The Green Blah! co-director hopes to capture the city’s important place in punk history
In an interview last year, Jim Baker reflected on the sudden importance of documenting the Green Bay punk scene. “It got to the point where some of our friends were dying.” After years of attending shows at the Northside Bowling Lanes and VFW halls, Baker and co-director Chris Pretti suddenly found themselves 30 years removed from the music they loved and shrinking timetable to remember it.
Baker and Pretti grew up a block apart and went to high school together. They even played in several punk bands in the Green Bay area, which stood as a midwestern beacon in the 80s with acts like The Minors and Suburban Mutilation. After organizing a 2008 reunion show over one weekend, the two embarked on what has become a daunting mission, capturing the sights and sounds of area punk bands for their Green Blah! project.
The experience hasn’t been an easy one. An on-again, off-again production schedule was hamstrung by countless trips to the area, changes in editors and personal tragedy. But now, Baker and Pretti are spending their summer whittling down hours of interviews and hundreds of photos while eyeing a fall release date.
This past weekend, I spoke with Chris Pretti about his experiences as a first-time director and why it’s so important to remember bands like The Tyrants:
You’ve been working at this on and off for almost four years now. Can you trace the origins of Green Blah! from that 2008 reunion show to today?
Jim had told me about this idea he wanted to do about the Green Bay punk scene. Coincidentally I had met Brad Warner, who ended up doing a documentary called Cleveland’s Screaming where he put together a reunion show and did interviews backstage at the gig and really went in like a week before and worked on it for a week and that was it. I showed Jim how Brad did it and thought maybe we could do the same thing.
We invited nine bands for a reunion show, but getting in the practice took up so much time and effort that getting the interviews done was not going to happen. But we did record the show with three cameras and had a couple photographers there and it turned out great. We were going to go into interviews following that, but we had double tragedies in our lives and it got shelved and you know how that goes. We really started working on the film in Dec of 2012, literally the last week. We did interviews primarily in 2013 and 2014 and a couple in 2015, and we had an editor who had other projects he needed to pursue so we were on the search for another editor. So that’s kind of what brought it from 2008 to 2016.
I know you have a trio of editors you’re collaborating with. Is there any other way this project has evolved for you guys?
When we first began the project, we talked to Rev. Norb from Green Bay, who’s a local fixture and pretty prevalent in the film. If you watch the trailer, he’s the one who says something like “Somebody pushes you into a locker and you’re like fuck you, you jock you!” That’s him. He’s got a photographic memory of sorts and we sat down with him prior to our first interview. I remember it was snowing and there was a Packer game. and it was like “Who are the 20 people we need to interview?” and he wrote this list. In the beginning, we were thinking we would interview these 20 people and then maybe 5 of our friends. But the more we talked to people other storylines would come up, and it just spread, so our initial pot of interviewing 20 people has gotten up to at least 80.
So it’s snowballed into much more?
It’s definitely evolved to get to the true roots of the scene. Jim and I started with the hardcore scene, which was roughly 1983 but there were a couple bands before that in the punk rock era. And we really trace it back to the first band in Green Bay that was even playing these kinds of tunes at a bar or whatever, the origins of the scene into the late ’80s, early ’90s.
You’re covering lots of local acts from that scene, but the trailer also mentions how the area became a beacon for bands like Black Flag. How are you handling that intersection between Green Bay bands and higher-tier acts in the film?
We interviewed a few people from those types of bands. We got Dave Smalley who was the first singer of All, the post-Descendants band. We talked to Mark Arnold from Big Drill Car who had played Green Bay a number of times in that era, and we talked to Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.
I lived in Green Bay until the end of the 80s and then moved to Milwaukee so I had experiences going to shows in both cities. You’d go see the Descendants in Green Bay and there’s 600 kids, and at the same show in Milwaukee there’d be 100 people. Green Bay had an all-ages scene where Milwaukee was mostly 18 and over shows. The Eagles Club was doing some of those shows back then but there wasn’t really that large venue doing punk shows, and I don’t think the promoters were really into it, so that was a huge draw for bands like The Descendants or Black Flag or Dead Kennedys. Those were the big ones that everybody knows, but 7 seconds and Agent Orange and Scream, which Dave Grohl was in at the time, came through and played a roller rink [laughs]. I think it was the all-ages scene and the fact that we had pretty good venues, and then there was almost like a third wave of 12 year old kids coming through. I can’t speak for a lot of cities but shows in Chicago and Minneapolis were really hard to break into and it just seemed like Green Bay was a fun place to go. There wasn’t that “We’re so punk rock and you’re not” attitude. It was very welcoming, and the kids made it fun.
You and Jim have a close proximity to the scene yourselves, both working with and playing in bands. How conscious have you been in tailoring your familiarity to an audience that might not be familiar with these acts?
I think every scene has that problem in the U.S. and that’s part of what we’re trying to address. Most of this music never made it outside the city limits, and for various reasons. Some of these bands never went on tour. Bands are short-lived, too, and if you do a record, it ends up in a stack of things that get sent back. In my mind, there’s some really good music here and nobody’s heard it.
What’s it been like rounding up old recordings and concert footage?
It’s very difficult. I’ve watched a number of punk documentaries and one in particular, All Ages, centers around the Boston hardcore scene and there’s an iconic album that’s SSD’s The Kids Will Have Their Say and it’s this iconic picture of the Massachusetts State House and there’s these kids running up the capitol stairs and it’s the perfect hardcore era photo. I’m watching this documentary and this guy says “Hey, it would be great if we had the contact sheet of that day’s photo shoot” and then they roll it out on film, and I’m like, shit, I’d give anything for some of these quality photos. We managed to track down more than 700 photos of varying degrees of quality, but man, it’s a struggle. Live footage was virtually nonexistent. There was one guy who had a VHS camera back then, and we got some footage from him. For The Tyrants, we’ve got one clip. Getting photos was probably one of the things I hated, the hassle of dealing with people. You’d ask them five times and never get anything. You’d get like three hits out of 30 emails. I have a feeling people are going to come forward after it’s done.
How many trips have you made for this project?
I’m down in Cudahy and it seemed like in 2013 I went up to Green Bay every weekend. For myself, probably about 100 trips. You try to get as much as you can. There were weekends where we’d have eight interviews, where we’d do two on a Fri, three on a Sat and three on a Sun, and you just kind of run with it.
Do you have any favorite experiences?
There’s a recording studio in Neenah, Dynamic Sound, and five or six bands from Green Bay and the Fox Valley had recorded there, and I was there on a recording session for one of Jim’s bands ’86 or ’87. Here we are back at this guy’s house, like the guy’s basement is his recording studio. 30 years later, I’m going into somebody’s house and I don’t really know this person. It’s always a unique environment and people are just cool. You see what their life’s about.
Neither of you have made a movie before.
It’s all DIY. [laughs] We’ve got a couple lines in the film that illustrate that. It’s just a small Sony HD camera, clip-on lights from Home Depot and a mic I got from Guitar Center. We did learn techniques going forward, and we didn’t get a lot of locations because a lot of these places are torn down so we’re going to have to rely on a lot of photos.
The time period you’re focusing on coincides with when the Packers were pretty crappy. Since it’s impossible to completely separate Green Bay from its football franchise, what has that identity done for your project?
Bart Starr’s son Brett actually played in The Tyrants. There are interviews where it’s like “The Packers were pretty crappy and then here comes Brett Starr to save the day.” The Packers are the underdogs of the NFL especially before Lombardi, and we kind of think of the punk scene here as the underdogs compared to Milwaukee or Chicago or Minneapolis.
I imagine you’re sick of answering this question, but where are you in the post-production process?
We’re really picking up steam on the editing. I would say a month and a half ago we had a film that was about 10 hours long [laughs]. Now, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of half that. We’re getting there. It’s starting to take shape. Because Jim and I haven’t done this before, it’s a learning curve. How do you deal with the story in your head and get that idea to the people editing it together?
And finding a through line with all this content you’ve found.
Right, with 85 interviews. And I’ve got 61 pages of notes. Honestly, I think we’ll have a final cut done in the fall. And there’s so many punk rock documentaries already, what makes this one different? Green Bay has ties to the Packers and it was a small scene that ended up blossoming into a destination point for bands. There’s this weird sort of self-deprecation to it where we never did take ourselves too seriously.
- You can follow the progress of Green Blah! at greenblahfilm.com