No Place Like Home

Searching for Bad Brains in Washington, D.C.

It’s been both a fascinating and frustrating week of work on the book project. One of the most enjoyable aspects has been talking with people at length about their experiences with SST Records. It doesn’t matter if they’re a musician, promoter, producer, or what have you, there’s almost always a moment when the right question asked at the right time leads to an unexpected revelation. Whether it’s filling in a missing piece of the puzzle or opening up a whole new area to investigate, when it happens it feels like a gift.

“Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me,” Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road.

As a young writer I understood that pearl to be wisdom, knowledge, or experience, some corny shit like that. Now I know the literal truth of this statement: the pearl comes from outside of you. I don’t feel like a journalist, an investigative reporter, or a historian, but someone who squats in front of gumball machines hoping something good will come tumbling out. 

But writing a book is not all epiphanies and moments of revelation. Scheduling and rescheduling interviews across multiple platforms sucks up a lot of attention. It’s like dating: it doesn’t feel like work at the time, but it can be all-consuming. Add uncooperative technology, tiresome notetaking, and the horror of having to listen to your own voice day after day, and it can feel like you’ve signed on to be some dickhead’s assistant except the dickhead is you. 

But those pearls make it all worthwhile. At the end of the day, it comes down to stringing them together in a way that leads to something pleasing and new. When I started this project I thought I was leading from a position of strength because I had an arsenal of opinions about this band or that album. Now I realize that almost none those opinions matter because they can only take me to places I already know. The point of all these interviews is to get closer to understanding something deeper than that, something that may very well be unfathomable. 

The last few weeks I’ve been feeling this even more acutely because my research has taken me home.  

I’ve been working on the Bad Brains section of the book, which has been fascinating for reasons both obvious and obscure. Not that it needs to be said, but Bad Brains are one of the best punk bands to ever plug into an amp. When it comes to art, I try to avoid superiority claims, but we’re talking about Bad Brains. No one looked like Bad Brains, no one sounded like Bad Brains, and no one could match Bad Brains intensity. The fact that the members are all black in a scene that was mostly white makes this achievement all the more astonishing because there were more barriers to overcome, the obstacles considerably higher.

Can you think of another punk band that dominated not one but two scenes? When it comes to Bad Brains there literally is no comparison. There isn’t even a second place. Bad Brains is in a class by itself and always will be. 

By the time Bad Brains signed with SST the band had undergone a religious conversion, alienated much of the punk rock community, had its gear stolen (twice), moved from Washington D.C. to New York and back to D.C. again, and split up for a year and a half before a triumphant reunion. Also, H.R. had been sent to prison and was on the verge of doing another stint with his brother, Earl, at Lorton Correctional Facility where their father was a captain. Talk about a fucked up situation. 

Bad Brains are from Maryland just a few blocks from southeast Washington, D.C. I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia on the southwest border but separated by the Potomac River. H.R. and Earl’s father served in the Air Force; my father was in the U.S. Navy. Any similarity between my life and the lives of the members of Bad Brains ends there. 

Last weekend, in response to a question posed on some loser’s Substack, I wrote about seeing the Ramones at the Wax Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1984. Someone else wrote about seeing the band two years earlier at the Bayou in Georgetown. We traded stories and discovered that we are the same age and grew up in more or less the same place with similar interests. We went to different schools, had different backgrounds, and took different paths that eventually led us to San Diego. There’s nothing coincidental or even interesting about any of this, but it was arresting to me because of its familiarity. Because of how our stories overlapped, I was thinking about old places in new ways. 

Reading about Bad Brains has been like that, especially the books that focus on the Washington, D.C. punk scene, a scene I did not participate in or witness but whose psychogeography I know and am intimate with.

Finding Joseph I: An Oral History of H.R. from Bad Brains by Howie Abrams and James Lathos. When H.R. was in New York in the early ‘80s he joined the Twelve Tribes of Israel, a Rastafarian sect whose members often take on a new name based on their birth month. Upon learning that he was from the same tribe as Bob Marley, H.R. embraced the name Joseph. Born Paul Hudson, he already had a plethora of nicknames but H.R. is how he is credited on his records. The book was released in tandem with a documentary of the same title and follows H.R.’s troubled journey. What both the book and documentary make clear is that for much of his life, H.R. suffered from undiagnosed brain health issues. 

The documentary underscores the challenges that people of my generation face when discussing mental health. Very few of the people interviewed for the documentary possess the language to discuss encounters with H.R. when he was struggling with his brain health. It’s slightly more nuanced in the book where people have the opportunity to speak at length, but even people who clearly love H.R. struggle to describe interactions with him when he was in the midst of a crisis.

Part of that is due to the fact that many of these people were relying on H.R. as a performer: they’re playing a show with him and he fails to appear, acts erratically, or refuses to perform. When an artist doesn’t do the things they’ve said they’re going to do in the context of a performance, it can have professional implications. In the annals of rock and roll, this is usually caused by drugs and/or alcohol and there’s plenty of leeway built into the system, but for mental illness? Not so much.

All rock histories, as I’m painfully aware, have blind spots, especially when they purport to be comprehensive. I’m of the opinion that oral histories work best when they put moments under the spotlight: the night Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Theismann’s leg or the filming of the music video for the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaboration “Walk This Way.” I love seeing one moment in time from multiple perspectives to get a better understanding of how it happened and why and, most importantly, how it means different things for different people. There are exceptions, but oral histories that tackle entire eras are much more challenging to pull off. My main criticism of Finding Joseph I is that I wanted it to be something it isn’t, i.e. a lot longer, which isn’t criticism at all but the gripe of a fan. 

Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins is a comprehensive history of a scene from the inside out that documents virtually every band that participated. The book has an interesting publication history and format. Originally put out by Soft Skull in 2001 it was rereleased in expanded form by Akashic in 2009, correcting many errors that appeared in the earlier edition. The book moves chronologically from the end of the ’70s to the end of the century.  As Andersen states in the afterword: “This is not the end, but this is where I’m stopping.”

Dance of Days is a work of history that charts the rise and fall of D.C.’s most prominent bands—and they broke up a lot, something the punk zines on the West Coast used to poke fun at. I suspect Dance of Days may be a bit denser than what many punk and hardcore fans are looking for (like this newsletter). I say this for a couple of reasons. The book tracks the scene’s growing political engagement and how the bands worked alongside organizations like Positive Force in opposition to the changes wrought by the Reagan regime. Also, Washington D.C. is a small city with a small scene. When I talked to Brian Baker of Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, and Government Issue for the Bad Religion book he told me in the early days it wasn’t really a scene so much as something he did after school with his friends. How many books have been written about what you did after school? 

But if you’re a fan of D.C. punk, hardcore, post-punk, and whatever genre it is that Fugazi more or less invented, Dance of Days is essential reading. The ultimate trainspotter’s guide, if you will. My only complaint is that despite the book’s larger format, most of the photos are still too small, but the next two books take care of that…

Banned in D.C.: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85) by Cynthia Connolly, Leslie Clague, and Sharon Cheslow. Banned in D.C. looks and feels like a cross between a photo zine and a high school yearbook. Assembled with craft and care it provides an intimate look at a scene without ever feeling too insular. While reading zines from the ‘80s can feel like stepping into the middle of a conversation between subliterate strangers, Banned in DC brings many of the scenes described in Dance of Days to life. 

The title comes from the Bad Brains song “Banned in DC.” For what it’s worth, Bad Brains weren’t actually banned from D.C. but several clubs did ban punk bands, so technically the shoe fits. The limited opportunities in DC was definitely a contributing factor in the band’s decision to relocate to New York. 

Spoke: Images and Stores from the 1980s Washington, DC Punk Scene by Scott Crawford is a mix of all three of the books mentioned above: part oral history, part photo book, part scene report. (You really have to hand it to DC punk books for their exacting subtitles.) Spoke provides an overview of the bands that inspired, galvanized, and transformed the D.C. punk scene. “Compiler” Scott Crawford directed the much loved documentary Salad Days and as a teenager in the ’80s created Metrozine, making him an undisputed authority.

Unlike Scott, when I was a teenager, I never went to any of the shows described in these books. My childhood across the Potomac River was too sheltered, but after I turned 16 I started to explore the city with greater frequency. By then it was 1984 and most of the early D.C. punk bands had broken up. 

I think most people know the Straight Edge movement was born in D.C. but what many people miss is that the drinking age in Washington, D.C. was 18 and even after they changed the laws there was a grandfather clause so that if you had the privilege of buying alcohol under the age of 21, they wouldn’t take it away. This attracted a lot of young people from the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland to the city. All you needed was one person who was 18 (or had a decent fake ID) that could buy beer. 

I had a friend who had a fake ID, a video camera, and a van, and with this trifecta we’d drive around D.C. with a case of Milwaukee’s Best shooting stupid movies at national monuments. We found a bar called Poseur’s that was aimed toward the Goth and New Wave crowd that would serve us so we hung out there. For a while we could get served at the Tombs, but it was a popular hangout with Georgetown students and the place was wall to wall rugby shirts. 

Somehow we found our way into shows, dance clubs, house parties. We weren’t looking for them, but they called out to us. I didn’t discover the music that animated the D.C. punk scene until I was sitting in a skinhead’s apartment in Ocean Beach, California, flipping through his records and listening to Minor Threat’s Out of Step for the first time. By then I’d enlisted in the Navy, which would pull me farther and farther from home. 

I had a moment while researching my book not too long ago that blew my mind. After I Against I, the studio album Bad Brains released with SST, H.R. put out several solo albums with the label and at least two of these were recorded at Cue Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, the tiny little town in Northern Virginia where I grew up. 

Cue Recording Studios, my sister informed me (Hi Molly!) was located above a janky little knock off 7-11 convenience store called 7 Stars. It was only a few blocks from the farthest limit of my paper route, down the street from the local movie theater, not far from the library where I cultivated my love of reading and the rec center where I sweated through countless basketball practices. And yet between 1985 and 1987, H.R. made semi regular appearances there to record songs for his reggae band Zion Train and solo projects It’s About Luv and Human Rights.

Did our paths ever cross? Did I have my back turned to the soda fountain when H.R. came in to buy rolling papers? What impact would a chance encounter with H.R. have had on my young life? What pearls did H.R. have for me? 

As Ian MacKaye so poignantly sang in “Cashing In,” “there’s no place like home, so where am I?”