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You are in a basement in Pasadena, Maryland in a house off Goose Neck Road. The basement is large but spare and well kept.
It is Friday, March 19th, 1993.
The flyer said the evening’s lineup will be:
Universal Order of Armageddon, Blank, Gibbous, Brave New World, and Beelzabob.
The show is free and scheduled to begin at 6PM. Drugs and alcohol are prohibited.
You are sixteen years old.
What are you doing here, somewhere between Old Bee Point and Jubb Cove, the Chesapeake Bay flowing all around you? Well, you are doing what you have been doing since you could, getting out of Dundalk, Maryland and leaving Southeast Baltimore behind.
The goal is to follow the trail of folks making music locally to see where it leads. You have spent time and effort, traveling alone, checking out shows in and around Baltimore. Most bands are cover bands or heavily indebted to another popular band. This is fine and naturally happens as folks build something, beginning with their influences or just pay tribute to them.
But you know there has to be someone making the as-yet-unheard music in your head, someone making music that sounds like here. Like Baltimore. Like Maryland. You know? The whole Tidal Estuary? Or like the industrial wasteland you call home? Gas is, on average, one dollar and eleven cents a gallon. So why not run around, get wild? Why not keep looking further from home?
Punk Rock seems the most promising, but you are living in a time before the Internet. You went to the card catalog at the local branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. You found cards in the catalog for books filed under “punk rock” with titles like Lipstick Traces. When you tried to check them out, you found out they had been stolen.
So, your mission began. Travel to get out. Travel to hear and see. Seeking alone. Seeking punk rock.
But anyways… back to the basement. It is somewhere around the ska band playing that you think “Okay. Another dead end.” It’s not that you don’t like ska, but it reminds you too much of Polka.
As a Polish American, you have heard a lot of Polka music, good ol’ Polka music, played by a Polka playing band. You know Polka music did not come from Poland. It is an inter-mixture of Polish folk music and Tejano music… so, horns and accordions. Polish polka is more horn based. German polka is more accordion based. No one cares about this, but you just can’t quite “pick it up pick it up pick it up” with any great enthusiasm. You would feel like you were back at the Polish Home Club in Fell’s Point.
Just when you were about to abandon all hope, the band comes on that you promised to stick around and see.
You know, you could have been a normal person. In fact, the pressure put on you to go in a certain direction in your life is powerful, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle. You have been handed a lot of privilege, but you are only now growing in awareness of it.
You want to live in a world where you are free, allowed to be who you want to be. The world that usually surrounds you does not seem to want you to do that. You are not very articulate about it, but, when asked why you are so filled with angst, you usually shoot back with “society, man” and let out an exasperated sigh.
So either you need to find a better world or you need to make a better world or… Armageddon?
The band you are here to see tonight has Armageddon in their name.
You’ve known the word since encountering Public Enemy for the first time in middle school, who stated, live in London, “Armageddon? It been in effect. Go get a late pass.”
That declaration made you think.
In any case, a bit later, you are fascinated by the band that just changed your life’s merch table, which was probably on a blanket, owing to the spare setting of the basement. Usually this would consist of the band’s releases. Not in this case. The band’s set up reminds you of the Dundalk Flea Market, a trading post of publications and other bands’ releases, a living collection built up over tours and time.
It is here where you first encounter ’zines. the first time that you encounter folks that write about their lives. They type them up, lay them out, xerox them and send them out in the world to be bought, read and traded.
What is veganism? What are soy-based inks? These people are… vegan? Should you try to be vegan? Is pizza vegan? Can pizza be vegan? You hope so. You file that away for further research.
You notice the records this band you dig are selling are all printed in ways that are unique, seeming to be hand-made. A record by a band called Moss Icon stands out, so you buy it. Its insert is printed up on… a shopping bag? You are not sure. Years later, you will learn that the guy who printed up and manufactured that record is so dedicated to environmental issues that he would do things at almost a loss to minimize the impact on the earth.
Nothing on this night or in this scene is forcing you into a totally new way of thinking, but the evidence is there that there are other ways forward. It is not just you who feels this way, stuck and seeking a larger hopefully better world.
You are not choosing an easy path. The critical thinking you are engaging in leads you to questions you cannot easily answer. “Why is this scene, despite being so dedicated to progressive causes and inclusiveness, so presently dominated by white boys with guitars? What is being done to make people feel welcome, to be let in? Who is being kept out and why?”
This is a lot to think about in March 1993 in a basement in Pasadena, Maryland. Maybe you are getting ahead of yourself.
But you do tend to do that. Point being, you followed the breadcrumbs, picked up the flyers, followed the directions. You are on the trail. It will take you to so many amazing places. It will lead you to a place in Waverly called Normals and, decades after entering for the first time, you will get to share this piece there for the first time ever.
As was said back in the neighborhood, “Now ain’t that something? Well I’ll be.”
You will eventually be known as a person who wears the same thing every day, but you are falling in with a group of people who dress sharp, often in a distinctive way that draws attention. To this day, as a sort of allergic reaction to how often some of these folks change up their look, you tend not to comment when someone changes their hair or style of dress.
But still, at some point you are going to have to deal with that word floating around these folks… “emo”, a word none of these people use to describe themselves but that others use in 1993 as a derogatory descriptor. The term will mutate far beyond the moment into something else. But it is what the other punks will call you and your friends, and it is not meant as a compliment.
After what happens in this basement in Pasadena, MD in the spring of 1993, you make such grand plans for the fall of 1994. You are going to move into a punk house near this basement. A flyer describes it as a “temporary autonomous zone.” Perfect.
You haven’t done the math or told anyone involved about this, but you could go to the University of Maryland, College Park? Is that nearby? Fugazi will play there with Slant 6 on your 17th birthday, less than a month from now. Instead of going, you will be hanging out with someone connected to that house. They will need something from there. No one will be home because folks had all gone to the Fugazi show. You learn that the electricity is weird. You have to walk into the house in the pitch dark and turn on the one working lamp in the center of one of the rooms. You are told to “watch out for the Vermin Scum”, by which they mean the rats. This is also the name of a record label run out of the house at the moment.
These would be red flags to others, but these folks feel like your people. They are perceptive, awake, paying attention, They learn your name and your deal and talk to you openly, as an equal.
But not in the van. You will find out that no one talks in the van with this band to or from gigs. The guitarist conscientiously keeping the speed limit, an excellent driver, tapping a rhythm on the wheel, will be the only sound barring the music on the radio and the sounds of the road. You feel self conscious in the van, just some kid with grunge hair, after all, not quite as sharp in the dressing department as the other folks, not quite as old. When you do act your age, the angriest thing people will say is “Are you going to recycle that?” regarding some bottle or can you are futzing around with, but the real issue is some of the things coming out of your mouth. The pose you have learned is to be sarcastic and to faux-hate things and be a 1990s “negative creep”. You are also used to a lot more macho, a lot more “tough talk.” This is a new reality in which none of that negative energy is present.
Well, except the music. The music is harrowing in its speed, its heaviness, its intent. You guess the members are so calm and perceptive because they get it all out on stage? The stuff that comes out of you, that gets backed up and leaks out of you? They don’t seem to have it, or maybe just have it more under control. You see a few more bands that approach this touching of a dynamo, a breaking past the bounds of time and space, making reality wobble. Even this band will eventually slow, moving away from the initial ecstatic, furious ritual.
But what a first impression to make. What a way to break through, to be willing to play basements and Oddfellows Halls and any tiny spot that will have them, pushing through and finding folks, folks like you who are looking for a way to be that does not involve the options being handed to you, being served to you.
You are watching those around you make their choices in 1993. Things are not going so well in the old neighborhood. As one song put it “Ain’t it funny how the factories doors close? /’round the time that the school doors close? /’round the time that the doors of the jail cells/ open up to greet you like the reaper? Some will die fairly soon. There is a pharmacy in Dundalk called Drug City, another called NewCare. As revealed recently in court, in one year, NewCare pharmacy will distribute three million Oxycontin pills. In a less intense sense, some are simply not fellow travelers, not “lifers”, just passing through, and will fall into things that will draw them away from the scene. But you are drawn to these people and see a community you want to be a part of. You will remain torn between the workaday pragmatism of your upbringing and the wild romantic intensity of these folks, perhaps forever.
At any rate, you are seeing a band off Goose Neck Road in Pasadena, Maryland, far from home but ready to get in their van and go. This is a whole lifestyle, a totality, an entire vast situation. Sometimes the 169 House, that house you want to move into, is called The Temple, sometimes The Total Experience, a name that seems apt. In terns of that last name, you do not know in 1993 that this is a reference to the club at the center of the film Dolomite. Hanging out, you will see bootleg videos of Born Against, Hoover, and other bands playing at the 169 House that won’t make it to Internet circulation. You will see Cupid Car Club MP, Antioch Arrow, and Unwound play in the basement of the 169 House up close and personal.
But wait… back it up. Let’s say your car breaks down or you get grounded or work is slow and you don’t make enough tips for gas money so you don’t wind up at that show off of Goose Neck Road. Spin the wheel, like the games folks play up the Carnival, and see a new future fortune. Instead of an “emo”, you become a Juggalo. Spin the wheel again. You become a regular customer at Drug City. Spin the wheel again. You are a passenger returning from a rave in DC the night the car crashes and you are killed, along with your best friend. Spin the wheel again. Again. Again.
Boy, this is a lot of pressure to put on some show in some basement.
But you gotta call it. Other folks will only see this band in Baltimore, at their last show of their first run at Club Midnite, future home of The Ottobar, in late December of 1994. This is a heartbeat of time away from that moment but it does not feel that way.
Some people believe in fate, that things “happen for a reason.” You just can’t do that. Life is to be throttled, white-knuckled. Point being here you are, face to face with a gateway to a national underground music and arts scene. And these people are talking to you as if you are real to them.
How is it that these moments and circumstances come along at just the right time, leading you to paths that you will follow permanently? Why is this crazy chaotic band such a big deal to you? Why is an experience that is usually social and communal one of individual seeking for you? As these doors open, other doors close. How did you know so clearly that night, on the edge of seventeen, that this was it?
It is kind of a mystery, this ballast you carry, this anchor. And, as you plant it, it does mean for a time you will have to deal with insults levied at your crew… “too cool for school,” “hipsters.” Someone will give you a book called The Hipster Handbook as… a joke? A warning? Either way, it was a clear sign that this was to be your last date.
Still, you remain resolute. You don’t even care about the five band bill in 1993 the way you would in 2024. Did it even expand to six? Did a band change their name? That ska band was named Nope. Why do some of these bands have no trace on your memory while others changed your life? They are all trying, after all. They wrote some songs, learned some cords, maybe figured out some covers. Thirty years later, the thing you have learned about your memory is that it is not the permanent record you once assumed it to be. Things fall off the shelf, into an abyss.
And the abyss will swallow all, of course. But until then, you will keep moving and talking and living in your particular way. The alien landscape of the underground you are discovering in 1993 eventually won’t seem so alien at all. In 2024, it is much more familiar than the (now) unknown home.
The climate can be frosty, the inhabitants wary of outsiders, the trail long and unforgiving, but you are home. You are alive.
