Originally published in LA Weekly, September 5, 1986

You could say this is the darkest Dark Age the music world has seen yet, what with commercial radio more dead than death itself and so-called underground rock ‘n’ roll in a stupefying heavy metal gridlock. Still, there exists on this comatose body the single working muscle that is SST Records, an independent company totally committed to passionate, fashionless music. Responsible for the now-historical albums of Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets, and Saccharine Trust, SST is the sole American independent record company that has uncompromisingly given less than a rat’s butt about the rock press and commercial radio.

Funny to call this SST thing a “company” when it operates from a couple of small rooms on a quiet street in Hawthorne—far enough removed from Hollywood’s pathetic fame-and-fortune ethic to know better, and just close enough to sound off loud and clear. SST was originally the moniker for a ham-radio business run by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, who paid for and printed up Flag’s first single with his own pocket cash. Today, SST employs eight people, distributes worldwide, and handles about 18 active bands and 87 records, as well as books of poetry, t-shirts, stickers, skateboards, posters, and a phone hotline. The company receives trash cans full of band demo tapes and mail orders, and circulates a video of the ecstatically third-rate film Lovedolls Superstar (which features many SST artists in spastic Super-8). College radio stations and the rock press alike support the smoother of the SST offerings. In every sense of the concept, the independent, grassroots, homemade rock ‘n’ roll mountain has been climbed and conquered. Even though SST has moved from the soily to the sophisticated, it has rocked the world simply because it will not control the material its bands produce.

“We’re really more of a service to bands we like,” explains regional press and retail operator Spaceman. “A major label will let a band screw around for a record or two, but eventually they make designs for you to get down to business. We’re only here to put the music out, not to tell the bands, ‘Well, we could sell another 5,000 copies if…’”

And what kind of bands would an institution as renegade and self-sufficient as SST like? Spaceman continues: “We feel anyone can be marketed, but the music criterion is that they not be like anybody else, which means we usually take bands that don’t get touched.”

Despite the seemingly unbustable music industry systems, the SST Attack (as they dub it) has actually paid off. Bands that were critically degraded and downright ignored on radio five years ago (check Minutemen, Hüsker Dü) now grace critics’ Top Fives across the nation. Chuck Dukowski, who has not only played for SST bands Black Flag, Oktobergaction, and currently SWA, but also involves himself daily in company productions and runs SST’s sister booking company, Global, warns that the process doesn’t take months, it takes years. “The nature of things is that people are afraid to put themselves behind anything… let alone tunes. If you can smash everybody in the heads with it, some of it hopefully will stick. I have faith in people who are into music. If you stuff something good into the system just a little, it’ll spread.”

Chuck’s dedication is not just phonetics. He spent time in the slammer for releasing, in defiance of a court injunction, Black Flag’s Damaged LP in 1981. He hustled for SST when payback wasn’t even a figment of anyone’s imagination. He’s been on television with Barbara Walters, rapping about punk rock. Currently, he’s making designs for a live-music TV show (tentatively titled At Your House) with Lovedolls producer and Global booking exec Jordan Schwarz.

In recalling his days as the manager of the American Classic Billiards pool table company, he adds, “If I had thought years ago, when I was more principally a consumer, that I would have a chance to be partially responsible for putting out that much good music, I would have been surprised. Nobody was doing what I wanted to hear. I know a lot of people join bands to see if the band will work with an audience, and if it doesn’t, they find a new band. That seems backwards to me. The thing you’re after is expressing yourself. And that’s what an audience wants. It’s backwards to start with the audience to decide what the band expresses.”