In Conversation: Ray Cappo of Youth of Today & Shelter
Few people can claim to have changed hardcore culture with the same level of volume and frequency as Ray Cappo. Were it not for one man's fixation on Ratt, he says, none of this would have happened.
A long time ago, Walter Schreifels said something to me that resonated as so true that I never forgot it: “It felt like there was a time in New York City where how cool you were in the scene was determined by how many degrees from Ray Cappo you were.” That was certainly my memory of late eighties New York, at least, when it seemed like Ray’s hand was in almost everything—from being the singer for Youth of Today to being one-half of Revelation Records to being an instrumental part of bringing Saturday matinees to the Pyramid Club. Undeniably, his fingerprints were all over the place. Eventually, when I was 15, I worked up the nerve to introduce myself to Ray after running into him on St. Marks Place in the East Village. I had no reason to do that, and he had no reason to be kind to me. But he was. More sooner than later, we became friends, and only a few years later, bandmates, when I wound up joining Shelter in 1992.
In truth, I started Anti-Matter when I did largely because I knew I was leaving Shelter. I never thought to interview Ray back then because it felt too immediately personal. But with the recent release of his memoir, From Punk to Monk, and a new iteration of Anti-Matter in existence so many years later, this felt like a perfect time to ask: How the hell did we actually get here?
Hardcore origin stories. I feel like they always start at home. Because our childhood homes show us who was in our corner growing up, as well as who we were up against. One of the things I felt like I didn’t necessarily get from your book was a sense of who your father actually was. He sort of plays more of a specter in your story, being in a coma for most of the narrative. So I was hoping to get to know a little more about your relationship with your dad and why his death played such a catalyst for everything you did afterwards with your life.
RAY: I think that, for me, he represented a type of stability. A type of regularness. He showed up regularly. That being said, in retrospect, I think he may have been an alcoholic based on what I know now about alcoholism. Not a belligerent or violent alcoholic, but maybe a silent alcoholic. And that’s not even a critique; it’s just an observation from what I know about alcoholism. It was a way of coping with raising seven children on a school teacher’s budget. Whenever you deal with any type of drug, it’s generally to medicate some type of emotion. You don’t want to feel. He was a high school English teacher and a guidance counselor. He had seven kids. He probably needed to take the edge off of just dealing with everybody. But he was responsible in that regard.
We didn’t have a relationship like the one I have with my children. I’m sort of like my children’s buddy. He was part of that “great generation,” where parents did their duties, and we exchanged info sometimes, but for the most part, it was like, “Get out of the house until dinner time”—and you just had to be out of the house. He was sort of a disciplinarian. He was also silly, but he could scare the hell out of you as well. No one disobeyed my father. That’s the way it was in our household. It wasn’t super intimate, but I always felt loved and cared for and protected.
When I was nineteen, when Youth of Today started and he got ill, which I mention in the book, he was sort of out. There was no communication, and all that was stable now became mysterious. Like, what is death? What is a coma? Is he alive? Part of the family thought he was alive and part of the family actually thought he was dead. I didn’t quite know how to experience it, but all I knew was that it could happen to anybody. He was fairly young, a few years older than I am now. So that was a tragic moment in my life. And I’m not trying to compare it to other tragedies—some people have much more tragic experiences in life—but when all you know is a type of stability, and that carpet gets pulled out from under your feet, it makes you rethink safety in the material world.
It’s interesting because all of this is happening at the same time that you are becoming as much of a “public figure” as you can be in the hardcore scene. Not too long later, I’m hearing you for the first time doing an interview on Crucial Chaos. I actually looked it up on YouTube and I found it. They say it was October 30, 1986. You would have been 20 years old then?
RAY: Umm, yeah. I was born in 1966.
OK, so you’re 20 years old, and I’m listening to you on the show, and you sound way more articulate than the average Crucial Chaos guest. Listening back to it now, it’s kind of hilarious. You’re like, “Why can’t we be nicer to each other?” [laughs]. You’re kind of towing this line as a model citizen. And I’m trying to figure out where that comes from.
RAY: Where did that come from? Sometimes I talk to the guys in Youth of Today about touring and they always say, “You were the dad of the tour. You were always like, ‘You better be on good behavior and get back here on time!’” [laughs]. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe that was from my family. My parents were very conventional family people. Maybe it came from them.
Were you a wild one in the family? Or were you a good boy?
RAY: I definitely wasn’t the wild one. Are you kidding? I remember my brother got arrested once for something sort of mysterious. My sisters smoked. They left home when they were sixteen. My older brother and older sister were potheads in school. My father was so upset about it. I just loved hardcore music. So it was like, I was clean-cut and straight, and I treated my parents with a lot of respect—I never mouthed off to them, that just didn’t happen—but I would steal the car and go to Toronto to play three shows on the weekend, and then drive back and say I went to Albany. My little brother would be like, “Hey, you just put 3,000 miles on mom’s Volkswagen. Are you kidding? Where did you go?”
But I was raised in church and Boy Scouts. I had a moral barometer that I kept with me, and I think I had it in high school. I didn’t want to be part of the high school scene. But when I ran away to what was supposed to be my alternative—to the New York hardcore scene—it was even worse, you know? People were lethargic. They put themselves in destitute positions. They were even more intoxicated. It was violent. I mean, I’ve never seen more Wild West violence than in the New York hardcore scene back then. Not just a high school fight where you get thrown against the lockers, but that sort of bottles-over-the-head stuff you see in cowboy saloon movies. So that kind of triggered me even more into thinking there had to be a different way than this.
I know you want to find an underpinning reason for it, but I don’t know what it is. I might have to do some talk therapy or take ayahuasca to figure it out [laughs].
I think listening to that interview again as an adult just made me think about who you were back then so differently. Like, it seemed like you even had a hierarchy of “morals” where things like compassion, positivity, and unity took precedence over even straight-edge. At one point in the interview you say that we should be looking at nonviolence and vegetarianism before we even start thinking about saying, “I don’t smoke.”
RAY: This was around the time that I wrote “Break Down The Walls”—that was the first revelation. It was like, Oh. I get it. I’m creating more tribalism with this straight-edge thing. That’s what that song is about. “I used to think that labels were just symbols of pride.” Like, we’re straight-edge. That’s a good thing. But I started to realize that this is a secondary thing. Compassion is a primary thing. Labeling myself to create myself as an “other” and others with their tribe, I’m creating more barriers instead of bringing people together. So basically, in the beginning of the band, there was some regret in taking something that is very personal and creating a tribe out of it—which eventually made me lose faith in it as a movement, even though these were principles that I valued, because I felt it was getting divisive and arrogant. People saw themselves as “better than.”
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I actually wrote an entire essay last year about how unprecedented it was to see the way you transformed “We Just Might” to “Time To Forgive.” Because we’ve all heard bands do that thing where they talk about an old song and say, “Yeah, we don’t play that anymore. That was when we were young and dumb.” But you acted out of accountability. It was more like you were saying, “I put something out into the world that I kind of regret, and I want to fix it.” I can’t think of another song like that in existence.
RAY: Right. Like, “We’re going to take the exact same song and rewrite all the lyrics so that they’re diametrically opposed to the original version.” It was a hairpin turn!
And implicit in doing that is basically saying, “I was wrong.”
RAY: Thank you, New Testament! I wrote that song after reading Matthew, Mark, and Luke [laughs].
That’s really funny that you say that, because when I was thinking about Youth of Today before we sat down to do this, I remember thinking, I need to know two things for sure: Were you ever a Christian? And you had to have been a Boy Scout, right?
RAY: Of course I was! Where do you think I got “physically strong, morally straight” from? That’s the Boy Scout Oath.
Obviously! But part of me was always like, “Is Ray just being camp?” [laughs]
RAY: I was a Boy Scout leader! I was my patrol’s leader, but due to my punkness I got kicked out. I was totally into Boy Scouts. It affected me. It probably changed the trajectory of my life. It’s probably also why I still love the outdoors so much.
OK, wait. Take me back to writing the song “Youth of Today” for a second. What the hell were you thinking when you were like, “I’m going to put the Boy Scout Oath into this song!”
RAY: [Laughs] Well, I remember thinking about that scout oath and thinking I can really rally behind that type of personal governance. That’s important. The scout oath is: “On my honor, I promise to do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people, to obey the scout law, to be physically strong, morally straight, mentally awake…” I think I’m gonna put that in my house somewhere! It’s a good mantra to repeat once a week.
Was there ever a part of you where you were like, “Wait, this isn’t punk!”
RAY: Well, when I wrote that song, you’ve got to understand, I was coming from Violent Children. I had an idea of what I thought was cool, what I thought was hard, what I thought I wanted to deliver. But I couldn’t do it all because I wasn’t the spokesperson of that band. I was the drummer. And even though I sort of started Violent Children, and Porcell later got into Violent Children, the singer still has all of the say of what the persona of your band is. And [our singer] kept on dragging it to, like, AC/DC and Ratt. There was such a fascination with metal in 1984 and I couldn’t stand it! Because, to me, metal was the epitome of pretense. Hardcore wasn’t pretentious. It was just an authentic losing-your-mind on stage. I could really relate to losing your mind, and I blended in what I thought were values. DYS and SSD and Minor Threat, they had some values of self-control and self-discipline that seemed smarter than what New York City was talking about. But New York had an image and attitude towards everything that I could appreciate; it was sort of a blend of New York and Boston that really attracted me. So when I saw the singer of Violent Children moving us away from that, I was like, I cannot tolerate this.
I wrote that song, “Youth of Today.” And the singer said, “I will not sing these stupid lyrics!” I was like, “You think these are stupid? You’re stupid! I don’t want to be anything like you. You think I want to wear a Ratt t-shirt on stage? You’re crazy” [laughs]. So at that point, I knew it was over. Our last show was in New Hampshire, and on the way back, me and Porcell were like, “We should go on tour.” And the singer said, “No way. You think I’m going to live in a van with you dirtbags?” I just realized this was never going to work out. This marriage will never stay together. Me and Porcell are going to start our own band and I’ll be the frontman. And we just conspired Youth of Today right there on the way back home.
We decided that we were going to do something that was specifically hardcore because the entire scene was turning metal. That was the year that Agnostic Front record came out, Cause For Alarm, which wasn’t my favorite. The Cro-Mags were moving in that direction. SSD was moving in that direction. I was like, “Someone’s gotta hold the wheels of this ship! We’re going way off course!” [laughs] It felt like there was a demographic that wanted to hear that.
It’s sort of impossible for me, having known you for so long, to not think about the person I know. And so over the years, it often feels like you have this constant drive to always be building a better mousetrap. It’s like self-improvement on steroids sometimes, and sometimes it’s a little more lowkey [laughs].
RAY: Yes, yes. I would agree with that.
And that’s a connective tissue that runs throughout your life to me. Whether it’s the Boy Scout Ray or how, when I started touring with you in 1992, you were obsessed with Stephen Covey and “being effective,” the tissue is there.
RAY: It’s so weird that ‘92 was only four years removed from Youth of Today… But yeah. Stephen Covey was about how to listen to people, how to empathize with people, how to hear people before you start to speak. We could get over all these international wars if people could just learn to seek first to understand before trying to be understood. But yeah, all that stuff was very influential. You mix that with 7 Seconds, and then mix that with some spiritual books, and you get someone like me, who is very ripe for that stuff. And who also has a megaphone stuck in his mouth. And I’m slightly nuts! [laughs] I mean, I will say this. I’m a pretty mellow guy. I’ve got a sense of humor. I joke around a lot. But if I get put in a corner, I can take it to eleven real quick. And I can scare myself. When you mix that type of youth-type of aggression in, I can just move right out of my body. That’s what I think Youth of Today was. Whenever you see a guy on stage losing it so much about a particular discipline, you’re gonna be like, “All right! He seems very confident in this regard! I’m going to go with it” [laughs].
Implicit in that search to build a better mousetrap though is that feeling that it will never be good enough.
RAY: I think there’s always that tension. I don’t mind that tension as long as the flipside of that isn’t, “I’m a piece of shit.” That’s where sometimes people give up on the concept of self-transformation. It’s like, “I’ll never be up to the standard, so I’m not going to even play the game at all.” I don’t think that. You’ll never feel like you made it to the top. If you do, I’ll start to wonder about you. But if you feel like there will always be that tension, and I’m okay with that tension, then there are different ways we can upgrade our lives. We just have to be careful of the pendulum swing.
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This might be a good time to bring up the part in your book about Guru James and “breaking edge” on magic mushrooms.
RAY: Not his real name by the way! [laughs] But he is a real person.
It’s a really interesting story to me because you could have just committed yourself to straight-edge dogma and stayed on course, but you decided to make an individual decision about something. Regardless of whether or not it was a good decision or a bad decision, you made a thought-out decision at that moment instead of just smothering yourself in a blanket decision. And while I’m sure that your story will piss off a lot of people, I think being able to maintain your agency, moment to moment, is a good thing.
RAY: I think it’s a great thing. I think it’s an important thing. It’s very hard when you stick your feet into one pair of shoes, and then it becomes your identity. And then you try something else? People want to kill you. That being said, I do feel like my intention was in the right place with it. People might disagree or not, I don’t care. It didn’t take a lot to just say it in the book. I felt like it was an important part of my story and I wouldn’t have done it any other way. That’s just what happened. And it did give me the ultimate realization that this world is temporary that I wanted to turn my life towards God. It wasn’t just done in a recreational way.
Of course, Mike Judge and Porcell thought I was nuts and I think they wrote a song about me [laughs]. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t care less about the dogma of the scene. And it took a lot. You heard me in the book, having that conversation with Guru James. It was like, “I’m the leader of an entire straight-edge movement and you’re asking me to take magic mushrooms?!” I have specifically written songs against this moment, like, “Experiment with your mind / You see things I can’t see” from “Thinking Straight.” But there was also this admission of: What do I know anyway? I’m not trying to create a brand here, where I’m the king of the brand of straight-edge or something. I actually wanted to find God! I didn’t know about mystics or metaphysical things. I really didn’t know anything. So part of me was naive and part of me was just eager.
How much of a secret was it at the time?
RAY: Well, obviously, Mike Judge knew because he wrote that song: “You’ve lost my respect.” I think it was about that. And I’m OK with that because that’s where he was. But anytime I’ve done something, I’ve had to be 100 percent convinced that this is what I’m going to do and I’m going to do it for the right reasons. And I felt like even those choices were done out of integrity—or at least integrity with the best information that I had in my brain. I wasn’t trying to go out to a UB40 concert or a Phish concert [laughs]. I was doing it because I trusted this guy that was leading me and telling me that this is the way that the mystics and masters find God. So I sat in a room alone and chanted these mantras that he gave me. I get how, in the straight-edge community, that looked insane. It’s OK. That makes sense.
Did you feel like the further you went on your spiritual path, the further you got from Porcell?
RAY: You know what? Both me and Porcell have this ability to just do our own thing. It’s only karmically that our lives have been interwoven to this day. I mean, he just texted me an hour ago about something random. Have you ever had people in your life like that? Where you’re not even trying to hang out with them, but the universe keeps spiraling you and keeping you woven together? That’s how my life with Porcell is. We don’t make plans. But I can’t get away from the guy and he can’t get away from me [laughs]. So I didn’t get into [Krishna consciousness] to get away from him; I was just doing my own thing, yet again.
There’s something else, and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a deficient thing. Let’s see how I turn out on my deathbed. But I’ve always been very detached from people. People can say that’s a bad thing, and in one sense, that is a bad thing; I can literally just walk away from people, and I’ve done that my whole life—which I don’t think is a great quality. I did that with my family. I did it when my father got sick. You know, I have a big Italian family. They’re very connected. I’m not. I just walked away from them. I was just very much on my own, and I had the ability to say, “OK. Where is the universe going to pull me?” Porcell has that same type of thing. Sometimes I feel like, Does this guy have a heart? Or is he just in his own world? [laughs] But I’m the same way!
OK, I wanted to talk about a slice of conversation I had with Kevin Seconds where your name came up. This part didn’t actually make the final version that I published, and it seems more relevant here. Kevin said:
I remember when Youth of Today first came out to the West Coast. We were all traveling together through California and Arizona, and I remember Ray saying to me, “Man, I’m starting to feel this pressure. Kids are really starting to get into this.” I don’t know how old Ray was—he had to be in his early twenties at that point—but I was always worried about him because they sort of picked up the mantle that was started by Minor Threat and later by SSD and all those bands, and really picked it up and took it. And the kids, they were feeling it. They connected on such a level that even we couldn’t connect with, because maybe our message was more vague or because we never fully embraced the straight-edge thing ever. But Ray was really concerned. He was like, “I don’t know how to feel about this.” And I said, “Oh boy, I don’t envy you at all.” I had no advice. I was like, “Believe in yourself, man. Stay true!” [laughs].
Do you have any memory of this?
RAY: I don’t have a recollection of that, but I remember I was never expecting it to become what it became, and therefore, when I saw the phenomenon happening—especially when it started happening in California, and then later when we got home to New York—I started to realize that were creating an insular scene within a scene. We saw that happen. If you got into hardcore, you wouldn’t buy the records I had in my collection; you would buy exclusively straight-edge records. If the band was good, even if they sounded like Youth of Today, you still wouldn’t buy that record. You weren’t even interested. And so that became a thing. I wasn’t like that. I liked all different kinds of bands and music. I mean, you’d see pictures of me with everyone from Negative Approach to GG Allin [laughs]. But it was becoming a very exclusive thing, and I was 20 years old trying to navigate that.
So that was probably when I started noticing it. And when we got back to New York, everyone started jumping on that wagon as well—and I somehow became the spokesperson for it. I just thought we were doing our own thing.
It’s a really unique kind of pressure, I think. And I only got a taste of it when I played with you in Shelter. It’s certainly one of the reasons that I quit the band—because I was tired of feeling like I couldn’t even eat a slice of pizza without someone calling the cops on me [laughs].
RAY: The accountability! Yes! [laughs]. There’s always that kind of tension there. But we shouldn’t condemn people. I found that a lot about [straight-edge], because it had no other laws. It was like, you don’t drink, you don’t smoke, maybe you’re vegan or vegetarian. But it had no other ways of behavior. So if someone stepped out of the circle, instead of saying, “Hey, man. Are you OK? Why are you leaning into drugs and alcohol at this time? Has there been a loss in your family? Are you going through a hard time? Do you feel disenfranchised? Are you going through financial struggles? Did your parents kick you out?”—it wasn’t like you’d extend a hand. It was more like, “You stepped outside the circle! It’s over!” That’s not love. That’s condemnation. And I didn’t like it.
For me, [my interest in] spirituality is something forgiving, and something loving, and something that’s understanding. It’s not about creating exclusivity. And so I knew I had to turn to more subtle things. Like, instead of being “the police,” I had to make this thing more about my internal journey as opposed to your internal journey. I had to stop minding everyone else’s business.
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Did you anticipate the level of pushback that you got from doing Shelter? Like, you mentioned hanging out with Tim Yohannon [the longstanding, late editor of Maximum Rock’n’Roll] in the book. Did you ever imagine he was going to dedicate an entire issue of his fanzine to being hostile with you?
RAY: Tim and I were actually very good friends. And when he did that without telling me, I felt betrayed because… we were just really good friends. I’ve been to his house many times; we’ve gone out to dinner together. But you know, he was 50 years old. That’s old. Now that I’m 58, it’s not that old. But he was old when we were all 20 [laughs]. And I liked him. And he liked me. He liked Youth of Today. So when he did that, it was just his hatred for religion. I just felt like he thought, “Oh, Ray’s been captured. He’s no longer the same person.” Because for someone to write that, that’s basically a death sentence to your friendship. To not even just print an interview, but to print an interview with all these interjections put into it—that was unfair. That’s what sort of hurt.
I try to contextualize it a little bit because I do think that exact moment, from 1989 going into 1990, was such a weird time for the scene. A lot of kids were dropping out. A lot of kids stopped being straight-edge. They’re growing their hair out, they’re smoking pot, they’re listening to different kinds of music. And then Shelter comes along with this literally foreign thing and it’s like… You know how you were talking about Youth of Today and metal? I think a lot of people were like, “Hey, we’re going off the tracks here!”
RAY: Right. Like, I got into Krishna, but I wouldn't get into metal! What’s wrong with me?! That’s like jumping off the tracks and getting in a boat [laughs].
So I have some hindsight empathy for it. Even when we were on tour in 1992 and 1993, kids were still coming to the shows with protest flyers. I got a little taste of it, but you were clearly the focus of people’s ire.
RAY: I always went head-to-head with people. Even in Youth of Today. It didn’t stop. There was never a moment with Youth of Today where it felt like, “OK, now we’re accepted!” We were never accepted. So for me to do it with Shelter, it was just like, this is business as usual. This is what hardcore is. Hardcore is: Show up, get ready for a confrontation. Over there are five guys with protest fanzines. And there’s the guy who slapped dead meat under your windshield wipers. I had to deal with this stuff on a regular basis. You never knew what your van was pulling into. But also, I’m very unabashed. I was just like, “Look. This is what I am. This is what I believe. How are you going to relate to it now?” And if you hung out with me, you got some of the heat as well.
Shelter did eventually find some level of increased success. Did it feel like your head got fucked with the bigger that Shelter got?
RAY: It wasn’t just the bigger Shelter got. It was more about shifting out of [monastic life] and into a more material existence. Even early on in Shelter, it was monasticism. I mean, you know. You traveled with us. We had a strict way that we lived, a strict way we behaved, a strict way that we spoke, a strict way that we ate. We had this standard. So I think any time a monk tries to step back into trying to figure themselves out on the slack line between monasticism and material life, it’s just a very slippery slope to have to walk. It had nothing to do with getting on a major label; it was more like: OK, you have to become independent and live on your own again. You’re going to be on your own now. You have a personal bank account. You’re trying to be successful. You’re trying to raise a family. And then you have to figure out, how does this fit in with my spiritual life again? It took me a while to figure out the balance between both worlds.
And then eventually you get to that place where you’re like, “OK, this is probably as big as it’s going to get. It’s all downhill from here”—and every band gets there [laughs]. When Shelter hit that peak, was there a moment of panic for you in terms of what’s next?
RAY: Well, because we always had some type of audience, I could still make some money from it. But at the same time, it was definitely like, how am I going to pivot here? What do I want to do with my life? That’s when I started teaching yoga. That was my passion. I’m not like you or Porcell; I’m not a musician. I don’t like being in the studio. I liked writing poetry for songs, but I can’t play the guitar or something. I can’t play anything really well. I’m more of a communicator. I’m more of a speaker. So, for me, to teach yoga, it felt like this is what I was born to do. I was physically good at it, too. Believe it or not, it’s more pleasurable to me than being in a band. I actually said that to someone the other day and they were like, “How can you say that? You were in Youth of Today!” And I was like, “Well, here’s how I can say that. If people don’t like my yoga class, they don’t get in the back and whip bottles at my head. There’s no fear that I’m going to have to go head-to-head with one of my students after a class” [laughs].
Actually, this is funny because I come from that hardcore scene where there was always that threat of violence, but I remember one time I was teaching a packed class in New York City. Everyone was in child’s pose. Their heads are on the ground. No one can see me, but I can see the entire class. And at the back of the class, I see this very big guy get up, look straight at me, and walk towards me. I was like, What the hell is happening? What’s going on? He is beelining towards me, and me, being a hardcore guy, I was like, “OK. It’s on! I must have said something. I’m going to have to freakin’ fight this guy in front of all of these yoga students.” So I got into this sort of fighting pose, like, Come on! Let’s do this! And he reaches down and grabs a tissue, which was by my foot in a tissue box. I was like, Why am I so broken? What has the hardcore scene done to me that I’m ready to fight a guy who wants to blow his nose? [laughs] But in general, I have much less anxiety teaching yoga.
In the end, you made a hell of a lot of music for someone who doesn’t consider himself a musician. When Youth of Today broke up, your plan was to walk away. But for whatever reason, you came back with Shelter. You still do it occasionally today. Something keeps you going.
RAY: I think I realized that this is exactly what I should be doing. [When Youth of Today broke up,] I felt like I was running away. But I’m good at this. I was very lucid in the way I wrote lyrics. I was very focused. I have an audience of people that are looking for inspiration, and I can write songs. I can start record labels. I’m a public speaker. This is what I do. I don’t like the nastiness of the scene, the back-biting of the scene, the betrayal of the scene, the dogma of the scene. But that’s just the stuff I’m going to have to deal with if I want to do this because I think this is such a valuable message. Despite all the other crap that goes with it, when you get a letter from a kid that says, “You saved my brother’s life”—that means something to you. Whatever this is, this is good. This is a good thing. This is helping people. And as cheesy as straight-edge could be for a lot of people in the scene back then, and as uncool as it was at the time, I’m glad these things were a part of my life. The same with spirituality. I’m glad it’s a part of my life, and I feel fortunate that I stumbled upon these things as a young kid because it protected me from a lot of hell that I’ve seen. I have no regrets about any of it.
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You have no idea how psyched I was to have this to read on my prep when my school went on a lockdown. I was literally hiding in a closet reading this and enjoyed this conversation so much…maybe being in the closet too, it’s impossible for me to have uninterrupted reads otherwise. Considering Ray has had both conscious as well as subconscious influences on my belief systems, I have always thought of him as a caricature and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. This conversation was so humanizing, insightful and inspiring. Thanks for always doing the work.
A true inspiration for me over the years, both the "Ray" and the "Raghunath Das". Jai.