We Never Learn is the story of what happened to fun time rock n’ roll in the 1980s, when punk went hard and arty but some bands just wanted to raise a little hell and play sloppy and fast. It’s written by Eric Davidson, of New Bomb Turks fame, and takes the form of interviews, oral history, personal recollections with a smattering of ‘zine covers, show flyers, photographs and perhaps most impressively, a soundtrack.
What Eric Davidson is doing is trying to give a succinct history of the modern garage rock and garage punk movements, collecting them under the genre heading of “Gunk Punk” which is as good a term as any for the messy, sloppy (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) fun time, fuck you school of post-serious punk that rose up in the wake of hardcore.
What a lot of the bands have in common is a love of unearthed 50s and 60s trash culture, whether it was the music unearthed in the quintessential nostalgia compilation Nuggets or in the later Back From the Grave series, car culture, bad sci-fi and horror movies and a burning desire to make some music that tears up the sidewalk as it roars past.
A lot of the book is weighted towards stuff like Crypt Records and Cleveland orbits grabbing interviews and reminisces from both, while passing on some things which I would have though interesting to have addressed, such as other acts in different genres pulling from the same backgrounds and musical influences to make different, but similar music (for example, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s Hit and Run Holiday or even psychobilly).
Eric’s use of language is strained at times, but how many times can you type “lo-fi” without going mad, so it’s here where it really became problematic for me. Gunk-Fi, Nix-Fi, Nil-Fi, and on and on. Aside from this grating example his vocabulary and ear for phrasing worked quite well, finding almost as many ways to describe the bands as there were bands to describe.
A lot of the stories seem to follow the same rhythms. New band, hella touring, little album sales, lots of drinking, lots of drugging, total breakdown in relationships of the band, break up. Wash, Rinse, Repeat across a few hundred pages. It’s like the “hundred words for snow.”
Stand out interviews are Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves, all the various Mick Collins stories, Teengenerates, Jon Spencer across his various bands and the history of The Gibson Brothers. A lot of the band histories make it seem like something was in the water, as bands would form the next town over without any knowledge of the others in a scene, but the interconnected nature of “the scene” is also explored; how bands, and zines influenced bands and zines.
What was really helpful was the included soundtrack. The book comes with a download coupon for 20 MP3 files ranging from live show recordings to studio recordings and everything in between. It’s quite impressive as it aims to help people who’ve never heard of these bands get a handle on what the music was like at its most desperate hungry and dangerous.