Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Rock Underground, 1981-1991 Gives Indie and Punk Their Due

Thirty-something. It's a weird age to be. We're the real "lost" generation. The Boomers have been ballyhooed to death (see John Strausbaugh's recent Rock Til You Drop for the whole story). The X'ers have received their share of notoriety too, although mostly of the negative variety. We can thank the Boomers for that as well?leave it to them to instill their own self-doubts and insecurities upon their offspring. Then again, what can one really say about a whole generation of kids named Jason running around in baggy pants and backwards baseball caps with funny little half-beards?

What about that weird generation that falls in between the Boomers and the Jason generation? Call them the younger brothers and sisters of the Boomers?the people who graduated high school between, say, 1973 and 1983, who came of age in the incredible dead zone of the mid- to late 70s, the era that National Lampoon so pithily described as "the worst of times, period." Punk's first generation, we remember the days when hippies still roamed the earth like mastodons and people printed fanzines and made records as opposed to creating Web pages and downloading sound files.

Until recently, this generation and its contributions to the culture-at-large have been criminally underdocumented. A perfect example is PBS' 1995 "history of rock" series, where they go from the Sex Pistols to U2 with nary a mention of the first five years of the 80s?which means they've written such important bands as Motörhead, Minor Threat and Black Flag out of history. The reason why is because most chroniclers of rock history have been Boomers whose own sentimental attachment to their 60s rock icons has overruled all other esthetic considerations. They're so out of it that they can't seem to comprehend and indeed refuse to acknowledge the fact that as early as '79, when Black Flag released "Nervous Breakdown" and the Misfits put out "Horror Business," the Stones already seemed hideously square and were as distant and alien to the new generation as Sinatra or Elvis.

Most of the bands profiled in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (Little, Brown, 522 pages, $25.95) came into being during this crucial period. In almost every case, their actions were not only directly influenced by the Ramones and Sex Pistols, but were some kind of reactive stance against the prevailing hippie culture. The evolution of these bands was different from that of proto-punk bands like the Stooges and even Television or the Modern Lovers, because they were the first generation whose musical evolution began after punk. The term "post-punk" was logical and fitting, but for all those two words have been bandied about during the past 20 years, it's amazing how little of any substance has been written about their practitioners. Even rap has gotten better treatment at the hands of the "rock press" than the original purveyors of punk, particularly those in the American scene.

The English scene has been fairly well documented for a couple of reasons: one, because the English are more academic about these things to begin with (cf. Jon Savage's exhaustive study of the Sex Pistols and beyond, England's Dreaming). The second reason is the provincial nature of England. It's a lot easier to trace punk's development there during the late 70s than it is to document the sprawling American punk-indie scene, which spread to every corner of the nation.

That's why Our Band Could Be Your Life?for all its obvious flaws?is such an important document. Besides Joe Carducci's groundbreaking Rock and the Pop Narcotic in 1990 and a few barrels full of fanzine scrawl published during the 80s, this is the first time anyone has tried to make sense of the post-punk American rock scene. Post-punk in this case meaning all the bands that anyone who grew up during that time and listened to rock?and I mean seriously listened to it?cut their teeth on. Instead of making this book an all-encompassing history of indie rock, Azerrad concentrates on 13 bands that, to him, symbolize the movement as it evolved: Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, the inevitable Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening. Through their stories we see (for perhaps the first time in a literary endeavor) the clear lineage between the primal bootstomp of early hardcore and the later, more fleshy sprout of the Northwest scene that Nirvana would take to the world in 1991 (forever doomed to be stricken with the somewhat ironic qualifier "the year punk broke"). Reading Azerrad's narrative, it all makes sense?no small task given the choppy format.

Despite the lack of documentation concerning this period, it's perhaps gratifying to consider that most of the musicians here have been at least partially vindicated, be it in the obvious way of a Sonic Youth or Butthole Surfers or Dinosaur Jr., all of whom took a dip into the major label grab-bag, or in the more subtle manner of a Fugazi, who've become well-respected elders of the "movement." Then there's Big Black, whose Steve Albini became a big-name producer and who were able to hear their own influence manifest itself prominently in the whole "industrial" movement etc. Until now, however, no one has really told the story of how these bands got to these statesman-like positions. Azerrad does a fine job doing just that, detailing each band and its ensuing scene?not just the events and happenings, but the whole mindset that made them possible. That's something that only someone Azerrad's age?I'm gonna guess mid-30's?could understand for the reasons detailed above. What he proves through his careful documentation is that punk survived principally because of its practitioners' almost insane levels of commitment, sacrifice and self-sufficiency.

As for the 13 groups Azerrad has selected as his talismans, it's a pretty good list overall. The ironic thing about the indie scene was that it was so regionally influenced and fragmented?even as early as '83 or '84?that the kind of unanimous consensus that happened in the 60s, when virtually everyone who listened to rock listened to the same groups, was no longer possible. To this day, I've never heard Big Black and I'm sure the inclusion of Mission of Burma will have more than a few well-tuned-in hipsters scratching their goatees. One could make the argument that at least a dozen other bands on the American indie scene, from the Meat Puppets to the Dead Kennedys to Half Japanese to the Misfits are equally deserving of inclusion.

Nevertheless, these bands and other luminaries inevitably crop up in the narrative because the scene, by its very nature, was so incestuous. That was the beauty of it?bands as musically diverse as the Buttholes, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Beat Happening could coexist within the same realm. Although not always harmoniously, as one of the more amusing anecdotes in the book testifies. Azerrad tells of the time big bad Hank Rollins was up front at a Beat Happening show heckling Calvin Johnson, only to be ignored by the sniggly matinee idol. Frustrated, Rollins reached out and grabbed Johnson's crotch, which elicited a curt rebuke from the indie maven: "Didn't your mother teach you any manners?" It's the perfect incident to sum up how much the cultural tide had turned during the decade since punk's inception. Punk, which had started out as a mostly nihilistic preoccupation, had now come to encompass ironic manifestations?in this case, the ginchy childlike stuff that would be so totally absorbed by Riot Grrl. Rollins, one of the original punk figureheads, was caught totally off his guard. Similarly, guys like Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye could never really come to terms with their peers' acquiescence to the major labels, remaining independent and somewhat embittered.

If there's any complaint about Azerrad, it's that he never quite comes off as a punk. Like Jon Savage in England's Dreaming, he maintains a detached and somewhat academic distance. Despite his romanticizing about the omnipresent punk-rock fixture of the touring van, one has a hard time picturing him actually crawling into the back of one to down a few beers with the members of the Buttholes or Mudhoney (especially after seeing the photo flap, where he looks like a bookworm Noel Ventresco type?but then again, that's "punk" too, isn't it? Isn't that kind of the whole point of this book?). A topic like this really deserves a more scum-wallowing tribute a la Please Kill Me, but for the time being, this is the first book besides Carducci's to treat Black Flag or Minor Threat with the same historical deference as the Beatles or Hendrix. It's an important step toward understanding the current cultural climate and it goes a long way toward realizing the formidable contributions of rock's true "lost" generation.