It was raining on that night too, the night it happened. I'm not going to say anything about the exact location. A small city, an ugly city, with a lot of boarded-up storefronts and empty old buildings of one kind or another and a lot of homeless young people. There was a thriving underground punk scene in that city, as there was in a lot of American cities back then and as there still is in a few. The punk scene can be very different from one place to another – artsy and silly in one place, radical leftist in another, white power skinheads here and macho meatheads over there. The scene I was part of was kind of a mix, but the emphasis was definitely on hardcore punk, the fastest and most brutal style of punk rock. Hardcore songs can be as short as thirty or forty seconds of sound and fury
