What Comets, Stars, and Moons are all about

Do you know the route you traveled to get into a specific type of music or a certain sound? Do you remember the first stand out piece from a certain genre?

For punk rock and me the best I can come up with is Boy Scouts, a taped college radio program, and Suicidal Tendencies. This memory came rushing back to me as I sat in the theater watching the third greatest superhero film ever made, Iron Man. During the scene where we first see Tony Stark in his garage/workshop the song playing in the background is Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized.” Pop quiz: What was the first film to feature this song as part of the soundtrack?

“Institutionalized” is probably the first “punk” song that resonated with me. I must have been roughly 12 when I first heard the song while on a Boy Scout camping trip. My troop was notorious in the Boy Scouts for being a little rough around the edges. From what I understand Boy Scouts is meant to help shape boys into pillars of society. Our Scout Leader, for better or for worse, preferred fun to the discipline and he encouraged our independence.

The older scouts would always bring a radio and music with them. During one of these camping trips a tape was brought of a radio show on UConn’s student station WHUS (where I would eventually go on to be music director a decade later). I don’t recall the name of the show and all I can remember is that the shtick of the two hosts was to randomly yell out “SPERM COUNT!!!!” And then count to a random number. The music of the show was predominantly punk rock and it shook my world.  I ended up…ummm…borrowing the tape at the end of the camping trip when no one was looking and one of the two songs that stood out more than any other was “Institutionalized.” (The other song was Dead Milkman’s “Punk Rock Girl,” but more on that later). I would rewind and play that one song over and over and over again. Why? I’m not sure, maybe Mike Muir’s words of being misunderstood when nothing was wrong resonated in my tween brain as I gazed out into my teenage years?

Suicidal Tendencies :: Institutionalized