Long Live Descenes and Discords

We know about the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and the cultural and generational forces that spawned them, but so much of that era has been lost to history. 

Descenes and Discords: An Anthology, a new coffee table book from DiWulf Publishing, revisits the birth of underground music in Washington, D.C. by publishing the complete runs of two seminal fanzines.

In 1979, Howard Wuelfing was living in Washington, D.C., playing in bands and trying to establish himself as a rock journalist. Frustrated with the lack of coverage for the nascent scene he saw around him, he decided to publish his own fanzine, one of the first in the country. Taking inspiration from Alan Betrock’s New York Rocker, Wuelfing’s Descenes debuted in January 1979, as a broadsheet newspaper that covered local bands and clubs with reviews, interviews and lots of gossip. A few years later, that idea morphed into Discords, a more nationally oriented zine with scene reports from around the country that predated Maximum Rock N Roll.  

Wuelfing and I met at Rutgers College and became friends, working together on the college’s daily newspaper. In 1979, I was covering film and theater for New Jersey’s Aquarian Weekly but wanted to write about music too, so I jumped at the chance to become the “N.Y. Bureau Chief” for Descenes and later, a contributor to Discords. 

Some 45 years later, Howard — for decades, a successful music publicist who worked for Jem and Columbia Records before starting his own successful agency — and I got together to talk about the new anthology and rehash some memories from the days when we stormed the barricades as embedded reporters in the cultural revolution.

These zines had been gathering dust for 40 years, what inspired you to collect them into a book at this point in time?

Most simply, my wife, Amy, a number of years ago, started DiWulf Publishing, her own “boutique publishing firm,” which is another way to describe something that really doesn’t generate any profit. She does it because she loves enabling people to tell their stories. And one of the early publications they put out was an anthology of a Jersey-based fanzine called Hard Times that she had been a contributor to. When they did that, I said, “Well, you know, I did a zine, too, why don’t we do that one?” But there were other books in the queue for a while, and they kind of cycled through, then my turn came up, and that was basically it. 

I’m assuming you hadn’t actually read through the zines since they came out. Were there any revelations, things you didn’t remember, things that you were surprised by?

One of the assignments I had from my publisher was to read every one of these things, and not just read it, but to come up with an intro for each issue. But since I hadn’t read them since putting them out, the only way I could effectively do that was to actually read each one, cover to cover, and then comment. 

So I did that for 14 days, one a day. And it was certainly interesting looking back with the perspective of hindsight, having lived a lifetime since these things happened. Reading them now, I could see the whole narrative, knowing how the story would evolve and end. I could see a narrative arc for each issue and watch how attitudes and goals progressed over time. So there’s that, but it’s also fairly embarrassing for me to see how we were trying to wrap ourselves around the emergence of hardcore and being really slow to appreciate it, to see the artistry that was there, and truly understand the stage of life these guys were in.

At the time, my friends and I were all wise 25-year-olds and so we’re watching these D.C. kids do their rite of passage stuff and we were like, wait a minute, why are they doing this stuff? We’ve already done this. But, you know, you’re stupid when you’re 25, you think you know everything, and you can’t understand why everyone doesn’t think the same way you do.

Reading Descenes, which was very much dedicated to trying to help the D.C. music scene coalesce and form a community, I saw the same thing. You were obsessed, or at least heavily focused on, bands that were doing well locally at the time and had the potential to maybe sign to a major and break out nationally. Bands like the Slickee Boys, White Boy, and Dceats, whom no one remembers. And then, bubbling under the surface, there are these kids like Ian MacKaye who start appearing in the narrative as minor characters. Talk a little about White Boy, that’s a fascinating story. The band featured this character called Mr. Ott and his son, and they were huge figures in the early D.C. scene, but it ended pretty badly, as I recall.

It ended very badly, Mr. Ott was tried and convicted for being part of a child trafficking ring. But before that, White Boy was this amazing band. Even though Mr. Ott played in the band with his son, it wasn’t presented as a gimmick, it’s just the way it was. He was an older guy, older than us, and he had been around rock ‘n’ roll, he had stories of meeting Elvis at a suburban radio station in Maryland, stuff like that. And when his son Jake started a band, Mr. Ott just kind of infiltrated it and became the frontman, and he was an incredible showman — provocative, funny and a big influence on a lot of people. Ian MacKaye will tell you that. Ian saw that White Boy put out their own records, right there in suburban Maryland, and realized that you could do that, put out your own records and put on your own shows. When the Atlantis Club stopped being a viable venue for the local new wave bands, Mr. Ott was a big part of the process of finding stinky bars that would let us set up punk nights. So yeah, he did some amazing stuff, and then he did stuff that was heinous and terrible. It’s a weird and tragic story.

Another band you saw very early on was Bad Brains. Could you tell they were destined for something bigger?

They were an interesting crew, and an influential one, because they were playing punk. They just decided to embrace the whole punk ethos and the punk esthetic. But they’d already been in prog-rock band, so they had these amazing rock chops. And the whole idea of playing as fast as John McLaughlin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra was… that’s something they had already mastered, and they just wound up applying it to this new kind of songwriting, and there you go. It was an incredibly powerful form of music. In their early prime, there’s no one who could stand up to them, period, just no one. I saw them open for people like The Damned. And it was just poor, poor Damned, you felt sorry that these flabby, old — you know, not old, late twentysomething — white guys had to try and follow Bad Brains. They were so intense and so precise and so driven. They were amazing.

I want to go back to something you said before. It might seem we had a vision that we’d be helping these D.C. bands so that they’d become nationally known and get major label contracts and stuff, but we didn’t really do that. The idea was more like, if you were in D.C. at that time, no one got signed out of D.C. Anyone who got signed out of D.C. moved away to do it, so it was more a thought of: We’re doing this for ourselves and for the other people in this area. That’s as far as we’re planning. We’re doing the zine for the people who live around here, who will come see our bands, go to the record stores in this area, and we had no aspirations that it should make any impact beyond that whatsoever.  

We wanted a scene that could be strong and functional, and that everyone would look after each other and you know, help; support venues that supported this kind of music. When I say, “this kind of music,” it’s one thing I noticed, reading through this stuff, is that (Bad Brains frontman) HR, a couple of times, refers to the music as “New Wave.” It wasn’t like, here’s Punk and there’s New Wave. It was just like, okay, there’s this alternative music, and some people sound like this, and some people sound like that, but it’s all part of the same thing. 

But by the time we got to Descenes #6, there is a sense that this isn’t working, because anyone who gets a leg up is not necessarily bringing everyone else along. It became a matter of, how can I become a professional? We need to focus on us. And how can we get into the more commercial venues? That became the mindset.

It just felt like it was a failure. I think I said that in the editorials. This didn’t work, so I don’t know what we’re gonna do now. It’s like, everyone’s eager to sell out, and there’s the irony that the first batch of bands who had been trying to make stuff work in D.C. had evolved into that careerist attitude, yet none of them ever “made” it.  

Meanwhile, all the kids that were about eight years younger were watching us and reading the magazine and coming to the record stores where we were working and stuff like that. It seems to me now, and I could be wrong, that they were absorbing this, all these attitudes we were espousing, and they felt, okay, this is how you’re supposed to function as a band. They absorbed those attitudes and, six months later, it’s like they start bubbling up. In the prime years of D.C. hardcore, you see all those values, that’s how it was working. Suddenly, the famous gigs are at the Wilson Center, with people finding alternative venues.  

So you decided to pull the plug on Descenes and then a few months later, you published the first issue of Discords (no relation to Dischord Records.) Now it’s not just about D.C. You have scene reports from little budding scenes around the country, and not New York, L.A. and Chicago, but the “flyover states,” places like Minneapolis, Ft. Worth, Boston, Atlanta and me in Hoboken. (Correspondents included young people who would go on to bigger things, like Twin/Tone’s Terre Katzman, the Meatmen’s Tesco Vee, Forced Exposure’s Byron Coley, and a Boston teenager named Gerard Cosloy.)

We also had a letters column so sometimes people would just write about their hometown and say what was happening there. You look at Gerard, this was before he started Conflict, and you see the heart of what he’s doing. He’s just passionate about music, he loves this stuff and he wants to share it with the world. That’s how we all felt.

Was there anything else that emerged from this project, truths you hadn’t realized before? Some of it must have been painful. Your first wife Tina was the publisher of the zines, she typeset them at her day job, and she’s passed away, and friends who died young.

Mainly, I’d say it was an interesting experience. I remember the process of how we did it all, but I don’t spend much time contemplating the past. I’d rather be thinking about what kind of trouble I can make now. What’s fascinating is that I see this basic attitude toward life and making stuff happen. I don’t know if it was formed by this period but it was my first big exercise in it. And it’s served me ever since and continues to serve me. 

The late ’70s and early ’80s were interesting times, it marked the end of the Baby Boomer dream. Just as we were leaving college, the whole idea of “here’s the path, and this is how it works,” for the first time for middle class white people, it stopped working so consistently, and that was kind of a shock. People are going to respond to that in different ways, and our response was, well, let’s find another way to get things done. Most of the people I knew were going to thrift stores for their clothes, not because it was hip but because it was what they could afford. But you’d find all this cool, weird stuff and be like, wow, this is even better. Not only can I afford it, but it’s a lot more fun than the clothes you’d buy at a regular place. You’d find yourself falling out of sync with mainstream consumerist society and realizing there’s a whole other way to approach living.

Anyone who reads the book and was around in that era will find this nostalgic, but what do you hope younger people will get out of reading it?

That’s going to depend on what you’re bringing to the experience. Everyone’s going to get something different out of it. What’s fascinating to me and makes me happy is to realize there’s a lot of lost information in the book that’s documented and that people will get to hear about. I mean, yeah, we interviewed the Bongos and Black Flag, and that’s great, but there are literally hundreds of groups in the book that just vanished. Zines and record labels and bands and venues that have all vanished from history, and it’s so sad that our culture works that way, that things that were alive and vital and interesting can, at a certain point, just be wiped away. 

Now we’re putting that information out there in a cogent and coherent form, where people can appreciate it. I hope people will stop and think, “Wow, this existed? How did it exist? Why did it exist? And is there something here that we want to exist now?” I think I spell it out in all the intros, exactly how we did this, and how it all happened, putting it into some kind of context.   

I think the introductions are a vital part of the book, because you set up every issue with information about what was happening at the time, what was on the brink of happening, and so this very immediate, improvised, timely fanzine writing literally becomes part of our history. 

How we did it. Why we did it. It’s important that those ideas exist. It was a time when we all felt that the greater society didn’t care about us and wasn’t going to help, and we persevered. We had something we wanted to do, and we found a different way to get it done. And that leads to the thought, “I can do that too!” Because anyone can.  

So that would be cool for me, if people were inspired by reading this to think, “I always wanted to do this, but no one encouraged me and no one offered a helping hand.” And they can realize they don’t need the helping hand, they can just do it themselves. All you have to do is evaluate your resources, take stock of your skill set, and set about in a reasonable way. 

These zines were printed on pulp, the cheapest paper there is, and it was given away. There was no distribution, we gave it away free. And we put a price on the cover that record stores could keep, which gave them an incentive to carry it. And it’s not like I have this huge trove of these because they didn’t move. I have maybe a couple of copies of each issue left. We had this thing that supposedly nobody cared about, and the whole idea was to give it away get people to read it, and see what happened.

DESCENES AND DISCORDS: An Anthology is available now from DiWulf Publishing (diwulf.com) in a limited edition of 800 copies.         

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Jim Testa

Jim Testa is best known as the editor and publisher of Jersey Beat, for 25 years a DIY fanzine that covered punk, hardcore, and a dozen different flavors of indie rock from 1982 into the dawn of the Internet era. These days, JerseyBeat.com carries that torch while Testa, an award-winning music journalist, also writes regularly for the Jersey Journal and NJ.com, Offshelf.net, NJArts.net, and most recently, NJ Monthly magazine, along with a long list of past by-lines that range from RollingStone, Request, and Guitar World to Maximum Rock N Roll. Testa makes music as well as writes about it, penning witty folk songs inspired by Tom Lehrer, John Prine, and humorist Jean Shepherd, which can be found at jimtesta.bandcamp.com.

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