This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘We felt like there wasn’t really a model for what we were doing,’ says Radding, ‘and it was both frustrating and a source of pride. I mean, for us it was the fulfilment of a dream to be able to present something we felt was truly our own but it could be pretty lonely at times.’

  Mindful of the distance they had placed between their new band and Mission Impossible’s propulsive posi-punk, the trio approached their début gig at the Lake Braddock Community Center on 20 December 1985 with some trepidation.

  ‘I remember feeling really excited to share what we were working on and I knew our group was special and something different for the hardcore scene,’ says Radding, ‘but I was worried about being accepted since I’d never really been part of that scene. Everyone else seemed to know who everyone was and I had kids coming up to me asking, “Who are you?” I had long hair and was wearing a sweater over a button-down shirt and in that environment I was somewhat of an enigma.’

  Dain Bramage opened up their début gig with a song called ‘In the Dark’, a reflective, mid-tempo minor key number. As he sang into a battered SM-58 mic just inches from a sea of curious faces, Radding was convinced that Burke’s young punks hated his band, but as the final notes rang out the assembled crowd broke into cheers and loud applause: ‘I was never so happy or relieved to hear a reaction like that in my life,’ he laughs.

  Twenty-five years on, Radding has one other indelible memory of that first Dain Bramage performance.

  ‘It was the first time as a front man that I ever experienced seeing an entire audience looking over my left shoulder through the whole gig,’ he laughs. ‘I had to get used to that pretty quickly, playing with Dave. I could play all the good guitar I wanted, and sing like a motherfucker, but all eyes were gonna be on Dave all the time. At first I resented it. Then I embraced it. We should have set up like a jazz band with him on the side facing in, then at least I could have watched too. Dave’s charisma was ever-present, both in performance and off stage.

  ‘He was always kind of hyperactive and he bears the distinction of being the only guy I ever knew who would smoke pot and become more hyper,’ he continues. ‘When he would get stoned he would act truly deranged and go into these episodes of extroverted performance, doing skits and voices, hilarious stuff. I can still remember us laughing till we were in serious pain at some of the stuff he would do when he got stoned. It was kind of like watching Robin Williams at his best – that energy and creative spontaneity – but better than a performance because it was real.

  ‘At one point he earned a new nickname from Dave Smith. We were at some house partying and Grave had been totally going off. Next thing you know he’s passed out under a pile of clothes in the corner and someone said something like, “Well, he’s finally had it.” And Smave just shook his head. “No,” he cautioned, “he’s just energizing.” Sure enough, Dave was back up at full energy in about twenty minutes and just totally going nuts. So for a little while Dave was known as The Energizer.’

  Shortly after their baptism of fire at Lake Braddock, Dain Bramage cut two demos with Barrett Jones. The first featured five tracks – ‘In the Dark’, ‘Cheyenne’, ‘Watching It Bake’, ‘Space Car’ and ‘Bend’ – while the second included a cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s 1973 Billboard chart-topping blue-collar anthem ‘We’re an American Band’, alongside originals such as ‘Home Sweet Nowhere’ and ‘Flannery’. Given Mission Impossible’s previous connection with Dischord it might have made sense for Grohl to approach Ian MacKaye about putting out a record, but the trio were (understandably) concerned that their artful post-hardcore might sound out of step with much of the didactic, righteous rage showcased on the nation’s premier punk rock imprint.

  ‘Looking back, we had a bunch of incorrect ideas in our heads by that time,’ Radding admits. ‘We were in a period of being down on Ian back then. We made fun of him behind his back. It’s one of the bigger sources of guilt in my recollections of that time, because the main reason we were snotty about him was just that so many people admired him so we felt like we had to tear him down. How fucking childish. I have the utmost respect for Ian and Dischord even though I like relatively little of their music. What he has built over the years is nothing short of extraordinary, and if we’d been a little less young and stupid we might have done more to join forces with Dischord or somebody else who would have carried more weight. What were we thinking?’

  Unusually for a DC area band, Dain Bramage ended up signing with a Californian record label, the inelegantly named Fartblossom Records, a new venture for punk rock promoter Bob Durkee (later ‘immortalised’ in scathing, scabrous verse in the song ‘Bob Turkee’ on NOFX’s 1986 EP So What If We’re on Mystic!). Asked what Fartblossom offered that other labels could not, Radding is disarmingly honest: ‘Frankly the appeal was that he asked us,’ he concedes.

  In June 1986 the band booked a four-day recording session at RK-1 Recording Studios in Crofton, Maryland with engineers E.L. Copeland and Dan Kozak (formerly the guitarist in Radding’s band Age of Consent) to record their début album. The trio had suffered a falling out with Barrett Jones – ‘They were rehearsing in our house using my PA, and there was some tension about them taking over the house and my equipment without ever really asking,’ Jones recalls – and Radding convinced his bandmates that they needed to use a ‘real’ studio in order to get a bigger and better sound for their début album. Visiting RK-1 for a reconnaissance mission, Radding was somewhat alarmed to discover that this ‘real’ studio was little more than a soundproofed suburban garage, but he swallowed his instincts and said nothing. It was a decision he would come to regret.

  The recording did not go smoothly. Within minutes of the band setting up their gear on 21 June, the local police interrupted the session, having been summoned by a noise complaint from Copeland’s elderly college professor neighbour. No sooner had the cops departed than a thunderstorm knocked out all the power in the studio.

  ‘The power went out in the whole neighbourhood,’ Radding recalls. ‘We took a “break” that went on for hours, all of us sitting on the screened back porch watching and listening to the storm and then finally giving up and packing up a lot of our gear by flashlight. The next day’s dubbing/mixing session turned into an all-nighter. Little things seemed to take forever to accomplish.’

  ‘It was probably the worst first weekend of recording I’ve ever had in my life,’ Copeland, now the owner of Rock This House Audio and Mastering in Ohio, admitted to me in 2010. ‘But the band were extremely organised and we quickly caught up. There wasn’t a lot of fiddling around or double-takes, it was just boom! We blazed through the songs and it was over. All the guys in that band were really energetic, but Grohl was something special. I thought it was really weird to see somebody beat the living piss out of a drumkit, I’d never seen that kind of playing before. We had a blast, it was a good time.’

  Copeland mixed the ten-track album in a day, at which point Radding sent the tape off to his label boss in Pomona. Some months later the group received in the post the test pressings of their first album, a number of songs from which the trio proudly previewed on a Sunday evening show on local ‘alternative’ radio station WHFS. Radding told the show’s presenter that the album, to be titled I Scream Not Coming Down, would be released in a matter of weeks. Back at Kathleen Place later that evening, Grohl listened back proudly to his mother’s cassette recording of the radio interview.

  ‘I remember thinking that it was so fucking cool that there was a DJ introducing one of our band’s songs, going out to maybe a couple of thousand people,’ he told me in 2002.

  ‘And that,’ he added with a laugh and a theatrically raised eyebrow, ‘was when I knew that eventually, one day, I’d become the world’s greatest rock star.’

  In the weeks that followed the WHFS interview, Grohl was repeatedly stopped by friends enquiring where they could buy his album. On each occasion he promised that the album would be out in a week or two. But when weeks turned in
to months, with a release date seemingly as distant as the line of the horizon, such questions faded into silence. Morale in the Dain Bramage camp dipped: it was a dispiriting, frustrating time.

  Late in the autumn of 1986 Dave Grohl found himself buying new drumsticks in Rolls Music in Falls Church. It was here that he spotted a note pinned among the flyers on the shop’s bulletin board. It read ‘Scream looking for drummer. Call Franz’. At first disbelieving, Grohl re-read the note several times, before tearing it from the board and stuffing it into his pocket. With Dain Bramage in limbo, he figured that he might as well take the opportunity to jam with a band he considered heroes. When he got home, he picked up the phone and dialled the number.

  Gods look down

  The feeling of driving across the country in a van with five other guys, stopping in every city to play, sleeping on people’s floors, watching the sun come up over the desert as I drove, it was all too much. This was definitely where I belonged.

  Dave Grohl

  In late 1987, as they toured America’s West Coast in support of their third album Banging the Drum, DC hardcore veterans Scream were interviewed for their first maximumrocknroll cover story. With its title inspired by Revolution Summer’s Punk Percussion Protests, Banging the Drum was Scream’s most socially conscious, politicised release to date, and writer Elizabeth Greene was keen to tease out the messages behind powerful new songs such as ‘Walking by Myself ’ and ‘When I Rise’. ‘Are there any political issues that are especially important to you?’ she asked the band.

  ‘Apartheid,’ said singer Pete Stahl.

  ‘Censorship,’ said his brother Franz, Scream’s guitarist.

  ‘We’re kind of worried about nuclear war,’ added Pete.

  Scream’s 18-year-old drummer, touring nationally with the band for the first time, chipped in with an answer of his own: ‘The drinking age,’ he replied.

  Dave Grohl was just 17 years old when he joined America’s last great hardcore band. Bruce Springsteen once sang of learning ‘more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school’: similarly, three years in Scream’s Dodge Ram van would provide Grohl with the finest education he could ever wish for. In a wonderfully evocative phrase which neatly illustrated the feral, lawless nature of the mid-eighties underground touring circuit, an ex-girlfriend once memorably claimed that Grohl was ‘raised in a van by wolves’: 25 years after joining Scream, Grohl still regards Pete and Franz Stahl as family.

  Scream hailed from Bailey’s Crossroads, VA, a rural no-horse town built around the intersection of Columbia Pike and Virginia’s Route 7. The area owes its name to the fact that P.T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, proprietors of a circus they grandly billed as The Greatest Show on Earth, parked up their menagerie in the area in the off-season. Pete Stahl remembers his hometown as ‘very Southern, very rural and somewhat segregated … Norman Rockwellish in a way’: many of Stahl’s contemporaries on the DC punk scene simply use the epithet ‘redneck’ to describe the area and its residents.

  Like Dave Grohl, the Stahl brothers had music in their bloodline: Arnold Stahl, their lawyer father, managed a popular rock ’n’ roll group called The Hangmen who were the toast of Georgetown society parties in the mid-sixties. In February 1966 the band’s ‘What a Girl Can’t Do’ single knocked The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ from the top of the Virginia/Maryland/DC pop charts: that same month the Stahl kids got their first glimpse of rock ’n’ roll’s capacity to incite mayhem when local police were summoned to shut down The Hangmen’s in-store performance at the Giant Record Shop in Falls Church after 2,000 screaming teenagers laid siege to the store. Franz Stahl bought his first guitar from the same shop ten years later.

  Scream formed in 1979, though their story truly begins in 1977, when 15-year-old Franz first started jamming on Hendrix, Skynyrd, Kiss and Funkadelic covers in local garages with two J.E.B. Stuart High School classmates, drummer Kent Stax and bassist Skeeter Thompson. Soon enough, the teenagers were turned on to garage rock and punk via two cult radio programmes, WAMU’s Rock ’n’ Roll Jukebox and Steve Lorber’s WHFS show Mystic Eyes; stomping standards by The Seeds, The Sonics and The Kingsmen were then added to their repertoire. The group were still searching for a sound and direction of their own when they first stumbled upon Washington DC’s nascent hardcore scene. Upon seeing Bad Brains lay waste to the capital’s basement dives, the scales fell from their eyes: in the rasta-punks’ searing electrical storms Scream saw rock ’n’ roll’s future. To Pete Stahl, H.R.’s crew were nothing less than ‘the greatest fucking band in the world’.

  ‘The first time I saw them [Bad Brains] was at a Madam’s Organ show and it scared the hell out of me!’ he told maximumrocknroll in May 1983. ‘I’d never seen a band like that. I just walked in and Doc, Darryl and Earl were just kind of back against the wall, and it was real crowded and dark, and all of a sudden H.R. just busted through the back of the crowd. It was just an intense feeling, just the tension and excitement, and as H.R. exploded through the crowd they exploded into their song! It just blew me away.’

  Skeeter Thompson was equally mesmerised. Previously, the bassist had considered that he was the only black kid in the nation in thrall to punk rock: witnessing Bad Brains’ righteous ferocity at close quarters was revelatory.

  ‘One day Pete came over and said you’ve got to see this band,’ recalled Thompson. ‘When I first saw them it was just like, “Man, I want to do that!” So much power!’

  Scream’s earliest performances took place at keg parties – or ‘beer blasts’ – in the basement of the house the Stahl brothers shared in Falls Church. Shows at Scream House, as the property was soon known locally, were spectacularly messy affairs. Starved of entertainment options in rural Virginia, every hesher, jock, pot-head and freak within a ten-mile radius would turn up on their porch on party nights. The Stahls’ basement floor would be awash with blood, sweat and beers long before the night’s ‘official’ entertainment was scheduled to begin. Inspired by Pete Stahl’s memories of his first Bad Brains show, Scream gigs always started with a violent explosion of energy: Stahl would crash through the tightly packed crowd like a raging bull, shunting beers and bodies to the four walls, and the band would kick in with concussive levels of volume. The room would duly erupt in a flurry of fists, elbows, swear words and screams. It was not uncommon for these shows to end amid squealing sirens and baton charges, as the Fairfax County police department piled in mob-handed to break up brawls.

  ‘It was insanity,’ laughs Franz Stahl. ‘Kids didn’t know what the hell to make of us. They were used to listening to Zeppelin or Foghat or the Allman Brothers, and what we were playing just freaked them out, it would put everybody on edge. It would get completely out of hand.’

  ‘Our music really pissed off a lot of the jocks and rednecks,’ agrees his elder brother. ‘It was pretty wild. At the start people either laughed at us or wanted to kill us. But soon they started to get into it, attracted by the energy of what we were doing.’

  Hardcore’s bush telegraph soon carried reports of Scream’s chaotic basement parties to Dischord House. Before long, Ian MacKaye and his friends stopped by Falls Church to scope out the scene. Their presence incensed territorial local jocks, and a confrontation ensued. Recognising the DC crew as kindred spirits, the Scream team backed up their punk brethren. Predictably, fists were soon flying. When order was restored, the bloodied but unbowed Dischord and Scream House crews forged an immediate alliance, and MacKaye pledged to find his new friends slots on hardcore shows in the city. The curtain dropped on Scream House’s infamous parties soon afterwards: ‘We couldn’t afford the cleaning bills any more!’ Franz Stahl laughs.

  Despite MacKaye’s endorsement, usually taken as gospel within the Dischord family, the DC punk community didn’t immediately embrace Scream. In a scene notionally populated by the marginalised and disenfranchised, they were genuine outcasts, a racially mixed, blue-collar rock band wholly uninterested in kowtowing to codified mu
sical, philosophical or sartorial scene norms. This nonconformist mindset caused confusion and hostility: to Capitol Punishment fanzine Scream were simply ‘a bunch of jocks trying to be punk’.

  The quartet’s début show in DC could hardly have been more disastrous. Booked alongside Bad Brains and Minor Threat on a fifteen-band bill at the Wilson Center on 4 April 1981, the Stahl brothers, Thompson and Stax found themselves playing to an empty room when their potential audience walked out of the room en masse as the opening chords of their set rang out. Further humiliation was to follow at a 9 May show with Minor Threat, S.O.A., Youth Brigade and D.O.A. Again, the band had barely set foot on the stage of H-B Woodlawn High School when the audience melted away. To lose one crowd may have been regarded as misfortune, to lose both was a genuine kick in the teeth for the young Virginians. But for encouraging words from scene elders Ian MacKaye and Jello Biafra (in town with D.O.A.) Scream may have abandoned punk rock at that very moment.

  ‘We were feeling pretty down,’ remembers Pete Stahl, ‘because we wanted to be in that scene: we identified with it and dug those bands and felt this was our natural home. So to have everyone diss us like that was pretty harsh. But Jello came up to me after we finished playing and said, “You guys are great, don’t worry about what happened.” He gave me his address and told me to send him a demo. That was a really sweet thing to do and it meant a lot.’

  ‘Having people turn their backs and walk out was fairly typical of the DC scene early on,’ admits Franz Stahl. ‘But them snubbing their noses at us initially just gave us that much more of a drive to smoke these guys every time we played.’