The Jabbers - Insult and Injury

(by Jimmy Reject)

By some strange cosmic coincidence, it was nearly 50 years ago that GG Allin, the now deceased rock star admired and abhorred for the most violent stage act and lewd lyrical content ever, was born to a dysfunctional family in the wilds of northern New Hampshire. It was also 50 years ago almost to the day that Elvis Presley gyrated his hips on stage, creating a catalyst that ignited GG’s heights and depths of rock ’n’ roll subversion.

Between then and now, the tradition has been kept. Sweaty, drunken rock shows have met on those dingy surfaces where the law is bent, reality is skewed and the whole room steals the carte blanche to soar like a rocket ship into the unknown. Since 1977, the sweaty and drunk contingency has matriculated into increasingly smaller rooms, urging with clenched fists that their three-chord heroes jet even faster to nowhere. Known for starting a career that attracted both talk show hosts and FBI agents, GG Allin and the Jabbers were among the first to answer the call.

Brandishing a Stiv Bators/Iggy Pop-ish contempt for the audience, the pre-shit stained GG would hit the stage wearing only fishnet stockings or egg — no pun intended — the crowd to pelt him with an assortment of grocery items that would leave any early Germs show in the dust. On their classic 1980 debut LP, Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be, one can hear streaming punk guitars, blistering leads and harmonies worthy of any pop aficionado’s sweetest dreams. Live, the band provided a muddier derivation of just that, but to some, records are merely promotional tools for the live experience and they exist strictly as a memoir of the time they performed. In their moment they gleam like the sun but before too long, the flame dies out, the band goes on to their respective day jobs and the moths flee to another flame. That’s when the worn vinyl spins through the melancholy chasm of time, oozing its sugary lament; a sonic snapshot saying “You wish you were here.” Until recently, that was the status of the Jabber’s oft-reissued debut album.

The reunited band’s new CD, American Standard, is a worthy follow up to their debut, and please take that as very high praise. While you’ll hear them utter their oft-stated phrase “punk is dead,” the new disc and more specifically the live show, are perfect grist for invective loners brooding by their record collections.

New frontman Wimpy Rutherford and the lads brought forth a rock and roll rave up of rare proportions. Lechery, rage and all-out cathartic fun was what the band provided that night. Whether they’ll admit it or not, the Jabbers are taking the sullen ghost of worn vinyl and setting it free to burst unhindered.

I caught up with guitarist Chris Lamy, bassist Al Chapple, drummer Mike O’Donnell and lead guitarist Harlan Miller at the Abbey Lounge in Somerville prior to their fashionably late CD release party and got a feel for the band’s history and attitude. Of course you can’t interview the Jabbers without wanting to dive head first into questions about GG and what I found out about actually went upstream against his public image.

“All he cared about really was the music,” says Geege’s childhood friend Chapple. “When we were kids he used to say ‘All I want to do is be famous. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about the money.’ He was like Iggy. He wanted to be bigger than Iggy. That was his goal. He, uh, took a wrong turn somewhere a little bit but it wasn’t that far off from the original plans.”

That’s an admission the late GG, so proud of his anti-industry stance, wouldn’t want to let you in on. But the Jabbers, having been so proximate with him, can recount in generalized detail the pain that GG’s pride brought.

“GG acted like he was very proud but he was very hurt,” recalls Lamy. “He kept a bunch of rejection letters. I remember going to his house right after the ‘You Hate Me and I Hate You’ single came out and there was a reject letter from Epic Records and from Elektra Records. MTV rejected the ‘Live Fast, Die Fast’ video and it bugged him. I think that rejection set him on the path toward getting attention any way he could get it, you know.”

Can you imagine the Madman of Manchester crooning to you through the saccharine rays of MTV? Old GG did and his regrets over not competing with the Duran Durans of the world were something he kept guarded until the grave. Otherwise, the Jabbers spoke of GG as an agreeable, hard partying punk rocker who somehow grew to transcend their comprehension.

GG is dead now; the once good looking youth who sang “Girls Are So Unpredictable” with the band now leaves his stench to linger in a resonant miasma. Without him, the Jabbers feel they have reemerged with better peer relations than before and have arrived at a whole new playing field.

“You know, now we’re friends with all the bands,” Lamy states. “There was a lot of competition back then. Hating each other, back stabbing. It’s funny because a lot of the bands we backstabbed then, we’re friends with now. We correspond with Johnny Angel, Monoman. Back then, we all hated each other and now we seem to all be friends.” The band’s new connections have earned them praise for their new CD and a healthy performing schedule.

Given the band’s original tenure mostly happened in the early ’80s, the Jabbers’ comments of competition and back stabbing shed an eerie light on the genesis of Boston hardcore, a scene that in many ways kicked off a time-honored philosophy of cooperation and unity. When I asked the Jabbers about this they illustrated that the scene concept of unity often came with a strict regiment of inferred conformity.

“The problem we had with hardcore was we liked to drink,” Lamy says. “There was this real straight edge type of ... it was like the mentality or the ethic back then. The straight edge unity. We were real outcasts because we’d show up drunk and it would be kind of a hassle to play. We had played with Gang Green and they wanted to shave our heads ... oh no, that was SSD. They were like, ‘C’mon, we’ll skin you guys.’” Kind of makes you want to use your old DYS singles as a Budweiser coaster, eh?

Another thing that’s held back the Jabbers then and now, they feel, is an often faulty reputation they’ve earned and the heat it brings upon them. Lamy provided an astute reproach on the band’s reputation, replete with a cinematic nod.

“The misconception is that every single song has ‘fuck you’ or, you know, whatever,” he says. “Half the songs on this album have no swearing at all. People hear swears when there are none there because there’s kind of this Jabbers mystique that there’s a swear in every song. The Jabbers are like that ear scene from ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ You never see the ear cut off in the film but everybody swears they see the ear get cut off. That’s like us, we play somewhere and the reputation precedes us and there’s bullshit about us playing. You know, the club has to hire extra police or suddenly it’s like ‘We’re not booking them.’”

That kind of reputation can easily bring back another chestnut of the early punk scene: police intervention. “When we play Manchester, [N.H.,] there’s always extra cops there,” moans drummer O’Donnell. “They were there the last four or five times we played. Actually we were the crime of the week. Some kid got beat up in the mosh pit and we were the crime of the week. A week later, a kid gets beat up at a Jabbers show. But now these guys were cops that were on the beat back then, they were captains and everything, so they still remember the name. ‘Oh, the Jabbers? Send a couple of extra cars down there.’”

Although he contends that there were other bands on the bill who could have shared in the blame for the violence, Lamy explains that the heat that comes down earns the band a certain distinction.

“Yeah, the club in Manchester we play is very much like [the now-defunct Boston live venue] The Channel,” Lamy says. “It’s this big concrete room. They tell us, ‘We never have the cops come in and walk around unless you guys are playing.’ I don’t know what they’re looking for; kids are kids. The only difference is that we got the kids with their mothers coming to see us.” “Mothers with their daughters!” Chapple interjects jokingly.

So what is the outlook for the creators of some of the best punk rock music ever? An overview of their comments would indicate that the band has remerged to be dealt a mixed blessing and not the sure fire path to success that so many cleaner, younger bands follow. They’re rediscovering old prejudices as well as the attention and anticipation brought on by themselves and their ambitious first singer. Given such adverse circumstances, one wonders just what keeps the Jabbers going 27 years after they embarked on the thankless task of playing punk and roll?

The answer to this enigmatic question is of course very simple. It’s the same motivating factor that drives every band gracing the pages of this magazine and what drove you to squander cigarette money in the interest of buying a copy. As it is with many others, the heroes for the teenage Jabbers were none other than the progenitors of punk, the Forest Hill Four — the Ramones

“When Kevin and I — GG and I — were in high school we couldn’t get booked at the Top 40 clubs because we were playing Lou Reed and Alice Cooper,” Chapple says. “Then we heard the Ramones for the first time. It was like the switch went off and we didn’t care about the old rock playing anymore. And then there was the Sex Pistols and the Dead Boys. But I think the Ramones were really the catalyst.”

Lamy nods in fervent agreement. “I think for every one of us, it was the first Ramones record that caused us to get rid of every other album in [our] collection,” he says. “I remember my mom driving me downtown to Manchester. I spent my allowance on a Van Halen, or maybe it was an Aerosmith record that came out around the same time as the first Ramones record. I heard the Ramones and I was like ‘Fuck everything else.’ Everything else got tossed.”

Asking Lamy, a long time friend of the Ramones, about the deaths of Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny elicited a much more somber response, one that resonated with innocence lost and impending mortality. “It was really tough. When I heard John was sick I was upset,” he recalls. “John and I were real close friends for a long time so it was not only like Johnny Ramone died but John Cummings as well.

“It just sucked because ... that first record was the reason we all met each other. Essentially that’s why all of us in different parts of the state picked up guitars and drums and started playing. It was like you were in high school and the Ramones were there, you went to junior high and the Ramones were there, you go to college, you graduate, you get a job, a wife and kids and the Ramones are still there, always sounding the same. One day they’re gone and it’s just weird to think they’re not going to be around anymore. I wasn’t joking when I said that punk rock is dead. There is no punk rock anymore. They were true punk, they never sold out.”

But if punk rock is supposed to be cathartic fun the set the Jabbers played mere hours after Lamy spoke those words proved, to me at least, that there are still glowing embers out there just waiting to be ignited.

During the first song Wimpy, an aged warrior in a faded Antiseen T-shirt, bolted into the crowd and punched a few audience members, including me, in the mid section. From there, he screamed the chorus to “Suck My Hard Candy Cock” to a comely blonde nearing the foot of the stage. He occasionally tugged at her black blouse, half caring whether or not he’d glimpse her pale mammaries. He sang “Gimme Some Head” face to face with bemused event host Miss Lynn of “Boston Groupie News.” In between that, the middle-aged punk rocker sang “You Hate Me and I Hate You,” “No Rules” and other teen-rage anthems while stumbling in and out of the crowd. And the kids sang along. A frothing pit of skinheads, the type who would’ve beaten the shit out of GG had it been 1988, tore through the pit screaming their razor slashes of hate into Wimpy’s mic. It was a moment when all that pent-up rage surpassed its insular confines and darted to the sky, erupting in a neutron blast of obnoxious fun.

When the dust cleared, no taboo was left in tact. The angry patrons milled about happily, their boiling wrath now reduced to a content simmer. As the sweat dried on the long ride home, I was cleansed. Old Dee Dee was smiling down from the heights, having not extinguished the flame but having passed the torch. The Jabbers are an original punk band who are not new to snotty, three-chord harmonies or audience abuse. As it was with GG as it is now, this band is a hallmark of authenticity that’s ready to whomp you upside the head.

“We were playing punk before it had a name,” boasts O’Donnell. Let’s hope they keep playing it long after.