar work and the rhythm section’s varied, versatile dynamic shifts keep the songs from straying into monolithic hard rock territory. Elsewhere, ‘Eyes Open’ combines acoustic and electric guitars in a post-punk adrenalin rush reminiscent of latter-day Hüsker Dü and ‘The Log’ is a superbly adroit slice of progressive punk that recalls Boston’s Moving Targets. The title track, co-written by Radding and his former Age of Consent bandmate Dan Koazk, is another high point, though Radding’s lyric sky’s my now serves as a rather poignant reminder of the band’s dashed optimism and unfulfilled potential. Despite his understandable disappointment at how things panned out for Dain Bramage, when Reuben Radding reflects now upon his time creating and playing music alongside Dave Grohl he has few regrets.
‘I was a kid, and my mistakes or questionable decisions are pretty easy for me to shrug off in that light,’ he told me in 2010. ‘Ever since Nirvana got big I’ve been surrounded by people who want or expect me to be bitter. Sorry, there’s no grounds for that kind of bullsh*t. It was a hell of a lot of fun.’
I Scream Not Coming Down finally reached record stores nationwide on 28 February 1987. Lauded as ‘a real rock ’n’ roll record’ of ‘incredible depth and power’ by Fartblossom, the album was largely met with positive reviews. Tim Yohannon of maximumrocknroll categorised it as ‘quirky, jangly hard pop meets the DC sound’, and hailed the band’s ‘complex’ arrangements: the album, he noted, was ‘a challenge’. Suburban Voice praised the album’s ‘heart, energy and guts’ and ‘knockout hooks’, describing it as ‘tuneful enough to stick in your head, with enough stylistic variation to make it come across as original’. Dave Grohl himself would later hail the album as ‘a fine demonstration of our blend of rock, art punk and hardcore’. By the time of its release, however, he was working on a new Scream album.
In summer 1985, some six years on from the release of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP, Rolling Stone finally acknowledged the existence of the American hardcore scene. Writer Michael Goldberg was tasked with bringing the magazine’s readership up to speed with the music, mindset and mores of the punk rock underground, in what was Rolling most significant report on the genre since Charles M. Young’s October 1977 cover feature on the Sex Pistols. Goldberg’s excellent article was titled ‘Punk Lives’. ‘They don’t sound like the Ramones, and they don’t look like the Sex Pistols,’ stated the feature subhead, ‘but bands like Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets are keeping the spirit of ’77 alive.’
Goldberg’s article offered a neat précis of what he dubbed the ‘neopunk’ community. Focusing largely upon acts signed to Greg Ginn’s SST label and Minneapolis’ indie imprint Twin/Tone, the writer highlighted the scene’s stubbornly independent Do-It-Yourself ethos and the tireless work ethic powering it, contrasting ‘old school’ punk’s cartoon nihilism with the ‘responsible’, proactive, self-reliant mentality underpinning the hardcore movement.
In the closing paragraphs of his feature, Goldberg detailed a conversation he held with Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould in regard to the advantages and disadvantages of bands operating within an independent label framework. ‘I think being outside the mainstream music business is good,’ Mould told Goldberg. ‘When you tie yourself down to a major label, you give up all your individual control over things. You become part of the machine. It wouldn’t seem right for Hüsker Dü …’ Yet, just nine months after the publication of Goldberg’s article, Hüsker Dü’s sixth studio album Candy Apple Grey was released on Warner Bros.
Though Hüsker Dü were not the first eighties ‘neopunk’ collective to sign to a major label – fellow Minneapolis act The Replacements had inked a deal with Sire shortly after the release of their brilliant 1984 album Let It Be – the trio’s decision to sign with Warners was significant, and hotly debated at the time. While The Stooges, MC5, Ramones, the New York Dolls, Television and most other key players in the first wave of American punk rock all recorded within the major label system, the American hardcore movement had never actively sought its endorsem*nt or patronage.
In 1981 Black Flag had signed a distribution deal with MCA Records affiliate Unicorn for their début album Damaged only to have MCA President Al Bergamo declare the album ‘anti-parent’ and refuse to authorise its release. The resulting lawsuit tied the band up in legal red tape for two years: when Ginn attempted to sneak the album out on SST both he and Dukowski were jailed for contempt of court. That Hüsker Dü, a fellow SST band, was now prepared to sleep with the enemy was viewed by many in the punk community as a traitorous betrayal of the scene in which they had honed their craft.
All too aware of the imminent backlash, in February 1986 – one month before the release of Candy Apple Grey – Bob Mould penned a column for maximumrocknroll (a fanzine with an editorial policy which dictated that no act signed to a major would feature in its Xeroxed pages) to face down such criticisms. Mould was at pains to point out that Hüsker Dü’s Warners contract guaranteed his band ‘complete artistic freedom’ in terms of their music, artwork and image, and stressed that the trio were still self-managed, still committed to all-ages shows and still punk rockers at heart. ‘I don’t think Hüsker Dü signing to a major label will have an effect on the underground scene at all,’ he wrote. ‘If anything, it might be a sign that something is happening, that some people are finally listening to the underground, and they might even respect what’s going on.’
Mould’s comment was both perceptive and prescient. Michael Goldberg’s Rolling Stone article was just one indicator that the mainstream no longer saw the underground as appealing solely to a demographic R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe pithily characterised as ‘the freaks, the fa*gs, the fat girls, the art students and the indie music fanatics’. In March 1986 MTV launched its own ‘alternative’ music show 120 giving national exposure to left-of-the-dial acts such as Gene Loves Jezebel, Killing Joke, The Smiths, The Cure and Hüsker Dü themselves.
In truth, Bob Mould’s band were not the only punk act looking to break through a glass ceiling perceived to exist just inches above the moshpit floor. The burgeoning success of R.E.M. and U2, two bands who had started out on the post-punk circuit, offered hope and encouragement to other aspirant underground acts. R.E.M., who had previously taken bands such as The Replacements and The Minutemen on tour, secured their first US Gold record classification in 1986 when Life’s Rich Pageant passed the 500,000 sales mark. While this level of mainstream acceptance remained a pipe dream for even the most ambitious young punks, such achievements did not go unnoticed in the underground community, as Greg Ginn told writer Michael Azerrad in his highly regarded text Our Band Could Be Your
‘[Bands] started out with the ambition “If we could just be a touring band and go around and do this, that would be cool,”’ Ginn noted. ‘Then R.E.M. came into it and it was like, “Wow, we can make a career out of this.” There was a sharp turn.’
Suspicious that this mindset was infecting his own band, in August 1986 Ginn broke up Black Flag. Four months later, following the release of his band’s Bedtime for Democracy album, Jello Biafra called time on Dead Kennedys too. The American hardcore era was over: the age of ‘Alternative Rock’ was dawning.
‘When we got really successful it kinda ruined the scene for everybody,’ R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck maintains. ‘Everyone got big major label deals and I’m not sure it was a good thing.
‘We got lucky and were relatively successful in the mid-eighties, but all my favourite groups – Hüsker Dü and The Replacements and hundreds of others – would come through towns and play to maybe 80 people. In 1984 I booked The Replacements to play a club in Athens [Georgia] and I personally dragged every single person to the club that night: there was 22 people there. It was completely under the radar. And that was fun. It was the Reagan years and you had us weird guys with dyed hair playing music that was never on the radio. It felt like us against the world.
‘But then there was a period for about a year where I had to apologise every time the radio came on, because college radio was just bands that sounded like R.E.M. without the good stuff. And then the year after us everyone sounded like The Replacements. And then everyone sounded like Hüsker Dü. And then everyone sounded like Sonic Youth … Maybe ideally it’d have been better for us to have been less successful.’
Mark Lanegan, then the frontman of SST-signed psych-rockers Screaming Trees, later Dave Grohl’s bandmate in Queens of the Stone Age, was equally cognisant of R.E.M. and U2’s increasing influence upon the mid-eighties underground music scene.
‘I remember we would go on SST tours which were notoriously long and you hit everywhere relentlessly,’ he recalled in 2002. ‘And everywhere we would hit we would try and guess if the [other] band [on the bill] today was gonna sound like R.E.M. or U2 – inevitably it would be one or the other.’
‘When we discovered U2 it was says Brian Baker, ‘and this was a band that was lyrically very powerful and sounded pretty tough to us relative to the time. To us it was just like Stiff Little Fingers or The Undertones, but just a bit slicker. They were a good example of what I thought was a punk ethic moving into a mainstream place.
‘My band Dag Nasty existed from ’85 through to ’88 and at that point a lot of things had changed. The climate was definitely different. Punk rock was not as threatening as it used to be, it had become much more universally understood and less feared, which meant that there were many more places to play and people were willing to play your music on college radio. In that period, bands were definitely trying to connect on a broader scale.’
It was against this background that Scream left Dischord in 1987 to sign to DC reggae label RAS (Real Authentic Sound of Reggae). Founded in 1979 by WHFS disc jockey Doctor Dread (aka Gary Himelfarb), the label was looking to expand into the rock scene, and Himelfarb saw the powerful, passionate Scream as the ideal first nonreggae signing to his roster. In their interview with Elizabeth Greene from the band could hardly have sounded more enthused about their new beginning.
‘It’ll be a clean, fresh start for Scream,’ said Skeeter Thompson. ‘Dischord is really limited in what they can do … not really limited, they just don’t have enough personnel I guess. They’re not really interested in putting out more than 10,000 copies of an album. Now I think Scream is just ready to put out as much music as we can.’
‘We’ve been sending out tapes for a long time, trying to get record companies interested in us,’ admitted Pete Stahl. ‘For one reason or another it never happened and RAS was really the first thing that ever came up. RAS really likes us and they like what we’re saying and they’d like to help us f*ckin’ get our music out and make some money at the same time.’
‘Ian [MacKaye] knew that we had aspirations to make a living as musicians and he was very gracious and supportive,’ Stahl told me in 2010. ‘He was like, “You might want to see where this can take you. You have a home here, but …” So we took a chance. It didn’t really work out.’
In the autumn of 1987 Scream booked a lengthy US tour to preview material from their forthcoming RAS début No More Before their new drummer could get in the van, he needed his mother’s permission to drop out of high school. To his surprise, his mother acquiesced without hesitation.
‘I said, “Hallelujah. Go,”’ Virginia Grohl recalled in 2008. ‘Because, of all the things he’s done brilliantly in his life, school was never one of them.’
‘Even then she knew me well enough to know I was better off following my heart,’ Dave would later recall. ‘All parents want their kids to do brilliantly at school. Still, why should I have stayed at school and learned things I wouldn’t really need later, when I could do something I really loved and wanted to pursue with all my energy: music.’
As he readied himself to leave home for his first tour, Grohl received a phone call from his old friend and punk-rock mentor Tracey Bradford. Far from encouraging Grohl’s pursuit of his musical dreams, however, Bradford desperately urged the teenager to reconsider his plans.
‘I came home from college one day,’ Bradford recalls, ‘and my mom said, “Dave joined a band called Scream and he’s dropping out of high school and he’s going to go on tour.” And so I called him and I was like, “God, David, don’t drop out.” I said, “David, look at all these bands I’ve seen who are still living in vans.” It wasn’t like Dave had a glamorous life, but with an education you can feed yourself and you can get an apartment. I said, “Your mom’s a school teacher, so how does that look, dropping out of high school with no education? You’re a smart kid, you’re not dumb and you could be a great musician and still be a nothing.” I was around some great musicians, really, really talented kids, and here was this guy saying, “I wanna be a rock star!” and I’m going, “Oh my God, please, just get something so you have a back-up.” But he was like, “Nope, this is my big chance.”’
‘Because I was still in high school I could never imagine getting out of suburban Virginia,’ Grohl recalls. ‘So I remember always being fascinated with the tour van. Any time I went to a gig I loved watching a band pack up their van, because I imagined it to be almost like a travelling tree-house. Tour vans represented freedom to me. So to get in a tour van for the first time felt like the start of a big adventure.’
Scream’s autumn ’87 tour itinerary took them across the Mid-West, into Canada and down the Pacific Coast. It took in venues such as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Community World Theatre in Tacoma, Washington (where Scream were supported by local punks Diddly Squat, featuring future Foo Fighter Nate Mendel) and the Speedway Café in Salt Lake City, where the quintet played as support to Keith Morris’s Circle Jerks. Accompanied by his pal Jimmy Swanson, who had blagged a seat in the van as Scream’s roadie, Grohl remembers the whole experience being an absolute blast. Every day brought new experiences. In Chicago Grohl scored his first-ever groupie (‘some blonde heavy metal chick. It was lame, not good, not sexy at all’); in Denver he took so many magic mushrooms that he barely made it through the show. The feeling of freedom was intoxicating.
‘I used to keep journals,’ Grohl recalls, ‘f*cking good ones. Every single day I wrote an entry in my journal, with diagrams and line drawings and sketches of the venues. They were poorly written, for sure, but absolutely real. I’d revisit them every now and then when I was super-high and look back and laugh.’
‘I was 18 years old, doing exactly what I wanted to do. With $7 a day, I travelled to places I’d never dreamed of visiting. And all because of music. The feeling of driving across the country in a van with five other guys, stopping in every city to play, sleeping on people’s floors, watching the sun come up over the desert as I drove, it was all too much. This was definitely where I belonged.’
‘Dave was at home with the lifestyle from day one,’ says Franz Stahl. ‘And he had the personality to fit in. He was a hyperactive kid, on and off the drum stool: he always seemed like he’d just downed four Coca Colas. From the start I thought, “This kid’s a star.” I knew it from way back then, I felt it. Maybe that was why I wanted him to be in the band. I mean, it was his playing initially, but I could see through that and see that this kid was going to go someplace.’
Asked for his most vivid memory of his first-ever tour, Grohl likes to recall an incident which almost ended his career before it had barely begun. He and Swanson had been tasked with piloting Scream’s Dodge Ram van on an overnight drive: unfortunately for his new bandmates, asleep in the back of the van, the irresponsible duo were rather more interested in roadtesting a new item of pot-smoking paraphernalia called the Easy Rider Aqua Pipe. As the van filled up with smoke, the two teenage potheads had an attack of the giggles, and lost control of the vehicle.
‘The two of us were laughing so hysterically ’cos we could hardly see each other,’ Grohl recalled. ‘I remember looking at Jimmy’s face ’cos he was looking at mine with two big bloodshot eyes, when all of a sudden the van starts rumbling ’cos we were way the f*ck off the road, going about 70 miles per hour and the van’s just quaking! Everybody wakes up from their sleeping bags in this cloud of smoke. We weren’t allowed to drive again.’
Some two months after Scream set out upon their autumn ’87 tour, Pete Stahl dropped Dave Grohl back at 5516 Kathleen Place. As Grohl clambered from the van, Stahl asked him if he held a valid passport. When Grohl looked confused, Stahl told him that Scream would be starting a European tour in February. As Scream’s van pulled out of the cul-de-sac, their 18-year-old drummer was still standing on his mother’s doorstep with his mouth hanging open.
Scream toured Europe for the first time in 1985, becoming the first East Coast hardcore band to do so. European punk rockers didn’t always take kindly to having American bands on their territory – when Black Flag débuted their Damaged album in the UK tour in December 1981 they were greeted with volleys of spit, anti-American abuse and skinhead violence at every show – but the Virginians’ easy charm and raw magnetism won over crowds wherever they went.
‘It was amazing,’ says Pete Stahl. ‘People seemed to have greater freedom in Europe to create little pockets of music and art and cinema and there was always people in those communities that would support us.’
Scream played squats and bombed-out youth centres, bonded with anarchist collectives over weed and industrial-strength cider and talked punk, politics and philosophy with fans who had driven across international borders just to attend their shows. When they returned to the continent in February 1988 (now a quartet once more, as ‘Harley’ Davidson had left the band at the end of their autumn ’87 US tour) they had a fervent, passionate fan base in every city – and a drummer who couldn’t quite believe that this alternate reality existed.
‘The whole trip was a real eye-opening experience,’ Grohl recalls. ‘We’d fly standby from Washington DC on this Dutch airline called Martin Air – they had standby tickets that you could reserve, so you could get a flight from DC to Amsterdam for like $110 – so we’d have enough money to get there, but we’d never have enough money to get back. So we had to tour until we had enough money to get home. And we toured f*cking hard. We’d go over for three months at a time and we were hanging on by a thread the whole time we were there.
‘Going on the road in America in the early eighties bands really had no f*cking idea what to expect, it was still like the Wild Wild West out there. But after that network was established in the mid-eighties it became a little easier: it was never but maybe you had played that place last time around and maybe you’d have somewhere to crash so it wasn’t a complete step into the dark every time. But Europe was so different. In Europe there were squats where we’d turn up and they’d still be building the stage, or someone would be out back tying wires together to pirate some electricity so that we could play. Or we’d show up to see them burning mattresses out front because there was scabies everywhere. Or there’d be riots where there’d be squatters chucking bottles and glass at the skinheads who were trying to evict them from the building … sh*t like that. It totally blew my mind.
‘Coming over to Europe for the first time I had no idea what a squat was. We landed in Amsterdam – which was great for me because I was at the height of my pot-head career, my stoner phase – and everyone we worked with lived in squats. Our booking agent Hedi lived in a squat that was one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever been in in my life, so it was hard for me to wrap my head around this concept. I was like, really, if a building is not being used and you maintain it you can just live there? How the f*ck is that possible? But just as the network that was the hardcore scene in America brought all these people together, you’d come over to Europe and see the same thing. I’d meet kids from all over the world in squats in Italy and Spain and Germany and they loved to come see American bands: Europe had great bands, amazing hardcore bands, but there were kids who wanted to see us because their dream was to go see America: they wanted to see the desert, or New York City or Los Angeles, California. That changed, at some point it became f*ck your desert, and f*ck New York and LA, but back then we were singing along with the rest of the world about how f*cked up our country was. It was an amazing time.’
‘Scream made a lot of friends out in Europe,’ says Ian MacKaye, then touring the continent for the first time with Fugazi. ‘They toured hard, and were well loved, well received and well respected. They’d hang out after shows and meet good people, and their reputation as nice guys and a great band spread. On Fugazi’s first European tour we played something like 78 shows in three months and we didn’t always stay for the party afterwards – we’d have an eight-hour drive so we wanted to get on the road quickly so we could destroy the next room the next night – but Scream always stayed for the party and won the affection of a lot of people.’
Lee Dorrian first met Scream at a party on the sixteenth floor of a Coventry council flat in 1985. Then a 17-year-old punk promoter, later the frontman of hugely influential grindcore band Napalm Death and now the vocalist of British doom rockers Cathedral and owner of the influential metal label Rise Above, Dorrian remembers the band being ‘absolutely trashed’, but good natured, likeable and friendly.
‘Pete Stahl was a real cool guy,’ he recalls. ‘I went to see Scream a few times, and I remember one gig at the Hummingbird in Birmingham, which I think was the last gig on their tour, and he reeled off a list of about 50 people he’d met on the road, and he remembered everybody’s name. That impressed me.’
‘When they came back to England in ’88 I put them on at a place called The Inn Hotel in Coventry. They had nowhere to stay and I had a council flat in Hillfields in Coventry, 52 Hillfields House, so they piled back to my flat. There were holes in the windows and doors made by some Dutch band who had stayed the week before, and I had to go around to a squat around the corner to nick some furniture. But they were just happy to have a roof over their heads. And they were good company. Dave was a particularly witty character. I remember my girlfriend at the time had a big Jimmy Page logo on the back of her jacket and Dave was in the back of the van going, “Does anyone like Led Zeppelin?”, and she was all excited, saying, “Oh, I do, I do!” He was just teasing, of course, just pretending he hasn’t noticed. He was really knowledgeable and excited about music too. Napalm had just recorded a session for [late, great, punk-championing DJ] John Peel and Dave really wanted to hear it, so I played it. It completely floored them, they thought it was nuts. I think Dave and I spent the rest of the night talking about Sabbath and Celtic Frost and Voivod.’
Back in Amsterdam after English dates with Concrete Sox and Subhumans, Scream’s 28 March set at Van Hall was broadcast live on Dutch radio. Released later that same year on Konkurrel records as Live! At Van Hall the recording stands as an excellent snapshot of a confident, dazzlingly capable band at the peak of their abilities. ‘Don’t ask me why they want an American band on the radio when there’s so many good European bands,’ says Pete Stahl after opener ‘Who Knows? Who Cares?’, but the incendiary 40-minute set that follows ably demonstrates just why Scream were generating such a strong word-of-mouth buzz on the continent: Grohl’s frenetic drum solo on ‘Feel Like That’ alone justifies the price of admission.
Before leaving Amsterdam, Grohl decided to commemorate his first visit to Europe by getting John Bonham’s three-circle logo from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed on his right shoulder: he’d attempted to ink the symbol into his own skin at the age of 16, but was disappointed with the end result, later admitting, ‘It looks like someone put a cigarette out on my f*cking arm.’ Ironically, though, it would be the discovery of another hard-hitting drummer, Melvins’ Dale Crover, which would leave the biggest mark on Grohl in Amsterdam. And although he could not possibly have realised it at the time, this discovery would ultimately prove to be one of the most significant events of Dave Grohl’s life.
‘We were killing time between gigs, staying at a friend’s house, smoking weed and doing nothing,’ he recalled in 2004. ‘I was literally playing through this guy’s record collection, every single last one. When I got to Melvins’ Gluey Porch I thought, Here’s another hardcore record. But when I put it on it really f*cking blew my mind. This was the moment I fell in love with the dirge aesthetic. The songs were so slow you couldn’t imagine how the band kept time. It was ten to fifteen seconds between each hit. I had never heard anything so heavy before, and the fact these were teenagers from Aberdeen, Washington, playing music heavier than Black Sabbath or any metal record I had heard was unbelievable.’
Hailed by the venerable Trouser Press Guide as ‘inimitable steam-rolling overlords of the slow-flowing magma’, Melvins deal in oppressive downer anthems resembling the sound of the earth choking slowly on its own vomit. Fronted by Buzz ‘King Buzzo’ Osbourne, a maverick malcontent reared on a high-carb diet of Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Flipper, Kiss and Motörhead, the band were cult legends in the subterranean Pacific Northwest rock scene, and a huge influence upon their hometown Nirvana. To Dave Grohl, their viscous punk/metal gloop offered a whole new lexicon of aural abuse.
‘I always thought I knew the definition of heavy,’ Grohl admitted in 2001, ‘but hearing Gluey Porch Treatments completely turned my musical perception on its side.’
Melvins were not the only band redefining the boundaries of underground rock in America in the late eighties. As the American hardcore dream turned sour, and the scene’s early idealism gave way to bitterness, cynicism and in-fighting, a new breed of nihilistic, provocative noisemakers emerged: the finest of these were Steve Albini’s Big Black, Texan audio terrorists Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, Washington DC’s puss* Galore, Wisconsin’s Killdozer, Minneapolis’ Cows and New York art-rockers Sonic Youth. Influenced by post-punk and No Wave acts such as The Birthday Party, Suicide, Killing Joke, Swans and John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, these disparate, dissolute artists were united in a quest to tear apart hardcore orthodoxy and challenge the punk mindset with excessive volume, confrontational ideas and extreme behaviour. A common overarching raison d’être for these bands was to prod, poke, irritate and inflame sensibilities to the point where even the most enlightened punk-cognisant audiences would wish to inflict physical harm upon them. In this mission they proved remarkably successful.
That this emerging scene was informed by, but not in thrall to, the hardcore movement is perhaps best illustrated by the earliest recordings made by puss* Galore, the unsettling, hate-filled noise collective led by future Blues Explosion frontman Jon Spencer. Though the sleeve of puss* Galore’s début seven inch, the Feel Good About Your Body EP, bore the dedication ‘Thanks to Ian and Jeff’ (Dischord owners MacKaye and Nelson having helped guide the band in setting up their own label, Shove Records) the vinyl within mocked the hardcore scene’s righteousness: ‘HC Rebellion’ featured bassist Julia Cafritz reading out letters printed in the September 1985 issue of maximumrocknroll as if they contained the answers to all of life’s greatest mysteries. This determination to offend the punk community in their adopted hometown was even more evident on the band’s second EP, Groovy Hate released in June 1986. Amid atonal slabs of noise every bit as abrasive and unpleasant as their titles – ‘c*nt Tease’, ‘Teen puss* Power’, ‘Kill Yourself’, ‘Asshole’ – Groovy Hate f*ck featured a brutally offensive song called ‘You Look Like a Jew’, which likened the DC punk uniform of shaved heads and thrift store clothing to ‘chic’ and celebrated rising outta Dischord It’s hard to imagine how puss* Galore could have tried harder to burn bridges.
Both puss* Galore EPs were recorded at Barrett Jones’s Laundry Room studio. Jones knew that these sessions were going to be entirely unlike any he had previously helmed from the moment that Spencer and Cafritz produced a rusty chainsaw, hammers, a steel oil drum and several panes of glass as ‘instruments’. The producer’s abiding memories of the sessions are Spencer encouraging him to make the recordings as distorted and f*cked-up as possible – ‘He’d say, “That sounds too good – make it sound worse”’ – and his roommates recoiling in horror as the leather-clad degenerates occupying their suburban home spent day after day assembling punishing walls of noise from screeching guitar feedback, brutish percussion and screamed lyrical obscenities. When Jones played the puss* Galore tapes for Dave Grohl and Reuben Radding, his friends assumed the recordings were intended as a joke. Jon Spencer would doubtless have been delighted.
Music critics were at once repulsed and fascinated by this new punk aesthetic and their scabrous songs of loathe and hate, detecting a deep moral core buried beneath the layers of feedback, filth and fuzz. Reviewing Big Black’s masterful début album Steve Albini’s forensic dissection of the ugly urges churning beneath the surface of Ronald Reagan’s whitewashed Pleasantville America, Robert Christgau noted, ‘Though they don’t want you to know it, these hateful little twerps are sensitive souls – they’re moved to make this godawful racket by the godawful pain of the world.’ Writing in the Village Christgau also coined the term ‘pig-f*ck’ to describe the loosely affiliated noise-rock movement: perhaps unsurprisingly, this umbrella term failed to cross into mainstream music criticism, but it’s a memorably unpleasant turn of phrase which goes some way to evoking the violent, perverse and knowingly obnoxious nature of the music in question. As an overview of the scene, Touch and Go’s 1986 compilation God’s Favourite featuring Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Killdozer, Scratch Acid, Happy Flowers (a Virginian duo featuring the incomparably named Mr Horribly Scarred Infant and Mr Anus) and Hose (featuring one Rick Rubin on guitar) is essential: one listen to Killdozer’s drooling deconstruction of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ should quickly determine your tolerance for the ‘pig-f*ck’ aesthetic.
In the summer of 1986, Steve Albini and Scratch Acid featured on another culturally significant compilation album. Sub Pop 100 was the first vinyl release from a new Seattle imprint owned by local fanzine writer and DJ Bruce Pavitt. Showcasing a range of hard-edged underground sounds from punk to industrial dance, the compilation also featured Dave Grohl favourites Naked Raygun, Portland garage rockers Wipers, Sonic Youth and Seattle punks U-Men. Though Steve Albini’s contribution was simply a short spoken-word intro, it set the tone superbly for the gloriously squally racket that followed. spoken word is he intoned solemnly over whining feedback. motherf*ckers,
Albini’s bullish sentiments clearly struck a nerve with Chicago-born Pavitt: while a message on the album insert dedicated Sub Pop 100 ‘to K-Tel with love’, the spine of the record carried the ludicrous statement ‘SUB POP: the new thing: the big thing: the God thing: a mighty multinational entertainment conglomerate based in the Pacific Northwest’. If nothing else, it demonstrated that America’s newest indie imprint had a certain sass and style.
Pavitt started Subterranean Pop fanzine in 1980 while studying for a degree at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He determined that his fanzine would focus upon the American indie scene and shine a spotlight on home-grown artists. The fifth issue of the fanzine, by then named Sub featured a 21-track cassette showcasing artists such as Portland’s Neo Boys, Michigan’s Jad Fair, Witchita’s The Embarrassment and Seattle’s Steve Fisk: when it was warmly received, Pavitt included a second 20-band compilation with issue number seven. He described these cassettes as ‘audio maps to America’s more remote locations’.
While promoting Sub Pop 100 Pavitt was interviewed on the University of Washington’s KCMU radio station by Jonathan Poneman, a Toledo, Ohio-born promoter and DJ. The two had a mutual friend in Kim Thayil, a philosophy student at UW by then playing guitar in a band called Soundgarden, and it was Thayil who suggested that the two music fanatics might want to consider working together. Excited by the challenge of starting a new label, the duo agreed. As Pavitt was already using the name Sub Pop for his own KCMU show and his weekly column in Seattle music paper The it made sense to retain it for their new venture.
Pavitt and Poneman’s gung-ho attitude was entirely in keeping with the mentality of the music scene they determined to document. From the early 1960s the Pacific Northwest musical community was motivated by one simple idea (later copyrighted as a slogan by one of the area’s best-known corporations): Just Do It. From sixties pop/rock bands such as Paul Revere and the Raiders through to garage rockers The Kingsmen and proto-punks such as The Wailers and The Sonics, energy, attitude and soul took precedence over technical ability for local musicians: it was no coincidence that Seattle-born guitar hero Jimi Hendrix had to travel overseas to England for his virtuoso genius to be appreciated. But the area’s ramshackle, adventurous spirit helped propagate one of the most fecund, experimental and visceral music scenes in the nation.
‘In high school I had a guitar but I couldn’t play very well,’ says Seattle music scene veteran, and Pearl Jam guitarist, Stone Gossard. ‘But one day I was talking to my friend Steve Turner and he said, “Don’t learn to play your guitar, get a band! Don’t figure it out, just do it!” Being in a garage rock band is the greatest!’ I’d never in my life heard anyone talk about art that way, it was the most liberating thing. I was like, “I don’t have to take lessons? Thank God!”’
In 1984 Gossard joined Green River, a punk/metal collective Turner had formed with his music-obsessed best friend Mark Arm. Named after the Green River Killer, a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least 50 women in Washington State in the early eighties, the band were influenced by Black Sabbath, Black Flag, The Stooges, The Sonics, Blue Cheer and Aerosmith: just like Dave Grohl’s Dain Bramage on the other side of the nation, they aimed to subvert classic rock clichés in a noisy, ragged punk style. That same attitude fuelled other local bands. Malfunkshun, fronted by the charismatic Andrew ‘L’Andrew the Love-Child’ Wood, mixed the glam theatrics of Kiss and T-Rex with the street-level aggression of Discharge. Soundgarden, fronted by Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell, formed to play ‘Black Sabbath songs without the parts that suck’, according to guitarist Thayil. Skin Yard occupied the middle ground between The Doors and Led Zeppelin. And Melvins showed everyone that playing slow and low was a really, really, really effective way to antagonise, irritate and aggravate causal rock ’n’ roll fans who’d stumble into bars such as the Central Tavern and the Ditto Tavern expecting to have their night soundtracked by covers of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Freebird’.
Mark Arm once attributed the sound of the Pacific Northwest to isolation and inbreeding. To that he might have added intemperance, irascibility and irreverence. Like Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow, New York and other tough, blue-collar port towns, Seattle bred men with bone-dry wits, quick fists and no-nonsense attitudes. The city’s soundtrack was always going to be dense, raw and fearless.
‘It’s still essentially wilderness country up here,’ Poneman once noted. ‘It’s attracted a lot of crazy people. But there’s a lot of the rugged, do-it-yourself, survivalist, drifter types. Apply that to rock ’n’ roll and that makes punk rock. Also, people who live out in the middle of nowhere like to party because there’s nothing else to do, which is why the local music was unusually rowdy.’
In the summer of 1985, Skin Yard bassist Daniel House took the initiative to document Seattle’s newest musical community, harvesting tracks from Green River, Malfunkshun, Soundgarden, Melvins, the U-Men and his own band for release on a compilation album entitled Deep Six on the C/Z Records label. Heard now, the resulting album is an uneven, rough-hewn collection of Sasquatch stomp-rock, but at the time it was compelling proof that something was stirring in the backwoods. It was also a massive inspiration to Poneman and Pavitt when they came to create Sub Pop.
To some extent, Sub Pop had advantages over other start-up businesses. Pavitt and Poneman were already plugged into the underground community as a result of their work in press, radio and retail, and they had ready-made media platforms from which to hype their new enterprise. But they were also shrewd enough to recognise something which the owners of more earnest US hardcore imprints would never explicitly acknowledge – that the underground music industry was still, at heart, part of the entertainment business, and that in showbiz, packaging, promotion and perception are just as important as product. When Pavitt worked at Seattle’s Bombshelter record store, he noticed that Anglophile music fans would pay exorbitant import prices for anything and everything released by 4AD, Postcard or Factory records, for those labels had developed an iconic identity which transcended the appeal of individual artists. He pondered as to how his fledgling label might create a similar aesthetic.
The answer came to him in spring 1987, while visiting friends at Room Nine House, a rented property shared by members of the psychedelic rock band Room Nine, local drummer Dan Peters, UW photography student Charles Peterson and an ever-changing cast of Seattle scenesters. A punk rock fan, Charles Peterson had been documenting live gigs in Seattle since the early eighties: his unfiltered, light-streaked and movement-blurred black and white images screamed with vitality and energy, slamming the viewer into the heart of the moshpit. Live shots of Green River, Malfunkshun and Soundgarden hung all over Room Nine House, reeking of sweat and alcohol, testosterone and adrenaline. Seeing them for the first time, Pavitt saw a visual identity for his fledgling label.
‘I looked at those photos, and I immediately knew that he was catching the energy of the groups, and combining these images with the music would work,’ he told Pitchfork.com in 2008. ‘Every record label needs a visual motif to establish [itself], and those photos would help do it. Those photos inspired me to focus on trying to release records by Seattle groups.’
Sub Pop’s first single-artist release was Green River’s Dry as a Bone EP: music from Soundgarden, Blood Circus, Swallow, Fluid and Mudhoney (a post-Green River vehicle for Mark Arm, Steve Turner and friends Matt Lukin and Dan Peters) followed. The releases had a defined, uniform look: each had a black bar across the top with the band name written in capital letters, followed by the release name, all in a sans-serif font. Charles Peterson supplied the cover images. Text was kept to a minimum: more often than not only Peterson and producer Jack Endino were credited. The idea, as Pavitt explained in Sub Pop’s official biog, was to ‘pump up the visceral connection to the records’ and add ‘a sense of mystery’.
‘Not only did we put an emphasis on design,’ Pavitt told NME in 1992, ‘but on consistency of design, à la Postcard or Blue Note. This was very key. If they liked the Mudhoney records and there was hype on Mudhoney and there was another record that came out that kinda looked similar, then people would automatically pick that up. It’s the oldest scam in the book.’
The release of Mudhoney’s début single Touch Me, I’m Sick created a genuine buzz around the label, nationally and internationally. Released in August 1988, ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’ remains one of the great punk anthems, a glorious yowl of dissatisfaction and self-loathing powered by rusty Stooges-meets-The Sonics guitar slashes and a flat-out f*cked drum pattern which threatens to collapse to the kerb at any given moment. Two decades on, it ranks alongside The Kingsmen’s version of ‘Louie Louie’ as the timeless definition of Seattle rock.
For all the acclaim and attention Touch Me, I’m Sick generated in the underground, however, by the end of 1988 Sub Pop was fast running out of money. In a last-ditch gamble to build their industry profile, in February 1989 Pavitt and Poneman paid for Melody Maker journalist Everett True to visit Seattle to soak up the scene. The pair were aware that, in their constant, relentless search to uncover music’s ‘Next Big Thing’, the weekly UK music magazines were given to hyperbole, their journalists rarely letting facts stand in the way of a great story. This suited Sub Pop’s own marketing strategies just fine. And with Everett True they lucked out. His excitable, action-packed 18 March 1989 feature on ‘Seattle: Rock City’ made the Sub Pop scene look like the epicentre of a thrilling new rock revolution.
‘Before Seattle I’d never been exposed to rock,’ True admitted in 2006. ‘Punk in 1977 had seen to that. It’s unlikely I would have been half as enthusiastic about Seattle and its music if I, like my American counterparts, had grown up on a diet of Led Zeppelin and hardcore. But I hadn’t, and neither had most of my British contemporaries. Reared on a constantly changing musical culture where the press determined that bands grew old very quickly, we were always on the lookout for the thrill of the new. Consequently I was able to write about what was essentially traditional rock music with real enthusiasm. The Sub Pop rock bands, both in spirit and in sound, were new to this naïve English boy.
‘Here were bands that achieved what I had thought hitherto impossible: they made metal sound cool. During the mid-eighties pop music was anti-guitar. Jon and Bruce’s stroke of marketing genius was to push rock ’n’ roll as rebellion – an ancient credo – while allowing people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility. Up until grunge, there had always been a line drawn between popular and underground music. Sub Pop confused that line once and for all.’
True’s feature focused largely on Sub Pop’s big hitters Mudhoney and Tad, a monstrously heavy, elephantine riff machine fronted by the super-sized Tad Doyle. While in Seattle, he was also taken to see one of Sub Pop’s brightest new hopes, Aberdeen, Washington’s Nirvana, a ragged ‘power trio’ featuring vocalist/guitarist Kurdt Kobain (as Kurt Cobain was spelling his name at the time), bassist Chris (Krist) Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing.
True had just made Nirvana’s début single Love Buzz/Big Cheese one of his Melody Maker Singles of the Week. He had hailed the band as ‘beauty incarnate’ playing ‘love songs for the psychotically disturbed’.
Now featuring a second guitarist, Jason Everman, in their line-up, Nirvana played their first show as a quartet at the University of Washington’s HUB Ballroom on 25 February 1989. Seeing the band in the flesh for the first time, True was far from impressed. In his 2006 Nirvana biography Nirvana: The True he described Nirvana as ‘another formless compendium of noise for noise’s sake’.
‘I loved their single,’ he wrote, ‘but what was this mess of noise and hair and alcohol-fuelled banter?’
This, however, wasn’t the story that he told the readers of Melody Maker in March 1988.
‘Basically, this is the real thing,’ he enthused. ‘No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket or lumber yard, or fixing cars. Kurdt Kobain is a great tunesmith, although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff with
The seeds of a new rock revolution had been sown.
‘Jumping the shark’ is what cultural commentators call the precise moment when an established brand or creative enterprise abandons its core premise and begins an irretrievable decline. For Scream, that moment comes with the penultimate track on 1988’s No More Censorship album. ‘Run to the Sun’ is a painfully sincere sub-U2, arena rock tune which even Pete Stahl’s heartfelt lyrics remember when we began / Getting together to make a band / Mixed-up teenagers, think you’re strong-minded men / We started playing to take a cannot redeem. The track was barely recognisable as a Scream song; moreover it was symptomatic of a broader malaise within the band at the time: for the first time in their career, Scream sounded like followers, not leaders.
Neutered by a flat, featureless production job, No More Censorship isn’t a bad album … but it’s not within touching distance of greatness. While the title track and ‘f*cked Without a Kiss’, a graphic, unflinching tale of prison rape in a DC jail, are among the most compelling of Scream’s career, too much of the album is mannered and mediocre, bearing little of the muscular flexibility showcased on Live! At Van Hyped up as a record to propel Scream out of the underground, in reality No More Censorship sounded suspiciously like the work of a band running desperately low on inspiration.
‘Our idea of making this huge rock record didn’t really pan out,’ Grohl admitted, with some understatement.
In 1989, less than a year after the release of No More Scream were dropped by RAS Records. The album had sold around 10,000 copies, a decent return for an underground band, but far less than both the band and Gary Himelfarb had anticipated: by way of comparison, Dag Nasty’s 1988 album Field Day had shifted in excess of 30,000 copies while Hüsker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey album was heading north of 120,000 sales. Scream were in danger of looking like yesterday’s men.
This was not the only problem facing the band in 1989: Skeeter Thompson’s drug use was also becoming an issue. As a collective, Scream had always been heavily into pot-smoking, but as their commitment to long tours intensified, so too did their drug use. More than one band member graduated from smoking pot to snorting powders. ‘Drugs entered the picture towards the end of the band,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘There was cocaine and sh*t going around. Still to this day I’ve never done co*ke, one of the reasons being that I saw how it f*cked everybody’s lives up. I can’t touch that sh*t, because if I did I would surely go down in a ball of flames. I got sent to hospital after drinking coffee, so imagine what f*cking crack cocaine would do to me! I’d have no teeth and I’d be sucking dicks in like a month.’
During a 1989 tour of Europe, Skeeter Thompson disappeared, without a word to anyone. Efforts to track him down proved fruitless, so Pete Stahl promoted roadie Guy Pinhas to the vacant bass slot, and Scream completed their scheduled dates without him. When they returned to Virginia, they found Thompson waiting for them. The bassist blamed his absence upon ‘girlfriend problems’: his friends pried no further.
‘It wasn’t completely unusual for Skeeter to disappear in Europe,’ says Franz Stahl. ‘He was a handsome lad, and he had a special way with the ladies. In the States he’d be called a “nigg*r” and then he’d go to Europe and have all these white women just throwing themselves at him, and he took full advantage of that, like anybody would. It was like the Hendrix syndrome, and he dove headlong into it. He’d disappear for a bit and come back with a new suit of clothes, with some girl having bought him an all-new wardrobe. But this time his problems seemed to run deeper and he clearly needed space to get his life together.’
With Thompson temporarily incapacitated, Scream were desperate to regain some momentum. DC punk veteran Ben Pape was swiftly recruited for their next US road trip. Remarkably, he too bailed out without warning, walking out mid-tour to join The Four Horsem*n, a new hard rock band assembled by Slayer/Beastie Boys producer Rick Rubin. The band immediately flew out ex-Government Issue bassist J. Robbins to complete the tour, but morale was sinking: ‘I had a really good time with those guys, and it was super fun playing with Dave,’ recalls Robbins. ‘But even when I was in the band I was thinking, “Well, this is cool, but this isn’t Scream.”’
‘Maybe we weren’t perfectly content with the hand that had been dealt to us at that point, but we’d certainly accepted it as a reality,’ says Grohl. ‘Growing up the way we did in suburban Virginia I didn’t feel like I had many opportunities. I had surrendered to, and resigned myself to, the idea that I would live the rest of my life there, doing the things that most people there do: like masonry, which I’ve done, or working in Furniture Warehouse, which I’ve done, or roofing. I just figured, Isn’t the idea just to do what you love to do and be happy? Because how much do you need, really? I was playing music, and going on the road to Europe and not making any money but coming home and getting my job back, and then having enough money to buy weed and eat and then going on the road again. Then I’d sleep in the van and f*cking jam with my buddies and come home and get another job. That was just how it worked. Skeeter sold weed, Pete worked at the Washington Post and Franz worked at a restaurant, so as much as we wanted to be a band that millions of people would appreciate, it just wasn’t in the f*cking cards. Hüsker Dü were playing places that held 1,200 people, and we considered them to be like U2. That was huge. If we had any aspirations it was that, and at that point even that was an impossibility.’
At a low ebb, the band returned to the basem*nt of Scream House to demo some new material. Stung by the poor reception afforded to No More and bitter about the ongoing problems shackling their progress, their anger and frustration manifested itself in songs darker, heavier and more aggressive than anything they had previously recorded. One track in particular, ‘Gods Look Down’, a seething, down-tuned dirge which sounded like the final anguished screams of a man drowning in quicksand, stood out. Originally demoed at Laundry Room Studios in 1988, this was Dave Grohl’s first-ever solo track.
‘Barrett Jones was in a band called Churn at the time and he’d sometimes ask me to come over and play drums on his demos,’ Grohl recalls. ‘So then I thought, Maybe I’ll ask if I can use the last bit of that reel and experiment, so I’d buy Barrett a little weed and he’d let me use the last bits of his tapes. I had a couple of riffs and I played them really quick, and then ran in and did the drum track and then the bass, and I listened to it and it sounded f*cking great. And “Gods Look Down” was the first time I wrote a song, recorded it with vocals and had my own complete song.’
‘I was totally blown away by how good it was,’ says Barrett Jones. ‘He had the exact arrangement in his head and he did the whole thing in twenty minutes, first take with everything, no mistakes. He made it look so easy. It was pretty incredible to see.’
Recorded in their darkest hour, Scream’s new basem*nt demos were a revelation, the sound of a band with their backs against a wall, lashing out ferociously with everything at their disposal. As tapes of the demo began circulating on the underground, word began building that Scream had created their masterpiece. Pete Stahl was contacted by Glenn E. Friedman, the North Carolina-born, LA-raised photographer whose images of the nascent skateboarding, hardcore and hiphop scenes had superbly captured the anarchic energy inherent in America’s emergent youth culture: the photographer, who had previously helped broker LA skate-punks Suicidal Tendencies break into the mainstream, offered to help find Scream a new record deal. Through his work with the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Public Enemy, Friedman had become friends with Def Jam’s owners, producer Rick Rubin and New York hiphop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and the trio were in talks about launching Friedman’s own imprint, to be called World Records. In the newly re-invigorated Scream, Friedman saw a credible marquee signing for his new enterprise.
The quartet returned to Europe in spring 1990 with a renewed fire in their bellies. They played 23 shows in 24 days, cutting a second live album at the Oberhaus in Alzey, Germany, on 4 May for the German independent label Your Choice. Attendances were strong and the band departed for the USA in good spirits. Back on home soil, their optimism was soon cruelly dashed. Friedman’s label plans were on hold, and his A&R connections at major labels didn’t share his enthusiasm for Scream’s new demo. As an additional kick in the teeth, when Pete Stahl and Skeeter Thompson returned to DC they discovered that they had been evicted from their shared house. Scream’s future suddenly looked bleaker than ever.
‘Pete wound up staying in his van in front of my mother’s house while we figured out what to do next,’ says Grohl. ‘And our plan was, let’s just book a tour and get the f*ck out of here. It was an escape, it was almost like we could survive on the road better than we could at home. But then we started that tour and shows were being cancelled all over the place. We were getting desperate.
‘If you read through my journals, you’d see the gradual decline in morale as that tour went on. The struggle was getting more and more difficult. And as I was getting older, even though I was only 21 years old, I was starting to question this as a life decision. I was like, “Do I really want to be homeless for the rest of my life?” There was one entry from New Orleans where I was stranded on a f*cking kerb in the middle of f*cking nowhere for hours, waiting for the guys to pick me up. I had no money and no food and no smokes … nothing. I was completely stranded with no lifeline at all, just a backpack and my journal. And so I dug the pen a little deeper that day and I wrote about all the things I was tired of. I was tired of having absolutely nothing; I was tired of being hungry, tired of being lost, and tired of being tired. I just wanted to go home and work at the Furniture Warehouse, and have somewhere to take a shower, and go to bed every night and be with my friends and my family. Because it had been three or four years from 18 to 21 of just loving every moment of playing, but getting tired of that struggle … and there being no other option.
‘When we got to LA, Skeeter disappeared. We woke up one morning and he wasn’t there. We had a gig that night at a club called The Gaslight and we waited and waited and thought, Okay, so when do we cancel it? By 7 p.m., when he hadn’t shown up, we cancelled. And then the next night we had a show booked in San Diego. So we waited and waited and we started calling everyone, like, “Have you seen Skeeter?” but no one had seen him. He had just disappeared. So that was it, we were stuck.’
It soon became apparent that Thompson wasn’t coming back. Scream were now stranded, penniless and depressed on the West Coast, a broken band.
‘We were in LA for a month, with nothing,’ says Grohl. ‘We were sleeping on the floor of this really nice house rented out by three girls who were mud wrestlers at the Hollywood Tropicana. One of them was Pete and Franz’s sister Sabrina, a beautiful, sweet, good girl who happened to be making a lot of money mud-wrestling, to the dismay of her two older brothers, who just wanted her to change her life. But they were hardly in a position to start giving lectures. Every night these chicks would come home and dump out mountains of one dollar bills on the table and count them in front of us. They were nice girls, they took care of us and would take us out for Thai food, or let us ride their motorbikes, but still, we were living in poverty. And I thought, What, does it just end here? Now I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in Los Angeles? I had no way to get back home. I guess I could have called home and asked for the money for a Greyhound ticket, but I didn’t even know if my mom could do that. We were just lost.’
While kicking his heels in Sabrina Stahl’s house on Satsuma Avenue, Grohl read in the LA Weekly that Melvins were coming to town. Scream and Melvins had recently played together at San Francisco’s I-Beam club, and the two bands were now firm friends, so Grohl placed a call to Buzz Osbourne to ask if he might be able to get a spot on their guest list for their upcoming LA show. Osbourne was surprised to hear that his friends were in Los Angeles, and asked Grohl what they were doing in the city. The drummer poured out the whole depressing tale.
‘And then Buzz said, “Have you heard of Nirvana?”’ Grohl recalls. ‘He said, “They’re looking for a drummer.” And he gave me Chris’s number.’
Grohl had heard of Nirvana, indeed he owned the Aberdeen trio’s début album But he knew nothing of the band beyond their music and their status as an underground buzz band: indeed, the previous month he had stood in the I-Beam’s dressing room with Cobain and Novoselic without recognising either man.
‘Someone told me who they were and I was thinking, What, that’s Nirvana? Are you kidding? Because on the cover of Bleach they looked like psycho lumberjacks. I was like, “What, that little dude and that big motherf*cker? You’re kidding me.” I laughed, like, “No way.”
‘But I loved I thought it was great. It had everything that I really loved about music. It had The Beatles influence on “About a Girl” and then songs like “Paper Cuts” and “Sifting” were heavy as balls. And “Negative Creep” was And girls liked Nirvana. I had a girlfriend that liked Nirvana and I was like, “You like a band that I like? Wow!” So I knew that Nirvana were successful in the underground scene and surely that was some motivation for me to call.
‘So then I talked to Chris and Kurt on the phone, but I didn’t tell Pete and Franz I was talking to them. But when I first called, Chris said, “Oh man, Dan Peters from Mudhoney is our drummer now.” And I said, “Oh, well, if you come down here, call me up and let’s hang out … because I’m f*cking stranded here!” And then he called back and said, “You know, actually let’s talk about this …”
‘Those guys liked Scream and they were bummed that we’d broken up, but they also loved Mudhoney, and they didn’t want to be responsible for breaking Mudhoney up. So then I got on the phone with Kurt and in talking to the two of them we realised, Wow, we kinda come from the same place. I love Neil Young and Public Enemy, I love Celtic Frost and The Beatles, and they were the same in that way. We all came from divorced families. We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also loved John Fogerty. We were all little dirtbags who loved to play rock music. So it seemed like we might have a connection.
‘So then I was faced with this decision, maybe the hardest decision of my entire life. It was, do I leave Pete and Franz and move on and join another band, or do I stay in Los Angeles? Pete and Franz were my best friends. I looked up to Pete like he was my father, he taught me so much, and I respected him so much and we were so close. But to be honest I just didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles and suffer any more. And for me to do that would mean leaving Pete and Franz …’
Agonising over his decision, Grohl picked up the phone and called Kathleen Place to ask his mother for her advice.
‘She loved Pete and Franz as much as I did, we were family,’ he says. ‘And she basically said, of course you need to do what you need to do, but you have to look out for yourself in this situation.’
When he replaced the handset, Grohl made his decision.
‘I remember saying to Franz, “I’m going to go up there to try out.” And he said, “You ain’t coming back.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know if I have the gig.” And he shook his head and said, “You ain’t coming back.”
‘And deep down I knew it too.’
