How We Rock

Al Barile, SS Decontrol, and the power of punk rock community

I spent my college years at the radio station. My diploma says that I majored in history, but I was really spent my college years studying the history of punk rock.

WHRB was one of half a dozen influential college radio stations in the Boston area, something that surprises people who have heard that Boston is not a big college town.

We were blessed with a local scene that featured Mission of Burma, the Lyres, the Neats, the Del Fuegos, the Neighborhoods, the Flies, the Outlets, the Dark, the Nervous Eaters, and Dangerous Birds. Most of those bands were led by college students (or ex-students who might have dropped out of BU).

Pushing back against the arty college kids were the straight-edge hardcore kids, led by the uncompromising SS Decontrol.

Those of us who grew up in that scene were sad to hear that SSD founder, guitarist, and lyricist Al Barile died this weekend after a long illness.

Hardcore was a complicated issue for me. I loved the records but thought straight edge was stupid. I originally wrote in this paragraph that it was “the anthesis of punk,” but that intellectualizes what was really my purely visceral reaction against straight edge.

I was raised in Southern fundamentalist culture, so punk rock’s promise of freedom of thought and freedom from conformity was its primary attraction. Think for yourself!

When Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye share his list of forbidden behaviors in “Out of Step,” I rolled my eyes but decided not to focus on the words because Ian was such a great vocalist and the record was otherwise perfect. I still give it 165 stars on a scale of 1-5.

D.C.’s Minor Threat was the #1 influence on SS Decontrol. The Boston band adopted a straight-edge lifestyle and it felt like they were running the city’s punk scene as a combination mob family/evangelical megachurch.

SS Decontrol live shows were all energy and chaos. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a band whip up a crowd the way they could every single night. Unfortunately, Springa was not a lead singer who could deliver in the studio and the early records pale in comparison to Minor Threat.

That didn’t stop them from releasing the greatest album* cover in punk history. The Kids Will Have Their Say shows a small army of straight-edge punks rushing the Massachusetts state capitol building. It’s both funny and a bit scary.

I’ll confess that this is the image that came to mind for me on January 6, 2021, wondering just how many of the punks in that picture were now nodding their heads along with the cable news coverage.

*Is The Kids Will Have Their Say an album? Well, it does have 18 songs even if it’s only 21 minutes long. Neither Xclaim! nor Dischord Records (it was a joint release) was going to submit this record to the Grammys in 1982 and it didn’t make either the LP or EP categories in the Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, so we’ll never have a definitive ruling as to whether it’s actually an EP. I say LP. So does Discogs. Loud fast rules.

Dead Wrong

In 1984, the band shortened its name to SSD and melted some brains with How We Rock, a 7-song, 21-minute record that gets called an EP. Why so many fewer songs? Because lead guitarist Francois Levesque was adding full-on metal guitar solos to almost every track.

The first image on this post is WHRB’s copy of How We Rock in a photo I took at the station back in 2010. As music director, I usually wrote a description of the record and noted recommended tracks when we added an album to the playlist.

Missing from this copy is my original sticker, which I think blasted the band for going metal and probably made a few snide comments that compared straight-edge to military discipline or mindless fundamentalism. That set off a flame war that resulted in the record being covered in stickers with comments from me and Rock Director Patrick Amory, with plenty of extra gasoline added by the station’s DJs.

Here’s the thing. He was 100% right and I was stupid wrong. With a few years of perspective, I’ve come to realize that SSD was charting the course for Green River (my favorite band of the second half of the decade) and laying the groundwork for the year punk broke a/k/a 1991.

What Al and the other members of SSD realized is that hardcore bands had painted themselves into a corner. There were only so many times that you could rewrite the songs from Wire’s Pink Flag and play them even faster. There were plenty of bands trying to adhere to the loud fast rules in the late ’80s but the hooks disappeared and the songs vaporized as third-wave bands tried to up the ante.

SSD’s How We Rock and the band’s final album Break It Up (released on Homstead in 1985) have aged at least as well as SS Decontrol’s pure hardcore records. They’re al million times better than almost all of those late-era pure hardcore records.

Unfortunately, neither SSD title is streaming and they’ve never been on CD or been reissued on vinyl. If you want to hear them and you’re willing to dig a little bit, YouTube (as usual) turns a blind eye to any copyright violations.

The power of positive energy

I revisited SSD after I came upon Al’s wife Nancy Barile’s Instagram page a few years back. She worked as a high school teacher and wrote a memoir about her time in the punk scene. Nancy met Al when she promoted a show for SS Decontrol and they were together for 43 years.

Nancy’s writing communicates the ideals and sense of community in the American punk scene better than anything else I’ve read. She published a memoir back in 2021: I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-and-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion.

Al went to college and got a straight job after SSD broke up, but she had recently encouraged him to reengage with the band’s history. I get the impression that Al was surprised to find out how much his band meant to punk rock kids from that era.

There were plenty of future reactionaries populating the Boston punk scene during my era, but it turns out that Al Barile was not one of them. Nancy’s stories compelled me to go back and listen to those records with fresh ears, and I now realize that I completely missed the point back in 1984.

I will always struggle with the straight-edge straitjacket lifestyle in the context of the punk rock’s “Think for yourself” value system. I understand that East Coast straight edge promoted its ideals as a positive choice and a rebellion against the stoner lifestyle of their culture.

Maybe it’s because I was rebelling against a totally different value system. I’ve joked that “Out of Step” could be a #1 Christian rock hit with only minor lyric adjustments, and that joke never lands. But you Baptists know that an “Out of Step” Ian MacKaye sounds like the hip youth minister who’s trying to adapt his message to connect with those hard-to-reach kids sulking in the back row.

That’s just me, though. Straight edge didn’t make much of an impact on West Coast punk, and it’s obvious which punk community had more issues with heroin over the next few decades. Let’s call it a net positive for a generation of rebellious kids.

We’re living in a moment when the world is full of male role models who play the whiny victim, pumping out the lie that more for anyone else means less for them. There’s very little talk of obligation or community or generosity. The lost boys of the 21st century could use a few more guys like Al Barile as role models: masculine and pumped full of testosterone but also principled and idealistic.

8-track of the day

Does SSD sound like Iron Maiden? No. Did I possibly accuse them of sounding like Iron Maiden in a radio station flame war? Possibly. Was I also wrong about Iron Maiden? Definitely.