The Cigarette Smoking Kid

Some of you may know that I used to be the vocalist in a hard-core band. It’s improper to call me a lead singer or anything like that, because when you’re in a hardcore band, you don’t sing. You do vocals. A local newspaper called Westword once said that I sounded like Henry Rollins in the act of being disemboweled, if that provides any context for you. At the time, I was very thankful for this kind of coverage but looking back I’m not sure that that’s quite how I like to hear myself described.Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the scene, it may be helpful to provide some context. Looking back at the history of music that involves distorted guitars, first you had rock ‘n’ roll, which eventually forked off into punk rock as one of the offshoots. Punk rock was fast, angry, and typically very politically driven. One of the other offshoots was metal. Metal was a little bit more theatrical. In my mind, I always associate punk rock with kids that can’t play their instruments and metal with those that can. They’re both angry, just in different ways. Hardcore sat almost exactly in the middle of both of those genres. Hardcore was born primarily out of the punk rock movement, but it had more of a moral character to it. It took the urgency of punk rock and instead of utilizing it to rebel against a political system, it always seemed to have some sort of a moral imperative driving the urgency of the music and the message.Within the hardcore scene, there were several other sub genres. I won’t get into all of them now, but the particular one that I was fascinated with and ordered my life around was called straight edge. Straight edge was a movement that found its rebellion positioned against the use of mind- altering substances like alcohol or drugs. It eventually broke off into other types of morality-based messages that included the rejection of sex and embraced veganism and animal rights.There was something that drew me to this hardcore movement. I can recall reflecting upon this with our guitarist one day. We were trying to figure out what it was that was so attractive about this particular genre of music. He popped off with.”You know what I like most about it, Max? It’s just so damn urgent.”And I think he hit the nail exactly on the head. There was an imperative behind everything that we did that drove us to express it musically with the most urgency and power that we could. It was kind of amazing. And it’s kind of funny how when we all grew up, we still maintained this type of urgent tone.Anyway, we had a fairly large following in a city that was a good eight-hour drive away from us. We really enjoyed playing there because it made us feel like rock stars. So we would go there quite frequently and we knew a bunch of the kids that came to our shows. This city in particular had a huge straight edge scene, and had earned its name of being a very militant scene as well. In other words, these kids took their straight edge oath, seriously, and they saw themselves as some sort of morality police. I took issue with this sort of militancy, but it was a very big faction within the subculture.One evening, we played a show there and we were headlining. The energy in the room was awesome. We were happy to be there and our fans were as well. We started playing. The crowd started moving. The mosh pit started forming. Our wall of sound kept pounding. We just let loose. The urgency was there. Maybe the urgency was too much though. Because about halfway through our set all of our equipment shut off. The club killed the power to the stage.The lights came on.Next thing we know police officers started parting the crowd like the Red Sea and made a beeline for the stage, followed by paramedics with a stretcher.Some kid was laying on the floor in front of the stage, bleeding. And guess why?He got stabbed. Stabbed at our show. Right in front of us and we didn’t notice because we were performing.That kid got stabbed because he was smoking a cigarette. After he was taken to the ambulance, the club just turned off the lights and turned back on the power to the stage and we started playing again. This was the wrong move. This dehumanized that kid on the way to the hospital. And I knew it and it bothered me that we were more concerned with playing a show than we were with this young man.So I stopped the show and started yelling at the crowd. “What the f**k were you thinking? What is wrong with you guys? You stab this kid because he was smoking a cigarette? What the f**k is wrong with you????”I almost got my ass kicked that night.I looked into the pit area and locked eyes with a guy. Then. another. Then another. Uh oh. These weren’t just hardcore kids or fans anymore, they were real people. People with the potential for either real compassion or people with the potential to start stabbing us too. Particularly me since I was the one calling it out. The room instantly polarized into two camps. Those who felt justified in stabbing this guy and those who were concerned with him. Looking back on this now over 30 years later I’m surprised a riot didn’t break out. It could’ve gotten really out of hand. People started yelling back and because I was the guy with the microphone I could yell the loudest. It also made me the easiest target.By the grace of God, nobody pulled out any more weapons. I said my piece. They said theirs. Well, we didn’t say it exactly, we yelled it. The point is, we got to the point where we realized we couldn’t resolve anything at a club without violence and we all recognized that we had two choices. We could either just shut it down and go home or we could finish out the set. We finished out the set.I don’t remember much about the eight hour drive home the next day. But I do know that it was somber. I thought about that night many times throughout the course of my life. I’ve thought about our guitarists’ observation that hardcore music was just so damn urgent. I didn’t know what the difference was between the urgency that drove our music and the urgency that drove that kid to stab someone just for smoking a cigarette. I’ll never know what was going through his head and I’m not sure that I understand what was going through mine either back in those days.With 30 years of reflection under my belt, I do know this. They weren’t too far off from each other. The feelings of urgency were the same. They were just pointed in different directions. One was pointed at a purpose and one was pointed at a moral code. One was an open hand and the other a fist clutching a knife.I’m willing to bet that not a single person in that room that night still calls himself straight edge. We all grew up. But what was it that brought us there together that night anyway? For some of us, the urgency that hard-core provided was nebulous, but it came from some sort of yearning for freedom. It was open ended. For the other half of the room, straight edge was a box or a framework or a cage. It was a fixed ideology. And that kid smoking a cigarette was outside of the cage. Looking back now, I realized something. The cigarette smoking kid had the most freedom out of anybody in that entire room. He was expressing his freedom and standing on top of all the cages we had built for ourselves. God bless you, man, wherever you are now.Peace to you,Max This is a public episode. 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