"You gotta hear this one song. It'll change your life. I swear."
I've been a daily internet user since around 1995/6. I know now that my fascination with the information I could find online is connected to Autism. The communities of like-minded souls I found in chat rooms and discussion boards provided a type of connection I struggled to find in "real life." It was in these early days that I downloaded a tiny JPG of the poster for Akira and printed it on iron-on paper to make a homemade shirt. This act turned out to be one of the most profoundly important decisions of my life.
A tenth grader at church complimented it the first time I wore it. His name was Brandon, and we became fast friends. A few months later, one of the cool skater kids (Chris) at school came to choir class to accompany us on bass guitar. We struck up a conversation, ended up hanging out at a pep rally the next day, and very quickly became best friends.
I'd always had a passion for singing, poetry, and songwriting, and my musical taste was, like most teenagers, expanding at the time. I was only allowed to listen to Christian music, but most of the music I heard in youth group left me cold. I found a few artists I liked - mostly alt-rock like Jars of Clay, Skillet, Bleach, Smalltown Poets, and PFR - but there was a real sense of searching, of wanting more. Brandon, Chris, and I talked about starting a band, but we didn't quite know what it would sound like.
I was a pleasure to have in class.
Jackson Junior High School (named after exactly who you think; it was West Virginia after all) started a new disciplinary structure the same year I started there. If students violated a rule, they would receive a "violation". Each week you went without a violation, you got a "buyback" that would allow you to remove a violation from your record. At the end of each six-week grading term, halfway through the year, and at the end of the year, there were rewards for having no violations.
At the end of the third year, the administration was shocked to discover a small group of us had gone three years without a violation on our records, and it was decided we should receive an additional reward: a pizza party. The combination of Autistic rule-following, an OCD compulsion toward honesty, and a deep fear of Hell had finally brought something good into my life! At this pizza party, we were given gift baskets, which included a random gas station CD. I traded some of the candy to a classmate for their CD (Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors) so I could take both to the local record store and get something good. I had every Christian record I wanted (and every Weird Al record) already, but I figured I'd find something.
Brandon had recently shown me a record by a local band called Zao. They had just released their debut LP for Tooth and Nail Records. I wasn't in love with it, but it was all I could find, so I bought it. While it didn't change my world, it was, looking back, a further narrowing in on the thing I had unknowingly been seeking. I was intrigued by this heavier, more frantic sound, and surprised that such music was also made by other Christians.
"It was a soft summer night when you came into my life."
In late July, 1997, our youth group went on a trip to one of Ohio's many amusement parks. At some point, Brandon popped up from the seat in front of me, thrust his headphones out, and said, "Listen to this." Yes, exactly like the Shins scene in Garden State. The record he was listening to was the debut of a Virginia-based punk band called Ghoti Hook. When the drums started blasting in on "Body Juggler", I was hooked. By the end of a record that ran the gamut from manic-yet-melancholic longing love songs to silly songs about food and sumo wrestlers to , yes, songs about evangelism and mediations on death and eternity, the direction of my life had been irrevocably altered. This was like Weird Al, but heavier, and matched the anxious energy I had been told repeatedly by every adult in my life to tamp down. This music let me stim in a socially acceptable way. This was the music I wanted to write and play. This...this was who I was.
As soon as I could, I went to the Family Christian Bookstore in the mall (the nineties were fucking wild) to order a copy of Sumo Surprise. Turns out, UPS had just gone on strike, and it was going to be a while before I could get my hands on a copy. I called in a request for "Seasons" to the local Christian radio's two-hour "heavy music" show and taped it, wanting for anything to hold me over. That fall, I started what would become a near-comprehensive collection of Christian punk CDs.
My interest in piano had long been waning. I doubted I could manage the manual dexterity to play guitar. I had a habit of "hand drumming" (stimming I was frequently shamed for), and began to steal a few minutes on the drums at church whenever I could, before being yelled at to stop. The band we were planning needed a drummer, so I decided to try drums, getting a starter kit that Christmas. Brandon soon moved on to both hardcore and emo, but Chris and I had become obsessed with pop punk and skate punk, and we intended to start a band as soon as we could find a guitarist.
One day, Chris brought over a new friend he had made who had interest in playing with us. His name was Kris, and he said he played guitar. We are still great friends, and I was amused to learn later on that he had as much experience with guitar at the time as I had with drums, picking up the instrument to play with us.
This Is What The End Of The World Sounds Like
We started a band called Chaos Effect. I would later joke that we were street punk, because we were trying to be pop punk, but we were bad at it. This band would never be what any of us wanted it to be, but we had a blast over the next year and a half. It would lead to my first time recording music, my first time designing an album cover, my first time in a recording studio (this section's heading being the title of the resulting LP), and my first time playing a show (booked at a church by the singer of a straight-edge skate punk band called Late Start, JT Woodruff, who would go on to front Hawthorne Heights). It is through this band and these friends that I met my now-ex-wife.
Chris made me a mixtape of Green Day and Rancid songs with the swears edited out via a deft hand at pausing and unpausing while recording disc-to-casette. Brandon made me a mixtape with songs by bands like Face to Face, Fugazi, and Bad Religion (my punk friends always find it hilarious that "Raise Your Voice" is the song that began my love affair with Bad Religion). Face to Face's self-titled LP would be the first non-Christian punk album I bought. I became obsessed with this music. With the scene. I voraciously consumed every morsel of information I could find online and in magazines.
Most importantly, it was Christian punk bands who first introduced me to leftist politics. Five Iron Frenzy wrote songs about manifest destiny and the genocidal history of America. MxPx wrote songs decrying capitalism and Christian hypocrisy. Subsequently, Bad Religion recontextualized my nerdy obsession with vocabulary as something rebellious, something transgressive. Blake Schwarzenbach's bands merged my love of poetry with this sound. And from Green Day to The Promise Ring, I found a connection to something that wasn't built on such restrictive masculinity. Punk was a place where my growing antipathy toward the hypocrisy and compulsive conformity of the world around me was rewarded rather than shamed. Where I could thrash around in a room full of other damaged people in a collective mass of cathartic energy. I was not alone. There was a place in the world for me. It was the lighthouse in the fog.
I could, and will, write essays on all the many ways the toxicity of the punk scene and the music industry damaged me and delayed progress on my mental health. It's a world of broken people hurting each other as much as they're helping. But I don't know where I would have ended up without it. Would I have still ended up leaving home, expanding my horizons, and discovering the person I am today? All I know is this: I cannot say for sure I would be alive now if I hadn't found punk rock, and that's as scary as it is beautiful.
