Good Reads: Ewige Blumenkraft!

The book: The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson put the voodoo into economics with their occult libertarian opus The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which blends together just enough fractured history, complete bullshit, libertarian broadsides and kinky sex to be confuzzle and amaze the most burned out acid casualty from the ’60s and anyone else with a biting sense of humor. Robert and Robert’s scifi whatsis touchstone is a mordant mix of spy shlock, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, John Dillinger, the Bavarian Illuminati, cheeky deux ex machina, Anton LaVey’s fake satanic hustle and Lovecraftian Nazi zombie death apocalypse at a music festival that skips through time, space and point of view in a schizophrenic mirror of the fractured 20th Century. There’s a reason why this might be one of the greatest books ever written. Fnord.


A representative passage:
There was a silence that seemed to stretch into some long hall of near-Buddhist emptiness—George recognized the glimpse at last!, into the Void all his acidhead friend had tried to describe—and then he remembered that was not the trip Hagbard was pushing him toward. But the silence lingered as a quietness of spirit, a calm in the tornado of those last few days, and George found himself ruminating with total dispassion , without hope or dread or smugness or guilt; if not totally without ego, or in full darshana, at least without the inflamed and voracious ego that usually either leaped forward or shrunk back from naked fact. He contemplated his memories and was unmoved, objective, at peace. He thought of blacks and woman and of their subtle revenges against their Masters, acts of sabotage that could not be recognized clearly as such because they took the form of acts of obedience; he thought of the Shoshone Indians and their crude joke, so similar to the jokes of oppressed peoples everywhere; he saw, suddenly, the meaning of Mardi Gras and the Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia and the Christmas Office Party and the other limited, permissible, structured occasions on which Freud’s Return of the Repressed was allowed; he remembered all the times he had gotten his own back against a professor, a high school principal, a bureaucrat, or, further back, his own parents, by waiting for the occasion when, by doing exactly what he was told, he could produce some form of minor catastrophe. He saw a world of robots, marching rigidly in the paths laid down for them from above, and each robot partly alive, partly human, waiting its chance to drop its own monkey wrench into the machinery. He saw, finally, why everything in the world seemed to work wrong and the Situation Normal was All Fucked Up. “Hagbard,” he said slowly. “I think I get it. Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created.”


The album: Violent Resignation: The Great American Teenage Suicide Rebellion 1992-1998 by In/Humanity

South Carolina’s In/Humanity lived to fuck with crust punk convention as they proselytized for the obviously-fake-but-still-kinda-serious concepts of “occultonomy,” “smashism” and “emo-violence.” In/Humanity’s rangy noise mixed crust punk politicking with cheesy Satanism, Charles Manson mockery and a goofball rip on the occult and esoteric to advance their goals of anarchism and personal autonomy at all costs. And with all that, their posthumous compilation demonstrates they had a deft hand at bending raw punk noise to their bidding as well. Death couldn’t even keep the band back as key members morphed into Guyana Punch Line to continue their mordant assault on mainstream mediocrity with a psychologically skewed slant on society’s ills.

A representative song: “Emo Violence Generation”



People try to put us down, the short sighted never see. What’s that emo violence sound? A sound for you and me! Occultonomist grips like strychnine on your back. The beast unleashed bears[sic] its teeth, now ready to attack! EMO VIOLENCE! EMO VIOLENCE!

Reduce, Reuse, Recyle: Southern Crust

Serves me right. If I'd been a little more patient I would have had a better story. Master producer Billy Anderson, who guided Damad through the recording of their masterpiece, Burning Cold, graciously took some time out to reminisce about the recording of that album for the piece I did on Southern crust last week. So even if you've read it already, take another gander and see what one of the underground's sonic maestros has to say about one of punk's most unappreciated albums.

Kick in the South: A Look Back at Prank Records and the Southern Crust Scene

Some of us spent the early 90s making questionable fashion choices involving flannel and debating the cultural importance of mopey rockstars with penchant for fellating shotguns. But way down south in the land of cotton, a loosely connected network of crust punks were about to set hardcore on its ass by soldering metal crunch to raging punk immediacy.
Southern crust was a musically and geographically diverse collection of musicians who lived the DIY credo out of necessity.
While Southern sludge – led by Kylesa and Baroness – is enjoying a current cache, that cultural currency escaped the scene’s crusty forefathers and –mothers, many of whom never grew beyond hometown hero status.
The enigmatic luddites in His Hero is Gone are one of Southern crust’s few bands to transcend Southern crust’s limitations, but back home in Dixie bands as varied as Damad, Antischism and Guyana Punch Line were keeping the punk rock home fires burning.
“The southern bands, besides the real heavy touring bands like Antischism, HHIG, Damad and Kylesa, have always been a really tough to sell,” Prank Records honcho Ken Sanderson said. “Scrotum Grinder [featuring Assuck bassist Steve Kosiba], Bury the Living and Guyana Punch Line would’ve been huge bands if they were from California, New York or Chicago where there was a scene and media to support them. But instead they spent most of their time as a band playing for the same small dedicated crowd in their hometowns.”
Curiously, the epicenter for the scene’s recorded output was 3,000 miles to the west in San Francisco where Alabama refugee and punk rock renaissance man Sanderson started Prank at a time when punk’s influence was on the wane.
“Hardcore was seen as largely cut out bin material by the late ’80s, early ’90s and few mainstream distros wanted to touch it since it wasn’t selling, but by having Mordam carry Prank (and later Six Weeks and Sound Pollution), extreme hardcore was again reaching places it hadn’t since the 1980s,” Sanderson said.
The same scattered geography that made the music hard for Sanderson to market also incubated each band’s signature sound, giving them time to experiment and grow without the pressure of conforming to a given scene’s bylaws.
“(By) virtue of isolation, there’s always interesting bands from there that come up with their own twist on things,” Sanderson said. “ Since they’re already so far out on a limb making that kind of music in their isolated town anyway, it might come closer to direct personal expression than playing to a pre-existing scene and sound.”
In small town South Carolina In/Humanity and Guyana Punch Line mastermind Chris Bickel was looking for “an outlet to relieve boredom” when he started his first band and laid the cornerstone for one of the scene’s forerunners.
“At the time I was living in a very small town in South Carolina and was one of the only people there into any kind of punk or hardcore,” Bickel said. “A guy named Paul Swanson moved down from New York sometime around ‘88 or ‘89 and had been involved with the hardcore scene there. It was kind of inevitable that we'd meet and want to play music together. Right about that same time I moved to Columbia, S.C., to go to school. That made it easier for us to make contacts with people as far as getting shows and doing recordings.”
As in all early DIY scenes, word of mouth predated today’s word of mouse.
“It was a really friends of friends kind of outgrowth that started from Dead and Gone, who knew Copout, who were a Memphis hardcore band that was supposed to be Prank’s second release. They broke up while finishing their LP, but the guitarist had a new band, His Hero is Gone that I ended up working with,” Sanderson said. “ Damad were friends of HHIG (and actually in terms of the ‘Southern crust’ sound, Damad were really the originators existing for a while before HHIG, though you could argue Buzzoven predates both and Initial State also has a lot of elements of the sound).”
One set of friends of friends was the Columbia, S.C., based In/Humanity who blended ferocious hardcore with Dead Kennedys irony to bring some much needed humor to a scene not known for bands with smiling faces. Just trying to imagine His Hero is Gone cracking jokes from the stage.
“In/Humanity was always a highly disorganized unit and we kind of just threw everything into the pot,” Bickel said. “Paul and I both had/have a healthy sense of humor and I had always been a fan of the Dead Kennedys and their use of humor and sarcasm to get across ‘heavy’ ideas. I don't think it would have been possible for us to take ourselves too seriously, though it's a fine line you tread when you don't want to be considered a ‘joke band.’ We took the issues we wrote about very seriously.”
The aforementioned Memphis sourpusses remain Prank’s most enduring signature bands.
“The His Hero is Gone groundswell was evident from their first single,” Sanderson said. “They were a band that worked super hard, toured constantly and had broad-based appeal—metalheads liked them, people who liked hardcore liked them, and emo kids liked their lyrics and political impact. Monuments was an important record from the outset, highly anticipated and recorded and released less than a year after their Fifteen Counts of Arson LP. I think at the time, the band didn’t understand a lot of the things I was doing as a label at the time: sending out heaps of promos, doing all this promotion, working towards the situation we have now where it’s a record people still tell friends to check out. This pushing of the records and band was part of the reason the band split with the label, but now I think they understand what I was trying to do and we remain good friends, and I’m stoked those guys have remained active with bands, doing their own and other people’s records, bringing foreign bands on tour here and broadening the culture.”
Sanderson also had the Midas touch for finding criminally underrated bands, some of which, like Damad, have not received the level of recognition their watershed sound – presaging the modern Southern revival – is truly due.
“Burning Cold probably would’ve been a more landmark record if it was released closer to when it was recorded,” Sanderson said. “We had to wait a year for Pushead to do the artwork. It’s part of what makes the record great, but took its toll on the band as they sat around forever waiting to tour on their new LP. "
Never mind frontwoman Victoria Scalisi was visibly pregnant during the recording sessions, recalled sonic guru Billy Anderson, who flew out to Savannah to produce the album with a limited budget and even less time.
“We weren’t blessed with a whole lot of time, so there wasn’t a ton of room to experiment. But what time we did have was spent with everybody contributing their best ideas and performances,” Anderson said. “… At the time, I dont think anybody was thinking ‘this is gonna be a legendary album’ or anything like that. We were all just happy to be getting it done and in to the label on time! But it is a great record considering what the limitations were. I’m personally very proud of it as I think they are too.”
While the music may have been vital, all of the off stage crap that swirled around Damad, including a nearly yearlong delay before Burning Cold was released, crushed the band in their prime.
"Both Damad and Kylesa, sadly, were always hit with unbelievable strokes of bad luck and set backs, and Damad were eventually basically unable to really tour on Burning Cold aggressively and broke up not too long after it was released," Sanderson said. "Damad (and Kylesa) were/are great live bands but always a bit more of an acquired taste. Ultimately I think at the time they were perhaps ‘too metal’ for the punk crowd, which especially this decade has grown more conservative and coloring between the lines.”

Look Back and Laugh: A Prank Records Crust Primer

Antischism
Still Life
1991
Southern crust’s Fort Sumter. These gay positive, feminist bunny huggers fired the scene’s first shots and set the tone for what was to follow on their first, and only, full length album, later reissued by Prank.
Antischism set the blueprint for much of what was to come: metal technique welded to punk ferocity, the male and female mic passing and the urgent, jaundiced lyrics that catalogued the time’s ills. Updating the sounds of Dishcarge and Amebix for a death metal and hardcore generation, Antischism’s buzzing attack set the tone for the southern bands that followed and helped keep the crust sound vital more than a decade after its emergence.
Though they flamed out early, members kept the spark burning with stints in Initial State, dotfuckingcom and Guyana Punch Line. Guitarist Kevin Byrd is currently active with a new band, Thank God.

His Hero is Gone
Monuments to Thieves
1997
His Hero is Gone were Southern crust’s darkly melodic lords and their middle child, Monuments to Thieves, saw them surveying their domain in triumph.
The apocalyptic worldview and scalding political diatribes, ringing lead guitar work and scraping riffs transcended the southern crust scene, making HHIG worldwide icons. Staunchly luddite – eschewing the rising internet (though electric instruments and recording studios were somehow kosher?) – and fiercely DIY, the Memphis misanthropes carved a path through punk that generations of lesser lights would continue to tread.
Like weeds they did grow and even after their demise, the band’s seeds took root in the fertile Northwest, pollinating a new generation of punk, including From Ashes Arise and the mighty Tragedy.

Damad
Burning Cold
1998
After the Antischism Jr. outing of Rise and Fall, Damad roared back a few years later, crossing Neurosis with Antischism and presaging much of today’s Southern sludge revival with stark songs about alienation, dejection, death and environmental destruction on their second and, sadly, final disc.
Album art by Pushead and production by Billy Anderson, Burning Cold was a buzzing, chugging, churning mess of frustration and anger cemented by guitarist Phillip Cope’s alternately spiraling and excoriating fretwork.
Victoria Scalisi was also one of the most intense and versatile frontwomen to ever hoist a mic. From pint sized pitbull to rabid Donald Duck, Scalisi changed up her vocal style on nearly every one of the album’s eight tracks.
Cope rode the Southern wave with his new band, Kylesa, while Scalisi briefly found a place for her formidable pipes in Karst, but it was Burning Cold that easily cemented the duo’s punk and metal legacy.

In/Humanity
Violent Resignation: The Great American Teenage Suicide Rebellion
1998
While it’s hard to imagine the stone faces in His Hero is Gone so much as cracking a smile, Columbia, S.C., merry pranksters In/Humanity never forgot that getting together with your friends to play hardcore is s’posed to be, ya know, fun.
Inspired by Jello Biafra’s savage satire, I/H headman Chris Bickel heaped his sarcasm on whatever target traversed his transit, but his keenest cuts were saved for the harder core than thou punk scene itself. Under the guise of emoviolence, a not so subtle elbow in the ribs to the powerviolence scene on the opposite coast, and occultonomy, a laughable brew of magick and anarchy, Bickel laced his band’s sloppy, spazzy punk with a deadly satiric core.
But emoviolence and occultonomy eventually gave way to a new tongue in cheek movement…

Guyana Punch Line
Irritainment
2000
…Smashism! Bolstered by faux punk sloganeering (“Home Fucking is Killing Prostitution,” “Reality is Elitist”), Chris Bickel, with Antischism’s Kevin Byrd in tow on guitar, realized occasional rehearsals were not anathema and updated and tightened the spastic In/Humanity sound for a new century.
Subtitled Songs to Disturb the Comfortable, Songs to Comfort the Disturbed, Irritainment buzzes, thrashes, stumbles and slithers through 21 tracks of speedy, crusty punk, tongue embedded in cheek, that spends more time excoriating the self righteous punk scene (“Skinz and Punks,” “Old Guy in the Pit,” “Punk Rock Sloganeering”) than it does ripping on corporate greed, political apathy and douchebaggery in general.
At a time when punk when seemed comfortable with formula, rules and that 2X4 rammed up its collective ass, Bickel and Co. philosophized with a hammer and were a refreshing middle finger to the scene itself, which is about as punk as fuck as you can get.

Scrotum Grinder
The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever
2001
Hailing from Tampa, where sweatpantsed, white sneakered death metal reigned, at first glance, the band’s moniker and choice of album title scream tired Carcass clone retread.
Instead, The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever, southern crust’s rear guard, was one of the burliest albums to grace Prank’s roster to that point. This Florida enclave’s sole album was a late entry to the Southern crust scene, but it makes up for its tardiness with sheer sonic heft.
Sure they devote a good chunk of the album to beating up on Ronald Reagan, a man who had been out of office for 12 years and was sliding into senility, but with every red tied Republican falling over themselves to name drop #40 during the presidential primary, it comes off less late than prescient in retrospect.
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