By John Ruch
Photo: The Spin review of No Control I clipped in 1990. (John Ruch)
Twenty-five years ago this month, Bad Religion’s No Control, one of the greatest and most influential punk rock albums, was released into the musical underground. I was reminded of this by some charming online pieces written by enthusiastic kids who first heard this album on YouTube, or its songs in video games. I had to laugh, because for me, the 25th anniversary comes in 2016. Back in 1989, I was the enthusiastic kid, and living in pre-digital small towns, it took me 18 months to even find a copy of No Control, let alone dream that one day I could share it with billions of people at a button-click.
Punk rock changed my life—and saved my sanity—more than anything else, and the work required to find it was part of the reason why. A quarter-century ago, punk (or metal, or rap) was like a demonized, persecuted mystery cult, with quasi-secret texts and hymns passed around among the initiated. You didn’t just listen to punk; you belonged to it. That mystique, combined with the genre’s substantial, searing social critiques, imbued it with life-altering significance.
As a Grand Canyon of a generation gap yawned between me and kids who grew up online, I wondered if punk could retain its meaning as anything more than a Green Day-esque sound and style. When you can instantly Google up the complete history of even the most obscure subcultures within seconds, and see them rendered as just another item on the web’s Chinese restaurant menu of an info glut, is it possible for them to have significant, personal impact? Can you have anarchy in your IP? Is Sheena just a YouTuber now?
Having taken their elbows in my face in mosh pits and chatted with them at zine fests, I can say that obviously these post-Internet kids still have a subculture that is absolutely punk as fuck. I think you can fairly privilege some heard-it-for-the-first-time experiences over others—an all-ages concert is better than a cruise ship commercial, for example. And there’s no question the ease of online music-sharing has devalued music financially and eroded its mystery. But overall, the DIY nature of the Internet dovetailed perfectly with that of punk, one of the very few pop forms that values creation over consumption among its own audience.
Thus, many of today’s punks know the genre’s history more thoroughly and holistically than those of us who lived it could have at the time. And they respect that history, using it as inspiration to stir fresh trouble around the globe. And so it came to pass that Putin met Pussy Riot.
But let’s get back to me and how I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get yelled at for my Dead Kennedys T-shirts. Picture, if you will, 1980s America. We’re all hostages in an insane nuclear-weapon standoff. The United States has elected a prematurely senile B-movie actor as president, backed by Blade Runner-style corporations and vicious witch-hunter churches. Landline phones. Snail mail. Maybe six TV channels, tops (unless you live in a place urban enough to offer, and have parents rich enough to afford, cable). The wildest shit on the radio is classic rock. Unless you live in a major city—and I was in small-town Appalachia—there’s no alternative media at all, no clubs and shops sustaining an underground scene.
Then one day in high school, a guy hands you a cassette tape and says, “You gotta hear this.” It’s a bootleg recording, and scrawled in pen it is identified as “Metallica—Ride the Lightning.”
“Metallica” is a meaningless word you’ve never heard before; the concept of music that isn’t on the radio is utterly unthinkable. You have no idea what the hell something with such a crazy name could be, and when the first song starts up, you think it sounds like boring-ass classical. Then your life changes irrevocably.
Fight Fire with Fire is all tank-division roar and nihilistic shouts. Not only had I never heard such music before, I couldn’t imagine how human beings created it. Yet it instantly gripped my heart, connecting with emotions of rage and terror I didn’t even know I was feeling all the time. It was music that I could not understand, yet gave me revelatory self-understanding. Years later, a Catholic priest/friar who is also a metalhead told me, “Yeah, you basically had a conversion experience.”
A conversion to a metal church with no building and few congregants. The Hit Parader and Rip magazines accessible via the town newsstand informed me I was living in a secret golden age of thrash metal. I also learned that actual religious types were the only mainstreamers also in the know and attempting to censor the entire genre, with the likes of Al and Tipper Gore interrogating musicians before a U.S. Senate committee.
Actually hearing any of this music was a different story. Aside from the few secret bootlegs floating around, the only option was to buy a record. The nearest record store any of us knew about was in a mall 20 miles away—a lousy proposition for kids in a blue-collar town with few cars and small allowances. At least when we could make it, somebody cool was buying for the place. There might be only a single copy available of a Slayer or Megadeth record, but there they were. I started building knowledge of the metal scene, while also just rolling the dice on records with nutty titles.
I got my first dose of punk through that totally contingent process. Something called In God We Trust, Inc. by a band called the Dead Kennedys? Here, have my allowance. The physical package was crucial. It looked crazier than any metal record. Its cover consisted of a golden crucifix mounted on a cross made of dollar bills. One side of the tape was blank, with a label that said that was on purpose so you could help bootleg more albums and put record companies out of business. The music was far wilder than speed metal, and the lyrics had words I had to drag out the encyclopedia to look up. (That’s right, a physical, 20-pound paper encyclopedia that did not include a 3,000-word entry on Captain Kirk written by my neighbor.)
I got really, really excited. Music that’s angry and smart? My life changed again. But finding out about this punk stuff was even tougher. No magazines at the newsstand. No punk sages among fellow high-school cellmates.
For me, getting into punk was more akin to an archaeological expedition than fandom. Kids today may not even believe how laboriously, painstakingly, I had to paste together clues, hints and gossip. I clipped out Rolling Stone articles that had stray mentions of these entities called the Ramones or Black Flag. I read something about how this band the Sex Pistols made international news a decade earlier, only to disappear from the mainstream chronicles. I wrote handwritten snail mail to English bands to find out if they were still together, and got cool handwritten Royal Mail back. At one point, the local drug store inexplicably began carrying Thrasher magazine; I first heard of many bands by seeing their T-shirts in its ads. I ordered catalogs from weird record labels and eventually came across Maximum Rocknroll. When I finally got my hands on something cool, I’d bootleg it onto a tape for friends, and vice versa.
I just searched YouTube for “punk rock” and got over a million hits, including song samplers, full albums and documentary movies. (The first hit showed the logo of the Exploited, a band I first heard about via graffiti on an alley wall in the town that had the shopping mall.) Back in the day, it was about grabbing up the scraps you could find, savoring what you had, and wondering like hell about what you didn’t.
From this sloppy homemade brew, I still read the punk-rock tea leaves clearly enough—join in, do it yourself, get off your ass, make your own art and music. Thus I was already fronting a band of my own before I ever heard some classic ones.
Bad Religion was one of them. In a fateful moment in ’88 or ’89, I stood in a shopping mall record store with enough dough in my pocket to buy one album on cassette. In one hand I held Bad Religion’s Suffer, never having heard of the band before and simply charmed by its awesome cover art. In the other I held one of SST’s Blasting Concept compilations. Unaware that, despite its lame title, Suffer had already won Left Coast respect as a stone-cold classic, I bought the comp on the bang-for-the-buck theory.
The next time I saw Bad Religion was in early 1990. It was a Spin magazine review of No Control published at least four months after the record’s release. Even in that alternative-ish mag, the reviewer couldn’t presume the reader had any knowledge of the then-cult band. So the review included a mini-history that praised the band as a SoCal standard-setter. As touchstones, he cited some bands I did know: the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü. This was the kind of punk evidence I seized with Sherlockian zeal. I clipped that review and kept it—to this very day.
I saved that review because I knew, as usual, it would take me a while to find the actual album. (Though now, through still more Internet magic, I see that issue of Spin offered me a chance to listen to some cuts for 75 cents a minute on a 1-900 number—an ad I either overlooked or laughed my ass off at.) By this time, I was attending college in a Midwestern town that had a decent record store, but finding a specific punk album was still luck of the draw. I suppose I could have special-ordered it via the store, but the owner—like most of his ilk back in the day—was a total dick and best avoided. Besides, I was used to being punk-patient and letting the music find its way to me.
So I went on my merry punk way. I mentioned that my hometown had zero alternative media. So on my summer break that year, I created one—a news and commentary zine that I dropped off at phone booths (yep, they really existed) and ATMs and wherever else I thought was funny. A local guitarist picked up a copy and wrote to me. We struck up a friendship, and we determined to form a band and cut an album.
A year later, on my summer break of 1991, we were in a garage writing songs when the guy shared some of his record collection with me. We had similar tastes, but he knew some scenes I didn’t (and vice versa) and turned me on to stuff like Plaid Retina and Godflesh. This time, it was, “Hey, have you heard these guys?” And there it was: No Control.
It was love at first hear, and I’ve kept that Spin review for a quarter-century because it symbolizes my Zen anti-search for that Holy Grail. The organic process of discovery made the album that much greater and more delicious.
But before I get too nostalgic, even then I knew that it came into my life about a year too late. I was already a little too old, too jelled, too set on my path. Bad Religion could have been another band that changed my life; instead, it just added to it. (A lot. And it’s great. But.)
So while I’m glad that the contingency of life made me have to start a zine and a band to hear Bad Religion, I’m also glad that today’s (Western world) punks can hear them virtually at whim. And because life is indeed contingent, I know that supposed generation gaps are messy blurs. There are kids living on the wrong side of the digital divide, or in families and towns that still make it tough to explore alternative art. There’s elderly me joking on Twitter with Bad Religion members and introducing their music to new friends via lyric vids. There’s an Internet that is both a Big Brother on a scale beyond my craziest nightmares back when it literally was 1984, and a DIY staging ground with power at a magnitude I could only have dreamed of.
I think back to why I so desired those fabled punk albums. Like everything punk, it wasn’t just about music. What I craved, searched for and worked hard on in 1989 was a radical future where people could self-educate, voice dissent with a power on par with their masters, and have the community I never did.
“What we need now is a change of ideas,” sang Bad Religion on No Control’s first track. That song was going to turn 25 no matter what. The remarkable thing is that, in a fast quarter-century, so many ideas really did change.
When today’s punks celebrate No Control’s 50th, laughing about antiques like Twitter and iTunes, may they also look back on an era they didn’t merely outlive, but altered forever.
Photo: The Spin review of No Control I clipped in 1990. (John Ruch)
Twenty-five years ago this month, Bad Religion’s No Control, one of the greatest and most influential punk rock albums, was released into the musical underground. I was reminded of this by some charming online pieces written by enthusiastic kids who first heard this album on YouTube, or its songs in video games. I had to laugh, because for me, the 25th anniversary comes in 2016. Back in 1989, I was the enthusiastic kid, and living in pre-digital small towns, it took me 18 months to even find a copy of No Control, let alone dream that one day I could share it with billions of people at a button-click.
Punk rock changed my life—and saved my sanity—more than anything else, and the work required to find it was part of the reason why. A quarter-century ago, punk (or metal, or rap) was like a demonized, persecuted mystery cult, with quasi-secret texts and hymns passed around among the initiated. You didn’t just listen to punk; you belonged to it. That mystique, combined with the genre’s substantial, searing social critiques, imbued it with life-altering significance.
As a Grand Canyon of a generation gap yawned between me and kids who grew up online, I wondered if punk could retain its meaning as anything more than a Green Day-esque sound and style. When you can instantly Google up the complete history of even the most obscure subcultures within seconds, and see them rendered as just another item on the web’s Chinese restaurant menu of an info glut, is it possible for them to have significant, personal impact? Can you have anarchy in your IP? Is Sheena just a YouTuber now?
Having taken their elbows in my face in mosh pits and chatted with them at zine fests, I can say that obviously these post-Internet kids still have a subculture that is absolutely punk as fuck. I think you can fairly privilege some heard-it-for-the-first-time experiences over others—an all-ages concert is better than a cruise ship commercial, for example. And there’s no question the ease of online music-sharing has devalued music financially and eroded its mystery. But overall, the DIY nature of the Internet dovetailed perfectly with that of punk, one of the very few pop forms that values creation over consumption among its own audience.
Thus, many of today’s punks know the genre’s history more thoroughly and holistically than those of us who lived it could have at the time. And they respect that history, using it as inspiration to stir fresh trouble around the globe. And so it came to pass that Putin met Pussy Riot.
But let’s get back to me and how I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get yelled at for my Dead Kennedys T-shirts. Picture, if you will, 1980s America. We’re all hostages in an insane nuclear-weapon standoff. The United States has elected a prematurely senile B-movie actor as president, backed by Blade Runner-style corporations and vicious witch-hunter churches. Landline phones. Snail mail. Maybe six TV channels, tops (unless you live in a place urban enough to offer, and have parents rich enough to afford, cable). The wildest shit on the radio is classic rock. Unless you live in a major city—and I was in small-town Appalachia—there’s no alternative media at all, no clubs and shops sustaining an underground scene.
Then one day in high school, a guy hands you a cassette tape and says, “You gotta hear this.” It’s a bootleg recording, and scrawled in pen it is identified as “Metallica—Ride the Lightning.”
“Metallica” is a meaningless word you’ve never heard before; the concept of music that isn’t on the radio is utterly unthinkable. You have no idea what the hell something with such a crazy name could be, and when the first song starts up, you think it sounds like boring-ass classical. Then your life changes irrevocably.
Fight Fire with Fire is all tank-division roar and nihilistic shouts. Not only had I never heard such music before, I couldn’t imagine how human beings created it. Yet it instantly gripped my heart, connecting with emotions of rage and terror I didn’t even know I was feeling all the time. It was music that I could not understand, yet gave me revelatory self-understanding. Years later, a Catholic priest/friar who is also a metalhead told me, “Yeah, you basically had a conversion experience.”
A conversion to a metal church with no building and few congregants. The Hit Parader and Rip magazines accessible via the town newsstand informed me I was living in a secret golden age of thrash metal. I also learned that actual religious types were the only mainstreamers also in the know and attempting to censor the entire genre, with the likes of Al and Tipper Gore interrogating musicians before a U.S. Senate committee.
Actually hearing any of this music was a different story. Aside from the few secret bootlegs floating around, the only option was to buy a record. The nearest record store any of us knew about was in a mall 20 miles away—a lousy proposition for kids in a blue-collar town with few cars and small allowances. At least when we could make it, somebody cool was buying for the place. There might be only a single copy available of a Slayer or Megadeth record, but there they were. I started building knowledge of the metal scene, while also just rolling the dice on records with nutty titles.
I got my first dose of punk through that totally contingent process. Something called In God We Trust, Inc. by a band called the Dead Kennedys? Here, have my allowance. The physical package was crucial. It looked crazier than any metal record. Its cover consisted of a golden crucifix mounted on a cross made of dollar bills. One side of the tape was blank, with a label that said that was on purpose so you could help bootleg more albums and put record companies out of business. The music was far wilder than speed metal, and the lyrics had words I had to drag out the encyclopedia to look up. (That’s right, a physical, 20-pound paper encyclopedia that did not include a 3,000-word entry on Captain Kirk written by my neighbor.)
I got really, really excited. Music that’s angry and smart? My life changed again. But finding out about this punk stuff was even tougher. No magazines at the newsstand. No punk sages among fellow high-school cellmates.
For me, getting into punk was more akin to an archaeological expedition than fandom. Kids today may not even believe how laboriously, painstakingly, I had to paste together clues, hints and gossip. I clipped out Rolling Stone articles that had stray mentions of these entities called the Ramones or Black Flag. I read something about how this band the Sex Pistols made international news a decade earlier, only to disappear from the mainstream chronicles. I wrote handwritten snail mail to English bands to find out if they were still together, and got cool handwritten Royal Mail back. At one point, the local drug store inexplicably began carrying Thrasher magazine; I first heard of many bands by seeing their T-shirts in its ads. I ordered catalogs from weird record labels and eventually came across Maximum Rocknroll. When I finally got my hands on something cool, I’d bootleg it onto a tape for friends, and vice versa.
I just searched YouTube for “punk rock” and got over a million hits, including song samplers, full albums and documentary movies. (The first hit showed the logo of the Exploited, a band I first heard about via graffiti on an alley wall in the town that had the shopping mall.) Back in the day, it was about grabbing up the scraps you could find, savoring what you had, and wondering like hell about what you didn’t.
From this sloppy homemade brew, I still read the punk-rock tea leaves clearly enough—join in, do it yourself, get off your ass, make your own art and music. Thus I was already fronting a band of my own before I ever heard some classic ones.
Bad Religion was one of them. In a fateful moment in ’88 or ’89, I stood in a shopping mall record store with enough dough in my pocket to buy one album on cassette. In one hand I held Bad Religion’s Suffer, never having heard of the band before and simply charmed by its awesome cover art. In the other I held one of SST’s Blasting Concept compilations. Unaware that, despite its lame title, Suffer had already won Left Coast respect as a stone-cold classic, I bought the comp on the bang-for-the-buck theory.
The next time I saw Bad Religion was in early 1990. It was a Spin magazine review of No Control published at least four months after the record’s release. Even in that alternative-ish mag, the reviewer couldn’t presume the reader had any knowledge of the then-cult band. So the review included a mini-history that praised the band as a SoCal standard-setter. As touchstones, he cited some bands I did know: the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü. This was the kind of punk evidence I seized with Sherlockian zeal. I clipped that review and kept it—to this very day.
I saved that review because I knew, as usual, it would take me a while to find the actual album. (Though now, through still more Internet magic, I see that issue of Spin offered me a chance to listen to some cuts for 75 cents a minute on a 1-900 number—an ad I either overlooked or laughed my ass off at.) By this time, I was attending college in a Midwestern town that had a decent record store, but finding a specific punk album was still luck of the draw. I suppose I could have special-ordered it via the store, but the owner—like most of his ilk back in the day—was a total dick and best avoided. Besides, I was used to being punk-patient and letting the music find its way to me.
So I went on my merry punk way. I mentioned that my hometown had zero alternative media. So on my summer break that year, I created one—a news and commentary zine that I dropped off at phone booths (yep, they really existed) and ATMs and wherever else I thought was funny. A local guitarist picked up a copy and wrote to me. We struck up a friendship, and we determined to form a band and cut an album.
A year later, on my summer break of 1991, we were in a garage writing songs when the guy shared some of his record collection with me. We had similar tastes, but he knew some scenes I didn’t (and vice versa) and turned me on to stuff like Plaid Retina and Godflesh. This time, it was, “Hey, have you heard these guys?” And there it was: No Control.
It was love at first hear, and I’ve kept that Spin review for a quarter-century because it symbolizes my Zen anti-search for that Holy Grail. The organic process of discovery made the album that much greater and more delicious.
But before I get too nostalgic, even then I knew that it came into my life about a year too late. I was already a little too old, too jelled, too set on my path. Bad Religion could have been another band that changed my life; instead, it just added to it. (A lot. And it’s great. But.)
So while I’m glad that the contingency of life made me have to start a zine and a band to hear Bad Religion, I’m also glad that today’s (Western world) punks can hear them virtually at whim. And because life is indeed contingent, I know that supposed generation gaps are messy blurs. There are kids living on the wrong side of the digital divide, or in families and towns that still make it tough to explore alternative art. There’s elderly me joking on Twitter with Bad Religion members and introducing their music to new friends via lyric vids. There’s an Internet that is both a Big Brother on a scale beyond my craziest nightmares back when it literally was 1984, and a DIY staging ground with power at a magnitude I could only have dreamed of.
I think back to why I so desired those fabled punk albums. Like everything punk, it wasn’t just about music. What I craved, searched for and worked hard on in 1989 was a radical future where people could self-educate, voice dissent with a power on par with their masters, and have the community I never did.
“What we need now is a change of ideas,” sang Bad Religion on No Control’s first track. That song was going to turn 25 no matter what. The remarkable thing is that, in a fast quarter-century, so many ideas really did change.
When today’s punks celebrate No Control’s 50th, laughing about antiques like Twitter and iTunes, may they also look back on an era they didn’t merely outlive, but altered forever.