Losing My Edge

I was straight-edge for twenty years until one day, I wasn't. That doesn't mean I walked away with nothing.

Myself, in much edgier times. New York, NY. 1997. Photo by Chrissy Piper.

I.

For several years, every Thursday night between 9pm and 10:30pm, I sat glued to a boombox with one finger pressed on record, waiting to capture the latest demo or the coolest classics on WNYU’s Crucial Chaos. That original version of the show was a New York institution for hardcore on the radio, and I honestly feel so lucky to have been there for it. I used to keep literal boxes of those tapes, and these recordings documented everything from the first time I ever heard Butthole Surfers—DJ Spermicide opened one show with “Butthole Surf Theme Song” from the second Rat Music For Rat People compilation and now I always think of them in that context—to the time she brought Altercation on for an interview and they seemed to stumble on almost every question she asked them about skinhead violence in the scene. (Hey, it was a complicated time for New York hardcore.) One of my most formative memories, however, is of listening to the show in October 1986 when she invited Ray Cappo and Richie Birkenhead to talk about their still up-and-coming band, Youth of Today.

I remember being particularly enthralled by this interview. Compared to the average guest on Crucial Chaos, Ray and Richie—respectively 20 and 21 years old at the time—were startlingly articulate and thoughtful. They talked about things like kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. They talked about vegetarianism as if it were the obvious conclusion of hardcore scene ethics. They talked about straight-edge, too, but contrary to what you might assume now, straight-edge itself wasn’t their banner issue. Not by a long shot, in fact.

“We want people to know that what Youth of Today has to say isn’t just that people should abstain from drinking or doing drugs,” Richie explained. “I personally think that’s a very superficial thing.”

“It’s a very selfish thing!” Ray added, with spirit. “I think you should stop hurting people before you stop hurting yourself—things like standing up against violence or standing up for vegetarianism. That’s directly hurting other people and other animals. We should all be looking at that before we start saying, ‘I shouldn’t smoke.’”

Hearing this interview again now, as a grown man, it’s amazing how I recall none of that. As a kid, I only remember hearing something about being straight-edge and feeling like that was something I might actually be interested in. I’d already tried smoking and drinking in 1986, and nothing about those experiences appealed to me. Honestly, I’d already started pretending to drink at parties and I was tired of pretending to be drunk. So I finished that interview, woke up the following morning, and bought the Can’t Close My Eyes 7-inch at the record store first thing after school. Within weeks, I would X up for the first time. For the next 20 years, I considered myself a dedicated straight-edge kid.

II.

For a long time, whenever I spoke about being straight-edge, I used acutely binary terms to explain my thinking about it. I wasn’t the only one. Find almost any interview with a straight-edge band from 1988 to 1992 and you’re likely to discover a world where there are only two kinds of people: straight-edge kids and full-blown addicts. It’s a world where either you have a “clear mind” or you’re completely fucked up all the time; a world where you’re either an object of purity or the epitome of decay. Straight-edge, I believed, was a single decision that you make—a vow—while everything after that was simply an expression of commitment to that promise. I took my own agency right out of the equation.

Interestingly, it was my commitment to vegetarianism that ultimately led to an evolution in my thinking about straight-edge. It took real work to be a vegetarian in the eighties and nineties; when I went vegan in 1996, the task felt even more herculean. Which meant that I had no choice but to be meticulously conscious about my diet. And I had to make countless conscious and deliberate choices every time I got hungry because everything was a choice. Every day I was forced to comb through menus to find not only things I “could” eat, but things I wanted to eat. At some point, it struck me that being vegetarian or vegan was not a single decision I made in 1988 that I was blindly adhering to; it was a repetitive individual choice that I was compelled to make every time I needed food. In other words, I am not “a vegetarian” as much as I am a person who has consistently chosen to eat vegetarian food for almost three-quarters of my life. It wasn’t about the things I didn’t choose, but the things that I did choose. Thinking about it like that makes me feel empowered. Because freewill isn’t free if you feel forever bound to a single decision—even if it’s the best choice for you.

For a long time, straight-edge was, in fact, the best choice for me. There was a period of my life when I actually needed a binary way to think about drugs and alcohol. Anyone who knows me can attest to the way my brain works, and to the way it tends to obsess over new discoveries. (I often joke that whenever I find something that I like, I will just go down with that ship.) Combine that with the wreckage of anxiety and depression that followed my adolescence and I can say, unequivocally, that being straight-edge for as long as I was saved me from a world of unnecessary grief. It also gave me the time and inclination to obsess over other things. Better things, like learning how to write and make music.

But then, one day in 2006, I made a different choice. I sat down at an Italian restaurant and I made the unmeditated individual decision to order a glass of the house red. I did not make a big deal out of it, nor did I feel all that strange about it. It was just a single choice that I made that day, and I did not feel like I should be bound to that choice for the rest of my life either. Since then, I’ve made several individual decisions to enjoy or politely refuse other drinks. I acknowledge and honor the experiences of those of us who may have predispositions for alcoholism and addiction, and who, for any number of valid reasons, don’t have that kind of luxury. But in my own personal experience, I can still say that I’ve never been excessively drunk. I’ve still never tried drugs of any kind, including weed. And perhaps most thankfully, I still haven’t turned into the kind of belligerent, intoxicated jerk that—if you listened to the same straight-edge records that I did as a kid—was the person I was told I’d be destined to become for “breaking edge.” I’m happy to report that those songs aren’t always true.

Youth of Today in 1986. From L-R: Richie Birkenhead, John Porcelly, Ray Cappo, Walter Schreifels, and Mike Judge. Photo by Murray Bowles.

III.

I can’t find the actual tweet anymore, but the first unofficial “review” I found of Ray Cappo’s recently released memoir, From Punk to Monk, went something like this: “I can’t believe I bought this book only to find out that Ray broke edge while he was in Youth of Today. Fuck this. I don’t even want to read the rest of it.” If you were ever straight-edge, surely you can at least relate to the feeling: Disillusion. Disappointment. Anger. “Losing your edge” can cost you respect, credibility, and even friendship itself.

Obviously, I knew about when Porcell lost his edge; I prodded him to admit it in an interview for Anti-Matter in 1994, and he certainly received his fair share of criticism from the younger straight-edge stalwarts of the time when that came out. Ray’s story was also somewhat known in New York circles, but I feel like it didn’t get around as much because most people would have had a hard time even trying to describe it: A year or two before he became a Hare Krishna devotee, Ray had been following a man who, in his memoir, he calls “Guru James.” Guru James taught what seemed like a hybrid of Eastern spiritual styles, and Ray—whose spiritual search began much earlier than most Youth of Today fans realize—had been developing a deeper faith in his teachings. At one point, Guru James told the young Ray Cappo that all of the great mystics who found God did so with the help of mind-expanding substances, and he encouraged him to have that experience. Ray, of course, balked at the suggestion for quite some time. But in the end, he decided that he needed to know if this was true. He decided that he must “break edge.” He locked himself in his bedroom, began chanting mantras, and essentially started tripping on mushroom tea.

“Of course, Mike Judge and Porcell thought I was nuts and I think they wrote a song about me,” Ray explains, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “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. I 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. 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.”

Had I known this story in 1988, I’m not sure I would have been as graceful about it as I am today. But whatever you think about Ray’s choice, I’d argue that there’s some value in knowing that the living archetype of late eighties straight-edge was able to make such a difficult choice for himself—in spite of his esteemed membership in such an easily jilted hardcore subculture—and that he learned something about himself in the process that ultimately strengthened his original resolve. In case you’re wondering, Ray almost immediately decided that this was not the path to enlightenment he was hoping for, and he walked away from Guru James shortly thereafter.

“I get how, in the straight-edge community, that looked insane,” he says now, laughing. “And that’s OK. That makes sense.”

IV.

In the first few years after I lost my edge, friends occasionally asked if I had any plans to cover up the straight-edge tattoo on my wrist. My answer was always the same: Absolutely not. The reality is, I love straight-edge. But I love it for more than just the things we didn’t do. Straight-edge gave me a framework to reconsider all of the so-called “normal things” I may never have questioned otherwise. Straight-edge made me more mindful of the brain’s magic capacity to grow, and the duty I have to protect that magic. Straight-edge opened me up to vegetarianism and a philosophy of life that promotes interconnectedness and compassion, and I still try to incorporate these things into the way I experience every single day on this planet. I love it more for those reasons.

Ray Cappo was a figurehead to me for most of the eighties—as he was, I imagine, for many of you—but at this point, I consider him to be more of an early inspiration, a former bandmate, and an old and cherished friend. (Ray was actually the one who really talked me into dropping out of high school in 1989, just before I turned sixteen, but that’s quite another story.) Even when we’ve had our share of disagreements over the years—and we’ve had them—I’ve always held a great level of respect for what I know to be his sincere and steadfast need to always be a better person, to find a better way. And as someone who has experienced many of his personal idiosyncrasies first hand, I absolutely believe him when he says that his decision to “break edge” on mushroom tea was an extension of that greater project. Misguided, perhaps. Controversial, for sure. I don’t think he’d argue with that. But we all have choices to make and things we need to learn for ourselves. We must all find our own ways of disappointing someone on the way to finding ourselves at some point.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Ray Cappo of Youth of Today and Shelter.

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