When I was a sophomore in college, I got it into my head to do a fanzine. Fueled by a steady diet of pizza and ginger-ale from Captain Nemo’s Pizza in Boston’s Kenmore Square, I became giddy with thoughts of the acclaim and accolades my zine-to-be would garner. It would be like the Paris Review of hardcore zines, erudite, knowing, and fun, reflecting my teenaged years as a straight-edge posi kid but with a burgeoning art-rock maturity that I believed my soon-to-be twenty-year old self possessed in spades.

I scoured Lungfish lyrics to find a suitably cryptic name for my zine. Would it be Plague of Particles or Invisible Regime? Either way, it would kick Suburban Voice and Flipside’s respective asses to the curb. It would be the kind of zine that would get you laid.

I decided that Jawbox would be my first interview. They had a show coming up at the Middle East. I bought a tiny reporter’s tape recorder, and got some film for my junky point-and-shoot camera. I thought about all the kids taking hot shit photos at shows, Brian Maryansky, Justin Moulder, countless others, on stage, snapping away, cameras slung over their shoulders like how Gregory Peck held a Sten gun in Guns of Navarone. Sure, that could be me too. Who needs a real camera or expertise or any sense of how to take a photograph that will look good on the printed page? Not me!

It was a heck of a show. This was in February of 1993. I know I saw Drive Like Jehu at the Middle East around the same time, and Shudder To Think as well. I can’t imagine it was all at the same show, though conceivably that bill could have existed--three legendary bands at the height of their powers--in my hazy memory, all three shows exist at the same moment in time, followed the next night by Jawbreaker playing a student performance space at Northeastern, followed by Kingpin and Eye for an Eye at TT The Bears.

It was a long time ago, but I remember them playing Ones and Zeroes specifically. I vividly remember Zach Barocas’s barely contained mania on the drums, a theatrical display of virtuosity, all flailing, rubbery limbs. Kim Coletta smiling and grooving, J. Robbins and Three-Dollar Bill Barbot somehow battling their guitars and coming up victorious.
 

After the show, I steeled myself. I had snapped a few bashful photographs of the band, but found the activity to be distracting and embarrassing. I was not the machine gun wielding Gregory Peck I’d thought I was. Robbins was loading up his gear when I walked up to him.

I stuttered out that I wanted to interview him for my zine. And what happened next is why I truly and completely will always love hardcore, punk rock music, and the strange little scene I grew up in. There was a moment of honest hesitation on Robbins’ face as I asked him. Like he was thinking, “good god is there a back door I can run the fuck out of an away from this kid? Can I tell him sorry, but no, I have to be somewhere? Is there any conceivable scenario where I don’t have to get interviewed for this kid’s fanzine that will probably never come out or end up being a garbled mess of misspelled words and xeroxed cliches? Can’t I just have like five minutes of peace?” And then he sighed, stood up straight and said, “Sure. Fine, okay. Let me just get a beer. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

Poor J. Robbins. I wish I could remember all the ridiculous questions I asked him, but I can only imagine the patience it took on his part to kindly and sincerely reply to each of them. We met at a table upstairs in the bar/restaurant portion of the club. I was nineteen years old at the time, so it might very well have been an impossibility, but it continues to astound my adult self that I didn’t even try to buy him a beer. They guy was willing to take his time and talk to me, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to get him a beverage.

I told him I’d seen them a bunch of times, which was true. I was a huge fan since their first seven inch. I’d seen them at the Anthrax in Connecticut, and at UCONN with Shudder to Think. I had a gray Jawbox Grippe t-shirt that I wore to death. After a few softball questions, I prepared for my big Woodward and Bernstein moment. It was about the hard hitting subject of lyric sheets. Why did the Novelty LP lack a lyric sheet? What were they trying to pull over on their fans? You’re a Dischord band for cripe’s sake--don’t you know the music is the message? Robbins threw it back at me, polite but firm. That was intentional on their part. Very much so. He didn’t want a lyric sheet--they weren’t a protest band, they were doing something different than their counterparts on the label. I had some sort of lame follow-up question filled with knowing self-righteousness, first they came for our lyric sheets...then they took our freedom, etc, but he had pretty much shut me down.

I know at least that my mom taught me enough to thank him for his time, and then I hustled out of there. The T stops running earlier than it should in Boston. I walked back towards my dormitory on Beacon Street in the biting New England cold. Across the Mass Ave Bridge where the wind whipped off the Charles like a knife.

I never transcribed the interview. I never developed the roll of film. Instead I skipped class, ate a lot of pizza, and played World Cup Pinball until the semester was over. I think I was embarrassed by what a poor journalist I was--or maybe I just lacked the hustle. I’m sure both the camera and the tape are now in a landfill somewhere, buried under twenty-two years of garbage. A golden apple of the past, lost except in memory.

When I was in high school, kids wore Led Zep shirts. I didn't, because I was a self-righteous little snot of a hardcore kid who thought Led Zep was tired bullshit. To me, the Bron-yr-aur Stomp reeked of thick-headed jocks in suburban backyard parties, a red plastic cup of Bud in their hands.

It would take me some years to come around to the popular music of my day and see the artistry in, say, U2's Unforgettable Fire, to say nothing of side one of Led Zep IV.

And but so when I was a freshman in high school, Led Zeppelin was about twenty years out of date. So the metalheads in my class who gave me grief and called me "thrasher" were wearing a t-shirt for a band that was formed before they were born. A band whose best albums came out when they were still gestating within their respective mothers' wombs or twinkling in their fathers' respective eyes.

I would go to hardcore shows and buy t-shirts of bands I'd see whose members were basically my age, so buying the t-shirt of a twenty-year-old band just seemed weird. It seemed cookie cutter and bland and empty of spirit. Book your own fucking life and all that. Disclaimer: I get it now. I'm not knocking Led Zeppelin. There's nothing wrong with teenagers liking them. Houses of the Holy rules. I like hobbits. They're great.

So now, two decades and change later, high school and/or teenagers/young people still occasionally wear Led Zeppelin shirts. Maybe not to the extent they did in the early 90's, but it happens. So Led Zeppelin is now forty-six years old. What I wonder is how do young people think about a wearing the t-shirt of a band that is forty-six years old? It would be like if, in my high school days, some kid was proudly wearing a Hoagy Carmichael t-shirt.

Does the modern young person wearing a Led Zep shirt feel about Led Zep the way an imaginary 1991 high schooler might have thought about Hoagy Carmichael or Bing Crosby or some other antique singer from another age? Or is that 1960's cultural bridge so pronounced that those of us on one side of it will always share a kinship not imaginable with the art and ideas on the far side of it? Or is it just that the consumption of media has so thoroughly changed in the digital age that there really is no difference between Led Zeppelin and Hoagy Carmichael? Or more precisely, is the difference between Hoagy Carmichael and Led Zeppelin like the difference between Beethoven and Bach, just two flavors of the same mildewed rainbow?