HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR009- CURSED, "Hell Comes Home" 7"

You would think that given their sort of cult status now Cursed was a successful band during their tenure.  Yes and no.  By the time they began the members had played in a number of influential bands and had a pretty good resume.  So when they did get rolling there was certainly some talk about them and they quickly released their first full length on Deathwish, which was already gaining momentum, but not nearly as established as they are now.  However, even though they were a touring machine Cursed often played to crowds where they could dedicate each song to a different person in the room and still have part of their set leftover to shout out to no one.  It really wasn’t until they were wrapping up that people really started to pay attention.  I had already known these guys for awhile and it wasn’t long before they came down my way and I booked a show for them in Syracuse.  On a couple of other occasions my band went up to Canada and played with them on their turf.  Each time was far less people than I expected, which was bizarre to me considering they were a pretty established group of people. It didn’t really matter either way though because they were always a treat to see.

I can’t count how many times I saw them play in some tiny hole-in-the-wall place (a gallery space in Ithaca, the basement of Sonic Unyon in Hamilton, ABC No Rio, the Hamilton Street Café in New Brunswick) and no matter the place they brought their wall of amps, cramming as many guitar cabs in as they possibly could and cranking things up to 11 so your teeth rattled while they played and your chest caved in from the total disregard for any one else’s hearing or well-being.  It was incredibly confrontational in the sonic sense, but also in frontman Chris Colohan’s forays into the crowd, getting all up in their confused faces.  Cursed just annihilated through and through.

So since we had a pretty good rapport going I talked Chris into doing a Cursed record through Hex.  The talks went back and forth for a quite a long time too, but mostly we talked about our shared love for the Rollins Band and our lot in life as short, scrawny frontmen with a very similar stage presence.  So the idea was that they would do a 7” record with a Rollins Band cover and an original song.  But being that Rollins Band songs are pretty tough to cover they decided to do a cover of a song that I guarantee had a huge impact upon the Rollins Band- “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges.  So it was more of a cover of a band that the band they wanted to cover would probably cover themselves.  In addition, there was a demo version of “Hell Comes Home”, which would become the lead single of their next full length (Cursed, “II”).  So this record acted as kind of a lead up to their second LP and I’m OK with it.  It was also the first time in awhile that I had done a 7” so I thought it would be fun to do several colors of vinyl for it.  Why not?  In all, 2000 copies of the 7” were made and they all flew off the shelves, so to speak.  I made an oath that it would be a one time pressing, never to be repressed, and I’m sticking to that.

A lot has changed since Cursed has split.  Most of the guys from that band have more or less stopped playing music, or do so in a non-touring sense.  Chris joined up with Burning Love for several years, another wild punk band that I thought was just excellent before that ended.  He currently fronts Sect, a decidedly vegan straightedge band featuring members spread out all over from bands like Earth Crisis, Fallout Boy, Day Of Suffering, Catharsis and Undying.  He also is the man behind Vegan Magic and Parmageddon, a couple food items that are amazing and versatile.  I’ve also interviewed Chris Colohan like seven times over the years so what’s one more time, right?  This time we’re talking about probably the same shit we were ten years ago, as well as that seven inch they did on the label all those years ago.

                               Chris, in mustache phase

At the time of this 7” you were between the first and second LPs.  What was going on with the band at that time?

Man, it’s a blur. We set it all in motion but it took us a year or so of lining up our lives (aka putting them in storage) to be able to go with it. So at that point, Radwan had moved back to Lebanon, I think Tom was with us on bass and it was 4 piece. I was back in Toronto from Montreal, and we were just going from one tour to the next.

Did Cursed end up having a lot of people ask you all to do records?  It seems like most of the attention to the band came after you all split up.

That’s pretty much right on. We were approached by labels from Relapse to Interscope (to a resounding "yeah right, whatever narc") and hardcore labels obviously, but we preferred not to look up like that, not to have anything dictating the thing we were making. And you’re right, in true form, most of it went over people’s flip phones (that they were texting their girlfriend on waiting for Evergreen Terrace to start) until the last year or two of the band, by which point we were in a total tailspin internally. 

I’m trying to recall exactly how doing the “Hell Comes Home” 7” came up between us.  When it did we had known each for awhile at that point and I thought the idea of doing a record for one of your bands would be fun.  But I think it revolved more around the idea of recording covers and how we had some shared interest in certain bands that would be fun to cover.  What’s your recollection of it?

I think I was like “Hey Hex, want to do a 7” and I’ll totally flake on getting you the artwork until 4 minutes before it goes to the printing press?” and you were like “dude, that sounds like it would be an enjoyable and non-stressful experience”, and then we went for rib-eye steaks, spat in our hands and shook on it. 

I know the initial idea for the 7” was to have a Rollins Band cover on it.  Was there any particular reason that ended up being a Stooges cover instead?  Did the rest of the band not share your (by ‘your’ I mean ‘our’) passion for the man/band?

Answer I: Come on. We’re both short, angry men. We know what kinda Danzig Syndrome this is really all about. 

Answer II: No, we all loved Rollins Band. Christian and I in particular, we saw them and COC in 92 here and it was a pivotal night of life. Rollins connected with a lot of young peoples’ aimless pent-up dad-hating anger, or, whatever we were all trying to prove connected with whatever he was trying to prove. That band though was worldly in its influences despite the cartoonish hyper-maleness of it, and led me to a lot of older bands like the Pink Fairies (Do It). That OG lineup was just ferocious and the production was great in a way that still holds up. If anything, I have to roll my eyes at Rollins’ part in it, but I feel like he’s smart enough to see that he laid that on a biiiiiit thick. I get it, Black Flag was a 5 year hazing ritual. But look at Kira. She’s not Joe Rogan about it.

 Cursed at ABC No Rio.  Dan Yemin from Paint It Black getting hearing damage in background

The main track off that record was “Hell Comes Home”, which dealt with the current, at the time, situation of getting into a war on false pretenses and how that will eventually come back to bite us in the ass, so to speak.  Was there any reason that was the song used, or was it the only thing demo’ed at the time for Cursed, “II”?

No, it was intentional to make that song a 7". That was just after Iraq part II kicked back up post-9.11. Things were getting hairy, aimlessly xenophobic and war-minded, and you could see them laying down the groundwork that led us up to the current state of authoritarian overreach and total dependence on misinformation. So I thought it was important to put that front and centre, if only to say “look at this objectively outside of the fear, keep looking when they want you to look in another direction and remember it the way it really went down”. Now as always the people that put that into motion are safely off the hook and we can look back at it truthfully, that there weren’t WMDs, that it was a wind-up, that it didn’t achieve any lasting stability, and have Trump saying flat out “yeah we shoulda took their oil”. Yet you couldn’t talk about that, or 9/11, in real time. And likewise right now you can’t make a truthful picture like that about post-Chavez Venezuela, so we’re going to watch them install a US employee as leader, secure the natural resources (which had been nationalized) for private corporations, the money from which will never make Americans any better off , but then we’ll be able to say it out loud in 10 years, when it’s done, and so on. That was the Hell Comes Home situation, but regarding the reality that if you export dominance and greed, of course it doesn’t end there, and you end up importing resentment and desperation in the form of terrorism and backlash proportionately to the injustices you put out there somewhere outside the bubble of the West, which everyday people on both sides will always pay the price for.

The band also began touring quite a bit more during this time period.  Would you say you were doing better with getting audiences by this point, or was it hit or miss?  Were there any bands that stand out that you toured with that you formed a kinship with?

Hit and miss for sure. There was never any correlation between how much we toured and the reality of the world asking for that. Most of our lifespan was playing at ourselves and handfuls of people that were into it, and we were fine with that. Touring with our friends and making trouble. Mi Amore from Quebec City were probably our closest kin on this side of the border. And I think the Louisville family of Coliseum/Breather Resist/Young Widows were our tightest friendships that came out of touring down there. But we had great times with a long list of great bands, American Nightmare, Daughters, Mare, KEN Mode, Converge, Darkest Hour, Bane, Verse, the Secret, Ringworm, Disfear, Rotten Sound, too many more to list.

I thought it was kind of a weird transition to do your first record with a very well-established label like Deathwish, to doing the next two through Goodfellow/Sonic Unyon.  Can you talk a bit about how and why that came about?

Hooking up with DWI was pretty random. Two of us were living in Montreal when Cursed started and 2 in Ontario. Our first weekend of shows were with Converge at Salle L’ex (a fantastic, long gone Montreal club). It was early on for both Deathwish and us, but we’d known all those guys through years of seeing and playing with Converge and their other bands. Jake just asked and I think we said “sure” that night. There’s miles of story between then and everything that went down in the next few years, but Goodfellow when it happened made sense too after us being awful if not self-defeating communicators and wanting to go back to our smaller home town circles, and run out of the building we practiced in the basement of. We’d had offers from bigger and different kinds of labels but we weren’t looking at anything like there was an up or down, just forward for however much longer we could get away with it. 

So the rest of the guys who were in Cursed over the years are pretty much not active with music anymore, or in a very limited capacity.  However, you still play in a pretty active band.  How is it the guy that doesn’t write music stays the most active?

Hey man, have you seriously never heard my mouth riffs? 

There’s another interview we did years ago when The Swarm was active where we were talking about if we could picture ourselves at 40 and you mentioned not wanting to still do band stuff when you were 40.  But here we are, each into our 40s and you’re still doing band stuff.  Does your past self hate you for your betrayal, or does your current self reflect to your past self and say, ‘listen man, I’m not dead yet so cut me a break’?

Don’t worry, my current self hates my current self and my future self hates my past self as much as my past self hated my then-future present self. I couldn’t picture life more than 6 months ahead at that point and even now I still can’t work that far ahead. I guess time and age just happen by default. I know that every time something would burn down and I was faced with stopping I had a guilty teenaged Black Flag fan on my shoulder making me just turn around and double back down on the next and the next thing from scratch, and here we are.  Sect is the most fun I’ve had in years and for me it brings  the whole thing full circle to play with people my own generation and starting point. So maybe bump that up to…70? And I’m basically dead inside, so you don’t have to cut me a break. Loop Hooooole. 

 excerpt from our first interview together back in 1999

What was your favorite thing about being in Cursed?  What was the thing you disliked the most?

Hrm. I mean, we went about it in a very self-punishing way and with a lot of internal bravado aimed at each other. It was more of a sick dare after a point than a band, and we all paid for how far we let that go in different ways. I think by virtue of sheer exasperation with ourselves and life it was very unfiltered and self-honest. So I’m proud of my part in that. We played shows like we were trying to kill each other, regardless of anyone else in the room. It was never an option or question not to give it our all, no matter how bad things got, and looking back I’m proud of that. I’m not as stoked on the damage we did to ourselves, or the fact that we all came from straightedge and we weren’t more honest with each other when it went in two extreme directions in real time. We let a lot of things between us fester and grow into something that consumed it all. And honestly, i don’t even know if I can say I dislike that, it’s kind of perfect for what we were to end in genuine disaster. But it left several people permanently damaged and myself, sober or not, pretty raggedy in the mental health department as well. If anything I’d change that but again, you buy the ticket, you take the ride. I like what we left behind. 

An Ithaca policeman after Chris showed him his dick.  Yes, really.

And there you have it.  You can catch Chris traveling all over the place with his current band Sect and you will never see Cursed play a show ever again.  Or will you ever see this 7" in print ever again.  And don't even try to get your hands on my copy of the test press, it's the only one I have left.  You can. however, get a digital version of this great record for just $1 this week on the bandcamp page instead.