I'm sure you've all met old farts who tell you, "ah that's not how I remember it being," when they see or hear something celebrating a time they lived through. The problem for people like me who talk like that was there's never been any proof the eighties weren't all Duran Duran and bad synthesizer music sung by guys with hair hanging down in their eyes and posh public school accents.
But now our heart's pain can be eased and we can stand up proudly and exclaim, "You see, this is what it was like, this is what I was doing on Friday and Saturday nights through the early eighties." The good folk at MVD Video have released a disc that is sure to have you caught between happy reminiscence and amazement you came through the times unscathed and your hearing relatively intact.
Bad Brains Live At CBGB 1982 won't make you all warm and fuzzy inside from sentimental nostalgia but it will make you feel like you can trust your memories again as compared to what corporate music wants people to think was happening in the eighties. Of course I doubt if Bad Brains ever intended to be warm and fuzzy or were considered music by the Industry. They would have been more apt to cause the machine to blow a gasket than be a cog in the smooth running of its operation.
First of all, who'd ever heard of a thrash hardcore punk band made up of four Rastafarians? Then again who'd ever heard of a thrash hardcore band that would play a reggae tune extolling the virtues of Jah every fourth or fifth song, then go right back into speed rock that makes Anthrax look like a stroll in the park? Even the music industry isn't that tolerant of people's drug habits and any A & R guy walking into corporate headquarters trying to sell his bosses on a band with that description would have been shown the door as being dangerously unstable.
Which was the point after all. You were peeled back to raw emotion at one of those concerts. So much raw energy confined in a small bar area makes it pretty damn hard to think rationally. If you had spent three nights, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day crammed into CBGBs for a hard core festival headlined by the Bad Brains you'd probably end up looking seriously fucked up, down, over, and sideways.
Not the best way to show up at a big shinny glass and metal, office building where you're trying to scale the ladder of corporate music America. Especially back in the early eighties when the first whiffs of what it meant to be under the thumb of Ronald and Nancy was just making itself felt. There was no room in Fortress America for that kind of behaviour anymore.
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