Knocking the Skill Level

Hardcore grants us immediate legitimacy for just doing the damn thing. For those of us who came to punk as neglected kids, that can be easy to get forget.

Chris Traynor and Bill Kiernan of Fountainhead. More Than Music Festival. Dayton, OH. March 1993. Photo by Josh Grabelle.

I.

I usually tell people the first band I ever wrote songs for was Fountainhead, and that’s mostly true: Many of those ideas wound up on a 1994 album called Drain that came out three years after I left the band. But if we’re being hypertechnical about it, the first band I ever actually wrote a song for was called Mortuary.

You’ve never heard of Mortuary—or at least not this Mortuary—because literally no one outside of earshot of my apartment in Queens has ever heard of us. That’s a good thing. We were like a thrash metal White Stripes; my older brother played guitar while I played drums and sang. Our only song was called “Fuck You,” and while I don’t remember all of the lyrics, I’m pretty sure the first couplet I ever wrote was: “In the dead of the night / You will run and scream in fright.” All I can really say about that song is that it was 1985, I was eleven years old, and I was really into Overkill.

I’m not here to tell you that “Fuck You” was a great song. I’m not here to tell you it was sophisticated or well-executed or even particularly meaningful. What I will tell you is that it had an intro, a verse, a chorus, and a bridge. It had a sense of dynamics. And it was tuneful enough so as not to be confused with actual noise. It met all the criteria for being a “song,” but more than that, it had feeling. (Trust me when I tell you that “fuck you” was something I wanted to say to a lot of people when I was eleven.) As far as I’m concerned, this was the moment I became a songwriter. It was a song, and I wrote it.

Let me be clear about what I mean by that: In my view, “Fuck You” is as much of a song as John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Lennon was a more experienced songwriter, and “Imagine” is undoubtedly a more elaborate song. But at their core, “Fuck You” and “Imagine” are two songs, composed in a major key, with similar arrangements, and conceived with the intent of speaking a truth that felt important to the writer. Whether or not one is more “legitimate” than the other is a game of semantics to me. If I made a cookie, using all of the ingredients of a cookie, and it tasted like a cookie even if it came out of the oven misshaped or slightly burned, I would still call it a cookie. I would still eat it. It might even be delicious.

II.

One of the things I love most about hardcore’s origins is the fact that most bands had an acute self-awareness about the fact that they were just beating on their instruments. Even in the face of more technically capable musicians like Bad Brains or Dead Kennedys, there was never a sense that you needed to rise to a particular skill level to be “legitimate.” In most cases, I’d argue, having technical abilities was a drawback.

I picked up a guitar for the first time in 1988 because there was a low bar to entry. Had the bar been set any higher, I’m not sure I’d be speaking with you today. After Mortuary, my older brother went on to study the virtuosos—everyone from Yngwie Malmsteen to Andrés Segovia—and, quite remarkably, he actually rose to their level of playing. My goal, however, was more reasonable: I put on the Someone Got Their Kicked In! compilation and sat there for weeks until I could play the majority of it with a single power chord. Learning how to play “Beefmasters” by Battalion of Saints with even a hint of competency, it turns out, bestowed all the legitimacy I needed.

And yet, I’ll be honest: When the major-label punk rock goldrush of the ‘90s rolled around, the goalposts for “legitimacy” began to move for many of us. My band, for example, went from putting a record out on Revelation in 1995 to meeting with Seymour Stein—the guy who signed the Ramones and Madonna—only a year later. I could sit here and tell you that I was completely unaffected by that kind of attention, but I came to punk rock as a damaged and neglected kid. A major-label bidding war only capitalized on my feelings of inadequacy because it made me feel important, maybe even for the first time in my life. I realize now that this is a power dynamic: Being anointed by the establishment can be a hell of a drug.

One of the bands picked up by a major at this time was Samiam. They were already melodic punk legends by underground standards, but after watching their Gilman Street contemporaries in Green Day and Rancid go on to find inconceivable mainstream success, singer Jason Beebout started to wonder if Samiam were missing something his friends’ bands had.

“I felt like [signing to Atlantic] was a validation—and a validation of what, I don’t even think I knew, because I didn’t feel like I even knew what I was doing,” he recalls, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “I didn’t feel like I’d grown so much or that I was such a better songwriter or we were such a better band that we deserved to get more attention or have this big machine behind us. But there was this validation of feeling like, ‘Oh, even your shitty little band is worthy of note. So now this big machine is going to try and get your music out to a lot more people and you’re going to be considered legit.’ It was kind of what you were counting on when you’re first starting to play music—like, you don’t have to be a virtuoso. You don’t have to be a lifelong songwriter. You don’t have to be Crosby, Stills & Nash to make a record, to play on stage, to entertain people. There’s a lot more to it. And there are a lot of people that would prefer to see whatever hack job I can throw out there than Crosby, Stills & Nash, you know?”

I’ve written before about the horrifying way that we tend to speak about our own creative projects in hardcore—either out of self-deprecation or worse. And how Jason talks about Samiam here is telling in that regard: that his songwriting didn’t “deserve to get more attention,” that his “shitty little band” wasn’t worthy of note, that he was a “hack job.” Somewhere along the way, that immediate legitimacy that hardcore gives us for just doing the damn thing got wrapped up in the far more complicated expectations of the outside world. Perhaps just being that close to bands that entered the mainstream consciousness skewered his expectations for what was possible—or even desirable. (The drummer for Jason’s first band, Isocracy, went on to become Green Day’s original drummer, while Isocracy itself gave its original name, Operation Ivy, to the band you probably know.) Whatever the case, it’s not for me to say.

What I can say is that Samiam is one of the greatest and most consequential bands to come from the East Bay. Even before their major label debut, they were esteemed by their peers and much loved by their fans. By my count, they had written and released over 50 songs on indie labels and had already sold tens of thousands of albums before Atlantic cut a single check. That is worthy of note. That makes you an experienced songwriter, whether you want to admit it or not. That is, without need for qualification, already “legit.” So many of us got our heads twisted back then, and it took time to untie those knots.

Jason Beebout, live with Samiam. Riot Fest 2022. Chicago, IL. Photo by Ryan Bakerink.

III.

I used to think I was a lesser guitarist than my older brother. He was trained, but I learned by ear. He practiced incessantly, while I noodled around when I felt inspired. He took his craft seriously, investing in quality gear, while I cribbed together my first rig with whatever I could afford at the time. (There’s a reason I played a Washburn guitar with Shelter.) I think he wanted me to believe that being “legit” was a formal qualification. I think there are a lot of people, with varying motives, who would love for all of us to believe that. But a little over 20 years ago, something happened that changed all that.

For most of his life, my older brother has worked as a guitar instructor. One day, he called to tell me about one of his new students.

“I usually ask them to start by bringing in a song or a record they’d want to learn and this kid actually brought in your record,” he told me. It was the first time my brother had ever listened to Texas is the Reason, and despite being quite possibly the most gifted guitar player I’ve ever seen—for real—he was having a hard time trying to transcribe my guitar parts. In spite of his extensive training, my brother literally couldn’t figure out what I was playing. He laughed, “You do some weird shit!”

We went over some of the songs together, and I took extra delight when, at one point, he stopped me to say, “But you can’t do that!” It was delightful because I understood that I could, in fact, do that. Being untrained means the only rule I operate with is, “Does this sound good?”—and that, to me, is a gift. It means I am able to make music out of instinct and without fear of “doing it wrong,” which I wholly attribute to my experience with hardcore. It means I work in a way that values the process just as much as the product—and bestows equal legitimacy on them both. Trying to degrade my process as “just making some shit up” denies the truth that all music is just made-up shit.

Once he listened to the record through the love of his student, my brother was finally able to appreciate what I do because, ultimately, it did the thing that we expect all good music to do. Being “legit” has never been about becoming a virtuoso or finding widespread acceptance. It’s about making at least one person feel something honest—even if it’s only the person who wrote it.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Jason Beebout of Samiam.

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