CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: What’s important to remember, about Long Island, about our scene, is that everyone knew each other.
RICH EGAN: The thing that set Long Island apart? They literally were set apart. They were out there on the island, you know? So they were able to create their own biosphere where they nurtured their own bands, promoters, everything.
GLENN GAMBOA: Long Island is the two counties at the eastern end of the same island as Brooklyn—it goes Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau County, Suffolk County. Long Island is about thirty miles east of Manhattan, but it seems like a different world. It’s where the first suburbs in America were. A lot of bands and people like Billy Joel came from Long Island in the sixties and seventies because they had garages and it was easier for them to practice, whereas in the city, you’re all on top of each other.
DAN YEMIN: Long Island’s in the shadow of New York City, the way where I’m from in New Jersey is, but because it’s such a bottleneck and so hard to get to from everywhere, it’s like its own country. We used to joke it would make more sense to book a show in Boston than Long Island. And usually that wasn’t an exaggeration.
MATT PRYOR: There’s this sibling rivalry between New Jersey and Long Island, that they kind of seem to hate each other, but are kind of exactly the same. Like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers.
GEOFF RICKLY: Long Island was very much more a New York scene than Jersey. The kids in indie rock or emo-y bands or whatever you wanna call it were way more like New York hardcore guys. They were tougher, they’d been on the streets more, most of them had been arrested for whatever reason. They were New York hardcore kids who happened to play pretty stuff, you know what I mean? Whereas New Jersey kids were way more like Midwestern, kinda plainspoken kids. In Long Island, they were just more streetwise.
VINNIE CARUANA: Me and my brothers got into rap music at first; that was our first number one. Rap was exploding and a lot of big artists were from close to where we lived. We were only a few miles away from where Public Enemy is from.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Pretty much everyone I knew listened to rap. Breakdancing, graffiti, skateboarding—it was all mixed together for us. On Long Island public access there was a TV show called Video Music Box—we got to see all these people and realize they’re all one town over from you. Five minutes from where I grew up in Lindenhurst was Amityville, which had tons of the most popular rappers in America at the time: De La Soul, one of the guys from Leaders of the New School. North of me is Wyandanch, that’s where Rakim is from. Public Enemy’s more like Nassau County, over where Beck from Glassjaw is from.
JUSTIN BECK: As you go from Nassau County to Suffolk County, farther east from the epicenter of Manhattan, it gets less diverse and cornier and whiter. And the North Shore of Long Island is much more affluent compared to [some of] the South Shore.
SCOTTIE REDIX: Its proximity to hip-hop culture made the scene unique. All the good Long Island bands had a hint of a bounce to their sound. It’s that vibe. It’s that air. It’s that lifestyle.
RICKY SAPORTA: When you saw a band onstage, you could tell they were from Long Island.
MIKE DUBIN: Dancing in our scene wasn’t just punching, kicking, moshing, fighting. There was rhythm and moves. From being on tour, I can say it was like nowhere else.
SCOTTIE REDIX: It was like, you can dance with a girl and also mosh with a girl, too. Because there were also girls doing the same thing in our pits. It’s just the sound. People danced like they were at hip-hop shows.
EBEN D’AMICO: It was always a little bit high school, you know, people ostracizing each other and talking shit about each other, being the cool kids and the less cool kids.
SCOTTIE REDIX: You had to be a player. That’s what kept you cool. How good you were at your instrument determined how cool you were in that scene. You could be a complete whatever . . . if you knew how to play, you’re in. There wasn’t a lot of it, but there would be skinheads, and bands that had that type of following.
There were a handful of us [people of color] at shows. The local Long Island scene, you would have a set cast of regulars. We see each other, give that little nod, like it’s all good, good to see you. These are like my first shows—going and playing. And fifteen, sixteen, my only knowledge of skinheads was what I’d seen on TV or what I read. My friends would always tell me, “You gotta check the shoelaces, that’s how you can tell if they’re white supremacists. Red shoelaces meant they’re cool; white shoelaces meant they’re not cool.” And even those lines would get blurred. When I would see them, I’d just lay low until it was time to play. We’re talking mid-nineties—it wasn’t as liberal as it is now. On Long Island, the closer you got to the city, you wouldn’t see the racism as much. You would see that most at shows out east in Huntington, Merrick, or Levittown. Racist vibes, not exclusive to skinheads per se. The tough-guy, straight-edge types, they would always blur the lines with those old crews like DMS. And when you think of that white machismo thing, it had hip-hop elements. That always boggled my mind.
ANTHONY RANERI: Long Island bands weren’t playing in the city because you couldn’t get booked by a real promoter. Christian McKnight booking you on Long Island in some hall was pretty much the only show you could get.
FRED FELDMAN: What made those other scenes really work was there was that local promoter. Jersey had Ricky Saporta. On Long Island, Christian McKnight was the guy. I would talk to Christian to try to get my bands booked. And then also just ask what was going on, what’s happening?
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: When I was a teenager, Long Island hardcore was my life. I decided that my school that I went to, West Hampton High School, was not for me. I dropped out so I could focus full time on being a scene kid. And I did nothing but book shows and go to shows; I was in a band for a little bit. I opened up a record store when I was nineteen. I opened up a venue when I was eighteen. And then when my band broke up when I was about twenty-two, I started booking shows full time again.
RICKY SAPORTA: Giuliani had shut down Manhattan, right? So I got to be close friends with Christian and we’d coordinate shows together: “Saturday this band will play New Jersey, Sunday they’ll play Long Island.”
TOMMY CORRIGAN: In our town, Lindenhurst, there was this spot called the PWAC, which was the People With AIDS Coalition. And that ended up being the best place for shows in the history of Long Island. We all volunteered there and ran it. We did a Fugazi show with over a thousand people. We were doing shows every week, so it turned into a scene where kids were showing up regardless of who was playing. I remember VOD [Vision of Disorder] played there in their height and three thousand people showed up. We were like, “Ho-ly shit.”
MIKE DUBIN: The top three bands in the mid-nineties were VOD, Silent Majority, and Mind Over Matter. Silent Majority’s earlier stuff was more punk and it became more melodic. VOD was straight-up screamy metal, and Mind Over Matter was that piece that fit in between.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: Silent Majority were the one band that nobody from Long Island would ever disparage, nobody would ever talk shit about, even though there was so many different scenes. There was the tough guy scene, like all the people that played beat-down hardcore. There were the people that played DIY hardcore, which was really socially conscious. But the one band everybody loved was Silent Majority.
EDDIE REYES: To me, they were Long Island. Those were my friends, we all lived together, we had the hardcore house. That was my crew.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Silent Majority started in my high school, my friend Ryan on guitar, my brother Steve was on drums. We were all from age thirteen to sixteen when we first started, goofing around writing funny songs after school. And then a couple years later we figured out to play a little bit and started taking it more seriously. When we did our first demo tape, that’s when it became real. That was a big deal back then. And then we did our first seven-inch, This Island Earth in 1994.
JUSTIN BECK: They could not have gotten off the stage if they didn’t play “Knew Song,” off This Island Earth. That was like their legacy song. It’s a simple song, but a pop anthem. Everyone could be like, you gave your rocks up for this cool new rhythm you’re doing, but could you please just play “Knew Song.”
JOLIE LINDHOLM: Silent Majority was emo. That’s what we called emo on Long Island.
GEOFF RICKLY: I thought they were criminally underrated. They were loved in Long Island, in New York, but the rest of the emo world looked at them as an anachronism, like a bunch of Long Island tough guys in an emo band. That was not a thing yet.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: I remember the first time I heard someone say “emo.” I was at the More Than Music Festival in Ohio, like a big coming together of every hardcore scene on the East Coast. This was like, 1992. There was a band from Long Island called Fountainhead, right? The bassist ended up being in Texas Is the Reason. This girl said, “Oh, that singer was dressed so emo.” And I was like, what the fuck? In the eighties there was a standup comedian called Emo Philips. He had these bangs, he was like a really weird, nerdy-looking dude. He’d be on like, HBO Comedy Hour and he had a very weird act. So when this chick was saying like, “Oh the singer of that band was dressed so emo and acting so emo,” I thought he’s walking around acting like the comedian.
GEOFF RICKLY: Silent Majority shows could be quite rough. Their fans were a lot bigger than a lot of the fans that were coming to see Thursday at the time, and usually old enough to drink. And they probably had a few to drink before the show.
VINNIE CARUANA: You would go see Silent Majority and the crowd would be filled with people who would become members of the next wave of bands that made a huge impact on the world of music: guys from Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, Glassjaw, Movielife, Crime in Stereo, all in the front row singing along.
GEOFF RICKLY: A lot of it really revolved around the singer Tommy’s charisma. Just an incredibly magnetic guy. He’s got really sharp, piercing eyes. He would be right there in the center, locked into the crowd. Total commitment to be in the moment.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Our drummer, Ben Van Dyke, a lot of people copied the way he did his drum kit. We’d play with a band, then play with them six months later, and all of a sudden the guy would have his kit set up exactly the same way.
JUSTIN BECK: I remember Silent Majority wrote a song in a six-eighths time signature. Everyone was like what the fuck is six-eighths? And then, all of a sudden, every fucking shitty emo song on Long Island was in six-eighths.
GEOFF RICKLY: I remember my roommates in You and I telling me this story where they went to play and it ended up [that] the person who [had] put on the show I think was in Silent Majority. And they were like, “Oh yeah, you can stay with us. But you can’t leave your van outside unattended, it’ll get stolen. Somebody’s gotta sleep in the van.” And they were like, “Oh, that’s weird. We have to sleep in the van even though it’s dangerous and could get broken into?” And they were like, “Yeah, here, take this gun.” They were like, “UHHHHHHH, what?”
TOMMY CORRIGAN: I lived in a really bad neighborhood. I can see me saying that to somebody. And we did have guns. I’m not sure it’s true . . . it might not be . . . I can’t confirm or deny it. Definitely sounds like something we woulda done.
TOM SCHLATTER: Okay, I can tell the story to the best of my subjective memory. On our first tour we got put on a show at a beach club in Long Island. After the show, we started to drive from this beach club in a pretty swanky part of Long Island, and after about fifteen minutes of driving, things started to look less swanky. We get to the basement apartment Tommy lived in with his friend, one of the guitar players for the Movielife. Tommy says, “Hey, you should have one person go sleep in the van, because the van’s probably going to get broken into.” We’re weighing our pros and cons: If the van gets broken into and no one’s there, some of our stuff will get stolen. If the van gets broken into and one of us is in there, our stuff will get stolen, and someone from our band will also probably get into a fight and get beat up or stabbed.
Then ten minutes later, Tommy comes out of his room dressed in all black. And he had two guns. And the guy from the Movielife is like, “All right, we’re going out to shoot up some cars, mi casa, su casa.” For all I know the guns could have been paintball guns and maybe there was some all-night paintball car shooting thing? I don’t know. So these guys left. And we’re like, I guess someone should sleep in the van.
The next day we wake up and Tommy’s nowhere to be found, but the guy from the Movielife is out front baiting a line on a fishing pole. And he’s like, “I’m gonna go fish today.” We’re like, pretty versatile guy!
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: Life of a Spectator, Silent Majority’s full-length from 1997, that record’s incredible. When you listen to it today, not only has it stood the test of time, but you can listen to it and hear some Taking Back Sunday, New Found Glory, the Movielife, Glassjaw—all these bands that were influenced by Silent Majority.
MIKE DUBIN: “Cross Crowded Rooms” and “Windows Down” were more melodic songs—not screamy, not as shouty. The subject matter was different. They were about girls.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: “Window down” is a graffiti term for when you write on a train below the windows. It’s about a graffiti I did on a freight train and seeing it on different train lines on Long Island at different times. It never came out of service, so I’d see it a year later, reflect on it and why I painted it. And there’s a little love story mixed in there.
Most of the kids I knew from graffiti in my town were Guidos and club kids. We were in a gang turf war with this other graffiti group from a couple towns over, and they were all skateboarders and punk rock kids. When I finally met them, I’m like, “Oh, I should have been in a crew with these guys!” It’s an area thing, you just fall in with the people from your town. Hardcore was different, because when we got into it we started meeting people from all different high schools. Which was crazy, because if you were out and you ran into kids from another school there would be a fight, you know what I mean? But hardcore gave you a pass to go to different towns like that.
JUSTIN BECK: Ben from Silent Majority and Ariel from Glassjaw came from a town called Sea Cliff. Sea Cliff was this enlightened little town. All the parents were fucking professors or some type of artist. It was just a different pedigree. Nobody had TVs in their bedrooms—it was books and everyone’s a vegetarian cooking falafel at age fourteen.
SCOTTIE REDIX: That town was on some hippie shit. They didn’t lock doors over there. You could just walk into any of your neighbors’ doors because they considered locking doors like being in a prison.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: I remember going to diners in different areas and you got to see all of Long Island.
SCOTTIE REDIX: You would always end the night at a diner. It’s all these bands in the same section, or in the parking lot, just doing what we do.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: There’s a lot of Silent Majority songs that reference a place called the Nautilus Diner, which was like, their diner.
JUSTIN BECK: The cliché Long Island hardcore night was you’d go to a show and then go to a diner. You’d get a bagel, a seltzer, and lemons—you’d ask for fucking marinara sauce, you’d make a homemade pizza bagel. You’d put sugar and lemon in your seltzer and for like two dollars you got a full meal with a homemade Sprite. And you’d sit there and eat till like 3:00 a.m.
SCOTTIE REDIX: Shit just used to sprout in Long Island. If you were four guys hanging out in a room at the end of the day, you’re gonna be a band, there’s no way around it. Eddie Reyes was a true Forrest Gump of that scene. He was there for all the important bands.
MIKE DUBIN: He was one of the original members of Mind Over Matter. I think he left or was asked to leave, I’m not sure how that ended. Then he had this band Clockwise that were awesome. They did well locally but didn’t really grow outside Long Island. Clockwise ended and then Eddie started Inside. He was in Inside for a while, then his relationship there ended and Inside got a different guitarist. He started the Movielife after that. He did that for a while. He did a band called Runner Up for a minute that didn’t really go anywhere.
EDDIE REYES: I always wanted to push myself. I guess it was stubbornness in the back of my brain I was like, “You want to do something else now.” I always had a bad habit of either walking away or trying something different. Then I decided to start Taking Back Sunday.
SCOTTIE REDIX: I was like, “Okay, it’s good to see Eddie back in the fold.” Because I remember him leaving the Movielife was a big deal. He kinda disappeared, then came back with this thing that became Taking Back Sunday.
EDDIE REYES: My vision was a band that didn’t give a shit, wanted to have fun, just wanted to be in your face.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: Our buddy Antonio was the first singer, who named the band. He was the singer shortly.
JOHN NOLAN: Antonio tried me out on guitar . . . Somewhere along the way, we brought in counter-vocals . . . yelling something while somebody else was singing a totally different part.
MIKE DUBIN: When Eddie first started Taking Back Sunday, Jesse Lacey was playing bass. So he was in Brand New and playing bass in Taking Back Sunday. And the Rookie Lot was Brand New before Brand New.
VINNIE CARUANA: The Rookie Lot was Brian, Garrett, and Jesse from Brand New, and Brandon Reilly, who went on to join the Movielife. So it was almost Brand New’s lineup.
They were good. They were a heavily-influenced-by-Lifetime kind of young punk band.
ANTHONY RANERI: After the Rookie Lot broke up, I went to Brian Lane’s house when we were still in high school, or at least I was. He probably wasn’t anymore. He and Garrett had a band called Hometown Hero. And there was this guy Mark, I think, singing and then they needed a guitar player. So I went and I played guitar for like two practices, tried to get it together. And then they were like, you know, we’re gonna have Jesse from the Rookie Lot and this guy Vin come in and we’re gonna start a new band. And then that became Brand New.
NICK GHANBARIAN: Brand New’s first show was at the Garden City bowling alley, opening for Silent Majority.
SCOTTIE REDIX: So Brand New, because those dudes are players, they put in the time and they were always rehearsing, always playing shows. Taking Back Sunday also were players but they didn’t always sound good. They didn’t sound refined or polished. It was almost like they were putting it together as the shows came, you know what I mean?
VINNIE CARUANA: They weren’t very good when they first started. I went to see them play and I thought it was bad. Then I told someone I thought it was bad and Taking Back Sunday heard about it, and Movielife and them were like little kid archrivals for a while.
EDDIE REYES: It was a vibe we got when we first started out, a lot of bands didn’t take us seriously.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: It took a couple years for the people that liked us to start bands. Silent Majority really didn’t put out a lot of music. We weren’t a full-time band, we’d go play a weekend every now and then. We never really went for it, you know what I mean? It wasn’t like everybody was quitting their jobs and saying, let’s do this. Some of us were going to college at the time. I was working full-time.
NICK GHANBARIAN: It was always like, “How do we get people to hear us?” In the late nineties, there wasn’t an internet to support it yet. There would be five hundred to a thousand people at a show—“If this many people on Long Island like us, we’re a good band. We’re really good. How do we do this in every city in America?” We just couldn’t figure it out in time.
We wound up breaking up for very cliché creative differences. Half the band wanted to stick with catchy, hardcore-style stuff. And then the other half of the band went to college, starting smoking weed, and getting into experimental stuff.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: The last Silent Majority show took place [on January 5, 2001] at a church where there were hardly ever shows. I think Ben from Silent Majority was a member. The band booked the show themselves. When the flyer came out, there was that feeling that it was the end of an era. But I also think a lot of people were not surprised. As the local hardcore band, they had hit their inevitable end and there really wasn’t much to do. I don’t think it ever would have made sense for them to sign to a bigger label like Vagrant.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: It was a blizzard. And the protocol back then was if it was going to snow, you’d cancel the show. But we had so much invested into doing the show that we didn’t cancel.
EDDIE REYES: It snowed really bad. And I remember being really sad they were breaking up.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: The show was in Manhasset, on the North Shore of Long Island, super hard to get to from Suffolk County, where we lived. People were getting lost and couldn’t find it. It was wild, man.
ANTHONY RANERI: It was on Shelter Rock Road somewhere. I used to pass it all the time and never got off it until I went to that last Silent Majority show, like, “Shit, is this the exit?”
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Twists and turns to get there, up on a very hilly part of the North Shore. It was dark and even the driveway to this place was up a big hill.
JUSTIN BECK: It was impossible to get up that hill.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: It was a nightmare.
JUSTIN BECK: It was a weird rich white people church in a nice part of Long Island. I had a Caravan and we’d squeeze all the people and equipment in this piece-of-shit Caravan. All I remember is trying to get up this goddamn hill to unload.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: This wasn’t a regular church you’d picture with the steeple you’d see from the street. It almost looked like a college campus and the show was in the gymnasium. Glassjaw played that show as the surprise guest.
RICH EGAN: Glassjaw was a huge influence, even though they never broke. They were royalty in that scene.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Daryl from Glassjaw made a fanzine for that show, which had an old interview he did with me and Rich from Silent Majority in it. He handed it out outside.
JUSTIN BECK: We were a generation just behind Silent Majority. They were our elders and we looked up to bands like them. But because we started kind of young, we’d been playing with them forever. So doing their last show, it’s like who are the bands that are still around? To be on the, quote, unquote, last Silent Majority show was a good bucket list.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: I wasn’t there early setting up or anything like that. I came from work to the show—it was a screen-printing shop in the morning, and then a tattoo shop from like noon to ten at night. I got out of work early to go play the show.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: The place was packed, sold out, wall-to-wall people. If I were to guess I’d say five or six hundred. It wasn’t like booking clubs where it’s like, okay, I know I’m allowed to fit two hundred people or whatever. They would allow as many people that fit and hope for the best. Every single scenester, every single person in a band . . . Every single person up front for Glassjaw and Silent Majority was such an integral person in our scene. There wasn’t a single person where it was like, “I don’t know who that is.”
ANTHONY RANERI: All of Brand New would have been there. All of Taking Back Sunday would have been there. I remember specifically hanging out with the Brand New guys. Brandon Reilly and Vinnie Caruana from the Movielife were certainly there.
SCOTTIE REDIX: We got there fairly early. We didn’t have to walk far, we got a good spot. Two of my favorite bands playing, I’m camped up on the side of the stage watching what the dudes are doing. I’ll do the crowd-surfing thing every so often but I’m watching the players, you know? Silent Majority’s last show, Glassjaw reuniting the old lineup.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: They used to be xGlassjawx, then it was the Glassjaw, and then it became just Glassjaw. Even though at the time of the show they were Glassjaw, they dressed up as the Glassjaw; that’s when they would dress up all in white T-shirts, baggy pants. And they had their early nineties lineup play.
ANTHONY RANERI: Another thing that stands out about that show is Daryl from Glassjaw went on a little rant about hipsters.
JUSTIN BECK: I don’t wanna speak for him, but that rings a bell of what was going on at the moment . . . It was like the emergence of the, quote, unquote, hipster and all these kids whose background was being into these hardcore bands, all of a sudden were acting like they were too cool for school. Kids who were total sick Glassjaw fans were like, “Wait, who are you guys?” Like, bro. You know who the fuck we are and we know you like our fucking band, but now you have this awakening with tight pants and fancy belts and snappy fingers and you just discovered the Get Up Kids or some shit and think you’re more evolved. It was kind of a nod to that. It was like the precursor to the Vice world: you’re hypercritical of social shit, you’re fucking vegetarian, but you’re eating fucking cocaine, like you’re a total fucking shithead hypocrite, get the fuck out of my face. You liked VOD six months ago, shut the fuck up, you were probably wearing JNCOs.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: It’s weird when you have hundreds of punks show up at a church because we’re pierced, we’re tattooed, everyone has dyed hair. The clothing was weird, probably a lot of big pants back then. Definitely a lot of big pants.
ANTHONY RANERI: All these shows you’d have friends of the band standing around the stage, so you’d have this semicircle back around the band but very quickly, they’d run to the front and start doing crowd control, catching crowd-surfers.
EDDIE REYES: I think that was the last time I did a backflip stage dive.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: It was our squad, a lot of the Lindenhurst people we grew up with. Sisters and brothers of people in the band. My mom was back there. There were people we knew from other states. It was the last time a lot of those people were at a show together. A kid showed up from fucking Spain. He bought a ticket and flew. I always considered us a local Long Island band, to have a kid show up from fucking Spain . . . I was like, “What? Sick.”
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: One thing I remember about Silent Majority’s set was there were so many sing-alongs. Given the fact it was their last show, it was the last chance people were going to have to scream these lyrics. So I remember the passion of everyone screaming these songs, especially “Polar Bear Club,” which is about the friends you made in the scene. Or “Cross Crowded Rooms,” which is about dating somebody you went to shows with, then breaking up with them and having to see them at shows. It was all relevant to our lives, it really hit close to home.
JUSTIN BECK: I just remember good energy. Good energy.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: Tommy, Irish dude, obsessed with U2. I remember them working “With or Without You” into the beginning of “Cross Crowded Rooms.” The end of “Cross Crowded Rooms,” “Take this finger, take this thumb, stretch them out to form a gun, point to the left side of my chest, just say bang then it’s done.” Dude, people lost their fucking minds.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: I definitely was bummed. I didn’t want the band to break up.
NICK GHANBARIAN: I was like, “We shouldn’t be breaking up right now. We’re very good. And people really like us.”
ANTHONY RANERI: It continued to snow like crazy as the night went on. And I was driving an eighties Bronco at the time, so I had to drive everybody home ’cause my Bronco did well in the snow.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: After the show, this is the rumor, the legend of how it went: this kid jumped off the stage, gets hit in the head, walks to the parking lot, and starts looking for his truck. He says to one of his buddies, “Yo, I can’t find my truck.” And his friends are like, “What are you talking about? Dude, you got rid of your truck three months ago.” So there were ten to fifteen scene kids all sitting in the waiting room till six in the morning, taking turns to see the dude that had amnesia who had no idea why he was in the hospital.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: After that show, the younger kids took it over and made the scene their own.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: That was a changing-of-the-guard moment. Because Silent Majority was really the underground of Long Island. They were never on a big label, they didn’t do massive tours, they never went to Europe. They didn’t have the aesthetic of the next wave of Long Island bands, but they had all the credibility in the world. You can name a million bands in the punk scene at that time who all credited Silent Majority as a major influence, but unless you were from Long Island or you were in a touring band and played Long Island, you didn’t know who they were.
ANTHONY RANERI: I don’t know if anybody else will tell you this from my generation of bands . . . once Bayside, Brand New, and Taking Back Sunday started happening, there was definitely animosity from certain band members of that older guard at how big our bands were getting.
People weren’t that psyched. I hate to ever say someone’s jealous of me, but it seemed like there was a bit of jealousy. Because a lot of those bands never really made it out of Long Island. There was animosity as the younger kids started getting popular.
JENN PELLY: I have this memory of going to a Hot Topic on Long Island and there were Taking Back Sunday shirts, and it did not occur to me that those shirts were available all over the country. I thought this was like when you go to the record store and there’s a local section. I thought that’s why there were Taking Back Sunday shirts at Hot Topic. It wasn’t until later that I realized that some of these bands were really famous.
EDDIE REYES: There’s a big place in my heart that wishes Silent Majority had gotten more of what they deserved. They shoulda been bigger than what they were.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: There’s a version of Life of a Spectator on vinyl and you know, it goes for like 150 bucks on eBay every now and then. Someone always sends me a link, like, “Oh look what it sold for. . . .” It’s cool though.
CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: In the past twenty years, the only reason Silent Majority has ever reunited was to benefit friends. One of our friends Rob who was in Iron Chic passed away and they did a benefit show for him. And because there was such a want to see them, there was a lot of money raised.
TOMMY CORRIGAN: Us going out opened it up for the whole early 2000s squad to come around. It put a nail in the nineties. That was it.