Back to the Grindcore

Justin Pearson knows that people like to talk shit—be it audience hecklers or Internet rumormongers. And while pushing the boundaries of punk and hardcore for nearly two decades, he’s gotten his share of pushback. “So, here I am,” Pearson writes, as if ready to accept his critics’ taunts, “a slut, a cokehead, a faggot and somehow a rock star.”

But that skewed perception of Pearson isn’t what emerges from his revealing new memoir, From The Graveyard Of The Arousal Industry. Instead of bragging about scenester groupies, Pearson writes how non-stop touring affects loving relationships. His band, The Locust, may have produced 10,000 “coke mirrors,” but he’s never touched the stuff. The homophobic taunts—whether from skinheads or suburban jocks—started as a kid, long before kissing a male friend on The Jerry Springer Show.

And the rock star label? Pearson’s no Russell Brand character, throwing TVs out the window of the Chateau Marmont. Still, even within a subculture opposed to rock star posturing, there are a handful of musicians, like Pearson, who achieve a kind of celebrity status. Since the early 1990s, Pearson’s played in a half-dozen notable bands—Some Girls, Swing Kids, Crimson Curse, Holy Molar, All Leather, Struggle—was involved in the experimental San Diego hardcore scene that also spawned genre-busting bands like Heroin and Antioch Arrow, and ran independent label Three One G. (Pearson named the label after Joy Division’s “Warsaw,” and later did a supercharged cover of the song with Swing Kids.)

Several of Pearson’s bands took a more avant-garde route than your run-of-the-mill hardcore band—think: chugga chugga riffs, sing-a-long lyrics and a breakdown—thus playing with a variety of bands, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bratmobile and At the Drive-In. In addition, The Locust got cast in a Toxic Avenger movie filmed at the Playboy Mansion while collaborating with director John Waters. There was also the legendary Springer scam, where Pearson and friends concocted a sordid punk rock love triangle that the producers and audience ate up.   

But even with success, Pearson hasn’t strayed far from the kill-your-idols, DIY ethos of breaking down the wall between performer and audience, with shows by The Locust—the band I got to see the most, beginning in the late ’90s—rising, at times, to cathartic experiences full of bizarre costumes and flailing bodies. Perhaps only at a Locust show could a song called “Moth-Eaten Deer Head”—a minute-long rush of crushing guitars, screaming and demented circus music synthesizer—get people on the floor.  

So where did all that emotion and rage come from? Well, it started in “Shit Creek Phoenix, AZ,” where Pearson’s father, an incorrigible drunk, was beaten to death with a crowbar outside his childhood home. Things didn’t get easier after moving with his mother to San Diego, where she took on an abusive boyfriend.  But Pearson channeled that aggression into music, releasing the first Struggle record when he was just 15, and starting Swing Kids not long after. Although now considered a seminal band, the self-deprecating Pearson repeatedly calls Swing Kids “unoriginal.”  (The band gets its due in a chapter from last year’s comprehensive oral history of ’90s DIY hardcore, Burning Fight.)

While Pearson is open about the deaths of his father and a former bandmate, he doesn’t give in to extraneous detail. As for other relationships, his brief marriage to “Bricks”—the alias she’s given for initially hitting him “like a ton of bricks”—lasts just seven pages. Other chapters are just a page or two. And yet, Pearson proves with writing, as in his music, the ability to express brutal truths in short and sometimes messy bursts.

>> From The Graveyard of the Arousal Industry by Justin Pearson. Soft Skull Press, 208 pages, $14.95.