Fresh at Twenty: The Oral History of Mint Records

Foreword

by Nardwuar the Human Serviette

Seeing as this here book, Kaitlin Fontana’s Fresh at Twenty, is a massive oral history of Mint Records, I wanted to begin the foreword with a couple of quotes. Thankfully I will not have to transcribe them, as others before me have preserved them for history. Who might these characters be? Ladies and gentlemen, first up in our examination of Mint Records, let’s drop the needle for Aleister Crowley and Andy Warhol:

Vancouver presents no interest to the casual visitor.

The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

Nobody in Vancouver buys art.

The Andy Warhol Diaries

As you can see, Mint Records never really should have stood a chance. Both Satanists and art legends alike would have found the notion to base an indie record company out of Vancouver frankly stupid. But Mint Records is still in the game after 20 years and 160 releases. Who can we turn to put this all into perspective? I’m going to now dig back into my own vault of interviews and pull out a few words from a conversation I had with none other than Snoop Doggy Dogg:

Nardwuar: So you made up with Tim Dog? Because he had that song called Fuck Compton, which really wasn’t too nice to the West Coast.

Snoop Doggy Dogg: No, this was a different Tim Dog. The other one that you’re talking about, he ain’t even in the rap game no more, so he’s not a problem.

That, to Snoop Doggy Dogg and me, Nardwuar the Human Serviette, is the most important thing of all: keeping in the game. While dozens of indie labels that were contemporaries of Mint Records have dropped off the map, Team Mint has forged ahead, with no major label funding, distribution, or backing, to create a legacy of defining moments in the Canadian rock sphere.

In that momentous occasion department, I will never forget that Mint Records has helped secure gigs for my band the Evaporators with everyone from Anal Mucus to Sleater-Kinney to the Whack Attack Puppet show. If that ain’t enough to whet your appetite and start bustin’ open Fresh at Twenty, here’s another personal Mintish-related momentous memory. Ready? Flipping the dials one night just in time to see Carl Newman of The New Pornographers on John McEnroe’s short-lived TV show doing The Witch by Tacoma (home of Neko Case!), Washington’s legendary garage rockers the Sonics. What made this even more incredible was that McEnroe was actually playing guitar with Carl. And the Rev Al Sharpton was a special in the house! Seeing as how Sharpton is a deeply religious man and not so friendly with Satan, and Carl Newman lives in New York City, home of Warhol’s Factory, let me now repeat the opening line in Cub’s My Chinchilla. Satan sucks, but you’re the best!

R.I.P. Andy Warhol. R.I.P. Aleister Crowley. Let’s hear it for Vancouver music, art, and you guessed it, Mint Records!

Introduction — Let’s Wreck the Party: 1980–1986

Heavens to Betsy,

Come on let’s see,

What could be worse than

the wheel of history?

— The Body Says No, the New Pornographers, Mass Romantic

There is a mythical Vancouver that we who came to this city late in the game mourn, though we never lived it — a Vancouver with a scrappy attitude, a Vancouver that sprang eternal and loud from deep in the West Coast’s bowels. A Vancouver that not only heard what was happening out there in the world but felt it, too, even more acutely than other places. An isolated, eager-to-prove-itself, brash Vancouver. A Vancouver that was messy and proud of its mess. A Vancouver perched on the precipice of a new era. A Vancouver that celebrated both its beauty and its darkness. And from this Vancouver, the Vancouver sound.

I speak, of course, of Loverboy.

Okay, no, I don’t. I speak of punk. I speak of Young Canadians, Subhumans, and, most proudly, of D.O.A., held up across the board as the discerning punk’s punk band, even all these years on. There are other great punk bands from here, too, of course. There was a definitive punk period in Vancouver, which this book is not about, but from which the main parties in this book got ideas, which led to thoughts, which became actions. Let’s just say that punk provided the prime directive: make good music happen here.

Vancouver’s punk era properly began when the then actually alternative local paper the Georgia Straight published its punk issue in 1977, placing hometown hero and D.O.A. leader Joey Shithead on the cover, his name at the end of a list of scene luminaries like the Clash and Patti Smith. (If you’d like to read about this era, I recommend Mr. Shithead’s awesome book, I, Shithead.) While punk was already happening on its own, most notably in venues like the Smiling Buddha downtown and the WISE Hall, this recognition of its residence on our shores (and of D.O.A.’s preeminence in the hardcore scene) began a golden age in this city that would last as long as the movement itself. It helped that D.O.A. toured the crap out of this continent, demonstrating Vancouver’s potential for punk dominance to people from L.A. to NYC and back again. It was the first time any music from Vancouver could really lay claim to ripping into and changing a scene from the inside out.

Young Vancouverites in the city at that time couldn’t help but be drawn to the energy this music brought. It was at some of these early punk shows that Bill Baker and Randy Iwata, the eventual founders of Mint Records, would be moved by the power of a great band, a great show, a great moment. These shows were also attended by people who would go on to form bands, write about music, host television and radio shows about music, and produce and engineer great records. It’s not unlike that seminal moment in Manchester’s music history (which, incidentally, was around the same time) — when the Sex Pistols played a show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to an audience that (supposedly) included eventual members of the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Fall. Like hundreds of cities around the world, Vancouver was aligning itself with punk’s force and spirit, and thousands of minds across this city were being warped and changed by it.

At the same time, wherever punk was taking root, there were those — specifically, those with power and money — who saw the movement’s danger, chaos, and ability to rally the youth. These people, called adults, as dirty a word as there ever was, pushed back on punk, trying to wrench the power from the broiling anarchy that threatened to take hold. In Vancouver, this manifested in a few ways, most notably in the descent of Transpo, a.k.a. Expo ’86, the transportation exposition, which was built to put a shiny, industrially progressive face on the city. In the months leading up to Expo, which fell on Vancouver’s 100th anniversary, our leaders stripped resources away from the city’s most destitute people to put toward impressing the world. With international recognition comes international money, and Expo’s organizers wanted to capitalize on that potential, no matter the cost. So began the towers of glass, the displacement of the addicted and mentally ill, the end of a proudly messy era and the beginning of a shamefully messy one. Punk’s death in Vancouver — spiritually, if not officially — occurred when Expo ’86 left its massive footprints across the sleepy little port city Mr. Shithead and his companions called home.

Of course, since then, Vancouver has made and continues to make terrific music; it produced and still produces great acts. It’s just that there’s something about that time we cling to, a powerful moment in our city’s cultural history that we just know we’re never going to get back. The more time we spend here, trying in vain to save our beloved venues, publications, and record stores, the more obvious it becomes that that time is gone. We can feel the power of it still, as though it’s been sealed into the streets and live music venues that used to throb and thrash with great, weird, scary music and now merely hum with the sounds of lattes being made, or condos being erected, or — horror of all-too-common horrors — DJs spinning Top 40 music.

Watch us, the desperate culture seekers, as we gravitate to the east side from our safe little basement suites near the university and the beach, not just because of the cost of living but because of some trace of a more interesting city we keep trying to create or unearth (and sometimes, boldly if misguidedly, legislate through city hall). But we won’t find it among the towers of glass and concrete — it’s gone. Trucked out of here on the last tour bus. Disappeared quietly like the toxic soil that used to be underneath all of Yaletown. Cleansed and scrubbed and sprayed down to a gleaming, boring sameness.

It’s not just us, either: cities around the world are clawing for some semblance of their great music past. Back in Manchester, cornerstone new wave and punk venue the Haçienda is now condominiums, the only sign of its former life a timeline of shows engraved in tiny font across a side wall. And let’s not forget that CBGB is now an upscale clothing store.

No, Patti Smith does not shop there.

Yes, the demise of our dirty and interesting collective punk past is total.

Ah, hopeful Vancouverites say, but what of grunge? Punk was not the most recent interesting music movement, and not even the one nearest to us! Grunge happened just south of here, yes? Grunge was a big deal!

Yes, it was. And don’t we know it. Nothing kills the potential of a great emerging scene faster than a nearby new scene beating it. Seattle having grunge is like your older brother being a football star — Vancouver never stood a chance at impressing mom and pop with big brother lobbing all those minor-chord classics through the pipes.

This book is not about grunge, either. But something interesting happened while grunge was growing just beneath us. While everyone was pawing at Seattle, Vancouver was suddenly free to be whatever it wanted. And thank god for that, because it was in grunge’s great shadow that Vancouver grew an interesting little personality of its own.

Before now, you haven’t heard much about this time in pop music history. But you have heard the music. The New Pornographers, Neko Case, cub, the Organ, the Evaporators, the Smugglers, Young and Sexy, the Pack A.D., and many others have sprung from Vancouver’s pop music moment, a moment created — quietly, effectively, and indelibly — by Mint Records, whether or not they’d like to admit it. Bill Baker and Randy Iwata, who founded the label, would never agree that they’re so influential. That would be a lot of pressure, after all, and they have other things to worry about.

What it comes down to is this: there is a huge risk in consigning our best music to that punk moment and to the white-flag waving that consignment implies. The risk is that we stop looking at all the great music and musical moments that have happened here since. Vancouver’s very good at looking out and saying things aren’t good enough here; we’re a young city, it’s what young cities do. But a recent rash of writers and artists have rejected that notion (Doug Coupland, Charles Demers, etc.) and I would like to join them.

Fresh at Twenty: An Oral History of Mint Records is first and foremost the story of an independent record label and the people who helped build it. But it’s also the story of a time in popular music and a place in that time — namely, Vancouver through the 1990s and 2000s. Mint not only shaped the sound of Vancouver at the end of the 20th century but also helped usher in a golden age of Canadian popular music that still thrives today (the likes of which the country hadn’t seen for a long time before that, perhaps even since the Band’s rise to success in the 1960s). These days, Canada is considered a boomtown when it comes to producing the best music, and Mint Records definitely played a yet unheralded role in making Canadian — particularly western Canadian — bands and musicians both accessible to tastemakers across the world and ready to take on the world’s stage.

In all of their own words (and a few of mine), this is the story of Mint Records. It’s a story that could only have happened when it did, to the people it did, where it did. While we were still out looking for our punk past and wrestling the gravitational pull of grunge, a little revolution was taking place. How Vancouver of us not to notice — not to celebrate — what was, and is, happening right under our noses. Better late than never.

Punk is gone. Grunge is dead. Long live Mint Records.

Kaitlin Fontana, November 30, 2010

1 — This Band Probably Won’t Be Your Life: 1986–1991

Randy Iwata: We haven’t had a very exciting twenty years, I think it’s safe to say.

Bill Baker: I think that’s what we think.

Randy Iwata: Like, it’s not the Mötley Crüe book, you know?

— The first interview, May 2009

Chapter 1 — To Have and Have Not

Late 1980s. Vancouver, B.C. The city was still recovering, in ways tangible and intangible, from the shock of Expo ’86. Day to day, however, there wasn’t a lot about the city that looked different. Especially not for two young guys attending the University of British Columbia and hanging out at the university radio station, CiTR. For them and many like them — music nerds with more knowledge than social skills — most days were spent sitting on the well-loved CiTR couches talking about music, drinking beer, and occasionally doing something resembling work — programming, writing stories for the station’s music magazine DiSCORDER, or DJing a show. It would be easy to say that Expo ’86 and the future of the two guys in question are not causally linked. And yet, in the days following Expo, one story kept resurfacing in the halls of CiTR and parts beyond: the Slow Riot.

Vancouver’s best and heaviest band Slow had played at the behest of Expo organizers as part of a concert series meant to display the city’s independent music scene. This is somewhat baffling in retrospect, but one thing’s for sure: no one really bargained for the results of a collision between Vancouver’s underground music darlings and its general public. Vancouver’s punk past was well known and, by then, celebrated; D.O.A., the Pointed Sticks, and the Young Canadians had most definitely made it into that chapter of music history. But this next phase of music, dirtier, less specific, unnamed, was just beginning. To say that Slow was grunge predates the grunge movement by a few years; however, as noted in the Canadian rock history book Have Not Been the Same (named after Slow’s seminal song, no less), Slow . . . epitomized many of the elements that would comprise the ‘grunge’ movement of the early ’90s. In other words, they fucking rocked, and everyone knew it. Still, the leap from there to Expo is a funny one. One imagines some Expo organizer having seen the cover of Slow’s I Broke the Circle, a 1985 Zulu Records release, on his teenage son’s floor: If my kid likes it, then maybe he’ll bring twenty of his buddies down, or something like that. Regardless, a culture clash of epic proportions was in the cards.

On that night, the Xerox International Theatre reserved for the Festival of Independent Recording Artists was packed with fans and curious onlookers when the band began their signature live show, a rather un-P.C. spectacle that, in dark clubs and basements, was wildly appreciated. This time, however, the open-air nature of things meant the audience was more diverse than usual. The band erupted into a shuddering, growling, loose come-on of a performance that shoved everyone under the age of 18 into a frenzy. It was, one can imagine, threatening to the image of Expo and its attempt at showing off Vancouver’s serene potential for business. It had to be stopped, no matter what. And the band had to be blamed.

A Montreal Gazette article dated August 8, 1986, with the unfortunate headline A bum rap? details events of that day: The incident began when singer Tom Anselmi stripped to his shorts and pranced around the stage. Anselmi and Slow bassist Hamm may have also mooned the audience. In some reports, Hamm allegedly exposed himself. As a result of the mayhem, Expo cut the power and cancelled the set midway through.

What happened then varies from retelling to retelling, but almost every account uses the word riot in a way that Vancouver would not use again until the Canucks playoff fracas of 1994: audience members leapt onstage and refused to vacate, they protested loudly and vehemently, and they swarmed and so disrupted the on-site BCTV news tent that the broadcaster was forced to end its live feed. This led to Expo cancelling not just the night but the entire slate of performances for the rest of the festival. Fourteen groups in total lost their shows, and the ensuing negative attention, along with the band’s self-destructive nature, contributed to Slow’s demise thereafter.

The Expo organizers’ response to the incident seemed, at least to the independent music community of Vancouver, totally overblown. Not that parents just don’t understand is news to any kid who wants to rock; that’s not the point. It was the feeling of an authoritative force that could and would giveth and taketh away high-profile shows at the drop of a hat, without mercy or explanation. Their willingness to do so stunned the local community. This wasn’t 1955, after all. Didn’t they know, went the common wisdom, when they booked us? Didn’t they know what they were in for? Wasn’t it cruel and unusual, not to mention hysterical, to punish every other band on the bill for the acts of one? A chance for Vancouver’s indie community to come out into the light of day had been, in essence, cockblocked by the Man. As a result, the scene went even further underground.

At CiTR in the late ’80s, the Slow riot story quickly became currency. The station had already been championing the plight of underground music in this strange, small, rapidly changing port city, where gigs and venues were hard to come by and would only grow more so over time. The Slow incident lent the band and the scene a whiff of infamy that indie kids crave — Vancouver underground suddenly had a cause célèbre to rally around. An argument could be made that this moment, more than any other, was the catalyst for Vancouver’s current underground music climate. No scene is a single moment brought to bear, of course, but maybe, just maybe, this is where our story starts.

Whether or not Bill Baker and Randy Iwata internalized the Slow incident, they were certainly around when the conversations were taking place. (Baker, for his part, was at the show itself. He says he was drunk and doesn’t remember it.) Perhaps subconsciously they took in the importance of this moment. Perhaps not. Regardless, one of their label’s first signings as Mint Records would directly connect with it. But that was a ways off yet. First, let’s meet our heroes.

Bill Baker was born and raised on the west side of Vancouver, an only son to parents who divorced when Bill was five. By the time he was in university, he’d already developed the acerbic wit and self-effacing humour for which he would become known. Randy Iwata, on the other hand, was born to Japanese-Canadian parents in southeast Vancouver. He and his sister Robynn, who would go on to form the band cub (much more on that later), shared a love for music. While quiet and somewhat unassuming, Randy could hold his own against Baker’s volleys. You could find them, in 1986 or so, sitting on the saggy CiTR couches and availing themselves of the beer machine (yes, beer in a pop machine). At that time, the words Mint Records had yet to be uttered.

Bill Baker: I used to listen to CiTR every once in a while. It’s funny, too, because I lived within that little zone where you could hear it, but I didn’t listen to it too much. I was much more into records and tapes.

Randy Iwata: For me, CiTR at UBC was many years in the making. The station had such a small wattage that you could only hear it, basically, when you got west of Cambie Street or Granville. My sister and I, as kids, if we had the chance to go to that part of town, we would tune in. It was the best stuff. You’d get this foreign, weird, neat music.

And it all began the first week that you attended university. You join CiTR, and you don’t leave there for five years. CiTR tends to lengthen your time there. In September ’84, I believe it was, I went there and plunked myself down and started to become useful.

Bill Baker: I remember in about 1981, seeing a Marx Brothers movie at the Ridge Theatre and there were all these punk dudes sitting in the front row acting so crazy. But it seemed really appealing and fun to me. And I turned to my friend and I was like [in a high-pitched voice], Let’s go home and cut our hair! I don’t think we did it, but it made us look into another type of music. I very quickly got involved in that, and of course all the shows, back then. That was where I cut my teeth on music, the local music scene. There were things you’d read about a record and a show and that sort of thing. And there was a record store right down the street. A Charles Bogle Phonograph Dispensary, right down the street from my house. It’s long gone, but they had an excellent selection. They had a whole shelf that was just bootlegs, which I thought was really cool. I would go there at lunch from school.

Randy Iwata: I remember being at a Black Flag show, and there was this guy in the pit, with spikes in his hair, and spikes in his shoulders. These honking huge nails; they were so obnoxious. I’d never seen that before. Half of us were trying to get away from him.

Bill Baker: My first big punk show was at Cambrian Hall. It was No Exit, Insex, and D.O.A. I was totally mortified. I didn’t fit in. But immediately, it was so exciting. There was this band No Exit, and they weren’t really that good, but the singer had amazing energy. I didn’t really know much about it, when I went, either. I just kind of had the Quincy punk episode in my mind. [Baker is referring to an infamous episode of the NBC drama, which ran from 1976 to 1983, about the titular L.A. County medical examiner. The episode is remembered as one of many examples of mainstream culture misrepresenting punk.] It was really cool that this was happening. Just seeing that crowd, the energy in the crowd. It was just this crazy explosion.

The record business is hard: Bill Baker breaks into a piggy bank, 1994.

The only bummer about it was, it got kind of late, and we were young, and didn’t really know any better, and we were like, Oh, let’s just wander around. And we wandered down Commercial Drive — I don’t know how we got to Commercial Drive. Somewhere they were showing that Sex Pistols Tour documentary, D.O.A., and so we went in to watch it. But then we didn’t go back and watch the actual band D.O.A., and it turns out that was the last time the original lineup of D.O.A. played. And I was so, so upset. Partially because that’s the most depressing suicide-themed movie. It’s so awful. I went to University Hill Secondary at that time, and it was a very liberal school; they really encouraged kids to be different. There was this whole crowd of people talking about the show. I remember being really excited, being able to talk to all those kids who’d been there at the show.

I went to CiTR not because of music but because I was following a girl. That story has its own legs. That’s actually a good angle, though I hate to admit it. I had been in the station, and it seemed like a pretty cool place to me, but honestly, it’s because of Laurel. I had a big crush on this girl Laurel in my Women’s Literature class, and so I didn’t join CiTR until the late fall of 1986.

Randy Iwata: Laurel was very involved in the station.

Bill Baker: I just have this memory of being up there and watching her do her radio show, and then she left to go do something and I took over, even though I didn’t know how to work anything. And I remember getting in some serious trouble for that.

It’s probably a good thing that I was blinded by my crush on Laurel, because it was a pretty exclusive environment at the time. If you were inclined to not feel welcome, that was a place to really mess with you. I was pretty oblivious to that [laughs]. But it wasn’t long before I started getting involved. Something about it just spoke to me. And then, same thing as Randy, I immediately started making myself useful. And yeah, I don’t think I basically set foot outside of there until ’91. Definitely ended up being the place I would go to, much more than to my classes. By far. There were lots of times I would get up at six thirty or seven to get to an eight thirty a.m. class and then pop in to check something, and just never leave. It was definitely the kind of environment where if you were motivated to do something, you were the only person to stand in your way. People would broadcast all kinds of things. It [was] just completely unstructured. There were people that used to volunteer there, and then they would just come back. They’d get a job working for a radio station or a record label or something, and they’d be so defeated because they weren’t allowed to do anything, while at CiTR you could basically do anything you wanted to do.

Randy Iwata: We were all studying English Lit. Bill, me, my sister, CiTR’s station head was in English Lit, Bill’s girlfriend after Laurel [Lisa Marr], who he lived with at the time and who began cub with Robynn — all English Lit. What kept us at CiTR, too, was the beer machine.

Bill Baker: Oh, come on, that’s not what kept us there.

Randy Iwata: You just plugged in your quarters. There weren’t loonies then. You could only put in quarters, nickels, and dimes. The going rate was a dollar twenty-five, and it had a lottery channel that was filled with light beer and the occasional Heineken or something.

Bill Baker: That was a good thing. That’s not what kept us there. Come on. But that is what introduced us to one another.

Randy Iwata: Yeah. There was one memorable time — and this is quite telling about our characters — we sat there from ten a.m., basically, in this building, and just drank, in our station. And that was pretty much it. We still do that now.

Bill Baker: I just remember that afternoon, because everything one of us would say, the other one would echo it. It would’ve been great if it was a date. It would’ve been the best date ever. Like, Oh my god, you toooo? Oh my god! It was like that.

Randy Iwata: That’s true.

Bill Baker: It was unbelievable, how many things would come up. I would just pull something out of thin air and you’d be like, Oh yeah, I did that, too. Or, I was there. It was just that conversation, and then more beer, and then more of that conversation. But I think that was how our friendship started. It was very quick.

Around the same time that Bill started at CiTR, a young annoying kid who talked fast and always had a bunch of records in his bag showed up at the station. In high school, he’d already organized concerts and interviewed rock stars, against their better judgment — of these, the most talked about was with Poisoned. That’s right, Poisoned at a high school assembly. Not only that, but the skinny weird kid had filmed the whole thing and snagged an interview with the band’s singer, Art Bergmann, to boot. Who was this kid? His real name was John Ruskin, but he’d started calling himself Nardwuar the Human Serviette. He was at UBC to major in history, and he loved history and politics almost as much as he loved rock ’n’ roll. In 1987, he started hosting a radio show at CiTR that exists to this day. Nardwuar ended up playing a huge part in Mint Records in the future, but for now he was just trying to make friends in a new environment, something he’d found a bit easier back in high school.

Nardwuar the Human Serviette: I was president of the student council at Hillside High School, so I was in charge of organizing music for the dances. And I knew nothing about bands, so I just went to people and said, Hey, what band should we get? People would say, D.O.A., Pointed Sticks. Well, Pointed Sticks had broken up, but there was an offshoot band of theirs called the Frank Frink Five, so we got them to play a dance. Somebody said the Enigmas, so we got the Enigmas to play. And I would go and buy their records at local record stores, so that’s how I got all into it. Just by people saying to me, Check out the Enigmas, check out D.O.A., check out the band the French Letters, there’s a great ska band called the Villains, go get them to play at dances. So I’d get them to play the dances.

It was my job, and I wanted to do a good job, so I’d ask everybody. I remember this band called Hand of Fate, and they were not indie, they were not punk, they were probably just aping the Grateful Dead. But that’s what the kids wanted, so we got them for a dance. I was just trying to please everybody. I still am, right up to today.

One of Nardwuar’s classmates at Hillside was a fellow music lover who was a few years younger. Grant Lawrence had an equal passion for live shows, particularly those that his band was playing in. As teens, Lawrence and Nardwuar started a lifelong friendship based on a mutual admiration and love of music.

While still in high school, in fact, Lawrence formed the garage band the Smugglers. As part of his extensive road life with the Smugglers, Lawrence began calling in to CBC shows from points across North America; the CBC brass came to enjoy his particular storytelling prowess and wit, and eventually he found gainful employment with the nation’s public broadcaster, namely, hosting indie music stalwart CBC Radio 3. Between then and now, however, he also played a huge role in the Mint story all on his own, as an employee, friend, and foe.

Grant Lawrence, Host of CBC Radio 3: I have a theory. We do this thing on CBC Radio 3 called Fourteen Forever. And my theory is that age fourteen is kind of a tipping point for people, if they’re music lovers. Age fourteen is kind of a pivotal age where you either go arts or you go sciences or you go sports, as a kid. And at fourteen, I went arts, very radically. And got into music heavily. Started off with my parents’ record collection, you know, fifties, sixties stuff, and really, really got into it. Had a few musical mentors, like Nardwuar. He was already called Nardwuar then.

His band, the Evaporators, were three years ahead of me. They were playing garage and punk rock songs. And I thought it was just the coolest thing that they had a band, and so I started working on forming a band in grade nine, working with all the music I loved from my parents’ record collection, and also the crazy punk sounds that I was hearing.

Nardwuar: The Evaporators started in February 1986 in high school. And