When Hokus Pokus was reissued on DVD by H-Street a couple of years ago you could find a ton of reviews and testimonials from fans who said that the video was one of the most important things that happened to them. Not just skaters but kids with video cameras too, who got the best-yet example of the potential of D.I.Y. filming. The whole thing has this camcorder-and-three-best-friends feeling; it's super homemade (legendarily, it was edited in a living room) but that aesthetic speaks a lot better to skateboarding culture than some multi-cam ESPN edit. Also the music was maybe the best ever.
My sophomore year of highschool we figured out that VCRs had audio outputs and we connected up our parents' decks, fed our walkmans endless hissy tapes of bands we'd never heard of, assuming we could even figure out which band was which. I swear I listened to "Dollar on A Platter" every day for months but only recently found out who it was by (Wheezing Maniac). It didn't really matter, we ignored the crash-whoosh of railslides and hard crashes (and Danny Way yelling "yeah man!"), flipped out over anonymous songs, and never once felt weird that a lot of this super-energetic punk was also depressed and hurt.
The real killer was "A Lot Less" by Sub Society, from the Matt Hensley session. I was fifteen years old and could not have been more heartsick or desperate if I tried. Sometimes I felt tough and I rocked Black Flag ("There's no girl that wants to touch me, I don't need, I don't need your fucking sympathy") but most times it was miserable and cowardly: Jawbreaker ("too scared to say a thing") or Green Day ("I wish I could tell you..."). "A Lot Less" cut through all of that.
The singer's gruff, worn voice seems so spent, so tired of dwelling on this girl. In retrospect it's crazy to think that the teenagers who made the song were only a couple of years older than I was when I first heard it, he just sounds so beat. Even with all this weight on him, he still maintains this melody, like he has to keep up with the band. The guitar and bass are locked in this classic west coast way, there's a propulsion to it that's completely irresistable, the same way the bay area bands could make songs that were so mopey and explosive at the same time.
On the east coast I feel like bands had a harder time with that split, like for them it was either winter or summer. But in California it seemed natural to get all fired up and heartachey at the same time, and 3000 miles away it really resonated for us. There's a preserverence, a relentlessness to the song that is probably the most important sense a song could impart to a person caught in that agony.
The DVD reissue of Hokus Pokus started a lot of conversations about those old songs, and "A Lot Less" became a pretty intense obsession for a second, we all wanted to hear it a) for nostalgia and b) because there still are times when I feel like I should think a whole lot less. Anyway, the amazing thing is that Hesh One from Sub Society set up a website where you can download their entire discography, complete with cover art to print out and assemble for FREE. Most of this stuff I've never heard, it seems like everyone had the "Relaxin'" 7" but the rest of it? Total freak-out panic excitement.
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