1980
San Pedro
New Alliance / NAR-001 (Mike Watt's Record Label; 1st release on his label)
• The existence of SST led Mike Watt to understand, according to a 1987 interview he gave to Musician magazine, how easy it was to get a record made: "All you had to do was pay the record plant man."
• "... our very first time in the studio was for Mike Watt’s compilation project, Cracks in the Sidewalk. It was an EP with groups from San Pedro, and Mike asked Saccharine to be a part of that. We went into the studio with Spot over in Hermosa, the same studio that Black Flag used, and recorded a few songs there." - Joe Baiza of Saccharine Trust
Hi Repo. Just wondering. What qualifies as Underground in this context?
The American Underground was a music SCENE that existed in the 1980s here in the States. It was mostly driven by the network of Punk Rock dive bars that existed across the entire country and the communities & scenes that those fostered. Places like The Rocket,which later changed its name to Club Babyhead, and The Living Room in Providence, RI. It was very DIY-driven with several independent labels releasing albums, perhaps most importantly SST founded by Gregg Ginn of the Black Flag. The music itself was all over the map but the chief throughline would be an extension of late 70s Punk, especially the NYC scene, as well as The Velvet Underground.
I hope that helps. I just woke up. lol.
Anyways, I was making this chart ... American Underground and plan on using this blog to outline and sketch out stuff I'm listening to in the process. They say a chart is worth a thousand words and if so, you will find all your answers there! 😅
Last edited by Repo on 04/03/2026 20:32; edited 1 time in total
The American Underground was a music SCENE that existed in the 1980s here in the States. It was mostly driven by the network of Punk Rock dive bars that existed across the entire country and the communities & scenes that those fostered. Places like The Rocket,which later changed its name to Club Babyhead and The Living Room in Providence, RI. It was very DIY-driven with several independent labels releasing albums, perhaps most importantly SST founded by Gregg Ginn of the Black Flag. The music itself was all over the map but the chief throughline would be an extension of late 70s Punk, especially the NYC scene, as well as The Velvet Underground.
I hope that helps. I just woke up. lol.
Anyways, I was making this chart ... American Underground and plan on using this blog to outline and sketch out stuff I'm listening to in the process. They say a chart is worth a thousand words and if so, you will find all your answers there! 😅
Cheers repo. Going to be following this blog. Sounds really interesting and we need more threads on the site so thanks for setting this one up. Gonna take a look at the chart.
I was actually hoping this thread would be about US local-scene indie/punk/wave compilations from the 1980s! I'd suggest starting a separate thread to focus on them, but I can't imagine enough people would be interested to sustain it for long. (Probably half the people who bought them at the time are dead now, after all.)
I will say though (at the risk of being overly contrarian) that there wasn't one "American scene" back in those days, there were actually a bunch of local scenes and they each rose and fell over time. Also, they weren't really "driven" by venues and labels — if anything, the venues and labels were gatekeepers, and it was actually college radio and mom-'n'-pop/indie record stores that were acting as tastemakers. To have a really thriving scene you needed all four of those things, but there were plenty of second-tier cities that had practically no venues or labels at all and still produced pretty good bands, at least in retrospect.
The problem was that the USA is too big and spread-out. It's always been too affluent, too (though now, of course, that's about to change)... Local scenes could sustain themselves without too much trouble because the kids all had money, but local indie labels could rarely afford to put on national marketing campaigns because half of them were run by record-store owners who had no money at all. I actually saw very little cross-pollination between local scenes in the USA back in those days, and that would probably still be true now if not for the internet. The "hot" 80s punk/new-wave scenes, more or less, were NYC, Boston, Los Angeles, Athens GA, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and maybe Chicago and Washington DC. (Sorry, Akron, we all loved you guys, but no.) Few of them (if any) really interacted with each other to a meaningful extent — I remember when Twin/Tone (a Minneapolis indie label) signed the Slickee Boys (a DC psych-punk band) — the fans in DC were practically flabbergasted, it was such a rare occurrence for that to happen.
I was actually hoping this thread would be about US local-scene indie/punk/wave compilations from the 1980s! I'd suggest starting a separate thread to focus on them, but I can't imagine enough people would be interested to sustain it for long. (Probably half the people who bought them at the time are dead now, after all.)
I will say though (at the risk of being overly contrarian) that there wasn't one "American scene" back in those days, there were actually a bunch of local scenes and they each rose and fell over time. Also, they weren't really "driven" by venues and labels — if anything, the venues and labels were gatekeepers, and it was actually college radio and mom-'n'-pop/indie record stores that were acting as tastemakers. To have a really thriving scene you needed all four of those things, but there were plenty of second-tier cities that had practically no venues or labels at all and still produced pretty good bands, at least in retrospect.
The problem was that the USA is too big and spread-out. It's always been too affluent, too (though now, of course, that's about to change)... Local scenes could sustain themselves without too much trouble because the kids all had money, but local indie labels could rarely afford to put on national marketing campaigns because half of them were run by record-store owners who had no money at all. I actually saw very little cross-pollination between local scenes in the USA back in those days, and that would probably still be true now if not for the internet. The "hot" 80s punk/new-wave scenes, more or less, were NYC, Boston, Los Angeles, Athens GA, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and maybe Chicago and Washington DC. ([b]Sorry, Akron, we all loved you guys, but no.) Few of them (if any) really interacted with each other to a meaningful extent — I remember when Twin/Tone (a Minneapolis indie label) signed the Slickee Boys (a DC psych-punk band) — the fans in DC were practically flabbergasted, it was such a rare occurrence for that to happen.
Love it! Keep sharing your knowledge drops!!! 😊
Interestingly re: Akron I was just trying to find a way to listen to this ....
... a couple of days ago. The cover alone is AWESOME!!! 🤓
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Repo
dihansse
MadhattanJack
