Capturing Hardcore's Heyday
From Slamdance to Sundance
By Tricia Brick
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Illustration by David McFeders |
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Paul Rachman was a political science major and television intern in 1980, but it was his fascination with the underground punk rock scene of the day that led him eventually to this year's Sundance Film Festival. Rachman (CAS'82) spent much of his free time volunteering at the cable stations that were then popping up throughout Boston's suburbs. On the weekends, he'd borrow a studio's cameras and media van and go film hardcore punk rock shows.
"The hardcore bands then, like SS Decontrol, Gang Green, The Freeze, D.Y.S. — they were these kids from the suburbs," Rachman says. "And early on, in 1980 and '81, on Sunday afternoons you'd go to the Gallery East and for a dollar you'd see these bands of, like, fourteen- to seventeen-year-old kids playing really fast punk rock. And from the first shows, something happened: I was like, 'Wow. I love this music. I love this scene.'"
Fast forward to 2006. In January, Rachman's new documentary, American Hardcore, made its world premiere at Sundance, filling Park City theaters and generating a buzz that led to a distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics. The film features interviews with such luminaries of the genre as Ian McKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Dicky Barrett (Impact Unit, Mighty Mighty Bosstones), and Vinnie Stigma (Agnostic Front) and footage of shows by bands like Gang Green, TSOL, and The Freeze — much of which Rachman himself shot during hardcore's early-1980s heyday.
Subtitled The History of American Punk Rock, 1980-1986, the film chronicles the music and mayhem of a uniquely American youth subculture most often remembered for its speeded-up, three-chord punk sound and a reputation for angrily antiestablishment politics. "Ronald Reagan was president, we were in a recession, and the economy sucked, and it was kind of a dark-gray era in America," Rachman says. "Meanwhile, there are these sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kids who are like, 'Screw the government! There are no jobs, and my dad just got laid off.' And they're listening to this English punk rock — which had died with the demise of the Sex Pistols — and trying to imitate it. But they didn't know how to play their instruments, so they just played faster and louder."
After he graduated from BU, Rachman used some of the live footage he'd shot in Boston to put together music videos for the bands Gang Green and Bad Brains. The videos were picked up by MTV and put into heavy rotation on its late-night alternative show, 120 Minutes, and the exposure led Rachman to a ten-year Los Angeles-based career as a director of music videos for artists ranging from Alice in Chains to Kiss to Roger Waters.
At the same time, he was beginning to move into more narrative genres, making several short films, including 1992's Memories with Joe Frank and 1995's Drive Baby Drive. In 1995, he was among the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, a Sundance alternative committed to showing the most innovative and independent of the indie films. "The Hollywood entertainment industry had been getting into independent film as a business," Rachman says, "and all the big studios started independent film divisions, like Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics and Sony Pictures Classics, to exploit independent film. And a lot of films that traditionally would've gotten into Sundance before were now being shut out, because films with more financial resources and bigger-name stars were being produced like 'independent' films."
In 1999, Rachman moved back to New York, planning to shift to narrative films. While working on a feature script, he ran into Steven Blush, a writer active in the hardcore scene of the early 1980s in Washington, D.C., who was now working on a book, American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Rachman proposed that the two collaborate on making the book into a documentary, and they did their first interviews for the film in Boston in late 2001. After twenty-five years, the pendulum is swinging back: when American Hardcore is released this fall, that footage from Rachman's college years will be seen in movie theaters worldwide.
Working all those years in L.A. made Rachman feel at ease amid the glitter and glamour of the Sundance festival. But when he talks about his art, you can still hear the filmmaker who got his start in the circle pits of hardcore punk.
"The whole world goes to Sundance, and having a film that is commercially successful definitely opens doors to raising money for another film," he says. "That's really the test, where art meets business. If you can do your art and somebody sees it as exploitable, they can make money off of you, and you can, hopefully, continue to earn your living doing your art. That's the dangerous game."
