Have you ever seen Eraserhead? In David Lynch's first B&W Surrealist mind-hump of a movie, there is scene with a little song the "Lady in the Radiator" sings in which the only lyrics are: "In heaven, everything is fine." It is a supremely affecting and menacing moment in an art film filled with them.

Josh Frank, co-author of Fool The World, The Oral History of a Band Called The Pixies, was a Twin Peaks fan growing up in suburban Potomac, Maryland when he first saw that perverse pageantry. He would later come to find out the otherworldly, upsetting tune was written by Peter Ivers, an experimental-pop musician and the catalyst-center of an early experiment in cable television's desire to blend challenging new rock music, insurgent comedy, and arty weirdness into a show called New Wave Theatre.

That show featured bands like the Dead Kennedys and Fear, among many others, and lived up to the strangeness of the movie Ivers wrote the song for, as well as his classically bizarre LPs Knight of the Blue Communion (1969), Terminal Love (1974), and others. Full of stark imagery mixed with improvisational madness, Ivers' own music was simply another element of this proto-punk Renaissance Man's adventures in acting, humor, TV scores (for Roger Corman flicks and even Starsky & Hutch), but most of all, his New Wave Theatre, which was a thinly veiled look at the real Los Angeles underground shot out on channels like USA to the heartland of America, rattling the minds of its children. It thrilled John Belushi and Harold Ramis, whose lives would be entwined with Ivers' own, as driven to excessive creativity as the former but with an ambitious heart to entertain wide-scale too like the latter. As status-quo karmic payback (if you believe in crap like that) Ivers was found gruesomely beaten to death in his art studio-loft-music space on March 3, 1983.

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When old school Seattle punk-metal icon Duff McKagan wrote about punk rock at the Seattle Weekly a couple of weeks ago, he gave a little list of bands he considers essential to the canon. Though it wasn't specifically numerical in importance, the phenomenon-by-response stack of heroes began with The Ramones (good choice), then The Clash (a little more arguable, but who can resist?), and then -- D.O.A.

To quote McKagan:

"D.O.A., Something Better Change: If you grew up in the Northwest in the late '70s or early '80s, D.O.A. were a larger-than-life example of how brilliant a live rock band should be. They were as important as any band in history, as far as I'm concerned."

The actual word "hardcore" as applied to latter period North American punk rock is most likely taken from a D.O.A. album title -- Hardcore '81. Note the year of its release, and that there really wasn't a musical genre with that name before D.O.A. nailed their hard, fast, no compromise sound.

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