FOR ALL OF ITS epic, crushing, bona fide genre definition, Bad Brains is currently adrift in punk rock's Bermuda Triangle. A band that hasn't (yet, anyway) been Joy Divisioned or Gang of Foured into modern pop consciousness, they're a buncha failed, fried, burnt-out dudes who did a lot of... really... something... things... stuff... that nobody seems to remember. The band's leader, HR, plays solo these days and Bad Brains—in its truest incarnation—is long dead. So in the name of keeping good things alive—let's run through a quick history of Bad Brains.
Before Bad Brains blew the living shit out of the early '80s DC punk scene, they began as a concept. Guitarist Dr. Know (Gary Miller), inspired by English punk's hard-on for reggae, enlisted singer HR, bassist Darryl Aaron Jenifer, and drummer Earl Hudson to do the same thing in the US. But they weren't pimply, scrawny, social-class-obsessed white kids; they were black dudes—vicious, smart, tough, pissed off Rastas, ever bending under the strain of Reagan's BS. As a result, their sound came out harder, faster, more violent—thrashed up by hardcore, cooled down by reggae. It was anachronistic, and it was intense. The Bad Brains that I'm speaking of here only existed for a very short time, during which they became one of DC's most popular punk bands, released a self-titled cassette-only debut and the great "Pay to Cum" single in 1982, and then signed with PVC that next year. The output from that brief era was half brass knuckling hardcore, half dark, dubbed-out reggae, and when they swung between genres it seemed natural and confident.
After that, the fire was all but snuffed. Between 1983 and 1986 they became more and more metal-influenced and lost a lot of their original fans. Soon the band was divided; Miller and Jenifer wanted to do metal and HR and Hudson were moving deeper into reggae. A gash torn down the middle of the lineup, HR and Hudson left the band in 1989 and were replaced by Israel Joseph-I and Mackie Jayson. Still, the new lineup continued on, signed a major label deal in 1993 with Epic, and were dropped when the horrible Rise tanked. In 1995, Maverick records offered to sign Bad Brains if they went back to their original lineup, and they did, but it was never the same. Like any band based on youth, energy, and social/political dissatisfaction, they were more a moment in time than a functioning organizational structure. Over the next few years, HR and Hudson quit again, went back to the band in 1998, and changed the name to the retardly hippie-ish Soul Brains.
HR is still making music—sort of. His last official release was Out of Bounds, which came out five years ago, and was recorded back in 1990. It's dub reggae, moody and echoey and a fine example of the genre. But besides that, and a handful of largely ignored solo records, you won't find much new about the man or his on-again, off-again—but still fucking legendary—band.