WVSU Yellow Jacket — London calling. A last look at the fall of Charleston's hardcore scene
By Sean Rose
Growing up in this world is difficult at best, armed only with inadequacy, doubt and wonder, a young teen is bound to make mistakes.
Last week, I must have been in touch with my old man side, slamming Generation Y without considering all the bad and crazy things I have done in the past.
Teen angst and the melodrama of life were never supposed to be a part of this story. Listening to The Smiths and the Circle Jerks lately has had me in a retro-pop cruise and I was really planning on divulging my youthful obsession with red haired angels, sprinkled with a touch of naughtiness. Time changes things. And we are now somewhere else.
I was an outcast in the political satire called junior high school, and I wanted more than anything to smash the world around me so that I might find a place in which my thoughts could thrive. JFA and Brand X take center stage and a long love of skate boarding took its place in my life.
Downtown Charleston was different then for sure. There was a naivety that the 90’s somehow washed away. Back then, a kid on a skateboard was no big deal and hearing the crack of a maple deck on the concrete outside didn’t seem to offend anyone and it certainly didn’t get the kid arrested.
There was an establishment downtown that all good punk rock kids came to adore. It was a small gallery on Capitol Street that had art by day and hardcore by night. Three stories above the floor of the city was a long room caked with pounds of spray paint. Any emotion that could be expressed was on those walls. Lit by a single spotlight and the drenched in waves of postmodern tribal music, one found a small sea of faces willing to accept whatever oddities one might have to offer.
Being accepted wasn’t easy, not exactly anyway. The main difference in having hardcore friends was you had to prove your alienation from the world and your desire to share it with others while committing random acts of chaos. Which basically meant skating, sex, alcohol and steroid driven rebellion.
After some changes that landed my dorkness a crown of acceptance, it wasn’t hard to seal myself a grand fate by making it with one of the hottest queens in hardcore circles. Top that off with a small Summer’s Street store that would sell fifths of grape and orange Mad Dog (that’s bad wine to those who don’t know) to a wiry 15-year-old and I was living large.
The store charged us double the retail price since we were obviously underage; but it never cost us anything because so many people had us buy it for them. Finder’s fees were always included in their price.
We would head into the alley behind and drink these cheap bottles of brutal juice in one swallow. Any hardcore punk who couldn’t down a bottle in one stroke would endure some serious ridicule. You had to fit in.
Many days we wandered the rather new Charleston Town Center and the streets that connected it with the rest of the real world we were not a part of. On days that heat overcame us, we would hike over to the train bridge that runs across the Elk River, drink a bottle of wine and jump off. If one were feeling more distant than normal, one would climb the steel superstructure and balance on a ten inch steel beam 35 feet over the tracks that were still some distance over the water. Swimming here was fun until we lost one of our hardcore elite to that bridge and the river below.
Somehow the spray paint atomic bomb above my bed never readied me for that. Death. We lived every day as invincible angels sent here to destroy civilization so that all people might find true happiness. Another died in a car. And then one to disease. And another to the system.
Driven by the fear embedded from a school and social system that doesn’t address and accept everyone, one of my dearest hardcore angels took his own life. He had been arrested by Charleston’s finest for his tongue. They were "profiled" - I believe that’s the politically correct way of saying harassed because they looked different. He told the police off because they hadn’t done anything. He was arrested and institutionalized for his "deviant" behavior.
I believe the intention of these people was to save him from himself and mold him into a socially acceptable clone. It’s hard to believe that the system can lay blame on him for what he did. I’m sure there isn’t a doctor, nurse or person of the law that would say they didn’t do everything they could for him and mean it. But I say he didn’t kill himself, the system did. Our beloved merely chose not to live in a world where he could never be himself. Personal freedom is the most sacred thing one can have. There is no life without it.
Six hardcore angels left this Earth in that time; all before I could even drive a car.
The end was strange. We had lived exiled from society but in a world free from race, belief and judgment. There were no racial boundaries. We all were outcasts from home and school. At 15, we could walk down the streets of Charleston in mid-afternoon with seven cases of beer. No one cared. And I mean that in a good way. In an instance, it was gone. Fear and numbers broke us. People became afraid of us. I guess the smile pure freedom puts on your face likens to a maddened grin. It intimidated those afraid to stand out from the rest. It was two years of bliss that surrounded Charleston and left. I’ve seen a broad world and there hasn’t been anything like it here since.
I’ll never understand people being afraid of people they think are different. We are not different. We all face the exact same fears and problems every day. We all relate to them in common and respond to them in difference. That doesn’t mean one is wrong and one is not. Six billion people inhabit this fabulous planet of ours, it seems to me we should celebrate difference every day and strive constantly to express individuality and mutual respect.
It seems really strange that Charleston circa mid-eighties is the one place I’ve seen this work with a microcosm of people embracing life and living free. Your thoughts can be walls, sometimes you need to step outside those walls and look at things from somewhere else. That is probably the most important thing you can ever learn.
Look closer. "Mommy’s Little Monster" is on the hi-fi at Hillary’s pad in Dunbar. There are 100+ of the freakiest looking people you’ve ever seen floating about in your drunken induced haze. A moment later you are curled up on the couch with a red haired angel and there isn’t anything in the world you would trade for the peace and joy of that moment...
Misfits memorabilia and the like to srose@cycline3.com. Until next time kiddies, have big love in West Virginia!
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