1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 3 - The Message of the Music

This is going to be a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this second article, I look at the music of the day and how it impacted my life then and still does today.

1996 in many ways, was a tale of two halves. The first half was all about me trying to finish strong as my senior year of high school drew to a close. The second half was a recalibration. The seemingly endless grind of school had ended. Sure, there was college on the horizon, but for all intents and purposes, that was voluntary.

What I didn’t know then but know all too well now is that when you go hard for a long time, you get calloused. Your body and brain get used to the grind. Once you take your foot off the gas, it’s hard to get the motor running again, or the motivation to do so.

Looking back, it makes the second half of 1996, mostly the fall into winter, a bit of a blind spot in my life. Senior year and all of the events surrounding graduation are seared into my brain thirty years later. That final summer on Cape Cod with my closest friends before they left for college is one of my most cherished memories of my life. Until the actual days they left to start new chapters in their lives, the reality of the situation didn’t set in.

In my world, 1996 still revolved around Grunge music, although now it was a post-Grunge Alternative music world. Long gone was Nirvana as Kurt Cobain had symbolically ended Grunge with his death in April 1994. That didn’t mean that Nirvana’s music wasn’t still a huge part of me and my identity.

The teenage angst that Kurt wrote about in his lyrics only grew stronger in me as the prospect of entering a new phase of life grew closer. My interest in lyric writing, more along the lines of poetry, began early in 1996. However, it was not a Nirvana song that inspired me to jot down my innermost thoughts and feelings. No, it was a real-life event that happened at my school.

As you read in my last article, my English teacher, one of the favorites I ever had, was fired from his job for allegedly soliciting a student to appear in an adult film he was producing. When inspiration strikes, sometimes it comes from the weirdest places.

To process the events surrounding our teacher, affectionately nicknamed Bubba, I bought a steno pad and got to writing. I can clearly remember sitting in my bedroom adorned with posters of musicians and sports heroes alongside my closest friend, Barry, and working on lyrics to a song about what was still a fluid situation at the time.

Music had always made me feel. I can remember listening to Queen’s song These Are the Days of Our Lives in 1991 and getting overwhelmed by its message of looking back on life as you age. I was 14 then and had music making me think and feel beyond my years.

Writing lyrics, or poetry, to certain music made me feel more like an artist. In the first half of 1996, the inspiration came from my Grunge and Alternative roots. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and others filled my brain.

It was an interesting contrast to try to write about teenage problems that were happening in the present while trying to sound like a weathered adult looking back. My initial year of writing poetry was a lot of simple, sometimes cringe-worthy, attempts at rhyming and explanations of life. College and the music I was exposed to would drastically improve my writing. Well, that and a surplus of new problems.

The music I tried to write to also served another purpose. It was a conduit for creative expression. A dream I had been trying to cultivate in the 1990s was that of being a filmmaker. I wanted to create worlds and share them. I spent around $800 of my savings in 1994 to purchase a bulky camcorder from Sears. That’s equal to just over $1,700 when adjusted for inflation to 2026.

That camcorder got used pretty much daily. By the time it kicked the bucket sometime in late 1997, I had recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 hours of VHS tapes. There were skits, there were family holidays, and random, pointless moments that I captured that I cherish to this day.

The same model camcorder I owned in the 1990s

A major part of those VHS tapes is the music video. Simple, really, my friends and I set up my camcorder, played a song on a stereo, and performed it on camera. In today’s world, we’d call this low-hanging fruit for content. The videos all had a similar vibe. Teenage boys in the mid-1990s jamming out to songs they loved.

We did have our favorites. Nirvana ended up having nearly their entire catalog turned into music videos on my camcorder. It was a who’s who of Grunge, Alternative, and straight-up Rock music. Every now and then, we might switch it up and do something foolish to make ourselves laugh like Milli Vanilli, Color Me Badd, or the Brady Bunch theme. Of course, most of the videos are embarrassing to watch today, but we were kids, what do you want?

It’s a fascinating time capsule to look back at the week I graduated high school in early June 1996 and see what the music charts had to offer. Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony was #1. It was eerie as the song talks about losing a friend. Now, we were losing friends as we went our separate ways for college, not death, but still, it was fitting.

The rest of the Top 10 that week was populated by stalwarts like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Toni Braxton, SWV, Metallica, and George Michael.

In general, music was trending away from the Grunge-Alt movement and into more polished pop, dance, boy bands, and that song they beat into the ground, ‘Macarena.’ That song debuted right around the time I graduated and dominated the airwaves for the next year or more. I even had to do that foolish dance when at my orientation on my first day of college.

After school ended, my main connection to music came on two fronts: my job and my girlfriend.

I worked as a prep cook at a local restaurant during high school. I was lucky to have a coworker who was a friend and more like a brother at times. We were the same age within a few days, and we had similar tastes in music. What I liked a lot about Liam was that we were just different enough that he might turn me on to a different band, and if he didn’t like something, he had good explanations and not just ‘it sucks.’

I made mixtapes (yes, tapes) called Prep Boys Rock that we would play while working. It was a lot of what I’ve already mentioned, except with maybe a little more REM. We played music loudly, sometimes to the detriment of our job, but again, we were teenagers, what would you expect? Here is a Spotify playlist of some of those classics from the mixtapes.


 

There was a time our music was so loud that we couldn’t hear someone calling to us to bring something to the kitchen. That didn’t go over well with the guy who was a crusty old 60-something who didn’t have time for us crazy GenX kids. He stormed into our prep room, literally tore the radio out of the wall, and took it. We acted worried, but as soon as he left, we made fun of him for the rest of the day, and honestly, still to this day.

It wasn’t all mixtapes. Sometimes we’d get tired of the same old, and we’d listen to the radio. Now we’ll get very specific to where I grew up on Cape Cod. We had some classic stations on the air in the mid-90s, like Rock 104.7 and Pixy 103 (both rock), 96.3 the Rose, and 106 WCOD (both Top 40). But Liam and I tended to choose the stations that felt like they were speaking to us, like Underground 93.5. It was the alternative we enjoyed with up-and-coming bands we might not have heard of yet.

The other connection to music in the back half of 1996 was my girlfriend at the time. I was trying to share my world with her, and the best way I could do that was by sharing the music that made me feel alive. I turned her on to some of the alternative that shaped me. I made her introduction to alternative music mixtapes. For a teenager who didn’t know how to express vulnerable emotions well, sharing music became a love language.

She was one of the select few in my life that I sang for. I always loved to sing, and think I inherited a pretty good voice from my Grampa, who was a jazz singer. So I would put on these concerts where I’d sing a song or two like I was some sort of celebrity. Again, it was a love language to share something so few saw, or in this case, heard.

I turned her on to Stone Temple Pilots, especially. She loved Scott Weiland. In fact, we ended up going to see them in concert later on November 30, 1996. This was only a handful of shows before Weiland got busted for drugs and was eventually thrown in jail, with the tour being canceled.

Concerts were the big new shiny thing for me in 1996. Getting to travel and see bands I loved perform live was something that blew my mind. The first concert I ever attended was AC/DC on March 19, 1996, at Boston’s FleetCenter. It changed my life.

I went with my friends Dan, Pete, and James (aka Butch). It was so liberating to be on our own despite still being in high school. There might have been a little smoke in the car, but for the most part, we were responsible.

My introduction to live music began with Beavis and Butthead on the big screen, segueing into Back In Black, shattering my eardrums. AC/DC was one of the loudest live bands, and I had the proof. For the next three days, it felt like I was wearing heavy earmuffs due to how that music had slapped my ears silly. To this day, I am surprised at how good my hearing still is. I hope I didn’t jinx myself.

I mentioned at the top of this blog that the second half of 1996 has become a bit of a blind spot in my life. I had been going nonstop with school, and as Senior Year wound down, I made a choice to not go away to college. I chose to stay behind and, after taking a semester off, begin my college journey at the local Cape Cod Community College. Why? Possibly burnout, stress, confusion, and the biggest reason, my girlfriend. I will get deeper into that part in the next blog, though.

It’s interesting for me to go back to that time. I know I lived those days, and yet nothing stands out. I believe part of the reason was that as soon as I stopped grinding at school, my mind collapsed in a heap. Not having to be in a constant state of readiness swung me in the opposite direction, and I became soft and lazy. Yes, I was working, but what else?

By the time September rolled around, the vast majority of my friends were gone to their next chapters of life, some never to return. I felt like I hit pause, and once I started up again, I had to try to run to catch up.

I graduated from high school and, within a year, was slam dunked into confusion and desperation about my place in the world. I wasn’t even 20 and was in the quarter-life crisis mode. To this day, I find one of my biggest regrets in life was not going away to college immediately. That stepping off the gas pedal made it easier for me to coast. I don’t think I quite realized that I had shot myself in the foot with my choice to pause my education to bask in the glow of couple’s life.

I look back at the songs that captured my state of mind as 1996 drew to a close. The confusing new releases from Pearl Jam (No Code), Weezer (Pinkerton), and REM (New Adventures In Hi-Fi) seemed to perfectly reflect my own state of mind. The party was ending, but I had only noticed the crowds leaving once my voice was the one left echoing across an empty room.

Music would ease my mind, and it would also influence my writing as I tried to put into words changes I didn’t fully understand. Life was changing faster than I was ready for. January 1996 saw me as a high school student getting ready for the real world. In December 1996, I was in the real world, standing at the starting line and watching it disappear onto the horizon, all while familiar bands played the soundtrack.

The seemingly infinite horizon can be liberating and terrifying all at once.

1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 2 - The Real World Makes An Early Appearance

This is a series of articles about the year 1996. It holds significance because it was the year I graduated high school, and it is now thirty years ago. In this second article, I look back in great detail at an unexpected turn of events that changed my worldview much earlier than expected.

In high school, even at 17 or 18 in Senior Year, you are somewhat insulated from the ‘real world.’ You still have schoolwork to finish, and childhood isn't completely dead. Even as the days to graduation ticked away, I reveled in the relative normalcy of daily school life. I knew at some point I’d have to start making big life choices, but that day was still in the distance. Then the event happened. As I tell this story, many of you might find it too hard to believe that it was real, but it definitely was. I’ll just get started.

You ever have a favorite teacher get outed for doing something terrible? Having your view of someone you looked up to get shattered can have rippling effects throughout your life. My English teacher was one of my favorites I’d ever had. I took his class in both Sophomore and Senior years at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School.

He was one of the few teachers who actually had nicknames affectionately given to them by students. The English teacher was nicknamed Bubba. He was heavyset with curly hair and a thick curly beard. He had a jolly demeanor and felt like a classic 1970s Hippie now dealing with middle age in the 1990s.

Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School

Looks and presence aside, what made him special was the way he taught English. The main difference was how he incorporated Pink Floyd’s music into our curriculum. I learned more about that band in class than anyone in my family who had grown up on their music could have taught me. It was quite fitting then that a Pink Floyd song was being played when the illusion of that teacher’s life came crashing down.

We were having, I guess, what could be considered a talent show in class. One student had brought his acoustic guitar and, in an appropriate nod to our teacher, had decided to play Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. The song was interrupted by the head of the English Department popping her head into the class and beckoning the teacher outside.

Mere moments later, the teacher was walking to his car and waving to us as he drove out of the parking lot. What had happened? The story was wilder than anything we could have imagined.

Our beloved English teacher had been found to not only have been directing and sometimes starring in adult films, but he had also been accused of soliciting one of his students to be in one of the films.

A parent of a student at D-Y had found an adult film that Bubba had produced and brought it to the attention of the school district superintendent. Why the parent was going through the adult films is their business, but still not a squeaky clean person to be pointing fingers.

The fallout was swift and harsh. The story made national news. Our little school in the middle of Cape Cod became a hotbed of news vans and reporters. It was a scene out of a movie.

I will never forget arriving at school the next day and seeing the swath of people out in front. Reporters were stopping and asking any student who passed by if they had any knowledge of what Bubba was accused of. For most of us, we had no idea. We would learn in real time about his adult film secret life.

A problem for many of the news outlets was that the kids they spoke to about Bubba didn’t have anything but glowing interactions and stories of him. There were very few, if any, scandalous anecdotes to be found.

Me, I was interviewed by local news stations like WHDH Channel 7 in Boston and WJAR Channel 10 in Providence. There was also a crew from MTV who briefly chatted me up. Like I said, once they couldn’t find any dirt, they moved on. None of my interviews was even aired.

I was 18 years old and had spent my whole life in the relative cocoon that was Cape Cod. I had never been exposed to a national scandal. Part of me wanted to talk to everyone and try to get my face on the news. Part of me wanted to run home and hide until the worst was over.

In English class, the department head did her best to explain to us what had happened while also keeping many of the details hidden. It was stunning and confusing, but we thought maybe Bubba would return. I can’t fully remember how we spent those class periods. Part of me thinks we had some sort of study hall. Maybe others from my class can remind me.

He was officially fired on January 17th after being a teacher for 25 years. Bubba always denied soliciting a student, but admitted to appearing in eight adult films in the previous six months. He spent his off-time in that world.

The news crews grew smaller, but some remained. They updated the story and even interviewed a few of my classmates who had gone to see Bubba in a show of solidarity. The rest of the Senior Class would show their solidarity in a big way.

Many of us, myself included, staged a walkout the week of his firing. Those who had vehicles decorated them with signs, paint, and balloons. Others crafted large signs on poster board with words of support for Bubba. As for me, being that I was a student in photography class, I took up my first important assignment. I documented what we ended up calling a ‘parade’ in vivid black and white film.

The famed D-Y 'parade.'

We felt like we were making a difference. Or at least we were showing our disapproval in the only way we knew how. Maybe we were naive, highly likely. But in our minds, we had only seen the caring, fun, and engaging English teacher. We never saw someone who would betray the trust of a student by asking them to be in an adult film.

Let me say that being in the adult film world does not make you a bad person. That’s not what I mean. It’s the idea that as a teacher, you build a reputation on being someone your students can trust to have your best interests in mind. We were kids, 15-18 years old, living on Cape Cod, not in the big city. Even the most experienced of us had very limited knowledge outside of our bubble.

I was torn. Bubba was one of my favorite teachers I had ever had. He made me enjoy going to school. Still, I felt betrayed even though it had nothing to do with me personally. There were grainy and blurred images from those adult films being shown on the news, and it didn’t seem real. How could the man who taught me about Pink Floyd be the same one in those movies?

Obviously, despite my only referring to this teacher as Bubba, if you Google it, you will find all of the information in detail. You will find articles from local outlets and from big ones like the Chicago Tribune. You can seek those out if you wish. I also have heard the name of the student who accused him of solicitation. I would never share that information out of respect.

Bubba fought his firing for several years but ultimately never taught again, as far as I know. He remained visible around Cape Cod. I can remember seeing him in a supermarket years later and not knowing if I should approach him or not. Unfortunately, it became impossible to separate the teacher from the adult film creator.

As far as I know, Bubba is still alive today and still on Cape Cod. He is closing in on 80 years old and has now spent more time ostracized from the teaching world than he was a part of it. Crazy how the world works.

1996 began with the real world being dumped on my doorstep. It was the first event to force a perspective change in my life. Bubba’s fall from grace actually did some good for me. I needed a way to process what was going on. It came in the form of writing. I guess you’d call them song lyrics, but it amounted more to a stream of consciousness in the form of prose.

I sat and scribbled words in pencil on a steno pad, sitting in my bedroom with my good friend Barry. I called my first-ever poem ‘Bubba.’ I learned how to process life events in poetry form thanks to what happened with Bubba.

It is kind of fitting, isn’t it? Today, I’ve written hundreds of blogs, had ten books published, and spoken at countless events surrounding my writing. It all got its start thirty years ago with a single poem. I say ‘fitting’ because Bubba was a huge influence on my love of writing, creativity, and expression. His downfall led to my beginnings as a writer. I guess that was his lasting gift to me.

In 1996 the future stretched off into the horizon.

1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 1 - The Rise of the Internet

1996 Changed Everything: The Rise of the Internet

This is going to be a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this first one, we look at how the rise of the internet changed society as a whole.

This year marks thirty years since I graduated from high school. It is a line of demarcation in most people’s lives. It’s a symbolic finish line crossed. The only difference is that once you cross this finish line, you are face-to-face with a wide-open horizon. The possibilities are endless, and also terrifying.

I find it poetic that the year I graduated from high school, 1996, feels like a line of demarcation in the world as well. It was during this same time that the world was changing. Much like when your life goes from high school to being in your 40s, sometimes in a flash, the world went from analog to digital in a snap.

The World Wide Web first became available for the general public on April 30, 1993. We didn’t know it at the time, but the countdown was on to the change in how we see and interact with each other and the world as a whole.

My family got our first computer, a Gateway model, early in 1996. It was just in time to have a bit of a leg up on my final months of high school work. Those first few weeks and months saw little change. I wasn’t on the internet all the time. Living in a house with four siblings did limit my screen time. The ball was already rolling, though.

I have heard so many people around my age say that the 1990s were the last decade to have a feel and a look. I agree, but can’t put my finger on why. It may be because it’s the final decade before technology went fully digital. Your opinion may vary.

Think about it. What is retro chic today? 80s and 90s fashions and trends. Thirty years from now, do you think kids will be clamoring for whatever the style is today? What is the style today anyway?

The day I first went online, I still listened to CDs, watched VHS movies, watched cable television on a boxy CRT TV, and talked on a phone attached to the wall. Granted, the phone was cordless, but still. The ability to find any bit of information or converse with people from anywhere was something my 1980s-kid brain never could have comprehended.

The reason I see 1996 as the jumping-off point might be because it’s where I come in as far as internet access goes. It also perfectly lines up with a major life change, as far as high school graduation. However, there are stats to back it up.

In 1995, only 14% of Americans had internet access. I was not one of them. In 1996, that number jumped to between 20-23%. By the time 1999 ended, it was estimated that as many as 50% of Americans had access to the Web at home, school, or work. In less than the time it would have taken me to go to a four-year college, internet access more than doubled. From there, it was off to the races.

Instant messages became preferable to telephone calls. Digital MP3 songs became easier to manage than huge analog music collections. Websites topped libraries for school research. Why go outside to play when you have dozens of friends inside in a chat room?

All of these changes are necessarily bad. They are, however, huge shifts in societal norms. Then again, shifts in society happen all the time. I think they seem more dangerous and egregious when they’re happening to the generations after you.

I am sure my great-great-grandparents couldn’t understand why my grandparents wanted to waste their time with automobiles, radio, and motion pictures. I am sure my grandparents couldn’t wrap their heads around Beatlemania, the Hippie movement, and television. I know that my parents thought my friends and I wasted time with loud music, video games, and extreme sports. Now my generation is the parents, and the music, fashion, and viral trends all seem odd. The point is, we all enjoyed something that our parents thought was dumb.

At one point the automobile was seen as a weird passing fad.

A big part of me never wants to become as close-minded and ignorant as my father, so I do my best to try to understand the who, what, and why of today’s generation. My nieces and nephews are good barometers for that. I don’t need to stay ‘hip’ or relevant. I don’t need to know the words to some random K-pop group's songs, or understand GenZ slang (although I understand ‘slay’ because of my niece Emma). I don’t need to recreate TikTok viral trends because I’d come off as a near-fifty year old man trying desperately to cling to straws of youth.

A reason why I think that 90s kids have adapted so well to the changing landscape of the 21st century is the fact that we got the best of both worlds. We got childhoods free of social media, cyber-bullying, online gaming, and homogenized music (sorry). We were also still young enough to learn and adapt to the rise of the internet, online lives, smartphones, and more.

I might have grown up without the internet, but I have lived more than half of my life with it now. I was there for the rise of America Online, Napster, RealPlayer, Hotmail, AIM, Ask Jeeves, guestbooks, Trojan viruses, and pixelated videos that took ages to download. I am comfortable fully immersed in a digital world, or sitting looking at printed photos, reading a book, and listening to a CD. Yes, I still have my entire analog music collection, just nothing to play it on.

1996 truly was a life-changing year, not only for me but for millions of others. I graduated from high school while many others graduated from analog to digital. The world can be cyclical, though. I have noticed in the last several years a growing number of people looking to pull back from their digital lives and retrieve some of their old analog selves. Maybe that’s why I never got rid of my CD’s? I always have the option to take a step back and remember who I was back before the internet rose to prominence.

This was a subject I wanted to talk about for a while. The strange timeline where my graduation and the rise of the internet intersect. I am also a sucker for nostalgia; it’s kind of my thing, so I didn’t need much prodding to do a deep dive into life back then. All it took was a blizzard and no power for a few days to remind me of living in 1995. No laptop. No smartphone. Just me and my mind to help me escape from boredom. I think we all need that sometimes.