May 19, 1984: It’s definitely not business as usual at the Yellow Rose, a blue-collar bar located on Tyvola Road near South Boulevard. The patience of the joint’s regulars — aging alkies, hirsute bikers, dusty construction workers — has already been tested by the antics of the Spinal Tappish Jeff Leopard and hardcore thrashers Social Savagery. Now lumbering onto the tiny stage are headliners Antiseen, who’ve drawn an unruly 200-plus crowd of skinheads, Mohican-coiffed punks and metal fans.The band abruptly lurches into action, a cement mixer on steroids churning forth ugly, distorted barre chords, guttural vocal growls and intestinal-rumble bottom end. The audience, likewise, revs into spin cycle. By the second song, guitarist Joe Young’s mic stand is a twisted wreck; by the third, a similar fate has befallen the bassist’s stand. Tonight, “destructo rock” is more than just a colorful term Antiseen slaps onto gig flyers — it’s an action verb.
Meanwhile, there’s this little matter of blood. Lots of it, actually.
“That was the first time I saw Jeff “juice himself,’ as pro wrestlers might put it, and I had no idea he was gonna do it,” recalls Joe Young, picking up the story. “First, there had been a guy throwing cups at the stage. Then I think Jeff saw this girl in the front row, maybe she was with somebody, and it made him so mad he busted a Gatorade bottle, gouged himself in the head, then started slinging his head from side to side. I don’t know whether it was the loss of blood or from slinging, but he collapsed on the side of the stage! At the end of the song I walked over and kicked him in the side. He finally opened his eyes, and I said, “Man, are you gonna finish or do we have to take you to the hospital?’ He got up and said, “Naw, I’m all right, let’s finish.’ And we did it. He had blood on every square inch of his face. There was blood on the ceiling, blood on the right of the stage, the left — he slung blood in 20 feet every direction! I’m sure nobody had ever seen anything like that.”
And they’d see more of it in the future…
“Danger element?” Jeff Clayton is contemplating Antiseen’s upcoming 20th anniversary celebration at Tremont. He’s loathe to give away too much, other than there will be several Antiseen alumni joining him, Young, bassist Doug Canipe and drummer Sir Barry Hannibal onstage, and that he’s eager to pull out some of the band’s old gimmicks, which have ranged from horror-flick visuals to pro wrestling-inspired theatrics to thrift-store pyrotechnics, to go with tunes the band hasn’t performed in ages.
Make no mistake, the years haven’t softened the edges for Antiseen. They still crank out a high-velocity, high-cholesterol skree, equal parts Ramones, Motorhead, Jerry Lee Lewis and Black Oak Arkansas. Plus, Clayton claims, the band is “more confrontational now than ever before, because our patience has just run thin.”
Point well taken. For two decades, the Simmer Twins — founding members Clayton and Young — have maintained Antiseen’s unique sonic architecture while adhering to an all-purpose “fuck you, no, fuck you!” philosophy. You’re either with “em or against “em — Antiseen’s personal “axis of evil” being timid concert-goers who go “Oh my!” at the sight of blood, egghead music critics who frown on the reactionary “tude and club owners who can’t handle a little mayhem and property damage.
“Of course,” continues Clayton, “ever since the Great White incident we have been doing some serious thinking [regarding the use of pyro]. But we will make the show exciting, and we pride ourselves on not doing the same-old, same-old. For example, when we last played Tremont, you know how in wrestling they’ll put people through tables? We covered one in fluorescent light bulbs, set it on fire, and jumped off a ladder onto it. [laughs] If that’s not a danger element, I don’t know what is!”
Twenty years of destructo rock: Antiseen’s had a few. But Young pleads to humble aspirations early on. “When we first got together in “83 we thought we’d get to play maybe every couple of months and get in free to see our favorite bands at the Milestone. I hadn’t even played guitar in my life when Jeff mistook me for somebody else: “You play guitar, right?’ “Uh, yeah, a little…’ I ran home, got a crash course from my brother and I showed up the next week playing some power chords and fooled Jeff into thinking I knew how to play. That first week or so, we wrote “Wife Beater,’ “I Don’t Ask You for Nothing,’ “She’s Part of the Scene,’ “White Trash Bitch.’ Five weeks later, we were at our first gig.”
Antiseen debuted on October 1, 1983, at Boone punk club The Barn. On the bill were Charlotte’s Fetchin’ Bones, Columbia’s Death Row and Hickory’s NRG. Why an untested Antiseen as headliners? “The promoter knew us, and his quote to me was, “You guys are gonna be intense,'” deadpans Young.
A couple of weeks later, the group made its Charlotte debut proper at the Milestone Club. Ten songs in 20 minutes. Young’s amp flew off the stage at the finale, thus marking, not so insignificantly, the beginning of a distinctively Antiseenian style of band-audience interaction.
“We had this wild gig opening for the Exploited in “84, down at Striders in Columbia,” says Young. “We’d just finished and Jeff grabbed the bass cabinet and slung it into the crowd. The guy in the crowd who’d gotten hit picked it up and slung it back up onstage and just tore it to pieces.”
Adds Clayton, “Man, the first 10 years were constant battles. We’d get banned from the Milestone regularly. We played Memories, a strip bar, and Chases, which was a gay bar. We played at Queens College, “84 or “85; they apparently had no idea what they were getting into. And of course I just had to ask the question [from the stage] how many there would be partaking of, uh, cunnilingus with each other later that night. At a college of liberal minded gals, that didn’t really go over too well. I guess we didn’t have as much tact back then as we do now.”
Ahem. Well, 20 years in the telling will make anyone turn misty. Some fans may recall that initial flush of hometown pride when the band’s initial waxing, the Drastic EP, was released in ’85. Others will bear witness to Antiseen’s evolution into an international touring commodity while issuing records on hip labels like Sub Pop, Sympathy, Jettison and Australia’s Dog Meat. More recently, the TKO label has reestablished the group’s record-store presence via The Boys From Brutalsville and the Screaming Bloody Live albums along with seven “Vault of Antiseen” remastered/expanded reissues. (Due this fall is a new studio record, Bad Will Ambassadors, plus an Antiseen lyrics/clippings book, Destructo Maximus.)
And for others, Antiseen is simply one of rock’s great, enduring exercises in thumbing a nose at the status quo. Clayton and Young still take grief for their association with late scumrocker G.G. Allin, yet they also demonstrate a chronic disregard for punk orthodoxy. (Warns Clayton, “People looking for “punk rock’ at the 20th anniversary, the kind who watch MTV and think a punk band is something like, aw, Good Charlotte, well, they better not come to our show because they ain’t gonna get it!”) Critics label “em gun nuts, unreconstructed misogynists and rebel flag-toting racist xenophobes — hell, they’re probably NASCAR buffs too — while failing to recognize the p.c. traps that Antiseen sets. This is a band, remember, with a signature song titled “Fuck All Y’all.”
“So many people have thought they had it all figured out and could sum it up in one little review,” observes Clayton. “And they’re wrong. Even though we’ve been called “caveman rock,’ “dumb guy rock,’ whatever, you have to have a certain amount of intelligence to even get what we do. So much of it is tongue-in-cheek, so much of it is sarcastic. Now, just exactly what is tongue-in-cheek and is sarcastic, well, that’s part of the fun of it. We’re not gonna sit there and outline it all for you. Hey, it’s nice to know we can still pull a reaction out of people! We’ll only stop if no one is coming to our gigs and no one wants to put our records out anymore. Or… [brightly] if someone offers us a million bucks to cease to exist once and for all!”
“This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to a high school reunion,” says Young of the upcoming bash, a note of awe creeping into his voice. “Here we are, 20 years later, still doing a song like “I Don’t Ask You for Nothing,’ the epitome of simplicity, just three basic chords and a “Louie, Louie’ riff, Clayton screaming at some girl. It’s like Mick Jagger said one time, “I’d rather be dead than playing “Satisfaction” in Vegas at 45.’ But here he is in his ’60s, still playing it.”I remember this multi-band showcase gig we did in the mid “80s in Raleigh, and this chick from Atlantic Records was there. Shit was flying everywhere, Clayton was bleeding. She told Jamie Hoover, “Those guys will never get signed. They’re the only band I’ll remember, however, out of this entire event!’ And to me, that was better than getting signed. Think about all the Charlotte bands that have gotten signed — Lustre, Jolene, Fetchin’ Bones — and dropped in the last 20 years. But we made an impression on that woman. And that’s all we ever cared about. When we’d blitz somebody’s town, it’s like when I saw the Ramones for the first time in ’79 in Atlanta, or when I first heard the Sex Pistols: We wanted it to be something they’ll never forget.”
Antiseen will hold a 20th anniversary show Saturday at Tremont Music Hall.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.
