In those days, hip threads were hard to come by so I ended up making a lot of my own tee shirts.
The closest I could come to joining the Suicidal army was listening to the album obsessively and making my own Suicidal tee on top of a turquoise tee with wave and palm tree my parents had brought me from Hawaii. The anonymous creators of the shirts seemed like a dangerous secret society of outsiders I wanted to be a part of. My favorite aspect of the sleeve was the many photos of hand-drawn shirts that used variations of the Suicidal type and skull iconography. There was also a disturbing photo of the band hanging upside-down from a jungle gym at dusk. The Suicidal Tendencies type treatment is iconic and has an aggressive barbed look to fit the music. In addition to digging the music on the album, I was mesmerized by the artwork on the sleeve. I think Suicidal helped break down barriers between the various underground music cultures, and hints of their more ambitious stylistic explorations can be heard all the way back to their first album. I even saw some Suicidal songs as having a stylistic kinship to Rap. Still, I would soon discover bands like Motorhead, Black Sabbath, and Metallica who I embraced more fearlessly seeing a crossover connection to Suicidal. It helped also that I found out that Mike Muir, lead singer of Suicidal was the brother of Jim Muir, founder of Dogtown Skateboards… firmly putting Suicidal in the easy to endorse “punk camp” as far as I was concerned. The lyrics like “I’m not anti-society society’s anti-me”, “Mind control the easiest way, sponsored by the C.I.A., it’s a weapon you cannot see, it’s propaganda subliminally”(from the song Subliminal, which inspired the name of our art gallery: Subliminal Projects), and “No mom, I’m not on drugs, I’m OK, I was just thinking, why don’t you get me a Pepsi” were very provocative to me as I was just starting to question authority and develop a sense of personal and world politics. However, after playing the album a few times, mostly to try to scatter some rednecks congregated near a ramp I was riding, I began to love it. The music was pretty hard and abrasive, with some dirgy metal influenced moments that I was scared might not suit my “punk” self-image.
When I first heard Suicidal I was attracted and repelled at the same time. It’s ironic how cultures about rebellion develop rules and orthodoxy, but ultimately the rules are meant to be broken, the kids like what they like, and attitudes shift. Then came along Suicidal Tendencies screwing up everyone’s categories. Punk was generally faster, metal generally slower. Most of the differences were superficial… punks had spiked hair longer in the front, metal kids had spiked hair longer in the back. The punk/skate faction considered itself opposed to the metal/BMX faction. The mid-80’s were a time of warring cultural factions. Ironically, a lot of my punk friends would claim the Suicidal album was “too metal”. My friend John Reigart who I skateboarded with had been given a copy of the first Suicidal record by a BMX’er neighbor who claimed the record was “that punk shit” instead of the heavy metal he’d been promised. In the case of Suicidal Tendencies it was the “one person’s trash is another’s treasure” scenario. Growing up in Charleston S.C., it was not always easy to get punk records, and I was generally broke anyways, but now and then a friend would have a cool older sibling with a good record collection willing to share. I also noticed that Gator wore a Suicidal hat in the “Skate Visions” video. I was already a fan of the last three bands so I was curious to check out Suicidal T. He referenced Suicidal as a “punk” band he liked along with others like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, and Bad Brains. I first heard about Suicidal in 1984 while reading an interview with skateboarder Corey O’brien. It is hard for me to believe that it has been 30 years since the first Suicidal Tendencies album came out.
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