VOID: Hardcore with Flavor

The year was 1982 and I was a freshman at an all boys Catholic high school near the heart of downtown Wheaton, MD, a somewhat irrelevant little suburb of Washington, D.C. Neither the town nor the school were exactly the pride of the metro area, but it was in Montgomery County, one of the wealthiest counties in the country and your parents had to pay for you to go there. I had already been heavily into skateboarding and BMX for years by then and my musical tastes had ranged from funk to metal, but mostly I was into what is now called classic rock, although I was branching out. I had a couple of Devo records and I liked the Ramones. I was fourteen years old and on a collision course with hardcore punk rock and didn't even know it.

At our school, you had to dress like a yuppie square, so everyone generally wore the standard attire, dress shirt, tie, no jeans, no athletic shoes. This made it just that more difficult as a freshman to tell who was who. I had spent the last few years in Montgomery County public schools where kids could basically dress however they wanted. Private school was a completely different place. The teachers, some of whom were referred to as "brothers" would get up in your business. They would get physical if they were so inclined. It was a weird and sometimes overly aggressive male environment. All boys, jacked up on fresh testosterone and basically just being dickheads at that clueless stage of life. Only, instead of fighting in school, if two kids had a beef with each other and word got out, everyone would go down to the Wheaton Library at 3:15 and watch them brawl right in the front lawn. It all seemed so organized and weird.

One day, in class, I noticed some kid sneaking a read of Bob Haro's Freestyle BMX book during a boring lecture. I was jonzing to see all of the newest maneuvers and the latest freestyle mini ramp plans, but I hardly knew the kid. Being the pest that I can be, I had to at least ask. He reluctantly agreed and passed it to me under the desk top. Some time after that day I came across this same kid sitting on the bench outside of the school waiting for a ride listening to a walkman. I sat next to him and all I could hear was this blasting fast paced music blaring into his headphones. I looked at his cassette in the deck and the tape inside read in bold capital letters, "FLEX YOUR HEAD". Being the same curious asshole that I was the week before, when the music stopped I had to ask, "Dude just let me hear one song." He put the headphones over my head and on came the most raw rock music I had ever heard. That is the first time I ever heard Void. Never before had I heard such organized chaos, and at the age of fourteen I was already overdue. Oh, and that nameless kid who BMXed and revealed DC hardcore music to me was none other than the now notorious punk music writer, Chest Pains singer and local Chapel Hill maniac Greg Barbera, aka: Greg E. Boy.

So I went out and purchased a copy of the classic DC punk sampler at Records Yesterday and Today in lovely Rockville, MD and I listened to it over and over for months. My absolute favorite tracks still to this day are the ones by Void, a band that at the time captured the pure essence of thrash punk with the most mind blowing guitar sounds I had ever heard before. This was the kind of music we started listening to at the ramps where I was beginning to spend almost all of my spare time. It just made you skate better listening to it. Back then, we had to build the ramps deep in the woods and steal all of the materials to do it. Blasting Void on the box at the ramp became a regular ritual for the suburban punk skaters in the metro area. I'll never forget some of the furious skate sessions with Void's epic split EP with The Faith screaming in the background. It remains as one of my favorite records of all time, the Void side anyway.



The record begins with a humming feedback that soon stops abruptly and gives way to a guitar intro that brings back memories of the Guess Who. Suddenly, you're slammed face first into a manic attack on your senses. Its the kind of music that makes you want to smash something with a smile on your face and then drop in on the ramp and do a frontside lapover grind while giving your friends on the platform the finger just for fun. The second track Time To Die will blast you into a backside air, and on from there the songs just continue to shred and they are actually great songs. Listen to the track Organized Sports with the gang chorus from outer space for a real eye opener. Guitarist Bubba Dupree may have been the only true master of punk rock guitar feedback that I can recall. His style and rhythm stand out on these old Void tracks. Singer John Wieffenbach was a rabid punk singer who sang every song like he meant it. The track Think will rattle any unsuspecting listener into a frenzy, and what about those lyrics... "When young pianist builder Kimberly as Iris, exacting Moran as will diversified present, and her area senior as recital popular as June 26 swells and gets Orchard Lake Avenue in America..." It goes on and really does make you think. Holy shit these guys rocked. They were onto something.

Anyway, as far as I know Void broke up in like '84, and two years later when I went to Maryland, I found out that Wieffenbach had lived in my dorm before me. This geeky kid named Doc on the third floor of Cecil Hall on South Hill used to weave tales of "The Mighty Weef" and proclaimed that there would never be another singer like him ever again. Doc was one of those kids who never moved out of the dorms until he graduated. He always wore a white lab coat and combat boots. He was a wacko dude, and I think now that he was right all along. He used to hang out with Weef and he naturally was a huge Void fan. I never saw him after my first semester when I moved out of the dorms.

Bigger hardcore punk bands emerged in the mid eighties and thrash ended up turning into speed metal, and then it all started to sound the same to me. Speed for the sake of speed. I guess thats part of the whole deterioration of that scene during that time. But now, looking back and giving Void another listen you begin to realize that they had a flavor all their own. Still to this day, when I hear their music I get amped.

check:
http://www.punkrecords.org Void Demo Download

http://www.dementlieu.com/~obik/arc/dc/void_tg22.html Void Interview