Al Barile, who played guitar in the influential Boston hardcore band SS Decontrol — a linchpin of the drink-and-drug-shunning straight-edge scene of the early 1980s that also encompassed Washington’s Minor Threat — died Sunday at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was 63.
His death was announced on Instagram by his wife, Nancy Barile, who didn’t specify a cause but said that her husband had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2022 and “passed away peacefully” with her at his side.
With songs that averaged about a minute in length, SS Decontrol — Society System Decontrol for long, SSD for short — railed furiously against what the members saw as the hypocrisy and the oppressive tendencies of government, the police and organized religion on albums such as 1982’s “The Kids Will Have Their Say,” which bore a cover photo depicting a group of young people storming the steps of the Massachusetts State House. The music was loud and fast, with pummeling guitar riffs that made the idea of a fourth chord seem like an immoral extravagance.
“’The Kids Will Have Their Say’ is so unsettling, so ugly, that SS Decontrol’s fans needn’t worry about their champs’ succumbing to creeping commercialism — not even accidentally,” Joyce Millman wrote admiringly in the Boston Phoenix in 1982. In the Trouser Press, Ian McCaleb and Ira Robbins called the band’s follow-up, 1983’s “Get It Away,” “a definitive hardcore classic.”
Alan Scott Barile was born Oct. 4, 1961, in Lynn, Mass., where he grew up playing hockey and “making Dracula movies,” as his wife said in a statement. Hearing the Ramones inspired him to start playing guitar, after which he formed SSD (while a mechanical-engineering student at Northeastern University) with bassist Jaime Sciarappa, drummer Chris Foley and singer David Spring, who was known as Springa.
“Al comes out and makes the big speech — and I remember this as clear as I remember my f— 8th birthday,” Springa said in a 2024 documentary about SSD. “‘OK, what this band is gonna be about — it’s not gonna be a groovy type of band where people go out on the dance floor and shake their ass. We’re making a statement here: It’s about anti-government, anti-society, anti-conformity and breaking down the barriers between the band and the audience.’”
In the documentary, Barile said he started SSD as a kind of response to famous Boston bands such as Aerosmith and the Cars. “It didn’t seem like it was real sincere, that kind of music — it didn’t seem like it had the kind of honesty and sincerity that I was after,” he said. The notion of spurning booze and drugs came from Minor Threat, which released its first EP in 1981 with a song called “Straight Edge,” in which singer Ian MacKaye sang, “I’m a person just like you / But I’ve got better things to do / Than sit around and f— my head / Hang out with the living dead.”
In her statement, Nancy Barile said the straight-edge philosophy “provided kids with a choice from the typical ’70s suburban party lifestyle.”
SSD put out “The Kids Will Have Their Say” as a joint release between the band’s Xclaim! Records and MacKaye’s Dischord label; for “Get It Away,” the band added guitarist Francois Levesque. The band put out two more heavy-metal-leaning LPs before breaking up in 1985. Barile later formed a group called Gage and worked as an engineer for General Electric. This year, SSD was inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame.
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