TWENTY YEARS OF

20 years of Dischord records, that is something to celebrate. Actually it is 22 years, but for two reasons all the celebrations will be held right now. The first reason, Dischord wanted to mark the point by releasing a special CD-set containing a song by every band ever released on Dischord records plus a special CD with unreleased stuff and a booklet that goes way beyond what is usually called “extensive liner-notes”. And, because Dischord always put quality over quantity or time-tables, this 3CD-set is released now, in September 2002. The other reason is the typical idiocy of music-journalism, which is always about products, releases, concerts (or personalities) rather than the music itself. I am sorry to notice that I fall for that myself. But anyway, this little piece is about Dischord, about the anniversary, about what Dischord means to me and why you should at least go and get this CD-Box for your own good.

Again, Dischord reacted the only way possible: ignoring everything else and going your own way. Even now in our times, which is still filled with small and smallest label that try to act like the really big ones, making up marketing concepts and business plans, trying to get onto the wave of the next-big-thing and making busloads of money of that, Dischord still show the way things can be done and I am sure that there are still hundreds of small labels around doing things this way – the right way.

My first Dischord-record was Fugazi’s “Repeater” because I had taped a show they played in Vienna from the radio. Inside the sleeve was a Mail-order sheet with the covers of all the other Dischord-releases in the typical unobtrusive, held-back style that was the trademark of Dischord. So I checked out other records, finding Soulside, Dag Nasty, Shudder To Think, Lungfish, Rites of Spring and the Holy Rollers along the way. See, in these times I was just a teenage kid growing up in a big box of flats on the outskirts of Vienna. Everyone I knew was into Italo-Disco music. Me, I liked Bruce Springsteen and listened to his 5-LP-Box feverishly. I had no friends who could tell me about cool music back then, I rarely ever listened to the only radio-show that featured this sort of music from time to time, the legendary “music-box” with Fritz Ostermayer. I had never read a fanzine and I had never been to a punk-concert. No, I wasn’t like the kids I read about later who said that they saw the Misfits play when they were 12 and toured with their first band at the age of 15. I was late, maybe. I discovered this whole punk-thing when I was seventeen. I grew up in a safe home with a caring mother. I never ran the streets. But I was trying to make a difference, or at least be different. And, more than anything I wanted to find music that had a meaning and it sure wasn’t going to be anything that other people listened to. So I read Spex-magazines but didn’t really understand a word (because Spex was so inside on things that you could only understand it if you were also inside on things.) When I first stumbled across an alternative record-shop in Vienna I had a vision of beautiful things to come. The “Rave Up” and the “Why not” – the latter now unfortunately closed – were a revelation for me. See, for a young kid on one side of the globe, what could a local explosion of music and talent on the other side of the globe mean? Well, since that kid was me – a lot!  

When I started to study at university the list grew longer, I earned some money and was able to buy more records (this is surely a junkie’s story) and I finally met people, who could tell me about this kind of music (they read Maximum Rock’n’roll), I found fanzines and punkconcerts. Or they found me. Anyway, in my second year at university I started my own fanzine together with two friends and it was great. I met a lot of fine people that way, some of them became close friends up to this day. And this is really what it was about. And this is also what this CD-Box documents – a bunch of people doing something. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, as in my case. Other times it turns into something great, as in the case of Dischord.

If you are just slightly interested in punk or hardcore-music you will have heard of Dischord records. If you are like me, then Dischord will make up an important part of your record collection. Then you’ll know about the “revolution summer”, “Inner ear studios”, “the Dischord house” and so on. But the 134-pages book will tell you all about it. There is two pages to each and every band on the 2CD-sampler (one page text, one photo) and you’ll read about all the history of the bands, get some anecdotes and all kinds of information. As it is with things of this sort, nostalgia blurs the stories a lot and after all, you don’t want to badmouth anybody after such a long time, so all the struggles, the break-ups are all touched rather loosely. For instance there is no mentioning of the various re-formations of Dag Nasty (then again, they don’t touch Dischord) and the whole “straight edge”-thing is only mentioned insofar as the name was coined by Minor Threat and there is also the story of the cross-marked hands found their way to the east-cost. There is also no mentioning about the years in the late Nineties, when the releases of Dischord proper dwindled down to just three bands (Fugazi, Lungfish and Bluetip – all of them take their time to produce quality records) and the label itself got out of the focus of its old-time-fans. Actually, the reason was not lack of talent or bands around, but rather that a lot of other labels started to exist, formed after the ideal of Dischord, such as DeSoto, Slwodime, Simple Machines, a.o. All of them documented their own various scenes, subscenes and communities and Dischord helped out with distribution. If you definitely want to nitpick on something then you might say that the whole thing is so idiosyncratic that you can’t really find any strong connections to the world outside of D.C. or Dischord records. But maybe that was the whole point – a perfect little world with a big attraction that can really suck you in.

Or when I found the Soulside-7” on a record-fair for a good price. And when I finally met Fred Erskine in person (then with The Boom and later on with June of 44) and I wanted to tell him how much I loved all the bands he had played with and couldn’t find the right words but he was nice anyway and talked to me as if I wasn’t a mumbling idiot. (I did another fanzine back then and interviews were always somewhere between chaotic and idiotic but the one with The Boom turned out great.) These were times I really like to think back now and then, because life was so great back then and I didn’t know it.

P.S.: Maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. Someone, who bought each and every record wearing the Dischord-logo without blinking twice no matter what it was, is bound to be subjective as hell.

www.dischord.com