I don’t remember if it was before, during, or after the first, second, or third Genesee Cream Ale tallboy, but someone in a squatters’ mansion in Cleveland, Ohio, was bleeding. I do remember that it was after the fireworks were set off. It was after the first band but before the last band. It was before the office chair was slammed to the middle of the floor like the beginning of a professional wrestling challenge. I know this, because that’s what hit the kid in the forehead — the product of a slingshot waltz into the pit meeting corporate furniture hurled discus-style. The band, of course, didn’t stop (it never stops) and we were cool with it. The bloody kid didn’t mind either — he tore his T-shirt, wrapped it around his head, karate-style, and sat on his bicycle outside of the venue.
This was not the worst injury I’ve ever witnessed at a hardcore show. That honor belongs to the girl who got her eyebrow ring ripped out by a wallet chain dangling from a jump-kicking leg. It was, however, the worst injury I’ve witnessed at a hardcore show in over ten years, but that is mostly because I hadn’t attended a show in that amount of time. Just this past week I threw out a T-shirt from those glory days, though, to be fair, I hadn’t worn the shirt in quite some time: it was over twelve years old, and despite miraculously not having any holes, it did have some rather egregious armpit stains — the ones where the cloth is frozen in place, rendering any arm movement extremely uncomfortable.
I had hung onto the shirt because it was a custom Do It Yourself job for a local band show when I was in high school. The show was held at Ely Field — a public venue in downtown Lambertville, New Jersey. Playing at Ely Field was a big deal; while I myself was not the musician (with the exception of the 10th grade when I was the lead singer of a band for about four months—my biggest contribution being a song called “Abstract” that started with the greatest couplet ever sung: “Electrowave through my head / for a sec my mind feels dead”) I was very much involved in the music scene. The majority of our shows took place on a stage built by hand at my friend Blake’s dad’s house, which was located about a mile off the road. The idea of those same bands playing at a sanctioned gig excited everyone involved to no end: thus, the T-shirt — black with white lettering that read “BURN L’VILLE BURN” on the back. We were going to tear the place down. We were going to set it ablaze with the power of post-core and Gibson SGs and group sing-a-longs. We would then rebuild the city with our bare hands while some hardcore version of “We Built This City” by Starship would crunch through the montage. It’d be sweet.
Of course, after sitting through a few acoustic sets and West New Jersey’s premiere teenage classic rock cover band Daybreak, the majority of the crowds had departed by the time the bands in our scene started checking levels. We shook fists and slapped our chests anyway. There was a lot of sweat and very few girls. It was sweet.
The bands broke up and reformed over the years, and the venues changed: there was an occasional show at the King Buffet in Clinton where they’d line up chairs to serve as a makeshift barricade to protect the bands from the pit, and there was even another show at Ely Field, though I’m rather certain that it signaled the end of the Summer Concert Series.
I moved away to college a few years later with the typical freshman-year belief of “I am awesome and I am going to influence and educate these sheltered souls,” and at first, it got me somewhere. I met someone on the first day solely because I was wearing a “This is not a Fugazi T-Shirt” T-shirt. I made people respect my vegetarianism, and I even figured out how to make my refusal to eat meat mean something other than I was trying to impress a girl. I wrote Earth Crisis lyrics on the whiteboard attached to the door of my room.
Like most identity-search surges at the age of 19, it eventually panned out. At The Drive-In broke up, and you can only listen to Start Today a handful of times in a row, especially when the Buzzcocks cover and “Biscuit Power” were already on the first album. I started eating chicken because a steady diet of Doritos and cheese sandwiches just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I started drinking beer. I bought “Stankonia.” The edge had gone dull.
Or, should I say, I thought the edge had gone dull. The edge of the chair that buried itself into that poor kid’s face certainly wasn’t dull. It was sharp. There was blood. My first reaction, after horror, was awe. That, in every sense of the word, was awesome. As the shock of getting popped in between the eyes led to the kid touching his nose to confirm the fact that, yes, that was a chair, and yes, there is blood, the aggression reserved for keeping people in the pit was reversed as the kid was picked up and whooshed out of the room as if a space lock had been opened. I, too, was driven into some semblance of space and stillness. I needed it. The show went on.
There is some sort of guilt here – not in the sense of a skinny kid with a backpack getting sliced open, not in the sense that I have left all of this behind, but in the sense that I am attempting to categorize and place into context something that does not need categorization or another element of thought. I made the drive up to Cleveland with my former roommate Steve, who was born and raised there and has been going to these shows since before high school. We joke that Steve and I, around the year 2000, were the same person. No one believes us when we divulge this information, but it is true. While he is undoubtedly one of my favorite people on the planet, we’re more of a complementary duo than two peas in a pod, per se. Our fiction/nonfictional rap duo name would be either Sportcoat (me) and Jeans (him) or Cold Cereal & Hot Cereal.
So when we decided to go to an old-fashioned Cleveland hardcore show, it seemed incredibly necessary. And while we arrived with the idea of only watching one or two bands, we both kind of knew that it might be a long night. When asked if I had seen anything like this before, I was quick to remark that I had, but it had been a while.
On the walk from where we parked the car, where we passed the sketchy nightclub that had a sign outside that boasted “Enterteinment” in the form of a pool table, to the convenience store where I paid for my beer with pocket change, to the rear entrance of The Tower with what appeared to be a failed garden or a lazy sandbox, to the kid who was in three subsequent bands playing three different instruments, to the merch table, to the return trip to the convenience store—I was taking notes. I’ve never been one to take out a notepad and write down what people say, but my mind was being just as egregious as that person: making connections, plotting out generalities and similarities, etc. Immediately my brain went into comparison mode: the sketchy convenience store where we bought our top-fermented American 24-ouncers brought up images of a 7-11 in West Trenton where we bought dragon fruit Snapple and Fritos. The Genny Cream tasted like Pabst and death. Throughout the trip I kept trying to put my finger on what Cleveland reminded me of: Baltimore with neighborhoods, urbansuburbia, Chicago stripped of pretentiousness. The space reminded me of a bombed-out graffitied venue near Penn. The lead singer in the graduation robe and my high school girlfriend. The kid with the gash in the middle of his forehead and the eyebrow ring plucked from that girl. I went between moments of happiness and feeling that my happiness was unfair. These were different times and different kids — they did not deserve to be grouped with my own memories as they existed outside of the eyes of this stranger that appeared one day as “a friend from out-of-town”.
Perhaps this is the definition of selling out: this concept of juxtaposition between a life that once existed and the one that does exist. When Civ left Gorilla Biscuits, there was an uproar: his new band was as well known for choreographed jumps than playing shows. Dedicating an album to former Warzone front-man Raybeez just didn’t have the same effect if that album was coming out on (gasp!) Atlantic Records. The bands and the music got recontextualized: the music existed as a means to get to something. When Youth of Today repackaged themselves as Shelter and started pushing Hare Krishna, the kids stopped listening. This isn’t to say that music doesn’t have purpose, but the music comes first. Singing about a unified scene is fun: reading a zine about how the scene should be unified is not.
This is the issue with writing, and namely the concept of “thinking like a writer”. There is a desire to observe, to shape, to plot a future while the present is occurring. To sell out. While my brain processed these concepts, I thought: “I can’t wait to write about this night, about Cleveland, about the scene here.” But, as it turns out, I can’t: the whole night turned into my viewpoints of things, forced nostalgia where there wasn’t any. I did not grow up in a city. I did not drink alcohol. We would’ve killed to have a place like The Tower growing up. We didn’t have fireworks. That singer is nothing like my ex-girlfriend.
And while I would like to make a grand movement that this essay has absolutely nothing to do with Cleveland, Ohio at all, it totally does. Because there is something compelling about the ouvre of it all: to get almost everything right. It’s like when you dream about your house: everything is completely off, yet you accept it as your home, despite the colors of the walls being off and the floor plan being skewed. Everything is familiar enough to accept and adore.
And the real story deserves to be told, but not by me. It deserves to be told by those who lived it and continue to live it. It deserves to be told by Steve—and he fucking better tell it. Because if a Cleveland, Ohio hardcore show is so apt for comparison, people need to know that it is the benchmark. Despite my brain being clouded by home (and the smooth taste of Genesee) I was an active participant: and it was fucking great. I got hit with glass from a guy who looked like a villain in Streets of Rage when he smashed a Budweiser on the floor. I pissed behind a dumpster. I shoved my best friend into a swirling Scrabble bag of Vitamin D-deficient elbows. I took heart in the posi-lyrics. Like the house in the dream with the slanted floors, it felt right.
Thomas Wolfe famously claimed that you can’t go home again, and this is true. I have friends still playing music back in New Jersey, but I know if I were to attend a show I would feel out of place. I would want the old bands. I would want the old songs. Hell, I might even start comparing the show to the one I saw in May in Cleveland. Thomas Wolfe also said, “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” Replace New York with New Jersey. Replace Cleveland, if only for the time it takes to wrap up a busted open wound with home.
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