Now It Can Be Told...
SST, Psychotic Pineapple, and me
Friends, I can finally tell you about the book I’ve been working on all pandemic.
I’m pleased to announce that I’m writing a narrative history of SST Records, the iconic indie label that championed bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Bad Brains, Soundgarden and many, many more. It’s called Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.
SST was founded by Greg Ginn of Black Flag and for many years the story of the band and the label were intertwined. At SST’s peak in the mid- to late ’80s, SST was the biggest, coolest, most sought after indie in the country. Bands wanted to be on SST. Other labels wanted to be SST. The label with the address P.O. Box 1 Lawndale, California, helped put LA punk on the map and then paved the way for the rise of alternative music.
But many bands defected from SST to major labels over claims of unpaid royalties and irregular accounting. Some bands have sued to get the rights to their music back, and there’s a great deal of acrimony between the musicians that made SST what it is and the man who created it. In recent years Ginn has become increasingly litigious and drawing his ire can be a very expensive proposition for those who find their way into his crosshairs.
It’s a big, messy, complicated story about intensely creative people. I love stories about artists and this one has hundreds of them and quite possibly a few geniuses. It’s a story about a time and a place that feels further away by the day . It’s a story about doing the impossible, which I have found during these dark times to be incredibly inspiring. At various points while researching and writing this story I have entertained thoughts of writing songs, starting a record label, launching a publishing company.
Corporate Rock Sucks will be published by Hachette and will come out in 2022. I’m stoked to be working with the same team I worked with on My Damage and Do What You Want.
Although the announcement is brand new, I’ve been working on this project for a while and It’s been keeping me company throughout the pandemic: reading zines, interviewing people, listening to records, writing pages. I’ve talked to dozens of people, including musicians, photographers, producers, filmmakers, former SST employees, writers, friends, fans, and more. It’s been a fascinating way to spend this long, cursed year.
Each week I’ll share something about the project here in the newsletter. It could be anything from who I’m talking to, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to, etc. I’m putting together playlists of my favorite deep cuts and exploring hidden gems in the SST catalog. It feels like each week I get sucked down two or three wormholes, and now you get to come along for the ride. I have a few zine projects in mind for surplus material and, of course, you’ll be the first to know about publication dates, cover reveals, etc. If you’re not a subscriber to Message from the Underworld, now would be an excellent time. It’s free and easy. Oh look, there’s a button right here.
What I really want to know is this: what do you want to know? Send me your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them in next week’s Message from the Underworld.
I Wanna Tell You about the Saw…
It happened again. A few weeks ago I wrote about stumbling upon an old forgotten punk rock demo and how it got the old memory machine going.
Last week I was on the phone with Razorcake co-founder Sean Carswell (Hi Sean!) and we were talking about how dicey it was to buy punk rock records back when we were kids. We were always broke and we didn’t know anything about anything. The odds of getting something good were slim.
Sean told me he’d order a record from the store and wait for weeks for it to arrive. When it did, he would sometimes force himself to like the music by listening to it over and over again because he didn’t have the money to go get another one.
I remember going to the used record store and trying to pick out punk records based on the cover. I loved The Ramones and my brother and I had bought every album we could find, but the Ramones covers were no help. By End of the Century the Ramones looked like a doo-wop band, Sha Na Na’s back-ups.
I knew that punk bands were supposed to look crazy and dangerous, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t want it to look too crazy or too dangerous in case my parents freaked out. One album I plucked from the bins at the record store had a song called “Headcheese.” When I was on the phone with Sean, I told him about it, but I couldn’t remember anything else about the band or the album.
After I got off the phone, I did a little digging and found the record online: Where’s the Party? by Psychotic Pineapple. I listened to “Headcheese” and all the other songs on YouTube’s Psychotic Pineapple channel and damn if I didn’t know all the words. Apparently, I’d listened to this album quite a bit when I was kid. I probably made a tape of it and listened to it during my paper route delivering the Washington Post. It was on these early morning jaunts around the neighborhood that I received my weirdo programming with The Ramones, Devo, Surf Punks, and Pat Benatar (yeah, I know) seeping into my brain. Add Psychotic Pineapple to the list. Why not? Isn’t this what every punk goes through early in the indoctrination, trying new music, new clothes, new hair, without really knowing what they’re doing and feeling super self-conscious about it? (My friend Michael T. Fournier ((Hi Michael!)) has written a novel about exactly this.) I think I must have sensed that Psychotic Pineapple wasn’t cool, that it was in fact deeply weird, and I decided not to care. I picked Psychotic Pineapple out of the bin, Where’s the Party? was burned into my mind forever, and then I forgot about it.
For, like, 40 years.
What is Psychotic Pineapple? It’s not punk but it’s not not punk either. They’re like an arty late ’60s garage rock band that stepped out of the shadows a decade too late. You know how some bands of this era have a heavy psychedelic vibe? The members of Psychotic Pineapple look like they’re actually on LSD. A keyboard features prominently in the mix and the members switch instruments and take turns singing. The vocals are delivered in a fine nasal whine like Violent Femmes meets ? & the Mysterians. Their favorite movie was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it inspired several of their songs.
Psychotic Pineapple has a secret weapon in its bass player John Seabury who is also a talented visual artist. The band’s flyers featured a character called Pyno Man who was always getting himself into absurd situations that owes a debt to Gilbert Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Psychotic Pineapple’s flyers were like an ongoing comic strip designed to catch the eye of the uninitiated and to entertain those who were in on the joke.
In 2012 Psychotic Pineapple got together for a reunion show and a short documentary was filmed that blends performances from the show with archival footage from 1979 and is interspersed with short interviews about the songs. I absolutely loved it.
(If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip to about twenty minutes into the doc where they discuss and perform “Headcheese.”)
There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching the doc. I think we all have moments when we think about our past and remember someone we used to know, or a place we used to go, just lurking beneath the surface of our memories, but when we go online to investigate there’s nothing there. The people are gone. The places torn down. The artifacts of the past scattered to the winds. All we have are our memories, which are fleeting and unreliable. Sometimes if we try really hard we can see a dim outline of the past, but very rarely can we fully excavate them and see these things in their true form, not for what we think they were, but for what they truly are. The appearance of an entire documentary that fully explains this weird obsession from my childhood feels like a manifestation. My past is breaking into the present and making itself known.
This seems to be happening to me more and more lately. It’s comforting to know that I can watch this video and for 45 minutes or so be in close contact with that weird kid I used to be. Now, after 40 years, I can proudly say, “I like headcheese.”
Miscellaneous Mayhem
Tod Goldberg’s new book of short stories, The Low Desert, came out yesterday. Highly recommended (even though it does have a few stories about cops).
No telescope required. Every issue of Punk Planet is now available on the Internet Archive. David Grad’s oral history of Black Flag, one of the few places where band members really tee off on each other, is a good place to start.
KLF has entered the building. The merry pranksters of house music have joined YouTube and Spotify. If you’re curious as to why this is a big deal, I recommend subscribing to John Higgs’ Tiny Letter, which he sends out exactly eight times a year.
Have a safe voyage into the weekend, my friends. And don’t forget to send me your questions.
Congrats Jim! Eager to read it.
Congrats on the SST book!