Click here for Duncan's website! Duncan is the dude. Destruct-a-thon is the band. Presenting spoken word performances is a daunting endeavor. Few can stomach the anxiety of being alone on-stage in front of an often unenthusiastic group of club goers. Duncan Wilder Johnson has been critiquing, entertaining, and dissecting rock culture since 1995. His work is delivered with high energy tirades about seeing epic rock shows, the simple lessons in life, and the thirst for fame through the music industry. Armed with brutal honesty and massive self deprecation, Duncan gives raw performances to show a whirlwind of catastrophic glimpses into American pop culture, especially Punk Rock and Heavy Metal music. Some have called him as "The Lenny Bruce of Hardcore." Destruct-a-thon is the new band which Duncan is fronting. Inspired by heavy rock bands like Motorhead, Kyuss, and Slayer, the quartet rocks out with conviction. Opening up for bands like Tree and Scissorfight, Duncan has turned loud rock fans onto his solo mouth of fury. He has played the Boston Freedom Rally (audience of 60,000 people), performed with Jim Carroll (author of The Basketball Diaries), Jello Biafra (Ex-Lead Singer of The Dead Kennedys), Marky Ramone (Drummer of the Influential Punk band The Ramones), and Angelo Moore (Singer of Influential ska band Fishbone). The Boston Phoenix, 8 Days A Week "Talkin' Metal" by Carly Carioli Duncan Wilder Johnson is something of an anomaly in the pantheon of rock-guys-turned-monologuists. The first generation of these, Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins, used their name recognition as the leaders of semi-famous hardcore punk bands to propel them onto a loose-knit postpunk lecture circuit. Johnson, though he is also a lapsed hardcore musician, has no such base to draw on. The last in his long line of bands broke up without releasing so much as a single; he finds himself releasing his first solo spoken-word album on a label that politely declined to sign him as a musician. Although he has self-published several chapbooks of poetry and other writings, he is not a regular on the local literary circuit. So if he succeeds as a "spoken-word artist" -- rock's official literary subgenre -- he would be among the first to do so without laying claim to either musical or literary talent. This isn't to say that Johnson's not very good at what he does -- only that it's hard to pinpoint what that might be. For one thing, he's extremely good at talking about Slayer. His account, on his new Heavy Metal Spoken Word (Wonderdrug), of attending an autograph-signing session by the high princes of metal at the Braintree branch of Newbury Comics works as gonzo rock criticism and also as a kind of narrowcasted stand-up comedy routine. As an art-school grad and life-long punk fan, Johnson falls into the most self-conscious subcategory of Slayer enthusiasts -- sarcastically skeptical and yet hopelessly devoted, equally as enamored of the idea of being a Slayer fan as of the music itself. He awakes "with flying-V guitars dancing in my head" and trundles to the mall, where "the elite youth of the South Shore metal scene" gather "like war generals meeting for council." Through Slayer, Johnson is able to capture the essence of heavy metal as teenage rock lust -- fast, furious, godlike, goofy, evil, and ultimately harmless. One of his best anecdotes is a parking-lot confrontation between the mulleted masses and a couple of lone punk-rockers, which he relates with an equally sharp eye for the latter's casual dismissiveness and the former's juvenile homophobia. He also speaks the language, with an unsparing use of the all-purpose verb "rock," and infinitesimal shadings on the pronunciation of "dude." He plays the roles of insider and outsider with such ease that the line between the two practically evaporates before your eyes. "I wish I was a slut," he declares in a segment that deconstructs his fear of romantic involvement, "but I'm just a kid who reads too much into Black Sabbath." Johnson grew up in Upton, near Worcester, and by the age of 12 he was immersed in the local punk scene. Inspired by Rollins et al. -- but also by the increasing difficulty of keeping a band together -- he began performing a combination of poetry, written observations, and off-the-cuff commentary at open-mike nights. "When the band wasn't playing, I went down to the Thursday night coffeehouse at the Espresso Bar and just read weird shit. Occasionally I would perform at hardcore shows -- I went on first and I would read these really loud, fast, aggressive pieces, and people dug it. Then I moved to Boston to go to Mass Art, and that's where I met Clay Fernald and Rich Mackin, and we started putting on shows." The three formed an informal collective, eventually releasing a compilation CD, On Tour Without a Band, through Johnson's Redbackpack mini-press. They have marketed themselves in much the same way, and in the same circles, as one would promote a punk band -- through photocopied flyers, and playing out-of-the-way places like basements and VFW halls and art galleries. Johnson and Fernald are about to embark on their second extended tour; on some nights they'll play with bands, on others with performance artists, and they'll make at least appearance at a comedy club. "The more DIY," Johnson says, "the better." |
