It was the Fall of 1994 and I thought I was a punk rocker. Kurt Cobain had killed himself a few months prior and I’d just abandoned the desert wastes of my adolescence for U.C. Berkeley. The cornucopia of psychotropic possibilities was just opening to me when I noticed a used CD by a band called the Cherubs. The cover featured a man floating face down in a bath tub and was emblazoned with the words "Heroin Man." The unrepentant mean-spirited intelligence of this image spoke to me, so I shelled out six bucks for the CD.
This record changed my life.
From the first split second of "Stag Party," in which a piercing phone-off-the-hook signal anticipates the lurching violence of an incomprehensibly blown-out avalanche of guitar, bass and drums, I was in love. When the temper-tantrum vocals at the start of "Mr. Goy" artfully implied a depravity without measure before the most raucous six-eight hook of all time made me want to kick in windows, I became obsessed. By the time the lumbering behemoth bummer of "Example Maiden Japan" redefined my conception of psychedelia, I was a faithful acolyte, prepared to hold my new god against anything the veteran punks of Telegraph Avenue were willing to volunteer as masochistic trip fodder, from Neurosis to The Crucifucks. This was heavier than metal. This was more visceral than punk. This was broken rock.
It took five years of school and ten years of steady employment to wake me from the fever dream that started in 1994. I missed Brit pop and nu-metal, as well as revivals of garage rock, post-punk and retro-metal.
Whatever -- fuck all that shit. Broken rock forever.
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