Forty days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I entered the world via Brunswick Hospital in Amityville (insert your own joke here), on the south shore of Long Island. Two towns east, in Lindenhurst, my mother kept house and rode herd over my two brothers and two sisters. Two towns west, in Babylon, my father – a mechanic – plied his trade as co-owner of Trophy Motors (pumping Good Gulf) with my Uncle Emil. My parents are first-generation Americans; my father’s side of the family is Greek/Italian and my mother’s side is Maltese. I am a Meditterean mutt. Both of my grandfathers were dead before I was born and I always suspect this is the reason I grew up learning absolutely no Greek, Italian or Maltese.

Forty-five miles east of Manhattan, Lindenhurst was (and is) a deceptively bucolic blue-collar suburb with canals leading directly to the Great South Bay. Our house was a small two bedroom (master bedroom added later) brick ranch with an attached one car garage and a backyard just big enough for an above-ground pool. We didn’t have much money but my parents tried to arrange one family vacation a year and make sure we had food to eat, clothes to wear and a roof over our heads. Things went along fairly typically – with the usual amount of conflict in a family where the kids are born barely a year apart – until my parents divorced. My father – who was hardly around anyway, always off trying to earn a living – became a ghost in my life, just as I entered puberty. I’ve never had what could be termed a “strong male role model”. This explains much about me, including why professional sports still fail to move me.

Around the same time as the divorce, I took up the guitar, it being the only “cool” instrument the Junior High School taught. By the age of fifteen I was in my first band – Cobra – playing the hard rockin’ hits of the day at parties and high school dances. My taste in music back then was largely informed by what ever I heard my brothers and sisters playing. Mario and Marc were into loud long-playing rock and roll – Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, etc. Diana and Joanie handled the 45 rpm/pop side: The Beatles, The Jackson 5 and whatever else had a beat you could dance to. Me, I wanted to be Jimmy Page more than anything in the world and, like him, used to wear my guitar slung real low: impractical but oh-so-cool. As the seventies ended, though, I was ridding myself of all my Led Zeppelin trappings (stuff that is now going on eBay for ungodly sums). Why? PUNK ROCK, BABY!

I still remember the 6 o’clock news report talking about the Sex Pistols and their infamous San Francisco gig. Mentioning “Johnny Rotten” and “Sid Vicious” as if a strong odor had wafted into the studio, the newscaster smirked and raised an eyebrow as Cow Palace footage ran behind his head. Before long I got myself a copy of “Bollocks” and had my own Pistols epiphany. THIS is what I’d been waiting to hear, even if I hadn’t known it. Cobra had already died so I began playing down in the basement with my friend, Mike Nicolosi who wielded a mean Hagstrom bass. Within a year of graduation from Lindenhurst High, we had formed The Nihilistics. I got the name indirectly, through Sartre’s “Nausea”, which I found in the trash outside our local Salvation Army Thrift Shop.

The Nihilistics consisted mostly of Mike and me, with a revolving cast of singers and drummers, until we finally locked onto Ron and Troy sometime in late 1979. We put out a 5-song EP which got played on Tim Sommer’s “Noise the Show” (and Hal’s “Oi the Show”) on WNYU. We were soon asked to contribute something to ROIR’s seminal “New York Trash” cassette. Our first Manhattan gig was at a benefit for Lyle Hysen’s “Damaged Goods” fanzine at none other than Max’s Kansas City. If memory serves, we played two nights in a row on one of the last weekends the place was still open. After that, the gigs came fast: CBGB’s, Great Gildersleeves, Mudd Club, Peppermint Lounge, Club 57, Mile Square City – The Nihilistics could be counted on for at least one live show a month during our heyday. And what a live show it was. We had nothing but the courage of our convictions and could be counted on to keep things mean, nasty, loud and fast. As far as we were concerned, life was brutal and we provided the soundtrack, along with a healthy dose of verbal abuse for any audience members stupid enough to think we were lightweights because we hailed from Long Island. Mike’s ability to vomit on demand also helped out in this regard.

By 1984, the factions within The Nihilistics had become too much for me to deal with. We were constant squabbling, especially over an effort by other band members to bring in a lead guitarist and “heavy metalize” our sound. A chance to get out of my mother’s house and move somewhere cheap was the final ink to color me gone. I moved to New Jersey in 1984 and shortly thereafter met Kaz, who was DJ’ing on FMU. Within a year he asked me to co-host and the “Nightmare Lounge" took to the air. That ran for three or so years, after which I served as an overnight DJ. In 1989 I gave birth to “Aerial View”.

There have been some other bands over the years, most notably Missing Foundation (I played on the first three LP’s), but my catharsis now occurs through solo pursuits: writing and “Aerial View”. It’s simpler that way. Collaboration is a bitch.