Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (Paperback)

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.

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.

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..