Scream hailed from Bailey’s Crossroads, VA, a rural no-horse town built around the intersection of Columbia Pike and Virginia’s Route 7. The area owes its name to the fact that P.T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, proprietors of a circus they grandly billed as The Greatest Show on Earth, parked up their menagerie in the area in the off-season. Pete Stahl remembers his hometown as ‘very Southern, very rural and somewhat segregated … Norman Rockwellish in a way’: many of Stahl’s contemporaries on the DC punk scene simply use the epithet ‘redneck’ to describe the area and its residents.
Like Dave Grohl, the Stahl brothers had music in their bloodline: Arnold Stahl, their lawyer father, managed a popular rock ’n’ roll group called The Hangmen who were the toast of Georgetown society parties in the mid-sixties. In February 1966 the band’s ‘What a Girl Can’t Do’ single knocked The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ from the top of the Virginia/Maryland/DC pop charts: that same month the Stahl kids got their first glimpse of rock ’n’ roll’s capacity to incite mayhem when local police were summoned to shut down The Hangmen’s in-store performance at the Giant Record Shop in Falls Church after 2,000 screaming teenagers laid siege to the store. Franz Stahl bought his first guitar from the same shop ten years later.
Scream formed in 1979, though their story truly begins in 1977, when 15-year-old Franz first started jamming on Hendrix, Skynyrd, Kiss and Funkadelic covers in local garages with two J.E.B. Stuart High School classmates, drummer Kent Stax and bassist Skeeter Thompson. Soon enough, the teenagers were turned on to garage rock and punk via two cult radio programmes, WAMU’s Rock ’n’ Roll Jukebox and Steve Lorber’s WHFS show Mystic Eyes; stomping standards by The Seeds, The Sonics and The Kingsmen were then added to their repertoire. The group were still searching for a sound and direction of their own when they first stumbled upon Washington DC’s nascent hardcore scene. Upon seeing Bad Brains lay waste to the capital’s basement dives, the scales fell from their eyes: in the rasta-punks’ searing electrical storms Scream saw rock ’n’ roll’s future. To Pete Stahl, H.R.’s crew were nothing less than ‘the greatest fucking band in the world’.
‘The first time I saw them [Bad Brains] was at a Madam’s Organ show and it scared the hell out of me!’ he told maximumrocknroll in May 1983. ‘I’d never seen a band like that. I just walked in and Doc, Darryl and Earl were just kind of back against the wall, and it was real crowded and dark, and all of a sudden H.R. just busted through the back of the crowd. It was just an intense feeling, just the tension and excitement, and as H.R. exploded through the crowd they exploded into their song! It just blew me away.’
Skeeter Thompson was equally mesmerised. Previously, the bassist had considered that he was the only black kid in the nation in thrall to punk rock: witnessing Bad Brains’ righteous ferocity at close quarters was revelatory.
‘One day Pete came over and said you’ve got to see this band,’ recalled Thompson. ‘When I first saw them it was just like, “Man, I want to do that!” So much power!’
Scream’s earliest performances took place at keg parties – or ‘beer blasts’ – in the basement of the house the Stahl brothers shared in Falls Church. Shows at Scream House, as the property was soon known locally, were spectacularly messy affairs. Starved of entertainment options in rural Virginia, every hesher, jock, pot-head and freak within a ten-mile radius would turn up on their porch on party nights. The Stahls’ basement floor would be awash with blood, sweat and beers long before the night’s ‘official’ entertainment was scheduled to begin. Inspired by Pete Stahl’s memories of his first Bad Brains show, Scream gigs always started with a violent explosion of energy: Stahl would crash through the tightly packed crowd like a raging bull, shunting beers and bodies to the four walls, and the band would kick in with concussive levels of volume. The room would duly erupt in a flurry of fists, elbows, swear words and screams. It was not uncommon for these shows to end amid squealing sirens and baton charges, as the Fairfax County police department piled in mob-handed to break up brawls.
‘It was insanity,’ laughs Franz Stahl. ‘Kids didn’t know what the hell to make of us. They were used to listening to Zeppelin or Foghat or the Allman Brothers, and what we were playing just freaked them out, it would put everybody on edge. It would get completely out of hand.’
‘Our music really pissed off a lot of the jocks and rednecks,’ agrees his elder brother. ‘It was pretty wild. At the start people either laughed at us or wanted to kill us. But soon they started to get into it, attracted by the energy of what we were doing.’
Hardcore’s bush telegraph soon carried reports of Scream’s chaotic basement parties to Dischord House. Before long, Ian MacKaye and his friends stopped by Falls Church to scope out the scene. Their presence incensed territorial local jocks, and a confrontation ensued. Recognising the DC crew as kindred spirits, the Scream team backed up their punk brethren. Predictably, fists were soon flying. When order was restored, the bloodied but unbowed Dischord and Scream House crews forged an immediate alliance, and MacKaye pledged to find his new friends slots on hardcore shows in the city. The curtain dropped on Scream House’s infamous parties soon afterwards: ‘We couldn’t afford the cleaning bills any more!’ Franz Stahl laughs.
Despite MacKaye’s endorsement, usually taken as gospel within the Dischord family, the DC punk community didn’t immediately embrace Scream. In a scene notionally populated by the marginalised and disenfranchised, they were genuine outcasts, a racially mixed, blue-collar rock band wholly uninterested in kowtowing to codified musical, philosophical or sartorial scene norms. This nonconformist mindset caused confusion and hostility: to Capitol Punishment fanzine Scream were simply ‘a bunch of jocks trying to be punk’.
The quartet’s début show in DC could hardly have been more disastrous. Booked alongside Bad Brains and Minor Threat on a fifteen-band bill at the Wilson Center on 4 April 1981, the Stahl brothers, Thompson and Stax found themselves playing to an empty room when their potential audience walked out of the room en masse as the opening chords of their set rang out. Further humiliation was to follow at a 9 May show with Minor Threat, S.O.A., Youth Brigade and D.O.A. Again, the band had barely set foot on the stage of H-B Woodlawn High School when the audience melted away. To lose one crowd may have been regarded as misfortune, to lose both was a genuine kick in the teeth for the young Virginians. But for encouraging words from scene elders Ian MacKaye and Jello Biafra (in town with D.O.A.) Scream may have abandoned punk rock at that very moment.
‘We were feeling pretty down,’ remembers Pete Stahl, ‘because we wanted to be in that scene: we identified with it and dug those bands and felt this was our natural home. So to have everyone diss us like that was pretty harsh. But Jello came up to me after we finished playing and said, “You guys are great, don’t worry about what happened.” He gave me his address and told me to send him a demo. That was a really sweet thing to do and it meant a lot.’
‘Having people turn their backs and walk out was fairly typical of the DC scene early on,’ admits Franz Stahl. ‘But them snubbing their noses at us initially just gave us that much more of a drive to smoke these guys every time we played.’
‘The first time Scream played nobody cared because they were better than all of us!’ says Brian Baker, then playing in Minor Threat. ‘They were a fantastic band, with fantastic musicians and great songs. There wasn’t really a backlash against them, but trepidation was raised from the minute they started to play. Initially people thought they weren’t cool because they had moustaches and they didn’t wear the “approved” regalia and they lived twenty miles away … and twenty miles in teenage terms is hours away. But then the moustaches disappeared, and someone bleached their hair and someone else bought a leather jacket and suddenly it was, “Hey! Now they’re one of us! Come on in!” After that they were revered by all of the Dischord people.’
In January 1983 Scream’s Still Screaming album became the first full-length release on Dischord. Produced by the band, Ian MacKaye, Eddie Janney and Don Zientara at Inner Ear, three decades on it stands up as a thrillingly urgent, impassioned and powerful collection, mixing up scratchy, Gang of Four-influenced punk-funk (‘Hygiene’),