Touch and Go Records and the

Rise of Hardcore Punk in

Late Twentieth-Century Detroit
Michael H. Carriere, Milwaukee School of Engineering

the suburb is a ghetto 1

In July 1983, Michigan: The magazine of the Detroit News, ran a story with
the eye-catching title The Punk Revolt. The article focused on the
lives of two young Detroit punk rock musicians: John Brannon (21)
and Larissa Strickland (23). The pair shared a cramped two-bedroom
apartment above the old Womens City Club in the infamous Cass
Corridor, an area in Detroit defined as being between I-75 at its
southern end and Wayne State University to the north, while stretching
from Woodward Avenue to the east and Third Street to the west.
Following decades of upheaval, the corridor by the early 1980s was
marked by blight and abandonment. To fellow punk musician Todd
Swalla (drummer for the seminal hardcore punk band the Necros), the
Cass Corridor was the worst neighborhood in the city. Most of the
neighborhood was burned out during the sixties riots and not much
was left except for dope houses.2
Yet the state of the neighbourhood, as Brannon and Strickland told
Michigan, was actually one of the reasons they fled the suburbs
and moved to this part of Detroit. Brannon hailed from the affluent
suburb of Grosse Point, where his father was an Episcopalian minister.
Strickland shared similar suburban roots. In the Cass Corridor, the two
could find a cheap apartment large enough to house them and all of
their musical equipment or they could squat in a vacant building and
live for free. The duo also noted that there were plenty of abandoned
Cultural History 4.1 (2015): 1941
DOI: 10.3366/cult.2015.0082
f Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/journal/cult

19

Cultural History
structures throughout the neighbourhood to turn into things like
practice studios, performance spaces and art galleries, all without any
interference from Detroit city officials or police officers. The Cass
Corridor was, in many ways, a blank canvas for such young artists.3
However, the main reason both Brannon and Strickland decided to
move to the Cass Corridor was because of what it was not: a dull postWorld War II suburb. The young musicians relayed a by-then-familiar
tale of post-war sterility and malaise. Commenting on why he both
got into punk rock and left the comfortable confines of Grosse Point,
Brannon told the Detroit News reporter that [a] lot of this is to stamp
out boredom. Weve got to stamp out boredom. I cant really explain
why I do this. I just know I have to. Strickland offered a similar critique
of suburban ennui and positioned punk rock as speaking directly to
this soulless atmosphere, not only in Detroit but in suburbs across
America. Like hardcore [punk]4 is massive in Los Angeles, Strickland
continued.
Thats because the suburb is a ghetto in L.A. Its hard to escape. Like
every house is alike. Theres no individuality. The kids are really middle
class, but not really wealthy. Theyre just sort of nowhere. Youre
expected to go to college, get married, get a job and get a place in the
suburbs. Your whole life seemed already planned out.

Escaping such a ghetto allowed Strickland to rethink her own

identity. In the Cass Corridor a region that most in the Detroit
metropolitan area would have classified as a ghetto at this time far
from the prying eyes and petty prejudices of suburbia, she could
embrace a world view that was anti-ignorance, pro-creative, antiprejudice. Its a way of looking at things that, according to Strickland,
was simply not possible in the suburb she once called home.5
Brannon also commented on the role that the suburbs had played
in his evolution as both a young man and a musical performer.
Describing the emerging genre of hardcore punk, Brannon noted,
This music is our soul music. The soul music of the suburbs, the
things that are on our minds. At the time of the interview, Brannon
was the vocalist for Negative Approach, a Detroit-based band that
became one of the most influential hardcore punk bands of all time.
On the bands eponymous debut seven-inch extended-play (EP) record
(1982), Brannon, speaking for his fellow suburban expatriates,
bellowed, in a song titled Lead Song: We want our lives/We want
our brains/You want control/But we wont pay/We want a fight/To
have a chance/To change the future/Erase the past.6

20

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

Fig. 1 The front cover of Negative Approachs debut EP, Touch and
Go Records, no. 7 (1982). Playing on the idea of hardcore punk as
the devils music , the cover features a still photograph of a possessed
Linda Blair from the film The Exorcist.

For Brannon, the post-industrial city of Detroit became an

environment where such a process was possible. As more and more
Detroiters fled the city (Detroit suffered a population loss of 20.5 per
cent between 1970 and 1980, losing over 300,000 residents during the
decade), Brannon, Strickland and other punk rockers participated
in a sort of reverse white flight. Looking at the admittedly troubled
landscape of their adopted city, Brannon and others saw a place where
much of the past was already erased. Here, within the wasted space and
vacant properties, history no longer mattered and the future could
be changed.7
In his important recent work Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days
of the Working Class, labour historian Jefferson Cowie positions the
1970s as a pivotal decade, one in which American society, from its
economic foundations to its cultural manifestations, really did move
in a new direction .8 For Cowie with his attention to the diminished
political power of the American working class this new direction was

21

Cultural History
generally conservative, a reality that helped set the stage for the
economic policies associated with the Reagan Revolution and the
me-first, yuppified culture of the 1980s. As Cowie notes:
[T]he range of working-class possibilities in popular culture was
diminished by the second half of the 1970s. Working-class story lines
hardened into three options: escape ones class position; find ways to
forget it; or, lacking any civic outlets, bury its pains deep inside.9

Within the realm of American music, Cowie usefully outlines how

the rise of such genres as disco and such artists as Bruce Springsteen
spoke to these emerging realities. And, with his eye on this relationship
between culture, class and politics, Cowie also sees the surfacing
of another genre commonly associated with this moment, American
punk rock, as ultimately ineffective in challenging the changing
tides of American culture during the late 1970s. American punk,
Cowie concludes, never became a national outlet for class antagonism
even when it shared some of the aesthetics and anger of British
insurgency.10 American punks, like their counterparts in other
genres, sought ways to escape or to simply stay alive.
This urge to view American punk rock through the lenses of class
and politics has also coloured the ways scholars looking more directly
at this genre have described their subjects. As Michelle Phillipov has
noted, punk scholars since the 1980s continue to operate with certain
assumptions about resistance, subversion and political radicalism
always in mind.11 Such a mindset has led such punk-scene observers as
Kevin Mattson to find that many strains within it took on heavy
political overtones. Looking at the world of punk rock in Washington,
D.C., during the 1980s, Mattson argues that in order to
explain why some youth went political, it is necessary to pull back from
the local punk subculture scene and take note of the general political
culture of the Reagan era. The 1980s was one of the most conservative
decades in United States history (similar, in ways, to the 1920s).12

While the broader political context of the rise of American punk

must be noted, it does not fully explain why this genre exploded
in popularity at this particular historical moment. To put this another
(perhaps too simplistic) way: why didnt punk rock emerge in the
similarly conservative era of the 1920s?
To Duke University English professor Susan Willis the answer to
this query can be found in the realities of late twentieth-century
class relations. Following the lead of Dick Hebdiges seminal work

22

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Willis, in a 1993 essay titled Hardcore:
Subculture American Style, finds that class is the single most
important factor in the definition of subculture, in America as in
Great Britain (where Hebdiges work on the subject was rooted). For
Willis, the rise of hardcore punk in the United States throughout
the 1980s was directly informed by the development of consumer
culture coincident with suburbanization and specifically [had] to do
with the emergence of new class formations brought about by
deindustrialization . Yet Williss essay remains frustratingly vague:
there is little discussion on how actual hardcore punk bands responded
to such monumental transformations.13
With this interpretive, suggestive essay,14 I wish to use the history of
seminal Midwestern punk rock record label Touch and Go Records
the label that released records by Negative Approach and other
important early American punk acts to argue that it is best to see the
rise of American punk rock not only as an indicator of political and
economic transformations but also as a moment of cultural rupture.
There is little doubt that American punk was reactive to some degree;
scholars such as Cowie, Mattson and Willis are not necessarily wrong in
arguing that the genre was reacting, in part, to political and economic
realignments. Yet often overlooked in such assessments is the fact
that American punk was also responding to broader currents within
American culture, specifically the recent history of American music.
It is the interplay between these forces with primary emphasis on the
cultural that will be the subject of this article. By untangling these
complex relationships one gains a better understanding of not only the
roots of American punk rock but also its continued evolution.
Sociologist Ryan Moore, in his recent Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music,
Youth Culture, and Social Crisis, provides a useful starting point for such
an exercise. To Moore, American punk rock was a sign of the
exhaustion of the faith in love, community, and possibility that had
characterized the counterculture and the New Left during the Sixties .
The cultural idealism of that decade was punks main target, as
the participants in the emerging subculture took great pleasure in
shattering the sense of Sixties utopianism that counterculture artists
had attempted to create.15
Yet Moore is quick to root this act of cultural rebellion within the
broader context of post-war America. With the benefit of historical
distance, he continues, we can also see that punk emerged in a
pivotal moment of transition in the global political economy, as the
social democracy of Fordism gave way to a more unforgiving brand
of unfettered capitalism. Understanding that they were growing up

23

Cultural History
amid a severe social crisis, punk rockers embraced a narrative
of declension as they simultaneously ushered in the condition of
postmodernity with cries of no future and no values. For such
disaffected individuals, it proved plausible to conclude that if nothing
is true, then nothing is possible. As Moore concludes, ultimately and
quite ominously the narrative of the rise of punk took on its greatest
significance as a harbinger of the descent into a callous society
devoid of alternatives.16
Moore is right to note that a certain brand of nihilism informed
some of early American punk. Yet in his attempt to create a dialectic
interplay between culture and such larger contexts (economic ones,
most specifically), Moore puts too much emphasis on the latter, to the
detriment of the agency of those making up the former. Yes, the forces
of global capitalism played a role in pushing American punk in certain
dark directions. Yet a ground-level examination of those associated
with the early history of Touch and Go Records highlights that such
individuals were not only reactive, nor were they simply acted upon by
forces outside of their control. Viewed from such an inward-looking
perspective, one sees a group of musicians, writers and others set on
creating a new, viable art form, one that sought to critique and replace
an older dominant culture that had come to be perceived as lacking
both vitality and innovation. Cultural realignment, rather than political
or class realignment, became the end result of such a process.
Therefore, production, in addition to reception, takes centre stage in
this article, allowing for a focus on a genre of music that is often
dismissed as unmusical and thereby unworthy of serious scholarly
attention. A focus on the micro-level of early American punk does
reveal, as Moore usefully documents, a distinct break from the culture
of the 1960s that preceded them: those involved with Touch and
Go had little love for what the decade had come to embody by the
late 1970s. However, the values that Moore and others saw punk as
hell-bent on annihilating, including community and possibility, were
not destroyed but rather taken apart and redefined for a new cultural
era. In the case of Touch and Go, no future and no values can
better be read as no past and new values. Here, the end of history
signified not only a moment of crisis but also one of opportunity.
If nothing was true, in other words, everything was possible at least in
the realm of culture.17
One sees this more hopeful vision of American punk most clearly
when another component is added to this dialectic interplay: the role
of urban space. Often overlooked by those studying the roots of
American punk, the spatial elements of cities across the United States

24

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

played vital roles in the ways the genre both came into being and
changed over time. Most important, it is in such urban centres that one
can best see the collision between economics, politics and culture
that Moore and others see as making punk possible. The environment
created by such forces as global capitalism did bring remarkable
devastation to a host of American cities. But through this destruction
they also produced urban spaces ripe for reinvention. It was this
vacuum that American punk came to fill.
This was particularly the case in Detroit and the citys Cass Corridor
neighbourhood, the region that quickly became the adopted home of
many musicians, fans and other individuals associated with Touch and
Go Records. Here, the urban crisis seen as beginning with the riots
of 1967 and continuing with the deindustrialization that gripped the
city during the 1970s and early 1980s moved the city, in the words of
Tamar Jacoby, beyond the point of no return , particularly for the
white Detroiters who continued to flee the city in record numbers. And
with the election of Coleman Young, the citys first African American
mayor, in 1974 there was the widespread belief that a torch was being
passed and Detroit was now officially a black town.18
It was this changing nature of the city that made punk rock in
Detroit what it ultimately became. With little attention paid to them,
the white youth drawn to punk rock found a world free of expectations,
surveillance or attention of any sort. Yet the landscape created by
deindustrialization did not necessarily provide evidence of the realities
of changing class and racial politics the punk rock coming out of
the city at this moment remained surprisingly apolitical but instead
provided young musicians with a sort of urban laboratory well suited
for cultural experimentation. The desolate environment of postindustrial Detroit, described by some contemporary commentators as
Third World in its conditions, provided the space and atmosphere
necessary for such a challenging form of music to develop. For many
young punk musicians and fans many fleeing nearby suburbs for life
in Detroit the narrative of deindustrialization was not solely one of
destruction but also, as opposed to their sterile suburban homes, one
of creation. The city became a place to nurture young musicians like
Brannon and Strickland and to provide a place for the networking of
acts from around the world.19
At its core, this article seeks to provide a cultural history for hardcore
punk rockers in Detroit, as their impact on the evolution of late
twentieth-century American culture has been severely underestimated.
Historians and other scholars are only beginning to parse out the
conquest of cool that occurred within turn-of-the-century American

25

Cultural History
culture. The radical culture created by Detroit punk rockers points to
the roots of this shift, as their efforts worked to destabilize mainstream
American music culture while providing both the inspiration and space
necessary for continued cultural innovation. These individuals, in
other words, were doing more than simply staying alive. They were
trying to create a culture, one in direct opposition to the popular
culture that reigned supreme at that historical moment.20
Yet this act of cultural reinvention, made possible by the changing
conditions of Detroit, was also heavily informed by the characteristics
of those doing the reinventing. The racial and class status of artists like
Strickland and Brannon, along with their drive to create something
new, afforded them both the means and the intellectual space to see
the city as little more than a blank slate. Such musicians wanted to
change music; they didnt necessarily want to change the city or even
begin to deal with the histories that continued to act on urban centres
like Detroit. It is this complicated legacy that can help us better
understand not only the continuing evolution of American punk rock
but also the continuing evolution of American cities. This fixation on
cultural upheaval in Detroit as opposed to political and/or economic
change impacted more than music, in the Motor City and elsewhere.
It also played a role in the spatial development of the city itself.
Fuck the Past. Support the New : The Birth of Touch and Go fanzine
The roots of Touch and Go Records can be traced back to the printing
of 100 copies of the first issue of Touch and Go fanzine in November
1979 in East Lansing, Michigan. From the first issue co-editors Dave
Stimson and Robert Vermeulen (writing under the nom de plume
Tesco Vee) strongly sought to make the point that the emerging
punk scene they were championing was distinctly different from
the counterculture of the 1960s and from those who came to
scavenge the corpse of that previous moment. In the not-so-subtly
titled article Kill the Hippies! , Stimson excoriated those who clung to
this past:
You hippies long for the days of peace and music and love, those
which were embodied within the Woodstock festival. Unable to relive
that era, you cling desperately to its music or a variation on the same
theme. Its like dragging around the corpse of your dead dog hoping to
perpetuate that old feeling between you and your pet. All that happens is
that the stench becomes more and more vile. Dry up and blow away,
because theres no place for you. The new music is here, and its here
to stay.21

26

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

Fig. 2 Kill the Hippies! headline, Touch and Go fanzine, no. 1

(November 1979).

What is perhaps most noteworthy about such a passage is that, rather

than focusing on the politics of the 1960s-era counterculture, Stimson
instead directed his ire at the musical legacy of that earlier moment.
What Stimson saw in the hippies was a cultural movement that, while
once relevant, had allowed market forces to neuter the critique of

27

Cultural History
mainstream American culture that the music associated with the scene
had once been able to provide. You see, Stimson continued, the
hippies control the airwaves, for it was they who first implemented FM
as a musical alternative to the pap that was being pushed by the AM
stations. Based on the premiss that radio could and should be used in
the advancement for the growth of popular music. Yet by 1979 it had
become the case that FM stations no longer adhere to that kind of
philosophy. Now, they have become static, having locked themselves
into a late 60s early 70s timewarp. Innovation and creativity have been
shunned in favor of hyped, schlocky commercialism .22
More specifically, the co-editors took issue with what the local radio
station WILS-FM (101.7 FM) was playing or not playing within the
Lansing metropolitan area. For much of the time, the station was
dedicated to the album-oriented rock format, with a heavy emphasis on
bands such as REO Speedwagon, Kansas and Styx. Yet Stimson even
took issue with variations to this format, particularly DJ Shaun
Hendrixs Sunday night New Wave show. To Stimson, Hendrix
had little knowledge of the vast amount of music that was emerging
to challenge the rock and roll the station relied so heavily on.
Shaun Hendrix, wrote Stimson, is the biggest wanking, scumbait
DJ in Lansing [E]ach and every Sunday night this lardbrain proves
to us that his knowledge of new wave goes absolutely no farther
than Billboard magazine . The only advice Stimson could muster for
Hendrix was to [a]dmit youre shit and leave this stuff to the people
who know something about it.23
One of the new wave bands that Hendrix championed on his weekly
show was The Romantics, a Detroit-based band that would go on to
international success with their 1983 song Talking in Your Sleep. Yet,
to Tesco Vee, the radio-friendly aesthetics of the band put them in the
camp of artists willing to simply continue to mindlessly embrace
the pop sounds popularized during the 1960s. Out of the cyclicly [sic]
contrived maelstrom of american pop culture, Vee wrote in a piece
on The Romantics, oozes but another glob of stench reeking of the
fucking 60s. Making matters worse was that the band called Michigan
home. The midwest, Vee continued, once supposedly a hotbed of
music now lays dormant due in part to archaic FM programming,
and lack of venues in which new bands can cultivate a sound and a
following.24
This dearth of places for new bands to perform became a central
component of Touch and Gos critique of the regional music scene of
the late 1970s. On the one hand, by the late 1970s clubs throughout
the Midwest had come to favour cover bands over acts performing

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Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

original material. Yet when clubs did book non-cover bands they often
did so in collaboration with area radio stations. These partnerships, as
Stimson explained, meant that only certain acts had access to the
regions clubs and other performing spaces. As evidence of this trend,
Stimson documented a 5 November 1979 Romantics concert that took
place at East Lansings Gables nightclub. This performance had been
organized and sponsored by WILS, a fact that led Stimson to question
the motives of such a strategy. For Stimson, the concert was thus
nothing more than [a] very elaborate promotional campaign: it is
not the stations altruism that initiates this kind of move (putting on a
show), rather it is done in the hope of building up their listenership by
appearing hip or chic via getting in on the ground floor of the
inevitable success of the Romantics.25
For Stimson, then, punk rock afforded the opportunity to recapture
the pioneering essence of the counterculture while providing an
alternative to the bland culture that had been able to grow in its wake.
Celebrating [t]he death of a hippies dream , Stimson looked to the
emergent world of punk and saw the beginning of a serious alternative
to crap weve been subjected to for so long now. You know the kind of
noise Im talking about Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, Styx, Foghat the
list is agonizingly long. What was most encouraging about this
alternative was the fact that it was the musicians themselves and the
fans who supported them that were, in large part, in control of both
the creation and distribution of the records and fanzines that Stimson
saw as so promising. The do-it-yourself ethos provided an exit route
from mainstream American culture. We want to be able to hear
the kind of music that we want, concluded Stimson, not this mindless
drivel that gets shoved down our throats by the major record
industries . In light of such limited choices, Stimson called on his
readers to start their own bands, open their own clubs, form their own
record labels and write their own magazines.26
For Stimson and Vermeulen, such a position led them to focus
directly on what was happening in their home state of Michigan.
For the two co-editors, the cultivation of local punk scenes was central
to the emerging genres long-term viability. This commitment to
regionalism were primarily interested in whats going on in this
area, wrote Stimson in the first issue of Touch and Go became the
hallmark of the burgeoning punk scenes across the country, in such
disparate places as San Francisco, Boston, New York and Washington,
D.C.27 Not surprisingly, Touch and Gos issue 1 went out of its way to
sing the praises of relatively unknown Michigan acts like Flirt, The
Cubes, Coldcock and Algebra Mothers, with the latter described as

29

Cultural History
having a sound unlike any of their midwestern counterparts. Their
45 is the areas best attempt at catching a bands live sound on record.
Moreover, the reviewer approvingly compared their sound to the
UK-based Cabaret Voltaire, an act who had gotten their start in 1973
and who sounded little like the punk music that was quickly taking root
throughout Michigan.28
Stimson heard in such acts the rebellious sound of earlier rock
and roll that the mainstream music scene of the 1970s had worked
to discourage and that punk and its ilk could potentially restore. To
Stimson, record company executives had sufficiently brainwashed
radio into believing that punk and rock n roll are two distinct
entities. The popular bands of the late 1970s, including the likes of
Styx, Toto and Molly Hatchet, could not be considered rock music.
Let me ask you, Stimson continued, what does some guy noodling
on his guitar for God knows how long have to do with rock and
roll. Absolutely nothing. In the face of what Touch and Go saw as nonconfrontational drivel, any sort of return to the unruly spirit of rock
and roll was indeed novel. To drive the freshness of this moment
home, the back cover of Touch and Gos issue 3 was adorned, under a
picture of another UK performer, Siouxsie Sioux, with the slogan
Fuck the Past. Support the New.29
Sick of talk: The rise of Touch and Go Records
In addition to reviewing the latest punk albums, Touch and Go fanzine
also went out of its way to tell its readers where they could go to
purchase these records. Issue 12, for example, provided a guide to
record stores throughout Michigan, highlighting East Lansings Flat
Black and Circular, Ann Arbors Schoolkids Records and Make Waves,
and Dearborns Dearborn Music. The next logical step was for the
magazine to put out its own records, a move they announced in the
introduction to issue 12: As u may have gathered were releasing
the first single on our rekord [sic] label. Buy one and prove it to
yourself theres some life in the Midwest.30 The following
issue featured an advertisement for the fanzines fledgling label,
appropriately named Touch and Go Records. The advertisement
featured the Necros debut EP (commonly referred to as the Sex Drive
EP), along with The Fixs Vengeance b/w In this Town EP. Perhaps not
surprisingly, the Touch and Go co-editors used this issue to promote
their two bands, as issue 13 featured interviews with both the Necros
and The Fix. For Tesco Vee, such bands, as he noted in the
introduction to the Necros interview, were finally giving the
Midwest a tad of credibility and self respect.31

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Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

Fig. 3 The front cover of the Necros Sex Drive EP, Touch and Go Records, no. 1
(1981). The minimal sound of early hardcore punk was often echoed by an
equally sparse visual aesthetic.

Formed in 1979, the Necros would use their experiences growing

up in Maumee, Ohio a suburb of Toledo to fuel their angry version of
hardcore punk. By 1981 the band had settled on a line-up of
Barry Henssler (vocals), Andy Wendler (guitar), Todd Swalla (drums)
and Corey Rusk (bass). That same year would see Touch and Go release
the Necros first record, along with their second EP, I.Q. 32 (co-released
by Washington, D.C.-based Dischord Records). Through such songs as
Police Brutality (from Sex Drive), Public High School, Peer
Pressure and I Hate My School (the latter three from I.Q. 32),
Henssler poked fun at the sterility and conformity of the American
suburb. Thousands of kids, Henssler sang in Public High School,
and theyre all the same / Might as well have the same last name / Have
no worries but they have no minds . In Police Brutality , Henssler
directed his ire at the institutions of surveillance that contributed to the
oppressive atmosphere of communities like Maumee: Police brutality /
The cops harassing me / Police brutality / Get it in Maumee.32

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Cultural History
This blunt critique of suburbia was married to an equally
straightforward approach to musicianship. As the first generation of
punk evolved into an artier brand of post-punk, the Necros pushed
the original punk formula to its breaking point. Songs like the title
track from the I.Q. 32 EP were played at a breakneck pace and wasted
little time in delivering a frenzied jolt of energy (I.Q. 32 clocked
in at a sprightly twenty-three seconds). Such a stripped-down, to-thepoint aesthetic was intentional. As Necros vocalist Barry Henssler
explained:
We saw what we were doing as something entirely different Most punk
rock, like the Sex Pistols, was essentially Chuck Berry riffs revved up. We
were taking the sound and idea of impact and extending it. Rather than
just one impact it was 60 impacts per minute. And people reacted
physically to that.33

To The Fix vocalist Steve Miller, such energy marked a distinct

difference between the rise of hardcore punk and previous musical
moments, including rock and roll and even earlier punk rock. This
new generation of punks saw themselves as creating something novel.
What was going on, explained Miller, as more and more musicians
gravitated to the city, was one more explosion in American music in
Detroit. There was some connection to earlier musical moments here:
like Henssler, Miller was attracted to the anti-social music made by
earlier Detroit-based groups like the MC5 and the Stooges; in fact,
Miller recalled that Iggy Pop [front man of the Stooges] was the hero
of our group. But there was also a simultaneous sense that that earlier
wave of music had run its course. You didnt want to do exactly what
your idols did. For Miller, hardcore punk provided a mechanism
through which to sonically push past both musical predecessors and
contemporaries. To Stimson, the frenzied assault produced by
The Fix aint for sniveling little wimps, if you cant handle it, stay
home and cuddle up to the B-52s latest debacle.34
For Rob Michaels, whose band Bored Youth recorded an EP for
Touch and Go in 1981 that, for financial reasons, was never released,
this drive to innovate was made all the more acute by the broader state
of American music. Like the editors of Touch and Go, Michaels surveyed
the grandiose, highly technical music of such acts as Styx, Journey and
REO Speedwagon and could only conclude that it had a certain
softness to it. To musicians like Michaels, the music of the late 1970s
was marked by a sense of remoteness that mainstream culture
seemed to have at the time big shows in big arenas, with a stage over
there and the crowd over here. Punk rock therefore provided an

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Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

aesthetic critique against a certain kind of sterility and self-indulgence
within the popular music of the time.35
Taken on its own, this displeasure with mainstream American music
was a powerful impetus for cultural innovation. Yet this disconnect with
broader cultural trends was made all the more powerful when it was
grafted onto the emerging critique of life in the American suburb. For
Michaels, the popular music of the late 1970s was the ideal soundtrack
to the mundane conditions that marked suburbia. Hardcore punk
spoke to the sense of social isolation that those left out of
such cultural and social arrangements were coming to feel. Viewed
in this context, Michaels saw hardcore punk not only as a response
to nationwide cultural forces but also, on the micro-level, as a
rebellion against a certain sterility, a certain type of conformity that
was prevailing in the suburban high schools. Perhaps most important,
hardcore punk also provided a means to address such conditions,
to actively participate in cultural production at a historical moment
when the larger world of music appeared closed off to anyone but a
select few performers. Easy-to-play hardcore punk (this era, as Michaels
explains, was kind of like year zero, music-wise, for many of those
kids ) was created by young people for young people and thus quickly
became, as Michaels concludes, a viable means of cultural expression
and participation .36
By 1982 Necros bass player Corey Rusk had become a partner in
Touch and Go Records (he would take full control of the label the
following year). That year saw the release of Negative Approachs
00
debut 7 EP, along with the release of an EP by the Larissa Stricklandfronted L-Seven on Touch and Gos new subsidiary label, Special
Forces a label designed to release records by bands whose music is
just as intense but doesnt fit into the realm of hardcore. Both acts
were based in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the city itself was fast
becoming the epicentre for activity related to Touch and Go Records
and their acts.37
Fuck history. Were making history:
Cass Corridor and the promise of deindustrialization
On 6 March 1982, L-Seven shared a bill with Bored Youth and Negative
Approach at the Freezer Theatre, a venue in Cass Corridor (3958
Cass Avenue). Since December 1981 the space, described by Tony
Rettman as a gutted concrete storefront suffering a slow death, had
become the focal point for the Midwestern hardcore punk scene,
hosting shows by local and touring acts alike.38 In many ways, the
Cass Corridor seemed to exemplify the worst of post-1967 Detroit,

33

Cultural History

Fig. 4 Negative Approach performing live at the Freezer Theatre, 1981.

Photograph by Davo Scheich.

showing the scars of both urban unrest and deindustrialization. It

was a shitty neighborhood and there was a lot of crime, as L-Seven
guitarist Dave Rice succinctly explained. Yet, as Rice understood, it was
these realities that made spaces like the Freezer Theatre possible.
Rents in the neighbourhood were cheap and there was a lot of space.
And the cops will look the other way at 70 bald kids with Coke
bottles .39
For Rice, such conditions provided the space for his cohort
of musicians to actively work to escape the confines of the past. Its
not that people didnt appreciate bands like MC5 and Iggy and the
Stooges , explained Rice. They did. There was agreement among
those within the hardcore punk scene that such acts, particularly in
the city of Detroit, had helped to lay a sort of infrastructure of
performance on which they were now building. Yet there was also a real
sense that by the early 1980s these bands had come to be viewed
primarily through the lens of an uncritical nostalgia. According
to Rice, some did see the MC5 by that time as a bunch of old hippie
fuddy-duddies We didnt see it as any sort of continuum. The
Freezer Theatre provided an avenue through which to redefine the
sound of Detroit. Soon, the space would become the communal home
of the fledgling Detroit hardcore punk scene.40

34

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

Driving this process was sheer necessity. In looking for places to play
in the city, hardcore punk musicians realized, in the words of Necros
vocalist Barry Henssler, that the club scene wasnt going to give a
shit about hardcore bands. Too extreme for clubs still privileging
cover acts, bands like the Necros had to go about finding our own
spaces. It was just a necessity. It wasnt a political statement or a
statement of utilizing an old space. Bored Youth vocalist Rob Michaels
echoed this sentiment, explaining that the decision to put on shows in
an underprivileged section of the city was an unpolitical decision.
There was no consciousness of that. Musicians such as John Brannon
and Larissa Strickland, drawn to the neighbourhood by its cheap rents,
soon took up residence in the Cass Corridor. By the summer of 1982
the two were living in The Clubhouse, a space on Willis Street (406 W.
Willis Street) that hosted hardcore punk shows for over half a year,
from July 1982 to February 1983.41
Yet there was also a real feeling that what made places like the Cass
Corridor appealing to such individuals was what they werent: suburban.
Most pragmatically and somewhat paradoxically these urban spaces,
for young people drawn to hardcore punk, were deemed safer than
suburban spaces. In explaining the appeal of the desolate Cass
Corridor, Necros vocalist Henssler noted that anything was better than
life in Maumee, Ohio. I just wanted to break out and get as far away
from there as possible. It was the least avant-garde place on Earth. And
it was in the suburbs, not the city, that Henssler feared bodily harm.
If you had a leather jacket and a crew-cut [in Maumee], continued
Henssler, people would throw bottles at you from their cars. For him,
then, there were no reservations about going to Detroit.42
Perhaps more romantically, others drawn to hardcore punk saw the
city as providing a sort of aesthetic inspiration, one that the boring
suburbs could not possibly provide. Corey Rusk has noted that
certainly aesthetically I was drawn to that [landscape of
deindustrialization]. Before I could drive I was going to shows in
Detroit. I think a lot of people found it or find it to be scary or creepy,
but when youre young you dont react that way. It just seemed strangely
beautiful to me, what it was, even though it was the most extreme
example of urban decay of a major city in the United States Maybe
growing up a middle-class American in a small town, something about
the decaying urban setting was such a dramatically different setting that
it was appealing.43

For The Fix vocalist Steve Miller, among others, such a deserted urban
setting quickly brought about a strong sense of community among

35

Cultural History
those who worked to literally build the Freezer. To Negative Approach
vocalist John Brannon, the participatory nature of the communitybuilding process at the Freezer fully informed the feel of the space, as
well as the scene itself. Commenting on shows at the Freezer, Brannon
noted, The whole thing about being in a band at that point, there
was no separation between the kids and the audience and whos on
stage. It was music for the people. Equally important, the desolate
environment of the Freezer also allowed the emerging genre of
hardcore punk to see itself as distinct from the broader historical
currents that had previously worked to define music in the city. You
were aware of its [the citys] history from the 1960s , explained Miller,
but not that aware. We really felt like we were doing something new.
It was kind of like Fuck history. Were making history.44
Perhaps not surprisingly, such individuals were also unaware of
earlier artistic movements that had occupied the Cass Corridor. More
specifically, the neighbourhood, according to art historian Julia R.
Myers, had witnessed an intense efflorescence of artistic activity in the
late 1960s and the 1970s , as visual artists such as Gordon Newton,
John Egner, Michael Luchs and Robert Sestok rooted themselves, and
their work, in the gritty environment of the Cass Corridor. These artists
practised what some art critics came to call industrial expressionism,
as their work reflected the danger and decay of a declining, postindustrial Detroit. Yet hardcore punk fan Greg Bokor who had
moved to the Cass Corridor in 1981 from Hudsonville, Michigan, to
attend art school at the nearby Center for Creative Studies knew
nothing about this history. I wanted to be near the music, explained
Bokor. I was there for the music.45
This ambivalent relationship with history carried over into
interactions with the predominantly low-income African American
population of the Cass Corridor. No allegiances were formed There
was never any real contact, recalls Barry Henssler and the two camps,
according to him and other white punk rockers, generally left each
other alone. There was no attempt to build solidarity with the African
American population of the community, or to even come to terms
with the culture of a group that seemed to share a similar narrative
of alienation from mainstream American society. The ironies of such
racial as well as cultural isolation were not lost on musicians like Rob
Michaels, who explains, The funny thing about it though was for these
kids to find somewhere to play, they had to find some shitty storefront
in the ghetto. So it was the soul music of the suburbs that had to be
played in the inner city. The suburbs these young people called
home had no place for such cultural expression. This scene

36

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

reproduced itself across the country during the early 1980s, as white
suburban young people moved into predominantly African American
neighbourhoods in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Such
movements were not necessarily about laying down roots or developing
an identity based on allegiance to a city, neighbourhood or any other
spatial category; they were primarily migrations of opportunity. Rusk
himself would move Touch and Go Records from Detroit to a larger
Midwestern city, Chicago, in 1987.46
Legacies of the moment and the movement
As scholars such as Suleiman Osman and Aaron Shkuda begin to both
flesh out and complicate the histories of gentrification in such cities
as New York and the role of artists in these histories it is tempting
to see such middle-class white punk rockers as the shock troops of
this process, making the Cass Corridor safe for other white people
while giving the neighbourhood the reputation of housing a new, edgy
culture. And there may be something to this narrative: throughout
the 1990s the region continued to attract white punk rock fans. In 1991
a new punk venue, 404 Willis, opened at 404 W. Willis Street in the Cass
Corridor. Just two years later, the Trumbullplex, described by Detroits
Metro Times as a Cass Corridor anarchist collective, began putting on
shows and running a housing cooperative. Other development soon
followed. In 1997, for example, Avalon International Breads opened at
422 W. Willis Street, while Goodwells Natural Foods opened its doors
at 418 W. Willis Street in 2006. 404 W. Willis Street is currently the
home of Flo Boutique, a self-described lifestyle clothing boutique for
women and men. At the same time, the building that housed the
Freezer Theatre was demolished in October 2013, making room for a
new parking lot.47
While more work is undoubtedly needed on the relationship
between such music scenes and gentrification, the example of
Detroit illustrates just how moments of cultural transition can occur
in American cities, what impact the urban setting has on such
moments, and how these moments can also shape the urban built
environment itself (through the creation of spaces like the Freezer
Theatre). The case of Detroit punk also highlights the sort of collective
unawareness that allows for not only the birth of new cultures but also
the forgetting of previous ones. An understanding of such a mindset
seems integral to grasping how gentrification has worked in the United
States. Yet, in the broader realm of American culture, the influence of
Touch and Go Records was anything but ephemeral. During the late
twentieth century, the label set the groundwork for the rise of the

37

Cultural History
alternative music genre that would sweep the airwaves by the early
1990s and, in the process, helped launch the careers of such genredefining acts as the Jesus Lizard, Urge Overkill, TV on the Radio and
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (among others), all of whom put out records
on Touch and Go. The label even inspired such legendary musicians
as Nirvanas Kurt Cobain (who reportedly sent the label his bands
first demo tape, hoping they would agree to put out Nirvanas
debut album) and such important independent record labels as Drag
City, Kill Rock Stars and Merge Records. It is with this cultural and
not political or economic legacy in mind that we must come to
understand the importance of the rise of American punk. And it is with
this cultural legacy in mind that we see just how the environment of
late twentieth-century Detroit provided the perfect setting for the
beginnings of this revolution.48
Notes
1. John Brannon, quoted in Lowell Cauffiel, The Punk Revolt , Michigan:
The magazine of the Detroit News, 10 July 1982, 12+ (p. 13).
2. Cauffiel, The Punk Revolt ; Swalla, quoted in Tony Rettman, Why be Something that
Youre Not: Detroit Hardcore, 19791985 (Huntington Beach, CA: Revelation Records,
2010), p. 85.
3. Cauffiel, The Punk Revolt , p. 13.
4. Emerging in the late 1970s, hardcore punk built on the sound and aesthetic of the
first wave of punk rock associated with the mid-1970s. To music historian Steven
Blush, hardcore punk, played faster than earlier punk rock, was an extreme: the
absolute most Punk . It is this genre of hardcore punk that will be the focus of this
essay. See Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral House,
2001), p. 18.
5. Cauffiel, The Punk Revolt , p. 13.
6. Cauffiel, The Punk Revolt , p. 13; Negative Approach, Lead Song , Negative
00
Approach, 7 EP (Touch and Go Records, Lansing, MI, 1982).
7. Wilbur C. Rich, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 23.
8. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New
York: New Press, 2010), p. 11.
9. Ibid., p. 17.
10. Ibid., p 325.
11. Michelle Phillipov, Haunted by the Spirit of 77: Punk Studies and the Persistence
of Politics , Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20:3 (2006), pp. 38393
(383).
12. Kevin Mattson, Did Punk Matter? Analyzing the Practices of a Youth Subculture
during the 1980s , American Studies, 42:1 (2001), pp. 6997 (77, 78).
13. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979);
Susan Willis, Hardcore: Subculture American Style , Critical Inquiry, 19:2 (1993),
pp. 36583 (367). In fact, Willis gets wrong the name of the one hardcore punk
band she mentions in her essay: the Washington, D.C.-based hardcore punk band

38

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

14.

15.
16.
17.

18.

19.

20.

Bad Brains is referred to as Bad Brain (p. 373). Willis also curiously reports that
eighty percent of a hardcore punks wardrobe is likely to be black; the remainder is
often white or grey (p. 369). There is no indication of how she came to such a
conclusion.
This is not a comprehensive institutional or social history of an independent
record label or a burgeoning American hardcore punk rock scene; I pay very
little attention to the day-to-day workings of such things. Recent works by such
authors as Tony Rettman and Steve Miller provide such useful on-the-ground
accounts of how punk operated in such Midwestern cities as Detroit in the late
1970s and early 1980s. Rather, it is an attempt to see how a number of actors used
the genre of punk as a means to interact with late-twentieth-century American
culture. See Rettmans Why be Something that Youre Not and Millers Detroit Rock City:
The Uncensored History of Rock n Roll in Americas Loudest City (Boston: Da Capo,
2013).
Ryan Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (New York:
New York University Press, 2010), p. 37.
Ibid., p. 37.
Here I am influenced by Kevin Mattsons explicit challenge to Hebdiges
fetishization of consumption in subculture theory. Mattson draws our attention
to matters related to cultural production and the way those involved in American
punk rock formed a robust community of producers through independently
creating musical commodities (sold through alternative networks) . Mattson, Did
Punk Matter? , p. 72.
Tamar Jacoby, Someone Elses House: Americas Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New
York: Free Press, 1998), pp. 238, 294. For the definitive work on post-war Detroit,
see Thomas Sugrues Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Such works as Sugrues Origins of the Urban Crisis, Colin Gordons Mapping Decline:
St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008), and Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcotts Beyond the Ruins: The
Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) relay the
now-familiar story of the damage wrought by deindustrialization in cities across the
United States. This article does not seek to ignore such damage; instead, it seeks to
begin to present the cultural side of a process that is often discussed primarily in
economic terms. Attention is therefore drawn to the ways in which one set of actors
responded to such environments as they struggled to make an American city more
livable. For a description of post-industrial Detroit as Third World see Zeev
Chafets, Devils Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Random House,
1990), p. 121.
See Thomas Franks The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise
of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) for more on the
seismic cultural shifts of the late twentieth century and on the ways that previously
underground cultures came to have pronounced impacts on the broader culture of
the United States. With Franks nuanced examination of the world of American
advertising in mind, I use the phrase radical culture, rather than a culture of
radicalism, consciously and carefully. While critical of the political and economic
trends of their day, the actors discussed in this article were more interested in
fomenting a type of cultural upheaval. Such ambivalence towards the institutions
that controlled American political and economic life may help us better understand

39

Cultural History

21.

22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

40.
41.

42.
43.
44.
45.

46.

how and why the aesthetics of punk rock so quickly became a part of American
mainstream culture.
Dave Stimson, Kill the Hippies! , Touch and Go, no. 1 (November 1979), p. 5. All
references to Touch and Go magazine are drawn from Steve Miller (ed.), Touch and
Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine 79 83 (New York: Bazillion Points, 2010). All
issues of the magazine are reproduced in this one volume.
Ibid., p. 5.
Dave Stimson, untitled editorial, Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 23.
Tesco Vee, Romantics , Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 24.
Dave Stimson, Drop Dead WILS , Touch and Go, no. 2 (December 1979), p. 32.
Dave Stimson, The death of a hippies dream , Touch and Go, no. 1 (November
1979), p. 3.
Ibid., p. 3.
Algebra Mothers-Flirt-Coldcock-The Cubes Live at the Ranch , Touch and Go, no. 1
(November 1979), p. 4.
Dave Stimson, Comment , Touch and Go, no. 3 (January 1980), p. 47; back cover of
Touch and Go, no. 3 (January 1980), p. 59.
Touch and Go , Touch and Go, no. 12 (April 1981), p. 239.
Tesco Vee, Necros , Touch and Go, no. 13 (June 1981), p. 267.
00
The Necros, Public High School , I.Q. 32, 7 EP (Touch and Go Records/
00
Dischord Records, Lansing, MI, 1981); the Necros, Police Brutality , Sex Drive, 7
EP (Touch and Go Records, Lansing, MI, 1981).
Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.
Steve Miller, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 19 February 2014; Dave Stimson,
The Fix , Touch and Go, no. 9 (November 1980), p. 164.
Rob Michaels, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 17 February 2014.
Ibid.
Introduction , Touch and Go, no. 18 (March 1982), p. 381.
Rettman, Why be Something that Youre Not, p. 83.
Dave Rice, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014. For more on the
events of 1967 in Detroit, see Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh
Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1989). For the history of the Cass Corridor, see Armando
Delicato and Elias Khalil, Detroits Cass Corridor (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2012).
Dave Rice, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.
Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014; Rob Michaels,
interview by Michael H. Carriere, 17 February 2014; Rettman, Why be Something that
Youre Not, p. 162.
Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014.
Corey Rusk, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 18 August 2006.
John Brannon, quoted in Miller, Detroit Rock City, p. 211; Steve Miller, interview by
Michael H. Carriere, 19 February 2014.
Julia R. Myers, Subverting Modernism: Cass Corridor Revisited 19661980 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2013), pp. 1, 3, 4; Greg Bokor, interview by Michael
H. Carriere, 18 February 2014. Tellingly, Myerss work makes no mention of the
Detroit punk scene that came to exist in the Cass Corridor towards the end of the
period she studies.
Barry Henssler, interview by Michael H. Carriere, 25 February 2014; Michaels,
quoted in Rettman, Why be Something that Youre Not, p. 94. While it is beyond the

40

Hardcore Punk in Late 20th-Century Detroit

scope of this article, more historical work needs to be done on the interactions
between such groups as underground musicians and African Americans in
American cities during the late twentieth century.
47. Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for
Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Aaron
Peter Shkuda, From Urban Renewal to Gentrification: Artists, Cultural Capital and
the Remaking of New Yorks SoHo Neighborhood, 19501980 (PhD dissertation,
University of Chicago, 2010); Domenique Osborne, Radically Wholesome , Metro
Times, 11 September 2002, www.metrotimes.com/detroit/radically-wholesome/
Content?oid=2174463. Last accessed September 1, 2014. Ryan Felton, The Days
of Anarchy in Midtown , The South End, 28 September 2011, www.thesouthend.
wayne.edu/archives/article_04cbd184-e1b4-55f3-af08-45af7aded984.html?mode=
story. Last accessed September 1, 2014. Flo Boutiques home page: www.
flowingflava.com/; Paul Beshouri, Cass Storefront and Former Freezer Theater
Now Erased , Curbed Detroit, 18 October 2013, http://detroit.curbed.com/archives/
2013/10/cass-storefront-and-former-freezer-theater-now-erased.php. Last accessed
September 1, 2014.
48. For Touch and Gos influence on Kurt Cobain, see Ben Myers, Label of Love:
Touch and Go , The Guardian, 20 April 2009, www.theguardian.com/music/2009/
apr/20/label-love-touch-go. Last accessed February 11, 2013. Myers writes that
without the inspiration of the labels [Touch and Gos] artists, its likely Nirvana
would never have happened .

41