Issue 12
The Detroit hardcore scene
By Tony Rettman
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, some people say Detroit had the most revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll scene in the country. Bands like the MC5, The Stooges, The Amboy Dukes, Alice Cooper, The Up and Frut stood apart from the hippie counterculture that dominated the scene and blasted out an ass-kicking din that displayed all the anger and turmoil surrounding their troubled city.
Urban blight hit Detroit in the late ‘60s through the ‘80s. The city was a wasteland of riots, white flight, abandoned and burned-out buildings and crack cocaine—great inspiration for punk rock. But by the time the ‘70s rolled into the ‘80s, The Amboy Dukes’ Ted Nugent was rocking 5,000- seat stadiums filled with muscle car obsessed youths while most of The MC5 sat in jail on charges of drug dealing. The city was already a physical wasteland—by the early ‘80s, as far as rock music was concerned, Detroit was now a cultural wasteland.
But strange things were afoot out in the suburbs. In Maumee, Ohio, a cluster of high school skate kids took regular day trips to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to buy the latest import punk singles from the Schoolkids record shop and frequented the Endless Summer skate park in Roseville. Two of these kids—Barry Henssler and Andy Wendler—went on to form the band Necros. Some other kids from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, were on a similar path—they would go on to form Negative Approach. Meanwhile, two grown men started a fanzine covering the records they accumulated while living in Lansing, Michigan. All these factors would convene to create one of the first hardcore punk scenes in America—and wake Detroit up from its drug-induced cultural slumber.
TOUCH AND GO BEGINNINGS
A schoolteacher and a clerk from the census bureau are unlikely spearheaders of a revolutionary magazine—but the Midwest is a bizarre place. Robert Vermillion (Tesco Vee) and Dave Stimpson (DS) were two kraut rock collecting weirdos who had their domes blown by the first wave of punk rock singles that came out of Britain and Los Angeles. They picked up these records from shops like Off The Record and Schoolkids in Ann Arbor.
Vee and DS named their publication Touch and Go after one of their favorite songs by the British band Magazine. Vee’s moniker was inspired by the pioneering U.K. noise band Throbbing Gristle. The first issue of Touch and Go came out in the fall of 1979.
Robert Vermillion (aka Tesco Vee, Touch and Go/The Meatmen): I remember going into this record store in my town and they had this little box of Import 45s. I bought 10 or 15 of them—Skrewdriver, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Johnny Moped, etc. The feeling I had during that first listen is hard to describe. The next day I went in and traded in all my Guru Guru, P.F.M. and a hundred more of my prog rock imports so I could get as much of this shit as I possibly could.
Dave Stimpson (aka DS, Touch and Go): Robert and I met at some lame club named The Rainbow Ranch in East Lansing. Afterwards, he invited me over to his apartment in Williamston to spin some records and drink. I forget who suggested it first, but one of us just asked, “Do you want to do a fanzine?” That was it. It was more something to do than any kind of divine inspiration.
Vee: I came up with the penname so I could trash the people I hated while extolling the virtues of others without being tracked down and killed. We always tried to write reviews that entertained first and informed second. I was totally inspired to write by Kickboy and Chris D. at Slash magazine and Lester Bangs, a literary God-boy plucked from us way too soon. We dug and dug trying to find the most obscure stuff just to rave about it. Some people would be tearing their hair out trying to find some of the stuff we wrote about. We didn’t want to just go off on muscle-headed hardcore stuff. We wanted people to know about other great stuff, like Throbbing Gristle or the Japanese band Friction.
DS: We wrote what we wanted and didn’t really worry about what other people thought. The one thing that set us apart from other fanzines was an affinity for adolescently sexual humor.
Barry Henssler of Necros saw Touch and Go at Schoolkids and sent a copy of his fanzine Smegma Journal to their offices. The Necros soon began visiting the editors in Lansing.
Meanwhile, a new clerk named Steve Miller (no joke) began working at the census bureau with DS. The two immediately hit it off. When Miller found out DS was one of the perverted geniuses behind Touch and Go, he told him about his band The Fix and told DS to come see them play in a frat house basement in the Spring of 1980.
Craig Calvert (The Fix): We had all these frat boys in front of us shouting “You suck!” They had Supertramp shirts on and didn’t understand what we were doing. It was clear the world wasn’t ready for our greatness.
Steve Miller (The Fix): At one point during the show, somebody let off a fire extinguisher and no one could breathe. [That] really impressed Tesco and Dave.
DS: That was one of the greatest shows I ever went to. We finally had a band in Lansing we could get behind, which was a great feeling.
Miller: We just figured if we caused a problem, we were doing our job.
Henssler: Tesco and Dave were the best/worst influences you can think of. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think the Midwest hardcore scene would have existed. DS: We met Barry and the Necros in early 1980. He told us about a show they were doing at the Xanadu Co-op in Ann Arbor, so me and Tesco drove down to check them out. Even though they were much younger than us, they seemed like real guys who enjoyed a good time. We hit it off pretty much right from the start.
Henssler: [The Fix] were way older than us and we didn’t feel the same bond with them that we did with Tesco and Dave. They were all OK guys except for their singer, Steve. But I really think only history has given them any validity.
Miller: Having The Necros around was like hanging around with someone’s annoying little brothers. They were so busy being “punk” that it was unpleasant and embarrassing to be around them. I always found them terribly inept musically.
HARDCORE VINES ACROSS AMERICA
At the same time, on the other side of the country, bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks took punk in a primitive direction—they churned out the soundtrack for Southern California’s hardcore scenesters, who bashed into one another on the dance floors of such joints as Blackie’s and the Starwood. West Coast punk magazines like Slash and Flipside showed this scene to the Midwest, and beyond.
California’s Black Flag were near legends in the minds of the Necros. DS and Vee took a pilgrimage to see the mighty Flag when the band swung through Chicago in the winter of 1980. Ohio and Michigan hardcore kids got their own personal dose when Black Flag came through Lansing in the spring of ‘81 and played Club DooBee.
Black Flag’s first single, “Nervous Breakdown,” intrigued the hell out of the Necros. The more they spun the disc while looking at magazines showing the savagery of their shows, the more they needed to know. Luckily, in January 1981 the Necros’ bass player Corey Rusk got into an exchange program; he went to the West to attend Beverly Hills High School.
And, the vines of American hardcore began to truly intertwine. The D.C. scene picked up steam with the formation of bands like S.O.A., Youth Brigade and Minor Threat—California hardcore bands toured the U.S. in the spring of ‘81. Things came together in an act of serendipity around the country— and in the Midwest. In the summer of 1981, kids from Michigan and Ohio descended onto gigs in Detroit with fake IDs. Bands like Canada’s D.O.A and New Jersey’s Misfits rolled into town, and Black Flag made their second trek to Michigan.
Meanwhile, the D.C.-based band The Teen Idles—whose bassist was Ian MacKaye, future vocalist for Minor Threat, Embrace and Fugazi—sent their single to Touch and Go for review. The eight-song 7-inch EP titled ‘Minor Disturbance’ was the first release on MacKaye’s Dischord imprint—a label that would go on to become the ethical blueprint for independent punk labels for years to come. Seeing and hearing the D.C. kids doing it for themselves put a spark under the butts of Tesco and Dave. If those guys could do it, why couldn’t they? With money from Touch and Go subscribers, they decided to launch a label subsidiary of the fanzine. The first two releases were 7-inch singles by The Fix and Necros, pressed in the low hundreds in early 1981.
Todd Swalla (Necros): [When he was at Beverly Hills High School], Corey, being the rich kid that he was, already had a video camera. He went to see Black Flag at the Starwood and videotaped the whole thing. Instant hardcore education!
Andy Wendler (Necros): Seeing that footage was simply incredible. Once we saw what was going on at those shows, we fully understood.
Henssler: As soon as Corey got back, we were freaking out, watching that video constantly. Mugger [Black Flag roadie] was acting as stage security and he had no regard for safety whatsoever. He was clocking people in the face with coldhearted meanness—we were into it! Corey hung out with Black Flag and the Circle Jerks while he was out there and got to know them pretty well.
DS: Ian MacKaye sent us a copy of The Teen Idles EP to review. Unfortunately, it arrived in about six pieces!
Ian MacKaye: There was this small record store across the river in Arlington, Virginia, called The Virginia Record & Tape Exchange. They had a small selection of fanzines and one of them had a picture of Penelope Houston from The Avengers on the cover; it was Touch and Go. I was a huge Avengers fan, so I bought it and I was psyched. They were talking about Black Flag and all the L.A. bands, plus they were interested in what was going on in San Francisco and they were not too into what was happening in New York. So that made us feel we shared a similar musical view with them.
Henssler: I remember when Tesco got that record in the mail. We just kept looking at the back cover and freaking out. These guys were all kids our age, which made for this immediate connection. We were so desperate to hear what it sounded like that Tesco taped it together and tried to play it. It just kept skipping and Tesco kept saying, “This sounds great!”
MacKaye: We got a letter back from Touch and Go almost immediately asking for another copy. It was the first positive response and we felt we had connected with somebody. We became instant pen pals with Tesco, Dave and all the Necros guys.
DS: [Starting our own record label] just seemed like the right thing to do. The Touch and Go name had some cache at the time, so it made sense. Tesco and I came up with half the dough and the bands came up with the other half. I printed the covers in a printing class I took at Lansing Community College. In the end, it wasn’t a question of why, but rather why not?
Henssler: It’s really weird to look at all this stuff in retrospect and where it’s fallen into place. At the time we decided to do that first single, it was almost a joke. As a band, we could barely keep it together, so the idea of doing an actual record was sort of funny to us.
Miller: We pressed up 200 copies of that single and we had no idea how to get rid of them. I gave one to my mother and gave out a few to my friends. We burned 15 of them on the radiator at our practice space. We didn’t think anyone would care.
Calvert: Club DooBee was a redneck country bar, but we talked the owner into letting us have some shows there. I think the first touring band we had there was Black Flag. Us and Necros opened up.
Henssler: That first time Black Flag came through was pretty special, but things didn’t start rolling for hardcore in that area until the summer of 1981. I remember we got to hang out with the Flag guys after the show at a party at The Fix’s house. Calvert: Greg [Ginn, Black Flag guitarist] and Dez [Cadena, Black Flag vocalist] cranked out some Beatles and Neil Young on our stereo at that party. That certainly surprised a room full of punk rockers. I think that might have been the night someone set our couch on fire. I remember the police weren’t so happy about that, and shut the party down.
THE SUMMER OF ’81
As the spring of ’81 turned into summer, the Necros got their first out of town gig, opening for the Circle Jerks at Irving Plaza in New York City. The show happened to be on the same date as Henssler and Wendler’s high school graduation—but they decided that opening for the Jerks was more important.
They left a few days early, and headed to D.C. to meet all the men they had been writing over the past few months, and saw Minor Threat open for the Circle Jerks at the 9:30 Club.
Henssler: We got along really well with those D.C. guys right off the bat. That summer we graduated from high school, we were always looking for reasons to get the fuck out of Maumee, so we were constantly road tripping to D.C. or New York.
MacKaye: I remember all the Necros. Tesco and Dave came down for that show. I was so psyched to open for the Circle Jerks because I saw them the summer before in San Francisco and they blew my fucking mind. So here they were in our town a year later and we were opening up for them. So I wanted to rock the house and throw down and show them they were in our town. We were sound checking and all the Circle Jerks were in the room as well as all the Midwest guys. We were doing “Screaming at a Wall” and at one point in the song, I felt an actual pop in my throat. My voice disappeared entirely. I was more or less making the sound of air and that’s it. I was panicked because this was a huge show for us and all those Midwest kids we’d been writing were there. So, I went and got a stack of fliers from the hallway of the 9:30 Club and wrote out all the lyrics on the back of the fliers. I held up the fliers throughout the entire show and made the crowd sing along.
Henssler: I’d say the summer of ‘81 was when it really started rolling as far as more kids finding out about hardcore and deciding to start bands in Detroit.
Rob Michaels (Bored Youth): That summer was like this huge world opening up of people who looked crazy meeting one another and forming friendships and bands.
Rob McCullough (Negative Approach): In the summer of 1981, Black Flag came to town and played in Detroit at a club named Bookies. At the time, I was hanging out at the Endless Summer skate park, listening to a bunch of California punk bands I read about in Thrasher and playing in a crappy punk rock cover band. I had no idea there was anything of a “scene” going on in Detroit. I remember I couldn’t make that Black Flag gig and was really bummed about it. The next day, everybody came back to the park saying how great the show was and how there was this group of kids from Maumee who had a band and invited us to hang out.
Pete Zewelski (Negative Approach): The punk scene in Detroit at the time had more of a New Wave slant and consisted of places like Bookies, Nunzios, The Red Carpet and a few irrelevant others. In the early days, myself and John Brannon (Negative Approach vocalist) would go to check out local Detroit bands like Coldcock, The Mutants and The Sillies. All these bands were supposedly punk rock. We found them all very disheartening, and if anything, their lack of conviction lead us to be more determined to start a band that was more relevant to kids our age. Through our neverending search for good music we luckily befriended a girl called Larissa who sang in a band called L-Seven. L-Seven were a huge breath of fresh air for us, and the only Detroit band we could take seriously at the time. Their sound was not hardcore, but it was very uncompromising in its approach. We took every opportunity to see them live and became real fans. Larissa was a very interesting person and highly knowledgeable musically and responsible for introducing John and I to the Necros in the summer of ‘81.
Brannon: The Necros were the guys that gave us inspiration to start Negative Approach. They were kids like us who seemed to want to start up something cool in Detroit. It just made sense to us.
The tail end of the summer saw the Necros record their classic nine song EP, produced by Ian MacKaye—usually referred to as the I.Q. 32 EP. Bands like Negative Approach, Youth Patrol and the underrated Bored Youth started buzzing in the basements of Midwest suburbs. Even Touch and Go editor Tesco Vee got into the fun by starting up the Meatmen— the most vile and uncompromisingly juvenile band in the Midwest sect.
Vee: I went to high school with the Ramsey Brothers, the guys I formed the Meatmen with. We used to sit around with our big long hair and smoke doobs and listen to Hendrix bootlegs in my room. My dad was the superintendent of the schools and I think his freak son was a bit much for his image. Later on in 1979, we reconnected and started writing songs in Rich Ramsey’s cramped, 100- degree third floor loft near Michigan State University. He used to grow mind-altering mushrooms in his crawl space and eat those and totally space out. I was an ex-acid head at the time, so that might explain why we felt like kindred spirits. It could also explain all the fucked up lyrics Zelewski: John Brannon and I lived in Grosse Pointe just streets from each other and went to the same high school. We were both the only punks in Grosse Pointe at the time and struck up a relationship instantly. At the time, I was playing bass in my band called the Sleeves while John was in a band called Static. Static were very glam punk in the vein of the New York Dolls and I was doing my best to be Paul Weller with the Sleeves. Although musically we were on opposite sides of the fence, it was inevitable we would end up in a band at some stage just because there was no one else around like us at the time. We started hanging out and going to gigs more frequently and eventually, through meeting the Necros, discovered hardcore. John had put a lot of work into Static and was hesitant to leave but listened to my advice and followed me in our first musical venture by forming Negative Approach. We recruited Rob McCullough on guitar, who I had met through some skate kids and we brought along an odd Iranian drummer named Zuheir to keep the beat. Before we knew it we had a band name, six songs and started spray painting the N.A. stencil all over Detroit!
Brannon: People were thoroughly upset by those early sets we did. All our songs were averagely 30 seconds long and the set would only last about 10 minutes. The dudes from the older, more established “rock” bands in the area were offended we had the nerve to go on a stage and do that. But the kids dug it and that’s all we really cared about. We knew it had to be done.
Zelewski: Those really early gigs were explosive. With each one we played, there would be another thirty or so kids in tow with N.A stenciled on their shirt or jacket. We never expected to be in the same league as the Necros or Minor Threat, but the support we were getting was very strong and so instant, we literally moved into the hardcore premiership overnight. What started out as a cool name written on a wall was now a band that was turning into a major force in the Midwest hardcore scene.
Bored Youth started in the suburbs of Bloomfield, Michigan, when vocalist Rob Michaels stumbled upon three kids in his high school who had a band.
Rob Michaels (Bored Youth): [The band] really didn’t know anything about hardcore, but they were into so many weird, obscure things for kids with no link to be into. They were obsessed with Eater and really into Sham 69 and The Cockney Rejects. I think it might have been Larissa that suggested I sing for them since all of them were pretty quiet guys. Since those guys weren’t coming from trying to sound like Black Flag, the songs were more melodic, but they still sounded just as raw and brash as any of the bands coming around at the time.
Zelewski: Bored Youth were easily the most underrated band from the Detroit hardcore scene. They weren’t technically a thrash/hardcore band, but they had a real style of their own. Lyrically, they were in a league of their own and sang songs that really hit home about what life was like being a teenage punk in Detroit. Just check out their song “Outcast.”
THE DETROIT FREEZER
The hardcore bug spread through the country, and compilation records documenting the scene began to pop up. Ian MacKaye and the D.C. kids’ newly-formed Dischord label released the Flex Your Head collection. Boston’s long-running Modern Method label sunk its fangs into the burgeoning Beantown hardcore scene with the musically vicious but cornynamed This is Boston, Not L.A. compilation.
Touch and Go’s Vee, DS and their new partner in crime, Necros bass player Corey Rusk knew it was time to show the country what the Detroit scene was all about. They released the Process of Elimination compilation through Touch and Go in late 1981. The 7-inch contained tracks from the Necros, The Fix, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, the short-lived Youth Patrol, McDonalds, Kalamazoo, Michigan’s Violent Apathy and Ohio’s Toxic Reasons. A Process of Elimination tour followed—the Necros, Meatmen and Negative approach played shows in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
As more hardcore bands formed, the Detroit clubs had to acknowledge these pimply-faced miscreants as a major force. But, as their violent, juvenile behavior became known around town, shows were closed left and right. Sometimes, the kids had to take matters into their own hands.
The late, lamented rock critic Lester Bangs once likened Detroit to a huge mouth with all its teeth rotted out. If this is true, the Cass Corridor was the most abscess-ridden part of the whole pie hole. It has since been gentrified, but in the ‘80s, the area was left for dead by the local government. In the middle of this war zone stood the Freezer Theatre, a gutted concrete storefront suffering a slow death—until the hyperactive hardcore youth from the suburbs came in to reek havoc.
Henssler: That little tour was a lot of fun. I remember the Boston kids being pretty crazy. New York was still a pretty nightclub oriented place, so it wasn’t like going to Boston or D.C. where there was tons of kids hanging out. We didn’t get to go on until two in the morning when we played in New York. It seemed really strange to us.
Brannon: I remember within the first five minutes of being in New York seeing Johnny Thunders walk down the street and fall down a flight of basement stairs. I was telling all the guys in my band “That’s the dude from The New York Dolls!” But they didn’t care at all.
Brannon: There was supposed to be this Necros [and] Bored Youth show at this club called Nunzio’s. Some anonymous person called the club beforehand and told the owner all the bands and their fans were underage, so he told us we couldn’t do the gig. So there’s a shit load of kids in the parking lot saying, “What are we gonna do?” My mom was out of town for the weekend, so I was like, “Fuck it! Why don’t we do the gig at my mom’s house?” I had a P.A. down in the basement and my parents were gone for the weekend, so why not? My mom ended up coming home unexpectedly and she wasn’t into seeing all these little skinhead motherfuckers running around her house. That was the night she chased me out of the house with a hammer and told me to never come back. That’s when I moved down to the Cass Corridor and we started having shows at the Freezer Theatre.
Swalla: At the time, Cass Corridor was one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. Most of the neighborhood was burned out during the ‘60s riots and not much was left except for dope houses.
Zelewski: I spent years going to punk shows in Detroit. The attitude towards anyone under 18 was always so negative, so it was completely refreshing to have the Freezer, a place where we made the rules. When hardcore bands used to play, there was sometimes as many as six to seven bands on the bill. You would be in the crowd one minute and the next you were on the stage. To me this was what punk rock was all about. [The Freezer] was without a doubt the birthplace of Midwest hardcore. There was one gig when there were so many kids trying to get in that we actually had to turn people away at the door. From playing to 10 people one minute to having kids waiting outside on the pavement was just unbelievable for us.
Swalla: The Freezer was run by this old acid casualty named Fred. He was an old, fried, paranoid hippie and I think he just needed the money. Brannon: Before we started putting on shows there, they were having acoustic shit and poetry readings. I think Fred was just happy to make some money. Fred was pretty infamous for disappearing in the middle of a gig with all the money collected at the door.
Henssler: The first time I went down there with Corey to check the place out, they were having a poetry reading and the only people in the audience were a bunch of homeless guys with 40 ounces sitting in folding chairs.
Brannon: I remember [the June 1982 Minor Threat show at the Freezer] being one of the greatest shows for Detroit hardcore. That’s the show where all the photos for our 7-inch were taken at. It kind of ended fucked up though because there was a huge scale riot out in the parking lot afterwards.
Davo Striech (photographer): After Minor Threat were done, I went back stage to get my photo equipment that I hid with all of Negative Approach’s gear. Turns out the ceiling backstage had dropped in while Minor Threat was playing. There was plaster all over our stuff. We were literally digging through rubble to get our stuff out the door. Just then it looked like a riot was about to break out, so me and Rob McCullough grabbed our stuff as a major brawl spilled into the street.
Henssler: The funny thing is, I was in a car driving away while the whole thing was going on. I remember seeing someone swinging a skateboard at someone’s head. Years later, some guy pulled a knife on me at a party thinking I was the one who started the fight.
MacKaye: I remember going outside to see something that resembled a battle from the middle ages. Police cars started flying out of nowhere and in the midst of all this, I see the promoter of the Freezer Theatre look around and start running down the street. I started running after him because he’s got the fucking dough. I chased that motherfucker to an apartment about three or four blocks away. I finally catch up to him and he’s like “Oh, hey! There you are! I’ve been looking for you!” So he takes me into this apartment where there’s this guy in his fifties and a transvestite teenaged boy. While I’m in this strange apartment arguing with this guy about money, the rest of the band are back at the Freezer wondering where the fuck I am while the police are going ballistic, beating on all these kids. Detroit was always a fucked up scene.
DEFECT THE DETROIT SCENE
The Fix returned to Detroit from a U.S. tour in the winter of 1982, which included an L.A. recording session with infamous punk producer Spot. They were taken aback to see that a whole new gaggle of suburban hardcore kids had sprouted up overnight. After returning from their second U.S. tour in the beginning of 1982, the Fix decided to call it a day. Their drummer Jeff Wellman left—he was getting pressure from his parents to become a “real person.” The group felt that they didn’t belong in the scene anymore.
Steve Miller and bass player Mike Achtenberg decided to form Blight, the short lived art-damaged group with Tesco Vee on vocals. In their brief existence, Blight released one single on the Touch and Go subsidiary label, Special Forces, and played a handful of high concept live shows that consisted of smoke, mirrors and shaving cream. In 2006, Touch and Go re-released Blights’ recordings on a record titled Detroit: The Dream Is Dead—The Collected Works of a Midwest Hardcore Noise Band. The group sounds like it could be on a present day label, packing noise rock festivals across the country. Touch and Go would last a few more issues in D.C. before Vee decided to retire the magazine in ‘83. He would continue on with the Meatmen until the late ’80s.
When they defected from Detroit, Vee and DS left the Touch and Go label in the hands of Corey Rusk of the Necros. Rusk quickly released the classic self-titled 10-song EP by Negative Approach, and singles by the Meatmen and L-Seven. Zelewski left Negative Approach in 1982 to form the mid-tempo Oi!-inspired group The Allied, which folded in 1983.
Meanwhile, the Necros did their first national tour opening for The Misfits in the fall of 1982. That winter, they embarked on an eight-week tour to promote the release of their debut LP Conquest for Death, which came out in 1983.
Miller: We came back from that tour and the Necros had kind of wedged themselves in and brought all these young kids that were really concerned with looking right and doing whatever the kids in D.C. were doing. All of a sudden, it wasn’t cool to drink anymore. It all seemed real lame and mindless to me. All those kids in those hardcore bands were throwing out their Aerosmith and AC/DC records. It all seemed fishy to me.
Once it became an arena for all these high school kids to talk about “the scene” and make up a reason to be friends and/or fuck one another, we really didn’t feel like we fit in. They would have these shows at skateboard parks and we were never asked to play. We just wanted to play. We had no interest in being friends with a bunch of kids.
Even though it wasn’t a conscious decision at the time, Blight was definitely a reaction to how everyone was taking the hardcore thing into such an orthodox direction. We just thought, “Oh—you want everyone to play fast? Fuck You! We’re going to play as slow and sludgy as possible just to piss you off.”
Vee: I always thought we were somewhat insulated in the Midwest, so when I lost my teaching job, I packed up and moved to D.C., and on to another bunch of kids and bands.
Zelewski: Although I loved the impact we were having in the scene, I was concerned there was no room to develop musically. I was getting really bored with the 30-second songs and full-on thrash approach. I loved the energy of hardcore but I wanted to slow the pace down and, in a way, offer an alternative to what my peers were doing.
Henssler: Looking back, I can’t believe [the Necros] survived on the road as long as we did. How I ever lived on five dollars a day is beyond me, but it was worth it. Not many people ever get out of Maumee, but we did and got to hang out with all our skate heroes out in California.
Swalla: Glenn E. Freidman hooked us up with Tony Alva, Jay Adams, David Hackett and Jay Smith. Alva actually took us to Paul Revere Jr. High to skate, which is one of the spots where they invented bank riding. The best was getting to see Jay Adams raging at this Discharge/Misfits show at the Florentine Gardens in L.A. At the time, he was a Suicidal member and totally amped on speed!
Wendler: Before we left, it seemed the Midwest scene was filled with the most creative, brightest and hardworking people in the world. When we came back, every retard you can imagine was involved.
Swalla: That first wave of disillusion in the Detroit scene can definitely be linked to all the Nazi skinhead violence that started to become a common occurrence at the shows.
Wendler: Although I do not sympathize or condone what any of those people were, you can sort of see the parallels within Detroit and what was happening in England at the time. A lot of their parents were being laid off from the car manufacturing plants because people were buying more foreign cars. These kids didn’t see much hope and they needed a scapegoat. Brannon: At that point, I don’t think any of these new kids were interested in the music. I think they were just coming to shows to beat motherfuckers up. There was a while there where there wasn’t a show that somebody didn’t get seriously fucked up, like getting stabbed or getting their teeth knocked out. I didn’t like to see people getting beaten up at our shows—I mean, not unless they totally deserved it! But I’d have to say all that violence was one of the big reasons Negative Approach broke up. We couldn’t get out a song without some semi-riot breaking out.
Brannon: At all those early shows, we’d have all these skinheads there screaming for “Can’t Tell No One.” They couldn’t relate to what we were doing. They just thought it was a load of art fag shit. It took awhile before we could just play out on our own.
McCullough: I wanted the chance to write some lyrics and material for the band, but John [Brannon] wouldn’t have it. It got to the point where we were playing the same material over and over again and I was getting bored. At this point, John had begun dating Larissa from L-Seven and she became a real Yoko Ono on the situation. She turned him onto heavy drugs and kept feeding his ego. That was the beginning of the end.
AFTERMATH
Negative Approach was the first band from the Motor City class of ’81 to bite the dust. In the fall of 1983, Negative Approach decided they’d had enough of Brannon and simultaneously quit the band. They reconvened to record the classic 12-inch “Tied Down” in 1983 and then officially called it a day. Brannon dug up a whole new line-up of kids to tour the country in the summer of 1984 in support of the album. The tour blew up within a week and that was that. A year or so later, Brannon formed The Laughing Hyenas with Larissa from LSeven. More inspired by the likes of The Birthday Party than Blitz, the quartet did not go over so well with the burr-headed Detroit contingent.
The Necros didn’t fare so well with the hardcore youth either—they decided to slow down the pace and rock out in a Motorhead meets Amboy Dukes style. They toured with Megadeth and the Circle Jerks before releasing their second LP Tangled Up on Enigma in 1986, and breaking up a year later.
By the mid-‘80s, the old guard of the Detroit hardcore scene had moved on. Corey Rusk had turned Touch and Go into one of the largest independent record labels in the country. The Necros’ Barry Henssler formed the protofunk- o-metal Big Chief while Negative Approach’s Brannon continued with the Hyenas until the mid-‘90s. Tesco Vee had retired both his pen and vocal chords while DS became a rare record dealer for many years. But there is no denying that this scene left a legendary impact on underground culture that continues to echo like a 40 ounce fueled burp to this day.
Henssler: There was a certain point where we started growing our hair out and wishing we were The Scientists while everyone else wanted to be skinheads from England. We just were getting tired of playing blurry thrash and wanted to develop our own thing.
The last gig of the Necros was at this place called Blondies, which is this total knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing metal club. I remember always saying, “I never want to play there,’” and there we were, opening up for Megadeth. At the time, I was 23 and almost done [with] college and I just wanted to move on to the next thing.
Wendler: The reason all that music is still important to people today is that it was totally pure. We had no intentions but to have fun and rock out.
Henssler: Let’s face it. The best music always came from the Midwest. There’s nothing to be gained by doing music out here. We did everything ourselves and did it for ourselves.
Zelewski: Hopefully we influenced others to do something equally creative to what we did. My only concern is that I feel kids today should be looking forward not backwards musically and concentrating on developing a scene or musical style that is unique to them, just like we tried to do. Punk to me was all about youth and change and progression and it would be great to see another movement which is as exciting as what was happening with punk/hardcore in the early ‘80s.
Vee: Leaving a legacy wasn’t really the mark I was shooting for. I’d like to think we just left a big nasty skid mark in the underpants of punk.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Larrisa Strickland of L-Seven and The Laughing Hyenas. She passed away on November 4, 2006.