Ah, 1984: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, “Thriller”, “Ghostbusters”, the debut of Apple’s Macintosh desktop computer. What a time to be into hardcore punk. So much to sneer at, so much to malign. If you were a punk-curious teenager living anywhere betweens Los Angeles and New York chances are you had at least one opportunity to see Black Flag perform in or near your town. As the legend goes, Black Flag’s relentless, grueling, selfless touring schedule in the 80’s is what gave young folks in small(er) towns across the US their first real glimpse at actual punk rock outside of fanzines, album covers and the occasional mention on the news or in movies. Just like so-and-so once noted “the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but blah blah blah started a band”, Black Flag is often credited with influencing nerds and ne’er do wells across the US to pick up instruments and make their own noise in the face of the mediocre rock crap the jocks were blasting out of sports cars in the parking lot of their high schools. The romantic notion of a band like Black Flag, or any other number of touring punk bands, crashing into a small venue in a small town and blowing away every impressionable youth in attendance before packing up and moving on is certainly a great way to imagine what it was like back then. Seeing as I was 8-9 years old in 1984 I can only assume anything anyone from that period says is the truth, whether it’s a passage from “Get In the Van” or an interview with Keith Morris in Vice.
All that said, when you’re digging on the internet for information on a band like Kor-Phu who released one record in 1984 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the fact that there’s so little information available makes you wonder why there’s so little documentation out there, even though, according to one site, Kor-Phu was “the winner of Wolfman Jack’s National Battle of the Bands competition in 1982”. So, I guess when I hear a record like this, see where they’re from, how little info is available and try to put them into perspective musically, I’m just assuming Kor-Phu was one of those bands that heard and/or saw Black Flag and decided “let’s do THAT.”
So, before I weigh in on what I think this record sounds like, let’s examine two reviews of the record, both published when it was released in 1984:
Now, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that in 1984 Andy Horwitz and Al Flipside weren’t exactly on equal grounds when it came to reviewing hardcore records, and that’s fine. I’m not sure what “thrash” meant to Andy but “quasi-hardcore” definitely makes sense in the same way Al does when he mentions the Minutemen. However, “Real dreamy, smooth flowing” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind with Kor-Phu. I agree that “it’s like Greg Ginn guitar” but I’d go even further and say that Kor-Phu sound like they had studied every aspect of the SST catalog up to that point, and settled on combining Rollin’s vocal cadence, Ginn’s guitar leads and some Mike Watt-style E string workouts on a few songs. Aside from a few tracks that feature twangy country-western style breakdowns and carnival music-esque guitar solos, the rest of the sounds on here are almost like SST Records Lego blocks that could be taken apart and reassembled into a sort of bizarro “Cracks In the Sidewalk” Megamix. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way at all. I think these guys wore their influences on their sleeves and if anything they were maybe a little overexcited to show off what they’d learned. I don’t know much about the punk scene in 1984 Albuquerque, New Mexico but I can imagine Kor-Phu’s interpretation of SoCal hardcore might have been plenty of local kids’ introduction to punk rock in general.
Any person taking the time to read this probably already has their own idea of what is or isn’t/was or wasn’t “hardcore” at any point in time and therefore probably gets the picture I’m trying to paint of Kor-Phu’s only record. I’ll be honest; it doesn’t exactly pack the punch of any Black Flag record even at its most extreme and that the bassist and guitarist wasn’t able to keep up with Mike Watt or Greg Ginn isn’t really up for debate. Taken as a document of an under-documented scene, it’s a great listen, and I wholeheartedly agree with Andy Horwitz that it has “excellent cover art” and stands on its own as a hardcore classic if for no other reason than the inclusion of a 9,000 name typewritten “Special Thanx” list full of random celebrities like Richard Nixon, Chuck Taylor and Morris the Cat and ends with an apology to anyone they forgot to include and a blank space for them to fill in their own name. If anyone out there has done or is willing to do the research to figure out who pioneered that classic move, I’d love to hear from you.
