at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and two friends from Hermosa Beach, California, 22-year-old Keith Morris and 23-year-old Greg Ginn, who played together in a Stooges/MC5-influenced garage rock band called Panic. Far from feeling cheated, and unaware that the Pistols had just played their last show – Johnny Rotten would announce his exit from the group just four days later – all three young men walked out of Winterland feeling elated, energised and inspired by what they had seen. Six months later Boucher formed his own punk band, Dead Kennedys, and adopted the stage name Jello Biafra. Six months after that, Ginn and Morris changed the name of their band to the more militant, threatening-sounding Black Flag.
It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that the American hardcore movement was born, like a phoenix from the ashes, out of the death of the Sex Pistols’ punk rock dream. By the summer of 1977, while the Pistols were finishing up the recording of their début album Never Mind the Bollocks at Wessex Sound Studios in London, there was already a fertile, diverse punk rock scene in Los Angeles, centred around the Masque, a dingy basement club just off Hollywood Boulevard. Here bands such as the Weirdos, The Zeros, X, The Bags and The Germs – the latter fronted by charismatic, nihilistic Iggy/Bowie acolyte Darby Crash and his guitar-playing best friend Pat Smear – played short, riotous sets for messed-up Hollywood club kids.
Keith Morris and Greg Ginn were occasional visitors to the Masque but found themselves out of step with the self-absorbed, narcissistic, peacocking club regulars, who took one withering look at the suburban beach kids with their long hair, faded jeans and T-shirts, and slammed doors in their faces.
‘We weren’t in it for the fashion,’ Morris told Black Flag biographer Stevie Chick, ‘we were in it for the music, its intensity, and the volume.’ The cliquish snobbery they encountered in Hollywood only enhanced the alienation felt by Morris and his friends, and strengthened their desire to create a new noise, without waiting for anyone’s permission or acceptance.
Black Flag’s début EP then was a startling declaration of independence, in both content and form. Released on guitarist Greg Ginn’s own newly created SST label in January 1979, the Nervous Breakdown EP featured four taut, wired tales of caucasian psychosis, delivered at breakneck speed, with extreme aggression. From Keith Morris’s agitated delivery of Ginn’s tension-filled lyrics – ‘I’m about to have a nervous breakdown / My head really hurts / If I don’t find a way outta here / I’m gonna go berserk …’ – through to the pen-drawn cover art (contributed by Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon) which depicted a terrified-looking man holding up a chair to fend off another visibly distressed, aggravated individual with clenched fists raised, it was a record every bit as viciously confrontational as The Stooges’ 1969 début.
By the time filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began documenting the LA punk scene for her 1981 movie The Decline of Western Civilization, Morris and Ginn were no longer playing together (the singer having bailed out to form his own band, the more frantic but less threatening Circle Jerks) but the Nervous Breakdown EP had become one of the cornerstones of a new punk rock community.
Born in South Bay towns such as Hermosa Beach, San Pedro, Santa Ana and Huntingdon Beach, American hardcore was, in its earliest incarnation, the sound of California screaming. Growing from childhood to adolescence while former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan reigned as Governor of California, teenagers in these towns were raised to believe that theirs was the golden generation, that they were the heirs apparent to the fabled American Dream: for many, such promises were a joke without a punchline. Living in the suburbs, and still dependent on their parents, these kids felt like flies caught in a jam-jar jail: they understood that a bigger world lay somewhere out there, but they themselves stood trapped in their everyday world, frustrated and constrained by the invisible walls they believed surrounded them.
To those with such a mindset, punk rock offered both succour and a sense of escape. It did not matter that by 1979 the mainstream was already pronouncing punk ‘dead’ – indeed this was the year that trailblazing fanzine PUNK ceased publication – it didn’t matter that the Sex Pistols were defunct and that The Clash had broken their chains with the expansive London Calling: for the kids who had just discovered the genre, this was a new form of music from which they weren’t about to walk away. Instead they stripped away the elements they didn’t like – the posturing, the obsession with fashion, the elitism – and rebooted the genre, amplifying its volume, simplifying its structure, accelerating the velocity, ratcheting up the aggression. What emerged was hardcore: music made by, made for and made about America’s angry, alienated youth, a true riot of their own.
In the 2006 documentary American Hardcore, based upon writer Steve Blush’s 2001 book of the same name, Keith Morris gave an eloquent summation of hardcore’s appeal for suburban teens.
‘I’m working Monday through Friday, here comes Friday night and I’m just gonna go off,’ said Morris. ‘I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authoritative figures, I hate politicians, I hate people in government, I hate the police: everybody is kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody is picking at me, everybody is poking at me and now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was … BOOM!’
Dave Grohl’s first punk rock epiphany came not in one of the community centres, church halls or housing co-op basements that provided the setting for the incubation of Washington DC’s nationally regarded hardcore scene, but in Evanston, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Evanston was largely populated by wealthy old money families, aspirational middle-class professionals and a transient student population taking classes at the nearby Northwestern University. It was also home to Virginia Grohl’s best friend, her former Boardman High School classmate and Three Belles bandmate Sherry Pelz, by then the married Sherry Bradford, and her teenage daughter Tracey, a sassy, feisty punk rock girl who within the space of ten days in the summer of 1982 turned Dave Grohl’s world upside down.
Tracey Bradford became a punk after seeing Dead Kennedys and Chicago’s own Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith destroy her hometown’s Club COD one ‘fun, crazy’ night in September 1981. An instant convert to the cause, within weeks she had shorn her long brown hair and swapped pretty, preppy dresses for bondage pants and ripped T-shirts. None of this, however, had been relayed to Dave Grohl before he knocked on the Bradfords’ front door that summer.
‘So we showed up that year,’ he recalls, ‘and Tracey came down to the door in engineer boots, bondage pants and an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, with a crew cut and a fucking motorcycle chain around her neck and spikes. And I was like, “You are my hero!”
‘We ran up the stairs of their mansion to her bedroom and she had, honestly, a collection of punk rock singles that would be worth like $100,000 today, singles that are considered impossible to find, like first-pressing Dischord singles, legendary shit you just don’t see. And I went through every single one of those records. And that definitely set my life in the direction it’s been in for thirty fucking years.’
Now a care home nurse living in Florida, Tracey Bradford has fond memories of her ‘cousin’ Dave’s visit.
‘It’s funny, I don’t ever remember thinking, “Wow, Dave thinks I’m cool!”,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t really recall him being really impressed. I just remember that Dave was always a really nice guy. He was pretty young the first time he came to visit – I remember him visiting with his little Winnie the Pooh bear – and he was a good kid, always super, super nice.’
As Grohl rifled through her record collection, Bradford dropped another bombshell: she wasn’t just a punk rock fan, she was also the singer in her own punk rock band, Verboten.
‘Verboten were a pretty cool little band,’ remembers Steve Albini, now frontman of noise rock provocateurs Shellac and a world-renowned
