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Authors: Jessica Hopper
Tags: Music Criticism
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Six weeks after I started high school, I was sitting on the bleachers during freshman gym class, which I was already failing for refusing to dress for class, along with all the other weirdos, who were also refusing gym on principle. Andrew Semans, also of the ninth grade, came and sat next to me and asked, “Are you a punk or a hippie? I can’t tell.” I told him I liked The Clash, and he started drilling me about a million bands I had never heard. The next day he handed me a cassette tape, a mix made from a very specific subsection of his big brother’s record collection. Butthole Surfers, Babes in Toyland, Boredoms, BALL, Big Black, Bongwater on side one; Pussy Galore, Voidoids, Stooges on the flip. By week’s end I was a convert and punk-identified.
As punk rock began to ravage and motivate my life, so did my adolescent hormones. I began to pine for for the attention of punk boys, of which I knew three. One of which was Andrew and we could barely stand one another but were bonded by conversations about Sonic Youth. His friend Ted who wore a Jane’s Addiction T-shirt and was on JV bowling; he thought All Shook Down was the best Replacements record—making him a no go. Then there was Andrew Beccone, who was in the tenth grade, who wasn’t so much punk as he was proactively grunge.
He became my crush by default, by virtue of the fact that he knew my name and he knew who Hüsker Dü was, and at the time that was more than I had going with anyone else. His look was proto grunge, he wore his hair long and in a middle part, all his jeans were ripped, he wore a faded Mudhoney Superfuzz Bigmuff T-shirt and a flannel. He played drums in a cover band of sorts with his college-age brother; they were called Korova Milkbar and their only gigs were in their basement. Their repertoire read like a best-of Sub Pop sampler: Tad’s “Loser,” Nirvana’s “Lovebuzz” and “Floyd the Barber,” a Soundgarden song, a Screaming Trees song, and they usually closed their set with a Mudhoney medley that included an infinite version of “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” that would alternate between the chorus and long drum solos. Because I “loved” Andrew and wanted him to love me back, and though I was approximately 4 feet tall, had a mouth full of braces and looked as much like a 14-year-old boy as I did a 14-year-old girl, I took the only route available—I became a grunge devotee.
The process was simple: I made the rounds to every record store in the Twin Cities, spending my hard-earned babysitting and paper-delivery savings on anything with a Sub Pop logo on it, every release in multiple formats—Mudhoney, Nirvana, Fluid, Tad, Dwarves, Soundgarden, L7 and Dickless. I saved up $100 for the out-of-print Sub Pop 100 compilation. I mail-ordered five Mudhoney, two Fluid, and one Soundgarden shirt and then made my own Nirvana shirt with a Sharpie.
I parted my hair in the middle, ripped holes in the knees of my jeans, scrawled the names of every band I liked on my Chuck Taylor high-tops in pen. I am not sure why I thought dressing exactly like Andrew Beccone might lure him to me, but I wanted to show him we were kindred spirits in the world, toughing out our teenage times with Tad’s 8-Way Santa in our Walkmans.
Alas, the pose did not end there. I did things like casually wander past his classes as they got out, holding nothing but a Mudhoney tape in my hand, as if that was the only supply one needed for ninth grade. I took the same Russian class as him so that I would have the chance to tell him such things as I was considering getting a tattoo of Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin, “once I got the money together.” My project for film class was a documentary on his band, and it was 20 minutes of carefully edited footage of band practices in his parents’ basement, and nothing but (I got a C-). I went to see Fluid twice that year, despite hating them, in hopes of seeing him at the show. When I saw him that following Monday,
Six weeks after I started high school, I was sitting on the bleachers during freshman gym class, which I was already failing for refusing to dress for class, along with all the other weirdos, who were also refusing gym on principle. Andrew Semans, also of the ninth grade, came and sat next to me and asked, “Are you a punk or a hippie? I can’t tell.” I told him I liked The Clash, and he started drilling me about a million bands I had never heard. The next day he handed me a cassette tape, a mix made from a very specific subsection of his big brother’s record collection. Butthole Surfers, Babes in Toyland, Boredoms, BALL, Big Black, Bongwater on side one; Pussy Galore, Voidoids, Stooges on the flip. By week’s end I was a convert and punk-identified.
As punk rock began to ravage and motivate my life, so did my adolescent hormones. I began to pine for for the attention of punk boys, of which I knew three. One of which was Andrew and we could barely stand one another but were bonded by conversations about Sonic Youth. His friend Ted who wore a Jane’s Addiction T-shirt and was on JV bowling; he thought All Shook Down was the best Replacements record—making him a no go. Then there was Andrew Beccone, who was in the tenth grade, who wasn’t so much punk as he was proactively grunge.
He became my crush by default, by virtue of the fact that he knew my name and he knew who Hüsker Dü was, and at the time that was more than I had going with anyone else. His look was proto grunge, he wore his hair long and in a middle part, all his jeans were ripped, he wore a faded Mudhoney Superfuzz Bigmuff T-shirt and a flannel. He played drums in a cover band of sorts with his college-age brother; they were called Korova Milkbar and their only gigs were in their basement. Their repertoire read like a best-of Sub Pop sampler: Tad’s “Loser,” Nirvana’s “Lovebuzz” and “Floyd the Barber,” a Soundgarden song, a Screaming Trees song, and they usually closed their set with a Mudhoney medley that included an infinite version of “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” that would alternate between the chorus and long drum solos. Because I “loved” Andrew and wanted him to love me back, and though I was approximately 4 feet tall, had a mouth full of braces and looked as much like a 14-year-old boy as I did a 14-year-old girl, I took the only route available—I became a grunge devotee.
The process was simple: I made the rounds to every record store in the Twin Cities, spending my hard-earned babysitting and paper-delivery savings on anything with a Sub Pop logo on it, every release in multiple formats—Mudhoney, Nirvana, Fluid, Tad, Dwarves, Soundgarden, L7 and Dickless. I saved up $100 for the out-of-print Sub Pop 100 compilation. I mail-ordered five Mudhoney, two Fluid, and one Soundgarden shirt and then made my own Nirvana shirt with a Sharpie.
I parted my hair in the middle, ripped holes in the knees of my jeans, scrawled the names of every band I liked on my Chuck Taylor high-tops in pen. I am not sure why I thought dressing exactly like Andrew Beccone might lure him to me, but I wanted to show him we were kindred spirits in the world, toughing out our teenage times with Tad’s 8-Way Santa in our Walkmans.
Alas, the pose did not end there. I did things like casually wander past his classes as they got out, holding nothing but a Mudhoney tape in my hand, as if that was the only supply one needed for ninth grade. I took the same Russian class as him so that I would have the chance to tell him such things as I was considering getting a tattoo of Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin, “once I got the money together.” My project for film class was a documentary on his band, and it was 20 minutes of carefully edited footage of band practices in his parents’ basement, and nothing but (I got a C-). I went to see Fluid twice that year, despite hating them, in hopes of seeing him at the show. When I saw him that following Monday,
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