Question: How did you start to get involved with Hardcore?

Jonathan Anastas: I had an afternoon job at Newbury Comics in Boston which was also Modern Method, who put out "This Is Boston, Not LA" and who put out the Boston Rock magazine. I kind of bounced around. I would work in the store sometimes, and I would work at the record label sometimes and for the magazine other times. I was getting into Dischord stuff making the transition from Punk Rock to Hardcore as the records came out. I remember when all the first Dischord 7" came out. I was absorbing through the spore of records. Boston had a big Punk Rock scene but not a big Hardcore scene. Basically getting into SSD sort of got me into Hardcore.

Jonathan Anastas: SSD were Boston's first Hardcore band. Probably every single one of the influential bands grew out of their road crew and their friends, the real Straight Edge bands. I remember I was really upset because I missed their first show. They used to come around and flyer Newbury street. They had a show in May or June in this collective space, and I had to go off to summer camp - I had already committed to being a junior counselor. When I went away to camp there wasn't a Hardcore scene, and when I came back SSD had played their first two shows, and there it was.

Jonathan Anastas: I wanted to form a band after that, so I put up an ad in Newbury Comics, "Bass Player With Guitar Player Seeks Singer And Drummer". Dave Smalley answered the add. The big joke was that his drummer couldn't play drums and my guitar player wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. After a couple of practices - we used to actually rehearse at the same collective media workshop where the Hardcore shows where - it ended up being just Dave and I. We went through a number of other people before the various DYS lineups that recorded came together. Through Dave I met the guys in SSD, and they became the center of the scene in every way imaginable.

Jonathan Anastas: In Boston, we were all fans of rock with capital "R". We loved Aerosmith and The Clash. My first influence to be in a band was Cheap Trick, not The Sex Pistols. I think we all wanted to be rock stars as opposed to Punk Rock stars. Punk Rock was the kind of music we could play. We all really believed in what we were saying, but if you look t the way that DYS and SSD sort of metamorphosized into rock bands, it was a natural progression. When you take Hardcore and slow it down and add a little more skill, it becomes hard rock.

Jonathan Anastas: Al Barille, the guitar player of SSD, had a black van, and the world revolved around that van. We would load into that van and just drive around very Friday night and Saturday night and around the city and harass the old Punk Rockers. There was a big schism between the Punk Rock people and the Hardcore people. We all had shaved heads, but it was way before the English Skinhead thing came in here, so no one put that association together.

Jonathan Anastas: We got our final guitar player from SSD because Al Barille told him that he should play with us. Negative FX and Last Rights were all SSD crew guys. They were the nucleus of the scene. There was the Straight Edge scene and other groups of bands that grew around it, like The FU's and Jerry's Kids and Gang Green and The Freeze. The Freeze was from Cape Cod, and they weren't really hard, and nobody liked them because they were melodic. Gang Green and Jerry's Kids were from the South Shore, which is the beach community south of Boston, and we we're all from the North Shore. It was a very, very different scene. If you look at the bands that have lasted and influenced, I think it's all the bands that sprung up around SSD.

Jonathan Anastas: SSD were sort of the first Hardcore band from Boston to gain national prominence. We used to road trip with the everywhere. It would be about 19 guys plus equipment in the van. I remember my first trip to New York with them when DYS used to play A7 and CBGB's. I remember driving across the Cross Bronx Expressway for the first time. I was a 16-year-old kid shivering in a van, seeing the burnt out cars and the trash in the streets. It was just unbelievable compared to what we were used to back in Boston. Boston is a very small, sort of patrician city.

Jonathan Anastas: We had all met the kids from Washington DC at that point. And there was a bond between Boston and Washington DC. We saw ourselves the same way, we were all Straight Edge. When Hardcore started in New York it was adamantly "no edge". The New York Straight Edge thing sprung up much, much later. When I first started going there it was almost anti-Straight Edge. Right about the time the Bad Brains moved to New York, we played a show at A7. Darryl, from the Bad Brains, stood in front of me and my amplifier for the whole set, and I was so intimidated because he was such a musician.

Jonathan Anastas: Every city had uniforms. The Boston uniform was a baggy hooded sweatshirt, some t-shirt underneath and maybe some boots. Then we got into boots, but we thought Doc Martens were really lame, so we bought motorcycle police boots that zipped up the side. These were the boots you were supposed to have if you were from Boston. Looking back at it, it is really funny because it is no different that the movie Clueless, or being a jock, something where everyone had a uniform. There were so many ridiculous rites of passage. The Boston thing wasn't about sleeveless t-shirts, you know with the arms cut of on a 45 degree of angle, but we used to take the extra arm off the sleeve and wear it around or heads as a head band, or over our ears to keep our ears warm. When someone first came into the scene and asked about a "sleeve hat", we would reply, "you just can't wear a sleeve hat. Every sleeve hat is earned. You have to go into the pit and get yourself a sleeve hat". That was the big laugh. Someone would come to a show for the first time and introduce themselves, and we would tell them the story of the sleeve hat, and they would go off and do it.

Jonathan Anastas: I never felt comfortable drinking. I just went along with it for peer pressure. I used to dump my beer when no one was looking. If we were drinking Vodka and orange juice, mine would be all orange juice. Becoming involved in Hardcore was the first time that I was around people that made me feel comfortable for feeling that way instead of uncomfortable. It gave me a support system because it wasn't saying, "You are weird, you are 15 years old and you don't want to drink". It felt like family, we were definitely family.

Jonathan Anastas: The other thing about the Boston scene was that we were all really anti-vegetarian. We were really into eating red meat and lifting weights. Al from SSD was a really big guy. It was weird when we would go to New York City and there would be kids begging and Krishnas feeding everybody weird vegetarian food in front of CBGB's. Life to us was to eat food, lift weights, band practice, drive around and hang out on Newbury Street.

Question: How do you feel about he influence that SSD and DYS had on the New York Straight Edge bands that came along a little later?

Jonathan Anastas: There was a lot of strife and acrimony because we felt that they had sort of co-opted our images and our scene without ever being there. Youth Of Today was a big prop. This sort of sprung up later when I was in Slapshot.

Jonathan Anastas: If you look at Bold and you look at the first DYS record, you'd think they were the same people stuck in a time warp. There was all the same rhetoric: "I'm hanging with my crew" and "old school - we were there back in the day". We though, "we were there, and you weren't". This is sort of were the animosity came from. I don't think that at the time anybody in Boston stepped back far enough to see that this it was really cool that they were paying homage. It was more like "Hey, you are appropriating our thing. Do your own thing".

Jonathan Anastas: I remember going to New York and playing with SSD, and the two bands were probably tighter than any other bands that played together. We did a lot of things at the same time, just by accident. We both added second guitar players at around the same time, going from four-piece to five-piece. We both started experimenting with rock. We went towards Metallica, and they sort of went 70s, buying expensive guitars and Marshall amplifiers, the whole thing.

Jonathan Anastas: We played the first Rock Hotel with SSD. It was a big club, about 1000 people, which for Hardcore back then was huge. We decided that we were going to go down there and pool our equipment. We brought all our equipment, every Marshall head and cabinet we had. There was six or seven Marshall stack on stage. a lot of people wore wireless. People were not playing thrift store guitars anymore, but were playing guitars that were custom made or custom ordered. It was as though we were metamorphosizing into a whole different thing. When people started coming in, there were cats calls like "It looks like Madison Square Gardens in here". It was very uncool to do all those sort of things.

Jonathan Anastas: There had been a show earlier that afternoon at CBGB's with Jerry's Kids and The FU's and a band called The Fucking Assholes which was a fake band put together of one member of all the other bands. They used to put on ski masks over their heads. They were a joke band, but every one of their songs - they had about 10 songs - was about how much New York sucked. Of course there were fights. My friend Pat got cut with a knife. All this animosity spilled over into the night show, and everyone was just looking for an excuse for things to happen. SSD and DYS had about $20.000 worth of equipment, and we didn't want kids on the stage. We were writing songs with six or seven different parts and tempo changes, and all of a sudden there are kids bumping into you, and you couldn't play your instrument. We brought our own bouncers and we were throwing people off the stage during SSD, and they were throwing people off the stage when DYS played. I don't think it was what New York wanted, I don't think it was what New York expected. The whole thing was chaos. It was to the point where I was swinging my guitar at people's heads. When SSD played, we were out in the pit. Boston was a really loyal, support-your-brother, kind of thing.

Jonathan Anastas: So we were ripping it up when all of a sudden over at the side, Dave Smalley was in trouble with two guys who were going to pound him. I thought, "I'm going to save my brother's ass". So I go over there and I just get pounded. Some New York kid hit me with a handful of rings, and I couldn't see. My eyebrows were cut, and there was blood in my eyes. I think that all I have to do is to get to the stage, and I'll be OK. So I get to the stage, and Jamie sees that I am bleeding, and everything stops. We ended up hiding in the dressing room until 4:30 a.m. until the people that were waiting to pound us left. I guess you could say that it had been led up to that for a long time.

Jonathan Anastas: There was always fight when Boston played New York or when Boston kids went down to New York to see Washington DC bands or bands like Black Flag. Al's van would pull up and 17 kids would get out. We used to draw X's on our foreheads before we'd go into the pit because when you were grabbing people to punch them, and they had an X on their forehead, you knew not to punch them because they were from Boston. All sorts of weird things happened. Choke, from Negative FX, and later Slapshot, got the cartilage torn out of his knee at one show. Some kid landed on his leg , and he had to have an operation. He was on crutches for nine months. It was just a whole weird scene.

Jonathan Anastas: Other bands came up, SSD had broken up, and then I was in Slapshot.

Jonathan Anastas: There was no Straight Edge scene in New York in 1981. I'm not saying there weren't any kids, but it wasn't organized. Slapshot got into an all open war with Youth Of Today to the point where it was in our lyrics. Choke was pretty much calling those guys out. Slapshot would play up in Albany, and the Youth Of Today guys would be there, and it would just be weird. There was a lot of tension. It was never close. If Boston ever had a sister city, it was Washington DC. The two big bands were Black Flag and the Bad Brains, and we would pretty much road trip anywhere on the East Coast to see those bands. There was one band in New York that we had good relationships with, Reagan Youth. Those guys were really, really cool. I think they were different that all the other bands. We used to stay at their house when we would go to New York to play.

Jonathan Anastas: The Boston scene was very different than the New York scene in terms of that it was a suburban, upper-middle-class movement. As opposed to New York, it seemed like a Lower East Side, working class, tough-kid, kind of thing. We were a lot like Washington DC - senator's kids and admiral's kids and professor's kids. Dave Smalley's father is an ambassador. LA was kind of like Orange County rich-kids thing, which was different, too. New York stood out to me in being different in that way, too.

Jonathan Anastas: The other thing I remember about the New York thing was the Beastie Boys. We were really down with them. We used to play with The Young And The Useless and the Beastie Boys. They would stay with us when they came up to Boston. Those guys were really cool. They were sort of down with us from back then too.

Question: What about Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Murphy's Law?

Jonathan Anastas: They all kind of fell on the other side of the Straight Edge/no edge thing. We were publicity friendly with those people for the most part. Everyone remembers Harley and Jimmy Gestapo from way back and CBGB's, but we didn't play together a lot. They were all coming up as we we're coming down, in 1985 or so. SSD broke up first, and we ended up with their drummer for our last few shows. There was a while when nothing was happening, and then Slapshot got together with the goal to bring back old school Boston Punk Rock. The name of our first record was "Back On The Map", which was supposed to be a whole statement. That was about the time the Cro-Mags were coming up. We were all into the Cro-Mags' music. It was sort of Metal and it was heavy. Murphy's Law went the other way. They were funny Punk, songs about drinking and stuff. So Slapshot tried to play with bands like Bold.

Question: Why did they try to play with those bands if there was so much animosity between them?

Jonathan Anastas: There was no animosity with Bold. To us, and this is going to sound really terrible, Bold was just a bunch of 14-year-old kids, and they were cool and into the right thing. They seemed sincere, but generic. Their hearts were in the right place. With Youth Of Today, there was this whole plan to appropriate someone else's thing. It was contrived. There was always someone threatening to kick someone else's ass or a verbal war. It was just a very different time, but it was sort of a carry over of what was started in 1981.

Question: I wonder if that goes on today.

Jonathan Anastas: I don't know. As far as I understand, Boston does not have much of a scene today. The New York thing just regurgitates the same six people again over and over again at this point. The other thing that was big in Boston, back in the days was that everyone was into dancing really hard. It was supposed to be a fight, it wasn't supposed to be dancing at all. None of that "going in a circle" thing. It was called "Boston-punch-thrash". If there was a circle, you'd go against it.

Question: What do you think about Straight Edge today?

Jonathan Anastas: I am the firmest believer in it. I am totally horrified when I get on American Online and see all these things attached to it, like veganism or whatever. To me that is not about Straight Edge at all. I guess you can make a loose connection of being aware of your environment. I am not a drinker today. I am not going to name names, but there are a lot of people from back then who aren't still. I feel healthier, I feel up. The Boston Straight Edge thing sprung from this sort of Nietzschean, social Darwinism, and I still sort of feel that today. I was always "Do It Yourself", very entrepreneurial. The training I got from the DIY of the 80s has sort of been renamed "entrepreneurialism" to me in the 90s. I really believe in the whole ethic of putting out your own albums, booking your own tours, doing your own posters, and doing it well. That taught me what I need today. That hyper-entrepreneurialism - this ferocious workout - I learned that there. I didn't learn that in high school or college or from my parents. I learned that from having a band. It was a business, and I had to keep it going. If I wanted to go out on tour for a month, I had to make sure I had 28 shows. I had to make sure that I had hotels or floors to crash at, so I didn't lose money every day. I had to figure out how to live on my per diem.

Question: What do you do now?

Jonathan Anastas: I am an executive at an advertising agency. To me those are the most important lessons I learned in my life. Those were the best friends I made in my entire life, and they are still my friends today. Twelve years ago I spent every day with Dave Smalley, Jamie Sciarappa from SSD and Christine McCarthy who was Springa's girlfriend and Jamie's best friend. Here it is, 15 years later, and we don't have every day to spend together, but if we have social time, we spend it together.

Question: Do you think back then that you would be this way for a long time?

Jonathan Anastas: Yeah. If we would have come out five years later, it would have been different. a lot of our contemporaries are doing really well. I look at the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, those people who stuck it out have been rewarded. I know those were good solid people [Dave, Jamie and Christine] in my life. When you are 18 or 19, you don't think about what you are going to do when you are 30.

Question: A lot of kids say "true till death".

Jonathan Anastas: We said that stuff, and it is turning out to be somewhat true. Hardcore is such a weird thing that you go through when you are so young. I probably played my first live show when I was 16 and played my last live show when I was 21. I was a kid when I was done.

Question: How old are you now?

Jonathan Anastas: I just turned 30 this year. I don't think I was emotionally or intellectually equipped when I was younger to deal with it. Sort of in the same way when you get to the end of college and you're figuring out what you should have done in high school. It's kind of like that - to be a 17-year-old kid and have to deal with things like groupies and the right code of behavior, to think of signing record contracts. Back then they were not for millions, they were not even for thousands.

Question: Do you play music now?

Jonathan Anastas: Not organized with other musicians. I have guitars. I actually sold all my guitars and amplifiers over the years. When I started making money again, when I was done with college, I started collecting again. I have a few collectable Gibson's kicking around. I sit on my couch and play the guitar a couple of times a week. I keep saying that I am going to make one more record before my miserable life is over. I am involved in music. As a marketer, I apply what I have learned to my friend's musical careers. I listen to friends' rough cuts and I visit them in the studio and go over their video boards. I shoot commercials, stuff like that.

Jonathan Anastas: It was wild, Stiff Little Fingers played the other night, and we all went to go see them. It was funny, after two years of ragging on people who paid $125 to sit in the front row to see the Eagles, we basically went to see the Eagles of our generation. I guess it is not any different.

Question: How much were the tickets?

Jonathan Anastas: They were comps. We are still young enough that we know people who work at clubs. Because of being a musician I have become a horrible snob. I won't pay to see anything. If I can't go for free, I won't go at all. If a club holds more than 250 people and I don't have a backstage pass, I don't go. I just get this visual experience from small clubs - who wants to see a band from 100 yards away?