Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [13]
Cautiously we set up our equipment on what passed for a stage. It wasn’t even a raised platform, just a slightly less cluttered space on the floor between some speaker cabinets that also served as the PA system. We didn’t want to sound-check in front of these guys since they were already starting to froth at the mouth as they eyeballed our assorted mohawks, skinheads, and metal-studded jackets. A few hours passed but the regulars never left. In fact several more of them arrived. Not a single new waver or punk showed up. By 10:30 the bar owner was telling us we’d better get started.
I was the one who looked most like these people, having never cut my shoulder length hair into a more “punky” style or gone in for the punk get-up of a black leather jacket and army boots. So The Eric Nipplehead Project (ENP), a side band I’d put together with the guitarist and drummer from Starvation Army to play instrumental surf tunes, was elected to go on first. We played eight numbers, spanning about fifteen minutes, and it seemed to go fairly well. We had the Batman TV show theme song and Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 in our set—which these Deliverance guys could sort of relate to. We got heckled a bit, but it was nothing we couldn’t shrug off. I got the feeling some of them almost liked us.
But that was it. ENP was all the normality we collectively had to offer. Next up was Zero Defex. I moved over from guitar, which I played with ENP, to bass, and as soon as skinheads Tommy Strange and Jimi Imij took the floor, it was clear there was going to be trouble. We got successfully through our first song, Drop the A-Bomb on Me—but only because, at eighteen seconds, it was too short for any of the alcohol-addled regulars to react to before it was over. When we launched into Die Before More of This, a guy with a red ZZ-Top beard whipped a wicked-looking hunting knife out of his jeans jacket and sliced Jimi Imij’s mic cord in half.
We didn’t have time to appreciate the irony that the PA system belonged to the bar and not to us before the brawl broke out. Chairs and beer bottles flew and crashed into walls and tables. I ducked into the ladies’ room and hid in a locked stall, scared for my life. Someone ran outside and flagged down a cop and things quieted down. We even got a police escort out of town—probably the only time in the history of hardcore that the cops protected the punks. Mickey, our drummer, went home with a fractured leg, though other injuries were mild. Apparently the bar was known for this kind of behavior. I found out later that my friend Johnny Phlegm’s Greenburst Burns bass had been trashed by one of these same rednecks at the same bar only months before under similar circumstances. Why Zero Defex ever accepted a gig there after that had happened is still a mystery to me. We evidently didn’t do our research.
I didn’t quit the band after that, but that incident took a lot of the drive to continue the movement out of me. Sure I wanted to shake up the complacent contemporary music scene—but I didn’t want to get killed doing it. Zero Defex broke up in the Summer of 1984. By that time punk had already started to turn turgid and conservative. It no longer showed the spirit it had even two years earlier. At first, punks had dressed the way they did to show their individuality. But by 1984 the leather jackets, tight jeans, badges, and short haircuts had turned into a uniform. When I used to show up with long hair and tie-dyed shirts, guys in mohawks would yell at me to cut my hair—just like the rednecks in pickup trucks did when I walked around like that outside. What was the difference? None that I could see.
The punks weren’t real nonconformists—they just had a different standard they thought people should conform