It’s all right there in the title. Washington, DC’s Black Market Baby was a great punk band, but they never went national despite all the fantastic songs they recorded—more than Fear, certainly, and more than my beloved Dictators even!—never received significant airplay, and remain beloved by DC punks but are largely unknown and unacknowledged outside our nation’s capitol. Is that unfair or what?
Ask Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat/ Fugazi/ Dischord fame, and he’ll tell you the answer is no. In fact, the whole notion kind of pisses him off. MacKaye was kind enough to speak with me about Black Market Baby, and he let me know he disagreed with former Government Issue singer John Stabb’s assertion (in his funny and perceptive liner notes to Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda) that Black Market Baby never got “their proper due within the punk music scene.” Said MacKaye, “I contributed a line to the press release of the reissue: ‘They were not underappreciated. They were a great fucking band.’”
A brief history: Black Market Baby was formed in 1980 when singer Boyd Farrell basically looted several other local bands for talent, snatching guitarist Keith Campbell from D. Ceats, bassist Paul Cleary from Snitch and Trenchmouth, and drummer Tommy Carr from the Penetrators. Mike Dolfi replaced Cleary on bass shortly after the band released their first 45, which they followed up with their 1983 debut album, Senseless Offerings.
But personnel changes were rife, they broke up several times only to regroup, and when Black Market Baby finally got around to recording their second LP (with MacKaye producing) in 1986, they couldn’t find a label to release it, although they came close with JEM, a large independent distributor trying to move into the record business. In light of this failure, Black Market Baby decided to call it quits, playing a farewell show in January 1988, only to regroup in 1993 and stick it out through 1997. Fortunately for all of us, in 2006 the Dr. Strange label released Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda…, which offers a grand and relatively comprehensive representation of the work of a great band.
So has Black Market Baby been dissed by history or not? MacKaye told me, “Black Market Baby was adored. I loved them. We all loved them. To perpetually repeat this notion that they were underappreciated kind of seals their fate. You could say the same thing about the Cherry People and Razz. Artificial Peace were hugely loved in this town. Where’s the handkerchief for those guys?”
On the other hand, when I asked Mike Dolfi whether BMB has been overlooked, he responded, “Damn right it has!” Farrell is a bit more circumspect: “I think it just took awhile for us to build up an audience. There was so much attention focused on the Dischord bands. Now it’s all been said and done, some people are starting to look a little deeper into the DC scene at that time. There were a lot of pretty good bands that weren’t on Dischord.”
The reasons Black Market Baby never achieved the nationwide fame they deserved are varied and complex. According to MacKaye, a lot of it came down to Black Market Baby’s insistence upon making it the old-fashioned way: “Whenever a DC band got some momentum, they moved to New York. There was no record industry here except Dischord. And at Dischord, nobody got paid. Even the bands didn’t get paid. That wasn’t interesting to Black Market Baby. They were coming at it from a different way. They were older guys. They had a manager. They were looking for a deal.” MacKaye then employed a nice analogy: “People are gathered at a bus stop, and some people get on that bus, and other people wait for the other bus, and that bus never shows up.” Black Market Baby’s bus never showed.
Farrell more or less agrees with MacKaye’s assessment. He told me, “Well, in the beginning I think that was more Keith Campbell’s plan; he even suggested we move to NYC and get into that whole Sire records scene, but it never happened. When it became obvious that no record company execs would come banging on our door with a bazillion dollar signing bonus, I actually did approach Jeff Nelson and [MacKaye] about doing something. But Ian always had other projects lined up and I got the feeling we really weren’t the type of band they wanted for Dischord. They really didn’t need us at that point anyway.”
There were other reasons Black Market Baby never cracked the big time. For one, they never really toured. Farrell told me, “Personally my commitment to my wife, kids, and job made it very difficult for us to function as a working band. I could never tour and I think that held us back and frustrated the others. We did some weekend road trips, but honestly, I never really liked it. The idea of traveling around and sleeping in a van with four smelly guys had absolutely NO appeal to me….I likes my creature comforts!” As for Dolfi, he didn’t say the band’s failure to tour fatally hurt its chance of grabbing the golden ring, but he had fond memories of the out-of-town shows BMB did play: “Those long weekends of punk rock and chaos were great and walking into a situation which was not a pretty picture happened more than enough.”
Furthermore, Black Market Baby proved to be too wild, too wasted, and too prone to internal strife to hold things together long enough for bigger and better things to happen. For starters, there was the band’s fondness for boozing and brawling. When I asked Farrell about this, he responded that BMB were “Heavy, heavy drinkers, which led to the “brawling part”… it caused a lot of problems for us down the road. We were actually kinda of nice when sober.” Dolfi added, “I used to like drinking enough to start a fight with someone twice my size who would pick me up and throw me to the floor. I always showed them!”
MacKaye recalls, “Those guys were heavy. They were an intense band. When they weren’t playing they went especially hard. I saw the [Capitol Hill] police lay Keith Campbell’s head wide open. The people who might have assisted him had to vamoose because they were carrying.” In the Coulda…Shoulda… Woulda… liner notes, Stabb writes, “BMB could usually be found getting into a brawl between shows at a little joint called the 9:30 Club.” He adds, “And their collective bar-tab was almost as out-of-control as their reputation around town.”
Finally, the band was just too beset by continuous infighting to stay together for the long haul. MacKaye told me, “What I see is an internal self-destruction.” In his liner notes, Stabb writes, “I still think of BMB as DC’s answer to The Heartbreakers.” Stabb was referring to Black Market Baby’s attitude, sound, and what he called their “unique talent for riling up a crowd,” but his analogy is also apt in that The Heartbreakers put out one studio album, fell to fighting amongst themselves, and ultimately broke up. Sound familiar?
Farrell attributed Black Market Baby’s break-up to “the usual things that always happen to bands that have been together for a while: Egos, excess, disagreements in direction… but I think mainly disillusion from nothing really happening for us at the time.” Dolfi came up with a more varied list, including the band’s “struggle to get the band touring,” its “appetite for destruction,” and infighting that saw Campbell leave the band. Dolfi himself left or was thrown out three times when, as he put it, “inner conflicts reared their ugly ways.”
I also thought to ask whether the advent of younger hardcore bands such as Minor Threat helped to kill off Black Market Baby. MacKaye, for one, disagreed, telling me, “I’m off-put by this idea that Minor Threat destroyed the punk scene. I don’t fucking think so. I do think it was a younger more energetic scene. It didn’t push them out, it just put them on a different track.” He added, however, that many of the older bands were dismissive of the new hardcore bands. “We were kids and we were treated like little kids. We were called teeniepunks.”
“Boyd was definitely the warmest,” MacKaye told me, recounting the time he was leaving a B-52s show—I know, hard to imagine—when he saw Farrell waiting to see the band’s second show, and Farrell kindly offered to pay MacKaye’s way back in. He added, however, “Some of the other ones were pretty snooty to us.” And said defiantly, “The treatment we received was the perfect incentive to destroy—to make great music.” When I asked Farrell the same question, he replied, “I thought they were kinda cute at first because they were all so young and inspired. I remember the first time I saw Brian Baker—he looked like a 6th grader! If I felt anything it was probably jealousy… I didn’t resent them because they all worked their ass off and were incredibly organized. They really made their own scene.”
Anyhoo, like I said before, if Black Market Baby never managed to break nationally, they still left behind one of the best punk albums you’ll ever hear. Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda… will come as a revelation to all those punks who live outside the Beltway and have never even heard of Black Market Baby, much less listened to their music or seen them play live. It’s 26 tracks of aural mayhem, raw power, barbed-wire riffs, great singing, and crisp, smart songwriting. And one thing that strikes me about Black Market Baby is that every single member of he band contributed great songs, which is rare and speaks positively to the fact that, despite all the infighting, at least there wasn’t a prima donna in BMB set on imposing his personal “creative vision” and hogging all the credit. In this respect Black Market Baby was a true democracy, and the amazing thing is not so much that everybody got their turn at bat, but that just about every damn song on Coulda… is at least a double, and there are plenty of home runs.
I’m not going to write a synopsis of every track, because that would constitute reader torture and I’m not a sadistic guy. Besides, this piece is already long enough as it is. So I’m going to focus on some of my personal faves, and we’ll see where we end up. Sound like a plan? Good. Because I’m working without a net here, and I’d hate to see TVD’s underappreciated janitor, Phil (Hi Phil!), have to clean up my bloody mess.
I’ll start with “World at War” because while it may not have as catchy a title as Fear’s “Let’s Have a War,” I think it’s the better song. Originally released in 1981 and then again as a split 7” with Bad Brains’ “Don’t Bother Me” in 1990, “World at War” boasts blitzkrieg speed, great chiming riffs, and cool backing vocals (“I want a war!”) Meanwhile Farrell barks out the lyrics like a fanatical drill sergeant who wants to “jump out of planes” and “be like John Wayne”: “I wanna war/I wanna show them my might/Wanna war/I wanna beat the Third Reich/Wanna war/I wanna cheap kind of thrill/I wanna war/I wanna reason to kill.” The song inadvertently changed DC music history, as John Stabb writes on Black Market Baby’s excellent website: “Not only is World at War a great song but it helped change my band’s name from the Stab to GI.”
“Strike First” and “Drunk and Disorderly” are two great anthems about getting drunk and getting in trouble. With its monstrous power chords, Farrell’s menacing vocals, and great opening line (“Twenty-five beers and I can’t see straight”), “Strike First” is definitely autobiographical, as Farrell recounts on BMB’s website: “I wrote this about the 9:30 Club. I came down with my good buddy Keith one night, got totally inebriated, and hit somebody who had no business being hit. Then all the 9:30 security personnel… pounded the shit out of me—which I did deserve. They were all friends of mine, but they enjoyed the hell out of it.”
As for “Drunk and Disorderly” it’s a cover of a Shirkers tune, but in the immortal words of record store owner/record producer Skip Groff, “I know you love the Shirkers, but the BMB/Ian version knocks its dick in the butt. Can I say that?” And Groff is absolutely right: “Drunk and Disorderly” may just be Black Market’s Baby’s best song. Farrell sounds frantic and deranged, the backing vocals are fantastic (“Drunk and disorderly!”), the melody is beyond catchy, and the song hurls itself heedlessly along (thanks to Campbell’s take-no-prisoners guitar and Dolfi and Carr’s lockstep rhythm) just like the out-of-control evening it describes, which ends with Farrell (after making multiple stops at the liquor store) “in jail and seeing double.” You also owe it to yourself to check out “Drunken Bull,” a really heavy-sounding barroom brawler from 1996. Great chorus, lots of big metallic riffs that are like a sock to the old solar plexus, and the way Farrell sings “Yeaaaa” all make it a great song, as does its very cool intro, which is followed by some power chords so feral they could give you rabies.
The great chiming riffs that open “Youth Crimes” are followed by Farrell at his finest, singing about “Kids on the street/They got nothing to do” and following that up with, “Sonny steals a car/But he’s too drunk to drive/Too many ‘ludes and he’s still gonna race/He hits another car but he gets out alive/Wakes up in the morning/Twenty stitches in his face.” It’s kinda funny hearing Black Market Baby singing about aimless and wasted youth, given their own hard-living habits, but like MacKaye points out the guys in BMB were older, old enough certainly to get into wasted bar brawls responsibly. The same goes for the fantastic “America’s Youth,” which features a great guitar solo and smash-mouth power chords and dissects teen culture and finds it vacant, dissolute, and without ambition: “America’s youth, flannel shirts and blue jeans/Spending their lives on drinking, drugs, and dreams/America’s youth, tribal customs are crude/Drinking six packs of Schlitz and eating quaaludes.” I love both songs, and all of their talk about ludes is making me nostalgic for the days when I’d down a few, sit down to eat, and jam the fork in my forehead.
But Black Market Baby didn’t just sing about drinking and drugging, as the fantastic anti-religious screed “Downward Christian Soldiers” proves. It opens with a great bass riff, then Campbell throws in on guitar and manages to sound like three people (and plays a kickass solo to boot) at once as Farrell snarls, “Condemn anyone who go against the words they speak/Day after day the christian army moves faster/They want control of your soul—downward christian bastards!” As for the chorus it’s great, with the band singing “Downward Christian soldiers!” followed by Farrell shouting out such lines as “Get out your wallet/Open your purse.” It’s every bit as good as any Dead Kennedy’s anti-religious diatribe, and actually better if like me you dislike Jello Biafra’s bird of prey on speed vocals.
Speaking of Biafra, BMB takes a shot at both him and Wattie of the Exploited (although Dolfi, in an e-mail response to Farrell and yours truly, said jokingly, “I thought it was about me!) in “This Year’s Prophet,” which MacKaye singled out for praise, saying it was “a pretty heavy song. It’s a well-written song. It’s an effective song.” Suspicious of visionaries—as any intelligent human should be—Black Market Baby used the uncharacteristically slow but titanic riff-heavy “This Year’s Prophet” to rail against “saints” and “saviors” who preach “on a soapbox of vinyl” but are just like you and me, and whose “fans are devoted, his records are bought up and played/Songs of deception, making money off those he betrayed.” The chorus is melodic and sneering: “This year’s prophet—ya don’t fool me/Who the hell are you supposed to be?/Full of dreams that have long since died/This year’s prophet, I can see right through all your lies.” It’s a great song, and although I agree with BMB’s distrust of rock preachers—show me a prophet, and I’ll show you a charlatan—I disagree with some of their reasons for disliking Biafra and Wattie, which seem to have a lot to do with both artists’ anti-USA messages. BMB, patriots! Too bad I distrust them as much as I do visionaries.
Black Market Baby garnered a good bit of controversy with “Gunpoint Affection,” a graphic song about gunpoint rape told from the rapist’s point of view. Washington Post critic Richard Harrington denounced the song, describing it as “a straightforward rape fantasy, unrelieved by any suggestion that they’re kidding. It’s a despicable song that negates the rest of BMB’s work.” Personally, I think Harrington is full of shit: “Gunpoint Affection” is unpleasant, sure. But it’s obviously not advocating rape, but a depiction of its horrors, and I find it a far more effective song about misogyny than Fugazi’s excellent but relatively innocuous anti-leering ode, “Suggestion.” A fast tune with an almost English feel, “Gunpoint Affection” has Farrell singing about first watching the woman and then raping her while Carr provides some truly impressive drum crash and guitarist Scott Logan—who briefly took the place of Campbell—plays a great solo. Meanwhile Farrell delivers up some Straw Dogs-repulsive lyrics including, “I press the barrel against your head/Your lips move but you don’t speak/No need to worry about rejection/You’ll stay alive if you’re submitting/You’re just giving me/Gunpoint affection.”
Dolfi’s great “White Boy Funeral” opens with a staggered drum beat, then the bass and guitar come ominously in. It’s one of their more unique tunes, what with its big tempo change and weird, almost-prog guitar riff. The backup singers shout “White Boy Funeral!” while Farrell sings the ambiguous lyrics, “He lived for the very day he died/Which was a day he looked forward to/He was loved by everyone/Yes, he was really easy to hate.” And, “Smell the death/Have a drink/Cry a little at a white boy funeral.” Farrell goes on to describe a mockery of a last farewell, one in which the deceased’s mama is laughing and his girl is fucking his best friend and “the party’s here/Have a beer/Sex lives forever at a white boy funeral.”
Dolfi also wrote the death-oriented meditation “Senseless Offerings,” a hard-charging, drum-driven (Carr assaults and batters the cymbals in a felonious manner) tune that packs tons of punch thanks to Logan’s guitar. Farrell flings the words at a speed well past the legal limit, singing, “Senseless offerings of words and descriptions/Only bringing back the part of life that was/The pain of feelings towards someone…/The reason we send flowers.” It’s a very deep tune for BMB, which isn’t to say they’re shallow, just that they tend to sing more about mayhem, and Farrell finishes it off by coming to the conclusion that senseless offerings aren’t for him, crying, “Now I understand why we send flowers/Now I understand why we send flowers/Don’t send me no flowers!”
Campbell’s “Just Like All the Others” is one of my faves, a rip-snorting race from here to nowhere and a great song about the pain of being stabbed in the back, again and again. Campbell’s guitar is a thing of wonder, the rhythm section nails the song down like a saint to a cross, and Farrell snarls and snarls, as is appropriate for a song that was originally entitled “You’re a Motherfucker.” “I can see in your mind that you want my kind,” he sings, “to vanish from the Earth/So you’ve got the odds, we’ve got the numbers/You’re gonna learn their worth,” and “Your hate is coming back on you/You’re gonna fall you know it’s true/You’d cheat your own mother/You’re just like all the others.” And the way he fires off that “You’re just like all the others” is so malevolent it almost makes the LP worth listening to all by itself.
“Killing Time” is a fast and propulsive look inside the head of a spree killer. Carr’s drums go bang bang bang just like the gun in the song, Logan plays a truly homicidal guitar, including one lethal as a hail of bullets solo, and the chorus is fantastic (“One time is all I want—it’s what I need/Yeah, that’s what I want/Yeah, killing time, one time is all I need, it’s what I need”). Meanwhile Farrell sings it like a man ready to head for the nearest rooftop with a sniper rifle: “Things come undone, there’s no ambition/Final cause it’s the solution/I feel the rush go through my head/Body count—ten persons dead.” This isn’t a song, it’s a homicidal rampage, especially the way Farrell pulls the trigger on lines like “I get my kicks from a 30.6” and “Hopeless case makes no mistakes/A bullet rips through someone’s face.” At long last, U. of Texas Tower shooter Charles Whitman has his very own anthem, although he’s too dead to appreciate it.
“Joe Nobody” is Black Market Baby’s cry of rage at America’s political system, and it’s a pessimistic rant indeed, with Farrell shouting, “To hell with speeches, to hell with the lies” and “I see no future for this country as it is/Power is made from the man, not just his mouth.” Carr plays some galloping drums, Campbell tosses in an incredible guitar solo, and the song is one mighty three-chord sock to the kisser to “politicians stuffing money into their faces.” And who will help? “Joe Nobody/He’s a face in the crowd/Joe, Joe Nobody/He’s the one speaking out loud.” Because he’s “sick and tired of it” and “a leader, not a foe.” I wish I shared BMB’s hope in that face in the crowd but I don’t. That said I love “Joe Nobody” even if I’d have turned up Dolfi in the mix, because I can hear him way back there playing some truly badass bass.
Album closer “Nobody Wanted Us” (which was recorded live at the band’s farewell gig at the 9:30 Club in 1988 but not released until 1997) sums up Black Market Baby’s attitude towards the mixed reception it received from Washington, DC. Defiant and funny at the same time—Farrell himself describes the song as “tongue in cheek”—the song’s chorus says it all: “Nobody wanted us in Washington, DC/There isn’t any way to/Make it easy/We don’t care if they fuck us up again.” The song is heavy and fast and Farrell’s voice is a big fuck you as he sings lines like, “We are the assholes in Black Market Baby/We’ll piss in your beer, then we’ll fuck your old lady/We don’t care if they fuck with us again/They make trouble with us… we’ll make double for them.” On the BMB website Farrell talks about how BMB’s hedonistic “philosophy was starting to clash with the beginnings of the straight edge movement,” and how “some of us were frankly quite rude to a lot of these [straightedge] kids. I think we unintentionally alienated a lot of people at that point. The clubs were afraid to book us because of our reputation and the fact that things always got damaged whenever we played.” Sounds like good clean fun to me, but then I wasn’t there.
There are plenty more excellent tunes on Coulda… Shoulda… Woulda…, including “Cheap Fun,” “Lip Service,” the presidential assassination song “Three Bullets,” “Back Seat Sally,” and BMB’s cover of the New York Dolls’ “It’s Too Late.” And they’re all testimonies to a band that, like so many others, were never able to make that leap to the big time that would have garnered them the nationwide attention they so richly deserved. That said, MacKaye is right, and Black Market Baby were at least beloved in their hometown, even if that love, as BMB points out in “Nobody Wanted Us,” was highly conditional.
But the guys in Black Market Baby seem reconciled to the past, and are remarkably positive about their rock’n’roll experience, even if it didn’t lead to fame, fortune, and enough groupies to cause David Lee Roth’s penis to fall off. Dolfi told me, “We were so lucky to have been billed with some of the greatest punk bands ever. I learned so much from Keith and was so lucky to become brothers with Boyd and meet all the friends we still have after all these years.”
And both Dolfi and Farrell seem thrilled to have been part of the DC scene during its heyday. Farrell reeled off a list of the bands he loved, including Razz, 9353, The Factory, The Slickee Boys, and Switchblade, as well as the bands in the DC rockabilly scene. He said of the time, “There was so much diversity but so much harmony too..…it was an incredible time to be a musician or a fan in this town. I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.” As for Dolfi, he added Scream to the list, and said, “Being able to go out and see any one of these bands at any time was so fucking great. And don’t forget Fugazi!”
And so it goes. I admire Black Market Baby because they produced a whole bunch of great songs played hard and fast, just the way they lived. And I admire Black Market Baby because when all is said and done they understand that making lifelong friends and being lucky enough to play and hear great music are ultimately every bit as important as making it big. Finally, I admire Black Market Baby because they were truly rock’n’roll, didn’t give a damn, and gave every bit as good as they got. A couple of lines in “Nobody Wanted Us” just about sum it up: “We’ve been trouble from the start, gettin’ drunk every night/Smashing up bars and gettin’ in fights/Now they don’t want us in Crapitol City/Our music’s good fun, but our attitude’s shitty.” I don’t know what you call that, but I call it Rock’n’Roll.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
