How it started.

1992 - when it started

I dropped out of highschool the previous year. i had been going to hardcore shows since my freshman year in 1988. i was doing construction at the time with my father. On the weekends i was hanging out with friends and going to HC shows. i ended up being friends with some south NJ people from my area Jay kwi, Jeff Ducko, Anthony Bochello, & a few more. We ended up picking up some more friends from Ben Salem, PA. they were in this band Flagman. AJ, Josh, Ed, Al, & Dave, and thier friend Sean Mccabe. We all hung out at shows and made a mess of things fucking around. at some point in the summer of 1993 someone decided to rent an apartment in Ocean City, NJ. a 1 bedroom apt. at this place on Moorlyn Terr. called the Idlewild. I was working alot so i didnt really end up down there at the start. I saw Jay Kwi at the troc one night out front of a Quicksand show. it was sold out, i had a ticket and he didn't. I liked quicksand but had seen them a billion times. so i ended up trading my ticket to Jay Kwi for free rent at the "shore house" I didnt realize that 14-20 people would be living there. Whatever. it was awesome. people lining the floors sleeping till 4PM everyday, and up causing chaos all hours of the night. Mostly south NJ kids & Ben Salem kids. All SXE and all looking to ruin someones day. Needless to say we all became real close.

Sean was the original singer of Flagman, but it didn't work out. He couldn't sing. I think he played like 2 or 3 shows with them as Flagman i forget. being that Sean was basically the pinnacle of Insanity & intelligence they knew he needed to be a frontman. So they started Crud is A Cult as a project band. It was Flagman with Sean singing. They were a Straight Edge band at the start with songs like Dedication. Crud was the band and all our friends were the "cult" . Crud was a pretty intense band to say the least. A highlight i would have to mention is on Mischief night one year they got on stage and said "Happy Mischief Night" and Egged the crowd! Fucking awesome.

in 1994 we did OCNJ again in a a couple of different houses. At this point we had some Emmaus / Allentown PA kids hanging out. Each year we just made more and more friends and we all hung out on the boardwalk and made fun of people. sometimes the Mouthpiece dudes would show up on the weekends too. Scott Palmucchi more than most. He was the most insane kid of all. We all had our antics we pulled. but he always took it to the next level. I'll talk more specific of such antics another time. At this point we had most of the young Philadelphia / Trenton area HC scene hanging out in OCNJ on the weekends. mostly SXE kids pulling pranks & making fun of people & fighting locals. These storys are endless. again, i'll talk about it later. I lived in the most random house ever. It was a normal friend of Jay Kwi. this girl Allison. she wasnt a HC kid. but they had a room they wanted to rent out. so me & Jay rented it from them. eventually Sean and Nate shared the room with us too. The rest of the house were some random people. Arian Bob "the surfer dude", Alison and her friend were normal College girls, & Shivo. He was this like hippie/surfer/pothead/hairy dude. he also had a Tattoo of a crushed beer can on his leg. i knew it was a beer can because it said "Beer" on it. Yeah hes a whole Blog by himself. Amy Sunny, Vern Laird, Dan Murphy & a few others still had like apts in the Idlewild that year. So this year we were a little expanded. we had more people down there and more chaos insued. this year Dave Rosenberg (Crud / Flagman) had been playing Bass in Mouthpiece. One day we were sitting in Gyro across from the Chatterbox eating. He dropped a bomb on me. He said he had stopped being SXE a few months back and didnt tell anyone. Especially Mouthpiece. He had played a few shows after breaking edge and didnt know what to do. He ended up quitting the band obviously. This was an important moment. he was the first to break edge. We were all SXE HC kids at the time so this changed things. one by one most of our crew followed suit. by the end of the summer into the winter crud was no longer a SXE band. Sean Mccabe wrote a lot of Graffitti with Dan that summer. He was writing SER "Straight Edge Revenge" by the end of that winter half of Crud wasnt Edge. and half of our friends wern't either. Honestly this didnt change much. we were all still real close. no lines were really drawn. I remember for like a week at some point i got all "Super Straight Edge" because i was pissed. It wasn't me. i couldn't hate my friends.

By the following summer me, Al & Vern were really the only SXE kids left. Sean stopped being SXE like a month before they recorded the Crud 7" for Windward records. Al had to sing Dedication on the record because it was a SXE song. Al was playing in Battery by the spring. While he was away his girlfriend cheated on him with his brother (Dave from crud / FM) & the Bass player of Crud. when he got back and found out...he then sold out. Thats when i realized that people are free to make their own choices if they want to be SXE or not. It really has nothing to do with anymore other than yourself. He made his choice because he felt thats what he needed. im not gonna lie.... i was bummed when i found out. but its his life and i respected that.

1995 - we rented this big house. it was real nice. me, AJ & his girlfriend, & 2 others. everyone came down and stayed there. This summer was different. Most everyone was drinking doing drugs & partying instead of causing insanity on the boardwalk. i was the only SXE kid in the house but i was having fun. The sound track for that summer was Rollerskate Skinny & Loveless. Everyone seemed to be more adult than the previous years. we all had jobs and didnt live in squaller.

That winter i moved away to Salt Lake city to work doing construction with my dad on the road. i would be gone for like 4 months at a time. This didnt work out. I missed my friends. They had all moved to a house at 1335 Rodman st in philly. I decided to move back and was on a train 20 hours later. There was an earth crisis show at U of Arts i wanted to get back in time for. The house was like a block away from the show. so i stopped by and checked it out. it was just like the shore. people hanging out & had the same vibe. Dan murphy had gotten a Place with Mike Levy down 13th st. on the corner of vine. Basically everyone up and moved into philly at the same time. i came in a couple months later.

when i got back from SLC I moved into my moms new house across the street from where i grew up at my grandmothers. she had gotten married and started a new family. my grandmother had died so they sold the house and put all my stuff in my moms basement. i was in a situation where i didnt really fit in anywhere. my roots were gone. after a fight with my mother one night i up and took a bus to philly and moved onto the couch at rodman st.


This was the beginning for me.