Guardians and Gargoyles: Jack Grisham and T.S.O.L.

"Dance with me my dear..."

Jack Grisham in the 1983 film Suburbia.

True Sounds of Liberty covered deathrock, anti-establishment  political punk and keyboard-heavy theater-rock in the span of four album releases. The strength of these albums lay heavily on the lead vocalist Jack Grisham (aliases would vary by release). Without his slick vocal stylings, the band may have fallen through the cracks and become just another footnote on the history of hardcore punk.

I remember being stricken by the uncompromising weight of the lyrics, combined with the poetic crooning style, all against the backdrop of thrashing guitar and speed-freak drums. "Army, Navy, Air Force... or jail!" Lyrically, this band was every bit as challenging and compelling as the Dead Kennedys, but their preferred sound was in a remarkably darker vein.

Their darkest hour.

Grisham and company offered something that was missing in the southern CA punk scene of the time; theatricality and even maturity (the maturity argument only holds up of course, if one excludes "Code Blue", a song about fucking corpses in mortuaries). Listening to the band's earliest works even now, Grisham sounds like he is performing a scene from a play, rather than screaming miserable cliches into a microphone. Songs with stories, characters give their albums a deeper, more thoughtful tone than those of their contemporaries. Despite the unrefined quality of the music, T.S.O.L. seemed like a group that could last a long time, instead of reflecting the flash-in-the-pan nature of most other punk bands. T.S.O.L. was never as unprofessional and desperate as the Germs, et. al. (although were known to have raucous crowds at their shows). Nor were they as narrowly themed as the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, and their songs were better than other horror-themed bands, such as 45 Grave. The finishing touch was a frontman who could actually sing, and wasn't just onstage to thrash around and attract as much attention as possible.  Grisham's melodramatic vocals were clearly reminiscent of Dave Vanian of the Damned, almost certainly purposefully so. Songs and albums that sounded different from one another and weren't just endless rehashings of the same idea... what a novel idea!

Why are so many other, less qualified bands are considered "legendary", while Jack Grisham and T.S.O.L. are swept under the rug, critically ignored in the development of punk and dark edged rock music?

Nick Feratu and Lin Zee