52 THRASH MAGAZINE
ounds
John
Lydon
UP FROM THE PUNK ROCK MIRE
of the late seventies came Johnny
Rotten. As frontman of the Sex Pis-
tols, he left an eternal skid mark on
the music world as we know it. At
a time when contrived disco sugar
cookies were being pumped down
everybody's throats, the Sex Pis
tols arrived with an electro-shock-
ing raw sound.
There have been countless articles, books, and
movies with endless accounts of what led to the
Sex Pistol's demise. Somewhere along the line
the media stopped telling the story and began
creating a fairy tale. Now, once and for all,
John Lydon wants to set the record
straight: "To tell the truth. I'm going to put
out my own book and fucking put a stop to
it, because I'm sick to death of being told
what I am and what I'm not." Part one will
span Lydon's birth to the end of the Pistols
and part two will cover the creation of PIL
to the present.
The much-publicized cult smash Sid and
Nancy was not a hit with Johnny. "That
movie was even worse than rubbish," he
says, "an absolute fairy tale. There was no
basis of reality to it at all."
But Johnny, did Sid Vicious really kill his
girlfriend Nancy Spungen? "How the fuck
am I supposed to know?" He shouts, "I
wasn't there!"
In spite of all the money waved around, the Pis-
tols will never do a reunion gig. Although Lydon
still keeps in touch with ex-Pistols Paul Cook and
Steve Jones, he vows not to do a reunion tour.
Says Lydon, "We're mates-we meet every now
and again, but that's over and I put a full stop on
it. I won't ever repeat it because there's no point.
It would only clearly be just for the money and
then I wouldn't be able to live with myself."
Says Lydon, "I just enjoy doing what I'm doing)
and I don't give a shit if anybody doesn't like it,
that's just too fucking bad. I'm not going to pum-
mel out rubbish just for the sake of it, and a lot of
that hardcore stuff is just basic moronic rubbish
It's not good enough and I think that those people
cheat their audiences because they don't try hard
enough. They just turn up the volume, and that
isn't good enough, I want a bit more than that."
That What Is Not is PIL's latest slab for the
masses. It slices like a knife to the gut and
includes a ditty entitled "Acid Drops," which
shouts the declaration of PIL loud and clear. It's a
fond and biting salute to personal rights and indi-
viduality. Says Lydon, "Censorship. I don't believe
in censorship at all. I cannot tolerate fundamen-
talist policies which aren't very far from becoming
fascist policies, particularly in this country. It
something isn't done about these people, I think
that those people will finish us all off. These fun-
damentalist republicans are the same ones that
want to censor all the music and the art the way
they see fit."
Another pipe bomb in pop clothing is simply
titled "God." Says Lydon, "I don't care if there's a
god, what's the point? You're not going to get an
answer to it, so why waste your energy? I can
wait for death, thank you, for as long as possible.
and then I'll know, because, quite simply, there
are no answers."
The Sex Pistols are his past, dead and buried.
PIL is his future. He is credited with creating what
we know today as the underground alternative
music scene. He once plowed a trail through the
redneck, close-minded US heartland when its
eyes were shut and it's ears were closed, but that
never stopped him. Lydon laughs in the face of
time and the proof lies in his longevity. -Jon Stain
Arrested
Development
"There are a lot of people who look up to rap-
pers and I want people to be aware that some-
times, what some artists are saying isn't always
right." Speech pauses. "I guess I'm giving anoth
er perspective."
Speech is the writer/producer who heads up the
Atlanta based hip-hop posse, Arrested Develop-
ment. The five-person crews' debut is a decep-
tively revolutionary collection of what Speech
tags, "Cultural-Southern-hip-hop-folk-ethnic-funk."
or more succinctly, "Life music. The title Three
Years, Five Months and Two Days in the Life of
...refers to the amount of time that passed
between inception and "discovery" of the group.
The group, notable for its inclusion of fully par-
ticipatory female members (the first rap group to
do so since the real early years of the Funky Four
+1), has refined and steadily developed its sound
and attitudes over the years. "At first we started
off just like a lot of the ather groups out there,"
Speech said. "We were talking about the ho type
of thing, too, about four and a half years ago. As
you get more concerned about the problems that
you see in your community, though, you start to
ask yourself, 'Okay, then, how can I help? How
can I change this stuff? So you start to change
your ideas, and your opinions. Our lyrics started
to change in a more positive way. So we have
sort of evolved ourselves; we got more spiritual.
we evolved into trying to be more righteous."
Arrested Development see themselves as pro-
country life and pro-African self-determination:
they're talkin' bout a revolution, but as they so
eloquently put it on the funk "Mama's Always On
Stage," "Can't be a revolution without women/
can't be a revolution without children."
-Amy Linden
Afghan Whigs
Most everything about Afghan Whigs is unique
ly contorted. They're a loud, rebellious voice from
the underbelly of middle America that refus-
es to be silenced. If it weren't for rock n' roll,
vocalist/guitarist Greg Dulli and company
would doubtless be in a tower with an auto-
matic rifle, taking pot shots at passers-by.
In Cincinnati, where these boys call
home, troublemakers are put in their place,
so the disaffected usually keep to them-
selves. Not Afghan Whigs though. They
thrive on torment, deriving pleasure from
confrontation. They're not satisfied being
individuals in a world of conformists, they
want to rub that individuality in the face of
anyone within striking distance.
Even their inception reeks of lawlessness.
Appropriately enough, Afghan Whigs formed in
an Ohio prison on Halloween, 1986. After an
evening of heavy partying, Dulli was arrested for
being drunk and disorderly. While in jail, he ran
into guitarist Rick McCollum, busted that same
night for urinating in public. The two hit it off
immediately. The only thing left to do was form a
band. They set about the task by recruiting
bassist John Curley, who used to sell Dulli mari-
juana, and drummer Steven Earle, who met Dulli
after his motorcycle hit Duli's car.
By 1989, the band had released their first album
Big Tep Halloween on their own Ultrasuede label.
Although few people actually heard the record,
Seattle band The Fluid got hold of a copy of it on
tour, and brought it back to SubPop headquar
ters. Next thing the Afghan Whigs knew, they
were signed.
Their first SubPop release, Up In It, was a
lethally engaging grungeathon, which struck a
a Seattle heckler who poured beer in his distor
tion pedal. Then in Washington DC, he trashed
Jesus Jones' drum kit because they didn't leave
Afghan Whigs enough room to set up. "Imagine
my surprise when I found out they have the num-
ber one album six months later."
TVTV$
Jeffrey Dahmer lived in easy walking distance of
where we used to live," bassist Keith Brammer
says. "We had to walk by his street almost every
day."
A grey cloud of depression has hung over the
band's hometown ever since Dahmer confessed
-Jon Wiederhom to murder and cannibalism. Ironically, "It hap-
"Television is America's baby-sitter," says gui
tarist Mr. Gloria with a nod. "The only way a rev-
olution would start in this country is if the govern
ment came and took all our TV sets away."
To Gloria, lyricist Blaze James, bassist DJ God,
and drummer Drug Pulido, "TV set" is a bad
word, bad news for any sort of bright future. "You
watch TV and all you see is America selling out,"
states Pulido.
TVTVS newest release, aptly titled Brainwash
ington, on Flipside Records is loaded with free-
thinking, corporate-bashing, punk-fueled rock.
"Like a TV" exposes the public's hypnotic state
towards the corporate types behind television.
"America has a short attention span," says DJ
pened right in the middle of a trial of some other
guy who chopped up and dismembered a friend
of ours," says Tunnison, a blonde grizzly bear of
a man. "The guy had his skull hacked open and
his brains run through the garbage disposal!
There wasn't a lot to be happy about at the time."
It's melancholy that's key to Kreuzen, a mood
that not only rings across songs like "Deep
Space," Wish" or "Big Bad Days," but grows out
of them-like moss. With Cement, these dark-
hearted goblins celebrate ten years of hard work
and troubling tunes: a spiraling, hypnotizing
sound that grew out of the wiry punk rail of 1984's
self-titled debut and has continued over such
sonic masterpieces as October File, Century
Days and an unsettling eerie Ep entitled Gone
Away best known for its cover of Aerosmith's
"Seasons of Whither."
So, what is it about Wisconsin, anyway? There
are theories about its history of violence and sav
agery dating back to the original psycho himself:
Mr. Ed Gein. One of the best has to do with a
tribe of Aztec Indians who came north seven-
hundred years ago and were all slaughtered by
the local Native Americans who didn't share in
their penchant for human sacrifices and eating
raw human flesh. Any connection? "Sure," Eric
wags his head. "Murder seems to be the only
thing that's constant about where we live. Some-
thing's definitely going on in Wisconsin."
-Mike Gitter
God. "Kids don't read anymore, they just watch Murphy's Law
television. That's where we're coming from."
At the abandoned Pabst Blue Ribbon Brewery
where TVTVS practices and DJ God lives, it's
clear they're not trying to change the world, but
they wouldn't mind opening a few eyes. "I'm
not a politician, I'm a songwriter," says
James, "we don't provide the answers,
we're just a catalyst."
TVTVS proves they're not all talk by bring-
ing their lyrics to life on stage. Demolishing
televisions with sledge hammers and torch-
ing flags is not uncommon, while their
choice of attire brings to mind walking
advertisements. "When you look at a Marl-
boro billboard, hopefully you'll think of
-Bob Pigment
TVTVS," says James.
chord somewhere between the contained fury of Die Kreuzen
Dinosaur Jr. and the hedonistic cry of Mudhoney,
making the band one of the label's top priorities.
Congregation, their new album, features plenty
of guitar bite, and tormented as ever lyrics. But
this time, there's actual melody and diversity
between the waves of blackened noise. Dulli
even goes so far as to call it soul music (soul
searing, for sure), citing numerous "points of ref-
erence that were "straight out stolen" from vari-
ous Motown acts.
"On this one I've been more true to myself and
the music I love," says Dulli. "Also, I'm not that
totally angry, violent person I was. I got that out of
my system. That's not to say I don't still get
pissed off a lot, I just deal with my problems a lit-
tle more honestly now."
How did Dulli used to deal with his problems?
Well, there was the time he kicked the teeth in of
"Milwaukee has turned into a pretty fright-
ening place to live," remarks Die Kreuzen
drummer Eric Tunnison. While the loudest sons
of the land of cows and beer were finishing
Cement, one of their neighbors was busy chop
ping up whoever he could get his hands on.
Even when everything that can go wrong does
go wrong, and the world is falling apart from
racism, greed and hatred, it's still important to
have fun. Enter Murphy's Law, a hardcore crew
from New York who think if laughter is the best
medicine, then a sense of humor can save the
world. When people stop having fun, they cut off
a crucial way to vent frustration and begin to get
uptight. That's how wars and traffic school hap-
pens. If all the stodgy politicians and fat cats who
run the world learned to laugh, maybe they'd also
learn to loosen up.
From the very beginning on New Year's Eve of
1983, Murphy's Law has made a maximum effort
to bring good times into a sorrowfully messed-up
world. "The first three years that the band existed,
we never got paid. We just played for benefits
and parties," says frothy frontman Jimmy Dresch-
er. "We never got together to be a band, we got
together to drink for free and get laid. Anyway, we
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