Tuesdays have always been hip-hop nights for Athens—at least where Montu Miller is concerned.
Miller is the COO leading the charge for local promotions company AthFactor Entertainment. Alongside DJ Chief Rocka, he hosts the First Tuesday hip-hop series at The World Famous. First Tuesday was built on a foundation Miller started circa 2005, when he launched Tasty Tuesdays at Tasty World. Over the years, the event has bounced around downtown venues such as Caledonia Lounge and Live Wire, until settling into its current digs at The World Famous. In September, organizers will celebrate the monthly gathering’s third anniversary there.
The aim for First Tuesday has always been to facilitate Athens’ hip-hop scene with an event that fosters creativity by strengthening the community through networking and friendly competition.
“For years, we’ve invited out artists from the Eastside, the Westside, the Stonehenge community—bringing everybody together, so we have a more cohesive scene,” Miller says. “There really is just one community with a few little satellites and branches, but it’s all moving together as one at this point.” Read the full story at Flagpole.
BLOOD VISIONS: Sadistic Ritual’s debut album is an ode to death. Photo by David Parham.
In the summer of 2012, Atlanta was a breeding ground for a raging heavy metal scene. For years, malevolent black metal masters Hellgoat, and death metal slashers Lectures on the Apocalypse, Withered, Death of Kings, and Spewtilator had kept the fires of Atlanta metal burning brightly in the underground. But that year, according to the Mayan calendar, the end of the world was at hand. A new breed of young metal bands and promoters rose to supremacy like thieves in the night and raised the bar high for whiplash fury, blast beats, and searing riffs. The apocalypse never happened, but the psychic tension it created was a boon for headbangers.
“It was a time when there were a lot of touring bands coming through town, and we had this one-two-three punch of Mangled, Sadistic Ritual, and Disfigurement opening pretty much every show, and everyone else got blown off of the stage,” says Charlie Southern, Sadistic Ritual’s guitar player, singer, and founding member. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. Basically, anybody who came through town back then didn’t stand a chance. And they definitely couldn’t hang as hard.”
Seven years later, the world is still here, reckoning with the very real threats of climate change, human overconsumption, poor governance, and species decimation paving the way for the sixth wave of mass extinction in the planet’s history. From that unholy trinity of Atlanta metal peers who, for a time, challenged any and all wayward metal bands, Sadistic Ritual is the only group still standing. Southern is the sole original member who’s stuck with the group since Sadistic Ritual’s first demo recording was released in 2010. “I’ve gone through a hellacious amount of band members since that time,” he says. “It’s purely by my will alone that this group still exists.” Read the full story at Creative Loafing, Atlanta.
To the best of his recollection, it was sometime in the early 1980s when Tav Falco last tried to play a show in Athens. His band Panther Burns was a young, Memphis, TN-based rockabilly outfit, born in a cotton loft on the Mississippi River in 1979. In the beginning, Falco boasted little musical skill or experience, aside from chainsawing a guitar into pieces during an act of performance art. Yet he paired up with guitarist Alex Chilton of Big Star to create an “art-damaged” balance of their respective abilities.
Over the ensuing four decades, the Arkansas-born auteur’s career has flourished. On songs such as “Brazil” from 1981’s Behind the Magnolia Curtain LP, or his cover of “Strange Fruit” on 2018’s Cabaret of Daggers, Falco has mastered a singularly primitive motif. Blues rhythms carry his less-than-pitch-perfect singing, creating an off-center momentum in which songs feel as though they could fall apart at any moment. But he always keeps them together, creating a marvelous tension—at least when the group is allowed to play.
That fateful trip to Athens began when Falco and Chilton, along with original drummer Ross Johnson and bass player Rene Coman, piled into a ’64 Thunderbird and set out for a three-night run of shows in Nashville, Athens and Atlanta. The group hadn’t made it an hour outside of Memphis when Johnson “got scared” and turned the car around. When the rest of the band made it to Nashville, they recruited a “drunken hillbilly” named Alvin to play drums. Read the full story at Flagpole.
Faith, spirituality and finding room for intellectual growth while parsing out a non-secular push-and-pull have long served as rich fodder for many an introspective songwriter. From country music’s enduring man in black, Johnny Cash, to indie rock stalwart David Bazan, the struggle has always been real—fertile ground for harvesting lyrical poetry that hangs in a balance of tension and resolve.
For Athens songwriter and producer Andrew Blooms, born Andrew Huang, this internal struggle remains steeped in quiet imagery and personal metaphors, ever present but never spelled out completely in songs such as “Humility,” “My Time Will Come” and the title track from Blooms’ debut full-length LP, Never a Waste, whose release he will celebrate with a show at the Georgia Theatre Dec. 3. Still, sweetness and innocence guide the billowing atmosphere and non-linear narratives that lie at the core of Blooms’ songs. Read the full story at Flagpole.
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: Vimur takes black metal into the void with ‘Triumphant Master of Fates.’ Photo by David Parham.
The cover art for Vimur’s second album, Triumphant Master of Fates features a painting by Portland, Oregon-based artist Adam Burke (of Nightjar Illustration), depicting a mountainous landscape divided by a river of blood. Standing atop a mountain, a lone traveler gazes into a massive black hole that has formed in the sky, radiating beams of light back at the viewer. It’s an arresting image that, like the cover of a 1950s pulp sci-fi novel, captures a climactic moment plucked from an epic journey.
For Vimur, Burke’s painting illustrates a moment of reckoning on a quest to find deep knowledge, a reverence for the expanding cosmos, and a vision of arcane knowledge, imperceptible when viewed through the lens of humankind’s earthbound senses. It’s also an enticing entry point that sets the tone for the Atlanta black metal outfit’s dive into a much older, colder, and infinitely larger universe than the Norse mythology hinted at with 2014’s Traversing the Ethereal Current and 2016’s Exegesis EP.
“The themes on the new album are all about seeking truth regarding the micro, the macro, the inner, the outer, darkness, and light; they’re about totality and all of its many dimensions,” offers the group’s singer, guitar player, and founding member, Vaedis Eosphorus. “In the past, I feel like I was just knocking on the door of concepts rather than fully opening the door and letting them come into me — come through me. I was exploring rather than exuding,” he says. Read the full story at CL ATL.
Daniel Ash has a story he likes to tell about how the inspiration behind his current group Poptone came like a thief in the night. Ash, the former Bauhaus and Love and Rockets singer and guitarist, had fallen asleep at his desk with a pair of headphones on. He’d been clicking around Youtube, and recalls with hazy detail one of the last things he heard before drifting off to sleep: Brian Eno’s 1975 album, Another Green World.
“Eno is one of my favorites of all time,’ Ash says over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. The album’s flowing atmosphere and minimal pop rhythms are more than enough to send anyone’s subconscious mind drifting through dreamland on a cloud of pastel impressionism.
But sometime around 4 a.m., the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll Lemmy Kilmister of Moțrhead emerged to commandeer the streaming algorithm of Youtube on continuous play.
The buzzsaw guitars of Moțorhead’s “Ace of Spades” came ripping through the headphones at maximum volume. When Ash heard the song and Lemmy’s rasp growling out from beyond the grave, “You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me/The pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say,’ it was as though Ash was given a new lease on life. “I knew what I had to do,’ he says.And it had to happen immediately.
“Until that moment, I had given up on the idea of ever playing live again I wanted to make film and TV music,’ he says. “I had lost my confidence, and thought that playing live would never happen for me again.”
Charged by this late night shakeup, Ash let the idea simmer. “I slept on it for a few days,’ he says. “I just wanted to make sure it really was a good idea.” Sure enough, the powerful late-night jolt had awakened in Ash a desire to break his long hiatus from performing live.
His longtime cohort and drummer Kevin Haskins was ready as well. Back in the ’80s, Ash and Haskins had played only a handful of shows with Tones On Tail, the short-lived band they shared with bass player Glenn Campling.
Revisiting Tones On Tail’s songs and giving them the attention they deserved became priority one. But Ash and Haskins had other songs on their minds as well. There was Bauhaus’ austere “Slice Of Life,’ from 1983’s Burning From the Inside a song that Ash identifies as the birth of Love and Rockets. There was also Love and Rockets’ early cover of the Temptations’ 1970 hit “Ball of Confusion,’ which consummated the group’s vitality, along with its shift from Bauhaus’ visceral goth and post-punk charge into the realms of shimmering psychedelic pop.
Love and Rockets also scored a legitimate Top 10 hit with the seductive 1989 single “So Alive.” Poptone was born as a career retrospective, but Ash wanted the group to be a nostalgia trip with a life of its own. It was a new band rather than a reunion with Campling, or Bauhaus and Love and Rockets bass player and Haskins brother David J. The latter has carried on with an extensive a solo career, and has recently been supporting his latest album Vagabond Songs
Ash’s first question: “Who’s going to play bass?” They decided on Haskins’ daughter Diva Domp̩. Domp̩ has carved a niche for herself in Los Angeles’ music scene, releasing solo albums via Critical Heights, and performing in bands such as Pocahaunted, Blackblack, and most recently as Yialmelic Frequencies, as well as hosting a monthly guided-meditation show for DubLab.com.
While much of Diva’s musical aesthetic is steeped in layers of mystical, electronic, and largely instrumental drones, adapting to the role of bass player for Poptone came naturally. After all, she shares the Haskins DNA with her father and David J, and has been exposed to the songs her entire life. The influence even manifests itself in subtle ways, such as her 2015 single “Satori,” which gives a nod to Bauhaus’ 1981 single “Kick In the Eye.”
“I have always been inspired by my dad’s music,’ Domp̩ says. “It was challenging at first, but I wanted to honor this musical legacy, stay close to the original songs, and do my part to hold the space energetically, and make this group happen.” In April, Poptone premiered with a two-night stand at Swing House Rehearsal Studios in Los Angeles. Since then, the trio has been touring across the country in short two-week bursts of shows that keep the group’s energy levels high amid a flurry of blazing lights and the haunted pop ambiance of songs such as Love and Rockets’ “Mirror People’ and Tones On Tail’s “Movement of Fear,’ “Lions,’ and “Go!” Through it all, “Slice Of Life’ is the one song that Poptone has chosen to represent Bauhaus, and it’s still one of Haskins’ favorite songs to play. “I kind of feel proud when we come to that song,’ Haskins says. “I don’t know any other way to explain it, but I start feeling a little emotional when we play it.”
Haskins says the Tones On Tail songs are at the heart of Poptone’s drive. And now, because of technology, they more closely resemble how they sound on the records; each one maintains the haunting presence of its original version, packed with a renewed energy. From Tones On Tail’s ghostly cover of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel’ to the distorted rush of Love and Rockets “No Big Deal,’ inhabiting these songs in a modern context has been enriching for both Ash and Haskins. But it’s the audience’s responses that have affirmed their instinct to return to the stage.
With confidence rekindled, what happens next remains to be seen. Writing new material has been discussed, but nothing has been determined.For Ash, the power of Poptone lies in the freedom of living in the moment. “I get tunnel vision when I’m involved with a project, and I’ll follow it to the end,” he says. “I put everything into one thing, and when it’s done, I move on. So I’m not really thinking about what happens next. It’s like something John Lennon said: ‘One thing I can tell you is you got to be free,’ and I’m a huge believer in that. I don’t know how long this will last, but it’s an absolute pleasure.”
This story was originally published by CL ATL.
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WE THE PEOPLE: Bob Glassley on stage at the Earl with the reignited Cheifs, February 2017. Photo by Brandon English
In November of 1979, Bob Glassley and a few friends piled into his car for a road trip down the West Coast. It was a retired police cruiser from the Dorris California Police Department, an all-white Plymouth with a souped-up engine. At the time, Glassley sang for a young punk band from Portland called the Rubbers. They were on a mission that day, to make some alliances in the Los Angeles music scene, and to line up some shows for a touring caravan of Portland bands. “We set out for L.A., and the motor blew somewhere outside of Stockton,” Glassley says. “When we got back on the road we found out it was the day they were taping the Hollywood Christmas parade. All of the freeway exits were closed, so we just kept driving around the city, looking for an off-ramp.”
Eventually they made it into the city and crashed at the Holly-West in Hollywood. The space was a former MGM studio and office building on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western, housing everything from a porno studio and a church led by a gay preacher to rehearsal spaces where musicians lived, practiced, and spent most of their time hanging out.
One day, Glassley was listening to a group making noise in a nearby room when a young man with bright blue hair — George Walker — poked his head around the doorway and asked if anyone played bass. “I said I did, although that was a serious stretch,” Glassley says. “I owned a cheap bass back in Portland, so I felt qualified.”
Walker was a gay black man in the late ’70s L.A. punk scene at a time when there were few out gay or black punk musicians.
The two became friends, and after sticking around and playing music for a few days, Glassley was invited to join the group and play bass alongside Walker on guitar with singer Jerry Koskie and drummer Kenneth “Rabit” Bragger. Soon they would come to be known as the Cheifs.
Glassley returned to Portland to play the final shows the Rubbers had booked and was L.A.-bound soon after. The Rubbers’ Bruce Loose went on to sing and play bass with San Francisco’s legendary punk outfit, Flipper. Back in L.A., Glassley experienced a thrilling new beginning, building friendships with the now-legendary denizens of the local punk scene, including Darby Crash and Lorna Doom of the Germs, Keith Morris of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, and Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L.
OLD SCHOOL: The original Cheifs lineup featuring guitarist George Walker (left), singer Jerry Koskie, drummer Rabit, and bass player Bob Glassley on stage, May 2, 1981, at Devonshire Downs in Northridge, CA. Photo courtesy Vincent Ramirez Photography.
He was thrust into a life bound by the live-fast, die-young ethos of late ’70s and early ’80s punk scene. But nearly 40 years after breaking up, the specter of the Cheifs has returned, demanding the songs be heard again.
In their prime, the Cheifs were a lauded act that bridged the gaps between West Coast punk and hardcore. They were a fixture of the Los Angeles scene but after scant few releases, the group has languished in obscurity.
From 1979 to 1982, the Cheifs were a staple of the L.A. punk scene. Even though he hadn’t played in a band since they broke up, a chance meeting with a fan one night at the Masquerade proved the catalyst for Glassley to head up a new Atlanta-based incarnation of the Cheifs.
Now 57 years old, Glassley lives near Woodstock, Georgia, where he works as a director of technology for Triton Digital. After watching social and political turmoil surge in recent years, the old familiar sting of unease that drove him to punk in the first place is stirring once again. With a new lineup together, Glassley is paying respect to the Cheifs’ Hollywood legend while laying the groundwork for a new chapter in his musical career.
Despite the decades that have passed, the songs he played and wrote leading into the Reagan era remain as urgent and relevant as the day they were penned. “It’s unfortunate,” Glassley says. “Some of those songs are even more relevant now, in the face of everything the country — the world — is going through.”
By December of ’79, the group had settled on the name the Cheifs. A friend of the band, Roger Rogerson, who played bass for the Circle Jerks, often playfully called out bossy people for being “the big chief,” or saying they were “chiefin’ out.” The band rolled with it.
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP: Rabit (left) wearing one of the shirts that gave Cheifs their name, George Walker, and Bob Glassley circa 1979. Photo by DL Jacobs.
Around the same time, Glassley had an uncle die from Leukemia. He’d worked as a butcher and always wore plain white T-shirts. When he died, Glassley inherited those shirts. One afternoon he bought some red and black spray paint, went to his room at Holly-West, and made band shirts. When he showed them to the rest of the band, the reaction was a resounding, “Ah dude, you spelled it wrong! On every single one of them!”
But amid the punk era’s landscape adorned with logos like the Misfits’ skull and Black Flag’s bars, “Cheifs” presented a golden opportunity for branding. “I know how to spell,” Glassley laughs. “The i and the e came after c! … And ask anyone named Keith how they spell their name!”
The Cheifs played regularly at venues such as Hong Kong Café and The Fleetwood, sharing stages with a who’s-who of Southern California punk legends: Black Flag, X, the Minutemen, Fear, Redd Kross, Descendents, Germs, T.S.O.L., Social Distortion, and more.
“The Gears, too, if I can add a band to that list,” says former Black Flag and Circle Jerks vocalist Keith Morris, who currently sings with the band Off! “The Gears and Cheifs were our party buddies. How many times did we all just crash on that floor where they practiced in the Holly-West building? Cheifs were easily one of the greatest bands around,” Morris adds. “When Holly-West Crisis finally came out it was such a great record.”
The Cheifs’ sound occupied a strange but growing middle ground in the post-punk era, when the term hardcore didn’t yet denote a musical genre. Before Cheifs came along, groups like X, the Screamers and the Weirdos had stylized a Hollywood punk sound by infusing short, sharp blasts of rock ’n’ roll with outsider art leanings. The more aggressive sound of bands like Black Flag and the Adolescents had yet to fully reveal itself.
In the Cheifs, Walker’s twisted hooks and bar chords taking shape in songs such as “Blues” and “(At The Beach At) Tower 18” were driven by a contentious snarl and fast, reflexive melodies. Rabit’s jittery drumming in “Knocked Out” was cut from a loud-fast and deceptively simple style on par with New York’s no wave scene. Koskie’s sneering voice was a conduit for disturbed visions of disenfranchisement, and Glassley gave direction to Cheifs’ buzzsaw onslaught.
KNOCKED OUT: The photo featured on the sleeve of Cheifs’ “Blues” b/w “(At The Beach At) Tower 18,” and “Knocked Out” 7-inch. Photo by DL Jacobs.
One song that Glassley penned the music and lyrics for, “Eddie’s Revenge,” tells the true story of a journalist who was gunned down by police. “The LAPD at the time were neo-Nazis, I won’t mince words,” he says. “I read a story in the newspaper about this amateur writer who was shot while standing inside a phone booth, holding a typewriter. A cop felt threatened. There was even a witness,” he adds. “The song is from his perspective, wanting payback because justice wasn’t served.”
Glassley sings: “Armed with a typewriter you look very threatening/They know you’re a nut case so they’ll say anything/And don’t try to resist your life’s worth nothing.”
Other songs such as “Blues” confront the hardships of the world with thick skin. In “(At The Beach At) Tower 18,” Walker offers insight into the perils of a gay lifestyle in the Reagan era when he sings, “You think your sex action’s better than theirs/They’re doing a job you could never do/At the beach!”
“Knocked Out” celebrates the youthful abandon and persistence of throwing punk shows whether the cops liked it out not.
The Germs’ vexed singer Darby Crash was a friend of the band, who hung out at Holly-West. Glassley recalls an afternoon in 1980 when Cheifs’ manager Debbie Johnson announced she’d lined up studio time at Present Time Records in North Hollywood. Crash wanted to be there. “I recall him setting in the control room and making suggestions about sound and vocal tricks, like the doubling that Jerry used on most of the recordings,” Glassley says.
The songs they recorded — “Blues,” “(At The Beach At) Tower 18” and “Knocked Out” — were pressed on a 7-inch via Playgems. It was Cheifs’ only release while the group was active. Crash is credited as “Creative Consultant” on the sleeve. “That wall of sound on the guitar was likely his doing,” Glassley says. “He was there from beginning to end, providing input, effectively working as a producer. He was a good friend of the band,” Glassley adds. “His fans demanded him to be someone he wasn’t 24/7. They expected him to be on stage all the time. I think he really enjoyed chilling with everyone at Holly-West.”
Holly-West is hallowed ground in the annals of punk history. Redd Kross’ bass player, Steven McDonald, remembers the intimidating feel of the place when he was a kid. “I was only 12 years old back in the those days,” says McDonald. Redd Kross also plays the Mess-Around on Sat., April 29.
“Redd Kross recorded a project there, and we hung out with Cheifs and the Gears and everyone else,” McDonald A. Everyone was friendly and accepting, but the place had this Bukowski vibe. It was a scary, old, decrepit building, but the community was really cool.”
Cheifs’ song “The Lonlies” appeared on the New Alliance/SST compilation titled Chunks that year. Later, “Riot Squad” (an adopted Rubbers song), “No Justice” and “Scrapped” appeared on an American Standard compilation titled Who Cares.
A half-dozen more songs were recorded, but personal differences caused Koskie and Rabit to leave the band. Glassley and Walker reconvened with vocalist Paul Brashier and drummer Gilbert Navarro, aka Jack Rivera, but they were together less than a year. By 1982, Cheifs were done. Glassley sold his bass and bought a computer, and has worked with technology ever since. He has made attempts to get the original lineup together for occasional one-off shows, even a surprise birthday party that Descendents’ drummer Bill Stevenson was throwing for singer Milo Aukerman. But neither Koskie nor Rabit have expressed any interest in playing with Cheifs again. The two have reunited to play shows with their pre-Cheifs band, the Simpletones. Neither Koskie nor Rabit were available for comment. Walker is presumed dead, although no death certificate has been produced yet. He was last seen hanging around Newport Beach in the early ’90s, but when Glassley went searching, word on the street was he had died.
Cheifs have since languished in obscurity, but the music refuses to disappear. A 1997 Flipside compilation titled Holly-West Crisis emerged as the definitive Cheifs document rounding up everything the group recorded. In 2000, Hate Records repackaged the songs for a European release, and Dr. Strange reissued Holly-West Crisis in 2004. The same year Spontaneous Combustion reissued Cheifs’ “Blues” b/w “(At The Beach At) Tower 18” and “Knocked Out” 7-inch.
In 1989, “Blues” appeared on the seminal Killed By Death Vol. 2 LP. What’s more, the Descendents often whip out a cover of “Knocked Out” during live shows.
Glassley moved to Georgia for work in 2000. His time with Cheifs had become a distant memory ever since. But that changed in July 2016 when Flag, a hardcore supergroup featuring singer Keith Morris, bass player Chuck Dukowski, drummer Bill Stevenson and vocalist/guitarist Dez Cadena — all Black Flag alumni — along with Descendents guitarist Stephen Egerton played the Masquerade. Glassley went backstage to say hello. While talking with Stevenson, Glassley felt a hand on his shoulder. A stranger asked: “Excuse me, did you say you were in the misspelled Cheifs?”
It was Scott Hedeen who owns Burnt Hickory Brewery in Kennesaw. The brewery is known for naming beers after punk bands, such as the Didjits Blood Orange IPA and Die Kreuzen Imperial Pumpkin Porter. Atlanta metalheads Order of the Owl even have a Chocolate Orange Stout in their name.
“Some of the seed money I used to start the brewery came from selling my punk record collection,” Hedeen says. “I sold a Cheifs single for $300, so I joked that he was a partial investor in the brewery.”
Hedeen and Glassley became friends. Hedeen hadn’t played guitar in a long time, but one night he sent Glassley a text. “I asked if he’d ever considered playing Cheifs’ music again,” Hedeen says. “I was in his ear. At the time he didn’t know the depths of where he had been, and the interest that’s out there for that era of music. It’s like you’ve seen a famous photograph from history countless times, and suddenly you realize that you see someone in the background. He was there.”
SCREAMING AGAIN: The Cheifs current vocalist Brad Castlen. Photo by Mark Kocher.
Glassley knew former Crisis Under Control singer and punk historian Brad Castlen would be interested. “When this started out last July, it was more for fun, but as people responded to the potential of the Cheifs’ music being played live again, I realized this was something more,” Glassley says. “Brad and Scott helped me see that. As I started posting lyrics on Facebook, it became clear there was still relevancy and many of the songs could have been written today and people related. That said, I was dead set against doing anything that would not live up to the original spirit and energy.”
They convened with a temporary drummer to play a Halloween party at Burnt Hickory. Hedeen made posters boasting a performance by “Holly-West Resurrection playing the songs of Cheifs.” Glassley was hit hard by seeing the name again. “He said, ‘You can’t do that!’” Hedeen says. “He didn’t want to dis the other members of the band, but I think we’ve convinced him now that they don’t care. Our intention is to make sure that Bob and the band get their just deserts.”
When Hedeen takes the stage, he sticks a laminated photo of Walker on his guitar, adorned with the word “Respect” — Shepard Fairey style. “George was a trailblazer on so many levels,” Hedeen says. “Getting into his head and figuring out how these songs work is a major accomplishment for me. I had to decode this man’s web of how he did it. I had to reinvent myself.”
Drummer James Joyce (ex Noot d’ Noot and Car Vs. Driver) knew Hedeen through the brewery and tried out for the gig. He’d also been friends with Castlen for nearly 25 years. After one practice, they looked at each other and said, “OK, we’re the Cheifs!” A Christmas party at Burnt Hickory was followed by a show at the Earl opening for Detroit proto-punk rockers Death. Then came a run of L.A.-area shows in March.
At first, wondering if they’d be accepted by the group’s hometown was nerve-wracking. “There were people who came out to the shows and said, ‘Wait, where’s Jerry?’” Glassley says. “I was worried about it at first, but the bottom line is, I tried to get him involved, but I found somebody else.”
BACKS AGAINST THE WALL: The new incarnation of the Cheifs features Bob Glassley (left), Scott Hedeen, Brad Castlen, and James Joyce. Photo by Mark Kocher.
Still, anxiety was high, especially for Castlen and Joyce, both of whom are of a younger generation than Glassley and Hedeen. Before their Saturday night show at Cafe NELA, they were sitting at the bar when Joyce noticed Keith Morris walk in. “Brad started losing it,” Joyce says. “He kept saying, ‘This is your fault! If it wasn’t for you being able to play these drum beats and tying everything together, I wouldn’t have to perform in front of Keith Morris, and have him judge me as the singer for Cheifs.’”
Morris, in his 2016 memoir, My Damage: The Story of A Punk Rock Survivor, writes that Cheifs were one of the few bands he thought of as the Circle Jerks’ competition. Now, he was there to see what the new group was all about.
“In the early days we were always friends — all of it was friendly until it was time to play shows,” Morris says. “That’s when some darkness crept up: ‘We’ve been playing longer, and we’ve played more shows than you. We’re from Hollywood, you’re from where you’re at, we draw more people, can you keep up with us?’ All of that kind of drama. But I always drank a few extra beers, got a little more fuzzy-headed and tried to keep the camaraderie at a social and friendly level.”
The Circle Jerks played their first show with Cheifs at a club in Redondo Beach called Kahuna’s Bearded Clam. “We pissed off everybody that night,” Morris says. “One of the songs we played was ‘Wasted’ and the guys from Black Flag wanted to firebomb our vehicles and run us out of town.”
The anxiety that Castlen felt, however, was over respect for the music. “There’s a lot of attitude in punk about where you come from,” Castlen says. “Crisis Under Control used to get that attitude from Atlanta punks because we didn’t live in Fulton County. ‘You can’t play punk or hardcore if you’re from Gwinnett County!’ So that’s just magnified. Here we are a bunch of guys from Georgia. How are we going to play these L.A. punk songs? I was worried people would have a problem with that and that we’re playing with just one original member.”
Afterward, Castlen thought, “If I don’t ask, it’s going bother me the rest of my life.” He approached Morris and asked, “What did you think?” Morris looked over his glasses and gave a thumbs up. “We did it justice?” Castlen asked. In the conversation Morris replied, “Oh, I woulda told you if you didn’t!”
Neither Koskie nor Rabit showed up for the L.A. shows. But other old friends were there: Don Bolles of the Germs was at the Cafe NELA show, and second Cheifs drummer Jack Rivera sat in for a performance of “Blues.” The night before, at a show in Anaheim, Brian Brannon of skate punk legends JFA and members of the Vandals were there offering praise.
Castlen recalls overhearing a conversation at a record store out there when their merch guy asked the record store clerk — an older guy — if he was going to the show. His response: “No. I don’t want to ruin it. I saw them back in the day.”
That kind of skepticism is understandable; plenty of people feel similarly about any bands who are resurrected with a new lineup. “But we’re busting our asses, making it sound as close to the original recordings as possible,” Castlen says. “I heard the criticism, but the legend of Cheifs means a lot to us, and we all felt like we had to prove ourselves.”
Kendall Behnke, who sang alongside Koskie and Rabit in the Simpletones, came out for the Friday night show. He showed up again the following night at Cafe NELA. According Castlen, Behnke called Koskie to get him out for the show. He didn’t come but asked how they were. Behnke’s reply: “I’m not going to lie to you … they killed it.”
Castlen says the band discussed what would happen if Koskie showed up. “I’d have no problem handing the mic over to him, if he wanted to sing,” he says. “But Bob’s in Woodstock, Georgia, so it would be hard to have a Cheifs reunion with two guys in California. I think he’s a great singer; I love the songs, and I have nothing bad to say about him. But I’m glad he doesn’t want to be involved, because here I am.”
FLASH TO BANG: Bob Glassley (from left) leads the Cheifs at Dipiazzas in Long Beach, March 2017. Photo by Albert Licano.
While practicing for the L.A. run, the new lineup learned a few songs that the original Cheifs played but never recorded, including “Heart in Chains” and “1988,” both originally performed by the Rubbers. Both songs will appear on a 7-inch with “Mechanical Man,” a partially reconstructed older song, along with a newer number, titled “Alienated.”
“I love playing and didn’t realize how much I missed it,” Glassley says. “Even my wife, Vicki, has commented on how playing again affected me, in a good way. Add to that the relevancy of this music, these words at this time, and it makes sense. Given the situation our country and the world faces, I think there is a lot to say, and this is a familiar vehicle to make oneself heard. I fully expect us to be writing new songs in the months ahead, and we’ll see where that goes, but for me it feels like 1980 all over again — only worse.”
They’re recording at the Living Room in June. After recording those two songs, they’ll record the rest of the songs they’ve learned, if for no other reason than to have a document of this lineup’s time together. Whether what they record gets released remains to be seen. “If you’re a legendary band that can release a new album, people will buy it, like it was an original Descendents album,” Joyce says. “We’re not there, so we’re not trying to push out an entire album’s worth of material that somebody has to digest. It’ll be more like a song or two here and there.”
This approach takes the pressure off while fleshing out the strongest material a song or two at a time. But before Cheifs start writing new songs, their priority lies in taking the show on the road. Until now, the group has never played outside of L.A. and San Diego. But with the new lineup clicking in Atlanta, the group has its sights set on the East Coast.
After 35 years, excitement surrounding the group only underscores the strength of the songs. Giving the music a chance to be heard by a new generation, in an entirely new era, the new incarnation of Cheifs is already uncovering new meanings for these songs. For nearly 40 years, the road has been long and full of pitfalls. Like it was the day that Glassley and his friends piled into his converted cop car heading for Los Angeles, the future is unwritten. “I still have difficulty wrapping my head around it all. I have a split personality in this regard,” Glassley says. “On one hand, I’m coming to grips with the legacy side of it for the first time, and the other hand, I want to hit the road and play some fucking punk rock!”
Between December 1979 and May 1980, director Penelope Spheeris shot The Decline of Western Civilization, documenting the exploits of Black Flag, the Germs, X, the Circle Jerks, and the denizens of L.A.’s early punk scene. The film spawned two sequels, 1988’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, and 1998’s The Decline of Western Civilization III—each offering a look into the lives of musicians in various states of desperation. Spheeris’ Decline trilogy changed the world’s perceptions of punk and metal forever. Although she achieved mainstream success directing later films such as Wayne’s World, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Little Rascals, it is her work with Decline that defines her career.
Spheeris took a few minutes to talk about the pain of reliving the past, reconnecting with her daughter, and the noble cause of helping other people.
The mark of a truly timeless work of art is that you can revisit it 35 years later and find new meaning and relevance, maybe in wholly different ways than what you originally intended. How has the meaning of The Decline of Western Civilization changed for you?
Having done the films so long ago—I really shied away from watching them for so many years. I asked my daughter if she would come to work for me. She said she would but only if I released the Decline movies first. I thought, ‘Oh God, what a nightmare.’ But what has been very gratifying is to experience other people watching them 20 and 30 years later. That, for me, is astounding. When I look at them, I don’t think that I did something profound, but that is what other people say. I was just making movies about subjects I was interested in. They kind of turned out, all these decades later, to be interesting to other people. It’s been a real weird trip, I’ll tell you that.
I get the impression that you feel some anxiety over these films. Why do you say it was a nightmare to revisit them?
Anxiety … That’s an understatement. I have a lot of anxiety over these films. If you think about it, as a filmmaker or as any kind of creative person, you want to have the product of your creativity seen by other people, and hopefully appreciated. For me, so many of the movies I’ve done—certainly Decline I and III, not so much with II—were not really ever seen on a legitimate platform. Decline I was bootlegged to death. People passed it around like underground contraband for decades because it wasn’t in distribution. It was extremely painful for me to go back and deal with these movies because, on a subconscious level, they brought up a lot of pain. That pain was that people couldn’t see my work; people who seemingly were interested in it.
That happened with a film I did with Sharon and Ozzy, We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll. Nobody got to see it. It happened with Dudes, which I did with Jon Cryer and Flea. It happened with The Boys Next Door that I did with Charlie Sheen. I had a long history of making movies that didn’t get seen. On the other hand, when I would do a comedy, it would definitely be seen. Especially Wayne’s World.
The thing to be said is that it’s hard to hide truly brilliant work. Even without distribution, I found a bootleg of Decline I in Omaha, Neb., in the early ’90s. That film put a face on punk rock for me and many others. It also made my relationship with the music more complicated—I had to put my life’s situation into context. I learned more about myself from Decline than I did from Wayne’s World—even though Wayne’s World is a fun movie.
Yeah, and the anxiety that comes along with putting out a box set is that, like you, I personally identify a lot more with the Decline movies than I do with the studio comedies. So I wanted it to be done right. When I am dead and gone, I want the right piece of physical items there to represent what they are. Once you do it, it’s done. It’s not like I can redo that. So that’s why there was so much trepidation involved with doing it. Now it’s like okay, you did it. Now you can die.
That has to be sort of rewarding.
What’s rewarding is that it’s no longer bearing down on me like a big dark cloud. For that, I really have to thank my daughter. Without her, I would have just died without doing it. I swear to God. It was just painful. Just watching the movies brought up so many memories, and she kept coming up with more pieces for the extras, which included a lot of interviews with me and with people I know from way back in the day. It was just hard to look at it. It’s like having your life flash before you. I just like to keep moving forward. I don’t like to look back. That’s why they never got put out before.
When you look back over the films—all three of them—are there subjects that stand out for you, or that you walked away from with some insight?
For Decline I, when I look at that movie I think, jeez, it’s pretty amazing that so many elements of today’s young people’s lives originated way back then. Now everybody has their tattoos and tight jeans and they have their haircuts, and it all started back then. So many social trends and philosophical ways of thinking started back then. So, for those reasons, I’m glad I was able to document all of that.
I don’t think there’s a profound lesson to be learned in Decline II except for trying to make it for the wrong reasons is stupid. That’s a pretty easy one.
For me, Decline III is the most important film of my entire career. It made me realize that I don’t want to be working in Hollywood anymore. There are more important things in life, and I should go help homeless kids, which is what I have done. If you go see it, bring a Kleenex, because it’s a heartbreaker. It was so hard to get it released because it is extremely sad. It reveals some really terrible domestic situations that happen with young kids that make them leave their homes and go live in the streets. Those are my buddies. Those are my family — the Decline III kids. Those are the people I’m close to.
There’s a kid named Eugene in that first film. I don’t have the same kind of anger in me, but I found him to be such a compelling character. How did you find him, and do you ever cross paths with him? Do you know how his life turned out?
He was friends with the HB kids—Huntington Beach, surfer punks. I saw Eugene up on the Slash office’s roof and I asked if he would be interviewed for the film. He kept saying no, but finally I talked him into it. He was 14 years old at that time. And he is very compelling. That’s why he starts the movie out. Today he lives in Berlin. I just sent him his 50 year-old birthday present. He’s a very good friend. He’s a folk singer. He’s known now as Euge From the Coast. He’s very happy in Berlin, and we email each other about once a week.
How have these films played a role in your relationship with your daughter Anna?
We sure do know each other a lot better after spending four years in the same room together!
Were the two of you estranged before this project?
In a way. When she was Four years old, her father died from a heroin overdose. So I raised her as a single parent. I think it wasn’t until it hit me in the face that addiction is extremely genetic. Five years ago, she had a drug problem that could have ended very tragically. We were fortunate enough that it didn’t. She wrecked a car with a kid in it. But she did a really good job with rehab and I said, “You have to come to work for me.” I wanted to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t relapse. She said she would do it, but we had to do Decline. You never know if something is bad or good until some time has passed. It was the most horrible thing in my life to deal with my daughter having that problem. But from out of that mess came this thing that people appreciate quite a bit—this box set for the DVDs.
She had been in touch with so many of the people who’ve been in the movies. She’s quite in touch with the people from Decline I and II. Whereas I’m the Decline III woman here. Those are my friends.
Honestly, Anna deserves 90% of the credit for the movies being seen again. I did the movies way back, but they would have never been seen in this form by so many people if she hadn’t virtually put a gun to my head and said you have got to do this. It was daunting and horrible. I would avoid it at all costs. She was down there with three editors at one time, sorting things out. She would have to drag me down to the editing room because I didn’t want to deal with it. For that, I am extremely grateful that she made me do it. She was so smart about so many things. She uncovered a lot and was like an archaeologist. A lot of the old tapes and old formats wouldn’t even play. She had to go and borrow chunks of equipment from friends—a DAT player—because nothing else would play them. She just kept going and going and going.
I could definitely see the evolution with the punks between Decline I and III. In Decline III, each individual was so much more tolerant, and kind, and not mean to the people that might be different from them. So there was some sort of evolution going on there. Flea is in Decline III and describes the original L.A. punk scene as being like an experimental art scene. Whereas in Decline III, even though everybody looks the same, physically, it’s not an art scene anymore. It’s pure and dire survival, and there ain’t no room for art in that world.
I think about those scenes from the first film and how all of the Black Flag guys lived in that church. That seemed dire…
It was fun dire. They were embracing their homelessness. They just had a different take on it. It wasn’t hurtful for them. It was fun. For the kids in Decline III, it’s painful.
What I learned from Decline III in getting to know those kids and their background: We don’t have any more noble assignment in life than helping our children and doing the right thing for them. These kids come from alcoholic and drug-addicted families that fought all the time and threw them out in the street.
It doesn’t make me feel good to sit down and have lunch with some major studio executive. Who gives a shit? It’s so vapid. What makes me feel good is being a foster parent. Staying in touch with my Decline III buddies, and going to these various cities and selling posters and donating the money to homeless shelters for kids. That, to me, is what makes life good. The rest of that jerk off stuff is so unnecessary. It’s funny to me that people get into such a frenzy to come to Hollywood and say “I have to make it in Hollywood!” Are you kidding me? No, you don’t! I guess I can say that because I kinda sorta made it, but not really. It doesn’t have any meaning next to helping people.
— Chad Radford
A version of this interview previously appeared in Creative Loafing.
Author John McMillian wants to make one thing clear: He is a historian, not a rock critic. It is precisely for this reason that he doesn’t pick a side in the age-old debate that stands as the title for his second book: Beatles vs. Stones (Simon & Schuster). After all, what is there that’s left to be said about such a tired debate in 2013? As it turns out, there’s still plenty to be said. But for McMillian, who works as an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, it’s not about riffing on which band had a better drummer, and whose records were chock-full of filler. “I have always been obsessed with both groups; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are two of my favorite bands,” McMillian says. “But I didn’t want to allow myself to get drawn into a debate over which one is better, and have readers approach the book as if it was a treatise on behalf of one sensibility or the other.”
Rather, Beatles vs. Stones takes on a wholly different angle on how the greatest rock ‘n’ roll rivalry of all time was fostered by the fans, the music industry, the media, and by the bands themselves. By bringing to light mounds of source materials that most scholars and critics have never mined, namely the alternative newspapers and fan magazines of the late ’60s and early ’70s, McMillian taps into the stories of both bands as they unfold. By tracing their evolutions, side-by-side, as they appeared in the underground publications of the times, McMillian offers fresh insight into the dynamics of both groups as they grew and changed, with a real-time and palpable sense of excitement.
As such, Beatles vs. Stones came about as a happy accident of sorts—an unforeseen by-product from the time he’d spent researching materials that went into publishing his first book, 2011’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America.
While spending weeks combing through microfilm reels of archived underground newspapers, studying the revolutionary spirit and headlines of the late 1960s, McMillian also uncovered an antic, and very public discourse that was brewing over the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
“The whole constellation of underground newspapers in the late ’60s were the most important primary source base for the book,” McMillian says. “A lot of them had never before been analyzed or brought to light in any other books on the Beatles or the Stones. I also spent about $3,000 on the fan magazines that both groups put out—The Beatles Monthly Book and The Rolling Stones Monthly Book. They’re not collected in any American libraries, so the next best option was to buy them off eBay.”
Naturally, both groups held strong connections to the youth rebellion of the times. The problem, though, was that there just wasn’t room to discuss it in Smoking Typewriters. Still, he couldn’t shake it. “The material was just too fascinating to let it go, so I set it aside for another time,” McMillian says.
Two years later, Beatles vs. Stones‘ opening chapter unearths Sean O’Mahony, the man who once published both bands’ monthly fan club magazines. O’Mahony explains: “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes, and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs … “
As the story unfolds we watch the Beatles and the Stones trade places, and this divisive assessment fueled the rich public sentiment that was kicked up circa 1963-1970 and still resonates 50 years later.
McMillian balances his own findings with already published accounts in dozens of other already published books and interviews, and even conducts a few of his own interviews. In the process, he uncovers a trove of often overlooked details, or finds new significance in them when telling the bands’ stories jointly.
Still, he refuses to step into the debate. “I like to think that a thoughtful reader can tell which band I like more than the other,” McMillian says. “But to spell it out would be a disservice to the book.”
A version of this review was originally published in Creative Loafing, October 13, 2013.
In September of 1986, just six months after guitarist, singer, and songwriter William DuVall had moved away from his home in Atlanta, effectively disbanding the city’s seminal hardcore group Neon Christ, he turned up in sunny Santa Cruz, Calif. It was there amid the late ’80s flashpoint, when thriving surfing, skateboarding, and punk scenes had all converged, that DuVall joined the ranks of local hardcore outfit Bl’ast! Alongside his new bandmates, Mike Neider (guitar), Clifford Dinsmore (vocals), Dave Cooper (bass), and Bill Torgerson (drums), DuVall’s second guitar brought strength and focus to the group’s already snarling melodies.
With DuVall in town, and now functioning as a five-piece, Bl’ast! spent countless chaotic, and oftentimes bloody, nights on stages hammering out songs that would go down in history as the group’s crowning achievement — culminating with the 1987 LP, It’s in My Blood (SST Records).
The album arrived as a powerful step up from the terse but clumsy songwriting that Bl’ast! had delivered three years earlier with its debut, The Power of Expression. Nailing the high-speed tempos of songs such as “Only Time Will Tell,” “Something Beyond,” and the album’s title track became an audacious testament to the band’s physical and mental dexterity.
“They were pissed-off Reagan-era California kids who all knew each other since junior high,” DuVall says. “Then, much like what happened to Neon Christ on the opposite coast, one gets a little older and the music gets more sophisticated—it develops a different kind of swag.”
Although DuVall parted ways with Bl’ast! in March of 1987, less than a year after he’d joined the group, he co-wrote and recorded the early versions of the songs that would later be re-cut without his parts for It’s in My Blood. For more than 25 years, the only real document of the time he’d spent playing with Bl’ast! has been a few grainy live shots flashing across the screen in the “Surf and Destroy” video. But a recently unearthed cache of the original It’s in My Blood recordings, featuring DuVall’s guitar parts, reveals the significant role he played in the group’s evolution.
Released in August of 2013 via Southern Lord, and re-titled simply as Blood!, the re-released album compiles a more hard-hitting version of the group’s songwriting of the era in all of its teeth-gnashing glory. From the thundering bass and charged air of anguish that rushes in with the album’s opener, “Only Time Will Tell,” Blood takes aim at anything and anyone that gets in its way.
In the American music press, Bl’ast! was often saddled with Black Flag comparisons, and rightfully so. The visceral intensity and real-time emotional confrontation playing out in such songs as “Ssshhh,” “Winding Down,” and “Your Eyes” bear an unmistakable mark of Black Flag’s influence. But Bl’ast! adhered to a fiery and baroque dynamic. Stylistically, Blood! personifies the late ’80s era when punk and metal found common ground with a dark balance of catharsis and experimentation. The bombast of each of the album’s 11 songs builds both attitude and tension in the subtle interplay between Neider and DuVall’s guitar attacks, particularly throughout the songs “Sequel” and “Poison.” The music for the former was written by DuVall, as were most of the lyrics for the latter number.
Ultimately, this is the lineup that wrote and arranged these songs. As such, there’s a breadth and intensity here that the original release just doesn’t capture. Of course, mixing the album on the Sound City board at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 gives the songs a thickness that the originals never projected. The members of the band worked alongside Grohl, Southern Lord’s Greg Anderson, and John “Lou” Lousteau — the latter of whom did some engineering work with Duvall for Alice in Chains’ 2009 album, Black Gives Way to Blue — to flesh out the sound. The lo-fi grit of the original release is lost, but it’s a small price to pay when setting such a powerful record straight. “The important thing for me is that with Blood!, the world finally gets to hear a more accurate version of what we were doing,” DuVall says.
Credibility aside, Blood! is a richly detailed redux that’s far more solid than anything else from Bl’ast!’s catalogue, making it an excellent artifact from a chapter in DuVall’s career that until now has remained lost in time.
A version of this story originally appeared in CL Atlanta.
Rad/ATL 