I don't remember much about this show. It was a week night. There was hardly anyone there. Legal Weapon were a great LA band, a punk rawk band from LA, good, gritty street-wise, tough rock'n'roll. They had two albums out that were really poorly distributed and no one knew much about them. Singer Kat Arthur was really sweet; I vaguelly remember talking to her after the show. No doubt I was drunk as could be. I never heard much about 'em after I moved to LA either; I think these were their last days. Hardcore was in its ascendency and there just didn't seem to be much room for this slower, rockin' sound.

These mystery shots were taken on the same night as the Crotch Rot shots, at the Ritz. Behind the bands is a huge banner that has Dicks, Jodie Foster's Army, Die Kreuzen & Power Thru Disipline written on it. Unless that banner was left up from the night before, I'm gonna guess that it's the bands playing that night. So I'm thinkin' that Power Thru Discipline (who I vaguely recall as being an Austin hardcore band) is the shot with the singer in the Circle One t-shirt, and maybe the other two (skinny singer w/ mohawk & guitarist) are Die Kreuzen? Or maybe not.

Richard "Crowbar" Mathers & Jim Straightedge had some sort of musical thing going. It wasn't actually a band, I don't think. Just some kinda thing. I sorta remember being not very blown away by it, which was a drag 'cause I really liked them both and wanted to like their whatever-it-was thing. I have a whole gang of really strange pictures I took of them in my back yard that we were gonna use in Cretin Bull or Wrestler Digest or whatever fanzine I was working on at the moment.

Power Thru Discipline is a great example of the sort of militaristic/fascist sounding names that hardcore bands were all starting to take. The straightedge bands were the worst offenders when it came to that sort of thing. That sorta militaristic/jock/boys club mentality originated with the South Bay & O.C. bands (like Black Flag) that more or less defined the hardcore sound, and in many ways that rules-and-regulations punk was antithetical to the no-rules anarchy of the scene it replaced. It stopped making any sense to me, and the testosterone levels were way too high for my tastes. There were no girls. Chicks went goth. I remember working with an Orange County straight edge band who became really popular, called Uniform Choice. I was never sure if the oxymoron irony of their name was intentional. I kinda doubt it. I really don't think they had any clue about what they were saying. The singer was a super rich kid going to Pepperdine University in Malibu where he played on the baseball team. The drummer was a super rich kid who was studying at USC. They both drove monster trucks, had cute girlfriends and were flush with trust fund money. I could never understand what exactly it was they were protesting against. Were they angry because they were too rich? Were they angry because their favorite sports teams lost? I have no doubt they all vote Republican now.

Nigheist was the opening band on an SST Records night at the Skyline Club that also featuring Meat Puppets and Black Flag. Black Flag roadie Mugger is the singer. He was obviously very influenced by Madonna, which is never a good thing. Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler (in Harper Marx wig) plays bass. I don't remember very much about them, except that they sucked, an assessment to which there seems no dissent amongst those of us who remember that show (or the ones that directly preceded or followed in Dallas and Houston). SST was Black Flag guitarist/leader Greg Ginn's label, run out of a garage in Lawndale. Lawndale is a blue collar South Bay suburb of LA, and I remember being thrilled when I went there and discovered that some time in the 70s Lawndale decided that lawns were too expensive and all public lawns had been replaced with astro-turf, which, by the mid 80s, was totally worn out and thread bare. You could easily see how a town called Lawndale that was carpeted in worn out astro turf could give birth to a lot of really bad heavy metal and how all that really bad heavy metal could wind up on SST. It's easy to figure out why Nigheist came to exist. That still didn't make them any good.