The Nation Of Ulysses - 13-Point Program To Destroy America

Back in the early 1990s, the Washington DC area was filled both with great music stores and slammin' music venues. When I moved back up to the region for my shore duty station in Arlington, after spending three years on sea duty out of Norfolk, Virginia, I was like a kid in a candy store! I set about rediscovering all of the great places in and around the city, some of which I became familiar with during my time in school in nearby Annapolis, Maryland in the mid-1980s.

In a post I wrote about fifteen years, I summarized the club scene in DC during this period; here's an excerpt from that write-up once again:

Back [in the early Nineties], downtown DC used to have a PUMPING bar/club scene - with Fifth Column and its next-door neighbor, The Vault, anchoring the F Street dance circuit (the old 9:30 Club was right across the street, along with a really good multi-story club whose name currently escapes me that ran through the entire block from E to F St. - one section was an old-school R&B dance club, one section was a quiet live jazz lounge, another featured house music, etc.). The 80's-themed dance club Polly Esther's was just half a block away. A few blocks northwest, close to the Treasury building between 14th and 15th Streets, was Zei Alley, home to Club Zei and its cross-alley dance club companion, the Spy Club. In the scary, dangerous, decrepit neighborhood over by the Navy Yard was the legendary Capital Ballroom/Nation and the nearby Tracks, a gay dance club that nonetheless drew a mixed crowd due to its great music. There was Anastasia's (New Romantic) and Poseur's (New Wave) in Georgetown; reggae clubs on U Street and 18th Street (near the current 18th Street Lounge); samba and live jazz in Adams-Morgan - frankly, there were great places all over town, and you could strike sparks wherever you went for whatever sort of music you were in the mood for...

In addition, there were some great back-alley/warehouse type clubs along the M Street corridor, in one of which one night I first heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a story I've related to you all earlier.

As for buying music, my go-to place back then was the old George Washington University branch of Tower Records, just off of Pennsylvania Avenue. They had a huge selection of tapes and CDs spread over two floors, and the place was always packed. For music that was more out of the mainstream, I'd go to one of the then-several locations of Olsson's Books & Records;

my favorite one was on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, just around the corner from Smash! Records, a venue that specialized in local hardcore punk and English post-punk releases, along with an incredible selection of band/concert tee shirts. For house and dance music, few stores could beat 12 Inch Dance Records on P Street near Dupont Circle. And over in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, the discount CD & Tape Exchange had thousands of used, half-price albums for sale.

As I gradually moved away from cassette tapes and into CDs in those years (I suppose I was one of the last holdouts for THAT format...), I began to seek out stores a little further afield than in downtown DC to feed my collection. In an earlier post, I mentioned Phantasmagoria Records in nearby Wheaton, Maryland, the place where I almost saw Stereolab play their second U.S. show back then. Really loved that store; it's been gone for more than 25 years now, but still missed by many.

The other place outside of the city I used to frequent early in my time in the area was just over the city/state line: Vinyl Ink Records in Silver Spring, Maryland. Vinyl Ink was a relatively small, single-room facility, and the selection there wasn't as extensive as could be found at Tower or Phantasmagoria. But the place was staffed by locals who were incredibly knowledgeable in both the local scene and in what was happening over in England (from what I understand, members of such still-celebrated DC indie bands such as Black Tambourine and Velocity Girl worked there at various times; the Slumberland Records music label was initially started out of that shop). Vinyl Ink specialized in English shoegaze bands and local groups, but the main
attraction there for me was the store's extensive rack of music fanzines for sale. They had a few of the national ones, and a ton of the locally produced ones, including my favorite, Teenage Gang Debs (a superb history/overview of this great fanzine is located here).

One day, while I was in Vinyl Ink browsing the racks, I noticed a small half-sized (5 1/2" by 8") pamphlet on colored stock, half-hidden among the larger-sized publications. It was the seventh edition of Ulysses Speaks!, the ongoing half-music 'zine/half manifesto dissemination put out by The Nation Of Ulysses.

The Nation Of Ulysses was a DC-area punk band that formed a couple of years earlier, in 1988. The band (made up of drummer Jim Canty, bassist Steve Gamboa, lead guitarist Steve Kroner, second guitarist Tim Green and Ian Svenonius on lead vocals) gigged constantly around the area, shows that were infamous for their high-decibel, aggressive, almost free form noise and extreme violence. Audience members routinely got hurt during their performances, and band members were known for breaking bones on stage. That sort of scene really wasn't my cup of tea at that time, so I heard about these events secondhand, never attending one of their concerts.

Coupled with their sound was a jumbled, somewhat pretentious and semi-infantile "band philosophy" the group claimed to operate under. To quote from Wikipedia:

Nation of Ulysses described themselves not as a rock 'n' roll group in the traditional sense, but "as a political party"[14] and as "a shout of secession." Explaining their intent, Svenonius said "it's basically a new nation underground for the dispossessed youth colony. It's all about smashing the old edifice, the monolith of rock and roll." AllMusic's Steve Huey described the Nation of Ulysses' philosophy as "a relentlessly provocative (and entertaining) jumble of teenage rock 'n' roll rebellion, leftist radicalism, anarchist punk polemics, and abstract intellectual rambling, [...] [which gives the sense of] an off-kilter, almost tongue-in-cheek approach to a 'perpetual 18-year old's' view of America, and life in general."

Outside of their music, the band's main organ for promoting this somewhat effed-up agenda/ideology was via Ulysses Speaks!, initially distributed at their concerts before the 'zine became more widely available at independent music shops in the area. The zines espoused what The Nation Of Ulysses referred to as "The Ulysses Aesthetic, "a jumbled mix of "1960s and 1970s radical politics, French Situationist writings, and juvenile delinquency". One was never quite sure if the group was being serious about this philosophy, or it was all just a giant put on.

Anyway, by the early '90s, The Nation Of Ulysses was simply another hardcore punk band in a city filled with music, with a small but rabid regional following. That changed in 1991.

Sassy, a feminist magazine for teen girls, was launched in 1988. It was considered the antithesis of existing mainstream teen lifestyle magazines such as Seventeen and Teen, because in its time it reflected a very hip, independent and (shall we say) "sassy" attitude about what was going on in the world. Every issue of Sassy contained interesting, irreverent feature stories with a feminist outlook, interviews with people important to teens, and extensive coverage of emerging indie bands nationwide (DC area native Erin Smith, one of the editors of the aforementioned Teenage Gang Debs 'zine and a member of Bratmobile, was hired early on as an intern in the music features department). And the public responded to this fresh approach; by 1990, Sassy boasted a monthly circulation of more than 450,000.

Since its founding, the magazine held an annual "Sassiest Girl In America" contest. And in the winter of 1991, Sassy launched its first annual "Sassiest Boy In America" competition. Over 100 entries were received from readers all over the country, and that inaugural winner was none other... than Ian Svenonius.

Overnight, the band's profile went nationwide, with the article declaring that The Nation Of Ulysses and Svenonius were going to be HUGE: "He's going to be a big deal. I'm sure he will be and we're going to be so proud that we were the first ones to discover him." Even afterward, when it was discovered that Ian had broken the contest rules and lied about his age (he wasn't a "boy" at all, but a 22-year-old man), the magazine still supported him (and let him keep his title).

Note that all of this national recognition and vaunted editorial predictions of success came before The Nation Of Ulysses had even released a single recording. The band's first long-player, 13 Point Program To Destroy America, came out in the early summer of 1991, a few months after the magazine issue hit the shelves, and just after I moved back to the Washington DC area.

What can I say about this album? Well, for the most part, to me, it's paint-by-numbers juvenile hardcore punk - all thrash-and-bang, trebly (whoever mixed this disc turned the bass WAY down, so the majority of the songs have no bottom rhythm), fast and loose, with Svenonius' shouty declarations slathered over the "music'. The few songs that do break out of this mold aren't masterpieces themselves per se; but you notice them mostly due to the fact that they aren't screechy pounding screeds. "Diptheria", driven by a nagging, insistent guitar line, is actually almost a gentle ballad, even in the moments where Svenonius cranks the urgency of the vocals up a notch. And "P. Power" is a pretty good near-mainstream rock song, and a highlight of the album.

But overall, while well-received in certain limited quarters, this release did little to increase the band's national profile. Because of the strong local connection, Vinyl Ink played portions of this album as background music in their store for weeks during that summer - so much so that I became heartily sick of the band and anything related to it. I never got into their fanzine, and it was years later that I finally acquired a copy of this disc (Why? Because I'm a music completest, that's why... and I want to have everything associated with a certain genre, time and/or place).

After a while, I got tired of Vinyl Ink's music selections and relatively small inventory, especially after Teenage Gang Debs' publication schedule became more haphazard after 1990's third issue (the 'zine folded after Issue #5, sometime around late 1993). I began spending more of my time and money at Phantasmagoria's more extensive racks. There was also an incident nearby a couple of months later that REALLY put me off going to Silver Spring...

My visits to the record shop usually happened after work in Arlington, so to get to Vinyl Ink I generally drove through the center of the city, then turned north on Georgia Avenue in the Columbia Heights/U Street area, close to Howard University. That area was devastated by the riots that occurred in the wake of Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination in the spring of 1968, and nearly twenty-five years later, the neighborhoods were still struggling to recover. So, not to disparage the place, but it wasn't the safest place to motor through, especially as evening approached. There was a large gas station halfway up Georgia Ave., between Brightwood and Takoma, where I sometimes stopped to get gas. So, one night, I made the trip up to the store, and on my way back down through DC, I stopped at the station, filled up, and went on my way - no worries or issues.

The VERY NEXT NIGHT, a driver with the same make and model as my car stopped at that very same filling station. While there, he was approached by an armed robber. I can't recall if he resisted or not - the news stories didn't make that clear - but he ended up being shot dead.

Same car... same place... 24 hour's difference. Not a big believer in "signs"... but I immediately curtailed my visits to that area.

The original Nation Of Ulysses lineup lasted for another year or so. They released their follow up
album, Plays Pretty For Baby, in October of 1992. But things were not all quiet in their world. During the recording of their sophomore disc, guitarist Kroner left the band. The remaining quartet made a haphazard effort to soldier on, prepping songs for a third album. But the band completely fell apart by the end of 1992 (six songs from these final sessions were finally included on the posthumous 2000 release The Embassy Tapes).

After the breakup, Canty and Gamboa stuck with Svenonius for a couple of short lived bands, Cupid Car Club from 1993 to 1995 and The Make Up from 1995 to 2000. Since then, Svenonius has involved himself with a number of DC-area indie groups and solo projects, with names like Weird War, Chain And The Gang, Too Much and Escape-ism, to name a few. By latest count, over the years he has been involved in or released more than twenty full-length albums and the same number of singles/EPs. As for the remaining former Nation Of Ulysses member Tim Green, he spent a few years on the production/engineering side of recording, before joining the California-based metal band The Fucking Champs, which is still going strong to this day.

The demise of the Washington DC area independent music markets took place slowly over the next decade and a half. Phantasmagoria gave up the ghost in 2001, replaced by a neighborhood cultural center. 12 Inch Dance Records in the Dupont Circle area closed its doors in 2002. After fending off bankruptcy for a number of years, the remaining locations of the once-vast Olsson's Books & Music chain shut down in 2008. But Vinyl Ink was the first to go, closing up for good in 1999. About the only place still left in DC flying the punk/indie flag is Smash Records, originally situated in Georgetown but now with a storefront in Adams-Morgan.

Sassy didn't make it past the '90s either.  After a series of editorial missteps and sale to another publisher that blunted its once-formidable edge, its circulation collapsed, and the magazine folded in 1996.

I still miss those shops, and the music they offered, making it easy at the time to find that left-of-center/quirky release you may have heard on WHFS or the college stations. And I include Vinyl Ink in that long-lamented group. It was a good place, for its time... but apparently some things aren't made to last.

And that includes The Nation Of Ulysses. Again, I personally wasn't a big fan. But they are still revered in certain corners, and several existing bands today (including The Hives, Bikini Kill, Death From Above 1979 and LCD Soundsystem, among others) have cited them as an influence.

So, if you have some residual nostalgia for that time and genre, or just want to hear what was happening in DC's early '90s punk scene, this one's for you: 13-Point Plan To Destroy America, the debut release of Washington's own The Nation Of Ulysses, put out on Dischord Records on July 1st, 1991. Have a listen if you can stand it, and as always, let me know what you think.

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