Oxbow's Eugene Robinson chokes rowdy concertgoers

While Robinson excelled at verbal combat, his entry into the word of competitive fighting started badly. "There was the first one where I got my ass kicked badly by a judo guy when I was 9 years old, which was wonderfully humiliating because I never even got to throw a punch," he says. "Because every time I stood up, the guy threw me down." Those gathered to watch were "laughing uproariously" throughout the spectacle. And there was his second fight, which he won with a sole punch. "And I was like, 'Oh, yes! Now this makes sense to me!'"

Knowing when not to fight served Robinson well as a teenager — such as when, at age 13, he upset the girlfriend of a member of the Jolly Stompers gang as school was ending for the day. He describes the scene that ensued as straight out of the gang movie The Warriors. "And what is the expression about the greater part of valor? I hid in the bathroom!" he laughs. "Until at such time I thought it was appropriate to get the fuck out of there."

Calling that a "completely defensible action," he offers this survival tip: Next time you are in a building surrounded by people who want to kill you, you hide, too.

Robinson, however, was no thug. He worked in Manhattan as a disco dance instructor, specializing in the Latin Hustle. On other nights he'd head to CBGB and other clubs to see punk shows. After graduating from high school, Robinson moved across the country to attend Stanford University. Norman says she discouraged her son from trying out for the football team because she was worried about him getting hurt — he joined the rugby team instead. "He's always enjoyed the rough and tumble," she says with a sigh.

During his time at Stanford, Robinson began playing with the punk band Whipping Boy. Although he started out as a biology major, he switched to communications and worked as a journalist for the Stanford Daily newspaper. He also published a magazine named The Birth of Tragedy.

Robinson struggled with college debt and was at one point so broke that he says a friend talked him into eating grass (or, more specifically, seed) from the backyard. "It tasted grassy, you know, like you would expect grass to taste," he says. "It wasn't very filling, though." After that, he opted to pursue a career in corporate media. He suspects his job hunting was helped by the fact that this was largely the pre-Internet era, before potential employers were easily able to find details about his punk rock alter ego.

Robinson also dipped into acting. He appeared in the notoriously bad 1987 Bill Cosby superhero movie Leonard Part 6, playing a thuggish guard to the villainous Medusa Johnson (Gloria Foster), a vegetarian activist out to take over the world with the help of attack frogs and man-eating rabbits. From playing a tattooed dude in a Miller beer commercial (directed by Gus Van Sant) to a bank robber in an industrial video as well as an international arms dealer in the campy Las Apassionadas, a short film about mercenary soldiers who start fighting for art's sake, Robinson was cast, not surprisingly, as a tough bad guy.

Still, he hated the "touchy-feely" and fake aspects of acting, and contends that actors aren't real artists. Music, however, was a different story — as he insists, "Punk rock saved my life!" Robinson may have been surrounded by Young Republicans at Stanford, but "in the 1980s we had the hardcore explosion, and it was a good time to be in California. That's the only reason I stayed."

That decision resulted in a cult following for the nearly-two-decade-old Oxbow, which was named the greatest art-rock band in the world by Vice magazine. Robinson says he originally designed the band to be a solo project — or, more accurately, "a well-crafted suicide note" — but teamed up with Niko Wenner and the band. "There's so much to [Robinson] and Oxbow," says Mark Thompson of Hydra Head Records, which released the band's recent album, The Narcotic Story. "They've done lots of living, and I love that. That's what drew me further and further into them — they've got so much history."

Robinson's friend and former co-worker at EQ magazine, Matt Harper, says those roots in the punk scene may have contributed to Robinson's desire to defend himself. He suspects some of the rich white kids have a "look at the big black guy onstage" fascination with the singer.