Quest For Certainty

For all of the division and debate it caused, the Krishnacore wave of the ‘90s left only a minor mark on hardcore history. But while most of us walked away unscathed, some people got hurt.

Shelter’s Ray Cappo, with myself and Porcell playing guitar in the background. Louisville, KY. 1992. Photo by Chris Higdon.

I.

The first one of my friends to move into a Hare Krishna temple was Bill. It was the Spring of 1991, and it had only been ten months since we both saw Shelter’s first show at the Anthrax in Connecticut—a night that, over thirty years later, still holds up as one of the greatest spectacles in hardcore history. Just picture the scene: At least a couple dozen Hare Krishna devotees were roaming the parking lot dressed in saffron cloth, singing and dancing and preaching to interested kids. The merch table was transformed into an Indian flea market, with neckbeads, chanting beads, Eastern philosophical books, and other imported accessories. Protesters from New York City’s ABC No Rio community congregated near the entrance and handed out flyers that positioned the Hare Krishna movement as antithetical to punk and hardcore, while both sides took turns yelling at each other. And that was just before showtime.

I remember thinking it all felt a little bit excessive as a whole—especially considering that most of the audience that night, including Bill and me, had yet to even hear a Shelter song. But in retrospect, maybe the protesters had a point: “Krishnacore” was about to make a bid for the lives of thousands of hardcore kids, and that actually was kind of a big deal.

Bill had only recently graduated high school when he moved into the temple on West Allens Lane in Philadelphia to join the “bhakta program,” an immersive religious training for new monks. In front of the building, a sign with the name of the institution responsible for bringing this tradition to the west: the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON for short. Ray Cappo had just moved Shelter—and their entourage—to the Philly temple, and the band’s early success with attracting hardcore kids to the movement meant that they were also tasked with taking over that center’s bhakta program. If you were there, you might have easily assumed that Shelter had taken over the entire temple: Sunday programs were overrun by local hardcore kids and the wooden bunk beds upstairs in the ashram were slowly but surely beginning to fill up with warm hardcore bodies. Like Dan from Salt Lake City, who played in an early Krishnacore band called Sādhana. Like Glenn, who was a poet and a writer from Washington D.C. Like my friend Bill, who until then had been the singer for my band, Fountainhead. And eventually, like me. In June of 1991, I moved in, too.

Bill and I were both “vulnerable” kids in our own ways, but I’d still argue that we walked into the experience with our eyes wide open. In Bill’s case, I think he felt a sense of uneasiness with moving into adulthood. He didn’t really have any career ambitions, and outside of singing in Fountainhead, he didn’t really have an outlet to feel validated at that stage of his life. Becoming a Hare Krishna monk seemed like a very doable aspiration, as well as an edgy one, and Bill dove in as soon as he got there—immediately shaving his head and accepting the saffron cloth of a brahmachārī, the Sanskrit term they use to describe celibate students who choose to live as renunciates. Bill always did things in broad strokes; he was never the most subtle kid at the show.

My situation was different from Bill’s, but in retrospect, it was also kind of typical. A little over a month before that first Shelter show, my best friend died in a car accident. It was an unexpected and devastating loss for me; it was my first-ever brush with mortality, and my mind was reeling. Chris was only eighteen years old when he died. I couldn’t make sense of that, and I wanted answers I couldn’t possibly find. But the fact is that, in 1990, Shelter was the only band actually singing about death and dying—so directly, in fact, that they literally had a song called “Death and Dying”—and in my seventeen-year-old brain, Ray’s lyrics were actually proposing actionable suggestions for beating it. So I took to Krishna consciousness with a personal mission: I clearly wasn’t prepared for Chris’s death. But somehow, I was going to be prepared for my own.

108. Summer of 1993. Photo by Lenny Zimkus.

II.

From a historical perspective, Ray Cappo and Shelter may have been the unwitting founders of “Krishnacore,” but they were certainly not the first Hare Krishnas in punk or hardcore. The original singer for Agnostic Front, John Watson, became a devotee in the early ‘80s and took on the name Jayanta dāsa. The same for Eric Casanova, original singer for the Cro-Mags, who became Ekesvara dāsa. Antidote famously used Hare Krishna artwork for the cover of their Thou Shalt Not Kill 7-inch EP, and their singer, Louie Rivera, was known to spend time at the temple with the Cro-Mags’ John Joseph. Punk legend Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex joined the movement in London and became Mahārānī Dāsī. Keith Burkhardt quit Cause For Alarm to join a Krishna temple in San Diego not long after the release of their first EP. And so on. All of these things happened long before The Age of Quarrel came out, and much of it predated Shelter by almost a decade.

On some level, I knew all of this when I started going to the Brooklyn ISKCON temple in 1989—which is why the question of whether or not “becoming a Krishna” was punk seemed moot to me. These people were not only “punks,” they were pioneers. These were some of the people responsible for creating the hardcore scene I discovered, and I felt like I was hardly in a position to tell any of them what was or wasn’t hardcore. I can’t speak for anywhere else in the world, but here in New York City, Hare Krishnas were already a part of the fabric of our hardcore scene by the time I showed up. I honestly had no reason to believe I was doing anything particularly radical or “un-punk” by becoming a devotee.

Vic DiCara, a former member of Beyond and Inside Out by the time he joined Shelter, also lived with Bill and me at the Philadelphia temple in 1991. Even from the beginning, you could tell that “Bhakta Vic,” as he was known, seemed determined to dedicate the entire rest of his life to the movement. He was steadfast, even to the point where other devotees would call him “too intense” behind his back. But to the more senior devotees—and to the upper management in charge of the institution of ISKCON—he was one to watch. After playing with Shelter for a year or so, some of these leaders and gurus suggested that Vic splinter off with a band of his own, and that decision, which resulted in the formation of 108, was the beginning of what Vic sees now as a manipulative situation that he was unable to escape without leaving the institution of ISKCON altogether. In fact, when he looks back at those years now, he expresses some shame for allowing himself to be exploited by what he now considers to be a self-interested religious cult.

“I shouldn’t have turned in that direction,” he says, as part of a deeply personal interview that will run in full on Thursday. “ISKCON is fucked up in every possible way. That’s the thing. The stuff that I’ve done—the music I did and the creativity I had—I’m proud of it. And I’m also embarrassed by it. Like, it’s embarrassing to say that I fell prey to a cult. I joined a cult. What the fuck did I do? And I convinced myself that it wasn’t a cult. It’s like when a person is in an abusive relationship and they convince themselves that their partner is not abusive. They’re like, ‘It’s OK, they’re a nice person!’ I didn’t want to admit that I had gotten myself into this cult because that would have proved that I have no judgment, or that my judgment is bad. I think it’s the same thing in abusive relationships where it’s embarrassing to the person to admit their partner is a shithead because you picked this partner and you attracted this partner. I feel that way about ISKCON.”

It’s in this particular nuance where, perhaps, my experience and Vic’s experience varied: Whereas my life as a monk was overseen by local leadership and felt extremely personal in nature, Vic’s life as a monk—which went on for the better part of eight years—fell under the purview of the institution of ISKCON’s national leadership. Shelter and 108, to them, were preaching arms that were filling the temples in a way they hadn’t seen since the sixties, and keeping Vic under some form of control, he says, was central to their objectives. When he was finally told that he could leave 108 in 1996, it wasn’t a coincidence that he promptly left his life in the temple behind the following year. By the time 108 reunited in 2006, Vic was fully out of ISKCON and he—and the band—had completely reinvented themselves.

III.

It’s been well over twenty years since I identified with any aspect of my experience as a Hare Krishna devotee. When I made my formal exit, it was largely because I just realized that I didn’t really believe in the existence of God anymore—and I hadn’t believed in it for a long time. I stuck around largely because of my friends there, who I still love, and because the devotees filled a very basic need I had for a family. I don’t feel bad about that.

When I look back at the “Krishnacore explosion” of the ‘90s, though, I see a movement of circumstance: Hardcore was changing at a rapid clip, and the seekers among us felt destabilized and wondering if we were missing something. Many of us felt the hardcore scene fracturing and we began looking for a more stable community and neo-family structure. Some of us were just straight-edge and vegetarian kids looking to one-up each other. In the end, despite the ubiquity of Krishna zines and Krishna beads in the ‘90s, only a very tiny fraction of the Krishnacore kids who joined back then survived as full-time devotees. Shelter was right about one thing: We were on a quest for certainty. But as it turns out, Krishna wasn’t a sure thing.

Bill actually left the temple before I did, and I only lasted for about a year and a half before I quit the monastic life to play guitar for Ressurection. For as much as I tried, I was never really cut out to be a religious monk, and I think knowing that helped me to leave on my own terms and without much bitterness. Bill wasn’t so much bitter as he was directionless when he left. He went back to singing for Fountainhead for a short time before he eventually threw himself into New York City’s underground rave scene. From there, he got into some sort of trouble that pushed him out of New York, and eventually, out of the country. In 2013, Bill took his own life while living in Peru. I’m not saying that his short time as a devotee had anything to do with that whatsoever. But I do believe that the protesters at Shelter’s first show might have been more successful with a much simpler message about the reality of becoming a teenage hardcore monk—which is to say that many of us are already fragile, and some of us will break.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Vic DiCara of 108 and Inside Out.

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