I love movies that are so bad they’re good. I’m not talking about the 80’s Troma movies that are intentionally campy, I’m talking about flicks that are trying to do their big one and come up massively short. Movies like Miami Connection, Hard Ticket To Hawaii, and Deadly Prey aren’t making the Criterion Collection but they had explosions and gore, and if you were buzzed off a six pack of High Life talls or were half asleep, they weren’t that much worse than Rambo 3.
Two brothers from Nor Cal, Jose and Eduardo Quiroz, put together a run of great budget flicks in the late 90s and early 2000s like Veteranos, The Dope Game, and Smile Now, Cry Later . If some indie films are considered to be on shoestring budgets, these dudes put together movies on used dental floss budgets - some scenes are just on a tripod posted up in their living room. There’s a real charm to them though, and even if the budgets are paltry, they actually wrote some pretty decent storylines and edited the flicks well so they’re not boring at all like many budget films are.
Smile Now, Cry Later is especially awesome cuz it kinda ties into our DIY punk world. It’s about an aspiring rapper and record label trying to put out a record and get established. It kind of walks you through all the steps in a wikiHow manner: pay for studio time, do a layout, press CDs, find a distributor, do promotion, etc. Really that’s not so different from putting out a punk record.
They also did a flick called Jack Movez whose ridiculous name alone sparked an idea I wanted to write about: stolen/tribute lyrics. I always thought it was funny when Pennywise cited Zack De La Rocha for a line they used on their song “I Won’t Have It” from the About Time album.
Was the citation necessary? I dunno. Or is this a threat? Really - what the fuck is going on around here?
I pride myself in being a pretty good lyricist and I’ve had plenty of jack movez. On the Retaliate song “Tomorrow Lays In Ash,” I took the line “we toast to the old days” from the Tom Waits song “Sight For Sore Eyes.” Hell, we jack moved an entire album title Thorns Without a Rose from the Wait’s song “Downtown Train.”
“You wave your hand and they scatter like crows
They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
They're just thorns without the rose
Be careful of them in the dark
Oh if I was the one
You chose to be your only one
Oh baby can't you hear me now”Excerpt from Tom Waits “Downtown Train”
So are these tributes or jack movez? Should I have cited Mr. Waits like Mr. Linberg cited Mr. De La Rocha?
Noechno.net published a great interview with Jack Grisham recently where he tells the story about his biggest lyrical jack move.
So that leads me to, who was David Lord Porter, who is credited for co-writing "Silent Scream" on that record, which I think is about Dracula, right?
Yeah. That's actually pretty fucking funny because, there's always been a weird thing. You know, we've got a lot of emotional problems in that fuckin' band. So Ron Emory had brought these words to a practice and he goes, "Hey, I wrote this song." And he brought these words and I read it right, and I'm like, You didn't write this! I mean, Emory never even went to fucking school. You know what I mean?
You know, an Emory lyric is like, "You're burnin' in hell with baby batter on your face" [laughs]. So he brings in these lyrics and I'm thinking, he doesn't even know who these fucking people are. And then Mike Roche, our bass player got mad at me said, "You know, Ron writes something righteous and you give him shit for it" and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I said, "Yeah, whatever."
So we go and record Dance with Me and Ron's girlfriend shows up and said, "How did you like my book?" I go, What are you talking about? And she goes, "Well, Ron took those words out of my book," and I'm like, goddammit! And so David Lord Porter wrote a poem in a book and the poem's called "Silver Screen" and Ron changed it to "Silent Scream" so we had to end up crediting the guy. Thank God, he never came looking for money.
I gotta admit that this one kind of bummed me out cuz I’ve always thought those were TSOL’s most clever lyrics. I grabbed the book off of Thrift Books and sure enough, the lyrics are pretty much word for word out of it, with some minor tweaks.
Hey - this is 185 Miles South and we all love Uniform Choice, right? Pat Dubar was an 80’s hardcore superhero who protected suburbanite straight edge kids from knife wielding drunk punx at Fender’s ballroom. Part jock, part poet - all fuckin’ awesome.
He famously had poems end both the first UC LP and the Unity 7”. Oh, and our boy Patty D also pulled off one of the biggest lyrical HC jack movez, snagging a poem he most likely either read on a motivational poster or in his HS lit class. Was he hipping nuckleheads to poetry or being slick?
The last is maybe my favorite, because no HC front man delivers lines with as much style and personality as Raybeez. I would’ve never believed the song “Crazy But Not Insane” wasn’t originally Warzone lyrics because those words were so perfect for Warzone. But hey, shoutout Waylon Jennings who, circling back to the Quiroz brothers, was a dude who really did it his own way - an Outlaw Country original.
“For us, ‘outlaw’ meant standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things. It felt like a different music, and outlaw was as good a description as any.”
Jennings in his 1996 autobiography Waylon
Really, how different is that idea from 1980’s NYHC?
So much of being a hardcore lifer is curation and what you filter out to people as having merit. Maybe Ray was just exposing a whole different audience to the outlaw poetry of a completely different style of music that they would’ve never come across otherwise. Or maybe it was just a straight up jack move.
Can you think of any others?
Also, what’s your favorite Quiroz Brothers’ flick?
- ZN
Thanks as always to Pops for the help.
Tribute. Always love it when a band, hip hop or even actor uses a line from something they dig.