This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  All too aware of the imminent backlash, in February 1986 – one month before the release of Candy Apple Grey – Bob Mould penned a column for maximumrocknroll (a fanzine with an editorial policy which dictated that no act signed to a major would feature in its Xeroxed pages) to face down such criticisms. Mould was at pains to point out that Hüsker Dü’s Warners contract guaranteed his band ‘complete artistic freedom’ in terms of their music, artwork and image, and stressed that the trio were still self-managed, still committed to all-ages shows and still punk rockers at heart. ‘I don’t think Hüsker Dü signing to a major label will have an effect on the underground scene at all,’ he wrote. ‘If anything, it might be a sign that something is happening, that some people are finally listening to the underground, and they might even respect what’s going on.’

  Mould’s comment was both perceptive and prescient. Michael Goldberg’s Rolling Stone article was just one indicator that the mainstream no longer saw the underground as appealing solely to a demographic R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe pithily characterised as ‘the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the art students and the indie music fanatics’. In March 1986 MTV launched its own ‘alternative’ music show 120 Minutes, giving national exposure to left-of-the-dial acts such as Gene Loves Jezebel, Killing Joke, The Smiths, The Cure and Hüsker Dü themselves.

  In truth, Bob Mould’s band were not the only punk act looking to break through a glass ceiling perceived to exist just inches above the moshpit floor. The burgeoning success of R.E.M. and U2, two bands who had started out on the post-punk circuit, offered hope and encouragement to other aspirant underground acts. R.E.M., who had previously taken bands such as The Replacements and The Minutemen on tour, secured their first US Gold record classification in 1986 when Life’s Rich Pageant passed the 500,000 sales mark. While this level of mainstream acceptance remained a pipe dream for even the most ambitious young punks, such achievements did not go unnoticed in the underground community, as Greg Ginn told writer Michael Azerrad in his highly regarded text Our Band Could Be Your Life.

  ‘[Bands] started out with the ambition “If we could just be a touring band and go around and do this, that would be cool,”’ Ginn noted. ‘Then R.E.M. came into it and it was like, “Wow, we can make a career out of this.” There was a sharp turn.’

  Suspicious that this mindset was infecting his own band, in August 1986 Ginn broke up Black Flag. Four months later, following the release of his band’s Bedtime for Democracy album, Jello Biafra called time on Dead Kennedys too. The American hardcore era was over: the age of ‘Alternative Rock’ was dawning.

  ‘When we got really successful it kinda ruined the scene for everybody,’ R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck maintains. ‘Everyone got big major label deals and I’m not sure it was a good thing.

  ‘We got lucky and were relatively successful in the mid-eighties, but all my favourite groups – Hüsker Dü and The Replacements and hundreds of others – would come through towns and play to maybe 80 people. In 1984 I booked The Replacements to play a club in Athens [Georgia] and I personally dragged every single person to the club that night: there was 22 people there. It was completely under the radar. And that was fun. It was the Reagan years and you had us weird guys with dyed hair playing music that was never on the radio. It felt like us against the world.

  ‘But then there was a period for about a year where I had to apologise every time the radio came on, because college radio was just bands that sounded like R.E.M. without the good stuff. And then the year after us everyone sounded like The Replacements. And then everyone sounded like Hüsker Dü. And then everyone sounded like SonicYouth … Maybe ideally it’d have been better for us to have been less successful.’

  Mark Lanegan, then the frontman of SST-signed psych-rockers Screaming Trees, later Dave Grohl’s bandmate in Queens of the Stone Age, was equally cognisant of R.E.M. and U2’s increasing influence upon the mid-eighties underground music scene.

  ‘I remember we would go on SST tours which were notoriously long and you hit everywhere relentlessly,’ he recalled in 2002. ‘And everywhere we would hit we would try and guess if the [other] band [on the bill] today was gonna sound like R.E.M. or U2 – inevitably it would be one or the other.’

  ‘When we discovered U2 it was pre-Boy,’ says Brian Baker, ‘and this was a band that was lyrically very powerful and sounded pretty tough to us relative to the time. To us it was just like Stiff Little Fingers or The Undertones, but just a bit slicker. They were a good example of what I thought was a punk ethic moving into a mainstream place.

  ‘My band Dag Nasty existed from ’85 through to ’88 and at that point a lot of things had changed. The climate was definitely different. Punk rock was not as threatening as it used to be, it had become much more universally understood and less feared, which meant that there were many more places to play and people were willing to play your music on college radio. In that period, bands were definitely trying to connect on a broader scale.’

  It was against this background that Scream left Dischord in 1987 to sign to DC reggae label RAS (Real Authentic Sound of Reggae). Founded in 1979 by WHFS disc jockey Doctor Dread (aka Gary Himelfarb), the label was looking to expand into the rock scene, and Himelfarb saw the powerful, passionate Scream as the ideal first non-reggae signing to his roster. In their interview with Elizabeth Greene from maximumrocknroll, the band could hardly have sounded more enthused about their new beginning.

  ‘It’ll be a clean, fresh start for Scream,’ said Skeeter Thompson. ‘Dischord is really limited in what they can do … not really limited, they just don’t have enough personnel I guess. They’re not really interested in putting out more than 10,000 copies of an album. Now I think Scream is just ready to put out as much music as we can.’

  ‘We’ve been sending out tapes for a long time, trying to get record companies interested in us,’ admitted Pete Stahl. ‘For one reason or another it never happened and RAS was really the first thing that ever came up. RAS really likes us and they like what we’re saying and they’d like to help us fuckin’ get our music out and make some money at the same time.’

  ‘Ian [MacKaye] knew that we had aspirations to make a living as musicians and he was very gracious and supportive,’ Stahl told me in 2010. ‘He was like, “You might want to see where this can take you.You have a home here, but …” So we took a chance. It didn’t really work out.’

  In the autumn of 1987 Scream booked a lengthy US tour to preview material from their forthcoming RAS début No More Censorship. Before their new drummer could get in the van, he needed his mother’s permission to drop out of high school. To his surprise, his mother acquiesced without hesitation.

  ‘I said, “Hallelujah. Go,”’ Virginia Grohl recalled in 2008. ‘Because, of all the things he’s done brilliantly in his life, school was never one of them.’

  ‘Even then she knew me well enough to know I was better off following my heart,’ Dave would later recall. ‘All parents want their kids to do brilliantly at school. Still, why should I have stayed at school and learned things I wouldn’t really need later, when I could do something I really loved and wanted to pursue with all my energy: music.’

  As he readied himself to leave home for his first tour, Grohl received a phone call from his old friend and punk-rock mentor Tracey Bradford. Far from encouraging Grohl’s pursuit of his musical dreams, however, Bradford desperately urged the teenager to reconsider his plans.

  ‘I came home from college one day,’ Bradford recalls, ‘and my mom said, “Dave joined a band called Scream and he’s dropping out of high school and he’s going to go on tour.” And so I called him and I was like, “God, David, don’t drop out.” I said, “David, look at all these bands I’ve seen who are still living in vans.” It wasn’t like Dave had a glamorous life, but with an education you can feed yourself and you can get an apartment. I said, “Your mom’s a school teacher, so how does that look, dropping out of high school with no education? You’re a smart kid, you’re not du
mb and you could be a great musician and still be a nothing.” I was around some great musicians, really, really talented kids, and here was this guy saying, “I wanna be a rock star!” and I’m going, “Oh my God, please, just get something so you have a back-up.” But he was like, “Nope, this is my big chance.”’

  ‘Because I was still in high school I could never imagine getting out of suburban Virginia,’ Grohl recalls. ‘So I remember always being fascinated with the tour van. Any time I went to a gig I loved watching a band pack up their van, because I imagined it to be almost like a travelling tree-house. Tour vans represented freedom to me. So to get in a tour van for the first time felt like the start of a big adventure.’

  Scream’s autumn ’87 tour itinerary took them across the Mid-West, into Canada and down the Pacific Coast. It took in venues such as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Community World Theatre in Tacoma, Washington (where Scream were supported by local punks Diddly Squat, featuring future Foo Fighter Nate Mendel) and the Speedway Café in Salt Lake City, where the quintet played as support to Keith Morris’s Circle Jerks. Accompanied by his pal Jimmy Swanson, who had blagged a seat in the van as Scream’s roadie, Grohl remembers the whole experience being an absolute blast. Every day brought new experiences. In Chicago Grohl scored his first-ever groupie (‘some blonde heavy metal chick. It was lame, not good, not sexy at all’); in Denver he took so many magic mushrooms that he barely made it through the show. The feeling of freedom was intoxicating.

  ‘I used to keep journals,’ Grohl recalls, ‘fucking good ones. Every single day I wrote an entry in my journal, with diagrams and line drawings and sketches of the venues. They were poorly written, for sure, but absolutely real. I’d revisit them every now and then when I was superhigh and look back and laugh.’

  ‘I was 18 years old, doing exactly what I wanted to do. With $7 a day, I travelled to places I’d never dreamed of visiting. And all because of music. 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 was at home with the lifestyle from day one,’ says Franz Stahl. ‘And he had the personality to fit in. He was a hyperactive kid, on and off the drum stool: he always seemed like he’d just downed four Coca Colas. From the start I thought, “This kid’s a star.” I knew it from way back then, I felt it. Maybe that was why I wanted him to be in the band. I mean, it was his playing initially, but I could see through that and see that this kid was going to go someplace.’

  Asked for his most vivid memory of his first-ever tour, Grohl likes to recall an incident which almost ended his career before it had barely begun. He and Swanson had been tasked with piloting Scream’s Dodge Ram van on an overnight drive: unfortunately for his new bandmates, asleep in the back of the van, the irresponsible duo were rather more interested in roadtesting a new item of pot-smoking paraphernalia called the Easy Rider Aqua Pipe. As the van filled up with smoke, the two teenage potheads had an attack of the giggles, and lost control of the vehicle.

  ‘The two of us were laughing so hysterically ’cos we could hardly see each other,’ Grohl recalled. ‘I remember looking at Jimmy’s face ’cos he was looking at mine with two big bloodshot eyes, when all of a sudden the van starts rumbling ’cos we were way the fuck off the road, going about 70 miles per hour and the van’s just quaking! Everybody wakes up from their sleeping bags in this cloud of smoke. We weren’t allowed to drive again.’

  Some two months after Scream set out upon their autumn ’87 tour, Pete Stahl dropped Dave Grohl back at 5516 Kathleen Place. As Grohl clambered from the van, Stahl asked him if he held a valid passport. When Grohl looked confused, Stahl told him that Scream would be starting a European tour in February. As Scream’s van pulled out of the cul-de-sac, their 18-year-old drummer was still standing on his mother’s doorstep with his mouth hanging open.

  Scream toured Europe for the first time in 1985, becoming the first East Coast hardcore band to do so. European punk rockers didn’t always take kindly to having American bands on their territory – when Black Flag débuted their Damaged album in the UK tour in December 1981 they were greeted with volleys of spit, anti-American abuse and skinhead violence at every show – but the Virginians’ easy charm and raw magnetism won over crowds wherever they went.

  ‘It was amazing,’ says Pete Stahl. ‘People seemed to have greater freedom in Europe to create little pockets of music and art and cinema and there was always people in those communities that would support us.’

  Scream played squats and bombed-out youth centres, bonded with anarchist collectives over weed and industrial-strength cider and talked punk, politics and philosophy with fans who had driven across international borders just to attend their shows. When they returned to the continent in February 1988 (now a quartet once more, as ‘Harley’ Davidson had left the band at the end of their autumn ’87 US tour) they had a fervent, passionate fan base in every city – and a drummer who couldn’t quite believe that this alternate reality existed.

  ‘The whole trip was a real eye-opening experience,’ Grohl recalls. ‘We’d fly standby from Washington DC on this Dutch airline called Martin Air – they had standby tickets that you could reserve, so you could get a flight from DC to Amsterdam for like $110 – so we’d have enough money to get there, but we’d never have enough money to get back. So we had to tour until we had enough money to get home. And we toured fucking hard. We’d go over for three months at a time and we were hanging on by a thread the whole time we were there.

  ‘Going on the road in America in the early eighties bands really had no fucking idea what to expect, it was still like the Wild Wild West out there. But after that network was established in the mid-eighties it became a little easier: it was never easy, but maybe you had played that place last time around and maybe you’d have somewhere to crash so it wasn’t a complete step into the dark every time. But Europe was so different. In Europe there were squats where we’d turn up and they’d still be building the stage, or someone would be out back tying wires together to pirate some electricity so that we could play. Or we’d show up to see them burning mattresses out front because there was scabies everywhere. Or there’d be riots where there’d be squatters chucking bottles and glass at the skinheads who were trying to evict them from the building … shit like that. It totally blew my mind.

  ‘Coming over to Europe for the first time I had no idea what a squat was. We landed in Amsterdam – which was great for me because I was at the height of my pot-head career, my stoner phase – and everyone we worked with lived in squats. Our booking agent Hedi lived in a squat that was one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever been in in my life, so it was hard for me to wrap my head around this concept. I was like, really, if a building is not being used and you maintain it you can just live there? How the fuck is that possible? But just as the network that was the hardcore scene in America brought all these people together, you’d come over to Europe and see the same thing. I’d meet kids from all over the world in squats in Italy and Spain and Germany and they loved to come see American bands: Europe had great bands, amazing hardcore bands, but there were kids who wanted to see us because their dream was to go see America: they wanted to see the desert, or New York City or Los Angeles, California. That changed, at some point it became fuck your desert, and fuck New York and LA, but back then we were singing along with the rest of the world about how fucked up our country was. It was an amazing time.’

  ‘Scream made a lot of friends out in Europe,’ says Ian MacKaye, then touring the continent for the first time with Fugazi. ‘They toured hard, and were well loved, well received and well respected. They’d hang out after shows and meet good people, and their reputation as nice guys and a great band spread. On Fugazi’s first European tour we played something like 78 shows in three months and we didn’t always stay for the party afterwar
ds – we’d have an eight-hour drive so we wanted to get on the road quickly so we could destroy the next room the next night – but Scream always stayed for the party and won the affection of a lot of people.’

  Lee Dorrian first met Scream at a party on the sixteenth floor of a Coventry council flat in 1985. Then a 17-year-old punk promoter, later the frontman of hugely influential grindcore band Napalm Death and now the vocalist of British doom rockers Cathedral and owner of the influential metal label Rise Above, Dorrian remembers the band being ‘absolutely trashed’, but good natured, likeable and friendly.

  ‘Pete Stahl was a real cool guy,’ he recalls. ‘I went to see Scream a few times, and I remember one gig at the Hummingbird in Birmingham, which I think was the last gig on their tour, and he reeled off a list of about 50 people he’d met on the road, and he remembered everybody’s name. That impressed me.’

  ‘When they came back to England in ’88 I put them on at a place called The Inn Hotel in Coventry. They had nowhere to stay and I had a council flat in Hillfields in Coventry, 52 Hillfields House, so they piled back to my flat. There were holes in the windows and doors made by some Dutch band who had stayed the week before, and I had to go around to a squat around the corner to nick some furniture. But they were just happy to have a roof over their heads. And they were good company. Dave was a particularly witty character. I remember my girlfriend at the time had a big Jimmy Page logo on the back of her jacket and Dave was in the back of the van going, “Does anyone like Led Zeppelin?”, and she was all excited, saying, “Oh, I do, I do!” He was just teasing, of course, just pretending he hasn’t noticed. He was really knowledgeable and excited about music too. Napalm had just recorded a session for [late, great, punk-championing DJ] John Peel and Dave really wanted to hear it, so I played it. It completely floored them, they thought it was nuts. I think Dave and I spent the rest of the night talking about Sabbath and Celtic Frost and Voivod.’