I'm Not Crazy. You're The One That's Crazy.

Every once in awhile, straight-up nostalgia will cause me to re-purchase stuff I’ve owned and sold before. Gawrsh, I’ll think, I haven’t listened to those records in years. I haven’t even wanted to listen to them in years. But all of a sudden, I can’t imagine why I ever got rid of them when I did, and I can’t face life without them. So out comes the credit card, and home I go with some CD that causes my wife to look at me with the wary eye one casts upon a possibly rabid animal. My latest acquisition of this type? Three albums by Venice, CA thrashers Suicidal Tendencies.

ST came roaring out of the gate in ’83 with their self-titled debut, which featured the classic skate-rock single “Institutionalized,” which for those who don’t remember wallowed in adolescent angst while sending up parental misreading thereof. At the song’s hilarious climax, vocalist Mike Muir is in his room, “just like staring at the wall thinking about everything, but then again I was thinking about nothing. And then my mom came in and I didn't even know she was there, she called my name and I didn't even hear it, and then she started screaming ‘MIKE! MIKE!’ And I go: ‘What, what's the matter?’ And she goes: ‘What's the matter with you?’ I go: ‘There’s nothing wrong, Mom.’ And she goes: ‘Don't tell me that, you're on drugs!’ And I go: ‘No Mom, I'm not on drugs, I'm okay, I was just thinking, you know, why don't you get me a Pepsi.’ And she goes: ‘No, you're on drugs!’ I go: ‘Mom, I'm okay, I'm just thinking.’ She goes: ‘No, you're not thinking, you're on drugs! Normal people don't act that way!’ I go: ‘Mom, just give me a Pepsi, please. All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me. Just a Pepsi.”

The album was a huge underground hit, as much for its sound – a mix of hardcore punk and thrash metal, fronted by Muir’s whiny-but-emphatic vocals and stinging guitar leads – as for its lyrical content and the band’s instantly recognizable image. Suicidal Tendencies didn’t look like any other contemporaneous band. Muir was a long-haired white guy who dressed like an L.A. gangbanger; lead guitarist Rocky George, who joined with their major-label debut, was a black man, never seen without his trademark Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap; and the back line was a rotating mixed-race lineup of white boys and Mexicans. ST did one more album for their indie label, 1985’s Join The Army, and then they were snapped up by Epic Records, which is where they really came into their own, sonically.

How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today, is probably the ultimate statement of their musical and lyrical vision. The riffs are fast and blurry, prizing hardcore’s wall-of-sound approach over the high-tech crispness of speed metal. Indeed, the guitars are frequently louder than Muir’s vocals. Never a bellower, he was given to a menacing murmur, allowing his tales of melancholy and desperation to seep into the listener’s ear like bad dreams, while George (following the pattern established by his predecessor on “Institutionalized”) frequently soloed through entire songs.

It was this introspective lyrical focus that really differentiated ST from their peers, though. While Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth were busy tackling the horrors of war and the hypocrisies of organized religion on their records, and Anthrax were just goofing off most of the time, the Suicidals were releasing songs that lived up to their band-name. Muir wrote about depression better than anybody since Henry Rollins, but he didn’t seem to have the rage to back it up. Despite his muscular physique, the ST vocalist often seemed on the verge of tears. It was, and remains, a fascinating dichotomy, never explored better than on the titular single from How Will I Laugh Tomorrow…. “The clock keeps ticking but nothing else seems to change,” Muir sings. “Problems never solved, just rearranged/And when I think about all the times that I've had/Some were good, most were bad/I search for personality and I look for things I can not see/Love and peace flash through my mind/Pain and hate are all I find/Find no hope in nothing new and I’ve never had a dream come true/Lies and hate and agony, through my eyes that's all I see/If I'm gonna cry, will you wipe away my tears?/If I'm gonna die, Lord please take away my fear/Before I drown in sorrow, got one more thing to say/How will I laugh tomorrow when I can't even smile today.” This is not exactly the chest-beating content most thrash metal listeners were supposedly seeking back in the 80s, but ST connected with a large audience nonetheless.

They followed up How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… with a stopgap EP, Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit…Déjà Vu, which contained the hilariously bleak track “Waking The Dead,” in which Muir expressed his anger at the injustice of dead folks resting in peace while the living suffer daily torments. Again, this utterly desolate vision of existence was the single. Their 1990 album Lights…Camera…Revolution found them broadening their scope somewhat. Muir finally dried his tears, opening the disc with the anthemic “You Can’t Bring Me Down,” which featured the hilarious line “Who the hell you calling crazy? You wouldn’t know what crazy was if Charles Manson was eating Froot Loops on your front porch!” I saw them live supporting this record – their opening acts were Exodus and some band from Texas nobody’d really heard of yet, called Pantera.

The day these three CDs arrived from Amazon, I slapped ‘em into my iPod, and cranked it up on the train to work the following morning. (My new job as managing editor of the world music magazine Global Rhythm doesn’t allow for much metal-playing time.) They sounded as good as I remembered. Even better, in fact, because I’d had ‘em on cassette before. Inside the CD booklet for How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… is the epigraph, “If you’re not now, you never were.” I guess I still am.