HARDCORE HISTORY
City filmmaker cranks it up
It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when crowding into a dive bar to witness a band play as loud, fast and angry as possible was the most important thing in the world — to people of a certain attitude.
That was the Detroit hardcore scene, circa 1981-1982 — the subject of Windsor filmmaker Otto Buj's new documentary.
“For lack of a better term, we'll call it punk rock. But hardcore is a bit of a distinction from punk rock,” says Buj, 51.
“The whole scene, at that point in time, was populated by kids who were marginalized, kids who were outsiders. Kids who felt like they didn't fit in anywhere else.”
“You wouldn't find kids at hardcore shows who were also on the football team or going to church on Sunday mornings. These were kids who were all kind of misfits.”
Dope, Hookers and Pavement: The Real and Imagined History of Detroit Hardcore premieres this week as part of the Freep Film Festival, and becomes viewable online for Canadian residents on Jan. 1 (detroithardcoremovie.com).
The product of two years' work, the feature-length documentary relies on present-day interviews, decades-old photographs, and previously unseen video recordings to recount the earliest days of how a very specific subgenre — do-ityourself American hardcore punk — manifested itself in Detroit.
Despite the film's title, Windsor played an important part in this slice of underground music history.
“The huge Windsor connection to all this was a place called the Coronation Tavern, which some people say was the birthplace of Detroit hardcore,” Buj explains.
Formerly located at 1521 Riverside Dr. W., the Coronation Tavern was far from an artistic haven. According to those who were part of the scene at the time, it barely functioned as a venue.
But in the summer of 1981, that dingy Windsor bar hosted performances by seminal hardcore bands like Minor Threat, D.O.A., Necros, and Negative Approach.
“Detroit did not have a hardcore scene until people came to see shows in Windsor,” Buj says.
Buj asked hardcore punk icons like Ian Mackaye, Joe Keithley and John Brannon to share their memories of the Coronation Tavern — and also turned his camera upon Windsor folks like Chris Mcnamara, Kevin Shannon, Pat Petro, Martin Deck and more.
Shannon says in the documentary: “You walked in, you smelled urine. Or dog feces. That was the atmosphere of the Coronation.”
“It was just a dive,” adds Denis Buj, Otto's brother.
“You could probably throw a grenade in there, and it wouldn't look any different.”
In all, Buj tracked down and interviewed almost 70 people to make the documentary.
“It did involve a bit of footwork, a lot of referrals,” he says. “This whole scene is still tight-knit in that way.”
There's no denying the contrast: The grainy images are full of youthful rebellion, but the stories are told today by middle-aged faces and voices.
“We're talking about something that's now 35 to 40 years ago,” Buj says. “When this stuff was happening, in the early 1980s, Woodstock had occurred only about 12 years before. If you think about the rate of change back then, culturally, it was far more radical than what we're experiencing now.”
The passage of time is even more stark when it comes to the actual music: Early ' 80s hardcore was never about subtlety or variety.
For most listeners, the songs won't sound like much more than noise — a blur of indecipherable screaming and amateurish banging on instruments, recorded on substandard equipment.
“This is not worth talking about because of the music, per se,” admits Rob Michaels, whose teenage band Bored Youth is among the Detroit groups mentioned in the documentary.
Elsewhere in the documentary, Ian Mackaye jokes: “It wasn't Captain & Tennille music.”
But the niche nature of the scene — its relative obscurity and alienation from mainstream culture — was exactly Buj's motivation for creating the documentary.
“This history has almost been lost,” Buj says. “It's not a very well-documented scene. Especially the Detroit aspect, which was not considered a major scene, but became very influential in its wake.”
“If you want to talk about D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself ) music scenes, which we now take for granted, it all evolved out of this. Publishing fanzines, self-owned record labels, putting on shows any way you could. A lot of that grew, very organically, right under our noses.”
“My film deals with a very small window of time, when the kids were still inventing things as they went along. But those were the kids who set the mould.... It was all effort, interest and enthusiasm.”
Find out more about Dope, Hookers and Pavement: The Real and Imagined History of Detroit Hardcore at detroithardcoremovie.com.