Was his trauma particular to his hometown? “Of course, in a family there’s going to be a silence after a suicide, but I had a whole neighborhood that was saying the same thing. That was the dissonance that punk offered. The ability to make people feel uneasy was really important. I felt uneasy, and I felt everyone should be uneasy.” He refers to a scene from Easter Rising describing the time he first started dressing “punk” and had partly shaved, partly spiked hair. “When you walk around the block and an entire bus breaks out in laughter they’re saying, ‘You’re not one of us.’ And you’re saying ‘Thank God.’ ”
MacDonald would move back eventually, helping to launch Boston’s first successful gun buy-back program and breaking the infamous Southie silence with the South Boston Vigil Group. None of that, he says, would have happened without punk. “There was a lot of self-education,” he explains. Bands like the Clash and the Buzzcocks, he says “were referring to things I’d never heard of and things I wouldn’t have heard of in school at that time.”
If only he hadn’t lost yet one more brother. “He had taken the other pill, the Southie pill, and I ended up feeling guilty for that,” says MacDonald of his own subsequent rejection of punk and decision to reclaim his Southie roots. “In retrospect, I value that period of my life very much.”
Michael Patrick MacDonald reads at Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, Allston | September 30 | 7:30 pm | 617.734.4502
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