LA Original Saccharine Trust Brings Jazz Punk Catharsis to Mar Vista

The band Saccharine Trust, which will perform locally at Good Hurt in Mar Vista on Saturday, August 16th, is part of an underground scene of art/punk bands from the late ’70s and early ’80s that revolutionized and influenced the direction of contemporary rock music. They toured with Black Flag and were label mates on SST Records with the bands that were on top of the “alternative rock” world in the early '90s, such as Soundgarden, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
Rock icon and Nirvana vocalist Kurt Cobain touted their name as one of his greatest influences.
So what does Saccharine Trust guitarist and cofounder Joe Baiza have to say about the group’s influential past?
"I don't really care,” replies Baiza.
And no one got the impression that they ever did. The band is too busy doing what it's done since 1979 — creating art with their instruments.
Singer Jack Brewer writes thought-provoking Beatnik-flavored lyrical poetry complete with obscure biblical references and cries of desperation set to music that is sometimes odd and forlorn, even creepy, while at other times upbeat and jazzy.
The group combines sizzling, hissing hi-hat shimmers and pulsing bass, coupled with jazzy twang and guitar anti-melodies that sound more like banter from a snake-charmers flute than an electric guitar. A vibraphone adds depth and ambiance, and lays foundation for vocalist Jack Brewer's choppy, cathartic verse, making an asymmetrical maze of musical potency.
The group has been toying around in the Los Angeles art rock/avant-garde punk underground since 1979 and doesn't plan on venturing anywhere else soon.
They started out in the artsy San Pedro punk scene (often performing with Mike Watt’s early band The Minutemen), where originality and weirdness were mandatory. Baiza's favorite contemporaries were Los Angeles punk luminaries X, The Germs and The Screamers.
Baiza admits that in the San Pedro scene, Saccharine Trust was not all that much of an anomaly.
“In this scene, everyone really wanted to sound unique and had to sound strange,” Baiza says. The scene was not as genre- restrictive as nowadays, Baiza laments, and bands wanted to do shows with bands that didn’t sound like every other group.
Saccharine Trust released five albums — including its 1981 debut Paganicons — on the highly influential SST Records, one of the first of a wave of edgy independent record labels that became routinely carried in major record stores across the country. The group gained its greatest exposure touring with Black Flag, whose guitarist Greg Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski ran SST.
Admittedly, the music is not easy listening. Baiza describes the music of Saccharine Trust as a “bitter pill.”
“I was listening to the one copy of Surviving You, Always (the group's second album) the other day and it was really jolting to listen to, even for me,” he says.
Grunge fat cat Courtney Love is quoted as yelling at former husband Kurt Cobain for praising Saccharine Trust publicly.
“Why are you doing that? Kid's are gonna buy Saccharine Trust and like it?” she asked rhetorically.
It was members’ desire to branch out in different directions musically that caused a decade-long split up of the group from 1987 to 1997. Baiza was heavily into the 1940s bebop and jazz sounds of Charlie Parker, while Brewer wanted “more words or something,” says Baiza.
Brewer became heavily inter-ested in biblical references and into an outlandish and bizarre televangelist named Gene Scott, who would smoke cigars, proselytize using vulgarities and have vivid fits in the name of Jesus.
“Nuke ’em in the name of Jesus” was Scott's advice during the Gulf War.
“It wasn't that Jack [Brewer] was actually a follower of Gene Scott. He just was fascinated by that sort of thing,” says Baiza.
That fascination translates into the trance-like intensity Brewer sometimes falls into during his performance, the perfect ritual dance to his sermon-like vocals.
On stage, Brewer sometimes gets so into his lyrics, he appears to lose control of his undulating body, gripped by a higher power.
“He’s half-serious, half-joking,” says Baiza. “He started to be seen as some sort of a punk rock preacher.”
Brewer handles the microphone like he’s handling a poisonous snake and testifies as if Beatnik verse is being beamed in from God.
“Jack's kind of a strange guy,” says Baiza.
He would know. Brewer was 18 when the two musical novices teamed up to start a project that was more expressionism than traditional rock music. From the start, the band’s sound was slightly more somber, eerie and desperate than its peers.
A 1981 Los Angeles Times re-view described Saccharine Trust’s music as having a “whiney, nervous quality that tends to irritatingly crawl under your skin.”
It was an unbridled release of artistic energy and emotion.
“We started from nowhere,” says Baiza. “When we started, I had no musical training.”
He was even uncomfortable considering himself a musician in those days. He just wanted to make art with sound, he says.
“I would imagine a visual pat-tern and then just start drawing it out on the fretboard.” He was a late-comer to guitar, picking it up at age 26, and it wasn't until later still that he taught himself jazz technique and scales from books.
After the group's first album, its sound evolved into jazz punk with a forlorn beatnik flare, which remains the signature Saccharine Trust sound to this day.
When the group came back in 1997, adding new bassist Chris Stein and drummer Brian Christopherson, they found stability, something that they had always lacked in the past, says Baiza.
“We had egos to deal with when we were younger,” Baiza says. “There was friction about where each one of us wanted to steer the group. When we re-formed, all that stuff was worked out. It was all about music.
“Success would’ve helped, but it may have made things worse. People get greedy and it changes things.”
So, instead, fate left them with a cult following and “favorite Uncle” nods from rock stars.
Now, Saccharine Trust is part of the band members’ personal identities. It’s who they are, which is why the band keeps going after all this time.
“Me and Jack, like a lot of art-ists, are very obsessive people,” says Baiza. “We gotta do something so we keep creating. A lot of our friends are musicians, so what do we do, we go and play music. It becomes almost like a hobby.”
Baiza says he has reached a point where he is oblivious to the music business.
“At this point, nothing matters to me,” says Baiza. “We kind of enjoy being more obscure than being too popular, because the people who come to see us are genuinely interested in our music. They are not just there because of some hype. Some bands aren’t so fortunate. Their music becomes diluted through hype.”