Pick up this splatter variant of Bad Brains' 'Quickness,' limited to 500, exclusively in our stores.

We've teamed up with Bad Brains and Org Music on exclusive vinyl variants of each release in their extensive reissue campaign, and today we're excited to reveal our clear with white, red, and black splatter variant of 1989's Quickness, limited to 500 copies. The audio was remastered by Dave Gardner, and it comes on 140g vinyl. Order yours now before they're gone. That's a mock-up of the variant above.

We're also now stocking the book Finding Joseph I, the oral history of H.R. (from other members of Bad Brains, Guns N' Roses, Black Flag, Living Colour, 311, Fishbone, the Wailers, Cro-Mags, Dead Prez, Murphy's Law, P.O.D., Michael Franti & Spearhea, Ian MacKaye, Questlove, members of Sublime, The Deftones, and more).

Darryl Jenifer spoke about Quickness in our recent interview with him:

Well, that's like a New York record, right? We lived in New York, we're in New York and we were New York at that point. Also, HR was doing his thing, him and Earl, with their reggae group, but being in New York and being on the Lower East side, there's a community down there with John [Joseph] and Harley [Flanagan], we were all family, and Mackie [Jayson]. Mackie was our drummer because as far as I'm concerned, I was the first cat to see Mackie play in the club A7. I thought, "Wow." What he was really doing was interpreting what Earl was doing, but he had his own way of doing it because it was New York and he was learning and feeling it and discovering it from Earl, and Earl discovered it from the Ramones or something or The Damned.

So you've got the Bad Brains, and we're kicking it, and then little groups are starting up in the city, and Mackie was one of those drummers who I thought was the man. So me and Doc, with no singer, we started making riffs. Those riffs, if you listen to that album, it's like every day, we'd walk downtown where we were rehearsing in the financial district. For a year almost, we made these riffs and we would practice these riffs between this place downtown in the financial district and this theater on the West Side where we used to rehearse a lot – myself, Doc, and Mackie. We were all in the prime of our lives. I must have been about 27, Doc was about 29 and Mackie was probably about 20. We were kicking it. We're the Bad Brains and then Mackie, and we were making these riffs, but because it's Mackie, it's a little bit more metal. And so I kinda dug that because I like tight, as far as the riffs that I write, I write them with tight corners, which is not a good thing all the time, that I went on to learn as well in terms of chemistry and sound of music and dynamic. But personally, that's just what I like, tight corners.

[…] A lot of work went into that record. That record was in the prime of our lives. We didn't have singers. We were using a cat that we knew from the Lower East side named Taj [Singleton]. What happened was when we went to record the album with Taj, [Ron] Saint Germain, after we were in the studio for a while, he pulled me and Doc to the side — and I don't think I've told this story and this is a real story — and said to us that me, Mackie and Doc [sounded like we were] like chasing this singer down on the train tracks or some shit. You could see it and feel it in the music. We were like, "Damn, what do we do?" Then we reached out to HR and he said, "No problem." He was our big brother, so we said, "Well, we'll see what big brother wants." I believe that HR wrote that whole album in a night or something. To be honest with you, that's something that rock and roll people should know, I think HR wrote that whole album in a night by listening to each song and writing what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.

Read the full interview here and stream Quickness below. Pre-order our splatter variant while they last.

—