Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 [Hardcover]

Michael Azerrad (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31, 2001

It was a musical revolution that happened in the midst of Reagan's 80s: a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations and other subversives who re-shaped and re-energized American rock music with punk rock's revolutionary do-it-yourself credo. The music that resulted was deeply personal, always challenging and immensely influential. This book traces the arc of the American indie underground in the 1980s, from obscure beginnings to the point a decade later when the mainstream sat up and took notice. Beginning with the pioneering and notorious punk band, Black Flag, the story continues with the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening, among others. Without major label support, these bands depended on resourcefulness, creativity and an all-powerful sense of community.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nirvana's mega-bestselling Nevermind was credited with dramatically altering the American pop-musical landscape. Azerrad ably demonstrates that the "new" sound actually sprang from almost 15 years of innovation by hundreds of bands who remained "[b]elow the radar of the corporate behemoths." Linked under the loose rubric "indie rock," bands like Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Minor Threat and the Replacements languished in the musical minor leagues because they were too experimental for commercial radio, made unfortunate career decisions or eschewed mainstream success. Yet these bands formed the nucleus of a new youth movement. Youths who defined themselves in opposition to middle-American values found an aesthetic and a community through the music. Given the fervor for indie progeny like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the indie scene's impact was not insignificant and rock journalist Azerrad (Come as You Are) partly aims to trace that larger cultural legacy. But this thick slice of nostalgia, replete with colorful anecdotes that demystify even deliberately mystifying artists, primarily targets die-hard supporters of seminal 1980s indie bands, underground-club scenesters and 1980s college radio buffs. Though day-in-the-life bios predominate over extensive musical or cultural analysis, this is an astute insider's account of the collective accomplishment of these various bands: strong musical and political statements by people with little clout and even less financial support that reverberated throughout youth culture. A devotee himself, Azerrad is occasionally belligerent in his support of his subjects' art and attitudes, but he also deftly captures the thrill of being young, antiestablishment and impassioned the inspiring ingredients of all these bands. Photos. (July 31) Forecast: Indie culture has lost little mystique for insiders or outsiders, and with national TV and radio interviews, this tribute may draw the MTV crowd.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Music journalist Azerrad (Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana) makes it clear through his tales of 13 highly influential punk and indie rock bands from Black Flag to Beat Happening that his subjects could have easily been any misshapen, angst-filled, morbidly creative teens on the planet. In painting the portrait of the volatile 1980s underground music scene, he reveals the importance of subversive-minded musicians in an industry controlled by hit-hungry executives. Azerrad, however, is careful not to glorify this era: sprinkled throughout his inspiring pictures of musical revolt are details of the poverty and drug-induced dilemmas each band faced on its path to cult icon status. Featuring original interviews with the scene's leading lights (e.g., Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth), this collective biography is written in a cultured voice that even low-brow, in-the-know fanzine readers will appreciate. For all public libraries. Robert Morast, "Argus Leader Daily," Sioux Falls, SD
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown; First Edition edition (July 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316063797
• ISBN-13: 978-0316063791
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #888,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Everybody's Punk, September 5, 2001

By 

daibhidh "daibhidh" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (Hardcover)

I like this book a great deal; Azerrad writes well, for the most part, and neatly (perhaps too neatly) encapsulates some of the most important bands of the last 20 years, from Black Flag to (*gak*) Beat Happening. The book is loaded with interesting tidbits, stories, vignettes, and so forth. There are some great lines throughout, and it seems nearly every chapter has somebody offended by Public Image Ltd., in one way or another, which'll probably have John Lydon coughing up his tea and biscuits if he bothers to read it.

I am unsure whether Azerrad's doing indie rock revisionism in this work, however. The stories fall within the same narrative confines -- quirky, disenfranchised would-be rockers XYZ run into each other in an amusing fashion; decide to form a band; against all odds, they produce considerable sonic (and, of course, punk rock) excellence until they either implode or join a major label. They all seem to follow this basic arc, which seems a trifle tidy to me.

I came in on the earlier, punkier side of things (Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat), and I feel like Azerrad is weaving a tapestry linking those important bands to grunge and "alternative," creating a seamless web of musical innovation and negation culminating in Cobain's primal sonic scream. Not like the later bands aren't important, of course, but I think they were very different from each other, while Azerrad tries to paint them all with the same punk rock paintbrush -- it comes out more in the later chapters, where his comments are the equivalent of "how punk rock is THAT?" or "You can't get much more punk rock than that." Sure you can, Michael.

That seems an important thing for folks to do these days; punk retains credibility, beauty, purity, and power, all these years later, so scenesters seek to identify with it, rather than come up with a new idea. Maybe there are no new ideas, anymore: clean guitars vs. fuzzy guitars; loud vs. quiet; fast vs. slow; long songs vs. short songs, etc. Whatever the case, everybody seems either punk or hip-hop nowadays. That said, I like how Azerrad dealt with each band, gave them their own chapter, although I think some deserved longer chapters than others, in my opinion. And the lack of a follow-up section in each chapter, sort of a "where are they now" seems lacking to me.

If you haven't heard (or heard of) the bands he's referring to, then please go out and start listening to them!!! You'll never be the same, and it'll certainly help you appreciate what he's talking about more, and give you an inkling of how great these bands were. The omission of the Bad Brains is truly surprising to me.

All in all, this book is worth your time.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars At last, August 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (Hardcover)

The 1980s are being turned to chum, diced into simple nostalgia bites, so that the decade is best remembered now for a few MTV synth pop hits, maybe a Springsteen/Cougar Americana song, hair metal and the Rolling Stones' "Steel Wheels" tour. What is always lost in the VH-1 retrospectives is the remarkable American indie underground movement that began in roughly 1979 (the first Black Flag EP), peaked in the mid 1980s and had its last gasp in 1991 (when Nevermind, a record that could not have existed without the indie movement, hit #1).

So it is a blessing that we have at last a fine, relatively unbiased and intelligent history of Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Beat Happening, the Buttholes, Dino Jr. -- bands that were the equivalent to the Beatles and Stones to me, and whose influence inspired whatever life there was to be found in 1990s pop music.

It's not a perfect book. For one, everyone will have gripes about which bands did and didn't deserve chapter-length studies (the most obvious oversight -- the Meat Puppets, and I'd go to bat for Camper Van Beethoven as well), and did we really need two separate chapters on Ian MacKaye's bands? Once a band signs to a major label its story effectively ends for Azerrad, which is fine when you're covering Dinosaur Jr., for example, but which also means that the Replacements' Tim -- one of their finest records -- isn't even mentioned. An influence of MacKaye's rather hysterical obsession with "purity", perhaps.

Azerrad's writing on the whole is fine, though he occasionally litters his prose with a gruesome slang phrase, like "all about" (viz. "it was all about purity"), and I would have enjoyed a discography and a more detailed notes section, as fresh interviews done for this book are often stitched next to fanzine interviews from 1983, with scant notice.

But these are minor criticisms -- this is a long-needed, wonderful book that hopefully in time will inspire others. How about a volume 2? The Meat Puppets, the Dead Kennedys, CVB, the Misfits, Human Switchboard, Bad Brains, the Mekons, even REM..

62 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A promising book that's considerably disappointing, July 4, 2003

By 

Dave Hidebound (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (Hardcover)

Michael Azerrad's one of the best contemporary rock authors, and the work he did on the Nirvana book "Come as You Are" speaks for itself. He was able to tell a story that was devoid of opinions and let the facts speak for themselves, even if proof came out after the book's publishing that suggested that some of the pieces were exaggerated. Still, when it was announced that he was writing a book about the American indie underground of the 1980s, I was ecstatic. Finally, someone qualified was going to talk about an era of music that's sadly overlooked by most people. But upon reading this book, I was pretty dismayed to discover how half-baked "Our Band Could be Your Life" was.

Azerrad only interviewed about half of the people involved in these selected bands. For people he obviously didn't talk to, like Steve Albini, he instead pastes together quotes taken from 1980s fanzine interviews and places them in the book like they were actual recollections. He does cite these sources in the back of the book, but it's still a little bit dishonest. He doesn't even interview Calvin Johnson for the Beat Happening section. Why even bother include them then? Calvin was the Beat Happening as far as I'm concerned. With the Butthole Surfers, there's only accounts from King Coffey and some scant Paul Leary quotes that I suspect were also lifted. Both are integral members, but not interviewing Gibby Haynes is inexcusable. No Gibby, no Surfers. And there are other important people you'd like to hear from who aren't here like Black Flag's Chuck Dukowski and the Minutemen's George Hurley, among others.

I'm shocked with how Azerrad fills the book up with his opinions and half-truths. Unlike in "Come as You Are," Azerrad paints stories in his own light and adds ridiculous lines that will leave you frustrated with his lack of professionalism. Who can take him seriously after reading this description on Big Black: "While it may not have been a direct swipe at a nation obsessed with a show like 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,' it sure was a [fecal product] in its silver punchbowl." (Ouch.) He uses hearsay in describing people in the bands who he didn't interview, which gives him absolutely no grounds to talk about such unfounded information. Azerrad takes Henry Rollins, who was kind enough to talk to him, and paints him as the destroyer of Black Flag, which is highly subject to debate but something I'd strongly disagree with. Azerrad also tends to think of all post-"Damaged" Black Flag albums as being mediocre, ignoring the fact that they were bold underground rock records that tried to do something more interesting than common hardcore. Azerrad's facts are sometimes inaccurate, such as when he says Rollins started recording just a few weeks later after Black Flag's breakup in a band that "just happened to include" the rhythm section of Greg Ginn's side project Gone. Henry didn't recruit them until two years after Black Flag's breakup for his second solo album, long after Ginn dissolved the original Gone.

Each band has some kind of bizarre opinion attached that will leave fans of each band angered. Azerrad accuses the Butthole Surfers of betraying their roots by leaving Touch and Go for Rough Trade but doesn't similarly condemn Sonic Youth for suing SST and taking back their catalogue (where they later reissued it on DGC and left two of the LPs out of print... how indie!) or for Husker Du signing onto a major. He approaches each band differently, like he obviously has favorites. Worst of all is how he cuts off the story of each band around 1991, like all of them stopped being essential because they signed onto a major label. That's a very narrow-minded way to look at the overall scope of the scene, and if that's how he really felt ethically, then why did he stop with Fugazi after "Steady Diet of Nothing"? They've always been on Dischord, and they never signed to a major.

There's some truly incredible bands missing in here. Azerrad did say that there didn't wasn't enough room to include everyone and that it wasn't an encyclopedia, but there's just no rational excuse as to how you could leave out bands and people as significant as the Meat Puppets, Half Japanese, Jello Biafra, Scratch Acid, Daniel Johnston, the Melvins, the Flaming Lips, the Wipers, and the Pixies. Frankly, I'm more disappointed that Azerrad filled up the space with Minor Threat AND Fugazi. They're both legendary bands, but I'd think that Fugazi fits the scope of the book's topic a lot more than Minor Threat. Big Black's accounts are heavily relayed from Michael Gerald of Killdozer (who should've had his own chapter, really) and Mudhoney's chapter is more of an excuse to describe the beginnings of Sub Pop, Green River, and Soundgarden. Good information, but not the way to go about it.

The best advice I can give is that you should preview the book from a friend or at a store before you buy it. There is a lot of great information to be found in here, and few people have tried to cover the post-hardcore scene/proto-alternative rock scene like Azerrad. But it seems like he didn't do his homework. He suggests that those who don't like his book should go write their own, and I'm almost tempted to do so just out of spite. "Come as You Are" is still required reading, but I'm definitely not going to be seeking out any future Azerrad-penned works. If you want to read a comprehensive and brilliant book about indie/alternative rock, the best out there by far is Joe Carducci's "Rock and the Pop Narcotic." Carducci general managed SST Records exclusively during their peak years (1981-1986) and his knowledge on music of all types is staggering. Pick up his book instead. Much to my disappointment, this is a flawed account of underground music.