After a good game of phone/email tag, I finally got together for an interview with Brian Orr.  The vocalist of Smiling Sacrifice, Brian was a regular fixture on the scene, even before he got started performing.  We set up by the dumpster at Wyatt Earp Records (fortunately the smell wasn't too bad) for the interview, as it made a nice back drop with the stickers and rusty metal.

I wasn't super close with Brian back in the day, but very familiar with him, and Smiling Sacrifice.  That is one of the cool things about the Flint punk scene back then, you might have not been tight with everyone, but everyone knew that all others were at hall shows for the same reason, supporting local music and the scene.  As a result, it was like a big family, everyone welcome.  Brian validated this feeling during our conversation.  It's funny, as I conduct more interviews there are a lot of common themes that keep coming up again and again.  The organic community that was formed by all hall show participants is one of those things.

The sense of community is one thing that set the Flint scene apart from scenes in other cities.  There was such a wide variety of musical and personal styles.  Music like hardcore punk, swamp rock, metal, grindcore, new wave.  Personal styles like skinhead, skater, punk, poseur, preppy.  At a hall show you had a pretty good chance of experiencing any and all of these styles, and no one really thought anything of it.  In a larger scene like that in Detroit, you would go to a punk show, and see punk music and see punks, or a metal show at a metal club with headbangers.  Very little cross pollination.   Likewise, if there was a big show in Detroit, and a group or groups from the Flint scene went, there was a feeling that if trouble started (and in Detroit, there were occaisional run-ins with trouble makers) there were people who had your back, because you were from Flint.

As for the support of the scene, it was not uncommon to see many (maybe most) of the crowd show up for the first band, and stay through the last band, and even help load equipment or clean up.  As Brian explained, there is more of a sense these days that people simply show up to hear the one band they like, and leave when they are done.  Joel Rash also brought this same thing up when I spoke with him.  More and more, people are connected to others through various social networking patforms, and you can learn about music through various methods, again on-line.  That is great, but it doesn't build a real community in the way that the Flint Hall Show scene did during the '80s. You built friends by actually meeting them and learning that you have things in common.  You learned about new music by word of mouth, or by going into Wyatt Earp's and hearing a new record that Doug was playing.  You shared things like how to be mature and responsible when you broke up a fight, or cleaned up a hall after a hall show.  These weren't things any of us were thinking about at the time, but looking back these real life things were organically embedded as a result of this shared experience.

Smiling Sacrifice, Live at Fallout Shelter 1987

Smiling Sacrifice, Take No Prisoners TV Show 1990

Smiling Sacrifice live at Hot Rock Cafe 1987

Courtesy of The Flint Underground Music Archive