Mutations by Sam McPheeters

Author:Sam McPheeters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2020-02-03T21:02:21+00:00

SSD

Pro Footsie League

When I tell you that Society System Decontrol is my catbox band, I need you to understand: this band is so important to me that I listen to them whenever I clean my house’s catbox. Meaning, this band is so important to me that I needed to weave them into my everyday routine. I suspect I’ve never owned a dog because of their music.

SSD were the first insider band I gained knowledge of. Listening to tapes of their records (already rarities in 1986) offered me a first glint of secret info, one that seemed to transcend the normal quest for teenage acceptance and verge close to forbidden knowledge. Later in my life, the bands Can, Chrome, and Magma each occupied this position—the cool band only cool people knew about—although none ever came close to SSD’s oomph. When I saw Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic in an SSD shirt on MTV, I remember cheering at the TV set, even with the knowledge that this secret thing was clearly no longer secret.

Society System Decontrol were a central pillar of the early 1980s Boston hardcore scene. The cover for their flawless debut LP, The Kids Will Have Their Say (1982, X-Claim) showcases Boston’s central symbol of state authority. In the original photo by photographer Phil In Phlash, a bunch of bros jog up the steps of the Massachusetts State House on a sunny morning. Visionary designer Bridget Burpee solved the missing drama of this picture with one bold stroke: she removed the sky. In the retouched version, the building looks floodlit against a starless void. Something terrible has happened, and now grown men storm the halls of power during an emergency session in the dead of night.

Writing about the music of SSD is tricky. For one thing, their performance—songs that swoop and crash with all the gusts and torrents of a violent ocean squall—balances their production—visceral but gritty, like a distant radio station (you compensate by playing it loud). Then there are all the layers that came after, both the hardcore punk they pioneered and the straightedge hardcore they hyped. It’s a lot of heavy emotional shit to sort out.

A few particulars. Springa the singer had a great flinty scream and seemed to grasp the vocalist’s role as actor. Toward the end of “Police Beat,” an oddly touching anti-cop dirge, he yells “police” like a crime happened in the recording studio and he needs an officer. Chris Foley drums with such aggressively confident precision that certain songs sound martial, channeling that fife and snare scrappiness of the Revolutionary War. I am incapable of hearing the first ten seconds of “Fight Them” (repeated, on the same record, as “The End”) without getting goose bumps. Their second release, Get It Away (X-Claim, 1983), is just as good as the first.

As with most early American hardcore bands, pictures are key to the deal. These guys made great photos. Everyone is young and fit and knows how to leap. The band’s guitarist Al Barile played with an exertive physicality many have since aped.

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