Rozz Rezabek is best known as the singer for the first wave San Francisco punk band Negative Trend, but he also cut a blistering batch of tunes after leaving that group that only surfaced as a bootleg CD release in 1998, attributed to Rozz and erroneously to his former band. That is, until now, as those tireless Windy City punk excavators at HoZac Records have given those nine maulers a long overdue legit release. Scorching forth from that sweet zone from whence hardcore was poised to explode, 1979 Pop Session is out now.
Negative Trend was a vastly important band in the grand scheme of 1970s San Francisco punk, but they only recorded one EP plus two tracks on the seminal Cali punk comp Tooth and Nail, and by the point of those recordings Rozz Rezabek, who’d entered as singer as the band Grand Mal was morphing into Negative Trend, had made his exit. From there, Rezabek remained something of an obscure figure, most notable for his work in the early ’80s Portland, OR band Theater of Sheep.
Highly regarded for their connections to Flipper and Toiling Midgets, Negative Trend’s 1977 EP was reissued numerous times hence, so it’s perhaps not surprising the band is miscredited, either mistakenly or (more likely) deliberately, as backing Rezabek on these tracks. The reality is that the drummer is Bobby Barrage (later of No Alternative, who seem to have swiped their name from 1979 Pop Session’s third track) and the guitarist is Dave Basic (unsure if he ever did anything else. If not, more’s the pity).
Much had been made of how this session is a wound-up stylistic straddler, wildly humping the dividing line where punk classique is on one side and the heavyweight haymaker throttle maul of early hardcore is on the other. To be sure, 1979 Pop Session sits nicely alongside the work of contemporaries Black Flag, Middle Class, Circle Jerks, and Germs circa (GI), but there’s still plenty of Brit-tinged snot in Rezabek’s vocal delivery, this aspect hitting its apex in the set’s final track “I Don’t Want to be a Machine (Karen Ann Quinlan).”
Along the way, “I Can Laugh About It Now” has a little New York swagger a la Thunders or Hell, with a recurring reference to Valley of the Dolls reinforcing an interest in the tawdry kitsch of the previous decade (comparable to X’s “Adult Books”). But it’s in the first three tracks, “M 16,” “Never Say Die,” and “No Alternative,” that the raw and dense pummeling energy gets ratcheted way up, making it clear that Rezabek, while firmly of the first generation of punks, was busy shaping the template for the next generation of malcontents.
It’s really too bad that nobody heard 1979 Pop Session at the time it was spat out. Had they, it’s obvious it would’ve made a major impact and would today be considered one of the classics of its era. Oh hell, it is a classic; it just took 45 years for it to be gifted to the punk-loving world in full, officially released clarity.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
