So, there’s a thing that happens behind the scenes at Last Rites HQ called ‘Sunday Funday’ where we each pick a random album for the LR collective to listen to during the week, and then we reconvene over the weekend to offer up some words about said album. Any and all records are allowed entry, but so far the exercise does seem to sway toward highlighting releases considered to be lost / hidden gems. That, in a nutshell, is where this episode of Diamonds & Rust germinated and grew into the swollen essay you see below.
Prior to 1987, I was not terribly aware that punk was something I appreciated. In fact, based purely on the assumption that punk was the rebellious choice for those who “hated melody,” I figured I hated it because I loved, Loved, LOVED melodic guitar work. Still, with releases from bands like S.O.D., Zoetrope, Nuclear Assault, Whiplash, Tankard, Kreator, and even Slayer & Metallica in and around 1985 / ’86, I simply had no understanding of just how much influence punk rock had on the output from these ragers. Hell, even the fact that the NWOBHM bubbled into existence via the insistence of punk was 100% lost on me.
By 1987, though, I finally began to realize how strongly the two genres aligned, thanks both to the bands themselves making it quite clear via interviews, liner notes, promo pic shirts and because shows began drawing mixed crowds that included hair farmers, the mohawked and skins / shorthairs wearing flight jackets with orange lining. An Overkill pit in 1987? Not at all crazy to expect a ‘lockstep’ precursor to the wall of death where hardcore kids would lock arms and rush during “Deny the Cross.”
I have spoken of this before in these halls, but I owe a hell of a lot of my introduction to Hardcore with a capital ‘H’ to a friend of a great friend that tape traded with us for the better part of a year or so. We had some commonality via the bands mentioned above, but this dude bettered our lives with introductions to crews such as Agnostic Front, English Dogs, Attitude Adjustment, Token Entry, S.O.B., Murphy’s Law, the first Crumbsuckers, etc., and we floated him heavyweights like Nuclear Assault, Warfare, Zoetrope, Carnivore, Whiplash, Wehrmacht, et al. Suffice to say, it was a rather fruitful union, and both scenes seemed to cross-pollinate right alongside us, with the peak and sudden decline hitting just before we all careened into the ‘90s.
Was any of the work now commonly referred to as ‘crossover’ called ‘crossover’ before DRI released Crossover in March of 1987? Negatory. But like most any over-analyzed sub-genre floating in our sphere in the modern age, the term is now used to throw an overwhelming amount of bands / albums that simply meld any form of punk with some form of metal under one convenient umbrella. For me, and I assume for a number of others, most of what is now considered crossover from the mid-to-late ‘80s was actually a proper introduction to Hardcore with that capital ‘H’, and it felt different than straight-up punk because it was interested in both thrashing very metallically and occasionally being melodic. The second half of “The Eliminator” right out of the gate on Cause for Alarm (1986)? Oh, that was for me. So was Age of Quarrel, Attitude Adjustment’s American Paranoia, Crumbsuckers’ Life of Dreams, etc., all of which were widely accepted as Hardcore, pure and simple.
So, yeah, by 1987 the cross-pollination was very noticeable, with D.R.I.’s Crossover leading the charge and only getting eclipsed by Carnivore’s landmark Retaliation later that year. As a relevant aside, I cannot express just how much hubbub Retaliation garnered back then, both because of its strength as an effective Hardcore crossover record and because of how controversial some of the lyrics were. “These songs are simply a very dark and satirical social critique,” many would argue, and perhaps that was true, but it’s still the first time I recall feeling outwardly uncomfortable with the music I loved, which was significant. Blatant Satanic imagery and underscoring the glory of regurgitated guts just didn’t feel… quite as real, I suppose. Anyway, Retaliation also seemed to drop during a time when, as the two scenes became more and more hybridized, hostilities also appeared to rise, and I distinctly recall seeing the Crumbsuckers (with the desperately unheralded Joe Gizmo and the Spudmonsters) in early ’88 and watching bouncers levying strict rules to anyone in line with a shaved head.
A little more about 1988: I’m really not sure how even I found the time to care about Hardcore / crossover at this particular juncture on the timeline because straight-up metal was delivering banger after banger after banger, along with a handful of total disappointments that I still managed to obsess over (Candlemass, Celtic Frost, Death Angel and Metallica). Point being, in 1988 I was still largely metal-minded and metal-obsessed, but I absolutely did fuck with the following albums from that year that managed to connect with both sides of the metal and hardcore divide:
The Accüsed – Maddest Stories Ever Told
Bold – Speak Out
D.R.I. – 4 of a Kind
Erosion – Mortal Agony
Ludichrist – Powertrip
Num Skull – Ritually Abused
Nuclear Assault – Survive
Dr. Know – Wreckage in Flesh
Prong – Force Fed (yep, it’s crossover)
Slapshot – Step On It
Suicidal Tendencies – How Will I Laugh Tomorrow…
Vio-Lence – Eternal Nightmare
Warzone – Don’t Forget the Struggle / Don’t Forget the Streets
Beast On My Back, though? What a fucking wEiRd curveball that record managed to throw back in ’88. Clearly it was meant for the more adventurous, so it’s not all that crazy to assume that someone who was equally excited by a menagerie like, say, No Exit, Leprosy and History of a Time to Come would willingly dive in headfirst, which I absolutely did. But that album cover didn’t exactly help its cause when stacked next to loads of other records that understood just how much we all judged books by their covers.
Firstly, that album cover…
Band shots as cover art wasn’t exactly rare in punk, but metal-minded folks knew that if an album cover depicted just the players, something probably went wrong at label HQ (*cough* extremeaggression *cough*). B.O.M.B.’s cover essentially looked like a candid shot of five guys that worked at the local pizza joint near the harbor, and I’m guessing guitarist Chuck Lenihan (far left) was the delivery driver because he didn’t want to wear a goddamned hair net. The photo was taken in Long Beach, which is where Relativity sent the Crumbsuckers to record with the same feller responsible for Megadeth’s Peace Sells. Per an interview with bassist Gary Meskil:
“The idea for the cover basically came about as a result of some record company boardroom mumbo jumbo. They wanted the cover to be a band photo because ‘facial recognition’ was something they wanted to achieve for the band.”
Yeah, that did not work as expected. But the cover does feel weirdly iconic today because of its peculiarity.
More importantly, I don’t think anyone was expecting a Hardcore record that sounded… so proggy? Falling in line with crossover, thrash was of course there—you can definitely tell these guys listened to Master of Puppets and Peace Sells as often as they did Negative Approach and Siege. But this was like taking what they’d done with their seminal debut and filtering it through the PMA and sharpness of Bad Brains’ I Against I, plus the sheer boldness of a band like Mekong Delta.
The result: A much more crisp, melodic and swift approach to the riffing, a purposeful positive slant (doubled down via vocalist Chris Notaro’s religious upbringing), and a clear hunger and willingness to take crossover to places no one expected. I Against I might’ve been the closest living relative to B.O.M.B.—listen to the sheer optimism behind a track like “Charge” as an example—but I’d also say the record was tailor-made for anyone who jumped at DBC’s equally unexplainable Universe one year later.
So, yeah, beyond virtually every song’s willingness to turn on a dime and muddle time signatures to explore odd little riff ’n’ rhythm patterns, what you’ll find here is a work that unwittingly seemed like a precursor to… Rust In Peace? Is that fair? I mean, no, it’s really not, but holy crap does Robbie Koebler—a local guitar teacher who also happened to be an understudy of STEVE VAI—ever find a lot of room to shred like a bastard on this thing. The weirdly bright production really boosts his brilliance, too. There’s still plenty of HC stomp and punch to be had, particularly inside the first two cuts and with that wonderfully bruising title-track closer:
Sandwiched in-between, though, we get a smorgasbord of twists and turns that seemed rather opposed to Hardcore circa 1988:
» “Charge,” a song that sounded as if it belonged on Quickness before the Bad Brains managed to release Quickness.
» The instrumental “Initial Shock,” which lands like a legit gesture of pure reverence to Metallica’s “Orion.”
» A total head-scratcher in “I Am He” that twists and turns so often it feels like four different songs inside a very scant 3 minutes and 23 seconds.
» “Rejuvinate,” the forever unheralded cousin of Powermad’s equally unheralded thrash feel-good anthem “Nice Dreams.”
» And of course, whatever the collective decides to call “Remembering Tomorrow”—new age cyborgcore?
Also awesome: The fact that the album manages to reach all manner of strange new worlds and still operate under Hardcore’s strict “keep it under 35 minutes” rule. Get in, hit it, get the fuck out. Amen, sisters and brothers.
The band folded a year after the release of Beast On My Back because of the tried-and-true (and fully understandable) “musical differences.” It was a bummer, really, because they opted to hang it up it up amidst a really spectacular year for crossover, with 1989 not only producing the off-shoot’s apex predator in the Cro-Mags’ Best Wishes, but also slayers such as Excel’s The Joke’s On You, Killing Time’s excellent Brightside, Leeway’s leveler Born to Expire, Sick of It All’s cracking debut Blood, Sweat and No Tears, and Wrecking Crew’s under-appreciated Balance of Terror. So, 1989: Crossover’s peak? Quite conceivable.
The Crumbsuckers saw the writing on the wall, though, so bassist Gary Meskil, drummer Dan Richardson and guitarist Chuck Lenihan (current guitarist for Carnivore A.D.) went on to form a new project called Heavy Rain, whose purpose was to further plumb the depths of the Crumbsucker’s proggier face. Sadly, that venture produced such a quick collapse that nothing ever managed to be officially released, so Meskil and Richardson opted to return to crossover in the early 90s with a new project called Pro-Pain. That venture, plus Biohazard and the further musings from SoIA, continued to fly crossover’s flag for years to come. For many, though, our attention shifted to punk’s influence on metal in the more extreme realms of grindcore and death/grind. Still, for a relatively brief moment on extreme music’s timeline, crossover found its footing, embraced its spotlight, and whooped all our asses. And inside that span, no one did anything even close to what the Crumbsucker’s accomplished with Beast On My Back. A true unicorn of an album.
L to R: Robbie Koebler, Chuck Lenihan, Gary Meskil, Chris Notaro, Dan Richardson
