destroying the reputation of young lives

I never listened to Lash Out but most of my friends in high school were really amped about them. I spaced out all afternoon after getting an email from Rob about blogged and quartered and downloaded like 200 songs. Then I started clicking on all of the links from that blog and found this other one called Bring Honour or Walk Away that rules! The author name drops Dwid (from Integrity) super casually, like "Dwid sent me these photos..." I saw Integrity in Cleveland when I was 18, Dwid wore a human ear around his neck and encouraged the audience to fight each other. It kind of breaks my mind imagining him with an email address, scanning photos of old shows for a blog. Anyway, their most recent post is a scan of this 1994 fax from the father of Håvard Godøy, bass player for Lash Out. Apparently he intercepted a fax from Lash Out's label, Stormstrike, which was full of Satanic rhetoric, aka the kind of stuff all of my friends in high school (the ones that were into Lash Out) wrote all over their schoolbooks: "AVANTI SATAN"; "BLACK CIRCLE"; "HAIL!" etc. The dad, ashamed and indignant, takes it upon himself to reply to Stormstrike. He threatens to warn the other band members' parents, promises to investigate this Satanic activity, and cancels the upcoming Lash Out tour. It rules. I've been really into stories of parents derailing the underground like this, the rawness of the generation gap. Bridget Cross told a story about having to sneak out of her house when she was in Velocity Girl in order to play shows. The Danaides almost didn't get to open for Huggy Bear because the day of the show, Sonia's parents decided they didn't feel comfortable with it. The band all stood in her driveway crying until they relented. I have a demo tape of my high school industrial band where my mom comes downstairs and yells at us. At the point in the song that she interrupts, I was standing on an overturned shopping cart and screaming about my hurt feelings while my bandmate Sachin hammered a rusted gas tank with a table leg. She kind of took the wind out of our sails, but I'm glad we thought it was funny enough to include in the demo.