Make Do With What You Have, Take What You Can Get

Today I received my copy of the ADULT CRASH book:

This is a new(ish) book of photographs by Dave Brown, who does a label called Vicious Circle Records, which is a hardcore label that has been going for a long time. He's also a hardcore veteran with lots of stories to tell from shows he has been to over the years. More importantly, Dave Brown (kind of) discovered Clutch... so a lot of people owe Dave a favour and don't even know it.

One thing Dave is keen to emphasise is that he is not a photographer. In the intro, he says that he has never owned an expensive camera or taken photography lessons. Rather, Dave just had the foresight to stick a camera in his pocket before he left his house to go to the show... for twenty years. And now he's assembled over 400 of these photos together and published them in book form. To make the whole thing more interesting, he got some hardcore scenesters (John Joseph, Walter Schriefels, Tim McMahon and lots of others) to pen some words about surviving the "adult crash". And even better, he got some bands (Down To Nothing, Kill Your Idols, Slumlords & Cloak / Dagger) to contribute to a 7" to make the whole package even more attractive. The most limited version of the record was white vinyl, but this sold out in about an hour, and I didn't get one. But I'm happy with my blue vinyl copy because it's a nice shade of blue:

The problem with the book, in my opinion, is that there seems to be no order to it. I mean, you'll have a page with pics of bands from 1989 stuck next to modern bands like Down To Nothing. It kinda gives me the impression that, whilst the photos themselves were carefully selected, the order in which they are presented was anything but. As I turned the pages, I just found myself wishing that the photos were put into some kind of order, whether it be chronological, alphabetical by band, by venue or by some other method that I can't think of. The randomness kind of annoys me.

Overall though, I'm into this. In essence it has come about because a guy who loves hardcore decided to gather together a bunch of his photographs and make them into a book. And this is a truly fantastic concept. Hardcore was built on the DIY principles that anyone can do a band, release records, take photos or make a book, and ADULT CRASH just proves that it's true and it works. Stuff like this is why I love hardcore in the first place.