This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘The first time Scream played nobody cared because they were better than all of us!’ says Brian Baker, then playing in Minor Threat. ‘They were a fantastic band, with fantastic musicians and great songs. There wasn’t really a backlash against them, but trepidation was raised from the minute they started to play. Initially people thought they weren’t cool because they had moustaches and they didn’t wear the “approved” regalia and they lived twenty miles away … and twenty miles in teenage terms is hours away. But then the moustaches disappeared, and someone bleached their hair and someone else bought a leather jacket and suddenly it was, “Hey! Now they’re one of us! Come on in!” After that they were revered by all of the Dischord people.’

  In January 1983 Scream’s Still Screaming album became the first full-length release on Dischord. Produced by the band, Ian MacKaye, Eddie Janney and Don Zientara at Inner Ear, three decades on it stands up as a thrillingly urgent, impassioned and powerful collection, mixing up scratchy, Gang of Four-influenced punk-funk (‘Hygiene’), loping, spacey dub-reggae (‘Amerarockers’), Clash-style rock ’n’ roll (‘Piece of Her Time’) and thought-provoking, razor-sharp hardcore (everything else) to stunning effect. Pete Stahl lays out his band’s manifesto on the fierce ‘We’re Fed Up’, referencing his band’s past while keeping both eyes firmly fixed on the future: ‘We’re from the basement / We’re from underground /We want to break all barriers with our sound /We’re sick and tired of fucking rejection / But we’re not down ’cause we got a direction.’ It’s a ferocious statement of intent.

  Given the mix of apathy and outright hostility they faced at their earliest DC shows, it was unsurprising that Scream began booking shows nationally even before the release of Still Screaming. In Putting DC on the Map (a booklet included with the 20 Years of Dischord box set) Ian MacKaye notes that Scream were the first act on his label to be paid ‘royalties’, when Dischord stepped in to help them pay for a van repair and a tour-related phone bill: this little detail speaks to the band’s proud reputation as inveterate road dogs. No DC band was more committed to taking their music to the people.

  ‘We didn’t really have time to think about whether anybody accepted us or not,’ says Franz Stahl, ‘we wanted to play the world and we couldn’t believe that there was this network that was already out there. DC wasn’t that big and you could only play the 9:30 Club so many times. We got out of there pretty quickly.’

  The responsibility for booking Scream shows fell to Pete Stahl. He remembers his band’s earliest national tours coming together on a somewhat ad hoc basis – ‘You’d phone someone who was a friend of a friend in another town and they’d say, “Okay, this guy is going to be at this record store between twelve and two and he’ll help you put on a show”’ – but over time he built up ‘The Book’, a comprehensive database of phone numbers and addresses for record stores, promoters, venues, fanzine writers, DJs, record labels and bands in every state. For all Stahl’s meticulous planning, however, touring the nation was rarely predictable: on the road a certain ‘Wild West’ mentality prevailed. On more than one occasion the band found themselves literally staring down the barrel of a gun.

  ‘We had a couple of shows where we had guns pulled on us,’ recalls Franz Stahl. ‘Once in Pennsylvania we didn’t get paid and the guy pulled a gun because basically Skeeter was trying to kill him. Another time we played in New Orleans and this crazed redneck came storming into the club with a shotgun, saying, “Any y’all feel like being punk rock here? ” This huge biker named Ace just stuck his hand out, whipped the shotgun out of the guy’s hand and said, “We’re not having any of that here.” That could have ended badly.’

  ‘You’d play a lot of crazy shows in those days,’ agrees Pete Stahl. ‘You’d have cops trying to shut down shows, there’d be tensions with skinheads – we had a black guy in the band, remember – and fights were pretty common. But we always got by.’

  ‘Most of the confrontations we had were with drunks, people who just happened to come to the club for a drink and got stuck with us,’ says Franz. ‘But Skeeter was a big, cut dude and my brother was afraid of no one, so they’d shut down situations pretty quick. Pete was never scared to jump in the middle of potential fights. People would just back away saying, “These motherfuckers are crazy.”’

  Following the example set by Minor Threat and Faith, in spring 1983 Scream decided to flesh out their sound with the addition of a second guitar player. Their new recruit could hardly have been more at odds with the DC punk aesthetic. Robert Lee Davidson – better known by his nickname ‘Harley’ – played in a Judas Priest-influenced metal band called Tyrant, and first met the Stahl brothers while dating their sister Sabrina. Every bit as stubbornly independent as his new bandmates, the candy-floss-haired, studs-and-leather-wearing metal-head made absolutely no attempt to tone down his look to assimilate into the DC scene, horrifying elitist punk purists. This secretly gave Pete and Franz Stahl no small amount of pleasure.

  Whatever his perceived sartorial shortcomings, Davidson was an undeniably gifted guitarist, and his fluid, technical hard-rock style helped Scream tap deeper into primal rock ’n’ roll sources on their superb second album, 1985’s This Side Up. The new guitarist’s metallic influences are most evident on ‘Iron Curtain’, a not-entirely-convincing Aerosmith-meets-Judas Priest headbanger replete with squealing guitar leads, but elsewhere This Side Up swaggers and slams with a confidence and agility of which Bad Brains themselves would have been proud.

  The rollicking ‘Bet You Never Thought’ could have fitted seamlessly onto The Clash’s London Calling; the title track is an exhilarating tangle of Buzzcocks guitar and air-punching PMA (‘Yesterday it rained so hard I thought the roof was gonna give / But now today’s so bright, just wanna let it all in’) while the soulful ‘Still Screaming’ matches shimmering minor key reggae with skronking jazz saxophone. Elsewhere, ‘I Look When You Walk’ has a sexy garage rock groove, and album-closer ‘Walking Song Dub’ mixes arty, experimental found-sound collages with booming dub basslines, cut-and-paste vocal loops and a whistled melody line. Within a scene hovering dangerously close to self-parody in the mid-eighties, This Side Up was a genuine revelation. In 1997 Dave Grohl nominated it as one of the most significant albums of his adolescence.

  ‘This is the album where Scream went from being a hardcore band into being a rock band,’ he told England’s now defunct Melody Maker magazine. ‘They sounded like Aerosmith and I loved that. I liked the fact that they had long hair, that they weren’t straight edge and that they played this kinda hard-rock/hardcore thing. It made me realise there was a place for me making music.’

  With a superb new album to draw upon, and with their sound bolstered by Davidson’s muscular fretwork, Scream quickly acquired a reputation as one of the punk scene’s unmissable live draws. When the quintet came through Boston in April 1985, Suburban Voice editor Al Quint declared their set at the Paradise ‘the best set of the year, so far’.

  ‘The perfect combination of speed, power and melody,’ Quint wrote. ‘The new songs combine those attributes and more. Pete Stahl has charismatic stage presence, able to draw people together, while the band’s versatile, uptempo sound, spearheaded by a two-guitar blitz, keeps on coming. The band’s newer material has been lumped into the metal classification, but it’s coming more from a late sixties hard-rock style – bands like Ten Years After, Steppenwolf (especially their 10-minute jam of “Magic Carpet Ride”) or Blue Cheer have influenced their newer material. Scream are definitely in the top echelon of American bands.’

  In autumn 1986 Kent Stax reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to leave Scream. Having recently become a father for the first time, the drummer felt that he could no longer commit to the band’s arduous, loss-making touring schedule. He promised, however, to stick around until the band found a suitable replacement. To this day Dave Grohl maintains that he never imagined that this opportunity would fall to him. When he first made contact with Franz Stahl Gr
ohl’s ambitions were modest: he simply hoped to score a jam session with his favourite local band so he could brag about it to his friends. In conversation with Stahl, he mentioned his stints in Freak Baby, Mission Impossible and Dain Bramage and explained that he was a huge Scream fan. When Stahl asked Grohl his age, the 17-year-old drummer claimed to be 20, making the assumption that a nationally touring rock band wouldn’t be interested in auditioning a rookie teenager. Stahl promised to be in touch.

  As an emerging talent on the DC scene, Grohl wasn’t a complete unknown to the members of Scream. Franz Stahl had seen Mission Impossible play at Lake Braddock, while both Stahl brothers and Skeeter Thompson had witnessed an early Dain Bramage show at dc space. Pete Stahl’s memory of that particular night tallies with Reuben Radding’s account of playing with Grohl: ‘All I remember is everybody staring at Dave and not really watching the band,’ Stahl says. ‘Everyone was like, “Wow, this kid is really good.”’

  Given the instant impression that the young drummer had made that night, Franz Stahl’s decision not to schedule an immediate audition for Grohl was mystifying, though the guitarist now admits that he has scant memory of the pair’s first phone conversation. In fact, Grohl only secured an audition for Scream after calling Stahl a second time. The delay proved to be to Grohl’s advantage, however. In the interim period he obtained Scream’s demo recordings for what would become the Banging the Drum album and he had taught himself the drum parts to every song. When the drummer arrived for his audition at Scream’s rehearsal space, situated beneath an Arlington ‘head’ shop, he felt confident and ready. Grohl would later describe the next two hours of his life as ‘heaven’.

  ‘Franz was the only member at that first audition,’ he recalls. ‘He was one of my heroes, and he just looked at me and said, “Alright kid, let’s see what you got …”’

  ‘I said, “What do you know?”’ recalls Stahl, ‘and he said, “Well, I know the first record.” And then he blew through twenty songs with a fervour I’d never seen before. As soon as we were done I immediately got on the phone with Harley and Skeeter and said, “You guys have to fucking come down here, you have to check this kid out.” To be honest, he had the gig after the first song.’

  Grohl was asked to sit in on two or three full rehearsals with Scream before he was formally offered a position in the band. He now faced a difficult decision. He could join Scream, and ditch Radding and Smith, his two best friends; or he could pass up the opportunity to join one of his favourite bands in the world and remain in limbo with Dain Bramage. He drove around Alexandra in his VW Bug for a week listening to Led Zeppelin III while pondering his choices: finally he phoned Franz Stahl and apologetically declined his offer. With a guilty conscience, he then confessed to Reuben Radding and Dave Smith that he had been tempted to stray.

  ‘I remember him saying how he was massively flattered but that it was more important to him to see things through with Dain Bramage,’ recalls Radding. ‘He said that he thought we were more original, and that he wasn’t so psyched about being just a drummer after being in a band like ours that was such a collaboration. I was dark, but relieved.’

  Scream were not the only band interested in securing Grohl’s services in 1986. That same year the drummer received an offer to join ‘Scumdogs of the Universe’ Gwar, a Richmond, Virginia-based heavy metal collective whose outlandish sci-fi monster costumes and gory, over-the-top theatrics made Kiss look like The Osmonds. A local hard rock band called Wizard enquired about his availability too. And following the dissolution of Embrace, Ian MacKaye also called, inviting Grohl to Dischord House to jam with bassist Joe Lally in a new project that would become the brilliant, iconoclastic Fugazi. By then, however, Grohl had spoken to Franz Stahl again, to tell him that he had reconsidered his decision to join.

  Reuben Radding learned of Grohl’s change of heart only after overhearing mutual friends discussing his defection to Scream. Later that same day, Grohl called to confirm his decision. By his own admission, Reuben Radding was ‘devastated’.

  ‘I both could and couldn’t understand his decision,’ he admits. ‘I was pissed off and I stayed pissed off for a very long time. We had done a lot for Dave already, especially Smave. He used to drive Dave around, fix his drums … he sacrificed a hell of a lot. We loved Dave tremendously, but I didn’t think I could trust him after that happened. Trying to talk him out of it wasn’t in my head.’

  ‘Dave was definitely torn as to what to do,’ recalls Larry Hinkle. ‘I remember thinking that he should have stayed with Dain Bramage, and I told him that. Scream was definitely cool, but Dain Bramage were up and coming, and they had a different sound than what was going on at the time. But he had already made up his mind.’

  With cruel inevitability, finished copies of Dain Bramage’s I Scream Not Coming Down album arrived at Reuben Radding’s house just weeks after Grohl’s decision to quit the band. Listening to the album did nothing to elevate Radding’s spirits; indeed it added to the sense of disappointment he was already feeling. Compared with the demos his band had recorded with Barrett Jones, Radding considers I Scream Not Coming Down ‘flat’ and ‘lifeless’: ‘The performances are not as comfortable and confident as the stuff we did before,’ he says. ‘The number of ways that the record doesn’t sound like us are numerous.’

  Nonetheless, I Scream Not Coming Down is not without its merits. The influence of Led Zeppelin is evident in the album’s most powerful tracks ‘Drag Queen’, ‘Stubble’ and ‘Flicker’ (not least in the subtly tweaked ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ bass line in ‘Flicker’) but Radding’s imaginative, non-linear guitar work and the rhythm section’s varied, versatile dynamic shifts keep the songs from straying into monolithic hard rock territory. Elsewhere, ‘Eyes Open’ combines acoustic and electric guitars in a post-punk adrenalin rush reminiscent of latter-day Hüsker Dü and ‘The Log’ is a superbly adroit slice of progressive punk that recalls Boston’s Moving Targets. The title track, co-written by Radding and his former Age of Consent bandmate Dan Koazk, is another high point, though Radding’s lyric ‘The sky’s my limit’ now serves as a rather poignant reminder of the band’s dashed optimism and unfulfilled potential. Despite his understandable disappointment at how things panned out for Dain Bramage, when Reuben Radding reflects now upon his time creating and playing music alongside Dave Grohl he has few regrets.

  ‘I was a kid, and my mistakes or questionable decisions are pretty easy for me to shrug off in that light,’ he told me in 2010. ‘Ever since Nirvana got big I’ve been surrounded by people who want or expect me to be bitter. Sorry, there’s no grounds for that kind of bullshit. It was a hell of a lot of fun.’

  I Scream Not Coming Down finally reached record stores nationwide on 28 February 1987. Lauded as ‘a real rock ’n’ roll record’ of ‘incredible depth and power’ by Fartblossom, the album was largely met with positive reviews. Tim Yohannon of maximumrocknroll categorised it as ‘quirky, jangly hard pop meets the DC sound’, and hailed the band’s ‘complex’ arrangements: the album, he noted, was ‘a challenge’. Suburban Voice praised the album’s ‘heart, energy and guts’ and ‘knockout hooks’, describing it as ‘tuneful enough to stick in your head, with enough stylistic variation to make it come across as original’. Dave Grohl himself would later hail the album as ‘a fine demonstration of our blend of rock, art punk and hardcore’. By the time of its release, however, he was working on a new Scream album.

  In summer 1985, some six years on from the release of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP, Rolling Stone finally acknowledged the existence of the American hardcore scene. Writer Michael Goldberg was tasked with bringing the magazine’s readership up to speed with the music, mindset and mores of the punk rock underground, in what was Rolling Stone’s most significant report on the genre since Charles M. Young’s October 1977 cover feature on the Sex Pistols. Goldberg’s excellent article was titled ‘Punk Lives’. ‘They don’t sound like the Ramones, and they don’t look like the Sex Pistols,’ st
ated the feature subhead, ‘but bands like Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets are keeping the spirit of ’77 alive.’

  Goldberg’s article offered a neat précis of what he dubbed the ‘neopunk’ community. Focusing largely upon acts signed to Greg Ginn’s SST label and Minneapolis’ indie imprint Twin/Tone, the writer highlighted the scene’s stubbornly independent Do-It-Yourself ethos and the tireless work ethic powering it, contrasting ‘old school’ punk’s cartoon nihilism with the ‘responsible’, proactive, self-reliant mentality underpinning the hardcore movement.

  In the closing paragraphs of his feature, Goldberg detailed a conversation he held with Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould in regard to the advantages and disadvantages of bands operating within an independent label framework. ‘I think being outside the mainstream music business is good,’ Mould told Goldberg. ‘When you tie yourself down to a major label, you give up all your individual control over things. You become part of the machine. It wouldn’t seem right for Hüsker Dü …’ Yet, just nine months after the publication of Goldberg’s article, Hüsker Dü’s sixth studio album Candy Apple Grey was released on Warner Bros.

  Though Hüsker Dü were not the first eighties ‘neopunk’ collective to sign to a major label – fellow Minneapolis act The Replacements had inked a deal with Sire shortly after the release of their brilliant 1984 album Let It Be – the trio’s decision to sign with Warners was significant, and hotly debated at the time. While The Stooges, MC5, Ramones, the New York Dolls, Television and most other key players in the first wave of American punk rock all recorded within the major label system, the American hardcore movement had never actively sought its endorsement or patronage.

  In 1981 Black Flag had signed a distribution deal with MCA Records affiliate Unicorn for their début album Damaged only to have MCA President Al Bergamo declare the album ‘anti-parent’ and refuse to authorise its release. The resulting lawsuit tied the band up in legal red tape for two years: when Ginn attempted to sneak the album out on SST both he and Dukowski were jailed for contempt of court. That Hüsker Dü, a fellow SST band, was now prepared to sleep with the enemy was viewed by many in the punk community as a traitorous betrayal of the scene in which they had honed their craft.