He’s never had the Secret Service in his house before.
Maybe they don’t care for the bandana, he thinks.
30 pages of bureaucracy later, the agents get ready to leave.
They tell him to notify them if he ever plans to travel to Washington DC.
His house empty, he goes to the fridge.
Pulls out a Pepsi. Sips.
And hums under his breath:
“I shot Reagan!
And I'd shoot him again and again and again”
Lyrics that had caught the attention of the US government.
Written by a hardcore straight-edge:
Mike Muir.
“We were our own security”
Venice Beach, California was not always the bougie place it is now.
In the 70s and 80s, it was the “ghetto by the sea”, run by gangs like Venice 13 (V13) and the Venice Shoreline Crips.
It was here Muir founded Suicidal Tendencies (ST).
(ST for short so I don’t get smacked down by the email gods.)
“Gangster” (or “gangsta”) music was not yet popularized.
At the time, most rock and metal bands sported leather or spandex. They had big hair. Makeup.
Not ST…
They wore blue bandanas to rep the “one tres” (the south part of California), flipped-up baseball hats, oversized t-shirts, flannel shirts…
They appeared more likely to shank you in a back alley than plug in a guitar.
The details about the band’s gang credentials are murky.
In recent years, Louiche Mayorga, one of ST’s founding members, has spoken quite candidly about the violence that followed the band in the early days:
“We were young. We wanted it. We liked fighting. We were 21, 22, 23. We were our own security.
We had a couple of guys that were just our friends from [the] neighborhood. Bad ass motherfuckers. You don’t fuck with these dudes. And we took them on the road.
Tiny was like a roadie. He was the biggest Black dude you’ve ever seen. And he took care of business, man, many times”
Is it any real wonder ST were banned from playing in Los Angeles for a 5-year period in the 1980s?
The band were blacklisted by “nervous promoters” due to reports and fears of gang violence and affiliations at their shows.
Of course the visits from the Secret Service didn’t help.
Nor did the band’s name.
Muir always insisted that the name, for him, stands for personal strength, as well as the high-energy, wild intensity of their live performances – rather than a literal desire for death.
To him, the “suicidal outlook” is about personal feelings and internal struggle rather than external, shallow topics like “girls and cars”.
Because for Muir, happiness is not a passive state:
“The most important thing in the world is being happy... and it's something you have to work for, but it's something that's worth working for.”
“All I want is a Pepsi”
Muir’s lyrics are mostly misunderstood. Or taken out of context.
ST shot to fame quickly through the song “Institutionalized”, which would now be considered a “meme” song.
In the song, Muir begs his “Mom” for a Pepsi:
“I say, "Mom, just get me a Pepsi, please? All I want is a Pepsi."
And she wouldn't give it to me”
She’s worried about her son who’s just “staring at the wall thinking ’bout everything”. It seems like unnatural behaviour to her.
Why isn’t Muir, like the rest of his peers, enjoying the “subliminal” effects of the TV?
Her conclusion is that he must be on drugs.
Of course, the irony is that Muir has never taken drugs and completely abstains from alcohol.
This sobriety seeps into the music.
Muir’s lyrics are often startlingly lucid.
And when he speaks in interviews, he does not slow down or pause, rattling off his motormouthed opinions with sincere conviction:
“[...] and the [ST song] “Trip At The Brain”, it's literally going to your mind and thinking because it's like a lost art. Nobody thinks. Everyone's like on autopilot. They're going through their life. They get up. Their alarm system. They eat this for breakfast. They go to work. They do this, No one thinks.”
“I cry for help but no one's around”
The band’s third album, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can't Even Smile Today (1988), is a shift away from their hardcore and punk roots to a more “thrashy” style of metal.
ST fused hardcore, punk, thrash and funk… before “crossover” was a thing:
“Is the song good, that’s the bottom line, not, ‘What kind of style is it?’ We’ll do something if we like it, [and] if we like it, it’s good.”
It’s a darker and moodier album than those which preceded. The title track’s opening lyrics set the scene:
“Here I sit and watch my world come crumbling down
I cry for help but no one's around”
“How Will I Laugh Tomorrow” is a polished account of inner turmoil from a band who were continuing to define and refine their sound.
The song begins with the narrator alone, silently screaming in his room, as “I bang my head against the wall”.
His anguish feels typically “masculine”. There’s always an “emotion”, but he’s unable to “explain” it. Throughout “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow”, he allows the music to do what the words can't.
Muir tells us in interviews that you need to take control of your own happiness.
Yet this seems contradicted by the narrator of the song who is constantly knocked down by external forces:
“I cried out so loudly, but you just covered your ears
I gave you all the signs, but you ignored my tears”
Even when he looks outside himself for help, he receives nothing:
“Seems like no one cares at all”
But then the tone shifts. Having dealt with his own internal anguish, he starts to look to the outside world for solace. This is the only time a real note of positivity creeps into the song.
“But if you want me here I am, ain't gonna die forever”
Maybe positivity isn’t the word.. But something closer to resistance, emphasised by the tempo change and driving trashy riffs.
“Always an emotion, but how could I explain?”
One night, during the album’s recording, guitarist Rocky George was wide awake.
He looked at the clock.
3 o’clock.
“I have it,” he thought to himself.
He improvised the guitar solo for the title track while the rest of the band slept:
“I like the 'How Will I Laugh' solo. I did it at, must have been, three o'clock in the morning. I remember Mark Dodson the engineer was laying on the couch, falling asleep, with the remote next to the couch. I was all wide-awake and excited. It wasn’t that I tried a bunch of takes. I felt like trying it at that time because I felt good. ‘Let me try it, put that song up,’ and everyone there was fading. It turned out really good.”
It starts off like a typical “shred” metal solo – opening with rapid flurries of tapping. But the second half of the song his jazz background takes over as George adds layers of much-needed melody to express the song’s pent up emotions.
At the time, guitar solos were “banned” in hardcore music. But ST weren’t going to let that stop them:
“We were just naturally doing what we wanted to do, what we felt like doing. I can’t see how you can be ashamed of something when you’re doing what you want to do.”
A jazz musician with a flair for shred guitar… He was, from the outside, the wrong man for this band with deep roots in punk and hardcore.
Which is exactly why the song worked so well.
“...ain’t gonna die forever”
Muir’s message was that we all face hard times. We all feel trapped within the walls we construct around ourselves.
According to Epic Record’s press materials, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) did not see it this way.
They tried to pull the album from retail chains… on the basis of the title alone.
Fortunately, the band was backed by their label, Epic, and the record made it to the shelves.
The song asking whether you can survive despair was deemed a threat to children… by the very people paid to protect them.
While it’s true ST have been grossly misrepresented throughout their career, it also needs to be noted that Muir is also hyper-aware of the world’s perception of him and the band. And there was a point where he stopped correcting people.
“How Will I Laugh Tomorrow” seems to be a defiant take on mental health in a world full of people (like the PMRC) who are willing to erase you based on who they think you are.
Not on who you’re trying to help.
“...you have to be free inside yourself”
Muir received letters after album’s release/
Struggling kids. People in genuinely bad situations who heard the title and felt, for the first time, that someone had asked the question with genuine sincerity:
“How will I laugh tomorrow”...?
“We've seen the effects it's had on a lot of people. It makes us believe all the more."
A year after the album’s release, the band stripped the song back to a semi-acoustic arrangement and released it on the Controlled by Hatred EP.
Guitarist Mike Clark noted that the “Heavy Emotion” version of “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow” was recorded “for all your ladies out there”.
Men who dressed like gangsters, hiding their vulnerability behind a joke.
Robert Trujillo – who joined the band in 1989 – went on to become the bassist for Metallica, the biggest band in the world. Brooks Wackerman joined Avenged Sevenfold. Scott Ian of Anthrax called the ST debut a perfect record.
But ST never broke through the way the bands they influenced did.
Muir doesn't lose sleep over it.
“When you see things in the world and when you see people dying… People that get screwed up that you care about… You're telling me it's important that you got like a song that goes number one on the radio? It don't mean a lot to me.”
What’s more important is that the album the PMRC tried to pull from shelves has kept kids alive for thirty-seven years.
It’s only fitting we leave Muir with the last words:
"You have to be free inside yourself."
Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media
/