The first real rock show that I ever
went to was to see Helmet and the Rollins Band at Metropol on August
17th, 1994. This was at a time when I was completely
unaware of Punk Rock and knew absolutely nothing about the music that
would later come to save my life on more than one occasion.
At that point, and for the next few
years, the local Modern Rock station was still informing me on the
music of the day. I had no idea how limiting that was especially
since it was around the time of the great Clear Channel takeover of
Pittsburgh. I knew there was this world of underground music but did
not know how to access it from the bubble that I was living in.
I would see flyers for shows stuck on
phone poles while on the bus to school but had never heard of the
places where these shows were held or how I would get there if I did. I was stuck going to larger club shows and outdoor shows where there
was always a barrier between the bands and the crowd.
Pittsburgh has always been a tough
town for all ages shows due to the archaic liquor laws in the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This made it rather difficult for me
when I was underage to see any local bands that were worth their salt
or any smaller touring bands since they would always end up playing
at bars or clubs that were always more interested in selling booze than music. And how dare a person under the age of twenty-one express
an interest in seeing live music. The best I could hope for was the
Sunday night, all ages, grab bag of bands at The Electric Banana. And that was always a tough sled. For seven dollars, one could see a
handful of different bands all playing their first or second show.
I went to a few shows at the Banana to
see people I went to high school with play to varying degrees of
success. And by success I mean that all of the band members showed
up so they were able to play and then managed to make it through each
song they tried to play. As awful as those nights were on the ears,
those shows were the first time I saw that no one needed to ask
permission from a grown up to play in a band beyond calling up the
club and asking for a spot on the calendar.
As for house or basement shows, I
didn't even know that was a thing that could be done let alone
finding out where and when they happened. In order to do that I
would have needed to have had friends that knew the people that put
those shows together. I didn't have any friends to begin with. I
had no real friends at school and I lived in an isolated, dying
neighborhood with no one around my age that cared about anything but
sports and throwing rocks at each other.
Living in a house where I grew up with
the “seen and not heard” philosophy of parenting to go along with
a mountain of Catholic guilt that has been passed down from
generation to generation, nothing creative was even remotely
encouraged. I'm not even sure what I was expected to do with my free
time when I was a kid other than sit quietly and stare at the walls. Having anything to do with music would have been seen as foreign and
forbidden. Not only would it have been considered going down a path
towards temptation or some silly bullshit, it made noise and would
disturb the king of the castle so even listening to music was a
difficult thing to do. Creativity was seen as abnormal and would not
lead to a life of being employed as a cog in the capitalist machine.
So of course when I crossed paths with Punk Rock, I fell for it hook,
line and sinker.
Since growing up well adjusted wasn't
in the cards, most of my social interactions would end in alienation
and me sitting by myself in a corner. Trying to fit in just to make
friends always backfired with similar results. As I started
scratching the surface of Punk Rock, I started realizing that this
music was being made by people that didn't fit in either and their
music was their statement of rejecting the rejection. Not fitting in
was alright and there was nothing wrong with being an outsider. This
music had started me down the path of being myself and not caring if
anyone else was okay with that or not.
My first serious pipeline into Punk
Rock came from a chance meeting of one of my sister's friends at a Butthole Surfers show at the local outdoor “amphitheater” which
was really just a fenced off portion of parking lot with a stage at
the end. After that, he had a new show buddy and I had a new source
for music because of the tapes he would hand me when he'd swing by to
pick me up.
These tapes and shows were my first
encounters with Nick Cave, the Melvins and other less palatable types of
music that had no chance of airplay on the local stations. Even
though I wore these tapes out they still sit in a box with the ticket
stubs from the shows we went to.
Around the same time that I found
employment at a sandwich shop, the record store that became my dealer
opened down the street from it. Brave New World was located at 406
S. Craig St, in Oakland. After my shift of slinging ham on rye, I'd
stagger down the street and hand over damn near my entire paycheck. That's where I slowly started to amass my collection of Stooges, Clash, Ramones, Motorhead and Black Sabbath records. My curiosity
knew no bounds. Anytime Spahr and Robbie, the guys that ran the
store, would say “Hey, you might want to check this record out,”
I would take it home and give it a listen.
More importantly, Brave New World was
where I was able to pick up the records of all those local bands that
I saw on the flyers while my bus was stuck in traffic. Aus-Rotten, Submachine, Anti-Flag and countless others. The records that these
bands put out were further evidence that you didn't have to ask
permission to put something that you created out into the world. These bands were from my town and they were putting out records and
getting in the van to go from town to town playing shows. These were
things that I would never have the courage to do because of my
anxieties, depression and inability to get out of my own way.
It was also around this time that one
of my coworkers told me that he was in a band and asked if I would
want to go see them play the next time they had an all ages show. This was my introduction to the metal band Crayon-Death. When I saw
the band play the first time, I couldn't quite wrap my head around
what they were doing due to the awful PA that was in the club so I
didn't really have a reaction to what was going on.
A few weeks later, I was given a tape
with a handful of song demos that would eventually end up on their
album Three Sixteen. I put
the tape in when I got home and as soon as it ended I flipped it over
and listened again. By the end of the night, I ended up making
another copy of the tape to listen to knowing full well that I would
wear out the original. I was hooked. I went from not knowing how
things got made to possessing music that had not been released yet
and was still being refined. And on top of that, the songs sounded
really good to my angry, teenage ears.
By the time the
band called it quits, I was lugging gear, taking photos and recording
their shows with a Mini-Disc recorder. Working for that band in a
limited capacity got me on the other side of the barrier and I wanted
more. But then life got in the way.
I didn't have
enough money to leave town for a writing school out West and then the
sandwich shop job went away while I was trying to save up to get out
of here. Into the capitalist pit I went, taking a day job in an
office just to stop the parental nagging that would occur on every
encounter all because doing something different or being different
would never be understood.
I would still work
a show here and there if someone I knew needed a hand but the days of
heading out three or four nights a week to clubs and bars were over. The next thing I knew, it was twenty years later and I was a single
parent with a mortgage. Living the American Nightmare of
work-sleep-work-sleep until I die of boredom from a low to no impact
existence.
Through
all of the ups and downs, the records kept spinning. I can credit
the voice of Joe Strummer for single handedly getting me through the
long, hard slog of navigating the family court system. I even
listened to his solo album Earthquake Weather on more than one occasion and that record is a tough listen.
Punk Rock has
always been there for me. Even now, as I'm entering what I am sure
is a mid-life crisis. Instead of buying a sports car or a motorcycle
as some people do when they freak out and start panicking after
having noticed a large chunk of their life has evaporated into the
ether, I picked up a camera to drag out to shows with me so I can
start taking pictures of bands again. And now that I have invested a
large amount of money in this enterprise, I have more motivation to
get off of the couch in order to justify buying the goddamn thing.
Breaking the long
held habit of limping into the house after traffic has its way with
me and then allowing the depression to win until it's time to head
back into traffic in the morning has been proving rather difficult. That's why I am eternally grateful for the sonic onslaught that is Killer Of Sheep. I will try to see that band whenever I can. And luckily, Submachine still plays on a regular basis which is even more
incentive to leave the house. This town will never understand how
fortunate we are to have two heavyweight bands such as them. But
then again, they're not one hit wonder cover bands so the majority in
Pittsburgh wouldn't be able to grasp the concept.
Having come to the
long overdue conclusion that the nine to five world was not for me, I
picked up the pen again and started creating on my own. Getting out
to shows when I can so I have something to write about other than the
bizarre interactions that I have while in an office environment.
Locked
into the corporate life out of financial responsibility was making me
physically ill and I could feel my mind rotting away. Sitting around
and waiting for the next day to be a repeat of the one before became
intolerable. It was time to stop waiting for me to give myself
permission, to get out of my own way. To stop staring at the walls
and find some sort of creative outlet. I've got a house full of
records and books that were created by people that had something that
they wanted to say.
I'm not sure what
will come of it, if anything, but I'll keep writing even if I can't
tell if the words are any good. I don't even know if people have the
attention span to read anything anymore. But none of that matters,
I'll keep writing because I have to. Toiling away in my tiny corner
of the internet just to prove to myself that I'm still alive.
The bands, the
music and the places where it happened might not mean much to most
people and can be seen as disposable but they carry a lot of weight
with me. Some people “grow up” and leave Punk Rock behind
relegating it to the dust bin of so called childish things. That's
alright. I'll pick up the slack for them and that means more records
for me. If there is ever a day that Singles Going Steady by
the Buzzcocks doesn't sound like home to me, that will be the day
that I start worrying about my personal well-being.
Punk Rock has
always been the armor that I use to get through my day to day which
has been taken out of my control. Now I use it as motivation to take
back some semblance of control and put something of my own back into
the world.
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