It was a genuinely transformative experience. Walkman buried deep in coat pocket, I hit play, and within the length of time it took to walk in that storm and to the video store, heard pretty much the entire album. Once home, I found out school had been cancelled for the next day as well, so decided to go for a shin-deep snow shuffle to the video store and grab a couple flicks. Then I decided to wait, as the bus was too loud to cut through the cheap headphones and cheaper recording quality. ![]() The bell rang, and we each dispersed to our homerooms.Īt 11am, we were let out of school early for the day, due to an unexpected and quite volatile snowstorm that erupted from seemingly out of nowhere, dropping 3 inches of snow in those two and a half hours between 8:30am and leaving. ![]() I put it immediately into my walkman, as at the next available opportunity planned on listening to it. Bill presented me with GG cassette, saying only “ GG ALLIN is GOD!” *(a statement I’d far better understand after listening to the album). Until I saw our small outside-of-the-outsiders collective, this morning by my locker. Monday slowly came, a gray day, and I slothed my fat teenage ass into school, one of my mix tapes in my walkman, cranked to full volume to block out the shitty world of mid-adolescence around me and be left alone and adrift in my own thoughts and ideas. *(Hey, punk rock and it’s out-webbing, related genres, saved my life in those horrible years of home and high school hell – – – and still occasionally do – – – so this was a big fukking deal to me.) That night I barely slept, with an almost Christmas morning-to-a-child-like anticipation coursing through my mind as to receiving my copy of this mysterious album. He said something along the lines of “Fukk THE MENTORS, THIS is what we’ve been waiting to hear.” Roundabouts 9pm that very same night, a Sunday, Bill called me in a manic hysteria, telling me I HAD to hear this, that he was making me a copy right now. ![]() It was decided eventually that Bill would get to hear it that night, and by myself in a couple days. On the way home we mock-bickered about who was going to listen to it first. With no guff from the obviously stoned *(it was also a head shop) store owner/clerk, happy just to make another sale, we gleefully put our monies together and bought the album. There weren’t even song titles listed on the back of the cassette. ![]() Int’l Records, by someone we’d never heard of, GG ALLIN, simply titled “Hated In The Nation.” The cover was a pic of a horribly tattoo’d individual *(who just so happened to bear a striking resemblance our friend’s dad, Chabo – – – one of the main reasons we bought the album), looking like the shadiest fukker on the planet, the album’s title, and a big sticker stating NOT FOR SALE TO PERSONS UNDER 18 on it. Walking into Now & Then that particular day, we saw this cassette, put out by R.O.I.R. We were both 16, forever perusing underground musics, back when it was a constant hunt for new and different sounds that required travel, mix tapes, and word of mouth. It was February 1989 when my friend my best friend Bill and I discovered GG ALLIN, at the long gone *(but once notorious and cherished punk rock record shop) Now & Then Records, hidden away in the rurals of New Hope, PA.
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