Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

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.

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