Green vinyl, with poster. Seeing what an integral part Tom "Pig Champion" Roberts is to the legacy of POISON IDEA, it might be hard to imagine the band ever existing without his six-strings of fury leading the way. But when they first started out in 1980, the band's line-up consisted solely of Chris Tense on guitar, Helmet's Henry Bogdan on drums and founder Jerry A. Lang on vocals and saxophone. It might also be difficult to fathom them not coming out of the gate as a blazing hardcore punk unit, yet when they first started out, they were more inspired by the challenging and disjointed sound of New York City's No Wave scene than anything coming from the west coast of America. "The No Wave stuff was hard to understand and kind of scary, so that's what made it interesting" tells Lang, "But when that first wave of hardcore hit, it hit so hard. It was breathtaking, so I was like, this is what I want to do now". Ditching Bogdan and gaining Dean Johnson on drums, the band set out to be one of the first hardcore punk bands in Portland. Sadly, recordings of their first incarnation have yet to surface, but due to the tireless efforts of Mark Rainey and his TKO empire, we can now get an earful of their first stab at hardcore sans Tom here on Pearls Before Swine: The Early Years Volume 2.