LIKE GOLD DOWN A SEWER PART ONE.

ABOVE PICTURE: STILLBORN CHRISTIANS AT TURNER STREET, ON THE EVE OF THEM BREAKING UP, 1983. THE STILLBORN CHRISTIANS WERE ONE OF RALEIGH'S GREAT FORGOTTEN BANDS.

So here is likely the final home for what was supposed to be a book on my take on the eighties Raleigh North Carolina underground punk rock music scene, gaping holes and all. This is part one, there are three more parts and I will be slowly unveiling them. There was a lot of history around these parts, even if I wasnt actually here for a good deal of it. Read on, kids.



I became sort of infatuated with the North Carolina scene of the early eighties when I started reading scene reports in the then brand new (& ‘crucial”) Maximum Rock N Roll magazine, & it more or less started when I heard the “Why Are We Here?” seven inch that came out on No Core Records in 1983. A friend of mine, Ron Cerros, had it. It had the following bands on it: No Labels, Corrosion Of Conformity, Stillborn Christians & Bloodmobile on it. We listened to it all of the time. Then I got a copy of the Paul Mahern (of the Zero Boys, a criminally under looked Midwest hardcore band)’s massive double LP compilation record he assembled on his own label, called “The Master Tape Volume II”. No Labels had two songs on it. I thought they were both great. Then shortly afterwards, I got a dubbed copy in the mail from an Australian pen pal, of the No Labels “Jane Doe” demo. I thought it was one of the best hardcore tapes I had ever heard, & to this day I still think so. From then I started writing to all of those guys out there. It was what you did when you were involved in that scene. & then Corrosion Of Conformity put out their first record, which I also thought was fucking great. They played Hollywood’s Cathey De Grande club (a dive off of Selma Blvd. In Hollywood that I always went to) a few days after I got their record, & I missed it! After their tour, I struck up a pen pal relationship with Woody Weathermen & Ricky Hicks. In January of 1985, they came out west again to record their second record & I met them all formerly at the Sun Valley Sportsman’s Lodge in the San Fernando Valley, where the band was playing one of the first “crossover” shows ever. The funny thing that I remember is that the mostly heavy metal crowd kind of took ten steps back when C.O.C. played, not being exactly close minded, but not being sure how to react. It was pretty funny. They agreed to stay at my parent’s house that night & after pulling over to urinate in some strip mall in Simi Valley (me & then roadie Simon Bob Sinister), local Simi Valley police accosted us while urinating. Strangely enough, they let us go. Soon afterwards as the infamously graffitied & messy C.O.C. van pulled up to the house, Woody accidentally knocked over my parent’s concrete pillar mailbox. We propped it up with a few rocks. To this day, no one ever knew why it leaned so funny all of a sudden.
Six months later I found myself in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A that time, I was in this band at the time called Scared Straight, which was one of the dime a dozen suburban hardcore bands to come out of the suburbs of Los Angeles. We were as unoriginal as our name, & we were one of the several (un) lucky bands to become involved with & exploited by the infamous Doug Moody & his Mystic Records. I met some of the Scared Straight people when some of those guys were in an outfit that played at a local 1982 event, this “battle of the bands” kind of thing. They were called S.O.F. (Secure Our Future) and actually won the thing. Scott Radinsky and Dennis Jagard were in that band; soon they put together Scared Straight. IT really impressed me that these kids were doing this, and I met them and became pals with them. They liked me because I was a nice guy and they even like liked the cartoons I drew. Keep in mind that there was really nothing going on in Simi Valley, nothing fun or even exciting. It was inevitable that punk rock had to happen, even in a boring town such as Simi Valley. I ended up joining the band (Radinsky, now the vocalist, guitarists Jagard and Steve Carnan, bassist Eric Swift) and we ended up doing a whole lot in an eight-month period. Shows everywhere, meeting a lot of cool kids, having a lot of fun. We weren’t really a great band, or doing anything that great, but it was a whole lot of fun. I was friends with all of them, but I really hit it off with Scott and our roadie and friend (and eventual short lived Raleigh resident) Robb Demko. I loved those guys.
We also had set up a tour across the country with some friends of ours, a band called Ill Repute. It really says a lot about the time period back then when a bunch of suburban kids could successfully tour the country off of a really poorly recorded seven-inch record with NINE songs on it.. One show that really stands out was going to Lincoln, Nebraska. We ended up playing to this brick building by these train tracks in this industrial part of town & no less then two hundred kids packed the place, some of whom had traveled quite a distance to see the show. Not only that, but these kids knew every word off of the after mentioned seven inch. They, & we, went nuts. It was great. The enthusiasm for what we were all doing in that building was incredible, as far as the excitement and the naivety of the time period. It was one of those things I will always remember, & there is no way that it would happen now, it is just too different of a world. You can’t recreate that kind of thing.
But then both bands got all of our gear & personal belongings ripped off in Pittsburgh. End of the tour. I look back and realize that this was a pivotal moment in my life. I ended up going to Raleigh to hang out. I met everybody & had a good time. The COC folks introduced me to all of their friends who I thought initially talked kind of funny (those accents) and some of them even looked kind of funny as well (no names here). I stayed there for maybe three months & then went home. It was then that I decided to move to Raleigh. In early spring of next year, I flew out here & have been here ever since.

SOME ORIGINS

There had been a pre “hardcore” history of underground music in Raleigh (of course). Brave bands like th’ Cigeratz and Butchwax along with magazines such as Biohazard, Modern World and Blind Boys Gazette more or less paved the way for a new bunch of younger kids scattered throughout Raleigh and Charlotte to pick up the torch in the very early eighties. The pre- hardcore days of Raleigh and its music scene is a whole other book that could be written by those who were there. It is hard to say if the band members of soon to be formed early eighties bands like No Labels or Corrosion Of Conformity were influenced in any way by the history of what had come before. My guess could be that there might have been a little bit, but I think the inspiration probably fell elsewhere for the most part.

BILL HICKS: Between 1978 and 1980, New Wave was also hitting the Triangle with the likes of The Fabulous Knobs, Secret Service, the X-Teens and The Psuedes. Fanzines such as The Blind Boy Gazette, New Wave News & Modern World supported this early scene, where the new wavers and punk rockers frequently found they had to band together for support. There were a few places to play like the Free Advice, The Station, Mad Hatter or The Pier, but most clubs only let in the new music reluctantly, if at all. You may not be impressed that New Wave started sweeping N.C. in 1980, but the original Punk was quickly dying out, and as someone put it, "An outsider doesn't realize how much balls it takes to play punk or new wave in a city whose average git thinks anything that isn't Led Nugent or Ted Zeppelin is wimpy or faggy."

During this brave time period there was also a first version of an infamous party house on Turner Street right off of Hillsborough Street.

ETHAN SMITH: We finally got evicted from Turner Street by A.R. Perry, that was our landlord, and it was really funny because they were getting annoyed at these huge parties, and the previous Turner Street crowd, people like Eric, they had a party there, and Rick Cardner, Vic, and Sheldon Terry had stolen these huge cement lions from the Velvet Cloak over there. You know, they sit by the doors? They pulled up in front of there, and Rick distracted the doorman by talking about the free apples, which we always stole from them. And in the meantime, Shelton and maybe Eric lifted up the cement lion and threw it in the trunk of their car and then Rick said, “Oh, have a nice day!” and they all drove off with it. When they had the party, the final party at the previous incarnation of the house, there was a whole gaggle of hippies upstairs that I hung out with and smoked pot with, and right below them were the first generation of punk rockers. It was really funny. I’d be upstairs with those guys listening to Hawkwind or Traffic and we were greeted constantly by Shelton Terry banging on the door downstairs for “us fucking hippies to shut up” with an axe in his hand. And then in the meantime, I met Rick Cardner who lived downstairs, and he’d play me stuff like Public Image’s first record, and stuff like that. But they had this huge final party with like three hundred people, bands playing in the street; they made bonfires in the middle of the road. They spray painted dead figure outlines in the road. They just abused it, there was like melting asphalt in the road. And inside of the house-they had been evicted, by the way, inside of the house they had a five-foot bonfire going. People were picking up the three hundred pound cement lions and getting three or four people to heave them entirely though walls. They busted out every single fucking wall in that place.

But things weren’t necessarily over just this yet.

ETHAN SMITH: Then, the funny thing was…after this, Eric Eycke, whose name hadn’t been on the lease previously, came up and he and J.D. got a lease from the “new” Turner Street, three or four months later. And the place had cheap wood paneling covering all of the walls that had been disemboweled. They had come up as these good upright citizens and re-rented the place and we proceeded to take the second generation there, and we’d have three or four hundred people there with bands playing again! (Laughter)

BILL HICKS: In the spring of '82, the next batch of kids started forming their own bands. A band called Corrosion Of Conformity who, although somewhat inactive at the time, had been around since the days of Butchwax inspired many. Their style of music was labeled Hardcore, and they found themselves isolated to practicing at home, as there were no legitimate places that would have them. The earliest hardcore bands around Raleigh were Easy Pick-ups, Colcor (later, Missionary), No Rock Stars, The Accused and Buckwheat's Army (later, No Labels). A unique symbol of the "scene unity," was that bands No Labels, The Accused & C.O.C. shared several of the same members at the same time. Talk about a hectic schedule! In late '82, two scenesters decided to rent the old Blind Boy fanzine house to have shows in, so 14-A Turner Street had a hardcore party nearly every weekend of that fall.

J.D. HOLDER: 14-A Turner Street was a mere gleam in my eye eighteen months ago. Raleigh at that time was a void. Hardcoreially speaking, that is. 14-A was known to me by past association with the infamous Blind Boys, the happenings that went down there were enough to fill a book-but I’ll leave that to someone who cares. Midsummer of 1982, Eric and myself are looking for a band house capable of holding the walls in on max practice sessions as well as the occasional party. Turner Street was the desired location all along but the landlord complications denied us access to the closed property. After having no luck elsewhere in our search, providence smiled and I came face to face with A.R. Perry. Mucho mucho of the silver tongue convinced the dimwit that I was a responsible tenant. “Being from a good family, I can tell.”

1982 proved to be ground zero for a lot of what this book is about. There were plenty of young kids who grew up in the Raleigh who were attracted to punk rock and hardcore, and there had been many one off or short-lived bands that were thrown together before that summer. The Military and the Easy Pick Ups were a couple of these, and had all boasted people that would go on to do bigger things, some of who included Eric Eycke, Errol Engelbrecht, JD Holder, Ricky Hicks. In Charlotte, a mere three hours away, you had the Wogs and its successor Not the Wogs II, which had featured Mike Dean and Jon McClain. Also Charlotte featured the band No Rock Stars, who I am guessing were the biggest band in the area. Jeff Clayton (later of AntiSeen) was a big participant, as well as his buddy Scott Williams. There weren’t a whole lot of people into this kind of stuff.

ETHAN SMITH: I was born in Winston-Salem. Then I was moved to New Orleans, Providence Rhode Island, Nashville, & then to Raleigh. We moved here when I was seven. My first memory was, we had this monkey, a squirrel monkey and the whole Taylor family-Wayne, Walter, Lila, came running across the street under the premise that they wanted to see the monkey. That is how I met Wayne. We grew up there. Wayne & me ended up trading music. He liked the old Beatles, who I really fucking hated. I hate love songs. He liked the Steve Miller band a lot. (Laughter) Anyways, except for that, we liked the same things. We bought records from John Swain’s store the Record Hole, & I used to listen to the radio a lot. When I moved here, I had never heard rock music before. The only stuff I heard was country & western, except for Elvis Presley who I seemed to like a lot. But I saw a commercial of Elvis Presley on television this one time, & he was singing hymns for God, & I never have ever fucking believed in God. (Laughter) Then there was Johnny Cash, who sang a lot about death & jails, so I kind of liked that. (Laughter)

ERROL ENGELBRECHT: I am from Wisconsin, I moved here in 1982, right on my eighteenth birthday…how did I get into punk rock. I was living in Wisconsin and pretty much hanging out with the loser greaser crowd at the time. The big thing was to cruise around in a big car, drink Boone’s Farm and listen to Boston on an eight track. And that was pretty much what I did but I was also heavily into skateboarding, and one day at school, I saw this kid who had green hair. Everyone freaked out on him; he was the only kid in school who looked different. This was ’79 or ’80. He was really into skateboarding, and I found out that he had a half-pipe in his backyard that he built. So I started talking to him, and then I went over to his house and started skating, and he played punk rock afterwards, and we hung out, smoked pot. At first I hated it. I was like, “this is shit, blah blah blah” but then I kept going over there, there was something about it that I really liked. There was something I really admired about the kid, you know..everyone in the school hated him because he was different and I was like, “Wow, at least people notice him”. I mean, everyone pretty much hated me but I was pretty much invisible at the same point. No one would look at me or anything, I was just..there. And I started listening to the music all of the time, he played the Dead Boys, the Clash, and the Pistols..stuff like that. And I just thought that this was the shit. And I stopped hanging out with those other kids. I went to Milwaukee with him and I went to this new wave salon, and I had long hair at the time and I cut it into a Mohawk, and there was dye in it, my friend stuck a safety pin in my ear, and I went to school the next day and boy..everyone freaked! And I thought, “Wow. This is cool.” (Laughter) So that was pretty much the start of it.

ETHAN SMITH: I met Reed at a bus stop. I was in fifth grade. There was this kid there who was new who looked a hell of a lot like that kid Oliver from the “Brady Bunch”. So the next day I was talking to Wayne-the Taylor’s were Catholics & went to catholic school, and I got Wayne to skip school, which was no big deal. So we went to meet the kid who looked like Oliver. We teased Reed relentlessly about looking like Oliver & he got kind of mad. Anyways, we all started hanging out with each other a lot. (laughter)

ERROL ENGELBRECHT: I was an outcast in the scene here. In school even, a lot of those guys wouldn’t talk to me because they were still sort of hanging out with their more conservative preppie friends and you know..being seen with me would have been guilt by association. I wasn’t a bad person. I had my moments, I think everyone had. I have done some pretty shitty things that I am not proud of but I think everyone has. I was really into the music and I thought it was funny that at the time I was the only person who looked punk rock and I thought that I was the only person who had the balls enough to do it. They had their own little group and they had their own rules that they kind of followed, and they all went by that. Even if they are being a “non conformist” they were still conforming. That attitude was always there, but I just said fuck them. If they don’t like me solely because of the way that I look, then they are no better then the preppies that didn’t like me because of the way that I looked.

RICHARD BUTNER: I was born in Winston-Salem (two hours west of Raleigh) and lived there until coming to Raleigh in 1981 to go to NC State.  My family didn't have a lot of money so I didn't have a stereo or very many records.  I remember
reading one of the first Time or Newsweek articles about punk (so, I must've been 12 or maybe 13) and thinking it sounded really dumb, because of course the article just concentrated on safety-pin fashion and not on the music or the ideas.
The thing that really got me into punk was Devo.  I loved them from the first moment I saw them.  And they were very much associated with all things punk and new wave, at least in Winston-Salem if not in the big city.  So, I quickly changed my mind about punk, too.

ETHAN SMITH: Woody came along in junior high. I hated school, so I used to sit outside and listen to music on a tape player. So one day I was sitting out there listening to “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath and Woody came up to me & started talking to me, like “hey! You like Black Sabbath? That’s cool.” He looked pretty much the same except he had shorter hair. So I started to get to know Woody pretty well from that, but he lived a couple of miles away so we’d hang out at school.

ERROL ENGELBRECHT: My parents moved here, my stepfather was a chiropractor and wanted to open up a practice down here. I really had no choice. At that point I had the Sid Vicious look, had a leather jacket. It took a few months to find out what was going on down here. The very first night I moved here I just turned eighteen, and the drinking age was still eighteen down here and the Romantics were playing at the Pier. I thought, what the hell I’ll go down there. I wanted to see if there was anything interesting going on down here. And I remember that there was a really long line, I just walked by and everyone was like (makes face of shock) disbelief. Like, “Wow! That is a real punk rocker!” I went into the show and I think I just scared the hell out of everybody. But apparently Ricky Hicks was there and his story that he told me was that he saw me there and he wanted to talk to me, but he was afraid that I was going to spit on him, so he didn’t.

ETHAN SMITH: Lee Johnson went up to those old Wilson Center D.C. shows a lot, which is where Minor Threat and six other Dischord bands would play, and I liked the speed of all of that stuff, so I would give Lee fifty bucks and would say, “hey, buy me some records”. So I got all of those, & I would start going to Wilson Center shows with Lee & some other people. Somewhere along the way I transferred that stuff to Wayne, Reed and Woody, who all liked it a lot. Eric Eycke showed Reed how to play drums, & then that turned into what would be C.O.C. and No Labels a few months later. Suddenly Reed played drums a hell of a lot better then Eric. Around the same period, Black Flag did their first tour down here, a few weeks before “Damaged” came out.

RICHARD BUTNER: The hardcore scene didn't really exist until a year later, though.  Summer of '82 (which I spent back in Winston-Salem) was when bands formed, folks moved up from Charlotte, all the kids who had discovered Minor Threat and Black Flag got to know each other, and the hardcore scene coalesced. I really liked No Labels (but then again, I was also friends with Ricky Hicks) as far as the lyrics and the riffs went.  Of course, there was a lot of uniformity at the time, so if you liked one hardcore band then you were bound to find all of the others worth listening to. 

ETHAN SMITH: Ricky appeared..I’m not sure where he came from, but he went to different schools and stuff. Ricky was funny because he was kind of serious about things, he thought the straight edge thing was a really good thing, he was into it. I remember one day talking to Wayne, Reed and Woody and suddenly they were playing with this guy Ricky who was a good guitar player and a real cool guy.

RICKY HICKS (1983): No Labels started in Feb of 1982. We were looking for fun and there were quite a few people in Raleigh that like hardcore-but no bands to speak of. By August we had established a permanent lineup and started to write our own songs. We all like music other then hardcore however it is the energy and truthfulness of the music that we are attracted to-not the label. At this point, it is mainly hardcore that we play.

I always thought that No Labels was sort of Ricky’s baby. He formed the band.

RICKY HICKS (1983): The band’s purpose or intent: Having fun-us and the audience-is the main intent but we can’t help but inject our personal opinions and politics within our songs. Is it too bad that there are so many bands that don’t take a stance on anything in their music or lyrics. If you are serving something that tastes good, why not add some nutrition to it? One important thing to say about us and every other band is that what we say is an opinion-no more or no less-the important part about what we say is the questions or thoughts that we arouse-not the answers. Those are for you to find.

No Labels started due to Ricky and Reed starting to play together. They had a different five-piece lineup and were called NEW REICH for a little while. After a few lineup shuffles in the summer of 1982, the lineup finalized with Wayne Taylor (“Wayne Kerr”) as the new singer, and Woody Weathermen playing bass.


NO LABELS INTERVIEW IN MRR ISSUE 5. Matt Matthews did this with interjections by Errol Engelbrecht.

MRR: What first got you interested in hardcore, the music, the lyrics, or what?
Reed: It was pretty much a gradual thing. From heavy metal to faster stuff. Experimental stuff like HAWKWIND, JOY DIVISION, PIL, early punk, the STOOGES, then into hardcore.
Ricky: I found myself at a STIMULATORS show. I liked the energy and excitement; the fact that people were dancing, a close-knit group of people. They were exciting on stage, they weren’t poseurs. Early punk, I listened to that, the PISTOLS.
Woody: I was in a heavy metal band, I liked fast metal.
Ricky: You don’t have a heavy metal mentality.
Woody: It was pretty fast for me. One day I was listening to heavy metal, the next hardcore. I heard a tape with BLACK FLAG and GBH. GBH is just fast heavy metal.
Reed: BLACK FLAG is just fast heavy metal.
Woody: I didn’t know the lyrics, I just listened to the music.
Wayne: The first hardcore band I listened to was SAXON! Lou Reed was my dad.
Ricky: (to Wayne) You used to come to the first NO LABELS practices..
Wayne: I really got into it, I had studs on my dick.
MRR: How do you separate the words from the music?
Wayne: With a mixing board.
Ricky: They compliment each other.
Wayne: Wait a minute, we are getting too serious.
Ricky: Live, it is for having a good time. You don’t get much across at a live show.


Wayne: Yeah, especially when I sing.
MRR: The way I see it, the intensity of the music matches the intensity of the lyrics.
Ricky: I agree.
Wayne: Wait a minute; if I say something serious, can we put it under Ricky’s name? It is like food. You can eat good tasting food with no nutrition and you can eat good tasting food that has nutrition. Hardcore is like good tasting nutritious food.
MRR: Do you find yourself writing lyrics and music similar to other bands?
Ricky: I’d like to think that our band is pretty much original. The fact that a lot of bands sing about the same stuff and sound about the same..
Wayne: It’s not for me, man.
Ricky: It’s not for me either, but it is pretty important that they are all concerned.
MRR: How do you feel about posers?
Ricky: In some areas punk is accepted and if you are not punk, you are not accepted. People try to fit what somebody else’s definition of what punk is rather then doing it their own way.
Woody: It seems to me that people do it for shock value, but it winds up that if you have so many people dressing up the same way, it is not going to be shocking anymore. The purpose is defeated.
Ricky: Anti-fashion becomes fashionable.
MRR: Like last night at the Black Flag show (at the 9.30 club in D.C.), I heard a lot of comments about Henry wearing nothing but gym shorts. That matters to a lot of people.
Wayne: Next time we go to D.C. everyone will be wearing gym shorts.
Ricky: It’s unfortunate, but that is the way it is.
MRR: What about the compilation?
Ricky: Hopefully NO LABELS will be on the Master Tape Volume Two.
MRR: What about tension between Raleigh and D.C.?
Woody: Let Reed talk about the song “harDCore”.
Reed: I went up to D.C. to see the U.K. SUBS and I had long hair and I tried to talk to people, to meet people because I was interested and they wouldn’t even talk to me. I guess it was because I wasn’t “cool”. That pissed me off. It was a pretty narrow-minded attitude, so I wrote about territorial morons.
Ricky: I think what the song deals with are the band aspects of it, not the whole scene. We just know about the D.C. scene because it is the closest big scene. I am sure that L.A. or New York has the same problem. I think everybody deserves a chance. Somebody didn’t give Reed a chance.
Wayne: That is why we cut our hair, so that we could be accepted when we went up to D.C.
Ricky: There are good things. I have a lot of good friends there and some of my favorite bands come from D.C…. so, it’s not all bad.
Wayne: Let’s quit. I’m quitting.

During the summer period of 1982, No Label’s Reed & Woody teamed up with two kids fresh from the Charlotte NC area, Mike Dean and Benji Sheldon. The new quartet went through short-lived dumb names like Misguided, Buckwheat’s Army, 7-Up and the Accused before settling on the name Corrosion Of Conformity in the fall. The original COC with Benji behind the mike was quite good, “a good fit”, as Ricky Hicks had told me. Meanwhile, Eric Eycke and J.D. Holder make a demo of some of the duo’s music called Colcor.
Unlike some of the short lived ensembles of the past, these new bands actually lasted longer then a month, or one show. Suddenly there is a “scene” for hardcore punk rock in Raleigh.

MIKE DEAN: I ran into these dudes that totally changed my life. This black guy had this total Jimi Hendrix outfit, which was kind of weird for North Carolina in 1981. He saw me looking at basses and said 'You play bass, man?', and I said, 'I'm trying to.' He said, 'Why don't you come jam with us, man?', and I said, 'because I'm not any good." They turned me on to all this weird jazz like James 'blood' Olmer, and all this funk. They said, 'Yeah, you're right. You can't really play, but you're a good guy. Why don't you take this bass cabinet and head with you? Our old bass player's in jail, and he probably stole this, so we don't want this hanging around but if you want to take it, you can have it.' He gave me a 1 15" bass cabinet and a custom head. I'd see them around sometimes and they were really weird, like, they kind of went the Afro centric trip and didn't want to talk to me, but they hooked me up with a starter rig.

WOODY WEATHERMEN: Seeing Black Flag changed my life! My old man had to take me...it was this place called the Pier...you had to be 18 to get in because that was the drinking age back then...I was probably 15 or 16, Greg Ginn`s amp blew up in the middle of the show...these roadies came out with soldering guns and started working on it and fixed it and they kept on playing...I was like damn that is some pretty cool shit...Black Flag was the real shit...they were the real deal.

BILL HICKS: The No Core cassette compilation was released in Oct. '82 featuring No Rock Stars, Colcor, No Labels & Corrosion Of Conformity and should be noted as the first hardcore/punk compilation in the state.

ETHAN SMITH: J.D. Holder was the main one who organized it (the No Core tape), & then Reed had a very fair amount of input. No Rock Stars were on it; they were people that Mike Dean and Benji had known. Oh, this is a great story: Eric & J.D. had a skate ramp in their front yard. On the inside of the tape it shows a picture of Eric sitting there. Eric and J.D. started to really hate each other a lot but it started when Eric accidentally hung J.D. in J.D.’s picture. (laughter) Eric was taking that picture and it was like, “Man, you’re doing a really good job! That’s really life-like!” and he walked up to him and looked at him and saw that the chair had accidentally slipped out from beneath him. The noose had tightened and his face started to turn blue and there was froth coming from his mouth, he nearly suffocated. He was intensely pissed off at Eric for a really long time. J.D. had nerve damage in his face for a few months after that.


THE VERY SHORT LIVED NORTH CAROLINA VERSUS WASHINGTON D.C. PROBLEM.

In the very early eighties with the dawning of hardcore, a lot of Raleigh kids would make the trek up to Washington D.C. to see shows & see what it was all about. There was a certain amount of snobbery & elitism to be found on these trips. Nobody up there seemed to be very interested in getting to know these out of towners. Ethan Smith told me that besides Lee Johnson, nobody in D.C., all of whom who looked “very punk rock”, would talk to anybody except Errol, who did look “punk rock”. The resulting attitudes involved would soon show up in numerous songs from N.C. bands like Colcor, No Labels & C.O.C., all of which would end up on the “No Core” tape compilation. Although this situation had been blown out of proportion, a lot of the Raleigh kids seemed to be amazed at the contradictions involved in trying to “fit in” into a situation where the idea had been not having to worry about “fitting in”. By rejecting the self appointed cool of a few D.C. kids, the N.C. kids were, on one level, a little bit ahead of the game attitude wise. What was going on seemed so small & secret, that if you were into checking things out, as long as you weren’t a redneck or frat boy, you were welcomed. After a certain period of time, there would be no weird feelings anymore & of course not everyone in D.C. or N.C. had problems with each other, just a select few situations that were made into songs, is all.

RICKY HICKS (1983): On Raleigh and D.C.: Because of Raleigh’s small size, a relatively small scene and narrow minded club owners, very few national bands make it to the area. No Labels and others have relied on D.C. as a place to go and see shows. They have some of the best bands anywhere. This is important because the song “hardcore” on the North Carolina cassette compilation No Core has seemed to cause a lot of tension between NC and DC. It is unnecessary and misfortunate. We would like to explain that we personally think DC as a whole has a great scene with good attitudes and good people, but within any scene because of its size, one is going to find problems. We cite DC in the song because we are familiar with the place. Its intention is not to breed ill feelings, but to serve as constructive criticism from an outside view stressing the distinction between territorialism and localism, and the stupidity of the hypocrisies people commit just to be “accepted” in the “scene”.

MINOR THREAT in NC. Interview segment in NEW BREED issue 2.

New Breed: What do you think about all of the kids you have met down here so far?
Ian: I haven’t met them all, most seem really cool. There seems to be a lot of bad feelings up in Raleigh as far as animosity towards D.C.
New Breed: That is pretty weird, the Raleigh bands were supposed to play with us last Saturday but we don’t understand why they write all of these anti D.C. songs and then all of a sudden when Minor Threat comes down here to play, who is first in line to play with you.
Lyle: Well, one reason I think why they wanted to play with us was to get a chance to say it directly to the people that are from D.C. They did their “harDCore” song with the “In My Eyes” opening-so be it-that’s their prerogative.
New Breed: I don’t think that the song “harDCore” is directly pointed at you.
Ian: I know, but when you start a song with “In My Eyes” and you sing a song about “what an asshole you are for beating me up”, what are people going to think?

But like anything else based on something that was kind of silly to begin with, it would prove to be kind of hard not to resist poking fun a little bit, as this excerpt from an early 1984 C.O.C. interview in Lee Johnson’s Southern Lifestyle fanzine will attest to:

Lee: How did your debut appearance in D.C. go over?
Woody: We had a good reaction. Nobody booed us. Nobody really got into it, though. I expected people to yell things at No Labels. It’s not really a big deal; I think they could care less about it.
Mike Carter: Ian was blown away!
Eric: People danced to the other bands, but with C.O.C. & No Labels, everybody just stood around. After the infamous No Labels, who crack on D.C., finished each song, everybody would look at Ian. If he started clapping, they’d start clapping.
Woody: It wasn’t everybody.
Mike Dean: I know I was.
Mike Carter: I heard Tesco Vee was running around saying, “play HarDCore”
Eric: Anybody who writes songs about dicks has problems.

ETHAN SMITH: We’d go to shows, & I never looked any different from how I look now. Jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel shirt or whatever. I never had a shaved head. We’d go up there and they seemed to me like they were..pretty dumb. I mean, it just seemed like these people mistook me for a redneck or something not punk rock, and very often you’d find things like when people were dancing, they’d go out of their way to intentionally run a shoulder into you or that kind of crap like that. The funniest story is when we went up there to see the U.K. Subs, and Lee had kind of a look going on, and then Errol, who had appeared in high school was very punk rock looking, very nice guy though. Leather and studs, the Discharge look. The rest of us didn’t look punk rock, and it was the funniest thing when people would go up to Errol and ask him where he was from and being pretty accepting. & then Errol would say, “Oh, these are my friends” and those guys would be like..it didn’t seem like they didn’t feel that there was any common ground for relations. Anyways, a lot of those got transferred into the anti D.C. thing. (laughter) I mean, there came a point when Reed and Wayne and Woody and everyone, a cotangent of people started to shave their heads which was kind of more making fun of it more then anything else. And when they arrived in D.C. after that point there were no communication problems. But when they had hair, it was…kind of a problem. (Laughter) I liked a lot of the D.C. bands and I met some of those people and they are really nice. So it was nothing personal.

THE BAD BRAINS DILEMMA

Around this time period, all of the youngsters were discovering the Bad Brains, who actually lived in the weird little town called Lizard Lick, North Carolina for a little while. The band blew everyone away. Just like virtually anyone else that would talk about the enormous impact the early Bad Brains had, the kids in North Carolina thought pretty much the same thing. In fact, it was the Bad Brains who probably had the biggest impact on most of the kids. They played down south quite a bit and even lived in North Carolina for a spell. Of course, dealing with the band and their strange attitudes was a whole other story.

ETHAN SMITH: The best Bad Brains story is all of the stories. Any contact with them was fucking ridiculous. I went out to where they lived in Wendell. A joint was being passed around to one of the Johnson sisters and then it was handed to one of the Bad Brains people. I can’t remember if it was H.R. or Gary or Doctor Know or whoever. They refused to smoke pot after the female..uh..smoked some. This was due to-as they put it, “their religious beliefs”. We couldn’t believe it. It was like, “fine. more for me.” (Laughter) The Bad Brains would play somewhere, and something would always happen. The redneck owner chased H.R. out of the Big Bad Wolf when they played there with a baseball bat. There were words exchanged like “Redneck” and “Nigger”, blah blah blah. Then fifteen minutes later, H.R. ran through again, still being chased by the redneck owner. It was very funny. I saw the Bad Brains like two dozen times before that ROIR tape came out & they were probably the greatest band in the world. They were incredible to see and it was always kind of a dilemma going to see them because I disliked their personalities so much. I thought their shows were great but the “jah” crap I always thought was a put on. I hope I don’t get beat up if I ever see these people again. (Laughter)

ERROL ENGELBRECHT: I personally never had any dealings with the Bad Brains. Being a man I guess made it easier but if you were a woman though-apparently from what I had heard people had problems with them because they didn’t seem to care for females too much. I just liked to see them play and didn’t really get too much into the politics involving their band, didn’t want to sit there and start arguing with them.



Towards the end of 1982, a few more people moved to Raleigh. Jon McClain, another Charlotte resident, moved to Raleigh. Jon had played with various Charlotte folks, including Mike Dean. Jon was a rather large smiley guy who played drums very well.

ETHAN SMITH: We would raid the Wonder Bread factory, which was around the corner from Turner St. and we’d steal loafs of bread and Twinkies and stuff like that. We’d start throwing them into CP&L who were across the street from us cause we had way too much of them. One day Eric said that a friend of his named Jon was going to be staying with us for awhile. I walked into the room and there is like this big black guy sitting in the room with a huge bong amongst all of this pot smoke, a really jubilant kind of guy going, “Hey! How are you doing? My name is Jon!” and there was this three-foot tall pile of Twinkies in front of him.

Jon eventually joined up with guitarist Gary Hess & bassist Jeb Bishop to play in the band Stillborn Christians. Jeb & Gary had a previous band that had played at the Pier. Attracted to hardcore, they soon re-tooled their band, changed the name, & scared away their first drummer after awhile before Jon (who was playing with JD in the short lived trio Missionary) showed up. The Stillborn Christians were a lot more skilled at playing then some of the other bands. I have been told that most everybody that saw them thought they were incredible.

Press blurb for No Core “Why Are We Here?” single compilation release:

Jeb Bishop and Gary Hess, the nucleus of the Stillborn Christians, are both classically trained musicians (trombone, Northwestern Univ. and classical jazz guitar, respectively.). Why they want to play punk rock is anyone’s guess, but just dig these social-psycho-analytic lyrics and alien chords, it speaks for itself. These guys have broken up for now, but experimentation with lineup, arrangements and instruments, as well as life itself, prompts interest in the future of this unique trio.

ETHAN SMITH: Jon appeared, and Gary and Jeb were playing shows at the Pier. They had developed “new wave night” at that point, and they realized that they could get people from this punk rock thing to come in there. A lot of cool bands had come through there, like X and Iggy Pop. The Stillborn Christians were playing there; I think they had a different drummer. Then Jon McClain took over on the drums and they were a lot better. They were really fucking good. I always thought Jeb had a really good Jello Biafra voice. I don’t know if anybody else thought that.

STILLBORN CHRISTIANS INTERVIEW IN SOUTHERN LIFESTYLE ISSUE NUMBER FOUR, EARLY 1983:

Jeb: Nuisance was our first rock band situation. I didn’t start playing bass until last summer. Before that I was into classical music and Gary was into jazz and we wanted to play jazz with our old drummer John. Then we decided we wanted to play rock music so we started writing these songs.
Gary: We heard the Circle Jerks.
Jeb: That was the first time that we ever heard any hardcore, at the time we were shocked by it. I had never heard anything like it. I bought the “No Core” tape because I wanted to hear more.
SL: Do you think that hard music has influenced your writing?
Gary: Definitely. We are not trying to copy it, though.
Jeb: We’ve always wanted to do stuff that sounded weird, we are always changing but I think right now we want to be pretty hardcore.
Gary: We get really disappointed if people don’t dance.
SL: Were people dancing at the Pier?
Jeb: Yeah, that was different. We went and took John to hear some hardcore and we were really disappointed that MDC didn’t show up. John didn’t really like it because it was the first time that he had ever seen it. We asked Benji and Woody if we could play, and they said we could so we played three songs. I thought we sucked.
SL: Weren’t you pretty well accepted?
Jeb: Yeah. We were surprised because we did two of these songs that we didn’t think of as our hardcore songs but people seemed to really like them. For a long time we thought that we didn’t want to be a hardcore band, that wasn’t the crowd that we wanted to appeal to.
Gary: But then we met all of the people and decided that we did.
Jeb: It was great when we played at the North Street party at Benji’s house, and all of the people were thrashing around. That was really exciting.
SL: Your old band recorded a demo at JAG.
Jeb: Yeah. I listened to it today and I was really embarrassed by it. I am not embarrassed that we had done it but our ideas have just changed so much since then. I never listened to much rock since this last summer so my tastes have been changing since we started to get serious about playing. I don’t have a lot of hardcore to listen to so I listen to a lot of experimental stuff like PIL, GANG OF FOUR and stuff like that.
SL: What do you plan to do with your music?
Jeb: We want to get back into a studio if we can get the money together, I think that we are really excited now about what we are doing a lot more then we ever were in the past, we have been writing a lot.
SL: Do you feel like you are obtaining new attitudes?
Gary: We are trying to not just fall in line. It has made both of us think.
Jeb: We had a lot of those views before. We’re not advertising the overthrow of the government or anything. We aren’t hardcore type people in a lot of ways.
SL: What is a hardcore type person?
Jeb: Well, some people say that you are not for real if you don’t shave your head. But I think it is good to have a lot of diverse ability instead of a lot of people doing the same thing. One of the great things about it is not having to conform. There is a fine line between jumping on a bandwagon and doing what you want to do.
Gary: My favorite word is “pretentious”.
Jeb: Yeah, we’re always worried about being pretentious.

RICHARD BUTNER: Almost immediately, though, there were really interesting bands who (and this is clichéd but true) found the energy in hardcore but moved beyond the rigid formal requirements.  Here I'm thinking of bands like Stillborn Christians--Jeb and Gary had been in the new wave band Nuisance together, but after getting hip to hardcore they formed Stillborn Christians.  It wasn't just that they were technically skilled (which they were, unlike most of the folks cranking out the barre chords back then) but that they
could integrate hardcore energy with a broader sonic palette. You also had interesting trickster bands like Etheroid and the Sacred Cows (instigated by Rob Stewart, fronted by Ethan).  I used to play in that ad hoc assemblage, which was guaranteed to piss off or at least annoy anyone in the crowd who just wanted to see shirtless guys counting off and yelling, "GO!!!!!!!" all night.


Around the end of 1982 or so, original Corrosion Of Conformity vocalist Benji was out, & for a very short time Robert Stewart became the second singer. Robert and his younger brother Jeff had been part of things and had gone to high school with most of the Raleigh kids. Robert was a smartass kid that never conformed to the punk rock look that most people had, and he also sported a band aid on the bridge of his nose for several years. Just as soon as that happened, Eric Eycke replaced him. C.O.C. started to write virtually a whole new set of music which was much more influenced by some of the band member’s heavy metal roots. No Labels existed side by side with COC, as both bands shared Reed & Woody. No Labels apparently was looked at as the more exciting band at the time. They played out numerously & soon recorded the infamous “Jane Doe” demo. The Stillborn Christians existed until some time later on in 1983 when the band disbands due to Jon deciding that he wanted to move to Los Angeles. It is a shame that there isn’t a real document of the band. Nearby in Chapel Hill, a small scene is also starting up that features the A Team as the main band and then a little while later, A Number Of Things. Also in 1983 Ricky Hicks decides to quit No Labels and the band soon disbands. Turner Street soon ends, and newer bands like Johnny Quest and Oral Fixation also show up. In nearby Statesville, Bloodmobile forms and ends up being included in the 1983 e.p. “Why Are We Here?” which also includes the Stillborn Christians, No Labels and Corrosion Of Conformity. Out of town bands also start to show up more frequently. A place called the Culture Club starts to have shows for a little while, and of course most other club owners in town still frown upon hardcore and these bands, making ongoing events and shows a constant battle, save for PC Good times, a place on Hillsborough Street that will later change its name to the Brewery. Sunday matinees were held there repeatedly throughout this era.