Rise of Hardcore Punk in

Touch and Go Records and theRise of Hardcore Punk in

Late Twentieth-Century Detroit

Michael H. Carriere, Milwaukee School of Engineering

‘the suburb is a ghetto’1

In July 1983, Michigan: The magazine of the Detroit News, ran a story withthe eye-catching title ‘The Punk Revolt’. The article focused on thelives of two young Detroit punk rock musicians: John Brannon (21)and Larissa Strickland (23). The pair shared a cramped two-bedroomapartment above the old Women’s City Club in the infamous CassCorridor, an area in Detroit defined as being between I-75 at itssouthern end and Wayne State University to the north, while stretchingfrom Woodward Avenue to the east and Third Street to the west.Following decades of upheaval, the corridor by the early 1980s wasmarked by blight and abandonment. To fellow punk musician ToddSwalla (drummer for the seminal hardcore punk band the Necros), the‘Cass Corridor was the worst neighborhood in the city. Most of theneighborhood was burned out during the sixties’ riots and not muchwas left except for dope houses’.2

Yet the state of the neighbourhood, as Brannon and Strickland toldMichigan, was actually one of the reasons they fled the suburbsand moved to this part of Detroit. Brannon hailed from the affluentsuburb of Grosse Point, where his father was an Episcopalian minister.Strickland shared similar suburban roots. In the Cass Corridor, the twocould find a cheap apartment large enough to house them and all oftheir musical equipment – or they could squat in a vacant building andlive for free. The duo also noted that there were plenty of abandoned

Cultural History 4.1 (2015): 19–41

DOI: 10.3366/cult.2015.0082

f Edinburgh University Press

www.euppublishing.com/journal/cult

19

structures throughout the neighbourhood to turn into things likepractice studios, performance spaces and art galleries, all without anyinterference from Detroit city officials or police officers. The CassCorridor was, in many ways, a blank canvas for such young artists.3

However, the main reason both Brannon and Strickland decided tomove to the Cass Corridor was because of what it was not: a dull post-World War II suburb. The young musicians relayed a by-then-familiartale of post-war sterility and malaise. Commenting on why he bothgot into punk rock and left the comfortable confines of Grosse Point,Brannon told the Detroit News reporter that ‘[a] lot of this is to stampout boredom. We’ve got to stamp out boredom. I can’t really explainwhy I do this. I just know I have to’. Strickland offered a similar critiqueof suburban ennui – and positioned punk rock as speaking directly tothis soulless atmosphere, not only in Detroit but in suburbs acrossAmerica. ‘Like hardcore [punk]4 is massive in Los Angeles’, Stricklandcontinued.

That’s because the suburb is a ghetto in L.A. It’s hard to escape. Likeevery house is alike. There’s no individuality. The kids are really middleclass, but not really wealthy. They’re just sort of nowhere. You’reexpected to go to college, get married, get a job and get a place in thesuburbs. Your whole life seemed already planned out.

Escaping such a ‘ghetto’ allowed Strickland to rethink her ownidentity. In the Cass Corridor – a region that most in the Detroitmetropolitan area would have classified as a ghetto at this time – farfrom the prying eyes and petty prejudices of suburbia, she couldembrace a world view that was ‘anti-ignorance, pro-creative, anti-prejudice. It’s a way of looking at things’ that, according to Strickland,was simply not possible in the suburb she once called home.5

Brannon also commented on the role that the suburbs had playedin his evolution as both a young man and a musical performer.Describing the emerging genre of hardcore punk, Brannon noted,‘This music is our soul music. The soul music of the suburbs, thethings that are on our minds’. At the time of the interview, Brannonwas the vocalist for Negative Approach, a Detroit-based band thatbecame one of the most influential hardcore punk bands of all time.On the band’s eponymous debut seven-inch extended-play (EP) record(1982), Brannon, speaking for his fellow suburban expatriates,bellowed, in a song titled ‘Lead Song’: ‘We want our lives/We wantour brains/You want control/But we won’t pay/We want a fight/Tohave a chance/To change the future/Erase the past’.6

Cultural History

20

For Brannon, the post-industrial city of Detroit became anenvironment where such a process was possible. As more and moreDetroiters fled the city (Detroit suffered a population loss of 20.5 percent between 1970 and 1980, losing over 300,000 residents during thedecade), Brannon, Strickland and other punk rockers participatedin a sort of reverse white flight. Looking at the admittedly troubledlandscape of their adopted city, Brannon and others saw a place wheremuch of the past was already erased. Here, within the wasted space andvacant properties, history no longer mattered – and the future couldbe changed.7

In his important recent work Stayin ’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Daysof the Working Class, labour historian Jefferson Cowie positions the1970s as a ‘pivotal ’ decade, one in which American ‘society, from itseconomic foundations to its cultural manifestations, really did movein a new direction’.8 For Cowie – with his attention to the diminishedpolitical power of the American working class – this new direction was

Fig. 1 The front cover of Negative Approach’s debut EP, Touch andGo Records, no. 7 (1982). Playing on the idea of hardcore punk as

‘ the devil’s music ’, the cover features a still photograph of a ‘possessed’Linda Blair from the film The Exorcist.

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

21

http://www.euppublishing.com/action/showImage?doi=10.3366/cult.2015.0082&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=249&h=252

generally conservative, a reality that helped set the stage for theeconomic policies associated with the Reagan Revolution and the‘me-first’, yuppified culture of the 1980s. As Cowie notes:

[T]he range of working-class possibilities in popular culture was …diminished by the second half of the 1970s. Working-class story lineshardened into three options: escape one’s class position; find ways toforget it; or, lacking any civic outlets, bury its pains deep inside.9

Within the realm of American music, Cowie usefully outlines howthe rise of such genres as disco and such artists as Bruce Springsteenspoke to these emerging realities. And, with his eye on this relationshipbetween culture, class and politics, Cowie also sees the surfacingof another genre commonly associated with this moment, Americanpunk rock, as ultimately ineffective in challenging the changingtides of American culture during the late 1970s. ‘American punk’,Cowie concludes, ‘never became a national outlet for class antagonismeven when it shared some of the aesthetics and anger of Britishinsurgency’.10 American punks, like their counterparts in othergenres, sought ways to escape – or to simply stay alive.

This urge to view American punk rock through the lenses of classand politics has also coloured the ways scholars looking more directlyat this genre have described their subjects. As Michelle Phillipov hasnoted, punk scholars since the 1980s continue to operate with certain‘assumptions about resistance, subversion and political radicalism’always in mind.11 Such a mindset has led such punk-scene observers asKevin Mattson to find that ‘many strains within it took on heavypolitical overtones’. Looking at the world of punk rock in Washington,D.C., during the 1980s, Mattson argues that in order to

explain why some youth went political, it is necessary to pull back fromthe local punk subculture scene and take note of the general politicalculture of the Reagan era. The 1980s was one of the most conservativedecades in United States history (similar, in ways, to the 1920s).12

While the broader political context of the rise of American punkmust be noted, it does not fully explain why this genre explodedin popularity at this particular historical moment. To put this another(perhaps too simplistic) way: why didn’t punk rock emerge in thesimilarly conservative era of the 1920s?

To Duke University English professor Susan Willis the answer tothis query can be found in the realities of late twentieth-centuryclass relations. Following the lead of Dick Hebdige’s seminal work

Cultural History

22

Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Willis, in a 1993 essay titled ‘Hardcore:Subculture American Style’, finds that ‘class is the single mostimportant factor in the definition of subculture’, in America as inGreat Britain (where Hebdige’s work on the subject was rooted). ForWillis, the rise of hardcore punk in the United States throughoutthe 1980s was directly informed by ‘the development of consumerculture coincident with suburbanization and specifically [had] to dowith the emergence of new class formations brought about bydeindustrialization’. Yet Willis’s essay remains frustratingly vague:there is little discussion on how actual hardcore punk bands respondedto such monumental transformations.13

With this interpretive, suggestive essay,14 I wish to use the history ofseminal Midwestern punk rock record label Touch and Go Records –the label that released records by Negative Approach and otherimportant early American punk acts – to argue that it is best to see therise of American punk rock not only as an indicator of political andeconomic transformations but also as a moment of cultural rupture.There is little doubt that American punk was reactive to some degree;scholars such as Cowie, Mattson and Willis are not necessarily wrong inarguing that the genre was reacting, in part, to political and economicrealignments. Yet often overlooked in such assessments is the factthat American punk was also responding to broader currents withinAmerican culture, specifically the recent history of American music.It is the interplay between these forces – with primary emphasis on thecultural – that will be the subject of this article. By untangling thesecomplex relationships one gains a better understanding of not only theroots of American punk rock but also its continued evolution.

Sociologist Ryan Moore, in his recent Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music,Youth Culture, and Social Crisis, provides a useful starting point for suchan exercise. To Moore, American punk rock ‘was a sign of theexhaustion of the faith in love, community, and possibility that hadcharacterized the counterculture and the New Left during the Sixties’.The ‘cultural idealism’ of that decade was punk’s main target, asthe participants in the emerging subculture took great pleasure inshattering the sense of ‘Sixties utopianism’ that counterculture artistshad attempted to create.15

Yet Moore is quick to root this act of cultural rebellion within thebroader context of post-war America. ‘With the benefit of historicaldistance’, he continues, ‘we can also see that punk emerged in apivotal moment of transition in the global political economy, as thesocial democracy of Fordism gave way to a more unforgiving brandof unfettered capitalism’. Understanding that they were ‘growing up


23

amid a severe social crisis’, punk rockers embraced a narrativeof declension as they simultaneously ‘ushered in the condition ofpostmodernity with cries of “no future” and “no values”’. For suchdisaffected individuals, it proved ‘plausible to conclude that if nothingis true, then nothing is possible’. As Moore concludes, ultimately – andquite ominously – the narrative of the rise of punk took on its greatestsignificance ‘as a harbinger of the descent into a callous societydevoid of alternatives’.16

Moore is right to note that a certain brand of nihilism informedsome of early American punk. Yet in his attempt to create a dialecticinterplay between culture and such larger contexts (economic ones,most specifically), Moore puts too much emphasis on the latter, to thedetriment of the agency of those making up the former. Yes, the forcesof global capitalism played a role in pushing American punk in certaindark directions. Yet a ground-level examination of those associatedwith the early history of Touch and Go Records highlights that suchindividuals were not only reactive, nor were they simply acted upon byforces outside of their control. Viewed from such an inward-lookingperspective, one sees a group of musicians, writers and others set oncreating a new, viable art form, one that sought to critique and replacean older dominant culture that had come to be perceived as lackingboth vitality and innovation. Cultural realignment, rather than politicalor class realignment, became the end result of such a process.Therefore, production, in addition to reception, takes centre stage inthis article, allowing for a focus on a genre of music that is oftendismissed as unmusical – and thereby unworthy of serious scholarlyattention. A focus on the micro-level of early American punk doesreveal, as Moore usefully documents, a distinct break from the cultureof the 1960s that preceded them: those involved with Touch andGo had little love for what the decade had come to embody by thelate 1970s. However, the values that Moore and others saw punk ashell-bent on annihilating, including community and possibility, werenot destroyed but rather taken apart and redefined for a new culturalera. In the case of Touch and Go, ‘no future’ and ‘no values’ canbetter be read as ‘no past’ and ‘new values’. Here, the ‘end of history’signified not only a moment of crisis but also one of opportunity.If nothing was true, in other words, everything was possible – at least inthe realm of culture.17

One sees this more hopeful vision of American punk most clearlywhen another component is added to this dialectic interplay: the roleof urban space. Often overlooked by those studying the roots ofAmerican punk, the spatial elements of cities across the United States

Cultural History

24

played vital roles in the ways the genre both came into being andchanged over time. Most important, it is in such urban centres that onecan best see the collision between economics, politics and culturethat Moore and others see as making punk possible. The environmentcreated by such forces as global capitalism did bring remarkabledevastation to a host of American cities. But through this destructionthey also produced urban spaces ripe for reinvention. It was thisvacuum that American punk came to fill.

This was particularly the case in Detroit and the city’s Cass Corridorneighbourhood, the region that quickly became the adopted home ofmany musicians, fans and other individuals associated with Touch andGo Records. Here, the ‘urban crisis ’ seen as beginning with the riotsof 1967 and continuing with the deindustrialization that gripped thecity during the 1970s and early 1980s moved the city, in the words ofTamar Jacoby, ‘beyond the point of no return’, particularly for thewhite Detroiters who continued to flee the city in record numbers. Andwith the election of Coleman Young, the city’s first African Americanmayor, in 1974 there was the widespread belief ‘ that a torch was beingpassed and Detroit was now officially a black town’.18

It was this changing nature of the city that made punk rock inDetroit what it ultimately became. With little attention paid to them,the white youth drawn to punk rock found a world free of expectations,surveillance or attention of any sort. Yet the landscape created bydeindustrialization did not necessarily provide evidence of the realitiesof changing class and racial politics – the punk rock coming out ofthe city at this moment remained surprisingly apolitical – but insteadprovided young musicians with a sort of urban laboratory well suitedfor cultural experimentation. The desolate environment of post-industrial Detroit, described by some contemporary commentators as‘Third World’ in its conditions, provided the space and atmospherenecessary for such a challenging form of music to develop. For manyyoung punk musicians and fans – many fleeing nearby suburbs for lifein Detroit – the narrative of deindustrialization was not solely one ofdestruction but also, as opposed to their sterile suburban homes, oneof creation. The city became a place to nurture young musicians likeBrannon and Strickland – and to provide a place for the networking ofacts from around the world.19

At its core, this article seeks to provide a cultural history for hardcorepunk rockers in Detroit, as their impact on the evolution of latetwentieth-century American culture has been severely underestimated.Historians and other scholars are only beginning to parse out the‘conquest of cool’ that occurred within turn-of-the-century American


25

culture. The radical culture created by Detroit punk rockers points tothe roots of this shift, as their efforts worked to destabilize mainstreamAmerican music culture while providing both the inspiration and spacenecessary for continued cultural innovation. These individuals, inother words, were doing more than simply staying alive. They weretrying to create a culture, one in direct opposition to the popularculture that reigned supreme at that historical moment.20

Yet this act of cultural reinvention, made possible by the changingconditions of Detroit, was also heavily informed by the characteristicsof those doing the reinventing. The racial and class status of artists likeStrickland and Brannon, along with their drive to create somethingnew, afforded them both the means and the intellectual space to seethe city as little more than a blank slate. Such musicians wanted tochange music; they didn’t necessarily want to change the city or evenbegin to deal with the histories that continued to act on urban centreslike Detroit. It is this complicated legacy that can help us betterunderstand not only the continuing evolution of American punk rockbut also the continuing evolution of American cities. This fixation oncultural upheaval in Detroit – as opposed to political and/or economicchange – impacted more than music, in the Motor City and elsewhere.It also played a role in the spatial development of the city itself.

‘Fuck the Past. Support the New’: The Birth of Touch and Go fanzineThe roots of Touch and Go Records can be traced back to the printingof 100 copies of the first issue of Touch and Go fanzine in November1979 in East Lansing, Michigan. From the first issue co-editors DaveStimson and Robert Vermeulen (writing under the nom de plumeTesco Vee) strongly sought to make the point that the emergingpunk scene they were championing was distinctly different fromthe counterculture of the 1960s – and from those who came toscavenge the corpse of that previous moment. In the not-so-subtlytitled article ‘Kill the Hippies! ’, Stimson excoriated those who clung tothis past:

You hippies long for the days of peace and music … and love, thosewhich were embodied within the Woodstock festival. Unable to relivethat era, you cling desperately to its music or a variation on the sametheme. It’s like dragging around the corpse of your dead dog hoping toperpetuate that old feeling between you and your pet. All that happens isthat the stench becomes more and more vile. Dry up and blow away,because there’s no place for you. The new music is here, and it’s hereto stay.21

Cultural History

26

What is perhaps most noteworthy about such a passage is that, ratherthan focusing on the politics of the 1960s-era counterculture, Stimsoninstead directed his ire at the musical legacy of that earlier moment.What Stimson saw in the hippies was a cultural movement that, whileonce relevant, had allowed market forces to neuter the critique of

Fig. 2 ‘Kill the Hippies! ’ headline, Touch and Go fanzine, no. 1(November 1979).


27


mainstream American culture that the music associated with the scenehad once been able to provide. ‘You see’, Stimson continued, ‘thehippies control the airwaves, for it was they who first implemented FMas a musical alternative to the pap that was being pushed by the AMstations. Based on the premiss that radio could and should be used inthe advancement for the growth of popular music’. Yet by 1979 it hadbecome the case ‘that FM stations no longer adhere to that kind ofphilosophy. Now, they have become static, having locked themselvesinto a late 60s early 70s timewarp. Innovation and creativity have beenshunned in favor of hyped, schlocky commercialism’.22

More specifically, the co-editors took issue with what the local radiostation WILS-FM (101.7 FM) was playing – or not playing – within theLansing metropolitan area. For much of the time, the station wasdedicated to the album-oriented rock format, with a heavy emphasis onbands such as REO Speedwagon, Kansas and Styx. Yet Stimson eventook issue with variations to this format, particularly DJ ShaunHendrix’s Sunday night ‘New Wave’ show. To Stimson, Hendrixhad little knowledge of the vast amount of music that was emergingto challenge the rock and roll the station relied so heavily on.‘Shaun Hendrix’, wrote Stimson, ‘is the biggest wanking, scumbaitDJ in Lansing … [E]ach and every Sunday night this lardbrain provesto us that his knowledge of new wave goes absolutely no fartherthan Billboard magazine’. The only advice Stimson could muster forHendrix was to ‘[a]dmit you’re shit and leave this stuff to the peoplewho know something about it’.23

One of the new wave bands that Hendrix championed on his weeklyshow was The Romantics, a Detroit-based band that would go on tointernational success with their 1983 song ‘Talking in Your Sleep’. Yet,to Tesco Vee, the radio-friendly aesthetics of the band put them in thecamp of artists willing to simply continue to mindlessly embracethe pop sounds popularized during the 1960s. Out of the ‘cyclicly [sic]contrived maelstrom of american “pop” culture’, Vee wrote in a pieceon The Romantics, ‘oozes but another glob of stench reeking of thefucking 60’s’. Making matters worse was that the band called Michiganhome. ‘The midwest’, Vee continued, ‘once supposedly a hotbed ofmusic now lays dormant due in part to archaic FM programming,and lack of venues in which new bands can cultivate a sound and afollowing’.24

This dearth of places for new bands to perform became a centralcomponent of Touch and Go’s critique of the regional music scene ofthe late 1970s. On the one hand, by the late 1970s clubs throughoutthe Midwest had come to favour cover bands over acts performing

Cultural History

28

original material. Yet when clubs did book non-cover bands they oftendid so in collaboration with area radio stations. These partnerships, asStimson explained, meant that only certain acts had access to theregion’s clubs and other performing spaces. As evidence of this trend,Stimson documented a 5 November 1979 Romantics’ concert that tookplace at East Lansing’s Gables nightclub. This performance had beenorganized and sponsored by WILS, a fact that led Stimson to questionthe motives of such a strategy. For Stimson, the concert was thusnothing more than ‘[a] very elaborate promotional campaign’: ‘ it isnot the station’s altruism that initiates this kind of move (putting on ashow), rather it is done in the hope of building up their listenership byappearing hip or chic via getting in on the ground floor of theinevitable success of the Romantics’.25

For Stimson, then, punk rock afforded the opportunity to recapturethe pioneering essence of the counterculture while providing analternative to the bland culture that had been able to grow in its wake.Celebrating ‘[t]he death of a hippie’s dream’, Stimson looked to theemergent world of punk and saw ‘the beginning of a serious alternativeto crap we’ve been subjected to for so long now. You know the kind ofnoise I’m talking about – Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, Styx, Foghat – thelist is agonizingly long’. What was most encouraging about thisalternative was the fact that it was the musicians themselves – and thefans who supported them – that were, in large part, in control of boththe creation and distribution of the records and fanzines that Stimsonsaw as so promising. The do-it-yourself ethos provided an exit routefrom mainstream American culture. ‘We want to be able to hearthe kind of music that we want’, concluded Stimson, ‘not this mindlessdrivel that gets shoved down our throats by the major recordindustries’. In light of such limited choices, Stimson called on hisreaders to start their own bands, open their own clubs, form their ownrecord labels and write their own magazines.26

For Stimson and Vermeulen, such a position led them to focusdirectly on what was happening in their home state of Michigan.For the two co-editors, the cultivation of local punk scenes was centralto the emerging genre’s long-term viability. This commitment toregionalism – ‘we’re primarily interested in what’s going on in thisarea’, wrote Stimson in the first issue of Touch and Go – became thehallmark of the burgeoning punk scenes across the country, in suchdisparate places as San Francisco, Boston, New York and Washington,D.C.27 Not surprisingly, Touch and Go’s issue 1 went out of its way tosing the praises of relatively unknown Michigan acts like Flirt, TheCubes, Coldcock and Algebra Mothers, with the latter described as


29

having ‘a sound unlike any of their midwestern counterparts. Their45 is the areas best attempt at catching a bands live sound on record’.Moreover, the reviewer approvingly compared their sound to theUK-based Cabaret Voltaire, an act who had gotten their start in 1973and who sounded little like the punk music that was quickly taking rootthroughout Michigan.28

Stimson heard in such acts the rebellious sound of earlier rockand roll that the mainstream music scene of the 1970s had workedto discourage – and that punk and its ilk could potentially restore. ToStimson, record company executives had ‘sufficiently brainwashedradio into believing that punk and rock ‘n’ roll are two distinctentities’. The popular bands of the late 1970s, including the likes ofStyx, Toto and Molly Hatchet, could not be considered rock music.‘Let me ask you’, Stimson continued, ‘what does some guy noodlingon his guitar for God knows how long have to do with rock androll. Absolutely nothing’. In the face of what Touch and Go saw as non-confrontational drivel, any sort of return to the unruly spirit of rockand roll was indeed novel. To drive the freshness of this momenthome, the back cover of Touch and Go’s issue 3 was adorned, under apicture of another UK performer, Siouxsie Sioux, with the slogan‘Fuck the Past. Support the New’.29

Sick of talk: The rise of Touch and Go RecordsIn addition to reviewing the latest punk albums, Touch and Go fanzinealso went out of its way to tell its readers where they could go topurchase these records. Issue 12, for example, provided a guide torecord stores throughout Michigan, highlighting East Lansing’s FlatBlack and Circular, Ann Arbor’s Schoolkids Records and Make Waves,and Dearborn’s Dearborn Music. The next logical step was for themagazine to put out its own records, a move they announced in theintroduction to issue 12: ‘As u may have gathered we’re releasingthe first single on our rekord [sic] label. Buy one and prove it toyourself there’s some life in the Midwest’.30 The followingissue featured an advertisement for the fanzine’s fledgling label,appropriately named Touch and Go Records. The advertisementfeatured the Necros’ debut EP (commonly referred to as the Sex DriveEP), along with The Fix’s Vengeance b/w In this Town EP. Perhaps notsurprisingly, the Touch and Go co-editors used this issue to promotetheir two bands, as issue 13 featured interviews with both the Necrosand The Fix. For Tesco Vee, such bands, as he noted in theintroduction to the Necros’ interview, were ‘finally giving theMidwest a tad of credibility and self respect’.31

Cultural History

30

Formed in 1979, the Necros would use their experiences growingup in Maumee, Ohio – a suburb of Toledo – to fuel their angry version ofhardcore punk. By 1981 the band had settled on a line-up ofBarry Henssler (vocals), Andy Wendler (guitar), Todd Swalla (drums)and Corey Rusk (bass). That same year would see Touch and Go releasethe Necros’ first record, along with their second EP, I.Q. 32 (co-releasedby Washington, D.C.-based Dischord Records). Through such songs as‘Police Brutality ’ (from Sex Drive), ‘Public High School’, ‘PeerPressure’ and ‘I Hate My School’ (the latter three from I.Q. 32),Henssler poked fun at the sterility and conformity of the Americansuburb. ‘Thousands of kids’, Henssler sang in ‘Public High School’,‘and they’re all the same / Might as well have the same last name / Haveno worries but they have no minds’. In ‘Police Brutality ’, Hensslerdirected his ire at the institutions of surveillance that contributed to theoppressive atmosphere of communities like Maumee: ‘Police brutality /The cops harassing me / Police brutality / Get it in Maumee’.32

Fig. 3 The front cover of the Necros’ Sex Drive EP, Touch and Go Records, no. 1(1981). The minimal sound of early hardcore punk was often echoed by an

equally sparse visual aesthetic.


31


This blunt critique of suburbia was married to an equallystraightforward approach to musicianship. As the first generation ofpunk evolved into an artier brand of post-punk, the Necros pushedthe original punk formula to its breaking point. Songs like the titletrack from the I.Q. 32 EP were played at a breakneck pace and wastedlittle time in delivering a frenzied jolt of energy (‘I.Q. 32’ clockedin at a sprightly twenty-three seconds). Such a stripped-down, to-the-point aesthetic was intentional. As Necros vocalist Barry Hensslerexplained:

We saw what we were doing as something entirely different … Most punkrock, like the Sex Pistols, was essentially Chuck Berry riffs revved up. Wewere taking the sound and idea of impact and extending it. Rather thanjust one impact it was 60 impacts per minute. And people reactedphysically to that.33

To The Fix vocalist Steve Miller, such energy marked a distinctdifference between the rise of hardcore punk and previous musicalmoments, including rock and roll and even earlier punk rock. Thisnew generation of punks saw themselves as creating something novel.‘What was going on’, explained Miller, as more and more musiciansgravitated to the city, ‘was one more explosion in American music inDetroit’. There was some connection to earlier musical moments here:like Henssler, Miller was attracted to the ‘anti-social music’ made byearlier Detroit-based groups like the MC5 and the Stooges; in fact,Miller recalled that ‘Iggy Pop [front man of the Stooges] was the heroof our group’. But there was also a simultaneous sense that that earlierwave of music ‘had run its course. You didn’t want to do exactly whatyour idols did’. For Miller, hardcore punk provided a mechanismthrough which to sonically push past both musical predecessors andcontemporaries. To Stimson, the ‘frenzied assault’ produced byThe Fix ‘ain’t for sniveling little wimps, if you can’t handle it, stayhome and cuddle up to the B-52s latest debacle’.34

For Rob Michaels, whose band Bored Youth recorded an EP forTouch and Go in 1981 that, for financial reasons, was never released,this drive to innovate was made all the more acute by the broader stateof American music. Like the editors of Touch and Go, Michaels surveyedthe grandiose, highly technical music of such acts as Styx, Journey andREO Speedwagon and could only conclude that it had ‘a certainsoftness to it’. To musicians like Michaels, the music of the late 1970swas marked by a ‘sense of remoteness that mainstream cultureseemed to have at the time … big shows in big arenas, with a stage overthere and the crowd over here’. Punk rock therefore provided an

Cultural History

32

‘aesthetic critique against a certain kind of sterility and self-indulgencewithin the popular music of the time’.35

Taken on its own, this displeasure with mainstream American musicwas a powerful impetus for cultural innovation. Yet this disconnect withbroader cultural trends was made all the more powerful when it wasgrafted onto the emerging critique of life in the American suburb. ForMichaels, the popular music of the late 1970s was the ideal soundtrackto the mundane conditions that marked suburbia. Hardcore punkspoke to the ‘sense of social isolation’ that those left out ofsuch cultural and social arrangements were coming to feel. Viewedin this context, Michaels saw hardcore punk not only as a responseto nationwide cultural forces but also, on the micro-level, as a‘rebellion against a certain sterility, a certain type of conformity thatwas prevailing in the suburban high schools’. Perhaps most important,hardcore punk also provided a means to address such conditions,to actively participate in cultural production at a historical momentwhen the larger world of music appeared closed off to anyone but aselect few performers. Easy-to-play hardcore punk (this era, as Michaelsexplains, ‘was kind of like year zero, music-wise, for many of thosekids’) was created by young people for young people and thus quicklybecame, as Michaels concludes, ‘a viable means of cultural expressionand participation’.36

By 1982 Necros bass player Corey Rusk had become a partner inTouch and Go Records (he would take full control of the label thefollowing year). That year saw the release of Negative Approach’sdebut 7

00EP, along with the release of an EP by the Larissa Strickland-

fronted L-Seven on Touch and Go’s new subsidiary label, SpecialForces – a label ‘designed to release records by bands whose music isjust as intense but doesn’t fit into the realm of hardcore’. Both actswere based in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the city itself was fastbecoming the epicentre for activity related to Touch and Go Recordsand their acts.37

‘Fuck history. We’re making history’:Cass Corridor and the promise of deindustrialization

On 6 March 1982, L-Seven shared a bill with Bored Youth and NegativeApproach at the Freezer Theatre, a venue in Cass Corridor (3958Cass Avenue). Since December 1981 the space, described by TonyRettman as ‘a gutted concrete storefront suffering a slow death’, hadbecome the focal point for the Midwestern hardcore punk scene,hosting shows by local and touring acts alike.38 In many ways, theCass Corridor seemed to exemplify the worst of post-1967 Detroit,


33

showing the scars of both urban unrest and deindustrialization. ‘Itwas a shitty neighborhood and there was a lot of crime’, as L-Sevenguitarist Dave Rice succinctly explained. Yet, as Rice understood, it wasthese realities that made spaces like the Freezer Theatre possible.Rents in the neighbourhood were ‘cheap and there was a lot of space.And the cops will look the other way at 70 bald kids with Cokebottles’.39

For Rice, such conditions provided the space for his cohortof musicians to actively work to escape the confines of the past. ‘It’snot that people didn’t appreciate bands like MC5 and Iggy and theStooges’, explained Rice. ‘They did.’ There was agreement amongthose within the hardcore punk scene that such acts, particularly inthe city of Detroit, had helped to lay a sort of infrastructure ofperformance on which they were now building. Yet there was also a realsense that by the early 1980s these bands had come to be viewedprimarily through the lens of an uncritical nostalgia. Accordingto Rice, ‘some did see the MC5 by that time as a bunch of old hippiefuddy-duddies … We didn’t see it as any sort of continuum.’ TheFreezer Theatre provided an avenue through which to redefine thesound of Detroit. Soon, the space would become the communal homeof the fledgling Detroit hardcore punk scene.40

Fig. 4 Negative Approach performing live at the Freezer Theatre, 1981.Photograph by Davo Scheich.

Cultural History

34


Driving this process was sheer necessity. In looking for places to playin the city, hardcore punk musicians realized, in the words of Necrosvocalist Barry Henssler, that ‘the club scene wasn’t going to give ashit about hardcore bands’. Too extreme for clubs still privilegingcover acts, bands like the Necros had to go ‘about finding our ownspaces. It was just a necessity. It wasn’t a political statement or astatement of utilizing an old space.’ Bored Youth vocalist Rob Michaelsechoed this sentiment, explaining that the decision to put on shows inan underprivileged section of the city was an ‘unpolitical decision.There was no consciousness of that. ’ Musicians such as John Brannonand Larissa Strickland, drawn to the neighbourhood by its cheap rents,soon took up residence in the Cass Corridor. By the summer of 1982the two were living in The Clubhouse, a space on Willis Street (406 W.Willis Street) that hosted hardcore punk shows for over half a year,from July 1982 to February 1983.41

Yet there was also a real feeling that what made places like the CassCorridor appealing to such individuals was what they weren’t: suburban.Most pragmatically – and somewhat paradoxically – these urban spaces,for young people drawn to hardcore punk, were deemed safer thansuburban spaces. In explaining the appeal of the ‘desolate’ CassCorridor, Necros vocalist Henssler noted that anything was better thanlife in Maumee, Ohio. ‘I just wanted to break out and get as far awayfrom there as possible. It was the least avant-garde place on Earth.’ Andit was in the suburbs, not the city, that Henssler feared bodily harm.‘If you had a leather jacket and a crew-cut [in Maumee]’, continuedHenssler, ‘people would throw bottles at you from their cars. ’ For him,then, ‘there were no reservations about going to Detroit. ’42

Perhaps more romantically, others drawn to hardcore punk saw thecity as providing a sort of aesthetic inspiration, one that the boringsuburbs could not possibly provide. Corey Rusk has noted that

certainly aesthetically I was drawn to that [landscape ofdeindustrialization]. Before I could drive I was going to shows inDetroit. I think a lot of people found it – or find it – to be scary or creepy,but when you’re young you don’t react that way. It just seemed strangelybeautiful to me, what it was, even though it was the most extremeexample of urban decay of a major city in the United States … Maybegrowing up a middle-class American in a small town, something aboutthe decaying urban setting was such a dramatically different setting thatit was appealing.43

For The Fix vocalist Steve Miller, among others, such a deserted urbansetting quickly brought about a strong sense of community among


35

those who worked to literally build the Freezer. To Negative Approachvocalist John Brannon, the participatory nature of the community-building process at the Freezer fully informed the feel of the space, aswell as the scene itself. Commenting on shows at the Freezer, Brannonnoted, ‘The whole thing about being in a band at that point, therewas no separation between the kids and the audience and who’s onstage. It was music for the people.’ Equally important, the desolateenvironment of the Freezer also allowed the emerging genre ofhardcore punk to see itself as distinct from the broader historicalcurrents that had previously worked to define music in the city. ‘Youwere aware of its [the city’s] history from the 1960s’, explained Miller,‘but not that aware. We really felt like we were doing something new.It was kind of like “Fuck history. We’re making history.”’44

Perhaps not surprisingly, such individuals were also unaware ofearlier artistic movements that had occupied the Cass Corridor. Morespecifically, the neighbourhood, according to art historian Julia R.Myers, had ‘witnessed an intense efflorescence of artistic activity in thelate 1960s and the 1970s’, as visual artists such as Gordon Newton,John Egner, Michael Luchs and Robert Sestok rooted themselves, andtheir work, in the gritty environment of the Cass Corridor. These artistspractised what some art critics came to call ‘ industrial expressionism’,as their work ‘reflected the danger and decay of a declining, post-industrial Detroit ’. Yet hardcore punk fan Greg Bokor – who hadmoved to the Cass Corridor in 1981 from Hudsonville, Michigan, toattend art school at the nearby Center for Creative Studies – knewnothing about this history. ‘I wanted to be near the music’, explainedBokor. ‘I was there for the music.’45

This ambivalent relationship with history carried over intointeractions with the predominantly low-income African Americanpopulation of the Cass Corridor. No allegiances were formed – ‘Therewas never any real contact’, recalls Barry Henssler – and the two camps,according to him and other white punk rockers, generally left eachother alone. There was no attempt to build solidarity with the AfricanAmerican population of the community, or to even come to termswith the culture of a group that seemed to share a similar narrativeof alienation from mainstream American society. The ironies of suchracial as well as cultural isolation were not lost on musicians like RobMichaels, who explains, ‘The funny thing about it though was for thesekids to find somewhere to play, they had to find some shitty storefrontin the ghetto. So it was the soul music of the suburbs that had to beplayed in the inner city. ’ The suburbs these young people calledhome had no place for such cultural expression. This scene

Cultural History

36

reproduced itself across the country during the early 1980s, as whitesuburban young people moved into predominantly African Americanneighbourhoods in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Suchmovements were not necessarily about laying down roots or developingan identity based on allegiance to a city, neighbourhood or any otherspatial category; they were primarily migrations of opportunity. Ruskhimself would move Touch and Go Records from Detroit to a largerMidwestern city, Chicago, in 1987.46

Legacies of the moment – and the movementAs scholars such as Suleiman Osman and Aaron Shkuda begin to bothflesh out and complicate the histories of gentrification in such citiesas New York – and the role of artists in these histories – it is temptingto see such middle-class white punk rockers as the ‘shock troops’ ofthis process, making the Cass Corridor safe for other white peoplewhile giving the neighbourhood the reputation of housing a new, edgyculture. And there may be something to this narrative: throughoutthe 1990s the region continued to attract white punk rock fans. In 1991a new punk venue, 404 Willis, opened at 404 W. Willis Street in the CassCorridor. Just two years later, the Trumbullplex, described by Detroit’sMetro Times as a ‘Cass Corridor anarchist collective’, began putting onshows and running a housing cooperative. Other development soonfollowed. In 1997, for example, Avalon International Breads opened at422 W. Willis Street, while Goodwells Natural Foods opened its doorsat 418 W. Willis Street in 2006. 404 W. Willis Street is currently thehome of Flo Boutique, a self-described ‘lifestyle clothing boutique forwomen and men’. At the same time, the building that housed theFreezer Theatre was demolished in October 2013, making room for anew parking lot.47

While more work is undoubtedly needed on the relationshipbetween such music scenes and gentrification, the example ofDetroit illustrates just how moments of cultural transition can occurin American cities, what impact the urban setting has on suchmoments, and how these moments can also shape the urban builtenvironment itself (through the creation of spaces like the FreezerTheatre). The case of Detroit punk also highlights the sort of collectiveunawareness that allows for not only the birth of new cultures but alsothe forgetting of previous ones. An understanding of such a mindsetseems integral to grasping how gentrification has worked in the UnitedStates. Yet, in the broader realm of American culture, the influence ofTouch and Go Records was anything but ephemeral. During the latetwentieth century, the label set the groundwork for the rise of the


37

‘alternative’ music genre that would sweep the airwaves by the early1990s and, in the process, helped launch the careers of such genre-defining acts as the Jesus Lizard, Urge Overkill, TV on the Radio andthe Yeah Yeah Yeahs (among others), all of whom put out recordson Touch and Go. The label even inspired such legendary musiciansas Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (who reportedly sent the label his band’sfirst demo tape, hoping they would agree to put out Nirvana’sdebut album) and such important independent record labels as DragCity, Kill Rock Stars and Merge Records. It is with this cultural – andnot political or economic – legacy in mind that we must come tounderstand the importance of the rise of American punk. And it is withthis cultural legacy in mind that we see just how the environment oflate twentieth-century Detroit provided the perfect setting for thebeginnings of this revolution.48

Notes1. John Brannon, quoted in Lowell Cauffiel, ‘The Punk Revolt ’, Michigan:

The magazine of the Detroit News, 10 July 1982, 12+ (p. 13).2. Cauffiel, ‘The Punk Revolt ’; Swalla, quoted in Tony Rettman, Why be Something that

You’re Not: Detroit Hardcore, 1979–1985 (Huntington Beach, CA: Revelation Records,2010), p. 85.

3. Cauffiel, ‘The Punk Revolt ’, p. 13.4. Emerging in the late 1970s, hardcore punk built on the sound and aesthetic of the

first wave of punk rock associated with the mid-1970s. To music historian StevenBlush, hardcore punk, played faster than earlier punk rock, was ‘an extreme: theabsolute most Punk’. It is this genre of hardcore punk that will be the focus of thisessay. See Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral House,2001), p. 18.

5. Cauffiel, ‘The Punk Revolt ’, p. 13.6. Cauffiel, ‘The Punk Revolt ’, p. 13; Negative Approach, ‘Lead Song’, Negative

Approach, 700

EP (Touch and Go Records, Lansing, MI, 1982).7. Wilbur C. Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 23.8. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin ’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New

York: New Press, 2010), p. 11.9. Ibid., p. 17.

10. Ibid., p 325.11. Michelle Phillipov, ‘Haunted by the Spirit of ’77: Punk Studies and the Persistence

of Politics ’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20:3 (2006), pp. 383–93(383).

12. Kevin Mattson, ‘Did Punk Matter? Analyzing the Practices of a Youth Subcultureduring the 1980s ’, American Studies, 42:1 (2001), pp. 69–97 (77, 78).

13. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979);Susan Willis, ‘Hardcore: Subculture American Style ’, Critical Inquiry, 19:2 (1993),pp. 365–83 (367). In fact, Willis gets wrong the name of the one hardcore punkband she mentions in her essay: the Washington, D.C.-based hardcore punk band

Cultural History

38

Bad Brains is referred to as ‘Bad Brain’ (p. 373). Willis also curiously reports that‘eighty percent of a hardcore punk’s wardrobe is likely to be black; the remainder isoften white or grey ’ (p. 369). There is no indication of how she came to such aconclusion.

14. This is not a comprehensive institutional or social history of an independentrecord label or a burgeoning American hardcore punk rock scene; I pay verylittle attention to the day-to-day workings of such things. Recent works by suchauthors as Tony Rettman and Steve Miller provide such useful on-the-groundaccounts of how punk operated in such Midwestern cities as Detroit in the late1970s and early 1980s. Rather, it is an attempt to see how a number of actors usedthe genre of punk as a means to interact with late-twentieth-century Americanculture. See Rettman’s Why be Something that You’re Not and Miller’s Detroit Rock City:The Uncensored History of Rock ’n ’ Roll in America’s Loudest City (Boston: Da Capo,2013).

15. Ryan Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (New York:New York University Press, 2010), p. 37.

16. Ibid., p. 37.17. Here I am influenced by Kevin Mattson’s explicit challenge to Hebdige’s

fetishization of consumption in subculture theory. Mattson draws our attentionto matters related to ‘cultural production’ and the way those involved in Americanpunk rock formed ‘a robust community of producers through independentlycreating musical commodities (sold through alternative networks) ’. Mattson, ‘DidPunk Matter? ’, p. 72.

18. Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (NewYork: Free Press, 1998), pp. 238, 294. For the definitive work on post-war Detroit,see Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

19. Such works as Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis, Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline:St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2008), and Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott’s Beyond the Ruins: TheMeanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) relay thenow-familiar story of the damage wrought by deindustrialization in cities across theUnited States. This article does not seek to ignore such damage; instead, it seeks tobegin to present the cultural side of a process that is often discussed primarily ineconomic terms. Attention is therefore drawn to the ways in which one set of actorsresponded to such environments as they struggled to make an American city morelivable. For a description of post-industrial Detroit as ‘Third World’ see Ze’evChafets, Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Random House,1990), p. 121.

20. See Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Riseof Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) for more on theseismic cultural shifts of the late twentieth century – and on the ways that previouslyunderground cultures came to have pronounced impacts on the broader culture ofthe United States. With Frank’s nuanced examination of the world of Americanadvertising in mind, I use the phrase radical culture, rather than a culture ofradicalism, consciously and carefully. While critical of the political and economictrends of their day, the actors discussed in this article were more interested infomenting a type of cultural upheaval. Such ambivalence towards the institutionsthat controlled American political and economic life may help us better understand


39

how and why the aesthetics of punk rock so quickly became a part of Americanmainstream culture.

21. Dave Stimson, ‘Kill the Hippies! ’, Touch and Go, no. 1 (November 1979), p. 5. Allreferences to Touch and Go magazine are drawn from Steve Miller (ed.), Touch andGo: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79– ’83 (New York: Bazillion Points, 2010). Allissues of the magazine are reproduced in this one volume.

22. Ibid., p. 5.23. Dave Stimson, untitled editorial, Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 23.24. Tesco Vee, ‘Romantics ’, Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 24.25. Dave Stimson, ‘Drop Dead WILS’, Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 32.26. Dave Stimson, ‘The death of a hippie’s dream’, Touch and Go, no. 1 (November

1979), p. 3.27. Ibid., p. 3.28. ‘Algebra Mothers-Flirt-Coldcock-The Cubes Live at the Ranch’, Touch and Go, no. 1

(November 1979), p. 4.29. Dave Stimson, ‘Comment ’, Touch and Go, no. 3 (January 1980), p. 47; back cover of

Touch and Go, no. 3 (January 1980), p. 59.30. ‘Touch and Go’, Touch and Go, no. 12 (April 1981), p. 239.31. Tesco Vee, ‘Necros ’, Touch and Go, no. 13 (June 1981), p. 267.32. The Necros, ‘Public High School ’, I.Q. 32, 7

00EP (Touch and Go Records/

Dischord Records, Lansing, MI, 1981); the Necros, ‘Police Brutality ’, Sex Drive, 700

EP (Touch and Go Records, Lansing, MI, 1981).33. Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.34. Steve Miller, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 19 February 2014; Dave Stimson,

‘The Fix ’, Touch and Go, no. 9 (November 1980), p. 164.35. Rob Michaels, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 17 February 2014.36. Ibid.37. ‘ Introduction’, Touch and Go, no. 18 (March 1982), p. 381.38. Rettman, Why be Something that You’re Not, p. 83.39. Dave Rice, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014. For more on the

events of 1967 in Detroit, see Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The CavanaghAdministration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor, MI: Universityof Michigan Press, 1989). For the history of the Cass Corridor, see ArmandoDelicato and Elias Khalil, Detroit’s Cass Corridor (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2012).

40. Dave Rice, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.41. Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014; Rob Michaels,

interview by Michael H. Carriere, 17 February 2014; Rettman, Why be Something thatYou’re Not, p. 162.

42. Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.43. Corey Rusk, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 18 August 2006.44. John Brannon, quoted in Miller, Detroit Rock City, p. 211; Steve Miller, interview by

Michael H. Carriere, 19 February 2014.45. Julia R. Myers, Subverting Modernism: Cass Corridor Revisited 1966–1980 (Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 2013), pp. 1, 3, 4; Greg Bokor, interview by MichaelH. Carriere, 18 February 2014. Tellingly, Myers’s work makes no mention of theDetroit punk scene that came to exist in the Cass Corridor towards the end of theperiod she studies.

46. Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014; Michaels,quoted in Rettman, Why be Something that You’re Not, p. 94. While it is beyond the

Cultural History

40

scope of this article, more historical work needs to be done on the interactionsbetween such groups as underground musicians and African Americans inAmerican cities during the late twentieth century.

47. Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search forAuthenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); AaronPeter Shkuda, ‘From Urban Renewal to Gentrification: Artists, Cultural Capital andthe Remaking of New York’s SoHo Neighborhood, 1950–1980’ (PhD dissertation,University of Chicago, 2010); Domenique Osborne, ‘Radically Wholesome’, MetroTimes, 11 September 2002, www.metrotimes.com/detroit/radically-wholesome/Content?oid=2174463. Last accessed September 1, 2014. Ryan Felton, ‘The Daysof Anarchy in Midtown’, The South End, 28 September 2011, www.thesouthend.wayne.edu/archives/article_04cbd184-e1b4-55f3-af08-45af7aded984.html?mode=story. Last accessed September 1, 2014. Flo Boutique’s home page: www.flowingflava.com/; Paul Beshouri, ‘Cass Storefront and Former Freezer TheaterNow Erased’, Curbed Detroit, 18 October 2013, http://detroit.curbed.com/archives/2013/10/cass-storefront-and-former-freezer-theater-now-erased.php. Last accessedSeptember 1, 2014.

48. For Touch and Go’s influence on Kurt Cobain, see Ben Myers, ‘Label of Love:Touch and Go’, The Guardian, 20 April 2009, www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/20/label-love-touch-go. Last accessed February 11, 2013. Myers writes that‘without the inspiration of the label’s [Touch and Go’s] artists, it’s likely Nirvanawould never have happened’.


41

Documents

Rise of Hardcore Punk in