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SHIPPING NOVEMBER 2024
San Francisco Punk’s stillborn 1979 masterpiece is about to be mid-wived and you’re invited to the violently beautiful procedure. The often misunderstood 1979 Pop Session recording has been historically misattributed to NEGATIVE TREND, the band originally fronted by ROZZ REZABEK, in its only available bootleg form, but one thing that’s for certain, these nine blood-boiling studio recordings are set to change the historical context going forward. It’s truly that heavy, that powerful, that intimidating, and somehow still unknown. Dangerously simmering in the pre-hardcore sweet spot of 1979, this collection of speed-soaked brain-frying tracks is inexplicably stuck in the blind spot for most first wave West Coast punk fanatics, until now. Featuring Bobby Barrage on drums (pre-No Alternative) and the ironically named Dave Basic on guitar, Rozz’s Negative Trendisms are still firing on all cylinders through some of the most cranium-exploding vocals ever set to tape. The purely aneurismic vocal delivery on tracks like “I Don’t Wanna Be a Machine” and “Never Say Die” are going to be used specifically to medically resuscitate dying punk people in the near future so you might wanna just get that ready, y’know?
check out an excerpt from the Oregon Live newspaper interview with Rozz in 2024:
“The audience’s reaction would only become more extreme as Negative Trend’s reputation grew.
One night, someone poured lighter fluid on Rezabek and then pulled out a BIC. In the moment, the
singer didn’t realize how close he came to being set aflame.
“I knew my eyes were stinging but I didn’t know what it was,” he recalled.
He continued jumping around the stage, scream-singing, while a friend threw cups of water at his
face to wash out his eyes. Rezabek’s vision cleared enough for him to see his attacker being
“dragged away. He got kick-stomped by everybody in the audience. Beaten to an absolute pulp.
I don’t even know if he lived.”
Negative Trend was so notorious around the Bay Area – “We were anti-everything,” Rezabek said –
that a wannabe domestic terror group, modeled on the one that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, started
using the band’s shows as a recruiting ground. The balaclava-wearing radicals handed out Xeroxed
“induction notices” that informed recipients they had to join up or become “target practice.”
One night they invited Rezabek to come along on a car-bombing mission.
“They scared me,” Rezabek said. He didn’t go.
Negative Trend was scheduled to play at what would turn out to be the Sex Pistols’ final show, at
San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1978, but not because they’d impressed the infamous British
punk group. The Sex Pistols’ manager “wanted a terrible band to play, to make them look good,” said
Rezabek, chuckling.
It didn’t happen. A melee broke out backstage, and so Negative Trend couldn’t go on – which was fine
with Rezabek. It was never about the music. He just wanted to act out, to smash things.
“I hit [Swedish actress] Britt Ekland in the face with a hot dog covered in relish,” Rezabek recalled of
the behind-the-scenes “riot” at the Winterland.
“I was overjoyed by that. She was going with Rod Stewart back then.”
“In the years before she started her influential band Hole and married Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love – then Courtney Menely – was a ubiquitous presence in Portland’s music and drug worlds. Shafer remembered seeing her around a lot in the early 1980s. “She did not have a good reputation,” he said. “You never heard anyone say, ‘I like Courtney.’ Everybody hated her.”
Maybe so, but that didn’t stop her from going after what she wanted. And what she wanted was Rezabek.
One day, an Aerogramme apparently written by Love to herself fell out of a book Rezabek was reading. In the letter, Love wonders if Rezabek really is as “bloody EDUCATED” as he thinks he is. “I think I’m going to sleep with him just to see.”
Love, then 18, followed him around, months before she formally met him. When he wasn’t working on new songs with his Theatre of Sheep bandmates, Rezabek attended classes at Portland Community College, and so Love enrolled as well. “I thought I was losing my mind,” Rezabek said. “Every time I turned there’d be this girl pulling a scarf up over her face or watching me from around a corner.”
One day, an Aerogramme apparently written by Love to herself fell out of a book Rezabek was reading. In the letter, Love wonders if Rezabek really is as “bloody EDUCATED” as he thinks he is. “I think I’m going to sleep with him just to see.”
Then Love became even bolder.
“She would shove these letters under our door,” Arbuthnot recalled. “She’d soak them in perfume.
I can still smell that perfume.”
Love also started calling Rezabek’s apartment, leaving long messages on his answering machine.
Rezabek, perplexed, would play them for friends.
“They’re hilarious,” Shafer said of the phone recordings. “Like a Cosby album.”
That still wasn’t all. Love began breaking into Rezabek’s apartment when he was out.
One time, like a scene from a horror movie, Love jumped out at him from behind a couch.
She demanded that he smoke pot with her. Then the situation got weirder.
Rezabek started to like the attention. He’d come home and she’d be there, having broken in again.
And he’d let her stay…
