Journal, Diary, & Blogging / Punk Rock Epitaph
I remember so much from my youth, too much sometimes . . .
I remember the alienation, the paranoia, the distrust and misgivings of a world which seemed only to delight in the destruction of a future that was rightfully mine.
I remember feeling alive and yet hopelessly fragile, strikingly contrasted to the usual cliché of youthful invincibility.
I remember being alternately loathed and loved for my values, or lack thereof.
I remember the police bringing dogs into my school, sniffing away at my rights.
I remember feeling unable to be an active participant in what was generally accepted as society and setting out to find something I felt I could be a part of.
I remember the first day I found that something, that dysfunctional family that made me feel at home . . . and I miss it, in a melancholy sort of way
A time when having a Mohawk or, God forbid, dyeing your hair primary colors elicited a harsh beating from any of the opposing sub cultural cliché’s of the era. At constant war with just about everyone you came into contact with, muttered epithets and curt looks of disgust.
You’d always know when a thumping was going to go down, there always was the ever-present van or truck full of idiots circling the block. Blasting their Boston or some other overproduced garbage on cheap 6×9 speakers. Bellowing taunts, casting aspersions as to our sexual orientation or our parent’s genetic makeup and relation to each other . . .
I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there will ever know just how dangerous it was, just how much of the fear we suffered.
Just because we looked crazed. Rabid. Different.
Staying up way past our bedtimes discovering how to drink, smoke, dose, shoot, snort, crush, swallow, lick, suck, screw… Screw it all, loud fast rules, locals only, fuck shit up, support your scene, resist censorship, beat the bastards.
Boots, braces, bleach, the buzz of hair clippers thrumming away in someone’s garage or their parent’s modern kitchen. Hoping their mom didn’t come home early from her latchkey second shift to find hair sheared in hideous clumps everywhere. Her oh-so-special child looking like one of those horrible kids in the news. Or on that one episode of Quincy, M.E. last Wednesday at 8:00 p.m.
Wasn’t there a report in Newsweek about this new threat, this punk rock menace? I heard it happened to the Thompson boy down the block and they had him put away for smoking a whole bag of acids. Half of the scene was in mental institutions, the other half escaping. Unless you were one of those kids whose parents just didn’t give a damn anyways . . .
V.F.W. halls became our second homes, bordered by burned out buildings and railroad trestles, deep in the ghettoes towards the East. Those old men let us in to have our adventures, our triumphs, our accidents. All without hassle, most of the time anyway. I guess it only makes sense—that men who have seen the brutality of war would let us have our gigs there, let us drink there; let us be. They always seemed to view us with a detached sense of disinterest, drinking their beer and cheap whiskey that we would steal when their backs were turned.
Well, except maybe for that time when Spencer broke that mirror with his fist, or maybe the time Skylar set his face on fire while he was tripping. He was wailing like some kind of animal, flailing about in this grotesque way, demanding to be let into the bathroom to see his charred face. Or possibly the time we beat the hell out of those Nazi skinheads, descending on them quick and furious, the whole room going violent all at once in their direction. Slamming the doors on their shiny bald domes on the way out of the club for suckerpunching people in the pit. We DO take care of our own after all.
The metal heads hated the punks hated the preppies hated the goths hated the skinheads hated the hippies. Actually, we all hated the hippies…
Were you there the night that kid brought his grandma to the show, I think it was 7 Seconds and Verbal Abuse at Franklin Ave. and she had a heart attack? I still remember her there, in the light rain, lying on the gravel at the entrance to the club. Clutching chest, surrounded by punks, almost serene amidst the chaos closing ranks around her. Strange to see, this refuse of humanity as we were, girls crying and guys offering help in our own freakish ways. Then the ambulance roared up, scaring the shit out of everyone. Two E.M.T.’s grabbed her and sped off into the neighborhood dark just past the parking lot. Still can’t figure out how it happened or how it turned out.
One thing’s for sure though . . . I know that the next morning Dave borrowed every cent that he could, along with Deb’s Volvo, put in the worn cassette of Damaged that was ever-present. Blasted through Uptown streets in search of cheap Mickey’s Big Mouths and nickel bags of dirt weed copped from some old black guy named “Midnight” near the Mississippi river.
We did that more often than not upon waking most days, which is unless we were at my mothers’ house on Saturday mornings still frying from the previous nights’ trip, waiting for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse to send us out in grand fashion. We would blare the DK’s during the commercials, making my little sister scream and swear she was going to tell Mom about the weed we were shooting up all over the place.
Getting trapped in grain silos on the river past the docks, in the middle of nowhere on some fruitless quest, on hopped trains moving way too fast for comfort, in the back of squealing squad cars, worse yet, some rich girls’ bathroom when Daddy comes home early to check on his little girl.
Crashing every party, even the one’s thrown by friends . . . especially the ones thrown by friends. Family dog in the microwave, refrigerator sacked and pillaged, leaving liquor and medicine cabinets with compromised security. More still—locked in someone’s’ closet dark with other inebriated casualties, peaking and freaking. I couldn’t find the walls and from what English I could make out, neither could anyone else.
That was the night Randy took something like 30 hits of everything on top of everything else, terrorized us with civil war swords and table legs, and then took us out for doughnuts and coffee. We watched the clouds stretch across the sky in long winding trails of blues and grays and ate our doughnuts in silent deference.
And nary a cop in sight . . .
Driving headlong into oblivion in a beater Gran Torino or just to L.S.U. campus to score a bag of smoke, Tiger Tacos’ expelled violently out the passenger side, too big of a hit man, too big. Screaming obscenities in the early morning out of duct taped windows at sleeping suburbanites . . . we knew everything sucked, as we put it and had to find ways to alleviate the crushing mediocrity and boredom, so we did.
Laughing . . . everything was funny in its own private way, everything was chaos, and everything seemed infinite. Girls in the slam pit, we suicide slam anyway, someone will help you up, don’t worry . . . watch out for that guy though, crazy fucker wore his spurs into the pit and it looks like he’s gonna stage dive. You see this one gash here? That’s gonna leave a mark; stings too.
Fuck the pigs, their system, all authority, your god, this country, and of course, you. F uck it all.
Man, I’d swear Raymond dosed me in my sleep last night with at least 1000 mcg. of blotter L.S.D. I awoke in a psychedelic frenzy, to a raging punk rock house party. Peanut butter on the walls, cigarette carcasses on the floor, broken glass everywhere of course, all replete with a soundtrack courtesy of the Butthole Surfers.
It was a risky proposition falling asleep like that, you’d wake piled with garbage or to find inverted crosses shaved into your legs. All in good fun depending on how hung-over you were at the time. And by the way, who was the asshole who shaved a 666 on the dogs head? Probably the same comedian that dosed the cat with . . . something. Poor bastard still hasn’t come from behind the armoire.
It was like that all the time at the Armpit, but then every city had at least one “punk house” as they were called, and they were all the same.
Oh shit, someone called the cops; guess Catch-22 shouldn’t have played “Fuck the neighbors” quite so early in the set. Strange part is, we wound up taking pictures with the pigs after they shut us down.
”My wife’s not gonna believe this, real punk rockers!”
Speaking of which, did you hear that the pigs thumped the crap out of Kenny last night? Something about that giant Corrosion of Conformity skull painted on the hood of his car. It was right near where the Misfits got busted for robbing graves down near the interstate, I think.
Dude, only six people showed up for that Scratch Acid show at Jed’s and the band was absolutely terrifying! Sick man, it was sick.
Broken down in a graffitoed VW Bug on the outskirts of town . . . screw it, walk home, and call it even. Hoping against hope that you didn’t get jumped, or hassled by the man, or even worse slog home in a torrential downpour.
Pizza boxes, cigarette packs, hair product boxes, hair, rolling papers, half empty beers, contraceptives, old crumpled gig flyers, underwear, a pair of boots and your best friend, all heaped on your bedroom floor, in no particular order.
Bad habits, bad kids, bad times, bad vibes . . . Bad Brains on the turntable, forces me to bounce off the walls, trashing my room, flyers fulfilling their namesake in my wake. Or better yet, trashing YOUR room in a youthful display of wild abandon and punk rock insanity. Ah, just tell your parents, if they are still married, that I did it, they always think it was me anyway . . . The quintessential bad influence.
They said they didn’t serve our kind in there, so we quickly exited . . . something about us stealing cigarettes (We were).
Nothing good on the radio. Ever. Buy more vinyl. Collector’s editions, limited pressings, signed and numbered, handsceened covers, bootlegs. The search for the perfect t-shirt.
Living on mac & cheese, dying from too much Top Ramen.
No school, save for that fabled school of hard knocks.
The bastard children of Reaganomics, raised under an atomic threat.
So anyway, she’s not really mine, nobody is really anybody’s here, you know? What are you doing tonight, by the way? Wanna hang out and listen to records and get loaded? My Mom is never home and I’ve got some pills . . .
Shit, we’re outta beer, bum me a dollar . . . no, strike that; make it two cuz I gotta get into the show later unless I can sneak in of course. Just lick the stamp they give you and transfer it to someone else, just make sure to do it while the ink is still wet.
When we got to the show, it was packed—people everywhere! Didn’t know the Virul Nihils were this popular . . . shit, I didn’t know this many people were in the scene in the first place. It’s getting to where everyone has a Mohawk now . . . Wasn’t that guy a metal head last week? And when did Marc become a skinhead? And where did those Goths come from? Not sure if this crossover is such a good thing.
I couldn’t cheat the stamp at the show and I didn’t have the balls to rush the door. Jessica was working there, and she could definitely kick my ass! At least I got to buy some stickers from their roadies outside.
I just hope my mom believes me about the broken lamp. I swear I’ll never let crazy Tommy in my house ever again, at least not on so much angel dust. Bad idea, having a party at 2:00 a.m. anyway.
No values, no Nazis’, no bogarts, no surrender, no rules, no fascist U.S.A., no future, no more…
It was one fist in the air, one middle finger pointed in all directions. Flailing wildly against everything acceptable, everything wholesome and pure. Thumbing our collective noses to convention, moral majority, to society in general. A form of dire communication that all was not well, in their land of promise, that their children were dissatisfied with what was being left for them. Creating a state of mind and projecting it outward in the most forceful, unavoidable manner possible. A pox, a chancre on the lip of American moral majority, toxic and ugly to admit to.
It was a systematic removal of pre-conditioned negative dogmatic mechanisms. A self-imposed exile of sorts, save for the others’ just like you. Just as the hippies failed to do, but without the trappings of self importance, of hubris. We were trying to apply force to relieve pressure, paradoxically enough it worked for a little while.
We were doing something important, although I can’t remember exactly what that was . . .
Start a band, start a fanzine, start a record label, start a music club, start booking bands, start a revolution, start a life, not just an existence.
Anyway, we’re almost all gone, my dysfunctional family and I, my old school punk rock brothers and sisters. Moved on, passed away, dried up, sold out, bought in, broke down, shut off. Fading into the stuff of legend, expose’ books, documentaries, websites, loving remembrances in fanzines. Some of us are still here, although we don’t talk as much as we used to, or at all . . . guess sometimes too much is enough.
All I know is that I had fun, some of the best in my life, and I’m still here. And I know that things were just different then, what happened in that time could never happen again. No matter how much the mall hawks ready-made punk gear, the prefab radio station squawks about the new boy-band cum rebellious youth gone wrong, or the Mtv gushes over the new batch of recycled riffs and postures and politics, the truth is its over. The climate is different, the ruptured innocence washed away as well as the very real danger. A fair amount of people I know don’t admit to being there, some just try to forget, cast it away as youthful indiscretion and peer pressure . . .
And me? I’d never trade those days, but then I’d never go back.
Some things are best left done, some things better left to the past . . .
So anyway, what was I talking about? I can’t remember . . .
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You almost sound like you miss it. I think i lived the same life for a bit in the u.k. dear god it was grim. I don’t think I took anywhere near as many mind altering substances as you seem to. Looking bacj on it now I felt like a cartoon character. Living in a squat stealing cheese, burning someones fence when it got cold. Vinyl all round the walls of the room. A record coolection looked so much more impressive those days. hahaha.
These times all you hear is I havent seen ‘smeg’ for a while. Oh yeah he has moved into property management.
Suppose you can’t be young for ever. I would have liked to hear more about the music from you ( You seem to have great taste). I know it’s probably been done to death like you say but….anyhow I liked what you had to say good read thanks.
some bits i liked:
Bad habits, bad kids, bad times, bad vibes . . . Bad Brains on the turntable – like this line ‘tis v.funny
The bastard children of Reaganomics, raised under an atomic threat. – u reckon growing up inthe a shadow of
missile silos made everyone crazy. The establishment was crazier than me.
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