Recently, my mom said, “You know, we knew when we sent you off to college that you were going to come back a liberal.”
Then we both laughed.
We didn’t really talk much about political parties in the squarely middle-class home I grew up in.
I’d say it was a Republican household: as a young kid, it seemed to me that my folks were fans of Ronald Reagan, and I later remember my dad saying, “I like Dukakis, but I’m voting for Bush. He’s committing more to the war budget.”
My dad worked for a company with Department of Defense contracts.
At 14 years old, this was kind of an epiphany to me: my dad’s livelihood could be influenced by our president. And I realized that a person might vote for their not-favorite candidate for the simple reason that that candidate’s victory meant that voter could better care for his family.
I turned 18 in early 1992, and in the first presidential election I was able to participate in, I cast my vote for Ross Perot. I’m not sure I thought much about how voting for the man from Texarkana was going to influence my livelihood, but my parents were taking care of all that for me anyway, so I chose to make a statement.
The thing is, my folks have always been pretty much happy just to live in the U.S.A. and to be Americans.
My parents are the kind of people we’d all like to have as neighbors, I think.
Over the years, whether their candidate won or lost, they were rooting for the next president to be successful. One time, my mom was talking to a member of our extended family, and an evening news blurb came across the TV, teasing a presidential press conference. The person my mom was talking to interrupted the conversation and spit, “Oh, I just hate him. I wish he would just die already.” My mom took on the baffled, wincing expression of someone who had just stepped in a hot pile of dog shit. She later told me, “I don’t get it. He’s our president. When he does well, and the country does well, that’s, like, good for us all. Why would we wish him to fail?”
Let me put it another way.
My parents have been diehard IU basketball fans for five decades. In all seriousness, they have a sign in their house that says, ‘We Interrupt This Marriage for IU Basketball Season.’
But when the Hoosiers get bounced from the NCAA tournament, do you know the first team my parents throw their support behind?
That’d be IU’s arch-rivals, the Purdue Boilermakers.
The way they see it, we’re all from the state of Indiana, and we all love basketball. They say, “These are our people. We’re all in this together.”
I’m not necessarily one to count blessings, but the fact that my folks never have their TV tuned to any of the cable news echo chambers is a fact I am thankful for every time I visit. (They find the Big Ten Network to be a much healthier option.)
Still, a few months ago, in the middle of a game of dominoes, my mom said, “You know, we knew when we sent you off to college that you were going to come back a liberal.”
Then we both laughed.
Of course, she’s not entirely wrong.
But: she is kinda wrong.
Fact is, yes: the two most important influences on the development and shaping of my political point of view are 1) my college roommate, Joe Leffel, and 2) Bruce Springsteen’s album The Ghost of Tom Joad, released in late 1995.
I met Joe Leffel when I was a college freshman; Joe was a junior, still choosing to live on the academic floor in McNutt-Bordner.
Socially, we were both timid, inexperienced. But we became fast friends, linked our arms and accepted our floormates’ invitation—presented with a charismatic cheer and a sweeping gesture by Chad Sopata, our Willy Wonka—into a vividly colorful world of delight and danger, of joy and jeopardy, of lager and luck.
After two years as neighbors in the dorm, Joe and I (alongside three more friends) shared a five-bedroom apartment on the near-northeast side of campus.
Joe was and is one of the smartest, most compassionate people I’ve ever met. He spoke with intelligence, perspective and humor on most any topic, and when it came to people—no matter their background—he exuded all the best that the most humane of us have to offer: benevolence and empathy, grace and kindness. He was, after my parents and grandparents, the first truly selfless person I’d ever met.
I still remember a moment in the mid-90s. There were some Haitian exiles, on a boat, somewhere south of Florida. These exiles couldn’t go home, but they couldn’t come here—they floated in purgatory. Whether or not to let these human beings into the United States became a national story, and a national debate.
We had a neighbor, a few macro-beers deep, hollering that the Haitians should be left to drift off and perish at sea. This individual soundtracked his diatribe with the music of The Offspring—“You gotta keep ‘em separated!”—played loudly. (I still can’t hear that band without thinking of those exiles.)
Joe calmly and surgically eviscerated that point of view. That Joe made his point while drinking an Absolut mixed with Hi-C Ecto Cooler and Tang and soundtracked by R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” only made me like him more.
That neighbor remains my friend; he’s a genuinely good human, a good dad, a good husband. But he was wrong. And on that night, in that debate, I wanted to be like Joe.
It’s not that I wasn’t like Joe—I just wasn’t like anything. I was ignorant, naive.
I had only the seedlings of a point of view. But Joe was a leader. He was a leader not by telling me, or telling anyone, what to think or what do do. Joe led simply be being, and by living what he believed.
Meanwhile, in those same years, I’d become obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen. I loved it all: Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, the collection of live bootleg recordings I’d amassed, even Human Touch and especially Lucky Town.
I couldn’t wait for Bruce to release a new album.
When it finally arrived, The Ghost of Tom Joad was shocking in its sparseness, in its bleak density.
Bruce had written the album under the inspiration of Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson’s study of the underside of American prosperity.
The album told the stories of Americans pushed to the edge by poverty, by displacement, by their ‘otherness.’ In “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The Line” and “Galveston Bay,” Springsteen sang of (sometimes illegal) immigrants, their despair and their desperation.
Joad’s title track was inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, juxtaposing that novel’s descriptions of the hardships of The Great Depression with the economic suffering so many Americans were facing nearly six decades later.
Bruce, whose music had often been so uplifting to me—even in its (and my) angriest moments—now pushed me beyond introspection. Bruce’s songs had always helped me understand how I felt. Now, they helped me understand how others felt, too. It became music that colored not just what I wanted for myself and those closest to me, but what I wanted for everyone.
So yes, my mom was kinda right.
But the thing is, before I ever met Joe Leffel, and before I ever deeply listened to Bruce Springsteen, and dammit Mom, before I ever set foot in Bloomington, Indiana—before all that—there were two other voices that forever changed the way I saw our culture and our country.
This is Straight Outta Bohemia.
I got into N.W.A by way of my older brother.
He drove me to school, so I listened to what he listened to. Which meant, for a long time, an awful lot of 80s hair metal.
“Hair metal” is not “metal metal.”
In most ways, hair metal is pop music—big choruses, power ballads—played on guitars with sharp angles by musicians who very often wear bright, tight spandex.
I’ve never owned a hair metal album, but thanks to that commute, I know most of the canon by heart: play any album from the late-80s by Poison, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Dokken, Cinderella or Whitesnake, and I can probably sing along—to the hits and deep cuts alike.
I love my brother and wouldn’t change a thing, but I do sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if he’d been a little less into Open Up and Say…Ahh! and a little more into Surfer Rosa.
My brother has always been interested in cars, and customizing them. (Still is, and made a career of it.) That passion for customization included investing in high-quality stereos, equalizers, amplifiers, speakers and, especially, subwoofers.
We’d been enjoying rap music for a few years. At ages 15 (him) and 12 (me), we arrived at a summertime family gathering with my brother’s new boombox playing his Run-D.M.C. Raising Hell tape. Once that cassette played through, we put in another tape and treated the family to a full-volume run through of The Beastie Boys’ sneering new single, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).”
The adults grimaced and shook their heads.
Just three years later, my brother was pushing the limits of his subwoofer with an emerging subgenre of hip-hop known as gangsta rap.
Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It became my brother’s favorite album, but I didn’t pay close attention until that album led him to Eazy’s group—N.W.A—and their just-released debut, Straight Outta Compton.
Compton became the new soundtrack to our daily drives to and from Northrop High School.
Not long after, I got my own driver’s license, and my first car—a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass. My first order of business was to use the money I made mowing lawns to upgrade the stereo, and then to have my brother dub me a copy of Straight Outta Compton.
The members of N.W.A described the group’s music not as gangsta rap, but rather “reality rap”—and I became captivated by the album’s depictions of the challenges faced by urban youth, and the rage it stirred within them.
Straight Outta Compton’s vivid and shameful tales of racism and bias made me angry. The storytelling was engrossing; it felt like a documentary look into a world that I didn’t know—or didn’t understand—existed.
As a suburban, middle-class, white kid whose family went to The Sizzler once a month, I knew I was eavesdropping. But I was incensed by what I heard. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be systemically marginalized, but how could I understand? Nonetheless, the unfairness expressed in the songs agitated and dismayed me.
(I’ll interrupt this story for a moment: I haven’t listened to N.W.A or its members’ music in 30+ years. My interest in these artists waned after just a year or two, as I became uncomfortable, unsettled and upset by the so many of their songs’ gross misogyny and transgressions against women. (And the same is true of the hair metal bands mentioned earlier.))
Straight Outta Compton’s lyrics, as you likely know, are often profane.
After stumbling upon our cassette copy of the album, my parents sat my brother and I down and told us they wanted to listen to the album together.
The album opens with a relentless 1-2-3 burst—the title track, followed by “F### tha Police,” and then “Gangsta Gangsta.”
During the first song, my brother and I performed a synchronized verbal pirouette, speaking loudly over the the precise moments of swearing, diverting our parents’ attention away from descriptions of violence, pointing to something out the window when a demeaning lyric was about to be uttered.
Midway through the second song, however, our ability to keep up the distractions waned, and we all sat in silence as one of the most infamous songs in music history soldiered on.
Before the song had finished playing, my dad stood up and walked out of the room, not saying a word.
(A couple years ago, my own teens (15 and 16 at the time) were obsessed with a band that has a song called “Bud Like You.” At first pass, the song seems to be an homage to the band members’ friend, their buddy. During trying times, “…it’s good to know I’ve got a bud like you.” On closer listen, though, it’s clear the friend is a metaphor, and the that the buddy is a bud—a bud of marijuana. I prepared for my own sit-down group listen, followed by a stern, healthy conversation. And then it occurred to me: that at their age, I was listening to Straight Outta Compton. “Bud Like You” suddenly sounded about as dangerous as “You Are My Sunshine.”)
In the summer of 1990, at the age of 16, I went to the B&B Loan pawn shop on Calhoun Street, and bought my first CD player, a used Sony Discman. I then drove to Coconut Records and bought my first two compact discs.
First, I bought the debut solo album by Ice Cube, my favorite member of N.W.A.
His album was called AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
And I bought Jazz, an album originally released 12 years earlier, in 1978.
The record was the seventh studio album from a rock band that, over the previous few years, had become my favorite rock band.
Their name was Queen.
In middle school and into high school, my main interests were sports, comic books and music. (The first-ever person I carved into my Mount Rushmore of idols was Walter Payton.)
In 1985, my favorite team, the Chicago Bears, won the Super Bowl. During one of the many retrospective looks at their near-perfect season, the short video was edited to sync with the song “We Are the Champions,” by Queen.
I’d never heard the song before. And I absolutely loved it.
“We Are the Champions” sounds like an obsession with sports superheroes colliding with an obsession with comic book superheroes, becoming the anthem of an obsession with musical superheroes.
A couple years later, I saved up my money and bought a Sony Walkman, before finally getting my hands on a K-Tel compilation of Queen songs entitled Collection–15 of the Best.
I played that Collection cassette all summer, mostly while mowing lawns, or while riding my bike to and from the lawn-mowing jobs, or while I brooded about the house before or after riding my bike to the lawn-mowing jobs.
I distinctly remember the first time I heard “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
The song fought its way through my headphones, clawing its way above the incessant sound of the push mower.
For the longest time—over the harsh sound of that two-cycle engine—I thought “Bohemian Rhapsody” was three or four distinct, separate songs. Then one night, as I studied the cassette’s “j-card,” looking for the piano ballad’s title (“Nothing Really Matters”?), I realized it was one single long song—longer than any I’d ever heard before—with defined, powerful movements.
The way the song opened and closed was with the most beautiful, and saddest, music my moody, early-adolescent ears had ever heard: “Any way the wind blows, doesn’t really matter to me,” “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all,” “Nothing really matters, anyone can see; nothing really matters to me.”
At this point, in the late-80s, Queen had fallen out of favor in the States. (In fact, they were without a record label in the U.S., and their albums were out of print—that copy of Jazz I eventually bought at Coconut Records was an import CD.)
But I tracked down their tapes and CDs, bought VHS tapes of concerts and documentaries, even joined their UK fan club. I studied the band and their craft. I studied in awe the way they built their own mythology.
At school, my favorite subject was art, and as a senior, I was able to take an independent study class.
For that semester, I worked on a series of painted portraits of the band, charting their artistic evolution from the early 70s through the late 80s.
But when other students and I would talk about music, and I mentioned that my favorite band was Queen, they didn’t respond by asking me which album was my favorite, or by talking about their own favorite Queen songs.
No, when I talked to other students about Queen, the first response was almost always, “Ha! You now he’s a [slur], right?”
“He” was Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer.
While he hadn’t publicly confirmed it, Mercury was widely thought to be gay.
As the 80s turned into the 90s, homophobia was rampant. In movies and on TV shows—especially comedies—homosexuality was played as a joke.
A person would get made fun of (or beat up, or a lot worse) for being gay, or for liking gay people, or for liking a book or movie or album made by a gay person.
And by and large, this ostracization was accepted.
“Gay” was used as an insult.
(Full disclosure: earlier in my life, I too had employed the word as a “cut down.” I came to deeply regret that.)
“Gay things” were widely considered “not cool.”
Indeed, when I walked down the E Hall to the art studio, with my portfolio case at my side and bag of paint brushes over my shoulder, some students would snicker under their breath, calling me an “Art F##.”
In that climate, Queen was very uncool.
But I loved them.
I dreamt of one day seeing them in concert.
I loved their old albums, and I loved their new albums.
At 17 years old, I didn’t quite understand what Freddie Mercury’s sexual preference had to do with whether or not his and his band’s songs kicked ass.
Then, in November of 1991, midway through my senior year, Mercury announced that he had tested HIV positive and had AIDS.
A couple days later, at age 45, he died.
There was a tenor of “that’s what ya get for being a [slur]” about the disease. It’s a sick thought, really. And it deeply unnerved me.
My final semester of my senior year, I took the first and only Speech class I’ve ever taken in my life. I needed it to fulfill one final prerequisite.
The class’s roster was one-part speech enthusiasts, one-part slackers.
I was shy, reserved, uncomfortable. This was not a class I was suited for, and I was nervous every single time I had to speak in front of the class—even if just for a minute or two.
At a certain point, the teacher, Mr. Record, gave us an assignment along the lines of, “Write and deliver a long-form speech that offers your personal point of view on a divisive topic.”
This was early 1992.
I thought it over, and decided I would give a speech about Freddie Mercury, his art and his music, and how I thought it was really stupid that people would insult him and judge his music poorly simply because he was gay.
I no longer have a copy of that speech.
I really wish that I did.
But while I don’t remember what I said, I do remember hunching over the lectern, taking a deep breath, and fading in and out of my body as I delivered the words. These days we’d call it a flow state.
And I remember, as I introduced the topic, the laughs and giggles in the room. The eyerolls and smirks. But I also remember, over the course of the next ten minutes, a change in the air. A snicker from one student being met by the somber reflection of another. Then quiet, all around. The look of empathy. The look of introspection. Each of us wandering to thoughts about the way we superficially judge each other, and what that means and why—because each of us, in our own way, had also been superficially judged.
Mr. Record said I should have stood up straighter, but that “he got it.” He said I was brave. It’s the first time I ever remember someone saying that to me.
A couple months after that speech, the movie Wayne’s World was released in theaters. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, the characters sing along and bang their heads to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The scene catapulted the band back to relevance—17 years after its release, the song reached #2 on the Billboard singles chart. All of Queen’s albums were reissued by a new American record label.
The film’s writer and star, Mike Myers, said that he and producer Lorne Michaels had to fight for the song to be included in the film. The studio had deemed the song uncommercial and the band irrelevant; they were pushing for a track by Guns ’n’ Roses. (In a denouement Freddie surely would have loved, G’n’R’s Axl Rose performed “Bohemian Rhapsody” with the surviving members of Queen at the memorial concert celebrating Mercury’s life and legacy.)
Later that spring, I got to school an hour early, and headed down the E Hall to put some time in on the Freddie Mercury painting I’d been working on for weeks.
After each day’s class, I would climb on the counters in the art room and place the in-progress painting on top of the studio cabinets to dry.
When I got to the studio that morning, I looked up, and the painting was missing.
I ran through the halls, looking for my teacher—my favorite teacher, Mr. Jacquay—to find out if he’d moved it for some reason. He hadn’t. We searched the studio, the hall, the school, and asked every one of my art class classmates, but it was gone.
The painting had been stolen.
I was inconsolable.
I considered the painting—a collage of many Mercurys from throughout his career—to be my great unfinished masterpiece, and nearly put away my brushes for good.
But it was a lesson—another lesson from Freddie—that you move forward.
That no matter what you lose, and no matter what you’ve lost, fairly or not, you move forward because there will be more.
You have to believe there will be more.
Ice Cube was marginalized because of the color of his skin. Freddie Mercury was marginalized because of the people he fell in love with.
In each of their own ways, N.W.A and Queen prepared me for Joe Leffel and The Ghost of Tom Joad, which then set me on a lifetime of listening and reading, forever learning and forever benefitting from the points of view of others.
Over the ensuing years and decades, I learned, and learned, and learned, from very smart and very inspirational and very benevolent people.
And I’m still learning.
Every single day, I’m still learning.
Recently, my mom said, “You know, we knew when we sent you off to college that you were going to come back a liberal.”
Then we both laughed.
Fact is, Mom, I’m really just trying to be like you and Dad.
So today, it’s Let’s Go Hoosiers! And if not, I’m sure hoping the best for the Boilermakers.
Love this, Matt. So many powerful memories and reflections here. I know we've talked about the importance to our lives of leaving home but also the ironies of ending back up there. On one level, I appreciate this piece as an ode to being a life-long learner, to being open to various influences at various times in our lives, some of which stick and some of which drift, but the impact lasting. Of discovering that much of what we know and believe is circumstantial. But I also connected on several personal points: listening to my older brother's music selections on the way to the school, walking through the halls at Northrop and regrets and disappointments from that time period, and being able to identify specific works or art as marking the seasons of our lives. Well done, and thank you for sharing.
Ah, another deep dive into Matt, The Formative Years! I love the voice of your pieces. As with many of your pieces, it is the power of music that resonates. It is a magical connection to Mark, The Formative Years.
There is a generational gap between us. My list of bands and tunes are quite different but, despite the difference in notes and lyrics the ability of music to mold, form, and, in large part, create, the person we become, is the heart of my connection to you and your writing. Love it!