From Punk To Polygamy, Part 4: Conclusion

The Baron and me, Sedona, AZ, 1994 - cracking up at the g's sticking out of my shirt

As I mentioned in my previous post, when I joined the AUB, a large Mormon polygamous congregation in Utah, I went all ascetic and gave up the music I loved, thinking that it made me holier-than-thou.  This was in the early '90s.  As a result, I missed the whole grunge thing.  Which is really ironic.  Here I was on the crest of the whole alternative movement in the '80s, and I practically missed the whole Lollapalooza explosion of the scene in the '90s.  All because I was trying to be a good Mormon fundie young man.  I was trying to improve myself.

Then, I found myself out of favor in the AUB.  It's a whole other story that I won't go into now, maybe some other time.  I did talk about it a bit in my Year of Polygamy podcast interview.  It got me questioning things and re-evaluating my membership in the AUB.  But, thankfully, it got me to be a bit of my old self.  For instance, this post from my journal in May, 1994 (names omitted):

"____ wanted us to work on one of his jobs in Herriman, so we went out there. We ran into ______, and he was asking us if we were going to tomorrow's work project. I said no, so he gave us this nauseating parable about people who couldn't feed themselves, but they could feed each other. ______  is such a hypocrite.

"I'm sorry to say (or am I?) that I've found again my old friend – cynicism. I lost it when I first came into the Group, but I've found it again.

"After work, Sean and I went to the MLA building to help ________ move things to the new archives by the endowment house. _____ and _____ were there. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. Not necessarily respectively. Nor respectfully. _____  asked us if we brought the food, and I responded, 'No, I fed it to Sean, and he fed it to me.'

"They're building another building behind the RCA building.

"I told Sean, 'Watch me touch a nerve.'

"Then I asked _____ and ______, 'Which one of you brethren is going to get credit for doing the construction on the new building?'

"______ spoke up quickly, 'I am!'

"They're so predictable! They want to do good works to increase their good names. I'm so disgusted by them."

I was starting to get that punk attitude again.  And I gradually started to get into music again.  I guess you could say that The Cranberries saved my life.  They were the first new band that I had gotten into for a long, long time.  I had heard their song "Linger" on the radio and didn't think much of it.  But then I saw the play live on late night TV, and I was hooked.  Martha and I were newlyweds, sharing a house with a couple of other married couples, and we spent our time in our basement apartment, jamming to the Cranberries with our baby daughter, Sophie.

The Cranberries

Then, I got the news of a lifetime.  My all-time favorite band, Cocteau Twins, was playing a live show at Saltair, a venue on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.  This was literally a dream come true to me.  I had loved them all through the '80s when they were obscure and no one really knew who they were.  And I was going to see them live!  I bought two tickets - one for me and one for my brother.  On a chilly winter night, we drove to Saltair and ran into one of our friends from the AUB there who had actually met the band earlier that day.  We hung out for the show with this guy.  The shoegaze band, Luna, opened up for them, and then I had the delicious experience of seeing my favorite band play live, something that I will never forget.  It was my first concert in years, and Cocteau Twins would break up three years later.

On the way from the show, my old '77 Dodge threw a rod at midnight just outside of Saltair on I-80.  My brother and I started hitchhiking.  No one picked us up.  I imagine Cocteau Twins themselves passed us, but no such luck. It was the day before cell phones, so we walked the entire seven miles to Salt Lake Airport where we called for a ride from the lobby of a hotel.  I was wearing dress shoes that night, and my feet were covered with blisters the next morning.

Cocteau Twins

It wasn't long until I was excommunicated from the AUB, and my wife and I packed up our little Mercury Topaz with our baby and all of the belongings we could fit into the car and drove through the night to Mesa, Arizona.  (We saw a UFO that night, but that's another story.)  I was back by my old-stomping grounds, although my wilder days were over as I now had a family.  But I rekindled my old friendships, like with the Baron, who played in a post-grunge band with other guys I knew in high school.  I went to their shows in local venues several times.  Now that I was out of the AUB, music was no longer forbidden to me, and I started to listen to rock again.  I didn't realize how out of touch I was with music until I went to a wedding reception in the Verde Valley, and a friend of a friend asked me, "I hear you're into music.  Can you suggest any good new bands for me?"

I went hot in the face.  "It's been a long time since I have been into any new music," I told him with shame.

Gradually, I started discovering new artists like Sky Cries Mary, early emo band, Sunny Day Real Estate, Live (still a guilty pleasure), and the revival of punk bands like Bad Religion.  My older brother from Utah gave me several used CDs that included Catherine Wheel and Sarah McLachlan.  One night in '94, I went with the Baron to Mill Avenue in Tempe.  We were eating spaghetti at a patio restaurant, watching people walk by like we always did.  All of a sudden, the Baron started choking on his noodles.  Right past our table walked Chris and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets, Mike Watt, Eddie Veder, and Dave Grohl.  The Foo Fighters - still without an album - played one of their first live shows, opening for Mike Watt, just feet away from where we were scarfing spaghetti.

And yet, it was strange for me coming back to Arizona, after having spent all of that time with the polygamists.  I never really felt like I fit in with the polygamists.  And yet, back in Arizona, I did not feel like I really fit in with the music crowd.  I had changed.

Me in 2007 - I had Kody Brown hair before Kody did

Shortly after coming back to Arizona, I went on another self-imposed exile.  My family all went in on a 40-acre ranchette near Concho, a small town in eastern Arizona.  It was an undeveloped piece of land down five miles of bumpy dirt road.  I moved out in December, 1995 into a rickety singlewide trailer.  The intention was to live United Order, a form of Mormon collectivism, which we did for several years.  We had no running water, no plumbing (we pooped in buckets and then buried it), no electricity, no TV, no music.

We gradually made improvements,  A well and tank, a septic system for toilets.  But I want to talk about the no TV thing for a minute.  A council member in the AUB that my dad respected very much once offhandedly told my dad that TV had ruined more United Orders than anything else.  My dad then told him, "Well, I like the documentaries."  And the council member said, "Well, I do, too."

Well, my dad was well-intentioned, but this story grew in the telling.  And after the passing of my dad, people kept telling this story, and it kept growing bigger and bigger.  This apostle prophesied with quivering rage that is we ever brought TV to the property, it would be the end of our United Order.  LOL.  People forget - I was there for this all.  I saw how the story "grew".

Me on the banks of the Congaree, South Carolina, 2009

Nevertheless, my dad drafted an agreement that we wouldn't bring TV onto our property, and I signed it.  I didn't want to, I didn't agree with it, but I signed it anyway.  Mostly because I wanted to please my dad.  Years later, other people tried to include computers in this agreement, and, by then, I had grown a pair and put my foot down.  The way I look at it now - I will never agree again to have any MAN control what I can or what I cannot have in my house.  Years later, after the United Order had dissolved, I bought a 7" DVD player.  It was like bringing fire to the natives.  My kids huddled around that thing like it might disappear.  Then a few years after that, I broke the agreement and bought a TV.  I guess I have always been a rebel at heart.  When I feel oppressed, I always have a tendency to do things out of the norm - like growing my hair long.  Maybe that's why I have this bushy beard right now.

Back in the early days of the United Order, all I had was a boombox.  Without TV, we listened to a lot of books-on-tape, radio broadcasts, and I listened to my music - at least as long as the D batteries lasted.  There was no internet, so it was hard to keep up with new music.  My older brother would send me mix tapes from Utah - Toad the Wet Sprocket, Heather Nova.  Once, on a trip to Phoenix, I got a free sampler from a CD shop.  I took that home and started listening to it over and over again.  I would up eventually buying everything on that sampler - The Badlees, Blue Rodeo, Jan Arden.

Me and my daughter Sara at the Puscifer store, Jerome, AZ

Around this time, I started practicing plural marriage, my attempt lasting thirteen years.  For years, as a punk, I was used to endure people looking at me oddly.  That was part of being a punk.  As a polygamist, I got a lot of strange looks as well.  Perhaps I have thrived on this.

During my time as a Mormon fundamentalist, even now, I have a lot of people telling me that I shouldn't listen to rock music, to "music of the world", or that I shouldn't go to movies.  I think that is ridiculous.  These people should adhere to the Mormon motto which is: "Mind your own business."  They should not concern themselves what I watch or what I listen to.  I have come to terms with my own spirituality and who I am.  I have learned to embrace the part of myself that loves punk music.  It's part of who I am.  And I would not be a Mormon fundamentalist if I had not first embraced punk.  My "splurge" is that I allow myself to download four albums a month.  It is mostly stuff that is obscure and that you have not likely heard of.  But that's who I am.  To keep discipline in really listening to the stuff I download, I started a music blog called Moroni's Music where I review my downloads.  I love keeping current with music and new artists.  Check my blog out if you can.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, my kids follow after me and love obscure music as much as I do.  My kids are always getting me into new music.  But make no mistake - I get them into new music just as much as they do.  It's great to have that kind of relationship with my kids.

When I am an old man, I will likely still be rocking out, much to the chagrin of the polygamous communities!  Ha!

From Punk To Polygamy, Part 3: Moving To Utah

Me in 1997

On a chilly September morning in 1990, at age 20, we loaded my parents' cramped car and headed to Utah, my parents taking me and my younger brother to Utah to start college and move in with my polygamist relative, Uncle Jim.  It was my turn to drive that night, and a fog poured over the rolling highway in rural Utah, my first time in my birth state in many years.  We arrived at my Uncle Jim's house in Salt Lake City, and we were met with open arms.  That afternoon, a group of polygamist men stood around a large tree in the sunlight of the afternoon sun and talked gospel.  Even though I was a novice, I joined in.  Later, one of the women told me that she admired me for having the nerve to discuss with older men who knew more than me.  I didn't know that I had committed some faux pas.

The next day, my parents dropped me off at the campus of the local community college for registration, and then they drove off to Arizona, leaving me alone.  Apart from my summer in Belgium, this was my first time being away from home.  I puked in the bathroom, I was so nervous.  It didn't take long for me to make friends, mainly with the international students.  I joined their organization and was involved in organizing their social events.  For one Halloween party, I was asked to deejay.  Of course, I spun house music, and then someone requested Aerosmith.  Some French girl approached me and sneered, "Now, this is real music!"

Me in Sedona, 1990, with my personal go-go dancer

I found that Salt Lake City, at the time, was roughly yet consistently about three years behind the times.  Stuff I had listened to three years earlier, like The Smiths or The Cure, were popular on their popular alternative radio station.  I auditioned as a deejay at a local modern club, DV8 and played house music.  I was told firmly that this was not the kind of music their patrons listened to.  A year later, I saw a live show - British acid house outfit, 808 State, and, before the show, the deejay was spinning house.  I just shook my head.  I applied a year too early.  That is not to say that there was not a good music scene.  Fans were enthusiastic about the live shows.  While I lived there, Throwing Muses did a free show on the lawn at University of Utah, and Frank Black (of Pixies fame) did an acoustic set in a record store while on a road trip across the States.

However, I really missed Arizona, even if I did like living in Utah.  Thirty years ago, there was not as much of a latino presence in Utah as there is now.  I missed my people. I missed my food in a place where sweet salsa and Taco Time were people's idea of Mexican food.  I started listening to Mexican music, Cuban music, Puerto Rican music - anything with a latin beat.  One night, I went to an open mic poetry night at Bandaloops, and I was pining about how much I missed Arizona.  Some hipster girl rolled her eyes at me and told me that Arizona wasn't exactly "the cultural mecca of the Southwest".  Later, that girl asked me if I wanted to go to a party with her.  I think she was baffled why I coldly turned her down.  I found friendship and companionship with many of the single kids from the polygamist families my age and started attending the dances put on by Joe Darger's family in Murray Park.  Following the tastes among the polygamists, I started, for the first time in my young adult life. to listen to country music - something that shocked some of my siblings.  To this day, I still listen to it, although I can get sick of it pretty quickly.  I also reunited with Chad, a friend from high school, who lived in Salt Lake City at the time.  Since we didn't really have many other friends, we used to hang out and go to movies.  There was an art house downtown - I don't remember the name - that used to show obscure art films, and it was so cold they used to serve hot cider to help warm you up.

Me in 1990

At the end of 1991, I, along with all of my family, joined the AUB, which is one of the largest polygamous churches in Utah.  The AUB are not as physically distinguishable as the FLDS.  Most do not wear the prairie dresses (although some of the old-timers do).  Being in the AUB was like being in the LDS Church, except they practice plural marriage.  When I joined, I ran into a couple of women that had attended college with, although I had no idea at the time that they were plural wives.  One of them told me, "I wondered if you were a fundamentalist because if your last name, but when you walked into class, you were wearing a bandanna on your head, a biker jacket, cutoff shorts, and combat boots.  I had no clue that you were a Mormon fundamentalist!  You looked pretty wild!"

In the AUB, I quickly learned that I was the odd man out when it came to my musical tastes.  Rock music, in general, was eschewed as evil and generally avoided.  One evening, I was invited with other young people to BYU to attend a concert of Mormon fluff rock act, Afterglow.  There are no words to describe how much I hated this music.  It was wimpy, effeminate, and passionless, all in the attempt to engender an uplifting, spiritual version of Mormon easy listening music.  With a sour taste in my mouth, I left the concert, and Martha - who would become my wife one day - was on a date with another young man.  They were gushing about how good the concert was, and I felt nauseous.  (Okay, I was a little jealous.)  I had to tell them how much I didn't like it.

AUB leader, the late Owen Allred and me, 1994

As Martha and I started to court, I tried to share some of the music I liked with her, and I was shocked that she didn't like any of it.  I placed her Dead Can Dance.  She shook her head and said that it was too dark.  I played her the most innocent, innocuous record I could think of - "In My Tribe" by 10,000 Maniacs,  "You have to ask yourself - is this uplifting?" she asked me.

I have since come to the conclusion - why does art always have to be uplifting?  Is life always uplifting?  Can life not be dark sometimes?  Or is it always sugar and fluff?  Art should reflect life, which is sometime uplifting, yet sometimes heavy and burdensome.  It's easy for me to say that now, but I did something to myself that was unconscionable.  I tried to rewrite myself in order to fit in with the AUB.  No one forced me.  No one made me do it.  I did it on my own.  I wanted to fit in.  I wore the button-up shirts that polygamist men wear.  I ceased being controversial and was completely mild-mannered.  But mostly, I stopped listening to the music I loved, because I viewed it as evil and not conducive to an uplifting spirit.  Shortly before I got married, I took a trip to Arizona to hang out with the Baron and Matt.  I took my crate of records and cassettes and sold ALL of them at Zia Record Exchange in Tempe.  Those that I could not sell, I gave away to my friends.  I purged that out of my life.

When I come back with Part 4, I will tell you how music saved me.

From Punk To Polygamy, Part 1

Me in 1988

In my recent interview on the "Year of Polygamy" podcast, Lindsay Hansen Park asked me briefly my history as a teen in the punk movement, as she thought it was an interesting aside about me.  She asked me if I thought that this interest in counter-culture movements might have contributed in any way to my embracing such an unconventional lifestyle like Mormon fundamentalism.  I mentioned that it indeed has.  There was a time when I tried to re-write myself, but, the older I get, the more I realize that punk - and other movements - helped to shape me and have made me who I am today.  I am grateful for that and have learned to embrace that part of me.  She has asked me to give a presentation at the Arizona Sunstone Symposium this March called "From Punk To Polygamy: The Story of a Mormon Fundamentalist".  I am sure that she will want me to focus more on the "Mormon fundamentalist" part than the "punk", but I thought I would write a little about that part of my life.

I grew up in Southern Utah in the late '70s.  Back then, the only thing that they played on the radio was country music.  In the home, my dad had a huge record collection he had amassed on his mission in Mexico, so we listened to rancheras and mariachi music.  Around 1979, at the age of 9, I started listening every Sunday to Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" on a portable radio.  It changed my world.  The first time I heard "Back in Black" by AC/DC, I sat transfixed, staring at the radio,  I had never heard anything like it.  It seemed almost forbidden.  From then on, I was listening to everything I could from that era - The Police, Blondie, Rod Stewart, Styx.  This was the stuff that I listened to.

In 1982, our family moved from Utah to Casa Grande, Arizona, a small town on the outskirts of Phoenix.  For a kid from rural Utah, this was a huge change.  It was '82, and I was the only kid in school still wearing bell bottoms.  I had older brothers in high school, and they made friends in the local LDS ward.  I remember, after Mutual, going to my parents' shop after hours with my older brothers and their friends to listen to heavy metal music on a record player - Rush, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.  And so I became a metalhead.

Me in the center with friends from Texas, 1986

My older brother, like my dad, had a huge record collection.  His tastes became diverse, and he ranged from the conventional into more obscure bands - Motorhead, Testament, Voivod, Venom, Slayer, and Metallica.  We were listening to "Kill 'Em All" before anyone really even knew who Metallica was.  I remember some conflict between my dad and brother over the record collection and my dad throwing out some of the records that he perceived to be satanic.

And because these bands were influenced by hardcore punk, we started exploring that music - or rather, my brother started exploring, and I listened to whatever he listened to - Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, JFA, Junior Acheivment, Reagan Youth, Fear, Crass.  My brother moved on with metal, but I stuck to punk.  I was in junior high at the time, and the only other kid in the school who listened to punk was a kid named Matt who had just moved from Chicago.  I started going to his house, and we developed a love for horror films and art, fantasy fiction like H.P. Lovecraft, obscure metal and punk.  He introduced me to music like 45 Grave, Christian Death, The Effigies, and SNFU - pretty heavy stuff for some junior high kids.

The summer before I started high school, my oldest brother came home from college with a bag full of cassettes that I raided when he wasn't around.  That bag of cassettes - filled with what was then called "college music" also changed my life - XTC, INXS, R.E.M., The Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order.  I started adding this music to my repertoire.

The Baron, me, & Matt in Round Rock, Texas, 1986

Once I got to high school, I learned that the people who listened to this kind of music were a minority.  Yes, we were close to metropolitan Phoenix, but this was still Arizona.  We were in a town dominated by cowboys and ranchers.  Anything underground was foreign and weird to them.  They made fun of us and our music.  In reaction, we changed our appearance and looked more garish - shaved our heads, used lots of hairspray, wore lipstick and eyeliner, tore our jeans, wore tees that reflected our musical tastes, wore combat boots, wore black.  One of the things that marked my generation that still persists today - we hate anything mainstream, and we embrace anything artistic, obscure, or indie.  We couldn't even drink Bud or smoke Marlboros like our cowboy counterparts - it had to be foreign beers and clove cigarettes.  Not only was our taste in music off the mainstream, but our choice in movies - "Eraserhead", "Blue Velvet", "A Clockwork Orange". This clique in Casa Grande, Arizona became very close and tight knit.  The cowboys called us "mods", albeit incorrectly.  Many of us to this day still maintain close contact through social media.  We have that shared experience of living in a small cow town, but bonding over our love of underground music.

Me & Melissa before a rave, 1990

For instance, there was Melisa, someone who made a great impact on me.  She was so cosmopolitan and "with it" that she was ahead of the times before anyone else.  For instance, she liked Madonna before anyone had even heard of her.  My youngest brother nicknamed her the "Black Widow" because of her affinity for wearing black.  We met because, at the beginning of my sophomore year, I was wearing a DIY, homemade Exploited shirt, and it drew her attention.  We started talking about music, and her knowledge was considerable.  She turned me on to Arizona's first alternative radio program coming out of Tucson on Sunday nights in 1985.  She introduced me to the music of The Smiths, The Jam, Style Council, and Siouxsie & the Banshees.  My friend from junior high, Matt, had moved outside of Austin, Texas, and continued to be instrumental in introducing new music to me, mostly gothic stuff, like Cocteau Twins, who remains to this day my all-time favorite band, as well as Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Bauhaus, and Clan of Xymox, stuff that I am still very much into.

The Domes

So, what did we do for fun?  These usually included forays into Phoenix were there was a readily available nightlife.  My older brother played in thrash metal band called Pedifile that was fairly well known locally.  While attending his shows, I got to see and meet members of the underground metal scene like members of Metallica, King Diamond, Fates Warning, and Sacred Reich, as well as honing my skills in the mosh pit (chipped my tooth).  There were a few alternative clubs that we would attend in Phoenix and Tempe - Prisms, Out of Water, Six Feet Under.  But mostly, we hung around town, throwing parties at homes or in the desert, blasting our music into the desert sky,  One of our favorite locations were a set of abandoned domes in the middle of the desert.  We simply called them "The Domes", and they were an eerie set of buildings with concrete floors, our laughter echoing off the walls.  They are heavily tagged now, but I was one of the first people to spray-paint graffiti on the walls - poetry about vampires.  The Domes are still in the desert and occasionally make online lists about haunted places in the U.S., although one has collapsed in recent weeks.

By the end of the '80s, people like us had banded into a cohesive movement.  120 Minutes was the show we all watched on MTV every Sunday night to watch videos from Husker Du or Peter Murphy to keep up on the latest music.  Arizona had its own alternative station with its smooth-voiced host, Jonathan L, who organized Q-Fest, the first alternative festival in the nation, before Lollapalooza.  (I attended the second Q-Fest). I feel lucky to have been part of this scene before it got big.

Me & my Valentine, Andi in 1987

So how did  my parents view all of this?  With remarkable tolerance.  My parents always knew that I marched to the beat of my own proverbial drum, and they did little to suppress my creative side.  The most "oppression" that I got was my dad making me cut my hair a couple of times.  Remember: all of this time, I was an active LDS kid, passing sacrament every Sunday.  In fact, some of the kids in my ward were in my "clique".  I was very careful about not too out of hand.  I was good at wiping off the eyeliner or lipstick or eyeliner before I got home from school, or taming my hair.  I was kind of a wild kid, and I am lucky I didn't get thrown into jail.  I remember being called a "punk kid" by a Chandler police officer and thrown down onto the hood of a car, being threatened with arrest.  The officer didn't arrest me, but let me go, and I went home shaken, my parents not even aware of the details.  By all accounts, I should either be in jail, rehab, or dead by now.  I can't account for having turned out okay.

So, why did I do it?  I moved from Southern Utah to a town with a lot of money, a lot of rich ranchers.  My family was never well-off.  We wore clothes from K-Mart.  We didn't have name brands - Polo, Reebok, Izod.  Everything in the '80s was about the brand.  If you couldn't afford to wear the brand, if you wore the imitation, you were made fun of.  I tried really hard to fit in my freshman year.  They never accepted me, and so I rebelled.  I started wearing combat boots and ripped jeans.  I would save my lunch money and buy the ugliest shirts from the '60s that I could find  from the thrift stores.  Then something surprising happened - in purposefully trying not to fit in, I became somewhat popular.  People knew me for having a unique style, and I guess it resonated with some.

I also started learning to think for myself at this time.  I became very interested in Marxist philosophy and read "The Communist Manifesto".  I became interested in the punk DIY ethic and anarchy.  I read underground, political 'zines, and even published one issue for our school, which was a lot of work before word processors.  I spoke like a revolutionary.  My girlfriend Andi and I got nominated for king and queen of the Christmas Ball.  I refused to participate, because I rejected popularity contests only to find Andi kind of mad at me.  I didn't take into account what she wanted.

So, all of this prepared me for life as a Mormon polygamist.  During this time, my dad was making an active effort to teach us more about the old Mormon doctrines of plural marriage and United Order.  I will continue the story tomorrow about my journey into Mormon fundamentalism and how music was a part of this.

Moroni's Review of Bad Religion's "True North"

The other day, I was reflecting about  how - as a teenager - I loved horror movies so much.  When I went to the video store, I went right to the horror section, and that's what I would look for - everything from cheesy renditions of H.P. Lovecraft stories to Troma movies to underground slashers.  I don't know when I stopped being so interested in horror.  I can't remember.  There just came a day when I was renting other stuff.  On my DVD shelf, I still have a cherished copy of the original "Evil Dead" that I break out every couple of years, but horror is no longer really my thing.

It is the same way with punk rock, hardcore, or death/ speed metal.  There was a time between the ages of 13 to 16 where that was all that I listened to.  In junior high in the early '80s, there was the crowd that was break dancing or listening to Michael Jackson's "Thriller".  Then there was the other crowd that listened to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy, an Mötley Crüe.  In all of Casa Grande Junior High School, there was  only one  other kid who listened to punk, and we developed our friendship based on exchanging music.  (And we still maintain a friendship to this day.  This friend spends his spare time shopping for obscure vinyl in New York City and Philedelphia.)  Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, D.R.I., Minutemen, X, 45 Grave, the Effigies, D.I., Reagan Youth, and, yes, Bad Religion.  

It's amazing to think that this was all I practically listened to.  I don't know when that changed, but I gradually started listening to other things to the point that now I almost never listen to hardcore or metal.  Don't get me wrong.  I still really like this stuff, but it’s like “Evil Dead” – I only break it out every now and then.  Usually when I am angry.

Of all the hardcore bands from the ‘80s, the one that I listen to the most – and relate to the most – is Bad Religion.  Maybe because they endured and are still around.  Maybe because they are like me – middle-aged men with a punk background.  Their sound has steeped and aged and become refined.  Their sound now reminds me a lot of Hüsker Dü back then.

So punk died in the ‘80s, and, a decade later, I had a younger friend in Cornville (still in high school at the time) who invited me to a party at his house.  I was married with a child, but I went anyway.  I remember that I was surprised by their selection of music.  It was Bad Religion’s
“Stranger Than Fiction”.  Yes, I remembered Bad Religion.  I liked their first album.  I even liked their keyboard-heavy, new wavey second album, and I really like “Suffer”.  This was the music of my youth, but it was a tighter, cleaner sound, better engineering.  I was also surprised to see this band reaching out to a younger generation.  I bought the album, and for the last 18 years I have listened to it and listened to it.  I didn’t realize that it has become one of my most-listened-to CDs, but it really has.

So I recently downloaded their new album “True North”.  I have really enjoyed listening to it.  One thing that can be perceived as a strength or a weakness – all of Bad Religion’s songs kind of sound the same.  The song starts out with a guitar screech, and the drums make that punk gallop.  Greg Gaffin packs some wordy, intelligent observations into a two minute song, accented by some yawning harmonies in the background.  Yes, this band has their unique sound, and it hasn’t changed much over the years.  

But that’s one of the things that I like about this album!  I tap my finger at every song from start to finish.

Once again, Gaffin’s lyrics are ironic, socially conscious, and often caustic.  Take, for instance, this jab at Mitt Romney in “Robin Hood in Reverse”:

Here's the church; there's the steeple.
Open up the door; corporations are people.
Wait, what did he say?
What the fuck did he say?

There are some grinding rock songs like “Hello Cruel World”, and there are break-kneck fast songs like “Vanity”.  On an album like this, it is hard to pick favorites, but mine are the opening track, “True North”, “Robin Hood in Reverse”, “Dharma and the Bomb”, and “My Head Is Full of Ghosts”.  A particular favorite is “Fuck You”, a song that Gaffin says was 30 years in the writing.

I hope that Bad Religion is around for another 30 years, but there are rumors that this is their last album.  If so, this was a  good way to go.  You should definitely check it out.