Fallen Warriors of sXe
- Story by J. Bennett
Decibel talks to some formerly straight-edge musicians—and a few who remain true to the path—about the thin line between clean living and just plain living
PART I: BREAKING THE EDGE
I walk the path of true change / commitment sworn in the name / of those who still walk the straight edge / convictions held to my grave
—Rick Rodney, “Force of Change,” 1997
It’s a Saturday night in mid-January and Neurosis are playing the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. Bellying up to the bar, Decibel clocks a familiar-looking bald dude waiting behind us. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, an ancient Slayer t-shirt and a gold chain. We can’t place him right away, but fuck—we definitely know him from somewhere. Sifting through the booze-stained detritus that occasionally gums up the gears of our mental Rolodex, we order a couple of seven-dollar beers and move along. Five seconds later, it hits us: It’s Rick Fucking Rodney. As in Godmoney. As in One Truth. As in L.A. straight-edge commandos Strife. We turn around just in time to see him ordering a couple of mixed drinks—they look like Jack & Cokes—sip one, and make his way back to the floor like nothing happened. Now, we’d been told that the last Strife album, 2001’s Angermeans, was kind of an edge-breaking coming-out party for Rodney—and we’d heard from friends in town that they’d had a pop or two with him at the local bar, so it wasn’t exactly shocking. By then, we were well beyond the point of caring, anyway. But to have actual first-person verification of his new freewheeling lifestyle was like hearing your own voice on the telephone for the first time and realizing that, yeah, you really do sound like a fucking choad. Plus it kind of made us wanna hang out with him, if only to find out what happened.
Not that we give a fuck what anyone drinks, smokes, snorts or swallows. It’s the transformation that interests us—the Hero’s Journey as it were—of being immortalized on three formats of recorded audio touting/screaming the virtues of a drug-free, alcohol-free lifestyle and now getting openly and unabashedly shitfaced in public.
So we did the responsible thing and tried to track him down. We talked to the folks at Victory Records, but they claimed to have no contact with anyone in Strife. We fired off multiple emails to two different Strife pages on MySpace and received no response. We started calling around to old hardcore buddies, asking if anyone had a line on our man. Finally, we started lurking in bars where we heard he’d been spotted (Decibel magazine: so thorough, we stalk people), but he never turned up. All we wanted to do is ask the question that weighs so heavily on the hearts and minds of at least a dozen crestfallen 30-year-old straight-edge dudes scattered throughout the continental United States: Why, Rick? Why?
TEEN IDLES
I’m a person just like you / But I’ve got better things to do / Than sit around and fuck my head / Hang out with the living dead / Snort white shit up my nose / Pass out at the shows / I don’t even think about speed / That’s something I just don’t need
—Ian MacKaye, “Straight Edge,” 1981
Former Undertow and current Himsa vocalist John Pettibone remembers the exact day he became straight-edge: December 2, 1986. “I was 15,” he says. “I got into punk rock as a kid, through skateboarding, Thrasher magazine, stuff like that. I knew of Minor Threat and straight-edge, but I didn’t really know what it actually meant. I grew up in a small town outside Seattle where everyone growing up just partied all the time, but I was never a part of that. I was always a sober kid. I think I smoked cloves for maybe six months when I was 14, but that’s it. I’d go to shows in the city and I’d always see guys X’d up and I always wondered what that meant. Then I saw the cover of the Teen Idles record.”
Ian MacKaye’s pre-Minor Threat band, the Teen Idles, were only together for 14 months, but the impact of the imagery on the cover of their 1980 EP, Minor Disturbance, cannot be underestimated. Depicting the crossed arms of the classic straight-edge pose—complete with a big black X on each hand—it became a universal symbol for the anti-drug, anti-alcohol, anti-casual-sex attitude that MacKaye would publicly coin the name for a year later in Minor Threat’s “Straight Edge.” The song spawned a veritable legion of first (SS Decontrol, DYS, 7 Seconds), second (Undertow, Earth Crisis, Unbroken), and even third-generation adherents (Bane, Ten Yard Fight, In My Eyes), many of whom—like Pettibone, former Earth Crisis vocalist Karl Buechner, Converge vocalist Jake Bannon and Howsyouredge.com founder Brian Murphy—live by its principles to this day. But even more have gone the way of Rick Rodney, abandoning a set of behavioral rules they no longer self-apply and a community that has outworn its usefulness.
Isis guitarist/vocalist and Hydra Head Records founder Aaron Turner went straight-edge in 1993, while he was growing up in Santa Fe, NM. “I’d done acid and smoked a bunch of weed at that point,” he says. “And to be honest, I really liked smoking weed—even when I decided to become straight-edge—but part of my decision had to do with the music and social culture I was into. I was friends with a few other kids who were either already straight-edge or became straight-edge around the same time as me. I think it had been passed down by some of our friends’ elder brothers. In a lot of ways, it was just another form of teenage rebellion, but it was against our peers rather than against our parents.
“At the time, I was already involved in a lot of what you might call DIY activities, and I felt like straight-edge was an extension of that,” he continues. “I just felt like there was a lot of apathy amongst my peers, and straight-edge was a reactionary move against that. Whether it was true or just a perceived thing on my end, I felt like drugs and drinking were connected to that apathy.”
Turner broke his edge six years later, at the age of 21. By that time, he had moved to Boston, started Isis and was finishing up art school. “I was true ’til 21, dude,” he laughs. “But I never drank—I just started smoking weed—so it didn’t really have anything to do with that age. It was more like, ‘OK, I’ve gotten what I need to out of this and I’m no longer in fear of falling into this drugged-out, pathetic state, so I’m gonna start smoking weed again.’”
Still, Turner feels that straight-edge was a positive influence on his life. “Aside from all the teenage dogma and wanting to belong and so forth, I do believe that straight-edge put me on a path that was ultimately beneficial to me,” he says. “It was part of what got me involved in the underground DIY culture, and instead of spending my time figuring out how to score drugs, I really did get more involved in the local scene and started up a distro—which eventually turned into the label—and I made contact with a lot of other like-minded individuals both within my area and outside of it. So I really do think it was a motivational force in my life. And you know, regardless of whether you endorse it or not, drinking and smoking are not good for your health. So the fact that I escaped that for a number of years was probably beneficial in that sense, too.”
Just a few years earlier, in the same city, Kevin Baker was released from prison. The future Piecemeal and Hope Conspiracy vocalist served 33 months—from ages 18 to 21, most of it at the Middleton House of Corrections in Middleton, MA—for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. “I was taught at an early age that to drink is to have a good time and vice versa, so I started drinking at an early age,” he says today. “I had an older sister who would get me beer or whatever I wanted. An angry kid plus drinking usually equals trouble, and I used to get into a lot of trouble. Eventually I got myself into some trouble I couldn’t get out of, and I had to do a little time.
“When you’re an angry kid, it’s fun to go out into places like Allston [the west end of Boston and former home of the author], which are breeding grounds for violence,” Baker adds, “Especially when you’re into punk and movies like A Clockwork Orange. It’s like, ‘OK, we’re all drunk now. What’s next? Let’s go out and fuck up some jocks.’ They’re gonna fuck with you first, anyway, and there’s nothing better than knocking some BU [Boston University] shithead’s face in when you’re hammered and in your teens. So that’s where my mind was at. Instead of thinking about college, I was thinking about going out drinking and getting into a fight every night.”
When Baker got out, he was confirmed straight-edge. “I figured the best thing for me at that time was to not drink anymore,” he says. “I went on parole for five or six years after that, and one of the stipulations was that I couldn’t drink—which was fine by me at that point, because I wanted to get my life back in order. I was into hardcore for years before that, and straight-edge seemed like the easy thing to do because I already had friends who were into it. We’d buy music, listen to music, and eventually we started a band. And that’s what I needed most in my life. Straight-edge was the right thing at the right time.”
Nevertheless, Baker broke edge in 2002. “I think I had a scorpion bowl with somebody,” he laughs. “My life was in disorder again, and I think it was a way of rebelling against something that was preventing me from enjoying my life to the fullest. It sounds stupid now, but at the time I was just like, ‘Fuck this. I’m over putting all these stipulations on myself.’ I had finished my parole, and I was sick of being told what to do, how to do it and what time to do it. I was done checking in and pissing in a cup, so I guess it was my way of celebrating the end of all the bullshit I went through.”
Pelican guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec grew up in the Parisian suburbs, where there exists a considerably more relaxed attitude toward teenage (and even pre-teen) drinking than anywhere in the States. “I was always encouraged to drink beer or champagne at family functions—it was never banished or forbidden,” he explains. “Even in middle school, I’d get six-packs with my friends. Then I moved to South Korea when I was 11.
“Being in a new culture and being around people I couldn’t relate to, having to learn English and everything—all that was very conducive to drinking and doing a lot of drugs. My parents never really cared until everything else started to fall apart and I started doing really shitty in school. That was when I was around 15 or 16. And Korea was a really easy environment to get anything in. There were no restrictions, no drinking age, nothing—so I spent my life in bars with friends, even as early as 14 or 15. I was hanging out with GIs, prostitutes—just crazy, crazy shit. But to me it was normal because I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”
Then the shit hit the fan. “My sister, who is only a few years younger than me, started going to the same parties and that became a real problem for me—seeing her do the same things that I was doing didn’t make me feel comfortable at all,” he says. “One night, I wasn’t there, she passed out, and some people who I thought were friends of mine took advantage of her.
“She came home and wouldn’t name names, but I was enraged. I knew about straight-edge culture from some of the bands I had been listening to, so I just decided to embrace the complete opposite of what I’d been living—if only to show her that I could sever myself from that and to make a statement against what had happened. That was halfway through my senior year of high school, right before I came to the States for college.”
Like Turner, Lebec was true ’til 21, keeping his edge for just three years. “I was getting really bored with hardcore and finding myself drawn to other kinds of music. All the kids I was around who were straight-edge were really judgmental and I found my social circle getting really, really small. Everything about the way we were living was painting us into a corner. At the time, the straight-edge community in Chicago was really exclusive and really fucking boring. People stalled. They got to an age and said, ‘I’m vegan, I’m straight-edge—that’s the only life experience I care about. Everybody else sucks.’ It got to be really limiting, so I said, ‘Fuck it.’”
UNBROKEN
Straight-edge—the discipline / The key to self-liberation is abstinence from the destructive escapism of intoxication / I separate from the poison—a mindlessness I’ve always abhorred.
—Karl Buechner, “The Discipline,” 1995
Like John Pettibone, Karl Buechner has been straight-edge for over 20 years. “My straight-edge birthday was May 1st, 1986,” the former Earth Crisis mouthpiece and current Path of Resistance/Freya vocalist says. “I got into hardcore after I got into skating in the mid ’80s, kind of following my older cousin’s lead. We’d listen to mixtapes of bands like Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, DYS, and we thought their message was amazing because it was basically what we’d already been living. Our lives were all about sports when we were younger, so none of us really experimented with drugs or alcohol.
“At the same time, we were getting involved in the punk scene, and the kids who had a couple of years on us were already drinking and smoking weed. In the years that followed, we saw them get into more caustic chemical drugs, and it definitely affected their skating and their musicianship. I saw that, and I didn’t wanna go down the drain with them. When I was 16, I made a lifetime commitment to straight-edge.”
Six years later, Buechner became the vocalist for Earth Crisis, one of the hardest of the hardline straight-edge bands to ever stalk a stage. The Syracuse band’s early recordings—1992’s All Out War and 1993’s Firestorm—set Buechner’s apocalyptic vocal tirades about clean living and animal rights to whiplash circle-pit breakdowns and blazing Slayer-esque riffs while injecting a strain of militant veganism into the groupthink of sXe’s burgeoning hordes.
“Earth Crisis was it for me,” says Zozobra mastermind and Cave In bassist Caleb Scofield. “Hello, vegan-straight-edge, here I come—complete with drop tunings and a fucking maniac singer.” Scofield became straight-edge in 1993 when he was a high school freshman living in New Hampshire. Like Pettibone and Buechner, he had never touched alcohol or drugs.
Two years later, future Darkest Hour guitarist Mike Schleibaum met future Darkest Hour vocalist John Henry at a pep rally at Robinson High School in Fairfax, VA. “He was wearing an Earth Crisis shirt, and I was wearing a Mouthpiece shirt,” Schleibaum recalls. “I said, ‘Dude—you’re straight-edge? We should hang out.’ At the time, there were only like five straight-edge kids at our school—out of like 4,000 kids.”
Both Scofield and Schleibaum turned to straight-edge in part because of alcoholic family members. “I had this impression of using substances—whether it’s drinking or taking drugs—that if you do those things, you do them recklessly and it’s something that will inevitably control you and should therefore be avoided at all costs,” Scofield explains. “Being surrounded by alcoholic family members put the idea in my head that using alcohol or drugs moderately wasn’t possible.”
“My father was a really big alcoholic when I was a kid, and that really turned me off because I guess I was afraid that I’d mirror his mistakes with my life,” says Schleibaum.
Both Scofield and Schleibaum would eventually break edge. Scofield managed to hold out for two years after his Cave In bandmates Steve Brodsky and Adam McGrath started drinking. “That was hard, because I was tied to the hip with those guys at that time in my life. We’d play a show and they’d be like, ‘OK, we’re going to the bar.’ I wanted to hang out with them, but I wouldn’t even go into bars at that point. So I’d just sit in the van while those guys had beers and shot the shit and had fun. I think about some of those tours we did, and I was just sitting in the van. It’s like, ‘C’mon, man—at least go hang out with your friends.’ Which I would do from time to time, but let’s face it, it’s not that cool to order Cokes at the bar.”
Scofield eventually drank his first beer at the age of 23. “It was a Coors Light tallboy from the fridge,” he recalls. “I was all by myself. I just got so tired of being… almost afraid, you know? I think one of the reasons I had never drank or smoked pot was because I was scared. I was afraid of what would happen. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t that big of a deal to go to the bar with your friends, have a few drinks and a few laughs. It didn’t mean you were gonna turn into a crazy alcoholic.”
Scofield had made a vow to his friend and then-roommate, Isis drummer Aaron Harris, that if he ever decided to drink, Harris would be the first one to accompany him to the bar. “After that first beer, I went over to his room and knocked on the door, like, ‘Let’s go, dude.’”
Schleibaum had his first drink last year at age 28, after 14 years of being straight-edge. “I shotgunned a warm Miller Lite on a boat at my bachelor party,” he laughs. “It was like, ‘Dude—it’s your bachelor party. Why not?’ And you know, I consider myself a pretty happy guy. I have a happy marriage, I love the dudes I’m in a band with—I don’t have those negative factors that could tie you up in a substance-abuse type situation.”
Like Scofield, Schleibaum’s perspective changed as a result of age and experience. “We’ve traveled the world a million times, and there are cultures that view substance use in ways of moderation,” the guitarist points out. “Substance abuse is a very American idea. It’s like, ‘I want this, and I want as much of it as possible.’ I’m not saying alcoholism or drug abuse doesn’t exist in other countries, but I’ve been to Holland, where marijuana is legal. And you know what? It’s not Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s actually a pretty progressive, nice place. When I made the decision to become straight-edge, I had seen only one person drink one way, and that developed my opinion. Seeing a lot of people drink a lot of other ways kind of changed it.”
NEXT MONTH Fallout From the Lifestyle War: Decibel examines the social repercussions of breaking edge, the potential effects edge-breaking has on one’s music and the perspectives of those who maintain—complete with commentary from the interviewees introduced in Part One and additional insight from Converge vocalist Jake Bannon, These Arms Are Snakes bassist Brian Cook and Howsyouredge.com founder Brian Murphy. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even track down Rick Rodney.
