—”Supertouch,” Bad Brains
It was a large, noisy, unconventionally dressed crowd that filed into Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations for a concert featuring the Cramps, Urban Verbs, and D’ Chumps. The mood suggested both a funeral and a possible riot.
In a way, these contradictory emotions made sense. Three days earlier, on January 31, 1979, WGTB had been yanked off the air by Georgetown University President Timothy Healy. Its trans- mitter had been sold for $1 and its frequency transferred to the University of the District of Columbia. The evening, then, was a paradoxical event: a benefit concert for a radio station that no longer existed.
The crisis had been building since at least May 1978, when Father Healy announced that the station was “a financial liability” and would close. Initially, few believed that would really hap- pen. “The radio station had a history of being taken off the air for short periods of time because it did not support the University per se,” Xyra Harper recalled. “Whenever we got too radical, they took us off the air for a while.”
Neither a petition signed by 20,000 listeners nor resolutions of support for WGTB by the Student and Faculty Senates swayed Healy. This time, the station was not to be merely silenced for a time but actually sold, making any revival impossible.
The exact reasons for WGTB’s demise remain unclear. Although the station had nettled the Administration for a decade, Healy would not admit to any consideration other than cost. Since a FM radio frequency was of immense potential value, and Georgetown essentially gave its license away, this explanation seems implausible.
The programming of punk and art-rock was probably not a crucial issue. For a station at a Jesuit university, WGTB’s gay and lesbian programming and abortion-counseling public service announcements were more controversial. The station’s worst offense, however, was something
more banal: Its unwillingness to air Georgetown basketball games on Saturday nights. “I know it sounds like a really horrible reason to lose a station, but that’s what happened,” said Harper.
If the end of WGTB was a relief to the university’s administrators, it was a severe reversal for the punk community. “When WGTB shut down, it was a tremendous blow,” said Mike Heath. “I cried. A lot of people cried.”
Some of the grief and rage was expressed in a sizable and spirited demonstration held on the steps of Georgetown’s administration building on the afternoon of February 3rd. The emotions were still palpable later that day as the Hall Of Nations filled with punk partisans. The loss of WGTB was the end of an era. But tonight D.C. punk’s past was to meet its future.
The concert was open to all ages and had been heavily promoted over the air during WGTB’s final weeks. As a result, many teens for whom WGTB had been a window to a world of cul- tural possibilities were in the crowd, many attending a punk concert for the first time.
This included most of the Wilson High skater crowd, who all still wore the long hair typi- cal of male high schoolers of the late 70s. Also there was 13-year-old Guy Picciotto, who attended the private Georgetown Day School. “WGTB was the only station playing remotely alternative music, the first place I ever heard bands like the Adverts,” he said. “To see it smashed was a really big deal to me.”
His sentiments were shared by David Byers, a young black teen from an all-male Catholic school, Archbishop Carroll, who was also there that night. “The first time that I heard anything good was on WGTB. It hurt to lose it,” he said. This was the first punk show for Byers and the friend who accompanied him, Georgetown Day School student Chris Haskett.
While these teens blended anonymously into the crowd, another group of newcomers was harder to overlook. Several wild-looking black punks stood next to the doorway handing out fliers. Their imposing appearance was matched by the bold hyperbole on the handouts: “World’s fastest,” “devastating,” “Are You Ready? We Are!” were among the phrases publicizing the basement show by their new band, Bad Brains.
Bad Brains was Mindpower turned punk, with a new look and sound. Paul Hudson, Gary Miller, and Darryl Jenifer had even taken on new names: “HR Brain,” “Doctor Know,” and “Darryl Cyanide,” respectively. Only sometime vocalist Sid McCray (who was soon to leave) and Earl
Hudson didn’t assume new identities.
Another book had now joined the works of Napoleon Hill in guiding the band: 1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, an anthology of Caroline Coon’s Melody Maker articles on the Sex Pistols,
Clash, Damned, and Slits. Bad Brains had adopted the punk style wholeheartedly upon reading
1988. Thanks largely to its inspiration, Bad Brains “designed many of our own clothes, our friends
helped out with the sewing,” recalled HR. “That was the thing that was so great about punk when we first discovered it. You made your music, you made your clothes, you created your whole thing.”
Fashion was hardly at the heart of their vision, however. “We dug the militancy happening in punk rock,” said Jenifer. “It said, ‘If you have something to say, say it.’ A lot of the things we saw our people falling for made us mad at the kind of illusions society was trying to create.”
This became a recurrent theme in Bad Brains lyrics. One of their new songs, “Don’t Need It,” rejected advertising ploys: “We don’t need Ivory Liquid/Don’t need no Afro-Sheen/Don’t need the latest fashions/Don’t want my hair to smell clean. . . You think I’m going crazy?/It just might be you.”
The band’s mutation had been sudden, but it was sincere. “If someone were to say to me, it sounds like you were just trying to get a gimmick, I’d have to say they’re wrong,” said HR in ret- rospect. “We weren’t looking for a gimmick. What we were searching for was what all true musi- cians do, which is to create. This is the difference between a sellout and what’s real. It’s a thin line. You have those who do the music because someone tells them to do it—to be popular—and then you have those who do the music because it’s what they love, it’s what they need to do. When we heard punk rock, we said, ‘That’s where the energy is!’”
Mindpower took its new name from a song on the fourth Ramones album, Road To Ruin.
Although Jenifer didn’t much like the record, the song title stuck in his head. HR remembers “talk- ing with Darryl about a new name for the band, saying ‘it’s got be something dealing with the mind and it’s got to be ‘bad’—meaning ‘great,’ in the street sense of the word—and he said ‘Bad Brains!’ and I said ‘yeah!’ Only later did he tell me about the Ramones song.” With its emphasis on the power of the mind to transform reality, the band’s use of the title reversed the meaning of the original song.
The renovated band moved into a rented house in Forestville, a Maryland suburb. There they practiced fervently, preparing to reemerge. Since it was bound to be a big show, the WGTB benefit was a chance for them to get the word out.
Bad Brains caught the eye of many in the crowd. “HR had short dreads, sticking straight up, with the side of his head shaved,” recalled Ian MacKaye. “He wore a Johnny Rotten jacket with shit hanging off it. Darryl had his hair peroxided on one side, Earl had a shaved head and Gary used to wear a surgical gown with blood all down the front and wore a mask and stuff. When they used to walk through Georgetown, they were the scariest motherfuckers you ever saw.”
On the Hall of Nations stage were the fledgling Bad Brains' antithesis: the cool, arty Urban Verbs. Thanks largely to a demo produced by glam/ambient cult hero Brian Eno, the Verbs would soon sign to Warner Brothers. Tight and energetic but also moody and atmospheric, the Verbs were a strong live act; one of the gig's organizers, Bob Boilen, described them as “a stunning realization of beat poetry and rock'n'roll.” Tonight, however, they were overshadowed by the Cramps who played two sets, one before and one after the Verbs.
A New York punkabilly band that played Washington frequently, the Cramps already had a strong D.C. following. Singer Lux Interior opened with an apparent slap at the Verbs' more man- nered style: “Some people wondered if this was a concert or a dance. Well, the concert part just ended!” The audience came alive as the singer contorted himself, climbed on amps and invaded the crowd, living out the B-movie nightmares of the band's songs onstage. People stood on tables, hop- ing to get a better view, and the tables began collapsing one by one.
The teenagers in the audience, used to the anonymity of shows at the Capital Centre, were riveted. “People were breaking windows and throwing chairs around,” marveled Picciotto. “You had no idea at all what Lux might do next. He seemed just totally insane, and the whole scene was like absolute bedlam. Even though I was scared shitless, I was thinking to myself’ This is the great- est thing that I’ve ever seen!’”
The Cramps seemed to have tapped into the crowd’s rage over the destruction of WGTB. “There was a real anger against Georgetown for what they had done to the station,” Picciotto said. “There was an air of total desperation that people were losing their only countercultural outlet. Sure, some people were totally messing around, but there was also a definite sense of protest.”
By evening's end, the hall was a shambles. Insurance bought by Boilen and co-organizer David Howcroft covered the $775 in damages, enabling the night's profits to finance other events. The show could not save WGTB; for some spectators, however, everything had changed.
music outside of giant rock arenas with bands like Kiss and Aerosmith, then to suddenly be here, with the band five feet away, playing so intensely, with people reacting such a visceral way—to be exposed to that level of interaction just blew my mind wide open.”
“At the time I thought Ted Nugent was really wild, so the Cramps show totally changed my life,” MacKaye recalled. “It was just unbelievable. It was the greatest shit I’d ever seen. It was every- thing I thought rock’n’roll should be. I was like, ‘This is it, I’m a punk rock motherfucker.’”
David Byers, who soon would help form the Enzymes with Chris Haskett, agreed. “From then on, it was, ‘All systems go!’”
By the time they went to see the Clash’s first D.C. show a few weeks later, MacKaye and Nelson had cut off their long hair. “The Hall Of Nations show was the first show that made us want to be in a band,” said Nelson. He and MacKaye allied with Mark Sullivan and fellow Wilson student Geordie Grindle, a singer and guitarist with cover-band experience. MacKaye had never played bass and Nelson had never played the drums, but they set out to learn by doing. They combined their favorite junk food, Twinkies, with the verb “to slink,” to form the band’s name, the Slinkees.
The band began with covers like “Louie Louie,” “At the Hop,” and “No Fun,” then added songs that mocked hippie rock (the un-Grateful “Deadhead” and the anti-Skynyrd “Dead Bird”) or celebrated a typical teenage diet (“I Drink Milk”). In the new-age-baiting “Conservative Rock,” Sullivan proclaimed that “We don’t sit in circles/We don’t meditate/We don’t eat health food/’Cuz Cokes and Twinkies are great.” MacKaye would later call these anthems “my first protest songs.”
Just as the Slinkees began to practice, the Atlantis closed. In an interview with the Washington Post, Paul Parsons blamed all the club’s problems on its patrons: “Every weekend the punks would re-arrange the building directory, rip the wiring and toilets out of the rest rooms, and roam through the upper floors of the building like droogs.” The newspaper offered no rebuttal from fans or musicians, who might have noted that Parsons had violated fire codes and liquor laws, lied to bands about facilities and wages, banned writers who questioned his policies and had one of those writers put in handcuffs, ended up in court with several of the bands who played there, and become the object of a long—and largely successful—boycott.
the Atlantis.” The band was promised a booking, only to see the club close its doors. Undeterred, the musicians continued to set up shows in the basement of their house, impressing many longtime scenesters. One early supporter was Kim Kane, who said the shows had “the atmosphere of an old rhythm and blues house party. People were sprawled everywhere, holes in the wall, lots of D.C.’s early punks crammed into the basement, listening to these speed demons playing furiously. Their energy was incredible.”
In addition to its breakneck, chaotic performances—HR gave up playing second guitar since it invariably got broken as he leaped about—the band had a unique style. “We were search- ing for an original sound, bringing in all our influences, the jazz, the rock, the funk,” said Dr. Know. Such early songs as “Redbone in the City,” a knockoff of “God Save the Queen,” showed the debt to British punk, but other material meshed jazz chops with punk fireworks, promising something all the band’s own.
The lyrics were filled with references to Positive Mental Attitude. A concept popularized by a rich old white entrepreneur was being molded to punk rock by young black men inspired by English kids they had never met. To Bad Brains, however, it all made sense.
One of the more challenging elements of this equation was race. By becoming punks, Bad Brains had entered a largely white world. The band members were often harassed in the black com- munity, where “punk” was an anti-gay slur, but some of their initial experiences in the white rock scene were scarcely more encouraging. While distributing fliers at a heavy metal show at the Keg, McCray says, they were harassed and called “nigger” by some in the crowd. At Bad Brains’ first club show, opening for the revamped Slickee Boys in a Baltimore suburb, the band was greeted by racial epithets and threats.
Howard Wuelfing, who attended the show, calls the hecklers “just little boys making a loud noise.” But Jenifer bitterly recalls the racist reaction they faced that evening, noting that “some peo- ple just couldn’t handle black folks playing rock music.”
Bad Brains’ skills were quickly recognized. In March 1979, just weeks after the band’s base- ment debut, Skip Groff approached Kim Kane about producing a Bad Brains session he had arranged at Don Zientara’s home studio. Groff admitted that he enlisted Kane because the group intimidated him. “I thought Bad Brains were an extremely strong group but, quite frankly, I was bit scared of them.”
The day of the session, Kane recalled, “The Bad Brains were way late, leaving only one hour to record and mix seven songs. Half the time was spent miking Darryl’s homemade fuzzbox. Because of that Gary had to overdub all of his leads in a row while the tape was rolling.” Miller got it right on the first take. An awed Kane said that “their passion and speed were amazing that day.”
Bad Brains were featured in the second issue of a new fanzine, The Infiltrator, started by ex-
WGTB staffer Mary Levy with the help of fellow former DJs Xyra Harper and Chris Thompson (for- merly drummer of The Look and, later, Tiny Desk Unit). Around the same time, Howard Wuelfing began his own zine, Descenes. “I wanted it to be like the original New York Rocker,” he said, “where the
people in the scene who saw each other’s band would write about each other,” building a healthy intra-scene dialogue.
The arrival of the Infiltrator and Descenes was a hopeful step for the embattled D.C. punk
community. So was the return of the Slickee Boys, who regrouped with new singer Mark Noone, an engaging frontman. The band began to gig frequently, introducing new material like “Gotta Tell Me Why,” a catchy new single written by Noone. With the success of acts like the Cars and the Knack, the Slickees’ new power-pop sound had commercial potential. Although one photo showed the band wearing garish wide ties—an obvious dig at the new wave of skinny-tie power-poppers— “Gotta Tell Me Why” was the band’s most professional and mainstream release yet.
The Razz bassist Ted Nicely co-produced “Gotta Tell Me Why,” and his own band was also moving toward a slicker sound. The quintet became one of the city’s top club draws because of its punky blues-rock attack and singer Michael Reidy’s abrasive stage presence, but the three singles the Razz released in 1978-79 showed a trend toward power-pop.
This was in large part because Tommy Keene had replaced original guitarist Abaad Behram. Keene was the first prolific tunesmith in the band, which was still playing mostly covers, but the songs he wrote didn’t appeal to Reidy. “Tommy would bring me these songs with the most banal lyrics imaginable and I would just tell him, ‘Tommy, I can’t sing these words.’ He didn’t like that very much,” said Reidy, cackling. “He didn’t like it when I put my lyrics to his tunes either! You know, ‘I hate you, I hate me, I hate the world.’ He’d just go off on me, yelling, ‘Reidy, I can’t believe you’ve done this, you’ve ruined my beautiful songs!’”
The change did make the band more marketable, and several local writers predicted that the Razz would become a major-label act. With the growing viability of “new wave” music, many D.C. bands began to think about such possibilities.
If judged by sheer tunefulness, D.C.’s leading power-pop band would have been the Nurses, who by mid-1979 had become the trio of Howard Wuelfing, Marc Halpern, and new drummer Harry Raab. Despite the band’s assured songcraft, however, its sound was too spare and its attitude too anarchic for mainstream appeal. Wuelfing later described the Nurses as “pop with nihilist streak a yard wide.”
Wuelfing produced the first single by Tru Fax and The Insaniacs, a band that featured for- mer Shirker Libby Hatch. This quartet’s punky pop was eminently melodic, and some compared the