Boston Was The Reason Why Wesley Eisold Felt So Blue

During the late 90s it felt like everyone I knew in Boston played in a hardcore band or some genre tangential to hardcore. We lived in shitty neighborhoods, ate unhealthy soy-based food, yelled at people on Newbury Street, and ended up doing a lot of really dumb shit.

The dumbest of dumb being: Paying someone to jump off a bridge into septic sludge, handing out fake coupons for free Ben & Jerry's ice cream to piss off the hippies behind the counter, going to Hempfest, selling Yankees Suck and bootleg Strokes t-shirts to pay rent, and hating one another for no reason.

For a lot of people those were the best times of their lives, the ones they toast to at wedding receptions, moments they gaze at on YouTube while their 2.5 children are asleep. There were plenty of good things that happened in Boston in the late 90s but there was always a cloud hanging over the city. Sometimes it was a frat boy hotdog burping in your face after too many dollar drafts or Will Hunting asking what you were "lookin' at." The good times were only so good.

I wondered as a teen why all the popular positive straight edge bands were from southern California or suburban Connecticut, while Boston had only grumpy old Slapshot. It didn’t hit me until I moved there for college along with about four million other 18 year-olds. Forget about a harmonious hardcore scene, this was a city that didn’t even welcome pop-punk as evidenced by a 100,000-person riot at a free Green Day show in 1994.

American Nightmare came along as the 90s said goodbye. In what seemed like a split second they were everyone's favorite band and t-shirt. Instead of catering to the narrow niches that hardcore had fragmented into, they just did whatever the fuck they wanted to.

They didn't look like a typical hardcore band, they shunned the popular collegiate aesthetic, and they played with a wide variety of bands partly out of necessity. Most notably, American Nightmare's lyrics were a pastiche of literary quotes and word plays intertwined with singer Wesley Eisold's reflections and observations. This starkly contrasted the typical "You did this but I did THIS" self-help vibe a lot of bands employed that resonated with more fans than offended purists.

By the release of their first LP, Background Music, American Nightmare's crowd seemed to mirror the band's diversity. Coke-sniffing girls with dyed black hair and freshly healed tattoos bumped against shirtless macho moshers and boys with black fingernails and Ian Curtis quotes inked on their wrists.

Despite the intensity and bleakness of the actual music that led their detractors to dub them "depressed guy hardcore," American Nightmare weren't sulking their way through tours and one off shows.

The jokes and antics were the same but instead of sober nights spent being sleep starved straight edge drunk in pizza shops and cafes, the fun shifted to the few Boston clubs that would spin new wave and post punk.

American Nightmare managed to influence the youth culture of Boston in the early 2000s as much as the then shrinking hardcore scene. The regimented ritual of hardcore grew into a frantic free-for-all across the northeast of late nights, excess, and eventually an epitaph for an era.

Like any hardcore band, you can't view one component singularly, as it’s all the parts working simultaneously that make a mark. American Nightmare returned late last year surprisingly after a seemingly finite break up in 2004.

Wesley once wrote, "Boston is the reason that I'm feeling so blue," and it's also the reason why American Nightmare successfully summarized what those before them felt but never expressed.

American Nightmare will play its final New York City performance this Sunday July 22nd, at Webster Hall.