Music Scenes, Corporate Rock Sucking and Me.

I've been driving a lot the last couple of weeks, catching up on some audio books and I'm finally getting around to

Jim Ruland

‘s book “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall Of SST Records” about SST Records, the record label founded by Black Flag guitarist and founder, Greg Ginn. It’s a wild story about ingenuity, greed and uncontrollable circumstances written very thoroughly but very entertainingly by Jim. A must read (or listen) if you’re a fan of punk rock, business and music scenes. Listening to it got me thinking about music scenes as a whole, what they mean now and how back then, with bit of a fire under their feet and a push from fans, bands had a place to thrive.

Lately, I have been telling myself that music scenes don't happen and aren’t a thing anymore, but I’m only kidding myself and being naive. Music scenes do exist, I am just aged out of them and, frankly, I haven’t been looking. 

The local music scene that my friends and I cultivated in 2002, was akin to, albeit a very small version, of what Black Flag did and in the same area to boot, which was the South Bay of Los Angeles. Cities like Redondo Beach, Lomita and Torrance are nuclear family, post WWII, strip small suburban enclaves. It may not have been the ripest culture roots per se, but it gave us great music, The Beach Boys, Redd Kross, Descendents, to name a few, as well as Black Flag, who in many ways, begat a new way of conducting business and cultivating practices that had never been done before. Perhaps it’s all of the second generation aerospace engineer latch key kids who took up guitar out of boredom, but who knows?

Either way, by the time it was our turn in the early 2000’s, punk was a bit more universal and less dangerous. However, it was still really hard to book an all ages show. In the SST book,

Jim Ruland

talks about how Greg Ginn would lie about Black Flag because nobody would book them, so in order to play gigs, he had to take matters into his own hands. Since bars and pubs were out of the question, their first show was at a Moose Lodge, where the owner had no idea what punk was, so he took a chance on the kids. Many shows that followed required even more lying, most notoriously, the Pollywog Park in Manhattan Beach concert in which he told the promoter Black Flag was a Fleetwood Mac cover band. Necessity breeds innovation, I guess. 

(Black Flag at Pollywog Park. I believe it was David Nolte of The Last who recorded this…)

I can speak for myself having booked many of the shows at the start, that it was not just punk shows, but booking ANY shows with teenagers was still something that had to be handled carefully. I didn’t want to book bars because the vibe wasn’t right and the rules were too finicky, so like Ginn, I took matters into my own hands. I booked Knights of Columbus and VFW halls, cafes, and even convenience stores that had an open spaces in the back. I even started a record label for the sole reason that it wouldn’t be worth it to wait for someone else to sign my band. You do what you gotta do, right? That fabric, that need to do the thing you want to do no matter what, came from the punk rock scene that Jim Ruland writes about.

This is stuff I’ve written about here ad-nauseum and will continue to, but listening to the book was just another reminder that there has to be thriving music scenes out there and that my view is just short sided. Just because I haven’t heard of it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The punk rock Denny’s viral video from a few years back was a nice reminder that I am wrong. I doubt there’ll ever be books or movies made about our little scene, (unless I do it!) as no one came out of it Black Flag famous, with the exception of maybe Joyce Manor, who came in a few years later and started their own incredible scene mostly in garages and house parties. (Side note: So stoked for their success!) 

All bands come from somewhere and aim for the same goals. Music is a communal sport and scenes, word of mouth, and devout fans carry every band to their next level and if they hit the lottery, they leave that scene to a bigger stage. The SST story showcases bands who did make it to the top, like Soundgarden, and bands who had potential but had to stop because of tragedy, like The Minutemen. But I’m interested in the other kind of band; the more common band who made good music, but never achieved the notoriety or success they expected. I think about those bands a lot, because I know some of them personally. Where does a band fit after the fire is gone, or rather, when the scene passes them by? I’m always trying to understand that. Perhaps things happen for a reason and at least Greg Ginn had the means and wherewithal to record so many bands that the lost, the forgotten and the in-betweens can live on forever through their records. 

At this stage in my life, starting a scene isn’t the target anymore. It’s fun to look back and compare and contrast war stories with the past but it’s just the past. I know with my band, the priority is to continue to create and write the best songs possible and do our best to share with as many people as we can. With the internet, the “scene” now is the entire population of the world, so it’s only a matter of time before SOMEONE hears it and likes it, they just may not be locals. Thanks Greg Ginn, Keith Morris, Joe Nolte, Brett Gurewtiz and all the other hustlers who helped build the road map so people of my generation could borrow and revise it and thanks to all the hustlers I’ve never heard of or never will. 

As always, thanks for reading. Talk next week!