Première partie d'un article sur !e straight edge et les artistes qui furent sxe mais ont brisé leur serment au bout d'un moment. La semaine prochaine, la suite avec des personnes qui sont encore sxe aujourd'hui.
“At the time, I was already involved in a lot of what you might call DIY activities, and I felt like straight-edge was an extension of that,” he continues. “I just felt like there was a lot of apathy amongst my peers, and straight-edge was a reactionary move against that. Whether it was true or just a perceived thing on my end, I felt like drugs and drinking were connected to that apathy.”
Turner broke his edge six years later, at the age of 21. By that time, he had moved to Boston, started Isis and was finishing up art school. “I was true ’til 21, dude,” he laughs. “But I never drank—I just started smoking weed—so it didn’t really have anything to do with that age. It was more like, ‘OK, I’ve gotten what I need to out of this and I’m no longer in fear of falling into this drugged-out, pathetic state, so I’m gonna start smoking weed again.’”
Still, Turner feels that straight-edge was a positive influence on his life. “Aside from all the teenage dogma and wanting to belong and so forth, I do believe that straight-edge put me on a path that was ultimately beneficial to me,” he says. “It was part of what got me involved in the underground DIY culture, and instead of spending my time figuring out how to score drugs, I really did get more involved in the local scene and started up a distro—which eventually turned into the label—and I made contact with a lot of other like-minded individuals both within my area and outside of it. So I really do think it was a motivational force in my life. And you know, regardless of whether you endorse it or not, drinking and smoking are not good for your health. So the fact that I escaped that for a number of years was probably beneficial in that sense, too.”
[...]Pelican guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec grew up in the Parisian suburbs, where there exists a considerably more relaxed attitude toward teenage (and even pre-teen) drinking than anywhere in the States. “I was always encouraged to drink beer or champagne at family functions—it was never banished or forbidden,” he explains. “Even in middle school, I’d get six-packs with my friends. Then I moved to South Korea when I was 11.
“Being in a new culture and being around people I couldn’t relate to, having to learn English and everything—all that was very conducive to drinking and doing a lot of drugs. My parents never really cared until everything else started to fall apart and I started doing really shitty in school. That was when I was around 15 or 16. And Korea was a really easy environment to get anything in. There were no restrictions, no drinking age, nothing—so I spent my life in bars with friends, even as early as 14 or 15. I was hanging out with GIs, prostitutes—just crazy, crazy shit. But to me it was normal because I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”
Then the shit hit the fan. “My sister, who is only a few years younger than me, started going to the same parties and that became a real problem for me—seeing her do the same things that I was doing didn’t make me feel comfortable at all,” he says. “One night, I wasn’t there, she passed out, and some people who I thought were friends of mine took advantage of her.
“She came home and wouldn’t name names, but I was enraged. I knew about straight-edge culture from some of the bands I had been listening to, so I just decided to embrace the complete opposite of what I’d been living—if only to show her that I could sever myself from that and to make a statement against what had happened. That was halfway through my senior year of high school, right before I came to the States for college.”
[...]oth Scofield and Schleibaum would eventually break edge. Scofield managed to hold out for two years after his Cave In bandmates Steve Brodsky and Adam McGrath started drinking. “That was hard, because I was tied to the hip with those guys at that time in my life. We’d play a show and they’d be like, ‘OK, we’re going to the bar.’ I wanted to hang out with them, but I wouldn’t even go into bars at that point. So I’d just sit in the van while those guys had beers and shot the shit and had fun. I think about some of those tours we did, and I was just sitting in the van. It’s like, ‘C’mon, man—at least go hang out with your friends.’ Which I would do from time to time, but let’s face it, it’s not that cool to order Cokes at the bar.”
Scofield eventually drank his first beer at the age of 23. “It was a Coors Light tallboy from the fridge,” he recalls. “I was all by myself. I just got so tired of being… almost afraid, you know? I think one of the reasons I had never drank or smoked pot was because I was scared. I was afraid of what would happen. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t that big of a deal to go to the bar with your friends, have a few drinks and a few laughs. It didn’t mean you were gonna turn into a crazy alcoholic.
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