Hardcore Rules: The Unreal Story of Youth On Trial
Hardcore Rules
A Novel
He was a teen. Alone in a roach-infested apartment. And a sound came out of the radio that split his life in two.
Brent Calloway wasn't supposed to become anything. His father choked him in a La-Z-Boy and called him a loser. His mother vanished into a boyfriend's life and left cash under a salt shaker. His sister was slipping away in Atlanta and nobody would listen when he tried to warn them.
So he screamed into a microphone instead.
The band was called Youth On Trial. There was Enzo - the rich kid with the loudest voice and the least to say. Douglas - the preacher's son carrying a secret behind a silence no one was allowed to see through. Peter - the guitarist who built riffs like architecture and walls around himself like fortresses. And Tess - the woman who'd seen the Damned in London and the Clash at the Rainbow before she was old enough to drink, who heard Brent play and said you need to put out a record, and then made it happen through a network of postcards, phone calls, and padded envelopes that stretched from New York to Helsinki.
She was twenty-one. He was sixteen. She was the first person who ever told him the truth.
A boy who sold his bicycle to buy a Joy Division record. A karate kick learned from a library book. A sister unconscious in the back of a stranger's car and a father who said she's fine, you're jealous - and hung up. A seven-inch record that traveled from a concrete studio in Miami to Helsinki through the hands of strangers. A scene that tried to erase a band and watched the room fill up anyway. A father who couldn't see the truth until it was too late.
Hardcore Rules rips through the birth of American hardcore punk - from the housing projects of Tallahassee to the church basements of DC. From a stage where cops tried to drag him off mid-song and he kept screaming until they let go - to a backyard in San Diego where a four-year-old swings a plastic bat and misses every time.
A novel about punk rock, broken families, and the most radical act of all - surviving long enough to build the life you never had.
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