Sounding Off in Suburbia

Pat ``Hit Me With Your Best Shot'' Benatar calls it idyllic. Lou Reed, of Velvet Underground fame, has only bitter memories. Folksinger Oscar Brand extols its natural beauty, and piano man Billy Joel sings of the dreams and frustrations of its ordinary people.

In the last four decades, Long Island has been home to a vast array of popular musicians who run the stylistic gamut from big-band and bubblegum pop to rap and heavy metal. Many of the musicians grew up here. Others migrated from New York City to raise their families. Several got out as soon as they could.

Love it or leave it, Long Island has influenced virtually all of these musicians and, in many cases, their sound.

There's no single reason why Long Island boasts so many famous pop musicians. It's never had a nationally known, grassroots music scene along the lines of a Seattle or an Austin or Athens, Ga., although it's had its mini-scenes, including an exploding hip-hop movement in the 1980s that produced some of the nation's most influential rappers.

What Long Island does have, of course, is proximity to New York City, one of the biggest pop music meccas. It also has an enormous number of kids who are just affluent enough to buy turntables and amps and electric guitars, and whose parents usually are lucky enough to have a garage or a basement where they can plug them in. Above all, it is suburbia, producing youths whose experiences, when they sing about them, strike a chord with similar youths in similar housing tracts across the nation.

While many local musicians' positive experiences have made their way into song, some of their most potent music has been produced by kids who considered their suburban surroundings a sinkhole of conformity.

``You've got a whole lot of frustrated, suburban blue-collar kids who want to get out of Long Island, which is really about as quintessentially suburban wasteland as you can get,'' theorized Dee Snider, who was the lead singer of the now defunct Long Island-based metal-glitter band Twisted Sister. ``And out of this frustrated blue-collar hell, a lot of great music has grown.''

``There is a facelessness to Long Island, especially on the South Shore, with the huge developments, the tract housing, the two cars in the garage and the one tree,'' continued Snider, who grew up in Baldwin and now performs with a band called Sick Mutha --- . ``I mean, I clearly remember literally just sitting on my porch as a teenager and wanting to scream, thinking, `God, there's got to be more than this.'''

To create more, Snider formed Twisted Sister, which prided itself on excessive makeup, garish cross-dressing, head-banging riffs and intentionally dumb but baiting lyrics. The band was a fixture at clubs like Hammerheads in Levittown before becoming a nationwide sensation in 1984 with ``We're Not Gonna Take It,'' a music video in which Snider throws an actor portraying his hard-line, Korean War-vet father out of his bedroom window for trying to make him clean his room.

As a skinny, unpopular kid at Baldwin High School (class of '73), Snider found that making rock music not only was a satisfying form of rebellion, it also was a way to be noticed by his peers.

Over at Island Trees High School, Plainedge resident Eddie Mahoney, who later became Eddie Money of ``Two Tickets to Paradise'' fame, came to the same conclusion with his high school rock band The Grapes of Wrath (``We actually read the classics in those days,'' Money quips of his band's name).

As a young child, Money was the lead singer in his church choir and loved to belt out the songs from ``Carousel'' and ``Oklahoma!,'' which he learned off records that his parents brought home after theater outings in Manhattan. But being in a rock band was far better. ``It gave me an opportunity to be in front of all these people without being the star of the football team or the smartest kid in the math class,'' Money recalled. ``And all the girls loved me.''

Once Billy Joel started playing in his first band, the Echoes, in 1964, the girls started loving the short, scrappy kid from the Hicksville side of the Levittown housing tracts, too.

``The first gig I remember getting paid for was at Holy Family [Church in Hicksville]. I had a crush on a girl named Virginia,'' Joel told a Newsday reporter last year. ``I was on stage, and she was looking at me. It was great - it was the coolest thing I could have done.''

John Tesh, the king of clean-cut New Age music, played organ in a rock band at Garden City High School with the same motive. ``I ended up getting into music because it might be a way somebody would think I actually wasn't a geek,'' he told Newsday last year. But music didn't pave the way to acceptance for Tesh, who as a sophomore was 6-foot-5, with size 14 feet and braces. ``I ended up being in the hottest band, but I was still the geek,'' he said.

Lou Reed didn't win adulation until he moved to Manhattan and co-founded The Velvet Underground, a band whose songs about transvestites, drugs and death represented the antithesis of the prototypical suburban experience.

``I hated living there,'' Reed said of his childhood in Freeport. Reed won't talk about his childhood experiences, which reportedly included being subjected to shock treatment when he was 17 for what his parents considered depressive and erratic behavior. Instead, he steers inquirers toward his 1989 song ``Small Town.''

``When you're growing up in a small town/and you're having a nervous breakdown/you think that you'll never escape it,'' the lyrics go. `` . . . Bad skin, bad eyes - gay and fatty/people look at you funny when you're in a small town . . . There's only one good use for a small town . . . You hate it and you know you'll have to leave.''

Mariah Carey, one of the best-selling pop stars of the '90s, also felt like an outsider during her childhood on Long Island, where she moved 13 times in 14 years before winding up in Greenlawn. She grew up poor, of mixed race - her father was a black Venezuelan and her mother was Irish-American - and the child of divorced parents. She did the minimum at Harborfields High School, instead spending her time writing songs and singing - her mother, a vocal coach who'd sung with the New York City Opera, started giving her voice lessons when she was 4.

``If there were difficult times when I was growing up, I got through them by being an optimist, praying and hoping, at the risk of sounding cliched and corny, that through music I would rise above the whole thing,'' she said in the February issue of Rolling Stone magazine.