Road least traveled

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 10, 2000 by Arthur Jones

From punk past to D.C. ministry

Mark Andersen took the least traveled road among the roads less traveled. He came to Catholicism by way of punk rock. It's been some journey, its stages marked by concert posters, newspaper clippings and personal struggles that he recounts with irony and humor.

Today, seated on a tilted office chair -- tilted because it's missing a wheel -- Andersen, 41, tall, fit, with close-cropped hair, transformed through a series of conversions, works with the elderly poor of Washington. He assists people in the depressed Shaw district with simple things, like getting groceries. He coordinates volunteers, finding people to telephone or visit elderly people who live alone. He also helps them in efforts that are considerably more complex, like threading their way through bureaucracies that provide essential aid.

On the wall of Andersen's office at Emmaus Services for the Aging there's a black-and-white poster from a Patti Smith concert. It's an appropriate poster, an icon of the path he's traveled, for, in a sense, Smith was there when Andersen's journey started in his bewildered teens.

He pinpoints the moment well, the moment his journey started. Its memory is recorded in his work-in-progress autobiography, Dance of Days:

A prairie wind blew the remnants of autumn's leaves down the streets of Plentywood, Montana. A longhaired kid in dusty jeans and cowboy boots, crouching against the frigid wind, stepped through the doorway into a tiny record store.

The heat of the cramped room that was Garrick's Records and Tapes caused the boy's wire-rimmed glasses to cloud over. After taking off his work gloves and wiping the haze from the lenses, he shuffled through the bins, pausing to pick up one particular LP. The boy studied a stark black and white photograph of a woman who had a defiant gaze and disheveled hair. As he did, excitement flickered in his eyes, a faint smile crossing his face. It was the record he had been looking for.

The year was 1975. The album was Patti Smith's "Horses." The kid was me. I was 16 years old, taking a break from hauling grain to the nearby Farmers' Union Elevator. The youngest child in a farm family, I lived out in the countryside on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, fifteen miles from the nearest town or paved road.

I had grown up immersed in conservative Christian pieties and love-it-or-leave-it patriotism. By the mid'70s I was estranged from those beliefs, feeling suffocated by the narrowness of my world. From what I knew, Patti Smith seemed like a kindred spirit. When I first played "Horses" on my plastic dime-store stereo, it took only Smith's deep sandpaper voice and the lines -- "Jesus died for somebody's sins/but not mine" -- to know that I had been right.

From Patti Smith to the Kinks' "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," Andersen said that he found music that told him he was not alone, that the pain he felt was real, that the world was insane, not him.

A quarter-century later, experience has him told he was right about that, too. The world is insane. Long before then he'd decided he stood for sanity.

He became the bogeyman in every Reaganite's nightmare: a political science master of arts motivated by punk's hard-driving sound whose lyrics attacked conventional society and expressed alienation and anger. Andersen's vehicle for expressing his rebellion was Positive Force, a long-lived Arlington, Va., punk rock collective he helped found.

"Early punk rock was about social transformation," said Andersen, riffling through desk drawer files for more news clips, "and Positive Force was one of the very first organized expressions of this impetus, this spirit in the punk rock world."

The impetus brought the FBI snooping around in the 1980s when the collective papered Washington with "Experts Agree: Meese is a Pig" posters. (Edwin Meese III was Reagan's attorney general.)

The collective, only now closing the doors of its house -- though not its organization -- was devoted to fundamental social change and youth empowerment. Its motto came from the lost kid on the prairie: "Isolation is the biggest barrier to change."

`Something that's true'

Andersen grew up isolated, he said. "I was facing a lifetime of manual labor. I didn't fit into any of the social groups because I didn't drink or use other drugs, I wasn't an athlete, I wasn't part of the Christian kids anymore. Basically I had this music and certain gifts that were intellectual gifts, mostly." But those weren't highly valued, he said, in Sheridan County, Mont.

High schooler Andersen went from wrestling grain into elevators to wrestling with political science and history at Montana State.

Groups like X-Ray Spex, The Jam, Generation X, Slouxsie and the Banshees, Stiff Little Fingers, all went with him on his dime store stereo.

All the while, music remained the touch-of-a-button hard-driving reassurance Andersen needed long after he'd gone through the surly-at-home, semi-suicidal ponderings, years beyond the shoplifting charge and the other scrapes.