It was 10:30 in the morning and we were skipping class. Well, Colin was skipping class—I was skipping gym.
We sat in Colin's nineteen-something-something Camaro, parked in
the back corner of the high-school parking lot, and drank from a
six-pack that Colin found when he cleaned his car the night before. The
last time I cleaned my car I found sand. Lots of it.
The beer was warm and tasted like Friday night. It tasted like
a bonfire in the woods, with my hands deep in the pockets of my jacket,
and the girls from across the fire, their faces lit in shadow. I sipped
it slowly and looked out through the spotted windshield. I watched the
high school silently manufacture things like honor students and the
French Club.
Colin's Camaro held none of the associations that usually come
from the word Camaro. It was ugly, nondescript, and seemed to come from
some weird era where sports cars were manufactured to look like your
great-aunt's sedan. It was not a cool car. It was built so low to the
ground that sitting in the passenger seat was like being strapped into
a fully reclined lawn chair. Getting into or out of it never failed to
induce a powerful fear of gravity.
Amazingly, we were not skipping class for the beer. Instead,
Colin had a song he wanted me to hear. He pawed through a box of tapes,
all without cases, until he found the one he was looking for. It was a
white tape with a dirt smudge on one of the sides and no legible song
titles or band name on either side. It looked like a tape that had been
played to within an inch of its life. Most likely it was a tape Colin
lifted from his brother. Colin had an older brother, which meant he had
access to things like music that was infinitely cooler than the Casey
Kasemapproved pop I was listening to. Having an older brother as a
teenager is like having exclusive access to imported goods: music,
beer, fake IDs, pornography. He had things I did not.
He put the tape in and the first thing I noticed was how badly
his stereo sucked. It sounded like the music was buried beneath an
elevator and was calling for help. Colin turned it up.
The Clash blasted their way through "Death or Glory" and
somehow the music managed to transcend Colin's vacuum-cleaner speaker
system. It was amazing. Beautiful. Loud and angry in a way I had not
heard before. Until that moment, I thought the Clash were a one-hit
wonder whose entire discography consisted only of "Rock the Casbah."
This was 1988 after all—Terence Trent D'Arby was claiming he'd be
bigger than the Beatles. Confusion was understandable.
Listening to that song was like hearing the sound of a large
door opening—a realization that there must be thousands of amazing
songs, bands, and albums that I had never heard before. It was a
gateway song. The one that set off a network of sparks and lead to a
lifelong addiction to underdog bands on two-watt radio stations and
bootlegs bought from men with beards in the back room of record stores
on the wrong side of town. The moment I heard the Clash roar out of
that awful stereo, I realized I didn't know anything yet.
On that day, the Clash were not a political band from England.
I managed to miss that part entirely. I was a kid from an American
suburb who skipped gym to drink warm beer with a guy who could actually
lose a six-pack in his car. I had bigger problems than politics. It was
the urgency and the anger in Joe Strummer's voice that struck me. It
was the undeniable appeal of a statement like "Death or Glory" shouted
over loud, angry guitars that hit me the hardest. It was the defiance.
That afternoon was the first of many times that I would write
"Death or Glory" on the front of my locker with a large black magic
marker. Each night the janitor would erase it and every day I would
write it again. I doubt battling the high-school janitor with a slogan
and a Sharpie was the type of defiance the Clash had in mind. But at
the time, it was the best I could do.
