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HR: It's About Luv 12” (Olive Tree Records, 1985)
I’m feeling alright today since I just got back from a weekend in the mountains celebrating my wife’s birthday. Whenever I get away, I realize how much stress I accumulate and hold onto in my daily life. As I get further away from work (both spatially and temporally), I feel my muscle fibers loosen and my mind calm and widen. I have strategies like meditation and exercise that I use to cope with stress on a day-to-day basis, but at the end of the day I think the only real cure is time. You have to put in the hours in a space far away from your stressors, engaging instead with things that bring you peace and joy… nature, family, art, good food, etc. If only society encouraged us to set up our lives around these things rather than money, status, and all the other things that weigh us all down…
I didn’t listen to any records this weekend, but flipping through my recent arrivals stack, I realized I hadn’t written about HR’s first album, It’s About Luv, which I’ve been listening to regularly for the past couple of months. I’ve mentioned the Bad Brains a few times in my Staff Picks lately, and I guess I’ve had them on my mind. Mostly that’s due to reading H.R.’s biography and having the arc of his life and musical career come into clearer focus in my mind. I don’t think I realized, for instance, that It’s About Luv came out in the window between Rock for Light and I Against I, during the Bad Brains’ first (I think?) significant breakup. After getting super into that 1987 Bad Brains footage I wrote about a while back, I knew full well that H.R. still had it in 1985 when It’s About Luv was released, so I added it to my wants list. It wasn’t too long before a cheap copy popped up on Discogs and I nabbed it. I must not have been paying too much attention when I bought it (it was really cheap, after all), because when it showed up I was surprised to find that it was a sealed copy. Furthermore, the seller had listed it as the SST repress, when it was actually a sealed original pressing on Olive Tree. Not exactly the score of a lifetime, but I thought it was pretty neat. I felt like I’d drawn one of those Monopoly cards that says “bank error in your favor: collect $10.”
I’d always heard that a big source of the instability in Bad Brains was that H.R. wanted to get away from playing punk rock and focus on reggae. Given that, one might assume It’s About Luv is a reggae album, but it’s really not… there’s not much reggae on it at all, in fact. Having learned a little more about this period of H.R.’s life in Finding Joseph I and from listening to the SST Records-focused podcast You Don’t Know Mojack (where they researched and dissected each H.R. album at length and in great detail), I have more appreciation for where this album was coming from. I once saw someone refer to this as H.R.’s “military fatigues” era. With the Bad Brains having broken up, he was living in a collective house in DC, I believe with most or all the members of the H.R. band, and the environment was extremely counter-cultural. The vibe I got was that the group was living well outside mainstream society, focusing entirely on music and their deepening commitment to Rastafarianism. It seemed like H.R. was deep into a mission at this point in his life, and the H.R. band was a big part of that mission, aiming to be both culturally and musically revolutionary. The label Olive Tree Records was another part of this mission, and since the label was funded by a wealthy benefactor, the group could focus on the music rather than mere survival. The pieces were in place for something creative and exciting to happen.
My many hours listening to You Don’t Know Mojack made me curious about the guitarist on this record, David Byers, who seems to have been H.R.’s main musical foil during this part of his life. Byers had been in an early DC punk band called the Enzymes and numerous other projects that existed at the edges of the better-documented Dischord Records scene we all know, and by all accounts he was an enormously talented person. Of course nothing can match the uncanny chemistry of the Bad Brains’ original lineup, but the H.R. band is formidable too. Byers could shred, and It’s About Luv is full of blistering lead runs that aren’t totally unlike what Dr. Know was doing, but there’s something really unique about Byers’ melodic sensibility. His playing has an off-kilter jazziness to it, as he tends to play notes that aren’t quite the ones you expect. It’s kind of like if you took Greg Ginn’s unique tonal palette and filtered it through Dr. Know’s inhuman speed and precision. You can tell the H.R. band was using Bad Brains’ style as a jumping-off point, but Byers’ musical voice ensured they weren’t just a retread. The big guitar hook in “Let’s Have a Revolution” is a great example of what I’m talking about… it’s as heavy and as intense as the Bad Brains, but also doesn’t sound like anything Dr. Know would play.
Honestly, that’s kind of the vibe with It’s About Luvas a whole. I don’t think it’s as great as Bad Brains, but it makes up for that by being interesting and taking the sound places you wouldn’t expect it to go. The songs are stylistically diverse in a way that’s perfectly in step with H.R.’s vocal and lyrical idiosyncrasies. This makes moments like when he shouts “give me back my marijuana!” over and over or when he gives a detailed account of being busted for selling pot in “Happy Birthday My Son” (I’ll never forget that he had precisely $270 in his pocket) really pop and stick in your head. And while the slightly murky production mutes it somewhat, the band’s performance is blistering. Earl is still on drums, after all, and as I mentioned above, H.R. still very much had it in 1985.
I don’t know that I’d recommended everyone run out and buy this album immediately, but if you’ve digested all the Bad Brains’ classic material, It’s About Luv is well worth a listen.