A little bit of Crass craziness from my youth:
I grew up in a small town. Very traditional, less than 10,000 people in rural CT. There was a single mother artist in town, whose husband had committed suicide, raising two children in borderline poverty. My childhood memories of our neighbor is that they had chickens, goats, and other barnyard animals. Their whole yard was chicken ****, which is a foul thing when children gather to play. So the son was made fun of and the daughter was an outcast of her own choosing. It was interesting among the suburban/rural citizens of our town to see the reaction to this woman, the mother. It was like Hester Prynne, only modern sensitivities made people nicer to her face. Anyway, the kids grew up, got into punk rock, and had a few punk rock friends. So went a high school group full of models (the more urbane and good looking ones adopted the punk rock aesthetic) wearing devil locks, shaved female heads, men with skater cuts, you name it. Like twelve-fifteen of them. This was around 1988-9 or so. Anyway, they had a rotating leather jacket with a Crass logo emblazoned on it. "Is The Cross In You?" read the jacket, and each day a different member would wear it.
It is here I come in. On the outside, looking in, I dug punk rock but was among the traditional townsfolk in dress, mannerisms, etc. Long story short, when it came down to it, I had an unspoken yet pretty definitive invite to join the punks and a "go do it" from the rest of the town that I interacted with. It was clear choosing was in the offing and would determine my high school life. But it never got to that point. The punks had a long-standing weekend exchange program with punks from other towns. They would gather at the artist's house because she was liberal and free and let her kids do pretty much what they were going to do. Sex was had. Drugs were had. Everybody was had.
Unfortunately, one weekend, while fashioning punk accoutrements that included nooses, one of the exchangers decided to hang herself. And she succeeded. A tragedy for sure. And the town and the police went batshit. Things were said. Sides were taken and voices were raised, both sympathetic and pitchfork-willing in nature. And thus unfolded one long finger point of town at kids, of kids claiming town was out to get them, of outsiders in disbelief at the crime scene and the youth involved. My friend's mother (An ER nurse) who was married to a very liberal husband (he tried to introduce us, as kids, to Alice's Restaurant and failed in the attempt) even wanted nothing to do with it. She had first hand knowledge of the drugs and the ER and resuscitation attempts heretofore to the hanging. Even the sympathetic were put off by it. The punks splintered. The town splintered. Everybody just splintered.
Long story short -- everyone who loved Crass in small town, CT needed a little small town self-restraint in them, and the small town needed a little Crass. Towns moved on, as towns do, and economic hardships did not hit the rural NE like the Rust Belt in the Midwest, so things are still reasonably the same. Only the vestiges of punk live on, the small town lives on, everybody lives on except for that girl who could have used some help and guidance along the way. She's still alive to her family, but nobody else. Aside from those of us that were there, the whole thing is pretty much forgotten, or it's viewed through such a different, more modern lens that it may as well be. What was so alien and foreign is seen for what it rightly was -- a troubled teen doing a troubling, tragic thing.
Yet I'm not being melodramatic when I say it shaped both my politics and my social outlook to this day. Why were you ****ing so much with death? Is the Crass in you?
I would hang out with the punks once we all hit adulthood. The son was a biochem major who studied at a prestigious liberal arts school in CT and had long ditched his ways from 1989. The sister grew up and lived her life. They were no longer punks, per se, but adults in their own right. But I think -- even though the Crass was never fully in me -- I understand what Crass is about, but I'm not sure they (both Crass and the kids I grew up with) realized how their ethos, adopted personally, might manifest itself in an otherwise ordered society. Crass is a longstanding punk idol, if you aren't killing your idols. But they didn't make the rockaction Punk Hundred. Never could with that memory.
