Fear

The edge of a gutted sidewalk, in a city where “filth reigns, the air stinks of shit and people are throwing up everywhere.” Four thugs appear from a corner, marching your way: they intend to "make war on you" and let you know that "there's plenty more where they came from." All around you, only "people dying in the street," too busy surviving to come to your aid: the first word stamped into your brain can only be FEAR.

Once upon a time there was the art of provocation. Not the kind meant to raise awareness of some humanitarian cause or the bad cop of the day: we're talking about outrage for its own sake, liberating in its gratuitous stupidity. The primordial instinct of those who want to smash things so that no one can rebuild, the driving force of vital adolescent superficiality and the rabid choruses that gave it voice. Before "reflections on" and the idea that music had to "educate" came along, hard sounds were fuel for a cocky, unpleasant rabble - yet lovable in all their criminal innocence. The watchword was to have fun causing as much damage as possible, rather than abolishing any "present state of things." The revolution did happen, and it could only be overwhelming, but the fuse was lit by an apolitical, antipolitical, even reactionary spark, close to that "fascist irrationalism" that Lukács framed so well. Radioactive waste from an era not yet bleached by today's sterilizing mania, in which the fever for inclusion has replaced proud self-marginalization, and shocking the respectable no longer seems a priority. We're forced to spy on it in secret, this Evil that Baudrillard declared "transparent." Extreme violence still excites us, but only for study purposes and provided it meets certain criteria: socially determined, mediatizable, harmless. We no longer give any quarter to a bestiality relegated to that rural world from which America's rotten seeds sprouted.

The unsavoury types pictured at the start of this piece are the offspring of a similar milieu - or are they? Lee Ving played for a long time with the image of the outlaw with a shady past, but it didn't take a detective to figure out he was anything but uncultured, and that transplanting a sociology/jazz guitar student among the punks could only result in a colossal prank. One glance was enough: against the pallid androgyny of the kids, General Lee (who really had served in the army) set a manly build and a weathered face like a cattle rancher; against the apathetic yelps, a testosterone-fuelled shouter's voice, albeit corrupted by Lydon-esque brashness. The only Man on the scene, you might say, and he said so himself: if you found yourself under his stage, it didn't take long before a hearty "fag cocksucker" landed straight on your forehead.

Women and homosexuals remained his favourite targets, but the true wilted flower in his poetic buttonhole would be a morbid interest in suburban filth, bodily excretions, the most squalid and gruesome details: a genuine "cult of disgust" rooted in the depravities of shock rock, if not of rock'n'roll itself. Shared with a handful of other reprobates on the scene (Tesco Vee aka Mr. Touch And Go's Meatmen, the Mentors of the ignoble Eldon Hoke, the less well-known but no less putrid Gynecologists, and of course GG Allin), it would become central to the most repellent strains of noise-rock (Butthole Surfers, Laughing Hyenas, Killdozer, and later Jesus Lizard too) and to genres like brutal death metal or grindcore (especially the gore variant launched by Carcass, and the vile output of Anal Cunt), while it would virtually vanish from punk (with the exception of the Dwarves, the genre's last great maniacs), which by then had condemned itself to tediously "engaged" music.

And yet we're still talking about punk here, taken to its most extreme consequences: noisy, playful and "dumb," as prescribed by the Ramones, but soiled by a rustic crudeness that turns it into an acceleration of the filthiest southern rock. It's no surprise he cut his teeth in his native Philadelphia as a blues musician, before blending in among California's hooligans. Also punk is the ironic, moronic tone used to defuse certain outbursts of violence, but channelled into a nauseatingly virile vulgarity: brimming with parochialism and sexual innuendo, Ving's brand of comedy is barracks-room humour, as coarse as only that of a mediocre character in an unhealthy situation can be. An exasperation that becomes a merciless snapshot, but also a lifeline amid the most absolute degradation: setting aside the decadent lyricism of X, his City of Angels is little short of a circle of hell - except here the sinners aren't punished, but roam free instead. Also punk, finally, is the insoluble contradiction of the whole operation: it's almost impossible to tell whether he's in on the joke or not. Conjuring up the worst doesn't serve to denounce injustice (as theorised by Jello Biafra in his fruit-and-vegetable market), but "merely" to generate disgust. Protest is set aside in favour of a masochistic self-satisfaction, combined with the urban fascination that once belonged to the Velvet Underground: "I Love Living In The City" (a wonderful pun on his own stage name), he declares on his band's devastating debut single.

Fear have been around since way back in 1978, and it didn't take them long to build a reputation as thugs, troublemakers and Nazis. We've mentioned punk ("simple" music) and blues ("traditional" music), but their songs are the most complex on the West Coast: hugely talented musicians, whipped along by one of the most powerful voices of the era, slurring funk and free jazz, they brush up against the contemporary no wave; at the same time, toying with certain metal clichés, they effectively invent crossover. And since we're still talking about hardcore, however jagged and atonal, the playing speed can only be insane: only the Circle Jerks are faster than them.

By 1981 they were already among the city's most notorious attractions. Penelope Spheeris comes across them putting up posters and wants them in the seminal "The Decline Of Western Civilization": the film is a hit, and a record deal finally follows. Even better is what his friend John Belushi does - a fellow drinking buddy who shared the same goofy recklessness - who the following year even manages to book them on the Halloween special of "Saturday Night Live": the studio is razed to the ground by a horde of moshers (including a very young Ian MacKaye), the show is cut off live on air, and all of America discovers who Fear are. No one wants to book them anymore, but as compensation they've already got a session lined up with Slash.

The name spray-painted on the asphalt, on the back a mugshot-style photo of four thugs in gas masks, and a title that stands for “testimony” but also “record” of brutality: even before you put it on the turntable, “The Record” makes itself unmistakably clear. As soon as the needle drops, every doubt is pulverized: snarled through clenched fangs like a rabid attack, the heavy-billy of “Let’s Have A War” is far more menacing than the final sequence of Walter Hill’s classic, with that “We need the space!” no less tragic than the “We are tired of your abuse!” of “Rise Above“. The shamelessly misogynistic anthem “Beef Bologna” is more insidious still: the intro is a replica of “Mannish Boy” with the hormones cranked to the max, dissolved in no time into a supersonic raid. Equally slimy is the syncopated, asylum-set portrait of “Camarillo”, which under the lash of an Arabic-tinged guitar (courtesy of the infallible soloist Philo Cramer) offers a taste of the torments of institutionalized Charlie Parker.

It's Ving himself who narrates the cocky “I Don’t Care About You”, the most genuinely punk shard of the lot, with a wild performance from Spit Stix behind the drums. Ten years later, disciples Guns’n’Roses will revive it in the tribute to their idols “The Spaghetti Incident”, in a medley with Charles Manson’s “Look At Your Game, Girl”: never was a pairing more fitting. The ultimate triumph of Ving’s vitriol, however, is “New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones”: a genuine piss-take of the punk-jazz so fashionable in the Big Apple, to which they wouldn’t even be out of place, complete with a mangled sax and homophobic double entendres. The first fatal dissing between the two coasts, as far as anyone knows.

If there are two tracks that perfectly frame the band’s stylistic limbo, they are “Gimme Some Action” and “Foreign Policy”: the first is a lesson in compactness unspooled in a mere 58 seconds, the second a reckless post-hardcore premonition, as jarring as a Fugazi anthem, in which the perennial farce takes on a half-serious anti-militarist edge. On the other side of the barricade stand “We Destroy The Family” and the already-mentioned “I Love Living In The City”, mouthpieces for the quartet’s metallic streak (and its most sadistic ferocity). All these influences seem to crumple together within the antisocial rage of “Disconnected”, the staging of a nervous breakdown that somehow infects even the twisted, obsessive cover of “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”: what in the Animals’ original was a hopeful dash toward a promised land here becomes a desperate, impossible escape already doomed to fail. Between the two versions lies the whole unbridgeable gap between the beaming optimism of the 60s and the resigned despair of the 80s.

The frustration is vented in the most chilling song by Fear, if not in the whole history of punk: “Fresh Flesh” meticulously describes the dismemberment of a prostitute the protagonist has no intention of paying, sparing no detail (“I wanna fuck you to death/ Piss on your waning grace/ I just wanna come in your face/ I don’t care if you are dead”). Only Type O Negative have drowned in equally unfathomable depths of amorality.

Less brutal but just as unacceptable is “Getting The Brush”, which instead reads like the plausible preamble to another femicide, this time at the hands of a jilted lover. Muttered by bassist Derf Scratch, it’s a condensed answer to “Shut Down (Annihilation Man)“, swept away along with the rest of (humanity) by the perfect nihilist parable of “No More Nothing”, almost reeking of Sex Pistols. The more merciful CD version adds, by way of a last meal, the courteous single “Fuck Christmas”.

Twenty-seven minutes and 21 seconds are more than enough to shake up a genre that seemed to have already reached the limits of its own crudeness. They would remain unmatched, both outside and inside the ranch. The band would survive for the length of one more album (“More Beer”, 1985), before running aground along with the scene that had spawned it. In between, a jarring appearance at “Rock Against Reagan”, just to blow apart any plausible interpretive key. Ving would go on to deepen his passion for blues and country, collaborate with Dave Mustaine and superfan Dave Grohl, and above all crown his acting ambitions, appearing in “Flashdance” and “Streets Of Fire”: with a face like that, how could it be otherwise. He would resurrect the band's name on and off, first to complete the hilarious beer-soaked trilogy (“Have Another Beer With Fear” in 1995 and “American Beer” in 2000), then for a paradoxical re-recording of the debut (“The Fear Record”, 2012), as pointless as Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of “Psycho” and, as such, magnificently punk. Through its ranks would pass musicians of every stripe, from Zappa-affiliated standard-bearer Scott Thunes to a then-unknown Flea.

Will crude provocation be the last twig we cling to so as not to die of boredom? When in doubt, we'll keep listening to “The Record”, the masterpiece of a band that today nobody would give a record deal to.

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08/11/2020