We're Not In This Alone

Hardcore's first decade was forged as a developing culture, its codes and traditions handed down by the elders. Time and growth rendered that practice as no longer viable. But did we lose something?

The corner of Bleecker and Bowery. December 2022. Photo courtesy of Shepard Fairey Instagram.

I.

The path was well worn by the end of the decade, but I can’t say I ever totally got used to it. I’d take the train to Manhattan, transfer at Grand Central for the downtown 6, and get out on the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette. From there, I walked east—with every passing block unlocking a new level of equal parts elation and dread. Mott, Elizabeth, Bowery. The closer I got, the clearer the sight of skins and punks and skaters came into focus. Whenever I tell anyone about going to a Sunday Matinee in the 1980s, I always think I come off sounding way cooler than I actually was. But I was a literal child, a poser. I was a guest in these people’s home, and I knew it would be years before I might be invited to stay.

I had been to “concerts” before I started going to shows. I saw Rush. I saw Iron Maiden. I saw Metallica open for Ozzy. There was no sense of culture at a concert. Everyone who paid for a ticket felt entitled to the same experience. There were only the universal tropes of “how to act” as an audience: Applaud after each song, scream “Woo!” whenever you’re asked how you’re feeling tonight, hold your lighters up for the power ballad. You were there to focus on the band you came to see, not on each other.

That’s not how it felt at CBGB. I’ve heard people say that hanging out on the sidewalk was sometimes more of the point than actually seeing a show, and I can sort of agree with that. Because hardcore shows back then, unlike “real” concerts, were also the living embodiment of a developing culture. There was a social structure, there were elders, and there were rules. That sidewalk, for me, is where I spent the most time as an observer. It’s where I learned the ways of being in hardcore, who the elders were, and the occasionally harsh reality that breaking the rules had consequences. Just standing there was a way of being tribe-adjacent until you were tribe.

If I’m being honest with you, I’m not sure I truly felt like a part of the New York hardcore scene for the first couple of years. In fact, looking back on it now, one could argue that my experience was practically antithetical to everything I believe about hardcore in 2024: inclusion was hard earned and not presumed, social hierarchies reigned, and new kids were often made to jockey for position. But if you were as young and as desperate as I was to join a surrogate family at that point in my life, it only makes sense that you might also be as starved for a connection to legacy and heritage. I wanted structure. I wanted elders. I wanted rules. I wanted a sense of history and belonging and even love that I wasn’t getting at home.

You have to remember: CBGB only held a legal capacity of 350 people, and most of the time only a couple of hundred people showed up. Which is to say that for most of the 1980s, New York City hardcore was still tiny enough to be tribal—and every tribe has its initiations. Whatever I think about it now, I went all in for it then.

Civ and Porcell from Youth of Today in the mid-’90s. Photo by Lenny Zimkus.

II.

There’s a scene in A Roadie’s Tale—the recently published book by Civ of Gorilla Biscuits which recounts his experiences on tour with Youth of Today in 1987—that made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Civ wrote about growing up in Jackson Heights, Queens (not too far from Woodside, where I grew up), and essentially being taken under the wing of Anthony Comunale, the one-time Token Entry singer who went on to become the legendary voice of Raw Deal and Killing Time. As Civ tells it, Anthony personally brought him to the places where all the local hardcore kids hung out. He introduced Civ and his friends to all of the bands they should know, and even took them on field trips to see where Queens elders from bands like Reagan Youth and Major Conflict once lived to “make sure we had respect for the past.” The next part of the story, however, rang particularly true for me. Civ writes:

Talking with Anthony one day, I mentioned that I wanted to get a pair of Doc Martens shoes. I wasn’t really a boot kind of guy. Anthony told me to go to 99X on East 6th Street and ask Duane to set me up. He tore a page out of a PennySaver catalog and wrote, “OK for Doc shoes (Black)” and initialed it. This was to make sure Duane knew my Doc purchase was sanctioned and bona fide. Proof of Anthony’s genius.

Most people may not remember this, but Doc Martens weren’t actually that easy to find in America in the 1980s—which is, perhaps, one of the reasons why so many kids had their boots stolen off their feet outside of CBs every week. Wearing Docs actually meant something. Like Civ, I waited to buy my boots until an older skinhead could bring me to a store called NaNa, which I only recently learned was the brand’s primary U.S. distributor in the ‘80s. For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, my older friend did all the talking. He showed me how to lace them up on the spot. And when it was time to pay for them, he just asked me for the money and went to the register himself. NaNa and 99X were the only two places in New York where you could reliably buy Doc Martens for the longest time, and since you couldn’t just buy a pair of Docs at any old shoe store, you had to depend on the older kids for what can now only be seen as an authorization to buy them. By extension, this was also your authorization to wear them. In cultural terms, it was a rite of passage.

Much of my conversation with Civ, to be published in full on Thursday, stems from the many great stories in A Roadie’s Tale, and as such, we talk about this transmission of hardcore tradition in New York at length.

“I was literally sitting at Anthony’s knee to get ‘the rules,’ you know? And then I got rules from Raybeez and Jimmy G and those guys [from] just listening to them talk,” he recalls. “In hardcore, what you brought to the table, what you brought to the scene to move it forward, that’s where you got your respect from. You also got respect if you could beat the shit out of three people at once, because there were those guys who didn’t really do a lot but they could do that.” He laughs, then adds, “But hardcore was a place where nerds could come and thrive if they were musical or if they were good artists or if they could put on a show, you know?”

It’s this last category where I finally found myself in hardcore, and it’s in this last category where I have finally been able to thrive for the last three decades. Make no mistake, much like Civ, I still very much feel a connection with the rough and tumble legacy of hardcore that I found on the Bowery. But I feel privileged to say that the legacy I hope to be leaving behind is that of a nerd who eventually brought his whole self to the table.

III.

Sometimes I wonder if any of the folks who fret about hardcore “getting too big” actually remember a time when hardcore was objectively small. The general assumption about scale is true: The more people who discover hardcore and who join our community, the more this thing we do will inevitably change. But why do our minds always want to interpret change as a negative outcome?

Here in New York, we have been experiencing consistent growth patterns since shows started moving from A7 to CBGB to the old 1,400-capacity Ritz, which had already begun selling out shows in the mid-‘80s. By 1991, Roree Krevolin moved her renowned Amnesty International benefit shows to “the New Ritz” on West 54th Street (at the site of the old Studio 54), which held a capacity of 3,000 people; her most well-attended show there featured Gorilla Biscuits, Sick of it All, Killing Time, Supertouch, Token Entry, Burn, Vision, and Quicksand. These days, the old Ritz is now Webster Hall, where Botch recently played two sold-out shows—with almost 3,000 tickets sold between both nights. So if you are talking to me as that same kid who literally needed permission to buy a pair of Doc Martens from a scene elder in 1988, then I’d tell you the ship of fear that hardcore is “getting too big” has long ago sailed. The only question left on the table is how we choose to adapt to it.

Many of the things that we’ve lost with scale are only a memory today. When hardcore was less than ten years old, for one thing, most of our elders had only been “hanging out” for four or five years. When I was sixteen, I considered anyone who was 25 to be a grizzled veteran. When I first started buying records in 1987, it felt technically possible to own all the records. These random facts paint a very different picture of experience for the people who lived it, at a time when our history and our people and our music were still a finite resource. The scene was something that was not only small enough to define back then, but also easier to shape—hence the existence of those New York elder-guardians who acted as stewards, sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh, for the community they started. Through it all, however, was the idea that something precious was being passed down to me, and an enduring desire on my end to continue to pay it forward. Perhaps the scene is too big to play the part of elder anymore. But my debt is too great to go home now.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Civ of Gorilla Biscuits.

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