It was my punkrocknewwave-crazed baby brother Brian who first made me come forth and see these Bad Brains. This back around 1980, in the halcyon D.C. days when they performed regularly at the legendary 9:30 Club. Brian also made the most incisive comment to date about the ruckus they brought: The most intense moment of any ‘brains show said he is that split second right before they actually start playing.

Like all great bands the ‘brains were lightning rods, heat conductors, charged particles capable of changing the atmosphere in a room simply by being in it. Like The Roots are doing today with hip hop, they brought instrumental prowess, precision and virtuosity to a form of music that could care less about such stuff. Punk rock was all we knew to call it back then before it became in their hands and after their fashion “hardcore.” And punk rock was many things to many people, razor-cut t-shirts, working class rage, exotic English youth rebellion, but before the ‘brains decidedly not a black thing and definitely no hotbed of fleet fingered technicians. Or American born Rastas for that matter. But the ‘brains changed all of that, taking punk rock at its word that here was a socio-cultural moment and movement where race and gender had no bearing on your right to belong and freely express yourself.

The musical architects behind the group had grown up together in an integrated working and middle class suburb of D.C., District Heights, Maryland. Their parents were civil servants, policemen,?//and such Gary Miller aka Dr. Know had played bass in various funk bands, discovered fusion along the way and according to Paul Hudson aka HR aka Joseph I, could play the entire Romantic Warrior album by Chick Corea’s Return to Forever note for note. It was Doc as he’s affectionately know to all who taught bassist Darryl Jenifer his first licks. (His nickname by the way came about because he was two steps away from pursuing a pharmaceutical degree when the ‘brains happened, though it also fit because of what a mastermind and scholar of music he turned out to be). Along with HR and his drummer brother Earl Hudson they were originally a fusion funk hybrid known as Mind Power. A mutual friend, Sid introduced them to The Dead Boys debut and something of an epiphany occurred. One nearly as decisive as the chance sighting of “Tuff Gong” Bob Marley just chilling backstage before a D.C. performance double bill with Stanley Clarke that was to circuitously lead them to Rastafari.

Those who know them can only chuckle at the title Darryl came up with for this compilation because the ‘brains, never a staple of rock radio, composed some of the most enduring, memorable and thunderous riffs in the history of hard guitar music. Riffs characterized by a shifting sense of syncopation more akin to P-funk than the ‘Pistols and a flair for the dramatic pause, for breathtaking uses of stop-time, more common to the bebop of Parker and Gillespie than ever heard before in anybody’s rock and roll. In a word, the ‘brains swung, like rock rarely has been known how to. Once you met them it wasn’t hard to know why, because they were all, to a man, at heart, just some straight up D.C. brothers, good from the ‘hood, and that whole world of jazz, rhythm and blues, blue light in the basement slow grind parties, go-go music and whatnot was their world too. They left it without ever really leaving it behind in terms of camaraderie and rhythmic sensibility. No they just complicated that swang thang a few times over within the context of their chosen artform, its accompanying audience and their own evolving spiritual beliefs. Nowhere is the Afrocentric rhythmic connection made more explicit than in the scatted intro Doc barks out before they go gatecrashing into the piledriving freight train that is “Soulcraft.” Not that the jollystomping funk of “Re-Ignition” doesn’t give it a run for the money. One day somebody needs to make a live concert film that demonstrates how the ‘brains brought African rhythm to the mosh pit because the synchronized swimming and line-dancing that goes on in their pits is without precedent or parallel. The thing about the ‘brains songforms that’s so deep is that when you find yourself whistling their tunes you can not throw in every swerve, curve, jerk snake and shimmy of the line that circumambulates those vocals and lyrics. HR has never really gotten his due as an innovator among rock singers. Granted this isn’t only for the obvious reasons, i.e. race, that might explain the faint praise directed towards every African American rock and roller since Jimi-but because he’s not exactly everybody’s idea of an endearing fellow. Be that as it euphemistically may he has been as indispensable to the creation of these greatest riffs as James Brown was to those concocted by his greatest bands. On most albums he’s credited not for something so wispy as vocals but as THROAT. An instrument in its own right this throat, much as you would say of what emerged from the throats of Ali Fateh Nusrat Khan or Betty Carter or hip hop’s Godfather of Noize, Rahzel. In HR’s case you could hear so much going on at the same time, the opera diva’s lungpower, the holy roller preacher’s stamina and self-righteousness, the soul mans sweet grace notes, the lounge singer’s pomp and sentimentality, an ex-slave’s rage, the Rasta man’s sufferation, the heavy metallurgists tapping of his inner Valkyrie. Without knowing a damn thing about his life off stage you could see and hear that this dude is about one complicated brother and his complexity matched our own, those of us that is who were young black and trying to figure out what it meant to be Black in post Civil Rights America before hip hop provided us with the collective answer. But for those whose identity questions could never simply be answered by joining the hip hop or crossover r&b, or jazz neo-classicist camps, for those who embrace the chaos, confusion and flux of the rainbow, HR and Prince and their later acolytes, Fishbone’s Angelo Moore and Living Colour’s Corey Glover, functioned as heralds, dark angels sent to scream and shout that yes it was possible to be in love with being Black and have mad love for Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten too.

The ‘brains not only influenced their once and future kindred Black rockers with these greatest riffs, but closer to the D.C. homeland, the Minor Threats and Black Flags and Cro-Mags of this world too, not to mention the Metallicas and the Nirvanas and the System of a Downs. They should have been as lavishly promoted and mass marketed as those bands, become likewise household names and such and truth to tell they might have if not for a glitch or two but such fanfare wasn’t in the cards. Yet as is the case with many an African American musical pioneers, I and I out-survived their over-hyped peers, remain creatively atop their game and will still blow any new jack’s butt off the stage if they have to.

They were also able, as this recording makes abundantly evident, to document their genius for present and future listener’s eternal pleasure and for that we all can only praise Jah. - Greg Tate