We've been doing a video series at The A.V. Club where an artist discusses and performs on of our favorite songs. I've done a couple:
Bob Mould discusses and performs “Hoover Dam”
Mac McCaughan of Superchunk discusses and performs "Digging For Something"
This originally appeared in a 2003 issue of Punk Planet (RIP). I wanted to repost it here ahead of GI's reunion show this weekend, despite how much the obnoxious first-person in the intro and some of the questions make me cringe. But it's still a good interview!
I was born in 1976. Depending on your age, that may seem somewhat young or relatively old, but one thing is for sure: During the heyday of 1980s punk, I was in elementary school, rocking out to the likes of Quiet Riot, not Bad Brains.
I have numerous older friends who saw Bad Brains or set up Descendents shows in their houses or saw Husker Du around the time I was in third grade, digging “Round And Round” by Ratt. One friend in particular was startled by my nonreaction when he told me how he had scored a used copy of Government Issue’s Crash at a record store. He lectured me on the importance of these D.C. punk pioneers as he walked to his CD player and skipped to track five, “Connecticut.”
As the guitarist Tom Lyle played its three opening chords, a spindle top of an untapped bounty burst forth. I began the long, laborious journey of collecting the band’s records, dependent on eBay and used record stores to find them.
I started with their later work. There was the self-titled record (aka G.I. 5) from 1986, which I found at Amoeba Records in San Francisco. That marked the beginning of the band’s departure from, as vocalist John Stabb Schroeder later described, the “bang and howl” hard core of the early ’80s—and cost them fans because of it. There was 1987’s You, ordered on eBay from a guy in Germany, the band’s first record with drummer Pete Moffett and bass player J. Robbins. A melodic-punk masterpiece, it was full of hooks and built a foundation for a sound that would be replicated years later. Then there was 1988’s Crash, which I purchased from another guy in Germany to replace the copy I burned from my friend.
All my work eventually proved unnecessary, as Dr. Strange Records started rereleasing the band’s records a couple of years later. It began with Government Issue, Complete History Volume One in 2000, which featured the band’s first five records and two EPs. In 2001, Volume Two came out, featuring G.I.’s final three records. This year saw the end of the process with the rerelease of the Strange Wine EP, packaged with a previously unreleased live album from a 1987 performance at CBGB’s.
In this, an era of unprecedented harDCore awareness thanks in no small part to Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins’ book, Dance Of Days, the rereleases are timed perfectly. But Government Issue lacks prominence in both Andersen’s book and many people’s perceptions of the 1980s D.C. punk scene. For a band that lasted nearly a decade in a scene full of notoriously short-lived bands, G.I.’s relative obscurity seems curious.
“G.I. is one of the original D.C. hardcore bands, and they were very popular, and they are a very important band, but in terms of being kind of the ‘cutting edge’ kind of band that D.C. became known for, they weren’t that,” says Mark Andersen, “which is not meant to slight them. Cutting edge bands by their nature are extremely rare.”
As many D.C. punk bands experienced a political and personal reawakening, Government Issue made a conscious effort to stay outside of that. Vocalist John Stabb Schroeder was an unrepentant smartass who poked fun at the sincerity of a scene that tended to take itself pretty seriously. He wore outlandish clothes on stage and, as Robbins said, “antagonized the populace” during performances. When the independent movement really got going, Stabb sympathized with bands like Husker Du, who signed to a major label. When the D.C. scene was enthralled with Revolution Summer, Stabb and Government Issue reacted with “Degradation Winter.”
“He was performing the essential function of the court jester or the clown, which in the process of making light of something, can share critique and insight,” Andersen says. “John also represented something very important in the sense of the ‘everykid’ with his playing out these psychodramas on stage that was very touching for a lot of folks. … He’s not a rock god; he’s the rock antigod.”
Unlike many bands in D.C. at the time, Government Issue kept going when members quit—and many did. The band went through, by my count, seven bass players, two drummers and two guitarists, including people such as Brian Baker (formerly of Minor Threat) and Mike Fellows (Rites Of Spring).
“Government Issue is unique in the sense it actually found its way through a myriad of line-ups to its most powerful one, the one it concluded with,” Andersen says. “I think it did its best work during those days.”
After the departure of bass player J.A. Leonard and drummer Marc Alberstadt after G.I. 5, the band found Robbins and Moffett. Alberstadt, who left the band due to increasingly serious hearing problems, had been the only original member of the band besides Stabb. But with the new line-up, the band expanded its sound even more, exploring new frontiers in melody, studio techniques (backwards playing), instrumentation (electric sitar) and vocal harmonies.
“I will say, that for people who were skeptics of Government Issue, the result of the jelling of this final unit was not expected,” Andersen says. “There were people who put G.I. down. It’s an elitist and kind of snotty approach.”
Even with the critical and popular acclaim that followed You and Crash, the band still suffered in obscurity in the United States, though they had a decent European following. It got worse: They had a bad van accident while on tour in England. They started to garner unintentionally a bit of a neo-Nazi following in the United States. (At the end of the live track “Notch In My Crotch” on Volume One, you can hear Nazis repeatedly yelling “seig heil” to the band after the song.) Such shenanigans, combined with low tour revenues, conflicting musical aspirations and other internal tensions, took their toll. The band finally called it quits in 1989, nine years after their formation.
With their breakup, Dutch East India, which had released most of the band’s later records under its Giant imprint, effectively stopped printing the records. A European label, We Bite, still produced some of them, though Government Issue claims it received no royalties from those sales—or from Dutch East India after 1989. When the band made plans to rerelease the records, Dutch East India threatened them with legal action. But the band’s lawyer determined G.I. owned the rights to them, and nothing ever became of the threat.
After Government Issue, John Stabb went on to be in numerous bands, none of which reached the same level of recognition as Government Issue. He’s currently playing in a band called The Factory Incident and working on a book about Government Issue called The Evolution Of Sheer Terror. Tom Lyle went on to record a solo record and occasionally works as a producer. J. Robbins founded D.C. post-punk stalwarts Jawbox shortly after Government Issue’s demise. Upon the breakup of that band in the late ’90s, he co-founded Burning Airlines with Moffett and fellow Jawbox alumnus Bill Barbot. He also does a significant amount of producing, working with bands such as Jets To Brazil, The Promise Ring and many others. Pete Moffett played in Wool and, later, Burning Airlines. He was on tour in Europe with Alanis Morrissette when this article was written. Marc Alberstadt gave up music altogether not long after leaving G.I.
Fourteen years after their breakup, Government Issue is discovering the staying power of their music—and finding peace with their place in punk-rock history. By phone and by e-mail, members of Government Issue got together for their first interview together since their 1989 breakup.
John Stabb Schroeder – vocals
Tom Lyle – guitar
J. Robbins – bass
Marc Alberstadt – drums
What were the early days like?
Alberstadt: Those early days were just incredible. Everything was fresh, and there were so many great bands playing every weekend. Every few months or so, a new demo from some band would circulate that would blow everyone away and raise the bar to a new level of musical achievement. Everyone was on their toes to stay creative, with bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains and Black Market Baby on the scene. Believe me, there was plenty to be psyched about.
John, you were a pretty iconoclastic frontman, with your outlandish dress, stage antics and sarcasm. What drove you to be that way?
Stabb: Sadly, it had to do a lot with [what was recently diagnosed as] ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]. What me, hyperactive? How would anyone that was once referred to as “the punk rock David Lee Roth” or the Washington, D.C., punk-scene weirdo ever be hyperactive? What a revelation! Once I got out of high school and put together this punk-rock band, it was my goal to attack the world for all the injustices I’d been put through all my life. Then down the line I discovered someone that was a huge influence on me, Jack Grisham from TSOL. We played a show with them once. I was still dressing drab punk rock, and he kind of taught me to go out of my way to wear irritating clothes and totally and completely fuck with your audience.
Having Brian Baker in the band was great until he wanted me to stop wearing goofy clothes because we weren’t being taken seriously as a punk rock band—just because Glen Danzig told him that. How ironic is that? Here’s a guy who’s in a band with guys that look like they’re extras in a Sabrina And The Groovie Ghoulies cartoon. And they’re giving me fashion tips?
You had a good time being so aggressive on stage, even though you say you were a pretty withdrawn person off-stage.
Stabb: G.I. for me was a big outlet. It was a primal-scream thing and a therapeutic thing, where onstage I’d let all this stuff out, then I’d go back to my normal life and be depressed. For that 45 minutes to an hour, it was my own world, and I got into it and had a blast with it, and people enjoyed it and that was great. If they didn’t, I got into it anyway. So I basically did my thing and didn’t care if they hated me.
G.I. was a such a big outlet for you, but was it exhausting to go up night after night and play the songs that were inspired by such pain?
Stabb: It was both exhausting and comforting. Being in steady punk group like G.I. helped give me an outlet. If I never had that outlet I would've been in serious trouble. I'd be in a dead-end life with a wife and children I didn't love and a job I hated. That or in a mental institution. I have been a very troubled person most of my life.
You guys also had a good time mocking a very serious D.C. scene.
Lyle: It was very humorless, and we thought that was quite funny.
Stabb: I was definitely a really cynical fuck with other people in the D.C. scene. With the “Revolution Summer” thing, I thought there were some really cool bands. I loved Rites Of Spring and Embrace, but I didn’t believe in making this sort of quick political statement the way all these other bands were. G.I., Scream and Marginal Man were the punk-rock dinosaurs that weren’t allowed to be part of the club. I kind of felt, hmm, well they had Revolution Summer, and it was around the winter at that time, so I called our thing the “Degradation Winter” and just went out of my way to mock it. I went out of my way to take the piss out of things when they got way too serious.
At the time, D.C. was notorious for having short-lived bands. How did you guys manage to stick it out for close to a decade?
Lyle: A lot of that was because there was this thing that if you lost a member, that was the end of the band. We weren't like that. Our bass player would leave, and we would just replace him and get another one. But there were a lot of other bands back in the day that if a member left, they would call it quits. We felt that Government Issue was more of a concept than the actual people that made it up. Replacing the entire rhythm section as we did and ending up with Pete and J. was probably one of the best things that ever happened to us.
And you replaced numerous bass players. When do you think the band was at its peak?
Lyle: I guess 1987, when we recorded the You album. When it was happening, we didn't even realize it was happening.
Robbins: I think Joyride and The Fun Just Never Ends are still the apex of G.I.'s recorded output. Our lineup reached for a lot of things on record that we didn't always really achieve. But those two records are unqualified successes, totally ragingly powerful and very musical at the same time. Anyway, I can't help feeling this way—it's hard to outdo records that influenced you so much.
J., you’ve said before that you didn’t think you were part of Government Issue’s best line-up. Why?
Robbins: The first punk show I ever went to, in 1984, was a G.I. show. I was a huge fan of Joyride and The Fun Just Never Ends—those were two of the first hardcore records I ever owned, and they literally helped form my idea of punk rock. I still think those records are amazing. So when I joined the band, I had a lot to live up to in my own mind. When I hear the stuff that we did on You and Crash, though I'm proud of it, and I remember the times with great fondness, I also hear myself struggling to learn how to play bass, write and arrange songs—and not always succeeding.
What was the writing dynamic like in the band? Did you and Pete feel like the “new guys”?
Robbins: The personal dynamic between John and Tom was pretty crazy regardless of whomever else was in the picture. But they were really upfront about how psyched they were to have the "new blood" in the band. … It was much more egalitarian than I expected, and they let me contribute a lot more than I thought they would. John's part always came last—the songs were never written around vocal ideas, because in actual performance, John was such a lunatic that it would have been impossible to count on him to cue anything or ever be the musical backbone. Pete and I got really into singing harmonies, and that became our territory, because it was the first time that G.I. had had that. So it was sort of easy because initially it was just Tom and Pete and me getting to know each other, and I was definitely the young kid, the most in a position to learn rather than lead.
How was the dynamic between Tom and John weird?
Robbins: Any time two people have had a creative partnership for that long, they develop a particular language between them, which is often hard for newcomers to decipher. I feel like what I said before sounds a little uncharitable, and it's not meant that way. I'm cracking myself up trying to talk about this now because I just bought the Spinal Tap DVD, and I keep falling back into Tap-speak. You know, they were two distinct types of visionaries: John was like fire, and Tom was like ice, which I guess makes me (and all eight other bass players) lukewarm water.
What was it like playing with Pete again in Burning Airlines? Certainly you had a lot more experience by that point, but did the old days come up much?
Robbins: G.I. at its best was such a pure, unified, wall-of-guitar type of sound, and BA at its best really embraced a kind of musical schizophrenia. And musically, at least to communicate ideas, yeah, we were both much more on the same level than we had been before. In G.I., Pete was a real mentor to me. I guess the G.I. experience was always kind of a background feature that we drew on occasionally, anecdotally. There were times it was funny to be playing in a city or venue where we had had some G.I. misadventure. But going that far back together was one of the main reasons I wanted to be in a band with Pete again in the first place.
G.I. was one of the most enduring of the D.C. bands at the time, but It doesn’t seem like G.I.’s legacy is as prominent as other D.C. bands. Why do you think that is?
Lyle: That’s because we weren’t as good.
Alberstadt: Well, our D.C. hardcore peers were the likes of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, Henry Garfield (later Rollins) and the Bad Brains. They are all visionaries that defined a genre—and it is quite difficult to leave behind a musical legacy greater than theirs. I will say this, though: G.I. had tenacity! After the first wave of the D.C. hardcore scene fell apart—the Bad Brains split for New York, Henry from S.O.A. joined Black Flag, and Minor Threat broke up—the whole D.C. scene became very dead, and G.I. was a real catalyst in keeping the momentum of the D.C. scene going. It was not an easy period. People take this for granted. During this dormant period, new D.C. bands formed and rehearsed, and a new bunch of great D.C. bands eventually emerged from all the break ups. G.I. was the glue that kept the whole thing afloat.
But it seems even those bands that came later or the ones that self-destructed receive more recognition than G.I. For instance, in Dance Of Days, G.I.’s not mentioned all that much.
Lyle: You gotta remember Dance Of Days is written by Mark Andersen. A lot of the perspective comes from bands' political involvement, and we didn't really step out that much in that arena as much as we were trying to sustain our energy through touring and recording. Certainly, from our perspective, we were as involved as you could be in any sort of scene. We were constantly touring and playing and recording as much as we could for our own cause, which was Government Issue.
Robbins: "D.C." has always meant "Dischord" to people from out of town, and G.I. sort of took themselves out of the immediate Dischord scene early on, that's one thing. The band always had a real "outsider" attitude. But I also think G.I. didn't go out of the way to "stand for" anything; it was a really good band, but it was just a band, period. Whereas there were major changes happening in the attitudes around punk rock in D.C., a politicization that some people really identified with and others resented. … Something grew out of that, which was larger than the music or the identity of any particular band, and that is the kind of thing that stays with people in a bigger, more lasting way than music. … But I remember G.I. almost taking pains to remain outside of the whole thing.
Another thing is that John was so sarcastic, so ridiculous (and that was a project of his: over-the-top ridiculousness and bargain-basement theatricality, strictly for its own sake, for the sake of the show), at a time when a lot of other people were either getting really political or exploring an almost painful kind of sincere intensity. Ultimately G.I. was never fashionable, and I think that goes a long way to account for the band's slowly but surely dropping out of the official history of D.C. punk.
Why did it end?
Stabb: I think Bob Mould described it best when he described why Husker Du fell apart: It was like a train out of control, and he jumped off before they crashed. I felt that way too about G.I. I think if I had stuck it out even one more year, I would have been very close to being suicidal because it just go to be a depressing thing. Everybody was also having creative differences, the running cliché of being in bands.
Lyle: It was mostly Yoko's fault. One of the major reasons why is because we were underappreciated, I think. I remember being in rehearsal toward the end and talking about offers that we were getting to play shows in the U.S. I particularly remember this example that we were trying to get a small, Midwest tour going, and we were getting offers of like $200, $300 for a show and stuff like that. We thought that was ridiculous, and we thought it wasn't worth it anymore.
Musically we were splitting, too. Everybody in the band was having their own ideas about how we should go musically. We were constantly at odds with that.
Robbins: I think we all felt it running out of steam, and those guys especially were frustrated that after having done this thing for so long, they were still always broke and toiling in total obscurity. But we were talking about how to sort of scale it down, or if we should do a couple of more tours and then pack it in. I remember Pete saying "if we're going to break up, we should just do it," so we could get on with whatever else our individual lives might hold.
How important is the band’s legacy to you?
Lyle: It's not important, it's not important. I wish that more people would get a chance to hear us. I can't say that I wish more people would like us because I have no control over that.
Stabb: So many people will tell us “you guys never got your due” and everything. I think we were successful because we toured Europe twice, and the first time we did it, we broke even on our plane fare for the trip. We played about two-and-a-half months all over the continent. Then we came back and had terrible, terrible luck: We flipped over in vans, we had a Nazi following, we had a full-scale riot at a show. It got to be like, OK, is this worth it anymore?
I still see our names referenced in books and magazines and all that stuff. I’m happy with having a cult following other than having this huge, monumentous success that like Henry Rollins or Ian MacKaye has had—because with that, they’ve also had all this other crazy insanity and kids worshipping them to the point that it’s kind of scary. I don’t get the same kind of insane, psychotic nutbag who’s in dire need of a therapist more than myself or the psycho letters Henry Rollins gets. I sort of get the hand-me-down psycho letters—thank God for that.
John, you’ve said that you don’t want G.I. to be the one thing you’re known for, but at the same time, with your book and the rereleases, you’re sort of bolstering that perception.
Stabb: I don’t mind talking about it with people on the street or at clubs. I’m completely approachable about that, but I definitely don’t want it to be the end-all and be-all. I don’t want people to think that’s the only creative thing that’s been in my life. I want to continue and do other things, like I’ve done with The Factory Incident. I want to show that’s a whole different side of me, and I can actually progress in my life as opposed to fall back and milk it for all it is.
Anything you would change or any regrets?
Alberstadt: I wish we could have had more time to record.
Stabb: I look at everything as being learning experience, good or bad.
Lyle: I can't think of a thing. We did the best we could. We thought we were as good as any other band that was out there at the time. If someone said to us, “just do this one thing, and you'll become as popular as Minor Threat was or as popular as Rites Of Spring is,” I don't know if we would have done it. We were doing what we thought was right. We wanted to make ourselves happy, musically and lyrically. We weren't doing it to become the biggest band in the world or to be remembered 20 years later.
But you are remembered 20 years later. Of all of them, what was your favorite record?
Stabb: I love the You album, and I’ve come to terms with Crash over the past five years. It was actually made to fit radio airplay. When we were in the studio, they’d put little speakers next to a radio and would go, “OK, that will fit the radio. It’s the same kind of level.”
Robbins: Crash is basically a Hard Rock record (note the capitals), not my favorite kind of music. And as far as my contribution to that record, I felt I was much more aware of what I was trying to do, and I imagined I was making something quite different from what it ultimately turned out to be. So, I guess I'd pick You.
Lyle: You is my favorite. It's when musically we really pulled it together, a consistent record from beginning to end. I can listen to that record from beginning to end—other records, I skip through parts.
Alberstadt: The band took too many directions for me to provide one favorite. As a classic hardcore band, my favorite record is Boycott Stabb. It is a record that very well represents that genre, done by a band at the top of its hardcore period game, with complete passion and focus. It is a fun record. G.I. experimented in many different directions later on, with varying degrees of success. My favorite record outside of the pure hardcore mold is You, despite the fact that I do not play on it. You had very strong songwriting and had great performances by every member in the band, in particular Pete's virtuoso drumming. The production values were unusually high for that predigital period, and overall, I never understood why You didn't cross over big time. I think G.I. at that stage was basically a band ahead of its time. Go listen to that record and then look at the release date if you don't believe me.
What’s it like having all this material available to the public for the first time in years? Do you cringe at all listening to the old stuff?
Stabb: I think it’s really cool that years after the fact that Dr. Strange is rereleasing all our stuff, and Tom Lyle and I are both making a profit 20 years after the fact, you know, because we got screwed.
Lyle: I find listening to Volume Two a lot easier than listening to Volume One. Some people tell me differently, and I just don't understand that.
Robbins: I generally avoid listening to anything I have played on because, more often than not, especially with stuff from so long ago, I fall into that creepy, unfun self-critical mode—and it's a little too late now to do anything about it! But I do appreciate how comprehensive the new releases are. I appreciate that they're doing them at all.
Alberstadt: Well, I have very vivid memories of the incredible live audience response we would get, so I think that G.I., during my tenure, was a much, much better live act than the recordings represent. There are some records that I and the rest of that lineup played very well on, and unfortunately, they were the worst recorded ones.
Were you worried at all that any of those old labels would come after you for rereleasing the material?
Lyle: This is our stuff. Let ’em come after us. What are they going to do, sue us? What are they going to get? Fuck ’em. Government Issue isn't that big of a band where anybody cares. That's what it comes down to.
How did G.I. affect the subsequent bands you were in?
Stabb: It's been a burden and a blessing, man. The G.I. stigma follows me everywhere. It's tough to do anything a bit different musically without the G.I. name being brought up.
Robbins: G.I. was like Rock Band 101 for me. They taught me everything about playing in a band, from "the bass player should listen to the kick drum" on up. And they made it possible for me to learn how much fun I could have doing this sort of thing instead of just dreaming about it. They also gave me some of my first lessons in group psychology. Thanks to G.I., I have firsthand experience of riots and van accidents.
I remember how amazing it felt when we got the first copies of You—we were on tour, and we got a package at a friend's house, and there I was, for the first time in my life, holding a record that I actually played on. That's a feeling I hope never to forget. I guess I ultimately figured out that there were things I wanted to try musically that G.I. couldn't have satisfied, but I would have never gotten to that point without the G.I. experience. I owe those guys a lot.
I'm all about 20-year-old SNL references lately; the other day I joked that I'm gonna bring back the Church Lady's catchphrase—"Well isn't that special?"—as part of my ongoing efforts to maintain a 95 percent level of irony in everything I say, apparently.
But the Sprockets reference came into my head thanks to my iTunes: I'm listening to the Wax Trax! Black Box compilation, and it's currently playing The KLF's "What Time Is Love?" It's not exactly the kind of thing that comes to my mind when I think of the label—it's way more of a straight-up dance track—but it's worth nothing the label's legacy goes beyond Al Jourgensen's pulverizing industrial anyway.
And that's a long way of saying I've been working on an oral history of industrial for a few months now. (And it's why updates to the site have been so infrequent.) It'll be published by Soft Skull Press in the fall of 2011, but it's due in seven short months. I've created a new section on the site to talk about the book, so check it out for updates. I'm also open to suggestions for the book.
More to come soon. I hope to link up some of my stories from last year on here too, but the book is obviously taking priority over everything else at this point.
OK, I've added all of my 2009 work thus far, and I'm in the process of adding images and kind of sprucing it up otherwise. "What about your freelance stuff?" you ask? Ha ha ha ha ha. The word "freelance" doesn't exist in my vocabulary this year, though I did pitch to This American Life a couple months back. And I did a book pitch. But otherwise, it's been all A.V. Club, all the time.
That wasn't always so, and I'll get the proof of that uploaded here soon. I have some big-ass pieces I've done for Alternative Press and Punk Planet that need to be put here, but I'm still figuring out how that will work with Squarespace's system. These external links are way easier to deal with.
Anyway, as always, more TK. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter for real-time inanity.
I didn’t grow up in the ’hood—just next to it—but three of my friends were dead by the end of sophomore year. A few others dropped out of school altogether later on. One ran away. A few ended up incarcerated. Yet, when my parents insisted I attend a hoity-toity private school instead of the nearby public one with my friends, I couldn’t understand why. Duh.
Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 2:25PM