Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [11]
SOMETIME late in my senior year of high school, I saw an ad in Scene, Cleveland’s free music paper, saying that the band Zero Defex was auditioning bass players. I’d seen Zero Defex twice at The Bank, each time with a different bass player. They were the hardest, fastest, and loudest of the Akron hardcore punk scene. Hardcore punk took the original philosophy of punk ten steps further: the fast tempos were twice as fast, the simple melodies transformed into shouting, the short haircuts gave way to shaved heads, and energetic pogo-dancing became people running around crashing into each other like dodge-’em cars
And Zero Defex took the hardcore punk further than anyone else on the scene was willing to go. The other bands I’d seen play with them still had identifiable songs, some of which lasted vast durations of two minutes or more. Every Zero Defex song was about fifteen to thirty seconds long and none of them could be distinguished from the others in any meaningful way. A whole Zero Defex set was over and done in the time it took other bands just to tune up.
*Though their heads were shaved and they often called themselves “skinheads” neither Jimi, Tommy, nor any of the other “skins” in the early ’80s Akron scene were the kind of neo-Nazi, right-wing racist skinheads that existed in some other areas. In fact they were almost annoyingly left-wing and decidedly anti-racist.
My God, I thought the first time I’d seen them play, This is it. This is the Real Deal. The hardest thing I’d heard up till then was the Ramones album End of the Century. Seeing Zero Defex was like a religious revelation for me.
Needless to say, I answered the ad (in fact I discovered later I was the only one who answered it) and was directed to band’s rehearsal space, a dilapidated old house in a seedy part of Akron called North Hill. Five or six punk rockers shared the rent at the place, though you could always count on there being twice that number just hanging out on any given day. Two of the residents had kids and so the place had been nicknamed The Mommy Dearest Daycare Center. The place was the foulest, dirtiest, stinkiest house I’d ever set foot in. There was trash all over the floor: cigarette butts, empty beer cans, junk food packages, you name it. There were piles of records in various states of disarray all over the place and a cruddy old record player that never stopped grinding tinny-sounding low-budget punk records out of even tinnier-sounding speakers. On one ripped-up old couch I saw two bald people making out. It took me a minute to work out that one of them was a girl.
I was led down to the basement and handed a sticker-encrusted Fender Musicmaster bass plugged into a nameless amp with a blown speaker. It didn’t even sound like a musical instrument, kinda more like a sumo wrestler with a case of squelchy farts. I played a few scales to warm up. Hearing me do this, the skinhead singer, whose real name was James Friend but who called himself Jimi Imij, said in a disgusted tone, “Oh, a real musician.”
The guitar player, Tommy Strange (aka Tom Seiler), another skinhead,*showed me some of their songs, which I was surprised to learn actually had set chord changes, contrary to their appearance of total randomness—though Tommy wasn’t uncool enough to admit he actually knew the names of any of the chords he was playing. He’d just show me the riffs at full breakneck speed and I was expected to work them out. When I asked him to slow down so I could at least watch what he was doing he shot me a withering glance of disdain. But their stuff was all dirt simple, even easier than the Ramones covers I’d been playing before that. I got the whole