—Golnar Nikpour

MRR Records Discography:

MRR 001 – Welcome to 1984 compilation LP (1984) Reissued in 2010. Available in our webstore. Terveet Kadet/Olho Seco/Crucifucks/Electric Deads/Inferno/Kidnap/N.O.T.A./Icons Of Filth/R.I.P./Skjit-Lars/Rattus/Raw Power/Bristles/Depression/B.G.K./The Stalin/Frites Modern/U.B.R./Mayhem/Red Tide/Moral Demolition/Huvudtvatt/Upright Citizens

MRR 002 – Turn It Around! compilation 2×7″ (1987) 3,000 pressed (?) Compiled by David Hayes. Reissued as an LP in 1991 as a benefit “bootleg” for Gilman Street on Very Small Records (1,087 pressed). Corrupted Morals/Sweet Baby Jesus/Isocracy/No Use for a Name/Crimpshrine/Operation Ivy/Stikky/Nasal Sex/Yeastie Girls/Rabid Lassie/Sewer Trout/Buggerall

MRR 003 – DEZERTER – Underground Out of Poland LP (1987) Reissued in 2010 by Nikt Nic Nie Wie.

MRR 004 – They Don’t Get Paid, They Don’t Get Laid, But Boy Do They Work Hard! compilation LP/cassette (1989) Out of print. The Detonators/Amenity/Christ on a Crutch/Nausea/Apocalypse/Conspiracy of Equals/Screeching Weasel/Jawbox/Dissent/Downfall/Dead Silence/Cringer/Bazooka Joe/Libido Boyz

MRR 005 – NAÏVE – Switch-Blade Knaife LP (1990) Out of print.

MRR 006 – BAD RELIGION/NOAM CHOMSKY – New World Order 7″ EP (1991) Out of print.

MRR 007 – DIESEL QUEENS/INSAINTS – split 2×7″ (1993) Out of print.

MRR 008 – THE SPOILED BRATS/BUTTAFUOCO – split 2×7″ (1994) Out of print.

MRR 009 – DIESEL QUEENS – Hooked on Moronics LP (1995) Out of print.

MRR 010 – FURIOUS GEORGE – I Gotta Gun/Burger King Is Dead 7″ (1996) Out of print.

MRR 011 – DIESEL QUEENS – The Beast with Five Heads… And a One-Track Mind! 7″ EP (1997) Out of print.

MRR 012 – THE B-SIDES – LP (1999) We still have a few copies of this. Buy one here via PayPal: Your location: US $10.50 Canada/Mexico $13.15 world $21.00 Or send $10.00 US • $12.50 Canada/Mexico • $20.00 world to MRR • PO Box 460760 • SF CA 94146 • USA Limit one per customer.

MRR 013 – STRYCHNINE – Born Too Loose LP (1999) Out of print.

MRR 014 – Public Safety compilation LP/CD (2006) Out of print. Aaritila, Career Suicide, Deadfall, Direct Control, Disease, The First Step, Formaldehyde Junkies, Framtid, Gorilla Angreb, Holy Shit, Look Back And Laugh, Limp Wrist, Nightmare, No Hope For The Kids, Observers, Pedestrians, Persevere, Regress, Regulations, Signal Lost, Sin Dios, Sleeper Cell, Smalltown, Smartut Kahol Lavan, Strung Up, Sunday Morning Einsteins

MRR 014.5 – BUM KON – Drunken Sex Sucks LP (2008) Recordings from 1983; co-released with Smooch Records. Available in our webstore.

MRR 015 – Noise Ordinance compilation LP (2011) Morpheme, Needles, Rank/Xerox, NN, Shotwell, Black Rainbow, Surrender, Conquest For Death, Acephalix, Airfix Kits, Ruleta Rusa, Face The Rail, Ecoli, Migraine, Year One, Love Songs, Suicide Bomb, Hunx and His Punx, Acts Of Sedition, Fix My Head, I Will Kill You Fucker, Duck And Cover, The Fleshies. Comes with zine insert. SOLD OUT.

Other MRR/related releases: Virus 14 – Maximum Rocknroll Presents: Not So Quiet on the Western Front compilation 2xLP – Alternative Tentacles (1982) Still available on CD through Alternative Tentacles.

MANIC HISPANIC – The Menudo Incident LP/CD (1992) The LP version was funded, at least in part, by Tim Yo, ’cause he loved it.

924 Gilman: The Story So Far… Compiled by Brian Edge It’s a Book! 400 pages, with over 200 photos and lots of first-hand stories, flyers, memorabilia, and a list of every Gilman show through 2003…awesome! We are sold out of this book, but you can still get it through AK Press.

The Wipers (photographer unknown)

Black Flag (photographer unknown)

Tim Yo and Grant Hart (photo by Murray Bowles)

As promised, next week we’re gonna go back to the future, so if you’ve taken some killer photos this summer, send them!!!

If you shoot shows and have photos you want to submit for the MRR Blog, send to: photoblog {at} maximumrocknroll(.)com. Be sure to put “MRR Photo Blog” in the subject. Include your name, the band, where and when it was shot. Just send your best photos – edit tightly. Three to five photos is plenty. We will be exercising a little quality control here…not everything sent in will be posted. Please size your photos so they are 500 pixels (72 dpi) at the longest side.

There are a lot of awesome photographers out there shooting shows…and there are a lot of unseen archives of old shows. Show us what you’ve got!

Bikini Kill (photo by Justin Demetrick)

Born Against (photo by Justine Demetrick)

The Mummies, circa 1990 (photographer unknown)

Next week we’ll have one more installment from the archives, (with two very special treats!) then it’s back to the NOW scene.

Wanna submit a photo for the MRR Photo Blog?

If you shoot shows and have photos you want to submit for the MRR Blog, send to: photoblog {at} maximumrocknroll(.)com. Be sure to put “MRR Photo Blog” in the subject. Include your name, the band, where and when it was shot. Just send your best photos – edit tightly. Three to five photos is plenty. We will be exercising a little quality control here…not everything sent in will be posted. Please size your photos so they are 500 pixels (72 dpi) at the longest side.

There are a lot of awesome photographers out there shooting shows…and there are a lot of unseen archives of old shows. Show us what you’ve got!

Straight outta Brookings, South Dakota — that punk rock mecca — comes a modestly presented yet invaluable treasure trove of punk history. It’s called Operation Phoenix Records and what you’ll find there is an amazing selection of classic zines available as PDF downloads in their entirety. These include most issues of Flipside from #1(!) thru #58, every issue of 10 Things Jesus Wants You To Know, almost every HeartattaCk, Suburban Relapse, Suburban Punk, Suburban Voice… the list goes on. Oh, and did we mention you can download everything from the first few years of Maximumrocknroll??

Operation Phoenix archives: the hard copies

Operation Phoenix is run by Adam Miller, an aficionado of early punk who writes, “I first got into punk when I was a teenager during the 90′s, but it was older stuff like the Stooges, Ramones, Black Flag, Germs, Circle Jerks — all of the usual suspects.

“The inspiration for the zine part of the site was due to the difficulty I had finding old zines to read. During the late 90′s, I contacted one of the zine libraries in the US to see if they would mail me zines if I’d cover postage and send them a deposit until I returned the zines. They said no. I understood the reason, but I thought an online site would fix that problem for a lot of people.”

Originally conceived as an online store (hence the name including the word “Records”), the site soon found its niche as a zine and flyer archive, with an online punk discography that Adam hopes to further develop. The zine archive is definitely the star of of show here though. I’ve been downloading zines from this site for months and still don’t have everything I want. And Adam says there are around 250 more zines he is still preparing to upload to the site.

Does this sound like a lot of work for one dude?

“The site absolutely takes a lot of work, but when I think of all the time that went into publishing all of these zines, it puts everything in perspective.”

Don’t miss the decades of perspective to be found at Operation Phoenix. Adam can be contacted thru the site. As a bonus, here are his recommendations for more punk archives.

Break My Face
Flex!
Kill From The Heart
45 Revolutions
Collector Scum

Happy treasure hunting!

[Click on the pages below to see them at full, readable size.]

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been 25 years since this LP was originally released. Yet here I am at 40, still super excited about a record which blew me away at age 15. 1984 was a sinister and prophetic year for a generation that grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and was weaned on the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Jeff Bale’s original liner notes point out the role of the elite in manipulating public opinion, and suppressing dissent is often manifested in the ideological and psychological sphere, rather than by brute force. Fast forward 25 years and we can see that Orwell’s vision of a futuristic Stalinist police state was crude, but his warning about the manipulation of thought and twisting of the truth was remarkably prescient.

The original punk movement of the late ’70s was shocking, loud, obnoxious and a break from the conformist malaise of that decade. As the bleak economic realities of the ’80s dawned, the radical right and corporate interests launched the Thatcher/Reagan “Capitalist Revolution” that was to result in great economic and social dislocation. As society swung to the right and embraced more conservative views, the slightly absurd and theatrical elements of ’70s punk were jettisoned for music of pure protest, energy and outrage: Hardcore! Maximum Rock n Roll was the international voice of this new movement, one that embraced radical social change and fast, powerful blasts of raw thrashing punk that made the bands of the ’70s seem tame and restrained.

It’s long been my opinion the Welcome to 1984 is the best compilation LP of all time. While it lacks the regional focus of runners up such as Flex Your Head or This Is Boston, Not LA, it documents not a local scene, but a worldwide movement. This movement was spreading, a virus of resistance to the conformity of the era that has continued to spread to the corners of the globe. The bands and songs selected by the MRR staff gave an impressive overview of this new and radical movement. 23 bands from 17 countries, this diverse assemblage all shared a power and urgency that truly captured the spirit of the times and the energy of the movement. When I bought this record at age 15 I was barely aware of punk outside my hometown and the UK. Reading MRR and blasting this record over and over opened up my eyes to the international hardcore movement and exposed me to many bands that have become life long favorites. There are some truly epic moments on this record, the bass intro to BGK’s “Computer Control,” the sing-along chorus of Kidnap’s “No SS,” and most importantly, the raw screams of Raw Power’s anthem “Fuck Authority.” When I first heard this record I knew I had found what I was looking for.

As the Cold War ended and the War on Terror began, the elite found a rationale to extend their manipulation of public opinion and ideological control. While the hardcore subculture has endured, and spread, many complain that it has lost much of the energy and urgency of the early days. A spin of this record is a shot of this energy, pure and unadulterated.

—Felix Von Havoc, December 2009

Eucharist played crushing hardcore with influences from some of the best late-’80s/early-’90s US hardcore bands. I can hear traces of Infest, Citizens Arrest, Born Against, Rorschach, Crossed Out, etc. Besides this 12″, they had a few tracks on the Nothing’s Quiet on the Eastern Front compilation LP (alongside Devoid of Faith, Assfactor 4, Dropdead, Monster X, and more), the Vida Life comp (on Lengua Armada), and the, uh, Double Dose of Dicks 2×7″ comp. Their guitarist Mark Telfian would go on to play in the band Hail Mary and was the original guitarist of Limp Wrist. He also did the label Paralogy Records.

Listen to the 12″ here:

1. Plague
2. Born in a Mess
3. Exit
4. Promised
5. Splintered
6. Spoon Fed
7. Fangs
8. Praying for Failure
9. Body and Blood
10. Frozen Minds
11. You’ve Been Had
12. Sensory Deprivation
13. Invincible
14. Fooled Again

As a side note, Mountain was a pretty diverse label, releasing stuff by Halfman, Seein Red, Iceburn, Atom & His Package, and comps with Totalitär, Antiproduct, Submission Hold, In/Humanity, and Balance of Terror. I was a regular volunteer there for a couple years in the early 2000s. Chris Jensen: if you read this, I hope you’re doing well!