Anyone Else Into Hardcore/Punk 1979-1989?

[ElvisNixon]

Pretty much what the title says.

Favorite bands, players, venues, stories etc.

Where are you from? I’m from DC.

Biggest Hardcore guitar influences:

Dr Know-Bad Brains
Greg Hetson-Circle Jerks
Greg Ginn-Black Flag

Not hardcore, but Johnny Ramone was/is a very big influence too. I play hardcore with strictly barre chords and mostly downstrokes.

 

[Monoprice99]

Been listening to L7 recently, sound a lot like Joan Jett does punk & I like it.

Also Green Day, since he uses P90's for LP Juniors. I just play the Special P90 I have in Bridge position. But heck, there's video evidence that BJ Armstrong gives away 2017 GC LP Special I P90's.

 

[msalama]

Not a HC guy myself per se but yah, Bad Brains was a great band, as was the Dead Kennedys. Do they count as hardcore though? No idea, because as a 70's kid I've always been more of a Pistols, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Clash and Ramones lad myself...

 

[Killing Floor]

Big part of my upbringing was post punk, skate rock, 3 chord speed, etc. I’m from Atlanta so my homes were 688 and Metroplex. But I played up your way at 9:30 and Hammerjacks and a bunch of other scuzzy holes.
To me, hardcore was a little faster and a little more brutal than Black Flag. But what do I know. That was a fun time for music if you were on the fringe a little.

 

[ElvisNixon]

DK’s are considered hardcore IMO, but they were unique and East Bay Ray is one hell of a guitarist. Punk or not. I think he’s more influential on me now than when I played in HC bands.

The Bad Brains were a full-on spiritual experience live in their prime.

 

[ElvisNixon]

Big part of my upbringing was post punk, skate rock, 3 chord speed, etc. I’m from Atlanta so my homes were 688 and Metroplex. But I played up your way at 9:30 and Hammerjacks and a bunch of other scuzzy holes.
To me, hardcore was a little faster and a little more brutal than Black Flag. But what do I know. That was a fun time for music if you were on the fringe a little.

You were pretty uptown if you played at Hammerjacks. That place was Huge! We played the 8X10 club when in Baltimore. It’s aptly named as far as dimensions go.

The old 9:30 was a hole in the best kind of way.

 

[ElvisNixon]

[…]
To me, hardcore was a little faster and a little more brutal than Black Flag. But what do I know. That was a fun time for music if you were on the fringe a little.

I’m referring to early (pre My War) Black Flag. I really didn’t care for post MW BF

 

[Nightclub Dwight]

I grew up as a punk rock kid in the '80s, a short train ride from NYC. Today, I count Kevin Seconds as a friend, and he stays at our house when he is in town. But, truth be told, back in the day I just never liked the hardcore punk bands. I was always more moved by the first wave punk bands, mostly based in NYC or London.

When I was young, one of my good friends quit school and moved to NYC. She was, and still is, very good looking. I was working for a few years between high school and college, so I'd take the train into the city to join her for weekends of fun and debauchery. For a while she was dating Cheetah Chrome. One morning I was getting up to go to work at 5:30 am and the phone rang. She and Cheetah had been up all night doing what people used to do in the middle of the night in the 1980s, so they decided to call me. Cheetah got on the phone and wanted to talk guitar. He said, "kid, all you ever need to know you can learn by listening to Led Zeppelin."

My heart sank. When I was growing up, the kids who listened to Led Zeppelin really didn't like those of us who listened to the Dead Boys. We punk rock kids suffered innumerable locker stuffings and worse at the hands of the kids who listened to Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. We sought out punk music because we thought--no, we knew--we were different. But here I was, on the phone at 5:30 am with my guitar hero, and he was telling me that I needed to listen to Led Zeppelin. A part of me died that day.

It wasn't till I was well into my forties, and Cheetah published his autobiography, that I was able to fully comprehend what happened that morning back in the days of Reagan and Gorbachev. For the people who invented punk rock, they didn't have the benefit of growing up listening to punk rock. The best they could do was listen to bands like Iggy and the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, and later, the more hard rocking bands that we now recognize as classic rock. So, even thought his advice was lost on me that day, I now realize that you find punk rock music where you can. The definition changes with perspective. Its not a tangible; its a way of life.

For me, I think the holy trinity of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Clash and the Dead Boys laid the groundwork for much of the important music that has been recorded in the years since. Yes, I realize that the trinity I mention is actually comprised of four bands, but the holy trinity just rolls of the tongue so nicely. Lets not get bogged down in those details, instead, lets just rejoice that kids no longer have to listen to Led Zeppelin to learn everything they need to know about music.

 

[SparkleFart]

Late 70's/early 80's growing up in Portland, Wipers were huge in my circle of friends. Satyricon was a venue of legend.

 

[ElvisNixon]

Yeah, I think most of us had our “foundational” bands like the Ramones, The Stooges and we got turned on to the Dead Boys by The Bad Brains.

I think you can trace a straight line from Link Wray through to today. Live At Leeds “white jumpsuit” era Who, The MC5, The Stooges, X, The Ramones etc.

Those bands were hugely influential on kids who started playing because of the foundational bands.

In DC we were lucky to have tons of Hardcore. Most people know of the Dischord bands, but there were a ton more bands than that.

 

[Doomguy]

Wasn't around for the 80's of course, but Rollins era Black Flag was a particularly big influence to a younger me, especially Damaged, My War, and Slip it in. Particularly into Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks too. More of a skate punk guy when we're talking punk, but hardcore is essential.

 

[boop]

The rich today get blood transfusions from young people to make themselves more youthful, but you can just soak up some youthful angst and energy for what I imagine is mostly the same effect

 

[northernguitar]

East Bay Ray was in a class to himself among the guitarists in the genre. I can’t think of a more versatile Punk guitarist.

 

[Engine Swap]

 

[middy]

I was into skate punk and hardcore in the 80s. My favorites were similar.

Dr. Know
Greg Ginn
East Bay Ray

 

[Buell]

I think I appreciated the Ramones and the Clash around that time but was more into VH and those type of bands. It took me awhile to really get into that whole "other" scene that I still dig to this day.

 

[pbenn]

Not "into" them now, but I was going to seedy bars in Edmonton, AB '77-'79 so I saw all the Vancouver acts.

Loud.

 

[Knows3Chords]

How about Fear?

 

[Tommy Biggs]

It was pretty cool that in the early days every body ‘got along’ and supported each other. I aged out and stopped going around but enjoyed the hell out of it all.
I always liked Adrenalin OD, Kraut, 7 Seconds, Cromags, Crumb Suckers, Murphys Law, and a million other bands from the A7/cbgbs scene.

 

[ReverendRevolver]

I'm a fan, I was into Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, and Black Flag. Then Fugazi and Minor Threat were big influences on what was the popular music scene around here when I was in high school (we called it hardcore. History as rebranded it metalcore, which was a separate genre then).
So, I was that guy in the 00s wearing the Dead Kennedys shirt at local shows for hardcore bands.
Now, something that always caught me off guard was my stepmom had lived near Canton/Akron OH in the early 80s, and was just getting out of high school when there was a thriving punk scene there. So this person who I butted heads with alot had ironically seen many of the bands I was into in the Cleveland area at the peak of thier momentum. It. Was. Weird.

For those of you who were part of the scenes folks talk about now, I can't imagine how surreal it has to be, hearing people talk about it in documentaries. It's weird (for me) WHICH bands from my youth actually stuck. And how they're remembered. Sellouts being not sellouts(hawthorne heights), or worse called innovators for tackling X or Y subject matter 4 years later than the rest of the scene(greenday writing on antiflags subjectmaterial). Oh, or late comers overshadowing the bands who paved the way (Eyes set to Kill was doing what people pretend Paramore was doing, but innovating instead of becoming more digestible).

I mean, I know scenes don't last, and bands evolve. But yall that lived the DC or SFbay area hardcore scenes saw what really happened. Nobody else but the bands did. And it never went the way of grunge, where it blew up and everyone got signed, it just was, then 15-20 years later everyone was talking about it.