Recreate The World

Revolution Summer is best known as the moment Washington D.C. centered political activism and personal expression in hardcore. But it was also an era when bands reclaimed the punk joy in being weird.

Rites of Spring and Revolution Summer, 1985. Washington, D.C.

I.

Back in 1991, K Records issued a four-song 7-inch from a band called Brief Weeds. There was literally no information about the band on the sleeve—no sense of who they were, where they came from, or even what the music inside might sound like. The cover art was simply a harsh sketch of a shirtless man. Not even the band’s name could be bothered to be featured in anything but the most nondescript of stock Microsoft Word fonts. A second Brief Weeds 7-inch followed in 1993, but for the most part, this record, too, kept the band’s enigma intact.

There is nothing particularly distinguishable about these records other than to say that Brief Weeds were primarily a psychedelic pop band—not unlike Syd Barrett or the Zombies or the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society era. They also appeared to be gently curious about dub music. (“The River Song” indulges in this interest over four minutes of drums drenched in reverb and what seems to be a field recording of seagulls.) Listen carefully to a song like “Hands of Love,” and it’s possible you might even catch their singer slip into a faintly English accent, but that’s really the only perceptible clue of their origin. It’s almost as if Brief Weeds were a band that was only meant to be lost, not found.

The reality of the Brief Weeds story, however, is more fascinating than any of this might suggest. At the time that these recordings were made, three of the four members involved—Guy Picciotto, Eddie Janney, and Brendan Canty—were better known as Rites of Spring. (Not to be outshined, fourth member Michael Hampton played in The Faith and Embrace.) And as most of us know, Rites of Spring are regularly credited with being a bellwether for both the mythical Revolution Summer in Washington D.C. and for what later became known as (much to everyone’s disdain) “emo.” So where did their simultaneous impulse to make music like this come from?

There have been dozens of books written about these two movements since then, and by and large, their song remains the same: A surge of violence and property destruction at hardcore shows in Washington D.C. in 1984 leads to multiple punk bans at venues across the city. A brief editorial for Issue 7 of Metrozine in 1985, penned by Government Issue’s John Stabb, describes the state of the local scene as having “800 people at shows [with] usually 600 of them [being] morons,” before asking, “Do you want a football game or a show?” A new wave of bands form in this environment—with Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Beefeater often seen at the forefront—and these groups begin actively discouraging violence at shows, not only with words, but through the development of a new hardcore musical movement that was considered more melodic, more engaged with local and global politics, and somewhat dubiously, more “emotional.” A special feature in Thrasher that covered the scene dubbed some of it “emo-core,” and so it was that history conceded the movement to this narrative.

I’m not saying that none of this is true. But I do believe that, as with most matters of historical significance, it’s easy to be so reductive that some of the more glaringly obvious details can go overlooked. Because in the long list of the things that we talk about when we talk about Revolution Summer, we somehow rarely ever articulate the fact that this was also an era where bands got unapologetically weird.

“You have to understand how miserable the general climate at punk shows was at this time,” explained longtime Dischord Records employee and Severin frontperson Alec Bourgeois in a 2008 interview. “Shows that had previously featured a diverse community of punks, rastas, freaks, queers and, yes, thugs—mostly looking out for one another—had degenerated into huge mosh pits of mostly ex-jocks and suburban skinheads.”

In other words, Revolution Summer was also an attempt to reconnect with our history of being stubborn outcasts. When the members of Rites of Spring hung out in their basement making four-track cassette tapes in the guise of a psych-pop band called Brief Weeds, whether in jest or not, it was only one part of a much bigger project to follow their most peculiar instincts—without inhibition. It came from the same place that led them to make hand-painted set lists or to scatter the stage with flowers at their shows. Being “punk” could mean a lot of things in 1985, but being a freak operated outside of that ambiguity. “From thirteen [years old] on,” Picciotto says in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, “there wasn’t a single fucking thing that existed that I didn’t want to undercut or question in some way.”

This is the point that none of the punk history books ever really make: Rites of Spring and the bands of Revolution Summer were not “being emo.” They were finding the joy in being weird again.

Craig Wedren, live with Shudder to Think. Chameleon Club. Lancaster, PA. Early 1990s. Photo by Tom Stevens.

II.

If punk is, by definition, a culture designed to exist on the fringes of the mainstream, then it only makes sense that the ways in which we express our differences—the things that mark us as strange—must evolve alongside the ever-evolving norms that exist in society. Allowing punk and hardcore to be codified into any one specific sound or style runs the risk of petrifying conventions that discourage experimentation and inquiry; it privileges the misguided idea of hardcore as an aesthetic form over its function as a vessel to be free. The position of Revolution Summer, then, was in its name: We are not here to preserve hardcore precedents, they essentially declared. We are here to revolt.

Few bands took this idea to heart more than Shudder to Think. Formed in 1986 from the remains of a more traditional hardcore band called Stüge, the band took its curious shape quickly upon finding its vocalist in Craig Wedren—a recent transplant to Washington D.C. whose own penchant for “freakishness” caused even Ian MacKaye to describe him as someone who “just suddenly appeared wearing a fucking sweater and his belly sticking out. We were like, ‘What, who is this guy?’” MacKaye, of course, would later bring Shudder to Think into the Dischord Records fold, where Wedren would go on to thrive as the singer for one of hardcore’s “weirdest” bands. But it’s a legacy that, he says, couldn’t have happened without that pivotal inflection point in 1985.

“I got to D.C. right at the end of what has come to be known as Revolution Summer,” Wedren tells me, for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “I was living in Cleveland, but I was already listening to Minor Threat and for sure Bad Brains, maybe Government Issue. And then I got there and I immediately got the Rites of Spring record, and honestly, that record blew the doors wide open for me and for anybody else with an exploratory mindset. It was just gorgeous and free. There was something in the water in 1985 and 1986. It was a really great time to be coming up with new ideas and throwing them against the wall. So by the time I tried out for Shudder to Think, I think I just sort of felt like, ‘Whoa. This isn’t like other things. And I like things that aren’t like other things.’ I had already learned that in Cleveland because… There were no rules in Cleveland because there were just no people. You couldn’t get a minion together of any one style. If you were a freak, you would hang out with the freaks, and everyone would bring in their freaky shit.” He laughs, then adds, “It was like first-wave L.A. punk or first-wave CBGBs, where it was just weirdos, homos, punks, and artists—and you just sort of bumped into each other and tried to come up with something new.”

With Shudder’s landmark album Pony Express Record reaching its 30th anniversary this month, it strikes me as especially necessary to appreciate the way this album still feels so defiantly idiosyncratic. It’s a collection of songs that pays no mind to genre conventions or any of punk’s so-called sacred totems, and as a result, it remains one of the most enduring and original records ever to come from our scene. Pony Express Record is all revolt and no conservatism. It’s an extraordinary freak flag, flying high.

III.

Insofar as we are still somewhat hesitant to embrace a hardcore scene where the rules truly are that there are no rules, the way we talk about Revolution Summer today is telling: Rites of Spring and Embrace continue to get endlessly namechecked, largely in part because—even though the records they made were considered unusual for the hardcore scene at the time—their extended influence has made it so that neither band is particularly unpalatable to a modern hardcore ear. Beefeater, on the other hand, are often relegated to the sidelines of any mainstream conversation about Revolution Summer, and I suspect this has something to do with just how far they were willing to go in their mission to reconnect with hardcore’s anti-“normal” beginnings—and how much that still causes discomfort for some.

“Beefeater, throughout its existence, listened to pretty much anything,” explained the late Fred “Freak” Smith, whose nickname tells you everything you need to know. “We took from this and that and just blended it into something. We fucking pulled from anything and everything. Nothing was off limits. That is what made it cool. That is what kept things fresh. Yes, we were a hardcore band, in essence, but we had a lot more shit to experiment with, and we made damn sure we did. No restrictions.”

Beefeater’s unwillingness to capitulate to hardcore conservatism is as important a part of the Revolution Summer ethos as anything else, and I’d argue that their inclination to view hardcore musical expression as a site for the liberation of personal expression is the only way we can keep from fetishizing any one particular form of hardcore that will inevitably cease to serve its function. Brief Weeds also understood this. So did Shudder to Think.

And so did Positive Force D.C. cofounder Mark Andersen, whose Dance of Days is one of the most definitive books ever compiled about the Washington, D.C. punk scene. In an editorial for the Washington Post written to commemorate 30 years of Revolution Summer in 2015, Andersen offers what I believe to be the most complete assessment of this moment’s long-term impact, as well as the insight to use its lessons to create a culture that will remain relevant for generations to come.

“Revolution Summer meant many different things to many different people,” he contends, “but the power of the idea lay in its openness, its sense of possibility, and its willingness to challenge individual punks and the world. What it communicated then—as it does right now—is the utter urgency to stand, feel, and create in each new, unfolding moment. In this, it defies commodification or categorization, forever overturning punk nostalgia to focus on the challenges of now.”

This is to say that revolutions don’t come to protect the past. They come to force our hand into the future.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think.

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