Premise: Four Iowa punk friends in their early 20s agree to see 100 shows that year, while also dealing with the ins and outs of their own personal lives and the wild world of 1984.
Sorry, no story so far. Working on research. But I'll post writing exercises, research, outlines, and whatnot. You can read my long treatment at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kCeqaT1Ug3zuEgjTeTTCby-1IJcreATvtH5tyAklFVM/edit?usp=sharing. Feel free to comment or make any suggestions.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. *At that time if you saw someone who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.
70s Detroit band, Flirt (Courtesy of Rockee Berlin)
Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): That scene had girls, but they all died. It’s weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.
Hillary Waddles (scenester): There were girls, but we were all people’s girlfriends. It just wasn’t the time for that yet—girls didn’t get in bands; you didn’t get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.
Gloria Branzei (scenester): It was a little dick fest, and they didn’t like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.
Hillary Waddles: Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn’t like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.
Gloria Branzei: It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone’s ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.
Tesco Vee: Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.
Sherrie Feight: Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.
Jon Howard (scenester): There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn’t get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam’s Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of ’81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Rea-sons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.
In 1983, the Seattle band Bam Bam, fronted by a talented, elegant Black woman named Tina Bell, created a sound and lyrical foundation for a genre that white men with knit hats and plaid shirts would later make famous as “grunge.” Bell was backed by husband Tommy Martin and lifelong friend Scott Ledgerwood (“Scotty Buttocks”). Jen B. Larson digs deep into the archives to give Tina Bell, who died in 2012, her props as the uncrowned “Queen of Grunge.”
You probably already know the cultural reproach to some extent, but did you know that before Nirvana, before Alice in Chains, before Stone Temple Pilots, a Black woman fronted (what is likely) the first grunge band? If not, the reason you wouldn’t know that is in no way your fault; the story has been kept off the record and out of print.
Bam Bam – 1983. Photo by John Seth
It is not a coincidence that in rock, R&B, and jazz (to name a few genres), Black women, often uncredited for decades, stand at the helm. In general, in most histories, women’s participation has been disregarded from the get-go or cut from the narrative after-the-fact. Though women have played key roles in musical innovations over time, we tend to notice them in hindsight, and only if dedicated crate-diggers are meticulous in excavating the past.
The motif is especially apparent for Black women.
In 1983, singer Tina Bell contributed foundational material for the earliest incarnations of a genre white men with knit hats and plaid shirts made famous when she co-founded the forgotten post-punk, proto-grunge and sludge metal Seattle band, Bam Bam, with her husband Tommy Martin and lifelong friend Scott Ledgerwood (“Scotty Buttocks”). Bam Bam was christened when Tina Bell and Tommy Martin combined their surnames into an acronym (Bell And Martin). The two had met a few years earlier when Tina answered an ad for a French tutor to help her with the lyrics of “C’est Bon Si” for a production by the Langston Hughes Theater with Mt. Zion Baptist Church. They married, had a son named T.J... and naturally, formed a rock band– the order of events is up for debate.
Bam Bam began as a three-way union among Tommy Martin’s lecherous guitar scales and Scott Ledgerwood’s thunderous bass strokes, both submerged under Tina Bell’s polished delivery of transcendental poetic doom. The documentation of Bam Bam (their recordings, photos, and videos) capture the essence of the band every punk wish existed. The irony is… they did exist, loudly, while everyone looked the other way.
As evidenced in videos captured at the time, her presence as a front person was striking, moving, and energetic. Over email, Scotty told me, “Tina had an inspirational aura about her that was absolutely regal, but without arrogance. Even when she was ‘raging’ on stage, her movement was so fluid and graceful. She had such confidence on stage; I’d feed off her strength. If a crowd didn’t know us or respond well, she’d lead us on with more ferocity!”...
Though a precursor to the grunge movement (and one who outlasted other early bands), Bam Bam, is hardly recognized even by music highbrows or historians. In Catherine Strong’s 2011 essay Grunge, Riot Grrrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture, a critique of the invisibility of women in grunge, Bam Bam are not even named. For context, after several years of exploring women in early punk, I had never come across Bam Bam until my friend (a righteous record collector) recently mentioned them to me. I spent weeks researching Bam Bam and Tina’s legacy (strangely, there isn’t much on the Internet) and talking with her ex-bandmate Scotty, who has archived press for the band on his website.
Turns out, in the ‘80s, Bam Bam performed at big Seattle fests, shared bills with popular bands, created videos that made it to TV, and were twice-honored as Best NW Band by listeners of KCMU/KEXP. Although they were dedicated, fiery, and played to big crowds who loved them, the scene didn’t want to embrace them. There may be more than one answer to this, but more than certainly…
The story of Bam Bam and their fierce front lady Tina Bell has been slighted more than once.
In the book Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge, subjects recollect Bam Bam as a “three-piece,” entirely leaving out Tina Bell. In 2015, a Wikipedia entry on Tina Bell was reported for “a lack of sources” and deleted on Christmas Day...
Bam Bam – Mike Patnode photo
Sadly Tina, who fronted Bam Bam until 1990, died in 2012. So, although she isn’t here to share her memories or feelings, people close to her continue to fight for visibility of her legacy. “Fight for” might even be an understatement. Scotty actually risked his life in 2017 to save Bam Bam’s master recordings from a house fire (a story for another day).
Recognizing social and political motivators for the collective gatekeeping of Tina’s work, he adeptly points to racism and misogyny as probable suspects. “America was certainly fucking not ready for a Black girl up front in a hard band let alone as a media sweetheart no matter how gorgeous she was,” Scotty laments. “As far as Bam Bam being suppressed? There’s probably several reasons, but race and gender clearly played a major role. The continued reluctance by Seattle to accept her is maddening. Part of it is people are uncomfortable around the race issue… it’s like ‘kill the messenger’ when I try to talk to folks about it.”
He says exhaustedly, “So yeah I’m pissed and puzzled by it all.”
What confuses me most is: Not to mention Tina’s talent and beauty, how can anyone miss the significance of a Black woman fronting a hard rock band in the ‘80s?
In a 2012 article in The Stranger, Jen Graves writes, “Bam Bam struggled, in part because audiences weren’t on board with an African American female punk singer. ‘The press compared her to Tina Turner, as if that made any sense,’ Tommy (Bell’s husband) says.”
Nearly 40 years have gone by and neither the talented band nor their one-of-a-kind frontwoman Tina Bell have garnered the respect they deserve–even in retrospect by important figures in their own city– for their role as early architects of grunge. After recognizing the injustice, to me, the verdict is quite clear: Tina Bell, the brilliant frontwoman, stunning vocalist, lyricist, and performer, is overdue for her crown. In order to get the facts straight, music historians must honor her, posthumously, for a title she more than rightfully earned.
It’s more than time to crown Tina the Queen of Grunge, and not as a woke PR move, but because it’s the Truth.
