This is a Call (15 page)

Scream toured Europe for the first time in 1985, becoming the first East Coast hardcore band to do so. European punk rockers didn’t always take kindly to having American bands on their territory – when Black Flag débuted their
Damaged
album in the UK tour in December 1981 they were greeted with volleys of spit, anti-American abuse and skinhead violence at every show – but the Virginians’ easy charm and raw magnetism won over crowds wherever they went.

‘It was amazing,’ says Pete Stahl. ‘People seemed to have greater freedom in Europe to create little pockets of music and art and cinema and there was always people in those communities that would support us.’

Scream played squats and bombed-out youth centres, bonded with anarchist collectives over weed and industrial-strength cider and talked punk, politics and philosophy with fans who had driven across international borders just to attend their shows. When they returned to the continent in February 1988 (now a quartet once more, as ‘Harley’ Davidson had left the band at the end of their autumn ’87 US tour) they had a fervent, passionate fan base in every city – and a drummer who couldn’t quite believe that this alternate reality existed.

‘The whole trip was a real eye-opening experience,’ Grohl recalls. ‘We’d fly standby from Washington DC on this Dutch airline called Martin Air – they had standby tickets that you could reserve, so you could get a flight from DC to Amsterdam for like $110 – so we’d have enough money to get there, but we’d never have enough money to get back. So we had to tour until we had enough money to get home. And we toured fucking hard. We’d go over for three months at a time and we were hanging on by a thread the whole time we were there.

‘Going on the road in America in the early eighties bands really had no fucking idea what to expect, it was still like the Wild Wild West out there. But after that network was established in the mid-eighties it became a little easier: it was never
easy
, but maybe you had played that place last time around and maybe you’d have somewhere to crash so it wasn’t a complete step into the dark every time. But Europe was so different. In Europe there were squats where we’d turn up and they’d still be building the stage, or someone would be out back tying wires together to pirate some electricity so that we could play. Or we’d show up to see them burning mattresses out front because there was scabies everywhere. Or there’d be riots where there’d be squatters chucking bottles and glass at the skinheads who were trying to evict them from the building … shit like that. It totally blew my mind.

‘Coming over to Europe for the first time I had no idea what a squat was. We landed in Amsterdam – which was great for me because I was at the height of my pot-head career, my stoner phase – and everyone we worked with lived in squats. Our booking agent Hedi lived in a squat that was one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever been in in my life, so it was hard for me to wrap my head around this concept. I was like, really, if a building is not being used and you maintain it you can just live there? How the fuck is that possible? But just as the network that was the hardcore scene in America brought all these people together, you’d come over to Europe and see the same thing. I’d meet kids from all over the world in squats in Italy and Spain and Germany and they loved to come see American bands: Europe had great bands, amazing hardcore bands, but there were kids who wanted to see us because their dream was to go see America: they wanted to see the desert, or New York City or Los Angeles, California. That changed, at some point it became fuck your desert, and fuck New York and LA, but back then we were singing along with the rest of the world about how fucked up our country was. It was an amazing time.’

‘Scream made a lot of friends out in Europe,’ says Ian MacKaye, then touring the continent for the first time with Fugazi. ‘They toured hard, and were well loved, well received and well respected. They’d hang out after shows and meet good people, and their reputation as nice guys and a great band spread. On Fugazi’s first European tour we played something like 78 shows in three months and we didn’t always stay for the party afterwards – we’d have an eight-hour drive so we wanted to get on the road quickly so we could destroy the next room the next night – but Scream always stayed for the party and won the affection of a lot of people.’

Lee Dorrian first met Scream at a party on the sixteenth floor of a Coventry council flat in 1985. Then a 17-year-old punk promoter, later the frontman of hugely influential grindcore band Napalm Death and now the vocalist of British doom rockers Cathedral and owner of the influential metal label Rise Above, Dorrian remembers the band being ‘absolutely trashed’, but good natured, likeable and friendly.

‘Pete Stahl was a real cool guy,’ he recalls. ‘I went to see Scream a few times, and I remember one gig at the Hummingbird in Birmingham, which I think was the last gig on their tour, and he reeled off a list of about 50 people he’d met on the road, and he remembered everybody’s name. That impressed me.’

‘When they came back to England in ’88 I put them on at a place called The Inn Hotel in Coventry. They had nowhere to stay and I had a council flat in Hillfields in Coventry, 52 Hillfields House, so they piled back to my flat. There were holes in the windows and doors made by some Dutch band who had stayed the week before, and I had to go around to a squat around the corner to nick some furniture. But they were just happy to have a roof over their heads. And they were good company. Dave was a particularly witty character. I remember my girlfriend at the time had a big Jimmy Page logo on the back of her jacket and Dave was in the back of the van going, “Does anyone like Led Zeppelin?”, and she was all excited, saying, “Oh, I do, I do!” He was just teasing, of course, just pretending he hasn’t noticed. He was really knowledgeable and excited about music too. Napalm had just recorded a session for [late, great, punk-championing DJ] John Peel and Dave really wanted to hear it, so I played it. It completely floored them, they thought it was nuts. I think Dave and I spent the rest of the night talking about Sabbath and Celtic Frost and Voivod.’

Back in Amsterdam after English dates with Concrete Sox and Subhumans, Scream’s 28 March set at Van Hall was broadcast live on Dutch radio. Released later that same year on Konkurrel records as
Live! At Van Hall Amsterdam
, the recording stands as an excellent snapshot of a confident, dazzlingly capable band at the peak of their abilities. ‘Don’t ask me why they want an American band on the radio when there’s so many good European bands,’ says Pete Stahl after opener ‘Who Knows? Who Cares?’, but the incendiary 40-minute set that follows ably demonstrates just why Scream were generating such a strong word-of-mouth buzz on the continent: Grohl’s frenetic drum solo on ‘Feel Like That’ alone justifies the price of admission.

Before leaving Amsterdam, Grohl decided to commemorate his first visit to Europe by getting John Bonham’s three-circle logo from
Led Zeppelin IV
tattooed on his right shoulder: he’d attempted to ink the symbol into his own skin at the age of 16, but was disappointed with the end result, later admitting, ‘It looks like someone put a cigarette out on my fucking arm.’ Ironically, though, it would be the discovery of another hard-hitting drummer, Melvins’ Dale Crover, which would leave the biggest mark on Grohl in Amsterdam. And although he could not possibly have realised it at the time, this discovery would ultimately prove to be one of the most significant events of Dave Grohl’s life.

‘We were killing time between gigs, staying at a friend’s house, smoking weed and doing nothing,’ he recalled in 2004. ‘I was literally playing through this guy’s record collection, every single last one. When I got to Melvins’
Gluey Porch Treatments
, I thought, Here’s another hardcore record. But when I put it on it really fucking blew my mind. This was the moment I fell in love with the dirge aesthetic. The songs were so slow you couldn’t imagine how the band kept time. It was ten to fifteen seconds between each hit. I had never heard anything so heavy before, and the fact these were teenagers from Aberdeen, Washington, playing music heavier than Black Sabbath or any metal record I had heard was unbelievable.’

Hailed by the venerable Trouser Press Guide as ‘inimitable steamrolling overlords of the slow-flowing magma’, Melvins deal in oppressive downer anthems resembling the sound of the earth choking slowly on its own vomit. Fronted by Buzz ‘King Buzzo’ Osbourne, a maverick malcontent reared on a high-carb diet of Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Flipper, Kiss and Motörhead, the band were cult legends in the subterranean Pacific Northwest rock scene, and a huge influence upon their hometown Nirvana. To Dave Grohl, their viscous punk/metal gloop offered a whole new lexicon of aural abuse.

‘I always thought I knew the definition of heavy,’ Grohl admitted in 2001, ‘but hearing
Gluey Porch Treatments
completely turned my musical perception on its side.’

Melvins were not the only band redefining the boundaries of underground rock in America in the late eighties. As the American hardcore dream turned sour, and the scene’s early idealism gave way to bitterness, cynicism and in-fighting, a new breed of nihilistic, provocative noisemakers emerged: the finest of these were Steve Albini’s Big Black, Texan audio terrorists Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, Washington DC’s Pussy Galore, Wisconsin’s Killdozer, Minneapolis’ Cows and New York art-rockers Sonic Youth. Influenced by post-punk and No Wave acts such as The Birthday Party, Suicide, Killing Joke, Swans and John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, these disparate, dissolute artists were united in a quest to tear apart hardcore orthodoxy and challenge the punk mindset with excessive volume, confrontational ideas and extreme behaviour. A common overarching
raison d’être
for these bands was to prod, poke, irritate and inflame sensibilities to the point where even the most enlightened punk-cognisant audiences would wish to inflict physical harm upon them. In this mission they proved remarkably successful.

That this emerging scene was informed by, but not in thrall to, the hardcore movement is perhaps best illustrated by the earliest recordings made by Pussy Galore, the unsettling, hate-filled noise collective led by future Blues Explosion frontman Jon Spencer. Though the sleeve of Pussy Galore’s début seven inch, the
Feel Good About Your Body
EP, bore the dedication ‘Thanks to Ian and Jeff ’ (Dischord owners MacKaye and Nelson having helped guide the band in setting up their own label, Shove Records) the vinyl within mocked the hardcore scene’s righteousness: ‘HC Rebellion’ featured bassist Julia Cafritz reading out letters printed in the September 1985 issue of
maximumrocknroll
as if they contained the answers to all of life’s greatest mysteries. This determination to offend the punk community in their adopted hometown was even more evident on the band’s second EP,
Groovy Hate Fuck
, released in June 1986. Amid atonal slabs of noise every bit as abrasive and unpleasant as their titles – ‘Cunt Tease’, ‘Teen Pussy Power’, ‘Kill Yourself ’, ‘Asshole’ –
Groovy Hate Fuck
featured a brutally offensive song called ‘You Look Like a Jew’, which likened the DC punk uniform of shaved heads and thrift store clothing to concentration-camp ‘chic’ and celebrated ‘
smoke rising outta Dischord House
’. It’s hard to imagine how Pussy Galore could have tried harder to burn bridges.

Both Pussy Galore EPs were recorded at Barrett Jones’s Laundry Room studio. Jones knew that these sessions were going to be entirely unlike any he had previously helmed from the moment that Spencer and Cafritz produced a rusty chainsaw, hammers, a steel oil drum and several panes of glass as ‘instruments’. The producer’s abiding memories of the sessions are Spencer encouraging him to make the recordings as distorted and fucked-up as possible – ‘He’d say, “That sounds too good – make it sound worse”’ – and his roommates recoiling in horror as the leather-clad degenerates occupying their suburban home spent day after day assembling punishing walls of noise from screeching guitar feedback, brutish percussion and screamed lyrical obscenities. When Jones played the Pussy Galore tapes for Dave Grohl and Reuben Radding, his friends assumed the recordings were intended as a joke. Jon Spencer would doubtless have been delighted.