Film celebrates Hub's hardcore past
It requires arch eological X-ray vision to see beneath the built-over crust of today's Boston the blackened Troy of its hardcore glory days.
The venues are gone and the streets are different; the battles are over, and the stories are myths. No more Gallery East, no more Boston Crew. As heavily and irrefutably as the Great Bay Hotel now sits on the site of what was once the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square, time itself has compressed this vivid chapter of local history into buried layers of noise and dissent, strange seams beneath the city.
But back in the day -- and ``the day" is defined by the documentary ``American Hardcore," which opens Friday, as being roughly 1980-85 -- Boston had a unique standing in the nationwide underground community of hardcore punk rock, that largely undocumented and unhistoricized youth movement that was the most vigorous alternative to Reagan's America. If the scene in Washington, D.C., was a beacon of radical consciousness, Los Angeles a cauldron of aggression, and New York's Lower East Side a bohemian free-for-all, Boston hardcore was where you came for militancy, insularity, earnestness.
``Hardcore wasn't just a music," says Steven Blush, the film's writer, by phone from New York. ``It was a lifestyle. I always tell people that I have two ethical codes -- the one that I learned from my family, and the one that I learned through the hardcore scene. And they're often in stark conflict with each other. Doing it yourself, having a disdain for authority, doing things not for financial reasons but because they feel right, and being fearless in your pursuit of all this -- that's hardcore. And Boston was a very important part of it. A lot of this movie is in tribute to Boston hardcore, because those kids really took it to its most extreme."
Musically , hardcore was punk abbreviated, shorn of its last traces of bluesiness and rock 'n' roll affectation. Played at a desperate velocity by kids who had often just picked up their instruments, it was a shrill, urgent, deracinated music, revving madly on twin engines of hormonal acceleration and teenage super-righteousness.
Politically it was a rejection, a convulsive throwing off of the demands and expectations of mainstream culture. Pre-Internet, pre-iTunes, the scene ran on fanzines, tapes, self-financed records, word-of-mouth, one-off shows , and the long, precarious cross-country tours undertaken by pioneers such as Los Angeles' Black Flag. No major label or magazine ever had the remotest interest in it.
``It was really a grass-roots movement," says Michael Patrick MacDonald, the South Boston author of 1999's ``All Souls," whose new memoir , ``Easter Rising , " chronicles his days as a punk-rock refugee from Southie, by phone. ``I ended up doing community organizing [MacDonald helped launch a gun buy-back program] and it's funny to think back and realize that these teenagers were doing that instinctively. They were creating a space for people to come into and come of age. I was 15 at the time and I only remember kids, there were no adults organizing any of it, and that was amazing."
Christine Elise McCarthy, the Boston native whose resume as an actress includes stints on ``ER" and ``Beverly Hills 90210," was an early fixture in Boston hardcore, which she remembers as ``gi normously male." ``It was a whole new eruption from the existing scene," she explains by phone from LA. ``But people who were in the broader punk-rock scene didn't go to hardcore shows because it was too abrasive, and I must say those boys could be a little unwelcoming to people they didn't know. In the pit it could be pretty unfriendly. A 27-year-old guy would be considered an old man in that crowd and he'd get completely assaulted. But I got along famously with them -- to me they were just good suburban kids."
The suburban complexion of Boston hardcore was one factor in its peculiar zealotry: Not an inner-city phenomenon, the scene was defined by the energy and ideals imported by teenagers from the north and south. The Braintree Extension of the Red Line opened in 1980, and the Northwest Extension, beyond Harvard, was completed between '83 and '85.
``Right before hardcore the Red Line expanded," says MacDonald, ``so you got all the kids coming in from Quincy and Braintree, whose parents and grandparents had come from Southie. And then out past Harvard were the more leafy, liberal suburbs, and kids started coming in from there too. I think that had a lot to do with how things developed."
Another factor was an intangible called Boston pride, pithily expressed in the title of the 1982 local hardcore compilation album ``This Is Boston Not L.A." ``There's a seriousness in Boston," says Blush. ``Its sports teams, its rivalries, its politics -- to me it's still one of the few towns in America where you can easily end up in a fistfight."
South Shore heroes SS Decontrol took the ``straight edge" philosophy developed in Washington, D.C. , by Minor Threat -- no drink, no smokes, no drugs -- and militarized it: ``There's no partying," a frowning Al Barile, SSD's guitarist, tells an interviewer in ``American Hardcore," in footage from 1982. ``If you're drinking or smoking at a show, you'd better do it behind our backs." Braintree's Gang Green, on the other hand, were gargantuan hedonists, carrying a bluesy-metallic, good-time gene in their music: ``No doubt about it/ I can't live without it/ Alcohol!"
Virtuous warriors or prodigies of hostile behavio r, in the end the charged-up teenagers of the hardcore movement were simply grappling and groping for truth: A very American spiritual impulse runs through the whole thing. DC's Bad Brains became Rastafarians; New York's Cro-Mags would turn to Hare Krishna. Up here in the Northeast, Hank Peirce, roadie-in-chief for Boston straight-edgers Slapshot, became minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford. Interviewed in his study in Osgood House, Rev. Hank sits serenely beneath a 200-year-old oil painting of David Osgood, the church's third pastor. He sees no discontinuity between his past and his present.
``You can't be two people," says Peirce. ``You've got to include who you are every step of the way. Are there things that I did when I was touring with bands that I'm embarrassed about, and wouldn't do today? Of course! But punk rock was a place where you learned to be who you were. People got into punk rock because they were smarter than everybody else in their school, or because they were dumber than everybody else in their school, or because they were gay, or weird, or had horrible lives, or were homeless and turning tricks in the Fens. And you might not have been accepted because of what you did, but you certainly weren't turned away because of what had happened to you."
``American Hardcore" director Paul Rachman was at BU from 1978 to 1982, and so had a ringside seat on Boston hardcore.
``A lot of the original people have moved on to good things," he says by phone from New York. ``Some of them onto not-so-good things, and this movie kind of validates their lives and their efforts. They can look back and say `Yeah, that counted for something.' Steven Blush would like his film to be a shout-out to kids -- put down the iPod, log off of MySpace and get with it!"
Or as an ex-Unitarian minister called Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in 1836: ``Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? . . .There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."
