Scratch Acid - The blues route to post-hardcore

Scratch Acid (Austin, 1982-1987) were a Texan post-hardcore band who built their music on the blues.

When it comes to geographic and social conditioning, consider that Texas is the land of ranches (Texas Rangers) and plantations (Texas is America's breadbasket), a place that moved from outlaws and shootouts, first to oil (the '30s) and then to high technology (Houston is NASA's home base and the headquarters of Compaq) and culture (Austin is arguably the most important university town in the American South). Caught between financiers and ranchers, Texan society is patriarchal and conservative. Texas holds the grim record for the most death-row executions. With 18 million inhabitants, it's the most populous US state after California.

As for musical conditioning, consider that Texas is the home of country music (the so-called "outlaw" country, as opposed to the traditional Nashville sound) and of "tex-mex" or "southern rock" (which carries traces of Mexican latinity, with its polka, waltz and accordion).

In 1982, the Austin rock scene wasn't dead: otherwise Scratch Acid wouldn't have been possible. Still, while America's latest development, hardcore, had moved on from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Washington and Chicago, Texas seemed to have little left besides the retro ZZ Top (Houston) and the legacy of the historic 13th Floor Elevators (Austin). Not to mention Stevie Ray Vaughan's '80s blues.

Mdc brought hardcore to Texas in 1980. But to record any material they had to leave Austin for the West Coast. The same goes for the Dicks. The Big Boys (also from Austin) had better luck, though by then they weren't really playing hardcore anymore: just like the Butthole Surfers (from San Antonio), who took their initial cue from them.

Big Boys and Butthole Surfers played a baroque, freakish post-hardcore (Captain Beefheart), closer to the garage-rock of the Stooges and the dirges of Pere Ubu than to the syncopations of the Germs. In short, closer to the blues than to rock'n'roll.

And it was even closer to the blues than to rock'n'roll that the very young Scratch Acid positioned themselves: after memorizing every punk record out of London and every hardcore record out of distant Los Angeles, in order to come up with something original and forward-looking, they wisely chose to stick with the feverish, transfigured, dark, ancestral atmospheres of their own homeland — along with all the musical influences needed to express them. The result was a primal blues that was also industrial: the exact equivalent of the Australia-Germany pairing that the Birthday Party of Nick Cave had worked out some time earlier — a band without whom Scratch Acid wouldn't have been possible, in terms of themes, settings, sound and technique.

After Scratch Acid, Texan rock would carry on down similar paths with Ed Hall and Pain Teens, right up to the globalized sound (though more rooted in Scratch Acid than it might appear) of Pantera.

Just as Rites Of Spring are Fugazi before meeting Slint, so Scratch Acid are Jesus Lizard before meeting Steve Albini.

If it seems almost a given that rock (and art in general) tends to express itself through the negative, painful, deathly side of life, Scratch Acid pushed this side so far as to pass right through it, arriving — within the artistic form itself — at relatively luminous outcomes.

Young as they were, Scratch Acid were already a band of musicians each better than the last: Rey Washam on drums, David Wm. Sims on bass, Brett Bradford on guitar, David Yow on vocals.

After five years of anonymity and hard graft, after two EPs and an LP as unknown then as they are now, despite being at the top of the rock heap both then and now, Scratch Acid, like Mdc and the Dicks before them, decided to abandon their thankless, oblivious homeland (a place whose guts they had nonetheless laid bare). But in doing so, they broke up. Scratch Acid split when Rey Washam and David Wm. Sims were summoned to Chicago (just as Mdc and the Dicks had earlier been summoned to San Francisco by Jello Biafra) to form the rhythm section of Albini's new project, Rapeman, for which Albini had disbanded Big Black. Bradford stayed in Texas. Yow followed the other two, though, having fallen out with Washam, he could only count on Sims. Because Yow, in a Chicago that was home to Naked Raygun and plenty of other hardcore veterans already by then, may not have felt the need to play hardcore, but he surely still felt the need to make music. Hence the founding of Jesus Lizard, the most logical continuation of Scratch Acid (of which they end up being the big-city version). Sims spent a couple of years (1988-1989) torn between Albini and Yow, while a drummer like Washam (later in Didjits and Ministry), who missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (to play in a band that would go on to sign with Capitol), stands as another example of rock's great what-might-have-beens.

Scratch Acid's work was originally released by the local label "Rabid Cat", and then, following their encounter with Albini and the success of Jesus Lizard, by the indie label "Touch & Go" (founded in Chicago in 1981, with a roster including Killdozer, Didjits, Butthole Surfers, Die Kreuzen, Big Black, Laughing Hyenas, and Slint).

Scratch Acid (EP, 1984): 8 tracks, 22 minutes.

Scratch Acid's debut ranks among rock's masterpieces, on a par with Jesus Lizard's best work. It's also flawless in execution, arrangement and production.

"Cannibal" (Yow) [2:24] is a relentless torture of Bowie's "Heroes", inflicted now through industrial tribalism, now through quasi/heavy-metal heaviness; darkness and ferocity in a sort of forceful andante that already contains much of the ground later made fertile for Jesus Lizard. "Greatest Gift" (Anderson/Sims/Sims) [2:11] is a voodoobilly piece somewhere between Cramps (musically) and Nick Cave (vocally).

"Monsters" (Sims) [1:19] is the track closest to hardcore, including in its length; or rather, more post-hardcore. We're in the vein of Die Kreuzen and Laughing Hyenas: monstrous vocals, fast and obsessive but not powerful music. "Owner's Lament" (Bradford/Washam/Yow) [4:39] even edges into a certain symphonic new wave (Ultravox); new wave sublimated here because it's steeped in Texan wastelands and held together by a minimalist instrumental backbone.

"She Said" (Bradford/Sims/Yow) [2:27]: this track is hardly distinguishable from a Birthday Party song, except for greater force and directness. Yow really is an off-key Nick Cave. "Mess" (Bradford/Sims/Sims/Washam/Yow) [2:22] is instead hardly distinguishable from an early Nick Cave track, that is, from a Birthday Party song that's more blues-inflected, slower, and grim not through violence or force but through constipation and expressive depth.

"El Espectro" (Scratch Acid) [3:39] raises the tempo into an almost catchy lament, coming across as English new wave, like Tuxedomoon filtered through Christian Death. "Lay Screaming" (Sims/Yow) [2:47] closes this perfect work perfectly; powerful, man-eating, ancestral blues: here we're not so much in Nick Cave plagiarism as sharing the same great artistic quality.

Just Keep Eating (LP, 1986): 11 tracks, 33 minutes.

"Crazy Dan" (Bradford/Yow) [4:13] opens onto the urban, indie world of Albini and Big Black: the new model that overshadows that of the Birthday Party. It's a ballad of misery and self-pity, a kind of artistic biography of Albini, who smooths out his own alienation into an art capable of finding an almost graceful founding value in its own form.

"Eyeball" (Bradford/Gross/Sims/Sims/Yow) [2:06] is an over-the-top power track that devours rock'n'roll riffs answered by hardcore screams: Rolling Stones at half speed, with torture, fetishism and flagellation as content. The difference between Scratch Acid or the Birthday Party and Christian Death or Marilyn Manson lies in the fact that while the former use torture, fetishism and flagellation as an artistic means (enclosing them in a form that transcends them), the latter use torture, fetishism and flagellation as an end in themselves — indeed, they use art as a means to reach those ends. While Scratch Acid or the Birthday Party expressionistically deform the real world in order to give it meaning while still remaining within it (so much so that their whole saga serves to express malaise, youthful before it is human), Christian Death or Marilyn Manson, by dint of deforming the real world, try to rid themselves of it, confining themselves to an almost horror-fantasy parallel world.

"Big Bone Lick" (Bradford/Sims/Yow) [3:48]: once again the melodic bass lines, a guitar holding down the rhythm with distortion, and an omnivorous drum kit surprise with a composure that's as classic as it is original: a passage from classicism into originality, marked, moreover, by Yow's vocal wails, so bestial they almost reach a kind of modulation (as already happened with Beefheart and Thomas).

"Unlike A Baptist" (Bollerjack/Yow) [2:32] is embellished, or rather thrown into disarray, by cabaret-like flourishes (horns, harmonica, the jazzy swing of the rhythm section). "Damned For All Time" (Lloyd Webber/Rice) [2:05] arches into a ska tempo (and a ska trumpet), doing to hardcore, with the black-humored trash of a crossover, what the Dead Kennedys had already done to it.

"Ain't That Love?" (Bradford/Sims/Yow) [2:23] is almost a ballad or serenade, still redolent of Dead Kennedys in its odd gait and tempo changes. Dead Kennedys, obviously, transplanted into Texan atmospheres.

"Holes" (Bradford/Yow) [2:00]: this masterpiece boasts all of Scratch Acid's alchemy, encompassing both the hardcore-dark of T.S.O.L. and the non-rock stylistic hallmarks of the Birthday Party.

"Albino Slug" (Bradford) [3:26] is a striking progression of futuristic folk that sublimates Scratch Acid's instrumental prowess, and which would teach a great deal to bands like Faith No More. "Split a Kiss" (Bradford/Sims/Sims/Yow) [2:02] returns to the contrast between industrial and atavistic blues, an indigestible mouthful, chewed now by Yow's gurgling vocals, now by the loftiness of the instrumental orchestration. "Amicus" (Balboa/Sims/Yow) [3:15] is a track, different yet again from the others, where Scratch Acid, starting from a blurred elaboration of a few simple moods, prove they have no limits: this is country music for extraterrestrials played by reckless jazz musicians. "Cheese Plug" (Bradford/Yow) [2:45] reinvents for the umpteenth time the use of bass, guitar and drums, to produce something that's practically no longer rock: futuristic blues, convoluted jazz, industrial folk.

Berserker (EP, 1987): 5 tracks, 15 minutes.

"Mary Had a Little Drug Problem" (Bradford/Sims/Washam/Yow) [2:16] plunges into one of Scratch Acid's most searing infernos, and it's already Jesus Lizard. The content abandons Texan surrealism for a metropolitan hyperrealism.

"For Crying Out Loud" (Bollerjack/Sims) [3:06] carries on in the same fast vein. The new Scratch Acid are new because they're faster and more hurried. It's no coincidence that Jesus Lizard would start out with a drum machine, meaning time that's counted rather than lived. "Moron's Moron" (Sims/Yow) [3:13] settles into an acidic, Albini-style industrial power-ballad.

"Skin Drips" (Dims/Yow) [2:42] brings order by way of a multifaceted jazz-blues played from somewhere deep inside a swamp. "This Is Bliss" (Washam/Yow) [2:16] is another flawless slab of pregnant, syncopated sounds, stretched out of shape by a driving blues pulse and Yow's wailing.

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