#live... suburbia!

With Reality Bites turning 20 this year, there's been a lot of reflecting on the movie, complete with quirky little listicles and other short form formats for our ADDed out brains. Lindy West had a fresh take for Jezebel, stating that the movie reads like a manual for "shitheads."

In 2011, Max G. Morton and I released Live... Suburbia! and the closing essay (which I've pasted in its entirety below) mentions the movie and has a similar slant. At the time I had re-watched the movie and thought about how if it was made now, Winona's character would have ended up with Ben Stiller, as these days everything is about money and not integrity or art. Blanket statement sure, but relatively true.

It's the reason why a band like Fugazi, wouldn't work now, no matter how many good songs they write. They'd get a quick bump on some sites, be the must see band at SXSW/CMJ, and by their second album, no one would really care, because there were another 200 new bands to replace them and blog about.

Maybe we all grew tired of being broke from chasing ideas and ideals, or maybe the whole earnestness/slackerdom of the '90s was pretty lame to begin with. I'd say it's a combination of everything I just mentioned and a bunch of other shit, and that leads me to believe that Reality Bites would never be made in 2014 and why the world is a confusing pastiche of the '70s, '80s,' and '90s (puke). 

THE UNDERGROUND IS OVER CROWDED

I woke up swimming in a sea of plaid, surrounded by boys with slick advertising agency hair grounded by deck shoes. There was a sales pitch coming I was sure of it but they quickly spread like ants to various coffee shops to freelance. Somehow the nerds of my youth had wired the brains of thirty-something year old men and Weird-Scienced together throngs of women wearing everything that was and wasn’t cool from the 60s/70s/80s/90s all at once. I rushed to the newsstand to see what year it was, as there were no clues around me other than a calendar date that ap- peared to be misprint. Cars weren’t flying and sidewalks weren’t moving so it couldn’t be thefuture. Everything was familiar but nothing felt real, I was sure I was just tired. What the fuck was this pop culture pastiche I was stuck in? I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes as they masked their robot circuits with boisterously colored Ray-Bans and text message focus.

A baby carriage wheeled by me but the man steering it looked like a action figure. His hooded sweatshirt matched his new jeans which matched his uncreased Nike sneakers. He was just taken out of the box and had to play Dad. I counted the rings on his fingers, measured his crow’s feet and knew he was older than me. My eyes were fixated on the baby’s t-shirt which said “Motorhead” and had the band’s violent skull logo underneath the text.

“He hates Spongebob” the father said “Motorhead is his favorite band, he can’t sit still when I play Ace of Spades!”.

“Well yeah, it’s pretty aggressive music for a...” I stammered before the baby interrupted me. Years prior babies did talk occasionally in movies but the Fox network now showcased sarcastic talking babies, this was common- place.

“I like Maiden more” the baby added. “Me too” I replied to the baby “I always thought Motorhead were kind of boring actually.” “Fucking poser” the baby commented as his dad wheeled him off.

As I continued to scan walls, magazines and humans I noticed that every novelty from my childhood was now a movie and a sequel. All bands, dead or live, were back together and playing festivals in deserts where they charged you for water. The food around me was either grass-fed by an urban farmer or the triple-kick-ass-fuck-you-burger. I was in New York City but I suspected this phenomenon was spreading through America or maybe all of Earth. Somewhere trendy Japanese teenagers were giggling at us. I was sure of it.

Suburbia was once my home, where denim sentinels guarded the arcade games I wanted to play and sold herbs and powdered prescriptions. There were two types of girl there, one wore a popped collar Polo shirt and the other a t-shirt from a rock concert I never wanted to attend. Both types hated me, so I chose to fake hate them too. I rode a skateboard, a BMX, kept weapons in my locker, cursed a lot, liked heavy metal, didn’t like heavy metal, lit things on fire, jumped off stuff, and if anyone I knew would have surfed I could have been a walking Keith Morris lyric. I knew my suburbia.

When car stereos blasted “Hells Bells,” or “Jump Around,” my skateboard became a broadsword. I dodged rocks, fists, chubby cheeked kisses, BBs, parents and teachers. The back patch on my jacket protected me from being blindsided and showed the world that the Num- ber of The Beast. Neal Peart was the greatest drummer and Mr. Rhodes a master of the polka dotted axe. These were actual facts even if you hated Rush. I knew suburbia.

The athletic boys in my school had no secrets and used any holiday as an excuse to cross-dress. Girls with Aqua Net sculptures shooting from their skulls had many secrets that came out with drags of stale cigarettes and peppermint Schnapps.

As a boy, all wanted was the next vehicle that could take me out of suburbia. Anything with wheels took me another stride away until I was old enough to drive an unsafe four cylinder automobile covered in stickers away from my fucking town forever ...or at least to a college campus. Every- day I X’ed out a day on the calendar and thought about living in a city.

There was every type of human in cities and they didn’t have segregated malls to pace. Guys would show me places to buy things they didn’t have in suburbia and girls would be impressed by the band names on my shirts not the brand name on the tag. I didn’t know shit about San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles other than that they weren’t suburbia.

Leaving suburbia was a blur. I remember learning one day that I could control Tony Hawk with a joystick and that Kiss wore makeup again. Straight Edge men threw baseballs and wrestled on television. The one dollar bill had Crim- son Ghost on it. No hardcore record had sold a million copies but every dorm came with a copy of Check Your Head.

In the present Cyndi Lauper rang up my groceries. A man who once was kicked out of every skate spot and punk show for being annoying designed propaganda that aided the election of our current president. All the humans I wanted to meet as a suburban teenage boy in the late 1980s were now stores my hometown mall. The convenience was great but still confusing. I ran into an old friend in a bodega as I tried to purchase some water. Even water was cool, it took me a while to find a regular bottle, I felt old fashioned. “Poland Springs?” he questioned “who the fuck drinks that anymore? What is this ninety eighty...”

My choice triggered something in his brain. He asked me why every activity that got us beaten up in suburbia was now a career. Flashes of awkward fashion, questionable hobbies and fads raced through my brain. Bandana Saturdays in the mall, loudly cursing radio trips to splintered skateboard ramps and basement heavy metal seances once drove us further from rural normalcy, now they were comical, admirable and fashionable all at once.

I couldn’t answer him but I knew the underdogs won and were abusing their power. The villain of Reality Bites invested his money in energy drinks became a hero. He made the our youthful dreams real with minimal work and a corporate budget. Slackers had lost and been eradicated. They disguised themselves with conviction and integrity but the new decade exposed them as truly lazy and stubborn. It was impos- sible to be lazy now as ideas were commodities and cool was a currency. Nostalgia could be downloaded to a mobile telephone and stashed safely in our pockets while we checked the weather and the stock market and moved forward into the past.

The above photo is from one of my eBay auctions. I contributed a story toBryan Turcotte’s Don’t Tell Me About Tomorrow Zine about Black Flag and it later appeared in my book Live… Suburbia! The zine was super limited and came with a bunch of photocopies from Bryan’s Black Flag flyer collection along with a CD.

Because I’m nice, I’m going to paste the whole thing for you, but make sure you jam the entire Slip It In album while you read. HERE’S the link for that. 

BLACK COFFEE - Taken from Live… Suburbia! on powerHouse

My suburban umbilical cord was cut the first day I sat bitch in the back seat of a sticker covered Jetta. Without public transportation or a friend with a car, my teenage mistakes were made in basements, sheds and the woods but now I was given a brand new way to say fuck you; we had a method of transportation at our disposal to execute all bad ideas. Fourteen year old boys aren’t cool especially to anyone over fourteen so if you were invited to squeeze into a back seat of some beater, provided you coughed up gas money, you felt like a god. The car of an older punk, skin, skater or burn-out wasn’t just a escape from the wood panelling of your depressing stucco ceilinged room, it was church. The back seat was the pew, the same back seat where barre chord gripping fingers guitar soloed on virgin pussy, where yellow coke was chopped, where headache weed was inhaled between phlegmy coughs, where sweaty heads rested and blood coagulated after a crusade. Good alter boys didn’t speak, they listened and absorbed.

Long drives meant 90 minute Maxell sermons that could expand your world from the Ramones, Metallica and Zeppelin to the SSD, Rudimentary Peni and Abrasive Wheels. Cassettes were the voice of the suburbs, you have to drive everywhere, you need a soundtrack everywhere you go and the analog hiss of tape was the only way to make this happen because every shitty car had a shitty tape deck in the 1980s.

Steven Tyler and Bon Scott’s shrieks of ” I wanna date rape you” were the sounds of touchdowns, pep rallies and flattops, you weren’t having a good time to you classic rock, you were getting your ass kicked or rejected to it. Hardcore pun was played on tape wherever the the fuck you went through tinny blown out speakers in junk cars and chipped boom boxes.

You’re wound tight like a cassette tape with no release from the endless knot because once the last note fades out on Side-B you auto-reverse to Side-A again. You’re running in place, waiting for something epic but all you get are hand jobs from a chunky goth chick that won’t take her rings or the rush of jumping off something with your skateboard to the applause of horny boys.

My phone rang early on a Saturday morning in February of 1989, a friend of mine informed me that there was room in Keith Galloway’s car if I wanted to head into Boston to go skating and buy records. I’d been carted around the suburbs before by rat-tailed drivers to barren parking lots with rough pavement. It wasn’t much more than a faster way to do something boring.

These were the types of dudes that wore Champion sweatshirts and Reebok high-tops to school to avoid ridicule but had a skateboard in their trunk. They’d find the most desolate places to skateboard to avoid being called a skater fag and they’d never dream of driving 28 miles to Boston to actually have fun. Guys like this had names like Greg or Alan and would disappear if they had the attention of a pimply fringe cheerleader girl who conveniently didn’t have her driver’s license.

Keith on the other hand was a legend with a car and a flirty girlfriend named Greta whose real name was probably something boring that just began with a G. She had a smokey voice, wore too much make up, drew her eyebrows on smelled like musty thrift store clothes and some type of mystical oil. She’d sit on the curb reading books about the occult chain smoking while we rolled around and would always address you by your full name. I was convinced that she did this because the more syllables she was able the pronounce the more she could tease your teenage cock. “Where do you live An-tho-ny Pa-ppa-lar-do?” or “Can I borrow your lighter Ev-an La-mark” sounded better than anything you’d hear on a 900 number.A trip to Boston meant she’d be riding shotgun and arguing with Keith about something for the entire 30 minute drive. 

We piled into the car and kept our eyes fixated on the stickers and marker scrawls on the backs of the seats ahead of us like good soldiers. It was freezing outside and the heat in the car barely worked but no one would dare ask Keith Galloway to turn the heat up, that was suicide. Along with being old enough to buy beer and having a car Keith had seen every punk and metal show you could dream of, hit people with brass knuckles, had random scars from things people had done to him and owned some poorly covered up white power tattoos including a Swastika on his arm turned into what looked like a child’s rendition of a window and a “nazi shark” on his calf which was masked by interlocking triangles which I guess were supposed to be the Budweiser logo or the markings on a black widow.

Despite being intense and imbalanced, Keith was friendly and engaging provided you didn’t get on his bad side. This could result in being kicked out of the car, beaten up or the absolute worst, being given a really demeaning nickname. You’d actually be kept around after being nicknamed just so you could be called this shitty nickname in front of everyone. Despite being introduced to Keith several times he would alternate between calling me Anthony and Andy. I didn’t bother to correct him when he said “Andy, grab me a tape from that DeMoulas bag on the floor”(*Any plastic bag found in the Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts is referred to as a DeMoulas bag as they were the biggest supermarket chain in the area). 

Here was my trial by fire, picking a tape for everyone to listen to. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal since they were his fucking tapes but I still felt like this was more important than where I should be going to college or something. I fished around for a second and passed over the Punk and Disorderly comp and a blank tape that said had Suicidal Tendencies misspelled on it in fifth grade printing. Instead there was a red cover peaking out with a Mona Lisa smile, Black Flag’s Slip It In.

After attending parochial grade school there was nothing cooler to me than an album cover featuring a nun giving me the shit eye gripping a dude’s hairy leg. It was the perfect blend of sketchy and funny. When I transitioned out of metal in middle school and converted to hardcore I was saved. Black Flag was my gateway drug, I wasn’t a crusty “remember when punk” who cringed when people said Rollins was the best Black Flag singer. I had a whole catalog to devour without guidance or discretion as it wasn’t 1981 and I honestly dug Rollins. Henry was the blend of drill sergeant and father figure. He yelled out motivational phrases, was physically fit and catered to every rebellious need I had. Punk rock was cool and rebellious but at the end of the day, punk rockers were the skinny junkie dudes begging for change in Harvard Square, they had a snappy answer for everything but came off as fucking pathetic.

Henry Rollins was the manifestation of everything I thought was simple, cool and tough. A plain t-shirt, blue jeans, Vans and a shaved head was the perfect uniform to me, I didn’t know how you could even skate in bondage pants and I thought mohawks were too much fucking work. I had a look, an attitude,and Annihilate This Week as my motto but I needed fuel. In order to really be impatient and overly self aware I needed to be strung out on coffee, black coffee specifically twenty-four-seven.

At fourteen I wasn’t going to be let into any bars and I wasn’t ready for any dangerous habits but coffee was a safe and practical rebellion. It’s fucking cold in New England, coffee warms you up. I needed to be alert and hyper and being jacked on caffeine gave me the perfect edge and for 99 cents I could sit as long as I wanted in a Denny’s and plot and plan. Besides not only was black coffee Rollins approved, the Descendents worshiped it as well, I could graduate to other beverages later.

"Thanks Ant" was the reply after handing over the tape, I was relieved that I had transitioned back to my birth name. The click of the tape into the deck was followed by the last strains of the title track "Slip It In," this was actually a relief because that song is over six minutes long and kind of boring, I didn’t really have any ire towards any women yet either.

Seconds later the Sabbathy grind of Black Coffee was blasting as we cruised up the on ramp headed south to Boston, everything felt official. The shittiest of car stereos don’t really have “stop” buttons, you can eject or fast forward a tape but not actually stop it. My whole world stopped when I heard Mr. Ginn’s guitar sped up to hyper speed and a loud buzzing hum. Greta had reached over to fast forward “Black Coffee” because she wanted to hear “Wound Up.”

“What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck are you doing you fucking bitch, Jesus fucking Christ we were listening to that …” Keith screamed over to Greta, completely taking his eyes off the road shrieking like a stuck pig. His right hand was open and raised and his eyes were bugging out of his skull like one of those gag toys being squeezed too hard. I was reminded at this point of another chapter in Keith Galloway’s folklore, he was really into coke, speed or any substance that made him more intense.

As they shouted back and forth and the poorly aligned car carved a jagged path on the highway I was fixated on the buzz of the tape fast forwarding. You could faintly hear the music speeding past mixed with a hazy frequency that cut through the cursing and screaming in the front seat. I wasn’t focused on it to achieve some zen-like escape, I was fixated because I knew at any moment there would be a mechanical “clack!” and then Side B would be cranked at maximum volume causing these two maniacs to yell louder or start beating the shit out of each other in a meth-amphetamine fueled rage resulting in a ten car pile up.

As undergraduates we just sat there paralyzed, afraid to move or speak wondering if our last moments were going to be spent in an shit stinking Jetta with a floor covered in fast food refuse and sweat soaked t-shirts.

The snap of the stereo’s gears were followed by the angular dirge of “Obliteration,” a confusing sound that made the the bitching of these two coke heads even more claustrophobic and unbearable. Keith was now leaning over the steering wheel and had advanced to the stage of rage where you just mutter things and channel your inner douche bag. He progressed past yelling at Greta and was now showing the signs of a true maniac by cursing out people that aren’t even there.

"Fuck you you fucking piece of shit, don’t-you-fucking-tell-me-what-the-fuck-I-should-do, don’t you fucking talk to my mother that way you fucking nigger, I-don’t-need-this-fucking-shit…" he ranted in an unnerving staccato cadence.

I was pretty sure he was bitching out his black step dad, followed by a teacher maybe and then back to Greta, it wasn’t that rad. We whipped off the highway and pulled into strip mall parking lot where Greta was instructed to “Get the fuck out of the fucking car you stupid cunt”, which she did without much resistance. Her pale face was covered in drippy make up and she was gripping her head which smeared one of her drawn on eyebrows which was really disturbing.

Like all true psychopaths Keith flipped his switch back to “level headed regular human” and asked one of us to jump in the front. Luckily I was riding bitch so it was between Evan and Berto the Skin (A racist latino skin who chose the name Berto because it sounded less ethnic than Roberto), Evan didn’t flinch and jumped into the front seat as Keith calmly talked about what a “fucking bitch” his “bitch” girlfriend was and how she can go “fucking die behind a dumpster” because he doesn’t fucking care. His voice never rose above the music or showed any signs of aggression just a calm venting about his “bitch-cunt-liar-whore” better half.

Our stride was broken but not our spirits, Greta’s flirting was semi-exciting but not necessary, besides our mission was to buy records and skate not fantasize about her saying our full names while we stared cock in had at her pointy tits and the Sisters of Mercy poster that hung over her bed in her overly incensed bedroom.

The pew had one less body, the tension was gone, Keith’s ranting was manageable and in twenty minutes we’d be rolling over smooth brick and budgeting out which 7” singles we could afford while still leaving a few bucks for coffee and french fries.