Interviews: American Hardcore: Paul Rachman & Steven Blush

We recently had a chance to speak with Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, the film makers behind the recent documentary, American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock (1980-1986). The film was one of the most thorough looks at the rarely examined influence of the second wave of Punk Rock, particularly the vast influence of bands like the Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag.

Spiritually adapted from Steven Blush's controversial book, of

So how does it feel to have the film out there now?

We all survived this really fucked up time where no one got their due, no one got paid, no one got laid, no one got anything out of it.

Well it’s good, you know, this is a long process. Steven and
I ended up making the film very much like this music was made. I’d taken the book around to a few
companies early on to see if anyone wanted to give us money to make it, and you
can imagine the reaction from looking at the cover of Steven’s book of a bloody
face, you know it didn’t quite click. In hindsight that was the best thing for
this film because it allowed us to make it the way this music was made. The
film has a little bit of that feeling.

One thing that really stuck out to me is that people have
made so many documentaries about punk, especially rooted in England, but
everyone glosses over this period in the 80s when America really developed its
own identity.

Paul Rachman: That was important to us, that was the road we
took. We’re going to tell the
story that has not been told; we’re going to validate the lives of all these
people who were not only our friends, but were people who meant a lot to who we
became.

Paul Rachman: This is the greatest music story never told.
It was just so important, this music was so important to us, and these bands
were such heroes to us, and they had never gotten their due, it was beyond time
that this happened. These bands weren’t just cool bands, they were really
influential. You wouldn’t have the
music today if it weren’t for these bands. From the obvious stuff like stage
diving and slam dancing and tough lead singers, but also to the more important
things like DIY records, independent touring networks.

That’s all the legacy of Black Flag, Bad Brains and Minor
Threat, and bands never really got their due for that.

You also gave a lot of credit to HR and the Bad Brains.

Paul Rachman: Yeah, I was lucky enough to work with those
guys a lot when I was younger, and I started shooting them a lot. I became a filmmaker because of
hardcore, I wasn’t close to it Boston, I was in college there in 78-82 and when
I saw the Bad Brains it just brought it up to another level. And HR’s interview was great because I
got him on a good day and he remembered these things that he really helped to
establish in DC in the very early 80s, late 70s. You know, that whole way of finding
alternative spaces to do shows and making sure that the band and the audience
can meet after a show. All those
things were things that HR really had a lot to do with.

Paul Rachman: The Bad Brains are also really fascinating
because they are the best and the worst rolled into one. They really are this
incredible band and this incredible positive message, and then all this
incredibly negative baggage. But
that’s what great artists are; great artists are flawed. You know what I’m
saying?

Definitely.

Paul Rachman: Great artists usually never get their due,
because they’re not savvy at first, they don’t know how to market themselves.
So, what happened to a lot of these guys is that they either didn’t know how,
or they weren’t thinking about commercial pursuits. And they were kind of
fucked because of it because kids came up along later and took a similar
sounding style, and they knew how to market themselves. But the Bad Brains were

- if Ian Mackaye speaks in such reverent tones of the Bad Brains, and if
that’s how he got to where he is, then that must be damn important.

They’re one of those bands that you always have to
separate their music from some of the strange things they’ve sad. Every time
I’ve ever written about them, I’ve always been forced to say "despite some of
HR’s statements" the Bad Brains are still great.

Paul Rachman: They were the one band who you could really
separate their personal story from their musical legacy.

Paul Rachman: They were repeatedly forgiven over and over
again because the music was so great. They would show up four and a half hours
late for a show, you know, it was unheard of! It wasn’t half an hour late, it
was half a day late! These things are unforgivable in a way, but they were
forgiven because they were just so incredible.

On the subject of the film, what kind of response have
you been getting so far?

Paul Rachman: Well its been good, I think that on one hand
we had a couple of premieres, one in New York and one in LA, and a lot of
people who were in the movie came to those. They really loved it, some of them
thanked us, a lot of them feel validated.
They’ve been ignored for so long, other than within their own
subculture, that it felt good, they were really proud to be a part of it.
Steven and I were participants in this when we were kids. We weren’t in bands
but we were part of the scene, we were participants and this is our way of -
Steven and I came along and we had the tools to tell the story in an authentic
manner and I think we accomplished that.

I can’t stress enough how important it was to see that,
because this is something that is always glossed over in history because the
British scene obviously had so much attention with the Sex Pistols and all the
antics and stuff, and the Clash were obviously amazing but the American scene
kind of defined a lot of the ethic, not even just the music. I don’t think Fugazi sounds anything
like the Clash or the Sex Pistols but they're definitely the spiritual heirs of a band like the Clash.

Paul Rachman: That’s one of the main points in this film
that - yeah there were some awesome songs there were plenty of awesome
songs, but its really about the ethic. Its really about the do it yourself,
disdain for authority, don’t do things just for the money, be fearless in your
pursuit, that’s what hardcore was.

Paul Rachman: None of these kids, when these bands started,
none of these kids were worried about failure, there was no place to fail
to. None of these kids cared what
other people thought of them. While some of their peers in high school, some of
their daily lives were all about what people thought of them. These were kids who were taking this
way of life, they were coming into manhood and taking these very radical,
ethical ways of living their life, very strong willed, on solid ground
attitudes. And it worked.

Paul Rachman: With this film obviously we’ve got lots of
good mainstream reviews, but the proof is in the pudding of the really
wonderful reaction we’ve got from the participants. Scott from the Bad Brains kissed Paul.

Paul Rachman: Scott came up to me and kissed me on the cheek
and said "You did it right." That’s all he said to me. Then we talked about other stuff.

Paul Rachman: We got that reaction from everyone, and that
says it all, you know what I’m saying, we had tremendous ones on us to get this
right. All these bands put their
legacy in our hands and we did not take it lightly. You know, we’ve got nothing but love back so far, so that
says a lot.

One thing that really stuck out to me is that you guys
really had unfettered access to a lot of people who never show their
faces. Like Greg Ginn who has been
almost invisible since Black Flag split up.

Paul Rachman: We didn’t come in as like interviews with a
list of questions that were going to lead us down this predetermined
script. These were conversations
we had that were intimate and honest.

The process for this film was really weeding out or carving out this
story out of these people’s conversations with us. We didn’t have this preset pattern, or we didn’t rewrite
questions according to what other people had said. We really wanted this pure honesty from everyone, and I think
we got that.

Paul Rachman: You raised a really good point, most of these
people are not available to press.
They would hang up on press, half of these people. They trusted us, and
that comes back to only one thing - that we weren’t - neither of us
are saying that we are major players in the original hardcore scene, but we
were participants and I’d say about 20% of these people crashed on my floor
back in the day. So it was a very
fraternal experience, and I don’t mean frat boy, I mean like war veterans.

We all survived this really fucked up time where no one got
their due, no one got paid, no one got laid, no one got anything out of
it. What we did get is this
intense community with this. I
think a lot of - for myself, starting with the book, it was just about
finally documenting it. It had
nothing to do with - one thing, one major moment in my decision to work
on the book was the History of Rock and Roll series on TV. It was very good but
like you’re saying it goes straight from The Clash to Nirvana like nothing else
ever happened.

People would come up to me and talk to me about hardcore and
they’d always have it wrong. People have been pulled with legend and lore and
it would get skewed as time went one because there were no Black Flag articles
in Rolling Stone magazine, and if it was it was to make fun of it. There was no
MTV videos, there was no real documentation. There still is the manifestation of that effort to kind of
finally, finally tell the story right.

Paul Rachman: This film has everybody in it, you have
- the participants are all there, you have other films, like - oh
there’s some films that talk about Black Flag, and that’s all they talk
about! So it was really about telling
the story of this complete scene as an entity during this time period.

The book
itself has always provoked a lot of heated discussion; it’s always been kind of
controversial, but have you had that kind of controversy with the film?

Paul Rachman: Well I think that when we set out to make the
film, I didn’t want to make a film that - documentary has changed a lot,
especially in the last five-six years, and I really saw this as a more
traditional documentary, back to the days of the Maysles brothers where you really
let your subject tell their story, however long that might take. You might have to shoot several
hundreds of hours of footage to get that story told properly, but that was the
process.

I really wanted to make a film that was this first-person
account from the people and just let their story be told. I didn’t want to have
narrators or expert opinions or people disagreeing with this and that, and it
not be coming from the people who wrote the music. I think that on the one
hand, that makes the film very intimate on one hand, and it does kind of work
at avoiding some of that controversy.
But that controversy - you dwell on one or two little things that
happened over a six-year period, however big they are, but it’s not what the
movement was about.

Paul Rachman: There’s no narrator to the film, there’s heavy
narration by people in the book. But I felt that was necessary because I
actually experienced these things.
I don’t get a lot of bad feedback but most of those people weren’t
there. Or if the people were there, they don’t like if I said that their legacy
wasn’t as great as they thought. That’s truth, I’ll swear on bibles over that
stuff.

Paul Rachman: But you know a book and a film are two very
different things. You can have a 3-400 page book, you can use quotes of people
at the end of the book and at the beginning of the book. You can edit sentences. Film can’t really be built that way.
Film needs to have this flow, and this energy that keeps on moving forward to
keep your interest, keep you in your seats. A book you can put down and pick up
an hour later or a day later, it’s a very different thing. So inherently we
wanted to make a film that really stood up as a solid, intense, hundred minutes
in a movie theatre.

I guess the road map for punk documentaries kind of was
set by Don Letts and stuff, I’m just wondering if that had any influence on you
either as a "let’s do this" or "let’s not do this" kind of thing?

Paul Rachman: No, not at all. We locked ourselves in a basement. Just as a filmmaker, personally, I’ve always had this

- even if you just look at my music video career, all of my videos were
very different. I really never got bogged down in what other people were doing,
and that also, its good in one sense, but it hurt me in a sense that in terms
of being commercially viable, people always kind of want to know what they’re
buying, less hirable or more of a risk. But with this film it was really about
the subjects, they really drove the style of the film.

The Decline of Western Civilization is a really great movie, it kind of is one of the important films talking
about the American scene, but it presents it in its nascent years, Greg Ginn in
the DVD, you’ll see t Greg Ginn talking about the day they went to that shoot
for the Decline, and Decline came out in 1981 so it was probably shot in 80 and
79, and Black Flag was nascent, that was new, and Greg Ginn goes "yeah we went
to Hollywood to do this movie Decline, and we had an audience that never looked
like any audience we had ever had before."

So American hardcore really has this 25 year perspective on
this particular brand, this particular movement, and type of music. And that’s
what keeps it unique. Don Letts was great with the English stuff, he doesn’t
really know that much about the American stuff.

One question that is always raised about a documentary
is that it tends to bookend an
event, as if to imply that hardcore isn’t still happening.

Paul Rachman: Well there was an ending - the people in
the movie talk about how it ended for them, things change. But I think the most
important thing is that the environment is different. I think Greg Ginn once
again describes it perfectly, Ian Mackaye and Greg Ginn have two great quote
about their endings.

Greg Ginn talks about 1986 he ends Black Flag because the
environment that surrounds the music, the scene and the band - is
different. It is no longer the
same. So the band cannot keep
going on being the same band anymore.

Ian Mackaye gets sick of the violence. The scene becomes too
violent and he’s at a Minutemen show and he punches somebody for the last
time. Everything changes, so I
think the environment that existed between 80 and 84 was very different -
you had this time and space where you had this intense new music, these energetic
kids with an avid, invested audience.

The audience participated, helped make things happen,
propelled it from town to town.
That’s how it became a movement, because it had this avid, intense
audience that was willing to propel it.
Its not like you could find this stuff in stores or anything like
that. You couldn’t call your
friend in the next town and say "go to the store and buy this". It wasn’t that easy. You really had to help make the show
happen. And then you had Ronald
Reagan coming in and trying to turn the clock back to 1950s America. So you had all these things happening
which all kind of connected in a weird way to propel this into a movement.

The American Hardcore film is a tribute to the original hardcore bands cause they’re our heroes. These guys deserve to speak without Sean Penn narrating

I think today as in any day you always have great art, you
have intense music, you still have hardcore, but the environment is completely
different, its not the same thing. Kids are less bored - kids in the
suburbs are less bored, they’re on their computers and iPods and all that. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s
just different. So it can’t be the
same movement that it was, but there will probably be something new in a few
years that will tear the walls down again.

One thing that definitely seems interesting to me is that
lately we’ve been starting to see more documentaries about this era. The thing
about documentaries is that they kind of lend this air of finality to
something.

Paul Rachman: You want a beginning, a middle and an end
(laughs). I guess in a way I think
that in our case, the people we talked to had their ending to it. Our film is very specific, 80 to 86. We
really wanted to keep it narrow, we wanted to keep it specific; we wanted to
keep it about something that we knew best, that we could make from our gut,
from our instincts. That’s what we
chose to do. I think that with
documentaries actually becoming more - documentaries are starting to
become more about the people who are making them, like Michael Moore and all
this, and it’s about him its not about the subject.

I think that’s what’s really changing in the documentary
world, some subjects that’s great for and some not. In this one we really chose
to take a more traditional route.

You definitely don’t see much interference from the film
makers. Michael Moore definitely is writing an essay in a documentary form rather
than actually providing a "document" of anything.

Paul Rachman: And that was - we set out to do that
from the very beginning. It was an important factor in the making of this film.

Paul Rachman: Yeah this was about letting the guys be heroes
through the five years of hardcore speak unfettered. The American Hardcore film
is a tribute to the original hardcore bands cause they’re our heroes. These
guys deserve to speak without Sean Penn narrating. When we say there’s an air
of finality about a punk rock story, we’re not saying that there’s not kick ass
bands today, we’re not like these old guys like "there hasn’t been a good
record in ten years." We don’t
feel that way.

There’s this hair curler, or this hair
flattener, for short hair, and there’s this hot chick on the cover, and it says
"hardcore" on it, like there’s this hardcore hair flattener and the design was
tribal tattoo motif, and I look at that and I go "this says it all".