The grim reaper will come to call on me soon…I’m about to finish Choosing Death, a book on the history of death metal and grindcore written by Albert Mudrian. Actually I don’t know if I will read the last few chapters any time soon as it focuses on Pig Destroyer, Nasum and even Earth Crisis. As a matter of fact I don’t really care much for death metal or grindcore anyway, with the exception of the British pioneers and the Western Mass godfathers. So far the book for me has gone from being very interesting in the beginning (the rise of the Birmingham scene and Earache Records) to plain rambling from the second part of the book on giving too many facts about the bands, their members and their record deals…and eventually it all becomes a bit too predictable. There’s no real storyline throughout the book and so it ends up being rather stale and factual, though, as mentioned before the first part of the book is pretty interesting. What follows is an excerpt from the book when Albert Mudrian goes a bit deeper into two bands that were very influential to bands such as Napalm Death, Heresy and Extreme Noise Terror, and is possible the best part in the book for people with a love for hardcore and a not so big love for death metal.
[…] Though sometimes overlooked, Boston had a powerful scene of its own. To most, Boston hardcore is forever defined by SS (Society System) Decontrol and their controversial brand of punk, which, along with Minor Threat, helped characterize the straight edge movement. But the Boston area, quite simply, had the fastest bands, several of which actually hailed from small suburban towns in western Massachusetts.
Amherst was such a place. A two-hour drive west of Boston, the picturesque college town was also home to a young local named Joseph Mascis. In 1982, the 15-years-old Mascis -simply known as J to friends- wasn’t much different from the town’s other few proud punk rockers, often spending his free time roaming the racks of local record store Main Street Records in North Hampton.
“I met this kid in that store that looked kinda like Dee Dee Ramone,” Mascis recalls, “I talked to him a little bit and he seemed to be into some of the same hardcore stuff as me. The next week I saw a flyer up in the record store and I figured it had to be that kid because I didn’t know anybody else that was into stuff like Discharge and Minor Threat.”
That kid was Scott Helland, who, along with his friend Lou Barlow, sought a drummer to play “superfast beats” –as their flyer bluntly stated- for their fledgling hardcore band. The group was practicing for several months before the painfully shy Mascis answered the advertisement. After joining, Mascis insisted the band draft his friend Charlie Nakajima to sing. Days later, Mascis christened the group Deep Wound, and within a few short months they began playing sporadic gigs with local hardcore punk groups, such as Helland’s other outfit The Outpatients.
“We just wanted to play as fast as possible, and, I think, sometimes it was to the detriment of our songs,” says Mascis. “All we were concerned with, really, was playing faster and faster.”
For that crown Deep Wound would have some competition. In another small western Massachusetts suburb named Weymouth, local drummer Robert Williams and his 10th grade classmates, guitarist Kurt Habelt and bassist Henry McNamee, had been instigating a racket since 1981, shortly after their first exposure to Minor Threat and Discharge. On the weekends, the trio frequently made the half-hour journey east to Boston’s premier independent record store, Newbury Comics, to feed their appetites for scorching punk rock.
“It was such a special time to be discovering music,” recalls Williams. “I can remember coming home from Newbury Comics –which was just a closet, with cardboard boxes of comic books and 7-inches on wooden shelves- and my hands were shaking I was so excited to play these records. I remember the look of absolute snobbery and disgust on the face of the cashier –a young pre-‘Til Tuesday Aimee Mann- when I came up to the register with an original pressing of the Meatmen’s ‘Blood Sausage’ 7-inch, which had a used condom with pubic hair on the cover. I had a rating system –the faster my mom would run upstairs to get me to shut it off, the better it was. I couldn’t get through a side of Black Flag’s Damaged. Flipper couldn’t even get through a song.”
Further inspired by their trips into the city to see Black Flag and NYC punkers the Misfits, Williams devoted more time to his musical project, which he had recently dubbed Siege.
“The three of us were jamming together in Hank’s garage and then later in a church, making absolutely hellish dissonance that resounded through the neighbourhood,” Williams remembers. “Locals still come up to me, now grown, and talk about how they used to drink beers in the woods with their friends and listen.”
Soon the quartet recruited singer Kevin Mahoney, from yet another western Mass. Suburb, Braintree –a town rich in hardcore heritage and home of the original Gang Green and Jerry’s Kids. By 1983, Siege began playing shows in this rapidly developing western Mass. community.
“It was a healthy, awesome, real DIY scene out there in western Mass. –a clique of very excited groups,” Williams explains. “It was one of the places that you played when you made the rounds, another being Stamford, Connecticut. They were very positives scenes, but very few of them made the ride to Boston to play shows. They were younger, artsy types and they weren’t the most driven, savvy entertainers in the world. These were just punk kids and they happened to live in a remote place. More often, Boston would go out to western Mass. to play.”
That community had already accepted the speedy Deep Wound, but withstanding the sheer velocity, violent lyrics and developing metallic leanings of Siege would be an even greater test. After all, this was a band both faster and heavier than the crossover thrash punk of Cryptic Slaughter and Septic Death, which was then regarded as the pinnacle of aural intensity in the US.
“There was a time when we made a deliberate decision to set out to be the absolute fastest band,” says Williams, whose speed training included playing AC/DC’s Highway To Hell LP at 45 RPM and duplicating the drum beats while wearing headphones. “The track ‘Beating Around The Bush’ becomes galloping Brit punk when played on 45,” he notes. “I loved metal, too –Venom, Priest, Motörhead’s ‘Iron Fist’. In fact, we covered Venom’s ‘Warhead’ at our first show, which was at our high school’s battle of the bands –we got disqualified for obscenity, plus our bassist Hank smashed his bass. But it was about speed. We would listen to the fastest punk and hardcore bands we could find and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna deliberately write something that is faster than them, because we are going to be the fastest.’ We took it very seriously.”
Williams and the rest of Siege, however, didn’t hold Boston’s straight edge movement in similar regard.
“I was a heavy pot smoker,” says Williams, whose drug use was in direct contrast to the prevailing sentiment within the hardcore scene at the time. “And we were younger guys, newcomers, certainly not straight edge, and didn’t fit in with the original Boston crew, who were bullies. Their thing kind of grew into the jock-infested macho one-dimensional shit that half of hardcore is now –the baseball cap-wearing, smack a kid up shit. The other half being the Maximum Rock n’ Roll peace-punk, crust leftist, reverse conformism –but this was before all those terms and before things were so clichéd.”
By the time Siege was making its own way in early 1984, however, their kindred spirits in Deep Wound were simply going away.
“The hardcore scene was kinda dead to us,” says Mascis. “I was more into the Birthday Party and the noisier types of bands after that. Scott, the bass player, was really busy with his other band the Outpatients, too, so basically he went in the Outpatients full-time and the rest of us formed Dinosaur, but we were called Mogo then and we still had the same singer from Deep Wound, Charlie, but then after one gig we decided that Charlie was a no go and then we officially started Dinosaur [which later became Dinosaur Jr]. We had a totally different concept. We went from being a kinda really loud country band or something, because hardcore had just died out for us.”
Before Deep Wound officially disbanded, however, the group managed to record a self-titled 7-inch EP and a few tracks for the Bands That Could Be God compilation with local producer Lou Giordano at Boston’s Radio Beat Studios. Giordano recorded Boston’s top punk and hardcore acts, such as SS Decontrol, Negative FX, the FU’s, Jerry’s Kids and the Proletariat in the tiny reconstructed AM radio station in the heart of Kenmore Square.
“There was a small staff there.” Giordano explains. “There was the owner, Jimmy Dufour, and then I joined up in late ’82, and that was right about the time that the Boston scene was really exploding. Black Flag had come through town and basically just freaked everybody out, and it was never the same after that. And the Boston bands were kinda racing to catch up with the rest of the country, and all these bands sprung up overnight with a completely different sound than anywhere else –it was like they passed them all.”
Unsurprisingly, Siege elected to make their first recordings there as well, entering the studio with Giordano in February of 1984.
“The way our studio operated was that anything that comes in –there’s no value judgements made about the music,” Giordano recalls. “We just record it. Still, one of the things that I guess was cool about being a staff engineer is that I wouldn’t have sought out a band like that. I wasn’t philosophically into anything that they were doing, but they were all good musicians –you would have to be to stay together at the speeds they were playing at. So there was that aspect of it, and just the whole pushing the envelope thing. It sounds like it’s just gonna completely break apart going 700 miles through the sky and then all of a sudden everything just comes right together again.”
“And they were some of the most unassuming, laid-back people to ever work with,” he continues. “I mean, they had no attitude at all. They just came in and they were just really polite and very thankful, and then when they turned on the amps and made that noise, it was just unbelievable that it was coming from them.”
“He had seen a lot of that kind of thing, but we were serious about equipment, and that may have been one thing that set us apart,” Williams remembers. “But it was nothing new to him. He was really adept.”
Siege would return to the studio in October of that same year, recording three more tracks –“Walls”, “Cold War” and “Sad But True”- for a compilation assembled by artist and Maximum Rock n’ Roll scribe Pushead called Cleanse The Bacteria. That session would be this line-up’s last. A little over a year later, with internal tensions mounting, Siege imploded before what was to be their first ever New York City gig at the celebrated rock club CBGB’s. “The vocalist was bickering the guitarist,” Williams explains. “The van was loaded for our show. We never played the show. Kev never showed up, and I really can’t blame him. After that, we stopped playing.”
There were several false starts over the next few years, the last of which occurred in 1990, when Williams and guitarist Kurt Habelt were joined by local Boston vocalist Seth Putman.
“We were recording and writing, and I had written a bunch of revolutionary stuff, like violent lyrics, and the same guitarist changed some of my lyrics with weak rhyme, making them pacifist rather than revolutionary, and really changing their context,” says Williams. “He delivered that to Seth in the studio behind our backs. And he went so far as to erase one line of Seth’s singing and put in his own voice. I still have genocidal resentment about that. We never planned on compromising our extremity.” […]
Check out these links for some more stuff on the book, Deep Wound and Siege:
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