Erich Gliebe, the head of America's biggest white power record label, has driven eight hours from his home office in Cleveland to the middle of North Carolina. He has stocked the trunk of his 1991 Pontiac with CDs, magazines and a shiny pair of Doc Martens. This is an important trip. This afternoon his latest signing, a five-piece punk band called Definite Hate, will play its first gig. In two weeks, its debut, Carolina Sons, will be back from the pressing plant and available on the Resistance Records' website and through mail order.
So far Gliebe's dealings with the band have been over the phone and with Josh, the 23-year-old singer. After years of struggling in punk-rock obscurity, Josh discovered the potential of white power—or hatecore, as it's also known—which merges '80s thrash with lyrics so harsh they're illegal in some countries. Hatecore welcomed Josh and his bandmates with its Caucasian arms wide open. The group had little more than a name and a demo tape and had never played live, but soon Definite Hate had scored a record deal and a slot at a Klan music showcase called Nordic Fest and had been offered a European tour. The band members don't expect to get rich or ever do 'shrooms with Carson Daly. That's for sellouts. They're content to rock out behind the white-supremacist message that got them a record deal.
Graham, North Carolina, is as small-town as Sheriff Andy. But today Mayberry has visitors. After lunch a group of young neo-Nazis in swastika T-shirts gathers in the town center for a Confederate Memorial Day rally.
Josh and his bandmates, who live three hours west, are late, so Erich Gliebe heads to the demonstration alone. Six feet three and athletically trim, he wears a green shirt tucked into his jeans. His hair is middle-class neat. Within a half hour, the young Nazis are joined by about fifty aging separatists who've come ostensibly to remember Robert E. Lee and the men of the "War of Southern Independence." In reality, the events focus on today's fight: against Mexicans, blacks and the media-hogging Jews. And the events serve to remind these fine white citizens that in twenty-first century America, they are the real victims.
"There's an attack on our heritage, and ethnic cleansing, if you will, of our people's symbols, our monuments, our holidays," hollers featured speaker Ron Doggett, a representative from NO FEAR, a group ran by Klansmen-turned-gubernatorial candidate David Duke. The crowd boos as Doggett name-checks the enemy A-list: the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center. He honors the memory of Michael Westerman, who was murdered in Tennessee by a group of black men, according to Doggett, for having a Confederate flag on his car. "We all know about Matthew Sheppard in Wyoming, we all know about James Byrd in Texas, but not many people know about Michael Westerman."
Though it hasn't rained for weeks, the skies suddenly grow dark. Rain soaks the assembled as they take a moment of silence for Timothy McVeigh. They huddle under the courthouse overhang as a rally organizer encourages the group to join the caravan of pickups headed to the Ossipee Ski Lodge for a special treat: Definite Hate. The band arrives at the rally just in time to shake hands with the president of its record label, before it departs with the caravan. Before long, it'll be time to rock.
···
Josh is wiry with bright blue eyes, a buzz cut and a collage of tattoos. Rhett, the second singer has a beard, an accountant's paunch and hair long enough to comb. Bassist Dave is quiet, an electrician who is glad the band will never crack the mainstream. "If we did, I'm sure some gang in New York would want to whack a few skinheads," he says. Rhythm guitarist Ben is, at 17, the only member not in his early twenties. He politely declines to be photographed; he doesn't want to jeopardize his college scholarship. Lead guitarist Brent will be a daddy soon. He runs his hand over his young wife's bulging belly. "I'm a little nervous," Brent says, smiling, "but at least I'll have a little Adolf junior in my arms."
Josh and Brent were alienated teenage punks when they met. Brent landed in a juvenile facility before his fourteenth birthday. Josh nearly died of an overdose of pills. The two moved in together in their late teens, and their bond grew stronger when they both embraced white power, a decision that cost them most of their punk friends but brought them a new family of sorts.
For Josh, the transformation from aimless, angry punk to disciplined, angry white separatist was gradual. As a kid, he didn't know why his granddaddy wouldn't let him play with a black friend from school. By his late teens, he began to understand. Using racist teachings as his guide, Josh took his experiences—an underqualified minority beats out his girlfriend for a scholarship, black coworkers appear to get special treatment—and filed them in his growing dossier of white victimhood. He already owned the sound track, from the seminal white-power band Skrewdriver. "I had these thoughts in my mind," he says, "but when I heard Skrewdriver, it was like some big Paul Bunyan motherfucker came up and booted me right off the fence."
Josh's punk bands had never amounted to much, but Definite Hate would be different. About a year ago, the band made a demo on a friend's sixteen-track and sent it to Resistance Records. Erich Gliebe called a few weeks later. There are a handful of white-power labels, but Resistance is special, the Interscope of hatecore. Its owner, William Pierce, founded the separatist organization National Alliance and wrote The Turner Diaries, the novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh. With their website, Internet-radio show and glossy magazine Resistance, Pierce and Gliebe were offering instant visibility.
Gliebe told Definite Hate he was mailing a contract. "It was," Josh says, "the most exciting day of my life." A deal with Resistance isn't about money: Though the label paid the $2,000 in studio costs, it offered no advance, no video budget and no cut of the merchandise. Definite Hate received $1 for every disc sold. (Resistance's best-selling release, Rahowa's Cult of the Holy War, has sold about 25,000 copies worldwide.) Signing with Resistance guarantees exposure. The label secures gigs and offers the only dependable storefront for selling white-power CDs, www.resistance.com. It also provides prime real estate in Resistance magazine. By the time of its debut, Definite Hate had been featured in a two-page spread. Without a blip on Soundscan, the band received an instant network of couches to crash on, comrades to purchase CDs and fans willing to drive six hours to see a band they've never heard.
George Burdi recalls hatecore's appeal. In the early '90s, Burdi founded Resistance and led the popular white-power band Rahowa. He has since denounced his racist past and formed a new band with a Jewish guitarist and a black bassist. Burdi no longer has a record deal.
"They're rock heroes in their little town," he says of Resistance's bands. "Their interviews are printed in twenty different languages. That's quite a bit for some poor kid. Do you know how it makes some 18-year-old who has self-esteem problems feel? Holy jeez, I know how it made me feel."
Gliebe, the ultimate networker, carries a palm-sized notebook with him wherever he goes. He takes the names of aspiring musicians and promoters and adds them to his other lists: of potential fans and record buyers and of promoters willing to pay his bands' travel costs for overseas gigs. Europe remains a white-power stronghold: Monthly shows in Germany draw thousands of skinheads, whereas American events attract only a few hundred. Gliebe knows the American audience for punk is limited, but there's no limit to the potential audience for the racists views he's pushing. That's why he's working to branch out into other genres. "Something that sounds a bit like Godsmack or Smashing Pumpkins," he says.
Gliebe admits the lyrics on some Resistance records are harsher than even his own racist views, but he knows harshness sells. "A lot of white kids are attracted to rap because they talk about killing cops and women," says Gliebe. "Sometimes we have to do the same thing. It's like hitting them over the head with a hammer."
_A fan shows off his ink. _
The Ossipee Ski Lodge sits in one of the ever shrinking pockets of Klan country in the American South. There was a time when blacks wouldn't dare approach these parts. Now they drive by, sometimes honking in protest as they pass. The lodge is a low cinder-block building with booths and pool tables inside, a concrete patio outside. The walls are decorated with Confederate flags and NASCAR photos. Above the bar hangs a noose around the mask of a black woman with oversize bogeyman features. Outside, a few dozen skinheads mingle with fifty or so older Ossipee regulars, drinking beer and sifting through Gliebe's table of Resistance products. A Johnny Rebel tape from the 1970s plays over the PA. His racist rebel songs provided a white-power fix for an older generation.
Around 4 P.M. Definite Hate sets up. Josh hoped their record company boss might surprise them with a box of fresh-pressed CDs. No such luck. There is good news, however. The band is wanted in Germany.
"Go to the post office," Gliebe tells Dave, who, like the rest of the band, has never been to Europe. "Get a passport if you can."
Gliebe takes a seat on a bench at the end of the patio to hear his newest acquisition. Definite Hate slinks onstage while most of the audience is busy picking hot dogs off the grill and refilling their beers. The band blasts into a ragged hour-long set, playing much of its debut album—"White Blood," "Unite Fight," "Til Victory"—and white-power covers from Skrewdriver and the Midtown Bootboys. They even jam to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son."
By now the skins have put down their hot dogs and gathered around the band to shout encouragement. When the boys play their catchy theme, "Definite Hate," the crowd picks up on the call and response. Definite! Josh screams. Hail! the skins shout, shooting their arms toward the sky in a Nazi salute. Hate! Hail!
···
The local police show up twice during the set, the first time a black cop waits by the car as his partner tells the bar's owner to keep it down. The second time, a red-haired officer spies Definite Hate and yells his request. "Play 'Free Bird.'"
The boys abide, sort of. They play their anthem, "Heart to My Nation." The six-and-a-half minute song is marked by a series of builds and crashes, a grungy Sturm and Drang. By now they've won over their audience, most of whom are stomping around in circles, oi! style.
Rhett takes the lead, his voice growling in and out of tune. At first the news is bleak. Our heritage is fading / Our people have turned back. By the end, he's howling redemption. Our heritage is growing / Our people fighting back. Josh pounds his drums leading the skins through two verses of chants. Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
···
As far as William Pierce is concerned, he's in the media business. Resistance Records is part of a communications network that includes a publishing arm and a weekly Internet-radio show. Music is a tool to spread his alternative history—one that casts Hitler as a hero and the whites of the world as victims. There's a war going on, and Pierce wants to enlist the kids who grew up on the outside, in the rural America pop culture forgot.
"Imagine what we could do with these millions of aimless young white people if we owned MTV," the 68-year-old Pierce told Alliance's Cleveland chapter in 1998, months before purchasing Resistance. "The thought of white rap makes my skin crawl. But we need to be open to just about any idea that will work for us."
Though he might not have much in common with the people who buy his records—Pierce has a Ph.D. in physics and listens only to classical music—he says he understands them. "You know the kids in this country are pissed," says Pierce, speaking from his compound in Hillsboro, West Virginia. "They feel there's no future for them, and they're mad as hell. I share their anger."
As the sun goes down in North Carolina, some of that anger is beginning to show. Gliebe has left for West Virginia. Doggett and the older racists have also gone. The beer has been flowing all day, and the skins begin to wrestle, pushing and shoving one another for no apparent reason other than that they're goofy drunk and in the company of men.
They interrogate anyone they don't recognize. Where are you from? What's your heritage? What's your religion?
"You're a fucking Jew," a kid in a goatee shouts at one of the strangers. "From the fucking ADL!"
One of the skinheads tosses out an idea. "What if we get a nigger and bring him back here for the camera?"
One of the older bar workers standing in the midst of this mess looks nervous. They aren't his kind of racists. "I don't think we're going to have them back again," he says, peering into the dark parking lot full of cranky skinheads.
···
The next day, Josh is worn-out. The night didn't end smoothly. The band members drove home, Confederate flags draped around the van, and got into a tussle in the black part of town. Somebody shot at them, as best as Josh could tell. Suddenly, the cops were on the scene. A search turned up plenty of open beer bottles but no guns, so the police let them go home.
Now it's lunchtime Sunday, and Josh sits in the living room of the $500-a-month apartment he shares with Dave and another guy. He's nursing a Bud and blowing his nose. Wads of toilet paper pile up on the coffee table. He perks up when he relives Definite Hate's first gig.
"This is what I've wanted since I was a kid," he says. "To get my music out."
The apartment is well-kept. On one bookshelf, Mein Kampf sits next to Angela's Ashes. Another wall features a seven-foot glassed-in cabinet that displays a few prized possessions: a rare Skrewdriver twelve inch and miniature Nazi tanks.
Josh insists he isn't a violent guy, though on the Definite Hate album he screams for a race war to take down the "nigger women" who become "baby factories" and the "chinks and spics" who steal our jobs. He sings longingly of when the "fucking Jews burn again."
Does he really mean it? Josh backpedals. "I'm not going to exterminate somebody just because they're black or Mexican, but Mexico's for Mexicans," he says. "We want our own land. Like the Jews want their own land, they want the Palestinians out, same thing. We want our own land."
His tattoos tell his story. On his right ankle, there's the hardcore anarchy symbol, which he got when he was 13. Above the mark, his leg once read FUCK RACISM—a punk relic from a more innocent time that he's since blacked out. On the center of his chest, he has the SS lightning bolts. On his right arm is a skinhead on a cross. It's symbol, he says, of the persecution he faces. But he doesn't get political now. All the rage, the beer-fueled aggression, the let's-get-a-nigger talk has dissolved. Josh has goals: to finish his community-college program and get a job as an electrician, to get married and have kids.
Still, Josh can't stop thinking about being onstage.
"My biggest high," he says, closing his eyes, leaning back and drumming the air, "is when I'm onstage and I'm playing. I'm looking around; there's people singing along. I know that with this music I'm in now, I'm not going to have thousands and thousands packed to watch me play. But those few people who are out there that I'm touching and waking up? Man, that's the ultimate high you can ever think of."