The speakers cut out and all eyes turn to the stage. A tall figure with long, wavy hair dressed in a blue hoodie with the words “American Hardcore” on the front, climbs the worn wooden stairs. With the exception of a few clanking glasses, the entire congress of tattooed, forgotten souls look on as the charmingly frazzled man addresses the crowd. “Tonight we’re here to celebrate drinking beer, getting laid and kicking ass. We’re here to celebrate hair metal,” he yells.

Ten hours earlier I sit in the Sheraton hotel lobby watching the white-collar swine scurry to and fro. They barely notice the ringing of the fire alarm and electronic voice advising “This is just a test.” This is perhaps the least hardcore environment to meet up with one of the foremost musical historians of the forgotten hardcore music scene. But maybe that’s what it’s all about ­– the irony. Blush’s work is filled with stories of life after music. Who’s to say the white-collared men of this lobby and the skinheads of the former hardcore scene aren’t one and the same.

Blush grew up ten miles from the suburbs of New Jersey. He was an average teen raised on Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. In 1979, when Blush was fifteen, he went on an exchange to England. When he got there people were saying punk rock was over. The Sex Pistols had just broken up and everyone told him he’d missed it. But he caught a few shows and was hooked. He came back with a newfound respect for music. “I was a fan and there were three kids in my town who knew what this stuff was,” the journalist says as he sits in his hotel room.

At this point, most other kids in the town were into fixing cars and listening to metal. They didn’t subscribe to the anti-establishment style of music and outcast those who listened to it. “They wanted to kick your ass for wearing a button,” Blush says remembering high school. “It just made me more and more into it.” But it was never really his music. Blush had come too late to bask in the teenage angst of punk-rock. Instead he was treated to an endless legion of Sex Pistol knock offs and Clash clones. And then it all changed. In 1980, Blush went to George Washington College in D.C. for Political Science. He expected to find a music scene much like the one in New York. “It was definitely different,” Blush says. “What was happening in D.C. was a new kind of music.”

On St. Valentine’s Day, 1981, when Blush was in his freshmen year of college, he went to see a show at the 9:30 club in Washington. The band was Black Flag. The young political science major’s life was changed forever. “That was it. I had discovered my version of punk,” the writer says. He loved all the other music but hardcore was his. From then on, Blush’s life was devoted to hardcore. He became a promoter and helped to book touring bands. “The first time I did it, I booked the Dead Kennedys in the school cafeteria and almost got thrown out of school,” Blush says with a grin. He went on to promote 20 shows and even managed a band called No Trend that toured with the Dead Kennedys. “I saw all these things, I experienced the whole thing. I was in the middle of it,” says Blush as he glances out the window in his hotel room.

But it was short lived. Hardcore didn’t make it out of the eighties. Groups disappeared and like punk rock, were replaced by cheap imitators. It was time to let go. “Somewhere in the mid-eighties, like everyone else in the book, I bailed on it. I just moved on. I got into new things.” Blush worked as a Journalist in New York where he was an editor at Paper magazine and ran his own magazine, Seconds. He was there at the height of the Grunge explosion led by Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney. “I knew all the grunge bands because they were all hardcore kids,” says Blush. I can tell from his misdemeanor this is a man who lives and breathes music. Not one to namedrop, he mentions hanging out with Mudhoney and Soundgarden as though they’re nobodies. “I was there at the heart of that,” Blush says. “I just kind of burnt out on music after that." Blush wandered through the nineties, distancing himself from the alternative music polluting the airwaves. It was a half-decade littered with boy bands and young girls in clothes too tight for their age.

“I realized this was a true lost civilization,” Blush says. “Nirvana came onto the scene and it was like the Ice Age – They all died.” The journalist found it strange how everything about hair metal that made it so popular and big didn’t exist in today’s music scene. “There are no remnants of it.”

With only a short time left I ask the musical archaeologist about the current music scene.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Blush says. “ There are a lot of good bands and a lot of killer records out there but I don’t see a scene. I don’t see a movement happening.” “I might be mistaken but I thought rock and roll was part of a revolutionary fervor of kids. And that’s what I want to see.” He notes that a music scene is never about the music, it’s about the scene and the fans that push it forward. “Hardcore was this idea that you’d give up everything to spread the word of. It was like this religious cult,” Blush says before pointing out the similarities in hair metal. “People that were into hair metal, especially the girls, they gave their life to this stuff.”