Nearly five decades after Bad Brains tore through their first studio session, those recordings are finally getting an official release. Trust Records will issue Are You Ready: The First Studio Recording (Inner Ear – March 1979) on Nov. 6, collecting six songs recorded during a frantic one-hour session at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Va.
The recordings, which have previously circulated among tape-trading punks in bootleg form, have been newly mixed by Minor Threat/Fugazi/Dischord Records principal Ian MacKaye and are being released in cooperation with the band on vinyl, cassette and digitally. The first taste is an early, previously unreleased studio version of “Pay To Cum,” recorded more than a year before the song became Bad Brains’ debut 7-inch in 1980.
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For a band whose eventual legend was built in part on the sheer velocity of its performances, the recording captures Bad Brains at an especially revealing moment: not yet capable of making the landmark self-titled album released in 1982 or fusing hardcore with reggae on an increasingly ambitious scale, but already possessing the ingredients of something radically different.
“The riff for ‘Pay To Cum’ started as a stream of punk rock vibes fueled by the Ramones, the Damned and Return to Forever,” bassist Darryl Jenifer says. “It was a gift that served as a springboard into our sound — sheer, straight ahead three-chord mayhem with a few breaks and a stop.” “The title actually meant nothing to us; it was just a fun-loving play on words,” he adds.
The six-track session also includes early recordings of “Don’t Bother Me,” “Black Dots,” “Migraine” and “Send No Flowers,” plus “Jamming at the Atlantis.” According to liner notes by Ian MacKaye’s brother Alec, the band arrived at Inner Ear after mistakenly driving to the wrong address and found itself with only an hour remaining on its booking.
Bad Brains had formed in Washington, D.C., in 1978 around vocalist H.R. (Paul Hudson), guitarist Dr. Know (Gary Miller), Jenifer and drummer Earl Hudson. As SPIN explored in its 2012 feature on the band, the musicians originally played progressive jazz as Mind Power before punk redirected their ambitions. After seeing the Ramones and the Clash, they began speeding up their approach and developing something that was both ferocious and unusually precise. “We’d listen to the Ramones and the Dickies and the Clash, but we’d speed it up and listen to it on 78 [RPM],” H.R. told SPIN in 2012. “We decided to come up with the tunes, but faster and with a more positive edge. So we came up with our own original style.”
That style would become one of the foundational sounds of American hardcore: metallic guitar, astonishingly fast drumming, H.R.’s elastic vocals and an intensity that never entirely obscured the musicianship underneath. As Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid told SPIN for that 2012 feature, Bad Brains had a rare combination of “street-level appeal” and musicianship. “They weren’t just guys who picked up guitars and were flailing away at them,” Reid said. “They were very tuneful.”
“Pay To Cum” was perhaps the purest early demonstration of that approach. H.R. recalled telling Earl to make the song as groovy as possible, only for the drummer to make it “as fast as possible.” H.R. responded by delivering the lyrics with what he described as “extra spirit, extra oomph and soulfulness.”
The song’s meaning, too, was more complicated than its title suggested. H.R. told SPIN that its underlying theme was about refusing to give up and maintaining peace, describing life as a series of things one must “pay” for. That idea would eventually become part of the broader Bad Brains philosophy. The band embraced the concept of PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) after H.R.’s father encouraged him to read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. The phrase would become central to the group’s music and identity, providing a counterweight to the violence and nihilism often associated with hardcore.
“We wanted to make sure a lot of our energy was put into executing our riffs and ideas,” Jenifer says now. “There was no overall vision of what we meant as a band or what it would come to mean to the culture. All we knew was we loved a wild version of rock’n’roll that they called punk.”
Bad Brains eventually became a central force in New York’s early hardcore scene after being pushed out of some D.C.-area venues by the intensity of their live shows. At CBGB, the band found a home alongside the burgeoning punk and hardcore community. Its influence subsequently spread far beyond the scene, reaching artists from the Beastie Boys and Minor Threat to Nirvana, Deftones, Green Day and countless later generations of heavy music.
Are You Ready will bring some of the people who were there back together. On Nov. 5, Jenifer and Ian MacKaye will discuss the session and Bad Brains’ formative years at Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. The following day, an archival Bad Brains exhibition will open at Lost Origins Gallery, featuring material from the personal archives of Jenifer, Alison Braun, BJ Papas, Lucien Perkins, Alec MacKaye, Roger Gastman and others.
The release’s packaging includes rarely seen archival images, with Jenifer creating the duct-tape logo and handwritten Bad Brains lettering used throughout the album package. Pete Lyman mastered the recordings at Infrasonic.
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