Beer and Loathing in New Jersey: Earth Crisis in Concert

By Christopher Pearson | Wednesday, January 20, 1999

For some musicians, songwriting is an art of subtlety:

Die motherf*ckers/we never want you back.
You're unworthy of the honor/that the title straightedge holds.
Your ilk's a dime a dozen/there's no room for weaklings here.
Through dedication to the creed/I live free and clear...

Karl Buechner is not one of these musicians. Lead singer of veteran vegan straightedge band Earth Crisis and lyricist of the above song chorus, Buechner explains, 'We're not writing pop songs. We have no interest in that. We are into aggressive powerful music...with a message.' He and his band are slated to perform that music tonight at the Stone Pony, a small New Jersey club that once nurtured the gooey power ballads of a teenager from nearby Sayreville named Jon Bon Jovi.

The 'message' of Buechner's music is straightedge, a movement for which he is the most well-known icon and a creed among hard-core punks that proscribes all drugs and alcohol, condemns promiscuous sexual behavior, and, among the more rigorously straightedged, requires veganism, a diet free of all animal products. No meat. No eggs. No dairy. In Marshall McLuhan's dictum, 'the medium is the message.' Straightedge rejects that notion whole cloth, separating the aggression and abandon of the music from its demands of self-control and social awareness.

Though it now has a following throughout America and Europe, Straightedge (sXe) originally emerged in the early 80's as an adjunct to the East Coast punk scene. Heroin and cocaine were flourishing and in their wake came kids receptive to an anti-drug message. As the epidemic moved inland, Straightedge followed and it quickly established a presence in most major cities of the East. At this point, straightedge was little more than a loosely organized group of urban punks dissatisfied with the drug scene. It took the formation of the band Minor Threat by a lanky teenager from Washington DC named Ian Mackaye to give the nascent movement definition. Minor Threat's frenzied delivery of three chord, two minute songs established the musical parameters.

The lyrics to a track on the bands' second EP gave the movement a name: 'I'm a person just like you/ But I've got better things to do/Than sit around and fuck my head/hang around with the living dead/Snort white shit up my nose/pass out at the shows/ I've got the straightedge.' Energized by Minor Threat and Discord, the record label Mackaye founded, straightedge exploded. By the mid 80's straightedge bands like Connecticut's Wide Awake, Washington, D.C.'s Youth Brigade, and New York's Youth of Today were playing to clubs packed with kids.

The inheritors of this legacy, Earth Crisis has drawn an eclectic crowd tonight, a lot of whom should be expected, namely pencil-thin teenagers shaved to the scalp with shirts that read 'Poison Free.' Yet there remains another contingent of fans, middle aged, tattooed generously, and mostly bald, who seem somehow out of place. Their limbs and jowls are lean but their bellies aren't. They each look like they just swallowed a basketball whole. One of them wears both a shirt that says, 'Mean People Rule' and a perplexed look that seems to say, 'What the hell is wrong with these kids?'

Today, straightedge owes its current popularity to bands like Earth Crisis, which take the message of straightedge punk and fuse it to the caustic riffs of heavy metal. Dubbed 'metalcore,' this union is a development that for many years seemed inevitable. Most straightedge kids never just listened to punk but also loved the music, if not the message, of metal bands like Slayer and Venom, whose drug-addled paeans to Satan, war, booze, and death exist at the polar opposite of the teetotaling spectrum as the straightedge ethic. Buechner himself acknowledges the influence of traditional heavy metal on his music. 'I love Slayer,' he enthuses.

Yet even fans of heavy metal, not just punks, are now supporters of the new metalcore sound. It is, in fact, this mixing of genres that sometimes brings such divergent fans, including aging metalheads weaned on Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, to Earth Crisis's shows. These heavy metal fans care little, it seems, whether a song's lyrics praise some obscure pagan war god or read like a public service announcement from Nancy Reagan. They simply feed off the visceral aggression of the music, be it straightedge or metal, ignoring the message of the lyrics. Buechner does not object to this, however. In fact, he considers his band's performance at the Ozz-fest, which features a huge roster of metal bands and hence metal fans, as one of their best ever. 'It was cool being able to be on a big stage were we could run around and be ourselves. We were very well received,' he gushes.

The show was slated to start at 8:00 but at 8:45, Abhinanda, a straightedge band from Sweden and Earth Crisis's opening act, had yet to take the stage. Pantera's 'I'm Broken' poured out of the sound system as more and more people continued to file into the club. Finally, one girl couldn't stand the stifling heat any longer and fainted. Yet most of those around her stood by obliviously. I thought perhaps no one had noticed until I witnessed a guy next to the girl, poking her feebly with his middle finger. Eventually, a security guard was called over and carried the girl away. I was surprised. For a movement obsessed with moral conscience, sXe's adherents in the crowd tonight weren't exactly paragons of mercy. At last, Abhinanda emerged. The band has always had a large fan base in its native land but its slot on this tour and its contribution to a widely distributed compilation LP paradoxically titled Straightedge as F*ck has begun to bring them to greater attention in America. Led by a long, lean vocalist whose spasms on stage resemble a water hose that has escaped the gardener, Abhinanda leaves an impression but not a particularly positive one. Their music is loud but little else. Way too much Sturm, not nearly enough Drang. Abhinanda closes by announcing, 'For those who aren't straightedge here tonight: F*ck You!!!'

Despite the recent forays into metal, straightedge remains a highly cloistered musical scene. Though Earth Crisis's latest CD, Gomorrah's Season Ends, entered the Billboard charts at No. 187, sXe is still largely ignored by radio and the mainstream music press. Perhaps as a result, the movement has evolved, at least in some of its members, a disturbing militancy about the correctness of its views. In Utah, recently, three straightedge teens chased a rival boy down and carved an X, the universal straightedge symbol, into his back. Even Buechner, who recognizes that this type of behavior is probably not the path to more widespread acceptance of sXe, refuses to condemn the assailants in Utah. 'From what I understand, the kid who got hurt was provoking the other ones, blowing smoke in their face, sh*t like that.'

Yet even short of violence against outsiders, straightedge has also recently become enmeshed in various heated disputes over dogma, bickering that appears ridiculous to those not in the scene but which is taken with grave sincerity by those who define their identity by it. Like ardent Christians who wonder if Jews can go to heaven, straightedgers now fight over whether carnivores and casual drinkers can be good people. For Buechner, the answer is yes. Sort of. 'I don't hate people who drink alcohol or do drugs. I just hate their behavior.' Straightedge is not an end in itself, he continues. Rather, 'the point of straightedge is to have control over our lives.' You should aim for clarity of mind through abstinence but it certainly is possible to do bad things with that clarity. 'Hitler was a vegetarian,' he points out.

Other currently raging straightedge controversies include debates over which of sXe's proscribed behaviors is the most serious offense, in other words, 'Which is worse: sex, drugs or Jell-O?' a reference to veganism's stance against gelatin because it is made of animal protein. To such a question, I could elicit no response from Buechner.

Earth Crisis's detractors blame the band for both these types of petty disputes as well as the periodic outbursts of straightedge rage, such as the incident in Utah. Earth Crisis, these critics allege, are merely a crop of of piously ill-tempered sprout eaters, Puritan punks who view dissent with all the abiding tolerance of colonial Massachusetts. Yet Buechner is not bothered by even the harshest criticisms of his band. 'In a way, a lot of our lyrics hold up a mirror to people's weaknesses,' he responds. 'It's not to belittle in anyway, it's to hopefully motivate and educate people to become involved and make a dramatic change for the better.' Despite his pleasant off-stage demeanor and sometimes Tony Robbins-like rhetoric, Buechner does often play into his critics' charges. He told the fanzine Metal Maniacs a few years ago that he would save a dog from drowning before he would rescue a man. In Buechner's view, animals are innocent; people aren't. He also penned a song three years ago called 'Deliverance' which called for vivisectionists to be 'dragged into the street and bludgeoned' to death.

Abhinanda's set is now over, it's Earth Crisis's turn. Karl Buechner in front, a knotted blue hanky on his head, the band emerges. In adoration, the audience roars collectively as guitarist Scott Crouse plucks out the opening to 'All Out War,' a crowd favorite. The sea of fans calm down for a moment only to erupt again when Karl starts singing. 'The weakness you can't control brings animal death and pain/ the struggle I fought to overcome is where you...' The rest of the band completes the thought: 'Choose to remain!' Buechner resumes: 'Keep on with your killing, your jokes, your threats, just brace yourself for what's in store...' Now it's the crowd's turn. 'Prepare For....' Karl yells. 'All out War!!!!' the audience answers in unison.

Despite the mainstream media attention sometimes foisted upon it, including segments on MTV and CNN, Straightedge, in terms of numbers, is extremely small. It claims less than fifty thousand adherents in a nation where liquor stores alone sell 63 million dollars worth of alcohol a day. But Buechner is nonetheless confident about straightedge's direction. 'I think finally the revolutionary potential is being noticed by the people involved in it,' he says. 'I think for all the kids involved in it straightedge is becoming more and more effective.' For Buechner, that revolution is effected by his personal decisions, necessitating both his asceticism and of those around him. He will opine after the show, 'I want to make the world a more just and more peaceful place and that is what I'm trying to accomplish on a personal level.' Right now, however, the world, at least my world and that of those around me, is not very peaceful but very, very loud.

Beer and Loathing in New Jersey: Earth Crisis in Concert

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