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samcave · 4 years ago

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(Last) Street Punk

1992 - Let In Life

When I was 12 years old, my Mom and I moved from Washington DC to Boston.The move tore me up. I was old enough to register the fact that everything was about to change, and I knew I would never see my friends again. Different reasons were given for the move, but I didn’t want to hear it. Mom had a better job and nicer friends in Boston. DC was too dangerous. We would be closer to the rest of the family.

Maybe I had some anger issues already. I was a child of divorce, and had only met my Dad once or twice. There was anger and resentment at home, because my Mother had grown up rich and felt a sense of entitlement. She quit every job she had, making the excuse that the job was beneath her or the boss was corrupt. When she was angry, which was often, she would make the rookie parenting mistake of comparing me to my ‘lazy’ father who was ‘a shell of a man’ - which is basically telling the child that they are by proxy lazy and worthless.

We rented the first floor of a duplex in a nice suburb and I was enrolled at a posh middle school in Cambridge. It was a stereotipically liberal Cambridge environment. The education pushed multiculturalsim and gay and lesbian awareness, not by introducing kids to people

Up until that point, my musical taste and knowledge revolved around hard rock acts like Guns N Roses and Motley Crew, but in the preceding year I had also discovered Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam. This music was pretty mainstream and easy to find, even though we never had cable or MTV.

School really sucked from the start. Most of the other kids were bonded already, having spent years together in elementary school. They ignored me or bullied me in the hallways. Everyone was Jewish and I wasn’t. I was a small, runty kid with a Tony Hawk flop and flannel shirt a la John Connor from Terminator 2. I had no friends. It was hopeless.

Finally a handful of kids took an interest in my hopeless life. One of them had a shaved head, Doc Marten boots and a Minor Threat t-shirt. The others dressed normally. Somehow at 12 years old they had all gotten into punk rock and hardcore music. I think one kid had an older brother who may have gotten him into it, but with the others it seemed to have happened on its own. I had never heard of Black Flag, Minor Threat, Screaching Weasal or any of the other bands they turned me onto.

My new friends knew about New York Hardcore like Agnostic, Sick of it All and Gorilla Biscuits. They knew about DC stuff like Fugazi and Dag Nasty. They also knew about Taang Records, the local punk label that was home to Slapshot, Mighty Might Bosstones, Sam Black Church and earlier bands like SSD.

On Fridays my friends and I would make the walk from school to Harvard Square. We would visit Newbury Comics, Second Coming Records, and the Taang store which at that time was above the Million Year Picnic comic store on JFK Street (it later changed to a different location down the street next to Charlie’s Kitchen). Newbury was amazing - they had CD’s from all the bands we were into, plus a ton of T-Shirts from punk and hardcore bands. Best of all, Mark McKay from Slapshot worked there! Every time I went in I would chat with Mark, and he would tell me about different new punk releases that just came out. He was kind of like a mentor during those early days - recognizing the young kids in the scene and taking time to give them ‘props’. One day he called me over to the counter and handed me a bunch of Slapshot t-shirts left over from tour. What a nice guy. I wore the shirt with the classic bulldog design for years - in fact I’m wearing it in the photo on the back of The Trouble CD, taken during the infamous show at the Marlborough Street church.

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