You're Not Punk, I'm Telling Everyone....

Crossley

24 Hour Revenge Therapy

03/16/12

Text tape, side A, track 1

You're Not Punk, And I'm Telling Everyone

　



What year was it? 1993? That sounds right, but is it?

To the best of my recollection, that can be stated as a fact. I was on the run from the Marine Corps. I was enlisted, I was due for basic soon, I got rabbit & just split. It's a long story and I ended up several places before I found myself in San Francisco for the first time. 18 years old, on the lam, and having the

time of my life.

There was so much new music in San Francisco in 1993. MDC was a band from the 80's I grew up listening to, but now I knew them, shot speed with drummer Al & crashed in his practice space.

There was Blatz, Filth, Dead and Gone, Tribe 8. I didn't even know what a Berkeley was. All I knew was that East Bay hated West Bay and vice versa. The first time I ever went over to East Bay was to see Citizen Fish at a tiny club in Oakland called Your Place Too. An unknown band on their fourth show was opening that night, they were called Rancid. They still are. Stevie and Maus and I hopped the BART, I had never been on a subway before. When we got out on the Oakland side, a transit cop yelled at us to stop when we jumped the turnstile, I actually did stop... Stevie and Maus looking back at me, screaming "Run, you dumb ass!" So that's what I did. I was used to running at that point. Is it safe to say, factual I mean, that it's the only thing I had been doing for years at that point? Running? Yes, I believe so. But facts are always fuzzy, I prefer to rely on feelings.

I was West Bay proud. SFJP. San Francisco Junky Punx (We shoot up to shoot you down!) I lived in squalor and young addict twilight. I lived in a bubble it's fair to say.

So when I made my way home to Cincinnati nine months later, and all of my punk friends were into this

Berkeley(East Bay) label called Lookout! I had no idea what they were talking about. Not only that, but I hated the artistic direction of the label and the crappy, whiny, retreads of 60's doo-wop the label was churning out at an alarming pastel colored rate. I was into the real heavy squatter punk stuff at the time: Rorschach, Anti-schism, Man is the Bastard, Battalion of Saints etc.

-So when my homey, my cat, my ace boon Ron Jones showed up with some disturbing Lookout! Records logo tattooed on the back of his neck, the word Popsicko! in rainbow colors, which was and remains to this day one of the gayest tattoos I have ever seen.... And my boy starts playing these tapes while we're all sitting around drinking 40's. It's all that doo-wop, pop crap... it goes

"Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby... I love you." Over and over again, I couldn't stand it.

Where were we at? Lannegans? Dan Sheas? I don't know why I put them there. It might just be association. Maybe it was Darci's house on Daniel's. Do I have to state for the record? Do you swear that I have to swear on bibles? Why does my past always play out like a courtroom drama in my head?

Fuck it.

Ain't that important... Feelings over facts.

Feelings overdose. Which was what I was in fact, feeling. I kept trying to put in this comp tape I had of Crust Punk my boy Cretin had made me. Ron pulled out one more cassette. "Just listen to this for a minute, it just came out, and it's not on Lookout! but they're from East Bay." He fucked with the buttons on the boom box, ffw'd to a key pause(remember with tapes, how you'd keep play pressed and hold down ff, listening for the pauses between songs?)

Well... This sounded a bit better, I had to admit. What is it?

"Jawbreaker, this song is called Boxcar."

Dude, the singer sounds like Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs, mixed with Rod Stewart, I kinda dig it. Oh, He's really into Kerouac, that was obvious before he name dropped him.

And like that... I was hooked.

I do, in fact, know the complete origin history of what is now called "emo". Anything after 1999, though ya'll are on your own. I also, do not consider Jawbreaker an "emo" band. I consider them post-punk the same way I consider the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, or the Only Ones post-punk. And those are all bands that could be, using the same criteria, construed as "emo". But this was years before such a tag was ever even considered a dirty word.

In a very paraphrased history, this is it. (Why do I have no problem stating other peoples POV as facts, yet holding my own to such scrutiny? Who cares? Idiosyncrasies baby!):

I deem every musical genres birth as 'punk', but we all know what I mean here.

When the punk wave of 1977 finally settled all throughout Americas' boundaries around 1979,

it was a much more meat-headed and hooliganistic scene than most would lead you to believe. It was violent. You had to fight to look like that. It had way more in common with the modern Skinhead than the modern effete Rocker. American punk was Hard-Core Punk, it was brutal, loud, and more than ready to smack you in the face with a cane than most music writers feel comfortable admitting these days(that's why most modern music writers are pussies, and you can blame them for Weezer. But not me baby, I'll kick your ass.)

Some punk musicians in D.C. got tired of the dogmatic coda of "Bro's, beers, and beat downs" and started writing ostensibly punk songs in a different manner: Rites of Spring, Gray Matter, Government Issue, Dag Nasty... This music spoke to a lot of the people in the scene, and spread for quite awhile until 7 Seconds infamous "Revolution Summer" of 1989, wherein, Kevin Seconds' tried to create a schism between hardcore punks, and just plain punks. Very simplistic view I know, but it's the truth from where I'm sitting. Besides, I want to get on to the album.

24 Hour Revenge Therapy: Jawbreaker.

Tupelo Communion Conspiracy Theory Records/ 1994/ Producer: Steve Albini

Until I typed the words "Steve Albini" out, I had no idea he produced this album. I've been an ardent Big Black fan since age 15, and have known this LP by heart since 1995. It's telling then, what a producer can bring to a record. The leap in change from Bivouac and Unfun to 24 Hour. There's more editing on this album than anywhere else in their catalog. It could be the influence of Albini, or it could be Blake Schwarzenbachs' writing style at that moment. I'm not sure that I care all that much what "it" is, I just find myself happy that "it " is.

I don't know that I've ever read the liner notes until now. It lists them as a San Francisco band. That ain't so strange, living in the current musical climate I find myself in. The competition was fierce between the bays back then, much like Seattle's current music scene. If there were more clubs on the Berkeley side, and they got their first following there, it's easy to understand. SF was all junked out crust

punk at the time, East Bay would have been more receptive to the other melodic bands from West Bay.

Boat Dreams From the Hill: Solid opener, "Sometimes rainy days drop boyish wonder."

Indictment: My current, favorite song on this disc. "I'd like to know what's so wrong, with a stupid happy song? It says many things in it's nothingness. It gives me space to think I guess. To think less, and less, and less... Moving units and tracking charts, will they ever learn? It isn't who you know it's who you burn."

Boxcar: The Genesis song, the track that made me love 'em. "I was passing out while you were passing out the rules.... one, two, three, four, who's punk? What's the score?"

Prosecuting DA: "Do you really wish to break the album up like that?"

Defendant: " No, Not at all what I had intended really... I'm just making this up as I go along dude."

Prosecuting DA: "I am not a dude, I am you."

Defendant: " Oh yeah, it's just... Condition Oakland."

Prosecuting DA: " A song on the album?"

Defendant: " If I may, I mean.. if it's alright with the court I'd really like to extrapolate on that fucking song man."

Prosecuting DA: " Go ahead Mr. Crossley, just watch your language, and I ask you to remember you are in a court of law. Common law, you've been with this album for more than seven years now? Living with it?"

Defendant: " We've had our relations. Yes, the album has lived with me for some 19 years or so. I have problems with remembering correctly sometimes. But my testimony is the truth as far as I know it.

And I do honestly believe that song to be the most emotionally accurate depiction of solitude that I knew when I first heard it. The man{Blake Shwarzenbach}was on to something. Listen to the bass line as it staccatos' it's way on in. The guitar is almost indiscernible fuzz, but that's true emotion on the track. Fuck blood, anybody can bleed! But who can truly emote without sounding like a complete pussy? I've heard Jets to Brazil man, that shit sucks after Orange Rhyming Dictionary!"

Prosecuting DA: " Mr. Crossley, we allowed your testimony, but advised you on your language already, please remember that you can be held in contempt."

Defendant: " Truth be told... I can't always remember who else was there, or where exactly we were, and I'd like to remind the court that the statute of limitations is expired in most of these scenarios... I just know that I was there... And it meant a lot to me. My whole life, my relationships with women when I was younger. This album has always been my go-to. I mean, after a break up or during a relationship even. it's an album as alienated from everything else as I am. I would not be who I am today, had I not discovered this album at the time that I did. If it pleases the court, I'd really like to go out for a cigarette now, and I'd really dig it if that jury of yours fucked right the Hell off."