E-Mail This Article to a Friend Persona non grata, continued
	Related Links   Jimmy Reject Official site of the one and only. Collects his rants, riffs, record reviews, unused lyrics, favorite links, and more. Also contains the epic, unexpurgated semi-autobiographical short story, I Was a Teenage Antisocial Misanthrope: The Ballad of Richie Wretch. "After all the SUVs and condoms are rotting somewhere in a heap of compacted garbage, my words of hate will survive." The Dimestore Haloes Abandoned home of Boston’s late, lamented trash/glam punk misfits. Includes a link to Pelado Records, where you can purchase their posthumous swan song, The Ghosts of Saturday Night. Fat City Magazine Boston’s best punk-rock magazine, featuring the informed and impassioned record reviews of Jimmy Reject. Now Wave Magazine "A web-zine for the rock ’n’ roll obsessed, specializing in the coverage of garage, ’70s-style punk, and power pop" — and another home for Reject’s reviews. Notes on Johnny Nihil The debut novel from the punk-rock scribe, the story of a sheltered suburban high schooler who falls for a dark and disturbed musician and nurses him back to sanity. Available for purchase in hard copy or for download. Lost in the Supermarket Dimestore Haloes front man Chaz Matthews is a writer, too. This is the sort-of-true story about one punk rocker’s attempt to make a living in a supermarket peopled with all manner of freaks and weirdoes. "Thrill to the romance, sex, violence, blood, and crushed apples of a life in the grocery store!"

So he drank. And drank. He’s dry now, and hasn’t gotten drunk since 2003. Still, he says, "I love alcohol. I love getting fucked up. That was my raison d’être back then." The cover of The Enemy’s Within shows him, eyes caked in kohl, sucking lustily on a bottle of Gordon’s gin. That was how you’d find him most of the time. "It was a sense of failure," he explains. "A very sharp feeling of frustration, a big sense of rejection from females. There’s always reason to drink." Perhaps worse for his precarious mental state, Harrington was complementing his liquid intake with sheets of LSD and bushels of pot.

But music was an outlet, too. He could keep time on a drum kit and started playing drums for a series of bands. First, in 1987, came Social Status. (Reflecting the ’80s anti-nuke Zeitgeist, Harrington wanted to call ’em the Seabrook Mutants but was voted down.) "We sounded pathetic," he says. "Our amps were smaller than this table." Ritual Silence came next, in 1990. "I won’t go too much into that, but they were real assholes. They kicked me out without telling me." The Dismal Serenade, in ’93, were a bunch of "Nazi goons," and a group he wishes he’d never joined. But the Dirge Carollers, in 1995, "were the band where I really cut my teeth." They even played at the Rat. Then, a year later, Jimmy Reject auditioned for the Dimestore Haloes.

"He was a little off, so to speak, but the entire band was like that," frontman Chaz Matthews remembers. "Awkward, never knew what to say to people. We were all taking antidepressants for various mental problems. It was hilarious that we all found each other and made music together under those circumstances."

But it was a glorious noise, melding the raw power of Hanoi Rocks and the Ramones, the glam-rock pout and louche sex appeal of T. Rex and the New York Dolls, the jilted romanticism of the Buzzcocks, the drunken dissolution of the Replacements. Song titles like "Kids Want Action," "City of Bottles," and "Hot Pink Stereo" pretty much told you everything you needed to know about the group’s aesthetics.

And people loved them. Folks flocked to Haloes gigs at the Rat and the Middle East and O’Brien’s. The national punk ’zines ate ’em up.

But the Dimestore Haloes took the middle-finger attitude of their music perhaps a bit too far. For one thing, they did their level best to talk shit about other bands from the cliquey Boston scene in every interview they did. Their trash-talking was born of "antagonism and frustration," says Harrington. "Everyone always looks back and says, ‘We were just kidding.’ But I don’t think we were."

In 2003, after almost a decade-long run, the Dimestore Haloes called it quits. (Their final album, The Ghosts of Saturday Night, recorded in 2001 and 2002, was just released in June on Pelado Records.) The band ended in part because they never really made the effort to get out and tour and build up their fan base. But the group’s make-up also did them in. "In a band of social misfits, [Jimmy] was the biggest social misfit," Matthews writes in an e-mail. "Where we were all functional on certain levels, he seemed not to be. It was the blind (us) leading the even blinder (Jimmy) sometimes."

Still, in many ways, Jimmy Reject was the Dimestore Haloes. "He really connected to the romance of what the Haloes were about," says Josh Rutledge, editor of Now Wave magazine, for which Harrington writes reviews. "Rallying against the apathy and mediocrity of the times, all that clichéd stuff. They were speaking out against that conformity, that shopping-mall ethos. I think Jimmy really believed that he was doing something important."

WRITING WRONGS

"I have this ongoing fantasy of kicking everybody else out of Massachusetts for a whole year," Jimmy Reject writes in his LiveJournal. "I would bide my time working from home at a rock journalism gig. The only way people could contact me would be by email. If I had to chat, I would call them. The scary and anti-social thing about that is it would take me quite a while to get sick of that. ‘Jim, it’s been six months since you’ve seen a human face. New York state is very crowded; you want to let the people back in?’ ‘I don’t know, traffic’s pretty smooth and lines are very short at the deli. Why don’t you give me another two years. I’m really gettin’ to know myself out here.’"

It’s not a half-bad idea.

Jimmy Reject writes for people who feel the same way. On his Web site (http://www.geocities.com/jreject), he posts a welcome letter:

Your band just played a bad show. You just got rejected by the girl of your dreams. You just got fired from a dishwashing job for incompetence. You stumble home shamefully through the late night streets, thinking that the rest of the world is too successful to fathom how you feel. That’s when Jimmy Reject, the self described "Enemy Within" of modern culture is with you. He has psychically tapped into your wrath, and is off somewhere scrolling your dejection onto a word processor, stretching your go nowhere ramblings to the annals of immortality.

It started in high school. In 1986, Jamie Harrington wrote a review of the Ramones’ Animal Boy for some older kids’ mimeographed ’zine. From there, he says, "it became sort of an addiction."

He cites William S. Burroughs and Lester Bangs as a couple of his favorite writers. He channels Burroughs’s "trippy flow," and takes Bangs as his model rock critic, a guy who can simply sit down and bang out impassioned paeans and polemics. (Still, "for a guy who has two books out, I’m not that big of a reader. The last book that really kicked me in the ass was the Mötley Crüe biography. I thought that was the bomb.")

The writing of Notes on Johnny Nihil — the story of a virginal high-school student named Tracy who discovers punk and pot, then finds herself falling for a shady, smackhead guitarist named Johnny Nihil — was different from anything Harrington had yet tackled. For one thing, he was sober.

"December 2003 is the last time I got drunk," he says. "I’ve had three relapses since then. Usually on the eve of going back to the mental hospital. But in my mind, I consider myself [at] well over a year of sobriety."

All the same, while writing Johnny Nihil, Harrington was under "immense personal duress," having been diagnosed as bipolar and having great difficulty with that, even with medication. "Like many times in my life, it just shattered my ego," he says. "The complexity of that mindset kind of lends itself to that writing. It’s the most finely crafted, meticulous, organized piece of writing I’ve done."

While the book has some awkward phrasing and its dialogue can be a bit clunky, it’s also got a compelling narrative and real descriptive brio. Sometimes, even its overwriting aspires to a manic rhythm that approaches beat poetry: "Punk rock is the manic guitar thrust of go nowhere kids charging the street like sleek atom bombs, to penetrate the womb of human intelligence, exploding in a cascading flow of neon lust. I will carry my divine light prose through the darkened alleys of greaser punks to seduce and sweeten the crotches of teenage lust forever!"

Best of all, it feels lived-in. Even though Harrington insists the work is entirely fictional — he’s never done heroin, for instance, but did consult a book called Heroin from A to Z — his experiences bleed through the text. When Tracy checks into a mental hospital, when Johnny goes to detox but the methadone doesn’t work, "they’re going through what I went through," he says. "They’re having themselves crushed and rebuilt up from scratch."

The book was therapeutic, in its way. It’s written from Tracy’s point of view; Harrington thought it would be a challenge to write from a female perspective — and might help in other ways. "Some of my earlier stuff has sort of a misogynistic streak," he admits. "I’m working through that. I don’t want to get too deep into it, but it’s not so much misogyny as a general frustration and inability to be close [with a woman]. I’m dealing with that. And that’s all I’m gonna say about it."

There’s an empathy at work here, a solidarity with society’s outcasts. But Harrington is emphatic that self-improvement must come from within. "The theme to Johnny Nihil is, if you need a messiah, be your own," he says.

There’s still work to be done. It’s one thing to be a fuck-it-all teenage punk, full of piss and vinegar and vanity and spleen, reveling in antagonizing society. But that changes, subtly but significantly, when you get older.

"When I was 18, listening to punk records over and over, reading fanzines over and over, all that dogma and drivel about fighting the system, it seemed kind of tired to me even then," Harrington says. Now, "as a thirtysomething, I can see how being an outsider is painful. It’s very different from being a punk rocker. It’s the fact that you can’t pay your own bills and have to be taken care of. That’s really easy to be ashamed of, y’know? There aren’t many people walking around detached from the outside world who don’t feel some sort of suffering from it."

He’s speaking, of course, of his own situation. But as he sits there banging away at an old computer, working through his shit, he also wants all the other outcasts out there to know he’s with them, that he knows how they feel. That’s the opposite of rejection.

"My aim was to write something that was of tangible use to other people, if only on an emotional level," Harrington says. "If anyone reading this picks up Notes on Johnny Nihil and derives great help from it, then they’ve done me a bigger favor than I’ve done them."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com.