Bad Brains Before the Lightning: Are You Ready, March 1979

Bad Brains arrived with the kind of energy that makes a room feel too small. *Are You Ready: The First Studio Recording (Inner Ear – March 1979)* takes us back to the beginning: six songs recorded in Arlington, Virginia, including the first studio version of “Pay to Cum.” There’s something wonderful about that title sitting here, still ahead of the single, ahead of all the reverence, just another song four people needed to get onto tape. Imagine having this in your hands before you knew what Bad Brains would become. Imagine trying to explain it to somebody.

The whole thing runs under fifteen minutes. A perfectly reasonable amount of time to rearrange somebody’s understanding of punk rock. “Don’t Bother Me,” “Black Dots,” “Migraine” - even the song titles suggest elbows, interrupted sleep, somebody standing much too close. These recordings precede the later 1979 session released as *Black Dots*, putting another small, combustible piece of the band’s history into reach. And thank god for the smallness of it. Six songs leave very little room to get comfortable. You barely have time to find your footing before the needle is heading for the runout.

What makes early Bad Brains so compelling is the strange relationship between velocity and freedom. H.R.’s voice gives you that feeling of somebody climbing onto furniture during an otherwise ordinary conversation. The band can turn a corner together while still making you worry about the wheels coming off. Underneath the aggression is an almost unreasonable appetite for playing, for finding out how much movement a song can hold. That’s the attraction of going this far back: getting close to the moment when those possibilities were still being discovered. A basement-sized space for an enormous idea. Somebody should probably move the lamps.

Listen and order here.