GLEN "SPOT" LOCKETT IN THE CRUCIBLE OF L.A. PUNK
Glen “Spot” Lockett's career began with a riot. It was 1979, and Lockett was at an outdoor show for L.A. punks Black Flag at Polliwog Park in the South Bay seaside town of Manhattan Beach. Lockett had been playing occasional gigs as the bassist for the group (then called Panic) for the better part of a year, killing time between freelance writing assignments and low-wage service jobs, but it was on that afternoon that he first saw the band’s music drive the crowd into a rolling boil, and all hell break loose.
As Black Flag kept playing, and the audience kept fighting, Lockett had only one thought, as he would recall in an address to the Red Bull Music Academy: “I got to record this band before they get killed.” It was one of those destiny-defining moments that musicians are powerless to resist, and it would set Lockett on the path to becoming the foremost producer of the Los Angeles punk scene—and a figure whose influence extended to such artists as Nirvana, Green Day, Rancid and far beyond.
It was a surprising turn of events for a 29-year-old Los Angeles kid, who just a few years earlier had been listening to synth-heavy prog-rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Even more surprising, looking back from our vantage point 44 years later, is the fact that the man who would become the formative record producer of a quintessentially white music scene was Black. But it was typical of Lockett, who over the next two decades would come to shape the sound and style of the genre that would take on the name of hardcore. Lockett’s work would be a bridge from the inclusive, diverse influences of his youth into the grunge, punk-pop and college rock scenes that would color the countercultures of the coming years. Paradoxically though, his work would also be one of the first steps in segmenting and siloing the punk scene, making that kind of musical diversity ever harder to find.
Paradox, however, was par for the course where Glen Lockett was concerned. Spot was born and grew up in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles, part of an influx of Black families that migrated to South Central L.A. throughout the ’50s and ’60s. Partly as a result of those shifting demographics, by the time Lockett was a teenager, L.A. was a heady melting pot of musical styles that hadn’t yet hardened into firm lines of genre, audience or color. A vibrant (albeit deeply segregated) jazz culture that had started in the 1940s continued to flourish out of Redd Foxx’s Jazz Go-Go club. Doo-wop soul like that of The Olympics and punchy Black pop by the likes of Billy Preston sat side by side with a burgeoning white garage rock and psychedelic scene that, by the middle of the ’60s, had made Crenshaw its epicenter, and the border between the two musical cultures was anything but firm. Black L.A. artists like Richard Berry and The Rivingtons saw their songs (“Louie Louie” and “Papa Oom Mow Mow” respectively) covered to far greater success by white rockers, who in turn offered inspiration to Black genre benders like L.A.-based Sly Stone. And, meanwhile, Arthur Lee and Love were using their sparse output to foreshadow a coming wave of music, combining mid-’60s psychedelia with propulsive drums in a way that would raise eyebrows among future punks. This was the Los Angeles of Spot Lockett’s formative youth.
Growing up, Lockett was deeply receptive to the fusion of local musical styles, and it may have been this that drew him toward prog rock most of all. By the early part of the ’70s, bands like Yes and Pink Floyd were capturing Spot’s attention. “I was really enamored with a lot of what I guess you would call progressive rock,” Lockett would later reflect. “That whole era with concept albums, when jazz fusion started happening, before it turned into bullshit.”
But Lockett was like a frog in boiling water: he was deep enough into his scene of choice not to see how fast, and how malignantly, it was changing around him. As the experimentalism of the early ’70s curdled into the heavily-produced arena rock of the decade’s later years, Spot found himself less and less enamored with the music he’d adopted as his own. Something needed to change, and in the final years of the decade, it did.
Spot had first become aware of the term and the notion of punk sometime around 1977, just as the scene was beginning to crawl out of its East Village origins and become a countercultural force. But it was a run-in at a vegan restaurant that finally brought it home to him. Lockett was waiting tables to pay the bills between freelance assignments for the local paper Easy Reader, when Greg Ginn, Black Flag’s leader and songwriter, decided to confront him over some prog-friendly reviews.
Ginn didn’t immediately strike Spot as an impressive figure (“He was just an awkward nerd who was very opinionated,” he would later recall), but his words cut deep. So did Black Flag’s music. Lockett was looking into the face of a style that was, at last, recapturing some of the thrill and terrifying unpredictability that had gotten him into music in the first place. In short order, he was jamming with the band at various gigs, sitting in with them in the studio and, following that fateful riot at Polliwog Park, going behind the mixing board to produce Black Flag’s second EP.
The result, 1980’s Jealous Again, was a revolution in recorded punk rock. Punk had always been about ruthless energy, of course, but earlier studio albums had, surprisingly, tried to downplay that tendency in favor of a certain ’70s gloss: The Sex Pistols celebrated debut Never Mind the Bollocks owes as much to T. Rex as to The Ramones. Jealous Again was something else: a furious—seemingly artless—explosion captured on magnetic tape. The critic Robert Christgau would sum it up memorably: “Black Flag are committed to rage, not in itself… but as a musical principle. Five songs, seven minutes, as arty as no wave.” Paradoxically, that kind of raw chaos required an intense amount of studio labor to capture, with the band often spending all day with Lockett grinding out countless takes.
The eponymous title track is emblematic of the early Lockett style: a mix seeming, at first listen, to consist wholly of a driving guitar riff and the frantic, shouted vocals of Ron Reyes. But the simplicity is deceptive. Spend a little longer with the record, and you’ll notice the deliberate, precise musicianship behind the chaotic façade—a tight, rehearsed rhythm section with nary a missed drum beat to be heard and guitar work that, while always averse to the flashy theatrics of more polished genres, never fails to hit its mark. It’s a sort of bottled chaos—the heat of a supernova without any of its cosmic unpredictability. It was punk rock in a package fit for Alternative radio.
Jealous Again’s success led Lockett into a gig as the house producer for SST Records, the label Ginn had founded initially to put out Black Flag’s music, but which soon expanded to encompass all the major groups of the burgeoning L.A. hardcore scene. There, Spot set the ground rules for one of the key evolutionary branches of the music that was crawling out of the primordial soup of first-wave punk. On records for bands like The Descendants, The Minutemen, Dicks and Saccharine Trust, Lockett’s style was loud, raw, fast and chaotic. Spot loved nothing more than preserving those unanticipated moments of wildness that happened to emerge on record, as with the accidentally clanged drumsticks that show up midway through the Minutemen song “Fanatics.”
Not surprisingly, that kind of spontaneity required an intense level of recording time. Lockett’s self-professed goal was to capture on tape the experience of hearing The Minutemen live, and that meant consciously avoiding any instrumentation or ostentatious arrangement that would have been unfeasible in concert. Studio trickery, Lockett would later say, “would have taken the soul away from their art. They weren’t a band that should have been overdubbed.” But the only way to bottle spontaneity was to repeat it, over and over again, take after take, ad nauseum, until the precise tracks could be found. On The Minutemen’s album The Punch Line, Spot would reflect, “I had to make so many cuts to put 18 songs on this damn thing.” The method, while paying dividends, also tended to irritate artists like crazy.
Case in point were Minneapolis-based punk darlings Hüsker Dü, who had gotten onto the radar of SST after a couple of auspicious singles. The band’s Spot-produced 1984 album, Zen Arcade, was a landmark in alternative rock. Spot’s singular production approach was still there, keeping things confined to live takes in the studio, with no extraneous instrumentation or arrangement beyond the band members on their own instruments. At the same time, it was wedded to an increasingly ambitious and melodic songwriting that saw Hüsker Dü pushing itself into new musical avenues. “The entire session, from basic tracks to final mix, was roughly about a hundred hours. Which is not very much time at all,” Spot would recall in an interview years later. “None of it was perfect. But we just had to get it done.” The conflicting instincts would give the album the same enticing combination of stripped-down noise and capable craftsmanship that was creeping into the sound of groups like the Replacements during the same era. Lockett wasn’t just helping to define what punk sounded like in the ’80s; he was foreshadowing what Alternative radio would be a decade later, too.
It was Spot’s high water mark at SST, but it was also the beginning of the end. As the ’80s ground on, Ginn and SST revealed themselves to be less reliable than artists had supposed: there were accounting issues that raised eyebrows and hackles, and a combination of organizational dysfunction and control over artists’ musical directions were taking a toll on morale. One of those issues at question was Lockett himself: When Hüsker Dü walked from the label in 1985, a key complaint was that SST had forced the group to use Lockett, against their wishes, as producer on their third album, New Day Rising. “We had no choice but to work with him. SST made us work with him,” drummer Grant Hart said.
That mutiny was followed by further disintegration: The Minutemen fell apart following the death of guitarist D. Boon that same year, and Black Flag self-destructed a year later. Appropriately, the heyday of SST was burning itself out as quickly as it had erupted. As much as Lockett was himself a flashpoint in these struggles, he was, he would later reflect, largely sympathetic to the artists’ position. He, too, was feeling a growing itch to branch out into more elaborate and experimental production styles that clashed with the SST sound. But helpless in the face of what he saw as label demands, he stuck it out for as long as he could. Still, by 1986, it was all over: Lockett was out from SST under unhappy circumstances, and his (and the label’s) golden age of punk production was done.
Lockett wouldn’t quite rest on his laurels for the following decades. Between the end of the ’80s and his death in 2023, following complications from a battle against fibrosis, he continued to push himself in different musical directions, in many ways attempting to recapture some of the early experimentalism that had influenced him in his pre-punk era. Moving to Austin, he found himself influenced by the Irish folk scene, and his own solo album, Unhalfbaking, from 2000, is a dramatic departure from the SST sound: an alternating set of stripped-down Delta blues and acoustic Irish melodies that might have teleported in from 80 years earlier. And yet, the hallmark of a Spot record is still there: the crisp, precise focus on live instrumentation—a sonic portrait of a small band in a dingy pub, into which all of us are packed.
Meanwhile, Lockett’s influence spread elsewhere. The grunge movement that emerged out of the burned-through wreckage of ’80s punk owed much to Spot’s records, and Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain cited Saccharine Trust’s Paganicons (one of SST’s notable releases) as a key influence on his work. For that matter, foremost grunge producer and engineer Steve Albini would go on to champion an ethos that was effectively Spot Lockett’s method writ large, calling (in his landmark Baffler magazine essay “The Problem With Music”) for a production strategy that captured the raw sound of instruments, understood the intentions of the recording artist and then got the hell out of the way. Albini would work not only with Nirvana, but with The Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey and Bush, and thus would the Spot Lockett sound become the sound of ’90s Alterna-
tive radio.
That the bands and producers most influenced by Spot’s career were almost uniformly white is perhaps an ambivalent fact to wrestle with. Lockett never spoke much about his race, or about much to do with his personal identity or upbringing, for that matter. And to an extent, it’s a net positive that so many white groups were driven to align themselves with the style of a Black producer. Yet at the same time, it’s symbolic of the way that, by the time Lockett left SST, the walls were closing in around the once-nebulous borders of the punk scene. What had begun the ’80s as a loose, intermixing combination of influences and styles, ended the decade by splitting into genres separated—by commercial demands or by personal tastes—into firm boundaries of audience, approach and color.
As important as it was, it’s tempting to see Spot’s career as a musical dead end: an intriguing might-have-been of a world where genres we know took on different, flexible shapes, and where post-punk and mainstream pop might not have grown up into such different worlds. But it’s more accurate, and fairer, to think of his work like a tiny preserved flame of a raging bonfire that was once Los Angeles punk. The energy and volatility that fueled SST Records and the hardcore punk culture couldn’t possibly have lasted. But thanks to Spot, we can still get close enough to feel the heat.
