In their essay The Grim Emotional Legacy Of 1970s Parenting, writer Jae L asserts the idea that it was a “golden era of parenting by benevolent neglect”.
They argue that “it was entirely possible to be emotionally neglectful while appearing to the world as a model parent provided you kept a nice home and sent your children out the door fully clothed.”
So, by the time the ’80s rolled around, it’s reasonable to assume that there was a generation of emotionally battered, self-reliant young adults who’d grown up with a resistance to authority baked into their DNA. And look at that, the California punk scene was full of their swinging limbs.
Hailing from Venice Beach, Suicidal Tendencies had been a hardcore band for just a few years when they recorded their self-titled debut album.
While Mike Muir has previously described his childhood as “fortunate,” he cast a wider net when writing the lyrics for Institutionalized. Clocking in at 3:50, his half-spoken, half-shouted words help create a spiralling panic attack of a song which was composed by their then-bassist Louiche Mayorga.
The recording – which also featured guitarist Grant Estes and drummer Amery Smith, and was produced by legendary skateboarding and music photographer Glen E. Friedman – would appeal to every teenager who’d experienced a complete breakdown in communicating with their parents and had nowhere to channel their hormonal rage.
In a 1983 interview with Maximum Rocknroll, Muir explained the real-life interaction which inspired the song and why the need to have a Pepsi features so prominently in the lyrics.
“I got it from this little kid named Howie, who’s 12 years old,” he said. “He used to hang out with us. He lives up here now. It was just funny he was saying ‘Man, I told my mom to give me a Coke, and she wouldn’t give me one. Wow, I don’t know why. Why?’ I just put that in there because I thought it was amusing. It all relates to having problems with parents and when they can’t deal with you, they say ‘I’ll have you [put] in an institution.’
It all relates to having problems with parents and when they can’t deal with you
Mike Muir
“I know about 10 or 15 of my friends have been, and it’s all a situation where their parents just are tired with dealing with them,” he continued. “They’re not saying, ‘OK, this is the way you are and let’s try to figure it out.’ They say. ‘It’s too much of a bother, we’ll just stick him in an institution.’ It’s saying just because you can’t understand the way a person is doesn’t mean they’re crazy. It’s just a cop-out: stick him in an institution.”
When the song was released as a single, US DJ Rodney Bingenheimer played it on his KROQ show.
“He said to one of the other top DJs, ‘You’ve got to play this song, just play it!’,” Muir told Metal Hammer. “They played it and the phones lit up, but one of the people at the top said, ‘This isn’t music. We can’t play that!’ It’s funny, because they’re supposed to be alternative.”
“A little while later I went into a 7-Eleven and they were playing KROQ, and Institutionalized came on,” he continued. “There were some older college chicks there. I thought they were gonna freak out and tell them to turn the fucking radio off! They were just like, ‘You hear this? I like it!’ I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ So, the supposed tastemakers got it wrong.”
The radio play led to a feature on the MTV show The Cutting Edge, a weekly alternative show which ran from 1983 until 1987.
“People got bummed when we were on MTV,” Muir told the Hard Times zine in 1984. “I asked them, ‘Did you like it, did you think it was cool?’ and they said, ‘It would have been cool if it wasn’t on MTV.’
“When we were on there, for some people it was the first time they’d ever seen anything like us,” he continued. “I think it was the best thing that’s ever been on MTV! It’s a helluva lot better to see Suicidal Tendencies on there than it is to see Duran Duran.”
In the same interview, Muir mentions that the band were going to make their first-ever video using their own money.
“The thing about a lot of videos is that, you know, you watch MTV and the video has nothing to do with the words to the song,” said Muir. “In a sense, Institutionalized is made for a video because the story’s already there.”
The now-iconic clip features Muir mouthing the lyrics directly to the camera, becoming more stressed and agitated as the song’s tempo gradually picks up and his skater friends unhelpfully perform ollies and kickflips around him.
I’m screwed up now, but not as screwed up!
Mike Muir
At 35 seconds into the video, Slayer frontman Tom Araya gives Muir a half-hearted shove and wanders off, presumably off to write a new, fast song about the devil.
Donating their services free of charge, Jack Nance (Henry Spencer in Eraserhead) and Mary Woronov (Principal Evelyn Togar in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) portray Muir’s exasperated parents, who, after attempting to lock up their agitated son at home, sentence him to a life in a “white shirt with long sleeves” in an institution.
All he wanted was a Pepsi. Now, Muir can probably get a can of pop whenever he wants, but can still relate to the young man who wrote the lyrics decades earlier.
“When I was 18 I was going, ‘When I was 16 I was screwed up!’ and when I was 21 I was going, ‘When I was 18 I was screwed up!’ and when I was 25 I was going, ‘When I was 21 I was screwed up!’,” he told Metal Hammer in 2020. “I look back and I can say that I’m screwed up now, but not as screwed up! But that first album is a great record and I’m proud of what we did. When we did that record there wasn’t really an audience for what we were doing. Selling 5,000 copies was a big deal. You just did what you did and it was a surprise if anyone else liked it!”
