Deaf? In his right ear he mostly was, he thought. And he would get a crackling sensation in there, too. He would shake his head, or bang his ear the way you do if there is water in it when you get out of the pool.
That side of his head had been toward the PA, at the show. He was down front, and it was blaring loud. So causation was not in question.
At the show, he tried to push toward the middle, in front of the stage, away from the stack of speakers next to the stage. But it was all elbows and shoulders, sometimes knees, and full-torso impacts in there.
The physicality, the occasional bruising impact, the contact-sportiveness of the hardcore thing was never going to be his bag.
Punk rock started out as dorky kids with guitars, skinny kids who collected records and started bands because they just could not contain the love and energy that the records infused into them, and that came exploding out of them.
Hardcore had energy and enthusiasm, yes. But it was different. It had an element of body-building and varsity athletics to it. It changed the whole tenor of the scene. And there was the sound, all he really cared about, which he could not love.
He was also dissuaded from pushing to the front and center by the stage diving. There was a near-inevitability of a teenage kid suddenly appearing in midair, flailing, plunging without warning out of the stage lights, onto his head. He didn’t want to catch the flying punk kids. He was risk averse about a sprained finger or wrist. But there they were, in midair, expecting, believing, that everyone was in this together. So he felt guilty if he just got out of the way and let them crash.
And if he tried to actually dance, a form of bodily movement seemingly natural in response to music, which was once possible in the realm of punk rock, he became the target of glares, head shaking contempt, open derision, and calls to get the fuck out of the pit.
So he was stranded on the periphery. He could have moved counterclockwise, in a quarter circle, to the center of the room, toward the back. That would have been a rational response, a recognition of reality, of his own limitations in that environment.
But he wanted to be close because he loved these guys.
Radius of Trust, they were called.
They started out in, of all places, Weirton, West Virginia. But they had recently relocated to Cleveland, Ohio.
He heard their first single on WMBR, college radio, one Saturday afternoon when he was back at his parents’ house in the Boston suburbs for a few days. He and a friend from high school drove into the city, to Newbury Comics, the next day, just so he could buy it. It had a black and white picture sleeve, with the band standing in an abandoned gas station, holding their guitars.
The A side was “Madeline’s Mascara,” which was a romantic punk rock song, fast but not blazing fast, with an anthemic chorus and a great solo, clocking in at 2:35. It was perfect. He loved it. “Dentist Drill” was the B-Side, a seemingly mocking hardcore pastiche, with breathtaking guitar leads. On that one, the song crashed to a stop after 2:03, and there was the sound of feedback and laughter, then ten seconds of outro that sounded like the beginning of “There She Goes Again” by the Velvet Underground, then it faded out. That was tantalizing.
It was not disputable, in his view, that sound-wise Radius of Trust were more like a first wave punk band. Maybe the cultural isolation of Weirton put them a few years behind the curve, in terms of style. Radius played fast, but they had melodies, and the tempos were not uniformly fast-fast-fast, hardcore fast. And their tall gangly guitar player played Johnny Thunders-style leads, what he thought of as “blistering” solos, the thrilling kind, the kind he loved and lived for.
Before the band came on he showed the stamp on the back of his hand to the pretty but tough-looking bartender. He was one of the old people who could drink at an all ages show.
He talked to some guy with a mohawk who was standing next to him. He told the guy that Radius were like an uptempo Heartbreakers. And the guy looked at him almost angrily and said, “What are you, an idiot? Tom fucking Petty?” And he tried unsuccessfully to explain about the towering greatness of Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan and Walter Lure and Billy Rath. But the guy just tuned out, and turned his back, to talk to his friends, or just to other people.
Whatever his theories, the kids at the all ages show thought Radius were fucking hardcore man, and they yelled “FUCKING RADIUS!”
At age 24 he was already part of a slower-moving, impact-averse, now dying breed, or so it felt.
For an encore he hoped for that hinted-at Velvets cover. But they did “12XU” by Wire, which was cool, and they finished with an obscure one, “Screaming Fist” by the Viletones, which was even cooler.
The encore provoked, and fully deserved, frenzied thrashing during both songs.
He walked back to his apartment in the cool night. It was breezy, and he was cold, because he’d gotten sweaty at the show.
He had on sneakers, jeans, a Mission of Burma t-shirt, a personal favorite, and a red cowboy style bandana tied around his wrist.
He was underdressed for the show.
The kids these days often wore more overtly punk regalia, including serious boots. They had weirder hair, even some legitimate Mohawks.
He had the side-part and short hair he had adopted ever since he fell in love with The Jam in high school. One day, to everyone’s surprise, he just went to the barber shop at the mall and had them cut off his collar-length hair. For him the 70s ended that day. But he regressed to his dream of the Mod 60s, and perhaps to his own childhood, when his mother combed his hair before school, instead of facing whatever the 80s were going to be.
He went to the Radius show by himself.
Everybody had jobs. No one but him was willing to be out late on a Wednesday.
He was tired at work the next day, but he just drank a lot of coffee. Two of the other paralegals were rock’n’roll guys and expressed regret about missing the show. He enjoyed regaling them with the details, only a little bit embellished, at lunch on Thursday.
Two days after the show, he got worried the ear issue would be permanent.
But it was mostly better when he got up on Saturday.
I love this so much.
For 25 years I did personal security. I traveled with many bands and am very familiar with the person and situations you detail here.