DISTORT #7

I’d moved to Melbourne and like most people who move here, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder from coming out of a shitty town where corruption was transparent in the local politics, it smelt like utter garbage most of the day and people were disgusting. In Melbourne transport ran on time, there were good record stores and a hardcore scene with good bands that played in venues with actual PA systems. It quickly became a pretty boring place to be with a lot of bullshit that came from livin’ in the city. Expensive rent meant working a lot, and working a lot meant being in the city a lot. I started a magazine with a couple of friends called What We Do Is Secret, but I hadn’t written for a hardcore fanzine since a zine I did in Wollongong called On Fire that I folded on moving to Melbourne.

One night I was listening to the New Breed compilation in my bedroom after work while reading a stack of recent hardcore fanzines. Shit like Game Of The Assholes, Voices Wake Us, Cut Sick, Warning. That plus Black To Comm: I really fuckin’ dug that zine, retard editor and all. I wanted to write about hardcore again.

Initially, I decided I’d try to track down Aaron Melnick through Paul from the Inmates, who I’d been trading records with. I wanted to interview Aaron and ask him about Integrity, because I’d only really heard Dwid’s story and he’d successfully made himself into a really goofy cartoon character. Melnick left the band before they turned to shit, which indicated he knew what he was doing. Plus he played in the fuckin’ Inmates, bud.

He was cool, so we did the interview, and I originally intended to pass it onto someone else. But one day I played the h-100’s Distort Cleveland single and had this idea to do a zine based on Cleveland hardcore, punk and rock bands that I dug: at the time I was listening to a lot of Rocket From The Tombs and my girlfriend had turned me onto the Electric Eels. I was connecting real heavily with everything I heard from the scene that 9 Shocks and Inmates came out of, and all their previous and current bands, so it made sense.

I started Distort in 2006 at #7. Over the years through interviews I’ve inflated this stupid myth that all the previous issues were out of print immediately or short run or mix tapes or whatever. The mix tape part was true: I made two mix tapes for friends called Distort #1 and Distort #2, and had a stupid idea about starting a mix tape club. But I started it at #7 because I’d been writing hardcore zines since I was 15 – Stop And Think, No Longer Blind, Room 101, On Fire most notably – and never got to #7 with any of them (bar NLB). So I thought I’d avoid the curse and just start there. One day I’ll dig up the choice sections from those zines, but it’d probably fill about a page and a half of space: they’re pretty standard teenage nerd fanzines, little substance.

#7 was definitely in the mode of early issues of Inside Front. I kinda wanted it to appear like part of that whole holy terror scene, only ten years later. So I dug out Adel 156, an old contributor to Inside Front, and asked him to write some shit for me. He wrote about how to kill people, which cracked me up. I was heavily into the whole Answer Me! and associated publications zine scene as well, and this seemed to be in the spirit of those assholes. Ben Parker from Voices Wake Us also wrote something about obscure early US hardcore, talking about bands like Die Kreuzen and White Cross, that don’t really seem all that obscure now. I guess this was right on the cusp of everyone downloading everything, and the American Hardcore film hadn’t been released yet. I wrote a little about ‘Abraxas Annihilation’, one of my favourite Integrity tunes, and sent it to Dwid, who wrote a reasonable yet terse email in response. I extracted a bunch of quotes from Anton Szandor Lavey’s books – pretty cheeseball, sure, but I was definitely attempting to pay tribute to a certain era of hardcore, and at the time I was really intrigued with cults and herd mentality. I used to read the Satanic Bible and cut open pregnant goats and drink uterine fluid, but I was never really committed to the dark lord, just curious.
A top five Cleveland record list and a rant from my mate Juz giving a Christian perspective on Integrity rounded out the issue. It went out of print almost immediately, and I started work on the next issues.

Straight away I introduced the idea of a subscriber. Then it was $5 for 5 issues. I had a pretty good way of burning a hole in my pocket every time I had money, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to let the banks know that I needed them.

FROM THE INTERVIEW ABOUT INTEGRITY WITH AARON MELNICK:

FOR THOSE WHO FEAR TOMORROW?
At that point of the band, Dwid was still one of my best friends / worst enemies and we shared a view on life that this world is a piece of shit. I think we probably both grew up with high expectations and big disappointments. If you begin your life as an idealist, the reality that this world is really fucked up will soon sink in and make you realize that things are shit and that won't change for centuries if we don't kill ourselves first.

This was my favourite Integrity record. It was closest to the original idea we had for Integrity and Dwid's vocals were the best whole album performance he ever gave while I was in the band. We were all still really into it. The kind of life I was living at the time the record came out consisted of drugs, alcohol and hookers.