It would have been September of 1984. That's when my friendship with Tom began. Sophomore year.
Now, I knew of Tom, had known of Tom since junior high, but if I ever actually met him before randomly being sat next to him in math class, I don't remember it. How did I know of Tom? Well, Tom was infamous because in junior high he had shown up to school with a mohawk. This was when a haircut could get you in trouble. He had the same haircut as Joe Strummer of The Clash and it meant that he was a punk rocker.
I can't stress how much this haircut reverberated through the school. It was DISCUSSED. "Did you see the kid with the mohawk?" Punk rock was not a widely known phenomenon at this time so the mere appearance of such a haircut was like an early version of the internet. It informed people. It was social commentary. 1982 was weird.
By the time I actually met Tom, he no longer had a mohawk. But I knew that he used to. Everybody knew. It was like the Scarlet Letter. We hit it off and somehow he invited me over to study for a test. And this is when I can honestly say that I was forever changed.
Now, up to that point, I had become obsessed with popular music. My childhood had revolved around our record player. We would put on musicals and act them out as we sang along. We also delved into my parents record collection, an odd assortment of folk music, Beatles albums, and Paul Simon. Then my tastes expanded once my older sister started listening to Casey Kasem's Top 40 broadcast. We would tape the show Sunday morning with our little hand held tape recorder and then wear it out during the week. “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” ruled supreme.
But punk rock? I knew The Clash song "Rock The Casbah". I knew about the episode of "Chips" which warned of violent punk bands. My notion of punk was also received via 60 Minutes style reportage. People were very worried about punk rock. To say you were a punk rocker was to reject all sense of decency and community. This nihilistic violent music was going to ruin the world.
The Clash had broken through to mass popularity but the underbelly of that success was very disturbing to mainstream early 1980's America. So when Tom invited me over, I knew I was entering a world that was foreign to me. I knew Tom was a punk.
We climbed the stairs to his room. We opened math books and promptly ignored them. Now, I am probably misremembering because I always do, but I feel like Tom played DJ that first hang. Did he have a record player? I think he did. He put on a Minor Threat album.
Nothing prepared me for the sounds coming out of Tom's speakers. I looked at the album art the way a starving castaway might look at a gourmet meal. It looked homemade. It was so far away from the commercialized Top 40 music that I was familiar with that I almost suffered whiplash.
What's more, Tom had an electric guitar in his room. A black Aria Pro 2. That he knew how to play. He flipped on a Ross Loudmouth amp, plugged in, and a distorted live guitar tone hit my eardrums for the first time. I had been to a couple of concerts (The Fixx, Squeeze) and my Mom taught guitar lessons, but that fuzz, that buzz, that distorted growl that came out of that black box literally altered the course of my life.
Sometime during that year, Tom and I "started a band". We called ourselves The FLAs, which stood for "Frustrated Landsacape Artists", a term our Humanities teacher Mrs. Franco had used to describe these poor painters who kept having to do portraits of rich bored royalty instead of the nature scenes they really wanted to be doing. We thought this was hilarious!
The first song we ever wrote together was called "Get Away". In fact, on the recording of that song that you are about to be subjected to, I announce the name of the band before I sing the first line. "This is the FLAs."
We spent several months writing and recording whenever we got the chance. And by "recording", I mean pressing record on my boombox and playing/singing live as the cassette rolled. I mean, you could see by looking at the Minor Threat album that these guys were just like us. They weren't seasoned musical professionals who had gone to the big city to make it. They were high school kids. They lived with their parents. If they could do it, why couldn't we?
A few months later, when I went to Tom's, he had invited Justin along. Justin also played guitar. He was joining the band. I had already been friends with Justin in junior high. We did a French project together that lives in infamy. We had hung out with a mutual friend on several occasions but we had not really continued to hang once we hit high school. We just weren't in any classes together. But it turns out that Tom and Justin had been flung together in a Latin and a history class and hit it off, much in the same way that Tom and I had in math.
Another phrase that a teacher had used was suggested as a name change to the band. Their history teacher (the incomparable Joe Laffey) was talking about a societal shift that happened during the French Revolution, maybe? He said that the conflict was between the crusty tired aristocracy and the "fecund youth".
The minute Tom, howling with laughter already, said, "Fecund Youth should be our band name", I was 100% on board. There were lots of punk bands out there with "Youth" in their name. Reagan Youth, Wasted Youth, Youth Of Today, Youth Brigade, Sonic Youth, it was a meme before memes. Our name was a subtle tweak on those, as we saw it, imbecilic slogans.
Fecund Youth. Say it five times fast it turns into a swear.
So the recordings that Tom and I had been making as The FLAs got co-opted. Justin learned the FLA songs and we became a three-piece. Sometime during junior year, Chris bought a bass specifically to join the band. He learned how to play our songs before he could actually play his instrument. We never got a regular drummer. But we rehearsed regularly and tried to concoct ways to play shows. Before Chris came on board, we played a party at another Tom’s house, opening for that Tom’s brother Steve’s group, who covered lots of hard rock and heavy metal. Eric Dwho lived down the road from me on guitar. They were pretty good, man. Erik S. drummed for us, too, a little bit, John B. joined on bass, and we attempted our songs. That was the first time I performed original music before an audience. I was instantly hooked.
This all was surrounded by the drudgery and magic of high school. Even when we weren't actually playing music, the band was an organizing principle in our lives. We were ALWAYS Fecund Youth. I designed posters. I drew album covers. I longingly looked at Chevy Econoline vans in used car circulars, imagining a barnstorm tour. If Minor Threat could do it, why couldn't we?
College loomed and I fantasized about not going, about turning Fecund Youth into a real band. I already planned on being an actor, why wouldn't I pursue something as reckless and uncertain as punk rock?
But Tom, Justin and Chris had other plans. They would be leaving Rhode Island to go off to college, while I would stay to attend URI. The idea of Fecund Youth lasted throughout our college years, however, with us getting together on breaks and playing, writing and recording more songs into my boombox, and even, on one memorable occasion, playing a New Year's Eve gig at the house I rented my junior year of college.
All told we wrote a couple albums worth of material and amused ourselves for the better part of a decade. But more importantly, Tom and Justin showed me that writing a song was something someone like me could do. So eventually I begrudgingly picked up the guitar and began to write on my own.
1984. Forty years of writing songs. And it all started with Fecund Youth. Here is unquestionably the very first moment of My Secret Career. Fecund Youth with Get Away.
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