As a resultant effect of recording and self-releasing Scree-Run Waltz, a twenty something noise advocate from New York began following the career of Wally Shoup. This personage, Thurston Moore, who would become acclaimed and captivate the ears of slackers across the country, would not be a consistent collaborator. Eventually, another New Yorker would. For a time at least.

At about this same time as this tape only release, in our nations’ capitol a young Radding was exercising his musicality within the “intensely serious” band, Age of Consent, before moving on to play with Dave Grohl in Dain Bramage. Each act was on the effete side of Punk, falling into the unfortunately named New Wave category.

While a Grohl collaborator, Radding, prompted to an encore in 1987, improvised a song after running through the entirety of the Dain Bramage cannon.

“All agreed that it was excellent,” Radding expounded, “but the others in the band refused to ever do it again!” Perhaps due to the uncertainty of the outcome, Radding’s band mates relegated him to servitude under others’ constructed musical writings.

Even if Shoup was a bit antiquated for what was ‘70s punk, Radding grew up amidst the flood of D.C. hardcore bands and in one way or another absorbed some of the attitudes that punk glorified: “anti-consumerism, self-determination and lack of aesthetic rules”. Championing those ideas was and will continue to coalesce scenes. But free-jazz or improvisers are still only figuring out how to take advantage of the market that still buys Sun Ship or Bap-Tizum. Radding observes that “nowadays the musicians in the jazz world are catching up with where we were 25 years ago, starting their own record labels, booking their own tours. Any music that doesn’t get much corporate or mass audience support is going to operate this way, with the artists and hardcore enthusiasts taking matters into their own hands.” No one can argue this point. And in a round about way, Shoup and Radding think the same thing, express it differently verbally and similarly musically.

Of the many avenues Shoup uses as a creative release, his website plays host to a few of his writings on music. In one essay he describes the relation between Punk and Free-Jazz. It’s interesting to note that he differentiates the Sex Pistols, the Damned and other assorted groups, as Punk Rock, not as Punk. Beefheart, he postulates, is Punk. And while that’s hard to argue, Beefheart was also a number of other things and is now a recluse. Ostensibly, the root of what Shoup seeks to uncover is the lack of precedent for tracing a music backwards. Beefheart was punk. There was not an antecedent. For that matter Zappa or Syd Barrett can be referred to as punk because what they did was an aural fuck all. The British Punk faire he mentions is criticized for substituting posturing for musical proclivity. Punk, in its most obvious form will keep the basic above ground musical tenets, which Shoup identifies as having a “keeper of the beat, player of the right notes at the right time in the right way.” The point he misses is that, Beefheart may have created a stirring racket that any listener in the ‘60s or ‘70s found alluring and subversive, but he never barked the lines “Fuck this and fuck that/Fuck it all and fuck a fucking brat” as Johnny Rotten did.