LAUGHING HYENAS, DIE KREUZEN, KILLDOZER - Touch & Go Records Roadshow, Toronto, Jan. 1988
By the time Grunge broke I felt like I was being aged out of the music scene since so much of it sounded like things I'd been listening to a few years earlier, when it didn't have a name except for maybe "indie" or "the music no major label will release." The bands who came to Toronto in January of 1988 as part of the Touch & Go Records Roadshow are a perfect example, and for some reason I was moved to try to get portraits of all three of them that night, despite my increasing wariness of photographing bands. (Long story short: like herding cats. Cats with shitty attitudes.)
Killdozer might have been the most popular band on the bill that night. The Wisconsin trio comprised of bassist/vocalist Michael Gerald and brothers Bill and Dan Hobson on guitar and drums sang sarcastic lyrics from debased or demented first-person characters over a pummeling grind. They were also the most eager subjects of the night, goofing for my camera and giving me my most successful shots for the spreads that would run in Nerve magazine.
I knew the least about the Laughing Hyenas when they showed up on the bill for the Touch & Go Records Roadshow in 1988, which might explain why I (shamefully) don't have any live shots of the band. They grew out of Detroit-based groups like Negative Approach and L-Seven, and I photographed their classic lineup before the show, with John Brannon, Larissa Stolarchuk, Kevin Monroe and Jim Kimball. The band had a troubled existence, with drug problems and lineup changes, but they produced some incredible records, and of the three groups I photographed that night, they're probably my favorite today. Sadly, Larissa Stolarchuk died in 2006 at just 46. John Brannon still tours with a revived version of Negative Approach.
Die Kreuzen were the band I was most excited to see on the Touch & Go Records Roadshow bill that played Toronto in early 1988. The Illinois band (whose name is pronounced either "Die Crusin'" or "Dee Kroy-tzen" depending on how metal you feel, I guess) had just put out October File, one of my favorite records of the '80s, which still had some traces of hardcore amidst all the prog, metal and post-punk influences on the record. Like all the other bands on the bill, the group was produced by Butch Vig, and Kurt Cobain's love of Touch & Go acts inevitably led to Vig producing Nirvana's breakthrough record for Geffen, breaking Grunge big but making me feel like this was where I came in.
I shot all three bands around soundcheck at what was probably the Apocalypse Club on College Street, with my most ambitious setup at the time - a white painter's tarp I carried around in a gym bag, gaffer-taped to the wall and a single flash bounced into an umbrella. The only real yardstick I had for band photos at the time were the promo glossies that record companies sent out in press packages, so it's not surprising that mimicking press handouts was the height of my ambition. I've re-scanned and worked on these shots pretty heavily; some of them are still just weaksauce attempts at band promos, but a couple are a bit more successful.