Rob Leary
November 2, 2108
I grew up skateboarding from age ten until I was 31 years old. About eleven to thirteen years old is when I remember first being exposed to punk and hardcore music by way of skateboard videos. Being a young, energetic, ADD kid, I liked most of what I heard. I dug the sounds of bands like Minor Threat, Fugazi, Black Flag, Sex Pistols, TSOL, Adolescents, 7 Seconds, Buzzcocks and Agent Orange that seemed to go hand in hand with getting rad on a skateboard in the 1980s. I remember referring to it as “skate music.”
As a young kid in the 1980s, I had musical influences coming at me from all different directions. There was hip hop, metal, hair bands and 80s pop that I liked. I was an only child, so, I didn’t have a cool older brother or sister to introduce me to good music. I kind of had to figure it out on my own. My Mom and stepdad were pot smoking post-hippies that tried to force feed me “real music” like the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Cream, Zeppelin, the Byrds, the Doors, the Stones etc. Some of it I liked but most of it I didn’t. When I heard Kiss, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Rush and AC/DC for the first time as a little kid on WMMR in Philly, I was instantly a fan of those bands. My parents were not. The same went for Black Sabbath. I was drawn to the harder stuff early.
Fast forward to high school. I had moved from Philly to Huntsville, Alabama. Nirvana had broke, which sent me branching out from Metallica and Guns and Roses to diving head first into punk rock. A lot of the other “grunge” stuff like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and those bands never grabbed me. Nirvana had a lot of faster songs and they had that punk guitar sound I liked. I went back and checked out those older bands from the skate videos I used to watch but I also found “new” bands like Jawbreaker, Dinosaur Jr., Screeching Weasel, Operation Ivy and Sick of It All. I really dug post-hardcore or alt-metal bands like Helmet and Quicksand. Around 1994, at age nineteen, was when I seemed to start gravitating more toward political bands. I was transitioning into adulthood and becoming more jaded by the boring, conservative town I lived in, as well as the Deep South redneck culture around me. Bands like Bad Religion, Screeching Weasel and Moral Crux seemed to be lashing out at the same culture and types of people I was frustrated with. It resonated with me big time.
Huntsville, Alabama, in many ways, was more progressive than your average small city in Alabama but there was still a lot of racism, homophobia and a myopic worldview among most of the people around me. Because of a huge military arsenal and scores of defense industry technology companies being located in Huntsville, it was very pro-military, people were very aggressively patriotic. I was a recently self-avowed atheist in the Bible Belt, surrounded by Southern Baptist religious fundamentalists trying to force their religious beliefs down my throat. I heard people around me every day, from the grungiest toothless redneck to the rich white collar business professional, use the “N” word. If I was out skating with friends, we could almost count on getting harassed by the cops, a pick-up truck full of rednecks or rich frat boys.
One late night after some drinks, I was with a couple of friends at the IHOP and some drunk rednecks picked a fight with us because my friend had a mohawk. It turned into a brawl where one of the redneck assholes, when he realized he was getting his ass kicked, pulled out a knife and tried to shank my friend. Thankfully, a very large member of the IHOP staff came up from behind and body slammed the guy. The blade went sliding across the restaurant floor and another worker picked it up. The cops came and everyone in the restaurant told the police the rednecks started it and tried to stab my friend but the cops let them leave without arrest. I realized, even in 1995, it was still dangerous to be a punk rocker in Alabama.
The IHOP incident--along with some turbulence in my family life—was my breaking point. I had to get out of Huntsville. I moved with my best friend to Orange County, California. Crazy thing was, not long after we got there, I remember walking in downtown Huntington Beach and about thirty nazi skinheads were hanging out on a corner. I quickly realized Orange County was very conservative, pretty racist and had some of the same frustrating cultural aspects to it that I had tried to escape by leaving Alabama. I also found myself on my own as an adult for the first time in my life, working to pay rent and just survive. I grew up relatively poor but working for barely above minimum wage and trying to pay rent in a beach town in OC, I began to understand the plight of the American working class pretty quickly. So, for the next several years, angry political bands that railed against classism, racism, Nazis, homophobia, religion, the cops, politicians and corporate America was what really struck me and influenced me.
The singular band that had the biggest influence on me and my politics was the Canadian band, Propagandhi. Their I’d Rather Be Flag Burning 10” split in 1995 with I-Spy (also a great political band) on Recess Records literally changed my life. It was my first exposure to Propagandhi and it just blew me away. The music ripped. It was pissed off and snotty and the lyrics just seemed so intelligent. They were referencing historical events and people I had never heard of. They railed against racists, exploitation of workers, cops, religion, corporatized governments and their violence against people. They seemed to be different from many political bands I had heard because they went past the cliched statements of “fuck you” to those things. They really zeroed in on detailed examples of what they were pissed about and what was fucked up in the world. Propagandhi took my anger and helped steer it toward actual injustices in the world that were truly worthy of being angry about. Even if you didn’t agree with them 100% on certain issues, you at least had to respect that they sure as hell knew how to back their arguments up.
Because of certain references Propagandhi made in songs and liner notes of their records, I read books on politics and history. I researched certain issues, events and people. There was sort of this political and intellectual awakening for me that made me want to go back to school, which I ultimately did. I majored in political science, went to law school and passed the bar exam. I now have a fulfilling and stable career in law, government relations and policy advocacy. I truly don’t believe any of that would have ever happened if I hadn’t been exposed to political punk/hardcore—and more specifically, Propagandhi. Even though I probably don’t agree with their stances on some issues at this point in my life, they are still my absolute favorite band and have been for many years now.
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