YANK CRIME

Growing up in Northeast Pennsylvania was a trip for someone into punk but completely at odds with the local Zeitgeist. On the job at the local chain record store, witnessing kids come in was a pageant on parade: the hometown goths, three months later transformed en masse into whitepower skinheads, then everyone worshipping at the spiritual altar of Ray Cappo for a bit—and eventually, yeah, Deadheads. It was all puzzling to wonder where one fit in the aesthetic and categoric realm of just listening to damn music, frustrated that the local take on it involved such lemminglike migration to group mentality in a genre that encouraged individualism.

Relief emerged in the form of a pal with wheels who could whisk us to NYC or Philly (or anywhere, for that matter), where we’d sponge up every kind of musical thought we could go experience in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Shopping at Philly or Princeton Record Exchange always resulted in a bounty of outward-thinking music we could share, play on college radio, and learn from. In the onslaught of indie 7-inch singles we hoovered up, I brought home a mysterious one from Peer Platters in Hoboken in ’92, Drive Like Jehu’s “Bullet Train to Vegas” 7-inch out of San Diego: a panicked onslaught of screamo/ sandpaper-coarse vox and incredible post-hardcore assault, complete with rubbery zigzag guitar lines rampaging over everything. Their self-titled debut LP smoked too. Order and tension were there, but all out the door in a mass of confusion underlined by simplicity. It was like someone let all the elastic out of Lugazi’s underwear.