Your morning hardcore: "Bye Bye"... by Borscht

Borscht is one of the many NYC hardcore bands playing the A7 reunion Saturday at the Knitting Factory. Tim at Stupefaction will be playing bass with the band. Here's the original lineup doing "Bye Bye" circa 1983.

An A7 reunion

Tony Rettman has the story in the Voice on the A7 reunion show taking place Saturday at the Knitting Factory.

Located on the corner of Avenue A and East 7th up until its demise in 1984, A7 was — and still is — a place of legend. Agnostic Front, Heart Attack, the Beastie Boys, Urban Waste, the Abused, the Misguided, and countless others regaled the moshing masses at this shoebox-sized spot long before CBGB ever accepted them. And now that the entire Lower East Side is a fuckin' romper room, it's time for a reunion.

Co-promoter Bryan Swirsky considers Saturday night's event (subtitled "One Big Crowd," after an early NYHC compilation) both a celebration and a tribute to the "action-first" style prominent in the East Village underground at the time. "These weren't soft-handed kids from Iowa putting on a show in the most horrible neighborhood in Brooklyn to call it 'authentic,' " he says. "These were runaways involved in bad activity mixing with hardcore punks who were also rubbing elbows with curious suburban kids coming in for the shows. There was no irony dripping from the fangs of cultural vampires. There was no time to be a culture vampire back then. You just did it."