Sometime late last year, I blindly purchased a contemporary seven inch by a band who took their name from The Exploited’s second full length album, Troops of Tomorrow. It was a really confusing purchase on my part. So confusing that I put the thing in the “to listen” pile only to briskly flip past it every time I took a drunken traipse through. Today, I took the thing outta that pile and really wanted to know why the heck I bought it. I went onto the internet and took a look at the cover of that Exploited LP (I don’t think I ever owned the fucking thing) and as soon as I saw it, I was like “Oh my lord! That cover! That…cover…”

This is the point where everything should go wobbly and we go back in time.

Someone lent Troops of Tomorrow to my brother when I was ten or so and now I’m having a “Father Pickering touched me” sort of breakthrough as I remember it. I have this very distinct memory of the LP sitting by the steps in our living room one sunny Spring afternoon as I walked in from school. I knelt down and examined it until both my legs fell asleep. For a ten year old, there was a lot going on in that cover to take in. First and foremost, why did the one member on the far right–who I later learned was guitarist “Big” John Duncan–have a beard? Punks were allowed to have beards? It was cool to have a big fire engine red stripe going directly down the center of your head AND prominent facial hair? I might have only been ten, but even I knew punk was a totally non-beard movement. Very confusing. But then there was the single strip of blue hair on the side of singer Wattie’s melon. For some reason, I thought that was pretty damn cool. Somehow it cancelled out their Burl Ives look-a-like guitarist. Then there were all these zombie punks popping out of storefronts and sewers and trash cans behind them. Like I said, it was a lot to take in! The record was at our house for a few weeks at least and I would just sit there and stare at it–never mind play it–for what felt like hours. I started to tell my brother’s friends that my favorite Punk band was The Exploited. They thought that was cute, I suppose. A year or so later, I bought their third album Let’s Start a War with my own money. Later on, I convinced my sister to buy me their first live record, On Stage. Their cartoon-ish image was right up the alley of a ten year old who wanted to get into Punk.

A little further down the line, my brother actually started letting me tag along with him to shows and I soon found out: IT WAS NOT COOL TO LIKE THE EXPLOITED! To my very young Anglophile mind, the Exploited or Blitz were just as exotic and interesting as Crass or Discharge, but you just couldn’t like all of them! One glance at Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll would tell you that! Since I was the young, impressionable type who wanted to conform to this non-conformist society, I traded in all my Exploited vinyl while on a trip to Philly with my sister. And that was that.

When I was fifteen, I ended up being the Exploited’s merch person for a night in January of 1988. For some reason or another, these guys were doing a tour of the U.S. with no one to sell their shirts. The promoter of punk shows in my town asked a friend and I if we wanted to ‘help out.’ In our youth-crewed-out minds, the idea of being a merch person for some mohawked U.K. Punk band was the least coolest thing you could do, but the promoter promised some money, so we did it. From the get-go, the t-shirt sales were overwhelming, especially for two kids who were in remedial tenth grade math classes. We didn’t know what to do with all the cash, so we kept shoving it into plastic cups from the bar and putting them underneath the table. It was pretty early on in the evening that we started to skim a dollar here or there from the cups.

Also on the bill that night was a local skinhead band, The Uprise. Stupid me, I thought “Well, that’s a billing that makes sense.” I figured these American skinheads just wanted to be English anyway, so they must be into The Exploited. WRONG! It totally slipped my mind that The Exploited had that ditty “Fuck the USA” on the aforementioned Troops of Tomorrow LP. Apparently, the new wing of Pro-USA skins didn’t take kindly to that song. Never mind that the song was on a record that came out five or six years ago. Never mind that it was a song directed more at the government of the country than its people. Never mind THAT IT WAS JUST A STUPID SONG BY AN EQUALLY STUPID BAND. They had used the words “fuck” and “USA” together and for that they would pay.

These dudes and their crew came with an agenda. When The Uprise hit the stage, they had already duct taped an American flag over the Exploited banner. Also, after The Exploited did their sound check, they pulled the real rock star dick move of just leaving all their equipment up on the stage for the opening bands to work around. I remember the drummer of The Uprise saying something into the mic like “Don’t worry about us, we’re not as cool as any band from England who come here to take your money. We just live here and love it, that’s all.” The crowd cheered. This was not shaping up to be a smooth evening.

When The Exploited finally hit the stage, it didn’t last long. A gigantic (and I mean GIGANTIC) American flag was being waved in their face by throngs of skins who looked like they were climbing some human rope ladder to violent oblivion the way they were piling on top of one another. Spit was flying in every direction. Finally, a very bold fellow just went right up there on stage and–CRACK!–belted Wattie right in the face and dove off. And with that, their set was over.

It was then that I thought “Hey, we’re selling t-shirts for these guys. I hope we don’t get beat up ourselves.” My friend and I handed three of the four plastic cups filled with cash to the promoter (who was obviously freaking out) and said “Don’t worry about the money you owe us!” We hid in the Pagan Babies’ van and interviewed them for our fanzine. Outside it sounded like a war was going on. You could hear glass breaking and see bottles flying past the window. Pretty soon we heard sirens and saw red and blue lights piercing into the vans’ windows. We were in the van of a “neutral” band that had cool Side by Side stickers stuck up in it and we were talking about The Damned. Let the retards be retards.

When the interview was over, we stepped out of the van and took a look at the aftermath. All the windows of the Exploited’s rental van were smashed out. The U-Haul trailer they had connected to the back of it was turned over with “USA” and “WHITE POWER” spray painted on it. The cops had cleared the parking lot of the skins waiting around to beat the band up. For a brief moment, I could feel an eerie stillness. That was until my brother saw us and waved us into his car. I might not have been the biggest fan of The Exploited at this point in time, but I remember feeling really bad for them on that car ride home. Whether these guys were assholes or not, they were stuck in a foreign country with a smashed-out van and a trailer with racial epithets scrawled all over. What the fuck were they gonna do? I envisioned them driving through the ghetto of our hometown to exchange it. And what about all those suburban skinheads who tore up all that stuff? Those kids could laugh and joke and go home to their safe, sound homes to see Mommy and Daddy while these Scottish guys were totally screwed. All in all, it was a fucked situation to mull over in my head.

That was probably the last time I ever really thought about The Exploited until I saw the singer for the Olympia based Hardcore band Sex/Vid donning one of their shirts a few years back and thinking “Doesn’t he know that band isn’t cool?” And now I have this three song seven inch by the band Troops of Tomorrow spinning on the turntable, so I guess I’m coming into the realization that in the revisionist rear-view, all that cool/uncool crap doesn’t amount to a hill of pintos. It’s all grist in the mill of history for kids who never really had to endure big, dumb racist skinheads, but like to romanticize the hell out of it.

So, the actual seven inch by the band Troops of Tomorrow is pretty good. It reminds me of some of the more rough-around-the-edges singles released on Riot City by No Choice or Court Martial. And there is a slight Iron Cross feel to it; which makes sense since they’re from D.C.
And having just downloaded Troops of Tomorrow, the album by The Exploited, I’d have to say I’d rather listen to the band than the record.

That’s all. See you next week when I dissect the work of Vice Squad with a fine toothed bristle brush.