The drums pound urgently, ebbing, increasing, a bass string shreds, the pulse becomes faster. The sounds smell like sweaty bodies. Distorted bits of a guitar, the completely overdriven amplifier beeps. After 1.44 minutes, salvation: a scream, followed by barely intelligible, hectically shouted singing. Words overflow.
“Bad Brains: Building Babylon Live At The Bayou” is the name of the legendary US punk band’s live album, which was recently released. A musical archaeological masterpiece, as his recordings were considered lost. And a debut, because it is the first non-jazz product from the US label Time Traveler, which otherwise specializes in releasing historical jazz recordings.
The historical sound documents were mastered by producer Don Zientara, known for his work in the Inner Ear studio, in which he explores the Washington punk scenesuch as Fugazi and Minor Threat. And so the double album features two of the earliest live performances by the hardcore punk band from Washington DC, which was one of the few black groups to have a decisive influence on the scene in the 1980s and 90s.
The recordings were made at a time shortly before the band was due to move from their hometown to New York in 1980 due to a ban on performing due to riots at a concert – i.e. before the release of their debut album in 1981.
The raw feeling
Now the sounds are actually coming out of the speakers as if they were freshly pulled from a time capsule. As soon as the second song “PMA”, which is called “Attitude”, the recording stops, short interruptions reinforce the raw feeling, as if the record needle were jumping. “Don’t care what they may say/ We got that attitude!/ Don’t care what you may do/ We got that attitude,” singer HR pants into the microphone. Everything is fast, productive and aggressive. There it is, the attitude. The audience whistles and cheers.
It is only on the fifth track, “The Man Won’t Annoy Ya,” that the sagging off-beat of reggae, for whose influences the band and its Rastafarian-influenced singer Paul Hudson, alias HR, also became known, comes through.
Well, not everything used to be better and that Rastafarianism is known to be misogynistic and homophobic in its conservative interpretations: two accusations that the band was repeatedly confronted with throughout its existence. However, the former sounds rather harmless in the context of the time on “Live at the Bayou”, when HR intones with pathetic boredom “No, the man yah, he won’t annoy ya. But a little Betty will”.
Bad Brains: „Building Babylon at the Bayou – Live“ (Time Traveler Recordings)
Public apology
From the band’s homophobia, which culminated in the late ’80s in the song “Don’t Blow Bubbles”, which was widely interpreted as insults about gay sex practices, AIDS and drug use, and for bassist Darryl Jenifer and guitarist Dr. Know later publicly apologized, but fortunately nothing can be heard on the early recordings.
It is thanks to the two concert recordings that some of the songs can be found in a double version, including the classic “Right Brigade”, in the 1981 version with a significantly longer guitar solo. What the band’s insane performance in the “Bayou” must have looked like is easy to understand in the almost 25-minute documentary “Bad Brains at CBGB: My Picture in your Movie Baby”, also released in 1980, filmed by the French artist Nicola L.
It’s a great joy to attend the concerts 45 years later in your own living room: listening to the cover version of Black Sabbath’s signature song “Paranoid” played so quickly, it’s as if you accidentally turned the record player to 45 revolutions. Discovering the song “Many Changes In Life”, performed with a dull, reverberating dubbeat – previously unreleased – is a revelation.
And sinking into the one and a half minute “free-fire guitar rage” as the US music magazine Trouser Press Once called “Pay To Cum”, the Bad Brains’ very first single ever, provides thieving pleasure.
The polemical frustration of the song lyrics
Even listening to the lyrics. And it is with a little anger that we realize how relevant they are again today when HR hurls the following lines into the microphone during “The Big Takeover” full of polemical frustration: “All throughout this so-called nation/ Prepare yourself for the final quest/ The world is doomed/ with the desegregation/ Just another Nazi test/ So understand me when I say, There’s no hope for this USA/ your world is doomed with our own interrogation, Just another Nazi test”.
Earl Hudson hits his drums harder and harder, and you can hear the spit hitting the microphone more and more bitterly. The singing sounds more and more exhausted and on the cover lightning strikes the Capitol.