Austin's hardcore heroes: The Offenders

Central Texas' fiercest punk band could only have come from the worst city in Texas

The Offenders at Camp Ben McCullough. Woodshock ‘86 photo Jerry Milton.

In the late ‘70s-to-mid-’80s, Austin was lousy with punk bands, but the most intense of the lot was the Offenders. With J.J. on vocals, Tony on guitar, Mikey on bass and Pat on drums, they were such a whirling menace of aggro-brotherhood that everybody gave them the last name of their band. Tony Offender’s guitar was like a gush of water- three feet high and rising- and then you had J.J. Offender turning punk rock cliches into fevered calls in the darkness (which called back twice as hard.) If you came to an Offenders show to see and be seen, they’d expose you in 20 seconds and send you clinging to the back wall. “Mommy!”

The Offenders were as good as the touring hardcore bands they opened for because they also had a rhythm section as fiercely locked-in as two Rottweilers fighting over a fat piece of rope. They were every members’ first band, so they didn’t know any other speed than relentless.

I saw them at Voltaire’s, a basement club beneath a bookstore at 4th and Lavaca, on my first week in town in April 1984, and it was the only time I ever slam danced. Some skinhead blindsided me and stood over, taunting, before pulling me back up, but I rejoined the fray with less fear. You can’t hurt me, the music said, any more than I can hurt myself! But getting everybody’s cold sweat all over me was the yuck factor that made me one-and-done in the pit.

Offenders at the Skyline Club. Photo Geoff Cordner.

The Offenders made records, too, including the Paul Leary-helmed We Must Rebel (1983) and Endless Struggle (1985), produced by Spot. These albums hold up to the ear, but not to the live show. You had to see J.J., (“Allright you motherfuckers!”) in a sea of fists to hear him better. Here was a band put on earth to tell the world that Austin was not soft.

J.J. Jacobson was hardcore to the end, living in a homeless encampment behind the HEB on William Cannon, when he was found dead in 2018 at age 52. He joined the Offenders in late ‘81, a 16-year-old juvie veteran from Houston who sold drugs to pay for his own. “Most punks came from the white suburbs and just pretended to be oppressed, but J.J. had street cred in spades, and it resonated with the kids,” drummer Doyle told David Ensminger in a 2018 Trust magazine overview of the band that remains a cult favorite. “I think his first song was ‘Fight Back.’ After that, stuff like ‘We Must Rebel’ and ‘Like Father Like Son’ and ‘Wanted by Authority’ just rolled off his notepad like there was nothing to it, like they’d been waiting in the wings for years.” The poetry was not in the words but the authenticity.

The band’s heyday was only four years, with the strangled swan song at Woodshock ‘86, the one at Camp Ben McCullough. Two of the members were drug addicts and two weren’t, an equation that never works out. One of the junkies went to prison and the other to San Francisco.

Killeen’s home of punk and metal imports, like the Offenders.

The Offenders story begins in Killeen at Renaissance Records, a hotspot for European metal and punk imports, owned by Dave Spriggs. An ex-GI who played drums in the Ideals, led by Fort Hood short-timer Davy Jones, Spriggs hired Tony Johnson, a tall, wiry guitar player the kids called “Lurch” behind his back, to work the counter. Everyday customers were Mikey and Joe Donaldson, who had the loudest record collection in Bell County. “Let’s start a band,” suggested Tony, who was six years older than Mikey, originally a guitarist who idolized Rory Gallagher. Donalson brought in Killeen High classmate Pat Doyle, also 15, who didn’t own drums, but it didn’t matter if you had a military ID. The trio got together at the Music Center on Fort Hood, where their fathers were stationed, renting a soundproof room, complete with drums and amps, for $3 an hour. They bashed out some Ramones, some Clash, some Hendrix, with Donaldson playing bass like a guitar a la Lemmy, and Doyle following him best he could. Tony had riffs to kill in his arsenal. Maybe these guys had something.

It was 1978 and Tony would come down to Austin for punk shows at Raul’s. “What should I name my band?” was a good pickup line for a guy from Killeen, but one annoyed woman sniffed, “you should be called ‘the Offenders.’”

Early Offenders in Austin. Davy Jones, in the foreground, often sang with the band and wrote the lyrics to anti-anthem “I Hate Myself.”

The Offenders first gig was at Por Que No, a Mexican biker bar on the outskirts of Killeen, with the Ideals headlining. Both bands trickled down to Austin in ‘79 and ‘80. The Offenders’ original singer was Davy’s friend from Arkansas, Mick Buck, who had just come back from London wearing clothes with all those zippers. He had befriended Joe Strummer, which was all the resume needed for the gig. The first Offenders single “Lost Causes” b/w “Rockin’ the Town” had a sped-up Clash sound.

The band debuted at Raul’s in June 1980, but they’d become a different band the next year, influenced by the hardcore thrash-speed scene. The Big Boys came back from a West Coast tour preaching the gospel of faster, louder and harder, and embracing anti-music industry ideals. Suddenly everyone was over at Inner Sanctum buying records by Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fear and Flipper. Fuck new wave!

Tony, J.J., Pat and Mikey reunited in 2002 for a show at Emo’s. Photo Austin Chronicle. It was the last time all four played together.

Doyle says the March ‘81 show by Black Flag at Raul’s, three weeks before it closed, was “ground zero for Austin’s hardcore scene.” Also galvanizing were D.O.A.’s Hardcore ‘81 and the Let Them Eat Jellybeans compilation on Alternative Tentacles. Reaganism was the enemy! The Dicks were already there, but Dave Dictor’s Austin band the Stains became the more politically radical MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), who sounded a lot like Black Flag.

Dictor’s R Radical label released the first Offenders LP We Must Rebel in 1983, but gave the band an even greater profile by including “Face Down in the Dirt” on the International P.E.A.C.E. Benefit compilation LP. In there with the biggest names of hardcore, the Offenders held their own. They always did.

The band had an in with Rabid Cat Records (formerly Frodo), owned by Tony’s girlfriend Laura Croteau, the mother of their two kids, and Stacey Cloud, who put out the “I Hate Myself” single (lyrics by Davy Jones) in 1984. Though active only five years (‘84-’89), Rabid Cat put out 24 records by the likes of Scratch Acid, Not For Sale, N.O.T.A. and Texas Instruments.

Offenders photo by Bill Daniel.

With Die Kruezen of Wisconsin and D.O.A. from Vancouver serving as brother bands, the Offenders flexed their power from coast-to-coast. The members who had apartments moved out in 1985 with plans to tour the entire year, but they ditched dates in Arizona and California and were back in Austin within a couple months. “J.J. and Mikey had gone off the deep end on drugs,” Doyle recalls. “Every show we were scrambling to find J.J. He’d just disappear.” Mikey was the brains behind the band, says Doyle, and J.J. was its soul, but speed and heroin and crack cocaine destroyed what they had.

Donaldson moved to S.F. to play bass in Sister Double Happiness, a truly great band with singer Gary Floyd from the Dicks. He lost weight, but not in a way you’d compliment.

Doyle, who plays with hard rock band Ignitor (featuring Jason McMaster on vocals), is the only surviving member of the Offenders. Donaldson died in Barcelona in 2007, after finally kicking heroin, but not alcohol. Johnson passed away in 2012 after a 20-month battle with lung cancer. He was honored with his name on the marquee of the Paramount Theater, where he worked as a janitor for 30 years.

Folks were always trying to help J.J., who was in prison or homeless his last 20 years of existence, but he thrived on chaos, and a life of no responsibilities besides having to get together the money, by any means necessary, to get high every day.

If you saw the Offenders live, consider yourself lucky. They were there at the intersection of punk and metal and hardcore, and just floored it.

FURTHER READING:

A harrowing essay about the ‘80s Austin punk scene by Kristin Casey (not her real name):

“…though I’d never heard of crystal, when JJ Offender turned out to be her dealer, how could I not let that punk rock James Dean stick a needle in my arm?”

Original Offenders singer Mick Buck is now head curator at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.