Life Support
Life Support
“Hardcore saved my life." We’ve all said it at one point or another. But when our personal struggles are too much to bear, we need to know: Asking for outside help is a matter of saving our own lives.
I.
It was the kind of text message that you look at more than once. First on your lock screen, where you’re seeing enough of a preview to know that opening your text app might make it real. And then again, later, after you’ve already opened it and you know that it’s real. Hoping it’s not true. Wondering if you can un-read it. Thinking you might be able to play dumb enough with yourself to forget what you know. No matter how many times you look or look away, none of this works.
This particular text came from a friend who seemed to believe that Bill—one of my oldest friends and the singer for my first band—took his own life while living in Lima, Peru. Attached to this message was an article from a Spanish-speaking newspaper that he wanted me to read, I assume, because he knew I can read Spanish fluently.
“Is that what it actually says?” he asked. “Is that even him?”
Trying to decide whether or not to click through at a moment like this is a rare kind of dread. For as much as we know that nothing is forever, we still make whatever dissociative choices are necessary to spend most of our lives untethered from that reality, planning for a future in which all our friends and loved ones—even the ones we’ve lost touch with—will simply always be there. At the time I received that text message it had been several years since the last time I saw Bill, but we still checked in on each other whenever we could. Life had become somewhat complicated for him when he left New York, first to Florida and then to Lima, and although he was loath to share any details, Bill was always very good at strong assurances. “I’m fine,” he always told me. “It’s all good, man.” In my head, there was never a future where we wouldn’t meet again.
And yet even before I followed that link, I knew where it was going to take me. Not because I ever seriously thought Bill was at risk—I would have done anything to help him had I any reason to suspect the worst—but because this was someone I’d known since we were teenagers. I knew who he was.
Bill was someone who only knew how to paint with broad strokes. He was the kid who jumped on your head at a show if he thought he could do it stylishly and the kid who plainly decided he was going to sing for a band long before he ever actually tried to sing. (True to form, I’d never heard him sing before we started our band, Fountainhead. Bill’s sheer audacity was more of a qualification to me than his voice.) He was the first kid I knew to move into a Hare Krishna temple when his interest in “krishnacore” was piqued and the first kid I knew to dive headfirst into the early New York City rave scene when his interest in hardcore began to wane. I mean, he moved to fucking Peru out of nowhere. Bill was someone who took risks. But for all of the experience and wisdom that may theoretically come from being such a person, it was also true that those risks sometimes got him into trouble. Bill was aware of that, but for him, it was just another risk to take.
Eventually, I read the newspaper story. It said what my friend thought it said.
Over the next couple of weeks, the people who knew Bill all felt compelled to look for signs—anything we could use to make it make sense. But whenever I started to think about all of the ways of being that may have put Bill “at risk,” I couldn’t help but see so much of the same story that brought the both of us to hardcore in the first place. We both barreled our way inside of a community of radical outcasts and dissidents because there was always something inside of us that never felt right in the outside world we were presented with, and we both held onto it because we knew there was a better chance that whatever made us feel different and unwanted everywhere else might be appreciated here. Ultimately, though, hardcore is more of a relief valve than a psychological quick-fix, and eventually, there comes a time when all of us must find an actionable path towards wholeness. Until then, we are always going to be more alike than different. This is the reason I ask so many people I interview: “What fucked you up to be here?” Because Bill was not some sort of troubled outlier in a sea of well-adjusted hardcore kids. He was you. He was me.
II.
This coming October 25th would have been Jon Bunch’s 54th birthday. He is still best known as the high-spirited singer for Reason to Believe, Sense Field, and for at least one album, Further Seems Forever, but above all else, Jon was my friend. Our bands toured together in the summer of 1996, but even before then, I could always rely on Jon for his dependable cheerleading. That trust in “hope” that lives in his lyrics also existed in Jon’s person; he truly seemed to relish pulling me aside at different points in my life over the years to give me encouraging words for whatever it was that I was focused on at the time. The last time I saw him, at a show that we played together in Chicago in 2013—a show that turned out to be Sense Field’s last-ever appearance with Jon—he did just that, telling me how much our band moved him during soundcheck. “I just really want you to know that I love you,” he told me. I loved him, too.
It’s important to me, then, that I don’t totally sanitize what I know about Jon’s life after Sense Field. At around the time of their final album, Living Outside, he’d begun to speak publicly about some of the issues that he was silently struggling with throughout his time in our community: a complicated relationship with his father, issues with addiction, childhood sexual abuse. For as long as I knew Jon, there was always a sense of pain rubbing up against his indelible need to express affection. “I’ve always equated being treated poorly as the equivalent of being loved,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “The songs [on this album] are still hopeful songs, but it’s finally just about standing up for yourself.” Much like Bill, Jon was also very good at strong assurances.
Chris Evenson, Jon’s longtime friend and musical partner since 1987, remembers the end of Sense Field with some heartache. As the guitarist for both Sense Field and Reason to Believe, Chris had known Jon long enough by that point to know that even though they both agreed the band should break up, a drastic shift was simultaneously taking place.
“He started to unravel a bit,” Chris tells me, as part of a wide-ranging conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “Making the last record was really difficult. It was pretty much just him and me trying to make that happen by the end. You could see that it was weighing on his mind because he wasn’t taking care of himself anymore. He was partying really hard. He went out to clubs all the time and did everything under the sun. He just wasn’t the same focused and hardworking Jon that he’d always been. And I think that’s because he realized it was coming to an end, and he went into a kind of self-destructive phase. It was hard to watch, you know?” He pauses, then adds, “There was a lot of conflict between the two of us then. Sadly, we were never close again after that, and we actually didn’t even speak for many years after that.”
No one will ever be able to really say why Jon Bunch took his own life on the evening of January 31, 2016. Almost nine years later, I still have a hard time imagining what could have pushed him over the edge and into such a desperate place. But thinking about it today, it feels important to me that we never sideline Jon as some kind of anomaly—simply for being a person with lifelong struggles in a scene that was literally founded by people with lifelong struggles. These people had a desire to create a space where looking out for one another is a non-negotiable part of the culture, a space where we could struggle together without judgment. Even the early pioneers seemed to know: We are all at risk.
III.
I received that text message about Bill’s death on February 16, 2013, a little over a month after the last time I saw Jon Bunch in person. It’s nearly impossible for me to separate those two events in my mind. Two hardcore kids, two singers, two friends whose mere existence enriched my life in so many ways—gone. It’s an incalculable loss, but it’s also a reminder: What we do here can help on some level, but we still need to fully eradicate the stigmas surrounding mental health in our community and we all must learn to ask for outside help when things get too difficult, as they inevitably do.
I also remember that date for something else that happened. Texas is the Reason was in the middle of our only real reunion tour on that day, and we were playing at Union Transfer in Philadelphia that night. At some point after soundcheck, while I was still processing the news about Bill, we were told that the family and friends of a fan who couldn’t be there wanted to meet us. When we walked outside to speak with them, we were told the story of Daniel—a young man who loved our band, and who even had a ticket for the show, but who also suffered from a life-threatening illness. He died before he could see us, but he still asked his family to play the song “Do You Know Who You Are?” as he passed. We were astonished to hear this.
We did not share the story of our own loss with Daniel’s family that afternoon, but we did believe that this had now become an opportunity to share our grief and to celebrate the lives of our loved ones. So we made the decision to do something we’d never done before and never did again: We played the song “Do You Know Who You Are?” live. The room was quiet and reverent and seemed to understand. We were all inside of a moment. We were all struggling together, and life felt all the more precious for it.
If you are experiencing mental health-related distress or are worried about a loved one who may need crisis support, please call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org. Connect with a trained crisis counselor. It’s confidential, free, and available 24/7/365.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Chris Evenson of Sense Field.
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Though Jon and I weren't pals, we were both part of that Revelation Records fam and spoke a few times over the years.
Reason to Believe was my very first wax ordered through the mail... so it, and Jon will always have a special place in my heart.
When I read the news, I cried tears of understanding why someone takes their own life—that's admittedly dark, but I understand when someone is "done". I've been there too.
Like so many other folks that were influenced by Jon's kindness, lyrics and heartfelt delivery on stage and though airwaves, I always thought of him as that slightly older brother that I wanted more time with.
This is really beautiful. Can't wait to read the interview.