1994: A Look Back

This was written in 2014 and I am presenting it here without changes.

I think the thing I miss most about being young is how everything means the world to you. Every band, every book, every movie, every girl, every Saturday night – everything was HUGE. Every piece of art you loved perfectly captured how you felt at that moment and every next moment offered endless possibilities.

Finding punk rock was the single most influential moment in my life. I didn't know it at the time – a part of me assumed I'd grow up and be a square – but turns out, I'm the same guy in my 30s that I was in my teens, just wiser and more polished. Becoming a father might be the bigger moment, but punk rock has influenced how I parent. So, while my daughter being born is the greatest moment of my life, I am only the man she knows because of who I have been for all these years. I didn't become a father and become a brand new man; I'm the same guy I've always been.

This is my story as I remember it. There are a cast of characters and I have not changed any names. Though names have only been mentioned in positive moments (save one), I've chosen to protect the privacy of my friends in regards to any personal issues. If you were there, you might know who I'm talking about, but then again it won't be new information to you either. 

Today was an ordinary day. I left work and turned on Social Distortion's Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell like I've done 10,000 times before. At some point though, the thought occurred to me that it's 2014 – 20 years since 1994, “The Year Punk Broke” as Spin called it that fall. It was also the year my life changed forever because of it.

I've been weird and been picked on all my life. I grew up in Southern Indiana and wasn't a good basketball player, so I was never going to be one of the cool kids. By the time I got to middle school I was beginning to not care about fitting in. At that time, in that place, there weren't really cliques yet (not until high school) and every kid more or less dressed the same except me and a few others. I was already playing guitar and finding my own music, mostly grunge and metal, but listening to Danzig and other bands I'd see on Beavis and Butthead led me to read Rolling Stone and other magazines where artists would talk about their influences. Then, I'd go to the record store and find those bands. That's how, in the summer of 1993, I went to the local Karma Records store and bought The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and The Sex Pistols' Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

The girl behind the counter told me, “The Pumpkins are good, but I don't think your mom is going to like The Sex Pistols.”

That comment made me love the record before I even heard it.

As it happens, Nevermind the Bollocks blew my mind. I'd never heard anything like it. It sounded like I felt inside, disillusioned at 13. Angry. Frustrated. Outcast from my peer group. I felt saddened by the fact it seemed that punk had died with Sid Vicious. I didn't even know that The Ramones made more than two records at that point. No internet. Small town in Southern Indiana. I thought I was the only kid in the world into this shit. Sure, I'd seen Thrasher at the grocery store. I knew kids skated and it seemed these two things should go together, but they only featured old school SoCal bands like Fear and China White.

Sometime in early 1994 things changed. I saw the “Longview” video on Beavis and Butthead or 120 Minutes. I saw the video for “Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)”, “Salvation” and others on MTV. I said to myself, “Holy shit! There are other people in the world like me! I can fit in somewhere!”

In spite of the music being available, I still thought I was alone in my hometown. I wanted to move to the East Bay, start a band and play 924 Gilman Street. I spent the summer sneaking cigarettes like any 14 year old, listening to punk rock and playing my guitar.

My freshman year of high school started at the end of that summer and it was total culture shock for me. There were a ton of cliques: jocks, preppies, band geeks, wannabe gangstas, rednecks and what I first called, “weirdos” - which, naturally, I assumed I belonged with. In my health class I met Roberto and we bonded over our love of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral and Weezer's first record. We got picked on together and we talked shit back to each other. He invited me to smoke cigarettes with him behind Dairy Queen in the mornings before school with all the punk kids and I felt like the fat girl finally got asked to the dance. 

The next morning Roberto and I smoked and talked about the band we were going to form called Government Cheese. The issue was – we had no one else in the band, but it didn't stop us from writing songs or printing flyers. No one was overly friendly, but no one gave me shit either. I felt socially assimilated for the first time in my life, smoking cigarettes behind Dairy Queen before school.

Then one afternoon I ran into this senior named John at Karma Records. He recognized me from Dairy Queen and said hello. We started talking and I was honest about the bands I liked, but I said I still had no idea how much was out there. He took me through the used cassettes and asked me if I'd heard this band or that band. He helped me pick up a couple of tapes including NOFX's White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean. After that, John started giving me rides to school and buying cigarettes for me and we became good friends for a couple years.

I eventually found my way into the inner circle of the punk kids and realized that there was a lot of diversity even amongst us weirdos. My friend Aaron referred to the stoner kids, who were into Sonic Youth (what today we'd call emo, art-fag, hipsters, sort of), as Light Siders, and we referred to ourselves as Dark Siders. We wore mostly black and listened to a lot of darker music. Not that we didn't like Green Day or The Queers or whatever, but we listened to The Misfits, Samhain, Danzig, Gwar, etc. too. 

That year might have brought punk rock music to the masses, but punk rock culture was still not considered mainstream. You might have started hearing songs on the radio, but pre-internet, we were still so far removed from overnight culture change.  Every single day I was bullied and ridiculed for the way that I dressed or for the bands whose names I wrote on my backpack, with a Sharpie. Doc Marten's weren't viewed as cool in my town and Dickie's and Chuck Taylor's were “gay” too (ironically Chuck Taylor is from my hometown and graduated from the same high school I did but he gets no love in Columbus). And if I had a nickel for every time some asshole yelled, “Skate or die dude!” at me, I would make Bill Gates look like trailer trash. I got into a lot of fights. Few major fights, but every day I walked down the halls with my eyes and ears open for an oncoming punch or flying object. I credit this for making me street smart today – thanks jock assholes, you did me a favor.

The other kids may have been really nasty to us, but the teachers flat out just didn't understand us. Freshman year, my English teacher, Mrs. Schultz, pulled me out into the hallway to ask me about my failing grades. She asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told her I wanted to be a musician.  She told me I still needed an education.

With a straight face she asked me, “Do you think Michael Bolton made it straight to the top?” 

I laughed in her face and got sent to the Dean's Office. 

While we struggled with our peers, teachers and the town as a whole, our parents were actually fairly supportive. We weren't bad kids and I think they saw that. Ryan's mom let him hold shows in his basement where his band, A.W.O.L. would play along with Four Rose Society (Louisville) and The Know Nothings (Dayton, OH), Cody's mom would drive us around and help us anyway we needed to work on our zine, As Is. My dad would extend my curfew on Friday or Saturday nights if I was going to Indianapolis or Bloomington for a show. There was no way he would allow me to get a piercing, dye my hair, have a Mohawk or any of that. He had a shit fit when I came home with my first tattoo; but when it came to music, he allowed me to go to shows and have band practice at the house (so long as I did my chores first). Though I have to admit, the fact his girlfriend lived in Indianapolis and he was often gone helped facilitate my lifestyle as well.

Perhaps one reason our parents were somewhat cool with us is because almost all of us worked all through high school. Aaron worked at a drug store. Ryan worked in a photo lab. Geoff worked at Subway, Megan worked at the movie theatre, and I worked everywhere in town but mostly at Blockbuster Video. This allowed us to pay for our records, t-shirts, shows, gas, cigarettes and a stop off for food after a show.  Our parents supported us mostly, but only a few enabled their kids. Most of us took on the responsibility of work and were given the freedom that went along with it. It was accountability and self-reliance. We weren't going to wait for anyone to give us anything.

In 1994, things were still DIY. Do it yourself. There was no Hot Topic. We couldn't just go to the mall with our parent's American Express and buy 20 punk t-shirts, a chain wallet, spiked bracelets and blue hair dye. We went to the Wal-Mart pet supply aisle and bought a dog chain to make our own chain wallets. I also bought my Dickies there as well as the plain white t-shirts I often wore. We'd get our chains caught in the desks at school and have our teachers ridicule us. 

There used to be a thing called mail order catalogs. Any time we went to Indianapolis or Bloomington, we'd have to find a cool record store, take a chance on something based on its album cover (some CD's but still a lot of seven-inch E.P.s at that time) and then send off for the sampler from that small record label. Or, we'd pick up the latest copy of MaximumRockandRoll and browse through the massive pages of bullshit to find one ad or one interview that struck a nerve. Then, we'd get a money order from a grocery store and mail it off for the record or t-shirt (often without ever hearing the band) and wait for four to six weeks for the record to arrive in the mail. 

Mixed tapes were still popular too. Ryan made me a mixed tape early on in my freshman year and that's where I first heard Minor Threat, The Melvins, Sloppy Seconds and a few other artists I still listen to today. We also loaned things to each other – if you liked it, you dubbed it until you had the money or the opportunity to buy a copy for yourself.

I was 15 when I formed my first band, The Disgruntled Postal Workers. I lasted with them for more than a year before splitting over musical direction (yes, this even happens in teen bands), and I jammed with all my friends off and on until 1997 when I formed Dodge Ball with two kids I'd just met. We played our first show two weeks after our first practice in Megan's basement with The Barnhills, The Bruce Lee 3 and pleatherpants. People liked us, but Zach was so used to playing drums in his bedroom in an apartment complex that no one could hear the drums. We didn't care; we were in a fucking band! We figured we'd fix it and be the next Screeching Weasel. For the most part, we changed bands like we changed girlfriends. Amongst about 15 of us, in the span of four years, there were probably just as many bands with various combinations.

We put on our own punk rock shows, in backyards, in basements, in garages. And, if we were lucky, we got to go to shows at Rhino's All Ages Club in Bloomington or a show at The Emerson Theatre on the east side of Indianapolis. We spent weeks cutting up magazines and gluing together flyers before going to the library and making as many copies as we could afford. There was no computer program (or usually no computer) available to us to make nice looking flyers. It was like a grade school art project, the way it'd been for 15 years in the punk scene. As noted earlier, we often brought in bands from nearby cities: The Know Nothings, The Barnhills, Lynyrd's Innards, Don't Call Me Brian (Dayton, OH), Four Rose Society (Louisville) and many others.

On the night of the show, we paid $5 to get in, we saw five bands, and we bought records, t-shirts and stickers. We had our own little economy going. This was our church – our community gathering point. Back in those days the pit was controlled chaos. Not a massive circle of people like you see now, but a seemingly random set of movements, not unlike many other interactions in nature.  People went in and out, circled around and back out again. At larger shows there were stage divers. We'd catch them and carry them to the back where someone would help them down. If someone tripped in the pit, there were three hands reaching down to help them up before they got hurt. We took care of each other. It was the Golden Rule in practice – we wanted to be picked up when we inevitably fell, so we picked up everyone else who fell – even people we didn't like.

Punk Rock allowed us to be close to the music we loved in ways the kids into Dave Matthews could only dream about. We'd help our favorite bands load and unload their gear. We'd jump on stage and sing with them, and we'd hang out with them after the show. The accessibility of the bands meant that they weren't just our favorite bands, they were our friends. When Dodge Ball decided to cover “I Was a Teenage Stalker” by The Know Nothings, I couldn't decipher all the lyrics, so I called Jeremy, the lead singer / guitar player / songwriter, at home and he sat down and listened to the record with me on the phone and gave me the lyrics line by line. Imagine some kid in Birkenstocks with an acoustic guitar trying to call Dave Matthews on the phone to get the lyrics to one of his songs – there was no disconnect between fans and bands in punk rock. 

Those shows were where we met girlfriends and boyfriends and lifelong friends. Girls in our scene were a minority for sure, so we depended on those shows to meet new ones. In our group girls were outnumbered close to 10 to 1. That is not to say there weren't more girls hanging around, but there were only a couple real punk girls; girls who listened to the same music as us, who were in it for themselves and not just their boyfriends. Girls who dated us but weren't “punk” were welcomed because one, it was a small town and it was hard enough to meet girls as it is and two, to get girls to go out with weirdos like us was an even bigger challenge. We also were a pretty inclusive group as a whole because we thought “punk” meant being yourself – I had friends on the football team, friends in school band and friends at the top of the class. If they were cool enough to not be worried about being seen with me, then I really didn't care what music they listened to or how they dressed. We always appreciated individuality and weirdness no matter its form.

After the show we'd go to the local truck stop or greasy spoon diner and drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and talk. A lot of that talk was far more intellectual than our peers were having because we actually read books for fun. We read the Beats mostly it seems in hindsight, but we read a lot. We wrote poetry and songs and discussed life beyond the confines of the cornfields and small minds that we were surrounded by. We talked about moving far away from there and never returning. Those were the nights when all of us misfit kids belonged somewhere. 

Books were not a part of all of our lives, but a good majority of us were very intelligent. For my smaller circle, books were incredibly important. I read a lot of Kerouac, Bukowski, Wolfe, Hemingway, and Salinger as well as Oscar Wilde and philosophy and religion. We often sat in those diners silent, writing poetry, to then turn around and immediately share the latest poem with each other. We talked about the difference between learning and education. We felt like we were constantly learning, but our public school gave us very little education. Fortunately, at least one of my teachers agreed with us. During the last semester of my senior year, I had a 27 percent in my English class because the books we were reading sucked. One day my teacher, Mrs. Sturgis, pulled me aside to ask me about the book I was carrying (it was For Whom the Bell Tolls if memory serves me correct).

I gave her a quick rundown of it and as I was only halfway through it she said, “You have a 27 percent in this class. However, I'm supposed to teach you skills, not books, and you obviously have those skills. So, I'm going to give you a D- and pass you because I don't want you not to graduate on time because the books you were assigned bored you.” 

That was the moment someone else confirmed my thought that public education was a sham. 

I have had no mention here of anything worse than cigarettes and coffee, but alcohol, marijuana and occasionally other intoxicants were around ALL THE TIME and while I was one of the lesser offenders, I was exposed to it constantly and I did partake on occasion, mostly alcohol. It's not my intention to tell another "drugged out punk" story, but I want to be honest – to tell it like it happened.  We lost a couple kids to overdoses and we lost a couple to long-term substance abuse. There was at least one guy I know of who had serious anger issues and later abused the mother of his children. We were not a utopian collective; we were a dysfunctional family like any other. 

Was punk suddenly available to the masses? Sure. But those of us who became lifers, we were still the misfits. Did the prom queen own a copy of Dookie? Probably. But she wasn't one of us. Looking back, I can think of only one friend whose parents were still together. We all came from broken homes. One friend's mom was in jail. Another one's had died. As if growing up isn't hard enough as it is, the basic unit of society, the family, had failed us. That's not to say everyone had bad parents. Several of us, including myself, had great parents. But I was a teenager and my parents had just split and my mom immediately got remarried and started a new family. My dad was single for the first time since he was 16 and he was living the youth he never had. I was left somewhere in the middle. Punk filled that void. Not just the music, but the community.

The bell that was rung in 1994 is still being heard today. Most of my friends when I was 14 are still my friends today. It influenced my individualistic personal philosophy (which influences my politics as well). DIY – making things happen rather than waiting for things to happen, and when a stranger falls down in the pit, you pick him up. I still listen to that music. That music led me to other music that changed my life. Social Distortion is my favorite band of all time and I didn't find them until the following year. When my parents split, my dad's friend lent him his copy of Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell and it found its way into my room where I ate it up. For one, it alleviated some of the heartache of my parents' divorce, but it was also the first time I heard country/rockabilly combined with punk rock and I realized that this was the sound I'd heard in my head and needed to hear all my life. I was already doing punked out fast versions of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens songs, and that record spun my head the same way the Sex Pistols had just two years before. 

It's been twenty years - TWENTY. I no longer smoke. I'm married with a baby girl. I'm still an anarchist, still rebelling against government, and any other kind of authority I can find, but I'm a peaceful person who doesn't feel the need to scream “fuck you” at every person different than me anymore. Of course I still play in a punk rock band. I think I'd shrivel up and die if I ever gave up being 14 altogether.