A few years before I was “officially” writing for this site, Rosenthal approached me and asked if I wanted to do a “Crust Primer.” I came pretty close to doing that in an earlier post I (cleverly) called “Nobody’s Bathing,” but I thought I’d revisit the idea in case someone wants to congratulate me on that title a few years later. This time, though, I’m mainly just going to post songs by crust bands that I think are on the list of things to listen to when you’re just getting into the genre. Think of it as the soundtrack to the story of this post. The mixtape, if you will.
That was just a damn good premonition. And yes, I understand that half of it won’t be “crust” but some other adjacent subgenre. Grow up and keep it to yourself the fuck.
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I was really into the idea of making mixtapes in the 1990s, and while I understand that it doesn’t make me any more special (than I already am), it was an important part of my quest to learn how to tell a story using someone else’s music. I had a bit of an advantage here, as I spent a lot of time listening to my local radio station, WLFR, and its well-curated metal programming. This isn’t really about that or the radio station, although both play an important role in the years I’m about to babble about.
I grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey, in the 1990s. That meant that our island was bustling with tourists and activity from Easter through early October, back when there were seasons other than “living in someone’s mouth” and winter (so to speak). It also meant that the center of our lives was the boardwalk, at least before anyone could drive a car.
There’s an ocean-view gazebo on the 12th Street boardwalk, a covered seating area where families can sit and eat overpriced pizza and look out at the majestic brown-green of the Atlantic. And for a time, this was the place where the losers of various subcultures met and held court.
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Every night, a variety of punks, metalheads, losers, and, in retrospect, robbers, armed with boomboxes, guitars, and other weapons of mass destruction, would gather there and tarnish the otherwise family-friendly resort town. Ocean City is a dry town, meaning there are no liquor stores or bars, which gives it this sort of wholesome facade. A place where a few dozen undesirables hung out was an urban taboo, which meant that the police presence was often heavy. I think that added to the thrill we got there, that sort of ne’er-do-well adrenaline.
I started hanging out there in the spring of 1995, when the seeds of the next few decades of my life were being sown, probably at the behest of the other evildoers I was friends with, the kind of people most parents would label as a “bad influence” before the really bad shit like drugs and crime (above the level of a misdemeanor) became commonplace. There were already a lot of established characters there, veteran punks who were probably a bit too old to be hanging out with teenagers, or some of the older kids you saw at school but never approached because you represented a social pecking order. It was a social club for the misfits. It was the first time I was exposed to mental illness disguised as “eccentricity,” and the first time I encountered con artists and manipulators. It would have been an eye-opening experience if I hadn’t been too young to realize it.
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I remember a man called Alan, who was probably a first wave punk influenced by Crass (which means he was pretty damn old), holding court to a bunch of enthusiastic 16 year olds, half of whom I’m pretty sure he fucked, while going through the intricacies of conspiracy theories like some Feeding the 5,000 Alex Jones. One of his theories was that every regular at the Pavilion was assigned his own cop, which seemed likely since I remember being constantly followed by the same one (even to the bathroom) for a couple of weeks that summer. Was I some kind of threat to the peace and safety of the community? The SPLC seemed to think so a few years later, but in 1995? Doubtful. Looking back, I’m sure I saw the same cop because the island is a damn few miles long and the police probably reflected that. But at the time, it felt really real. Alan eventually disappeared under some story that he had to go into hiding because the government was after him or some such nonsense.
Another was a punk named Dan, a gentleman whose body ended about mid-section. Since this happened at the exact time when Forest Gump he took advantage of the whole “Lt Dan” thing and was one of my first exposures to gallows humor. He was also one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. He was always jumping out of his chair and walking around on his hands, which tended to confuse tourists who weren’t used to facing that kind of reality at home. Of everyone I met there, I wonder the most what happened to Dan. Hopefully he has a good life.
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Many runaways ended up at the beach motels, which for a few years were the party haunt of the upper classes, which I was never really a part of. But one of my close friends, whose name I won’t mention here as he probably doesn’t need this story in his professional life, was there. My end-of-night ritual was to walk down to 14th Street, exit the boardwalk, and stop at Wawa for a cappuccino on the way home before sitting down with my SNES until the wee hours of the morning, something that has made me painfully nostalgic in adulthood. On this particular night around midnight or so, I played A connection to the past when my phone rang. It was my friend’s father, asking if he was with me because he hadn’t come home yet and his parents were worried. These calls continued late into the night, getting more frantic with each call. While they were preparing to call the police to file a missing person report, my friend wandered home. The next day, I was inundated with horror stories that he was possessed by a demon and spoke in tongues, scaring the hell out of those present. This all seemed somehow possible to my teenage mind (since I genuinely believed in such things until I became jaded and cynical) until they told me the name of the demon that had possessed him. It was Quorthon.
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He had spent the night feigning a possession because he’d always been good at reading a room, and read that this particular room was full of hillbillies. The languages he spoke in? He was listing off black metal album titles and songs. It was a stroke of genius, although I’m sure his parents didn’t think so. That story still thrills me nearly thirty years later. I’m sure half the crowd assembled for that spectacle died of overdoses.
The Pavilion would be the hub for the unwashed and unloved for a few more years of my life, until I eventually got a summer job at a haunted house a few islands over and surrounded myself with a similar group of losers until sometime in 2001 someone broke into the building and set it on fire like a carnival fantoft. By this point I was immersed in music. I didn’t go back to the boardwalk much until I started working at a record shop there in 2011. By that point any remnants of a subcultural hub had washed away and the Pavilion had reverted to being a family-friendly seating area, save for one broken holdout who still played his acoustic guitar, although he seemed largely ignored.
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I suppose it was replaced by the internet as a meeting place for the like-minded but socially inept. Or maybe they just disappeared. I’m not sure how long it was a landmark for this kind of shit. I’ve heard its history goes back to the ’80s, but that was all passed down by word of mouth, like some weird disease. I could never find much about it online, and I doubt I contributed much to the whole thing, but it had an important place for many of us growing up in South Jersey.
And so ends another story from my experience in the mid-90s. Much of what I’ve made of this column comes from that time, almost as a tool for remembering. I’m grateful to everyone who stuck it out for 42(!) of those damn things. I’ll see you again in a few weeks, but remember: all the best…
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I’d like to add a postscript here that fits well with the grumpy theme of the article here, and that is I wanted to commend Warlord Clothing for their exceptional customer service. A few weeks ago I ordered two shirts and when they arrived they looked like the mailman had opened the package and blown a sperm pellet or two into them, probably due to the extreme heat we were exposed to. When I contacted Warlord they were super quick to get everything back in order and sent me brand new, un-splattered shirts as well as several follow-up emails. That same week I had to open a Paypal dispute with a well-known label for not sending an order and I never heard from them directly other than asking me to close the dispute. Such a big, well-known label? Shit. An independent company that could have told me to fuck off? Great. Until next time.
