GI Joe, Vomiting, Cones

As a teenager, my room was a strange, eclectic disaster. Like a lot of lower-middle class families, new furniture was not something we could afford to buy. I had a dresser that I had from the age of 6 or so, the bed was my Step-mom's bed from college, and one of my lamps was a pirate ship, of all things. To most kids, this would have been the source of many frustrations and whining about wanting more grown-up furniture, I'm sixteen, Dad, not four, why can't I have a new dresser, I saw one on Miami vice that was real cool, this sucks, you don't even care...In our house, the answer to this petty, childish self-absorption was pretty simple: get a damn job. But I was not your average kid (nor were most of my friends) and I didn't really care about getting a new Camaro or the latest fashion, much less a slick new dresser. I was a Punk-rock kid, a do-it-yourself deviant, a destroyer and a creator of my own environment.

I cut up hundreds of magazines and newspapers, pasting mashed up layers to the wall: a picture of Jon Bon Jovi with giant lemur eyes cut from a biology text stuck on his face, ransom style cut-out letters spelling the words "I LIKE VOMITING AND LONG WALKS ON THE BEACH" pasted over a photo of Christie Brinkley, a pair of squids replacing Jesse Helm's hands, Black Flag bars spray painted directly on the wall surrounded by show fliers, a Barbie head nailed to the wall. I had glued a couple of dozen GI Joe arms and legs all over the lampshade of my pirate lamp, transforming it into an electrified, nightmarish sea urchin. It was the nightmare of a person stuck somewhere between boyhood and the stark, frightening prospect of adulthood.

It was also the essence of Punk ethos, the ratty fabric of chaos, the blurred scenery of the Hardcore mind. It was unintentionally reflective of the turmoil and pain and violence of a teenager's angst, an imposition of my will on my environment. It was, as so many of the bullshit, pop-psychiatric parent's guides of the era will tell you, my expression of the changes I was experiencing. But really, I just liked it. It looked cool and it freaked "normal" people out.

Punk is doing for yourself, no mater what that may be. Don't have a Minor Threat shirt? Make one. Your leather jacket looks too shiny for your tastes? Tie it to your bumper. Don't have any money for expensive hair-care products? Elmer's Glue is just fine. The Punk just did it, whatever it was. He made do with what he could scrounge up. She improvised, never caring about a label name or a designer.

Like my redecorating efforts, Punk bands had to do it themselves, as well. Make their own records, often establishing their own record labels, and promote their own music using whatever resources they could find for free, that could be stolen or borrowed or recycled. It was an industry run by the artists, an insane bunch of parent's worst fears, a time-bomb of financial disaster. But then, the flame that burns twice as bright, burns half as long and most of the DIY labels imploded or faded away after only a few short years. They were uncompromising and idealistic and naive. But they had BALLS and they made some of the most honest, intense, and fantastic music that the world ever had to cover its ears to avoid hearing. They didn't need a damn job, just effort.

The station-wagon pulled away from a somewhat dilapidated suburban ranch house, stuffed to dangerous levels with wild eyed youths. It rolled through a stop sign and turned east, picking up speed, an economy caravan, a spray painted conveyance decorated with the feverish howls of teenage insanity. It squeals to a stop in the middle of a highway on-ramp, ejecting a skinny, blue-haired kid who grabs a pair of traffic cones and heaves them into the back. With a few cautionary glances up and down the road, he leaps into the open rear door to some muffled laughter and a couple of indistinct shouts. The driver check his mirror and stamps on the accelerator, lurching forward, headlamps shining out like spotlights, searching the darkness for anything.

Graffiti, Hurricanes, Bruises

Memory is a funny thing. I am never sure if an event remembered actually happened the way I recall it or not. I can recall in excellent detail the inside of the 9:30 Club, down to some of the graffiti on the walls, the way the stage came out at a crazy angle, the tile in the hall. Still, though, the shows I saw there are murky and fuzzy, car accidents of music, felt rather than precisely rendered. But such is the lens of adolescence and young adulthood.

The shows I remember best are those that really seemed to pull the hate and rage out of me and leave it flying off into nothingness, a hurricane force leveling everything in its path but leaving me standing quietly in the eye. Release. And that kind of power leaves the mind shocked, unable to understand the volatility latent in its soft confines, the raw emotion. To recognize that immense and uncontrolled power is a frightening proposition; it takes a strong individual to really deal with it, to acknowledge that they are a bomb in boots, a shotgun one finger-squeeze from explosion.

I listen to lyrics when I am at home, in my basement, at rest. Then I can absorb them and understand them and let them tell me their story. At a show it's all emotion undressed. I always took the time to read lyrics so that I could comprehend what the musicians were portraying in a particular song. Many times it spoke directly to me and garnered that little head nod, that agreement, the conversation with a peer. Sometimes it left me wondering if the writer really believed them, if it was a sham, a mask. It is the difference between Minor Threat and The Misfits.

The Descendants always seemed to hit me right in the fleshiest part of my brain. There was such an amazing honesty in their lyrics, a celebration of the writer's flaws, dealing with them head-on, no fear. But their shows: pure adrenalin and release and speed. It was a perfect combination of the things I would never say to myself (but secretly thought) and the raw rage I needed to unload.

I saw them in '85 or '86 at the 9:30, a show I remember as a hazy climb up some crooked staircase only to tumble down, bruised but smiling, punching the demons in the neck on the way down, reptilian and explosive. I don't remember who I was with, the date, where I was living at the time, the color of my mohawk, or the set list. But that memory is so vivid, so real to me, I will likely go to the old-folks home still smiling when it surfaces. That show was one that gave me something back and was worth the ticket price, the sweat and the bruises, worth twenty times what I paid for it or the record.

I can only hope my kids have something that slaps them and sticks like that. They need their own blurry memories in this world.

Express Delivery, Catalyst, Cabbies

I am a patient boy
I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait
My time is water down a drain

Everybody's movin'
Everybody's movin'
Everything is moving
Moving, moving, moving

Please don't leave me to remain
In the waiting room

MacKaye. "Waiting Room" Lyrics. 13 Songs  Dischord, 1989 

I took a job as a courier in late '89 to make ends meet. Where they met was never clear, I was always in a state of flux, never really pausing to look forward or back, riding hard toward the same undefined destination always, a bullet with no target.

It was so easy to throw myself into the pedals, with every teeth-gritting, rage powered revolution pushing down on some blackness, forgetting briefly the visions of my (it was assumed) eventual destruction, hurtling through the flashing sea of metal, lights, and fumes. I actually found it much harder to get off the bike and ride the elevator with some lady from Suite 1009 or the the really good-smelling guy from Big Law Office, trusting the cables and pulleys, fighting the calf cramps, thinking...well, just thinking.

I ate virtually nothing then. I didn't really do any drugs as most of them made me feel serious paranoia and usually resulted in a freak out of some kind (some of those were LEGENDARY, but do not bear relating now) but I drank a fair amount. I had just gotten back to DC from parts unspecified, feeling at home again, recognizing the maelstrom, feeling it, glad to know this Devil. There was a girl, as usual, who didn't really know me, though we had been together for a year or so. She was a good person, probably, but I didn't really take the time to figure that out, I had to know what she could do for me, how long she would last before she left; I, self absorbed, a fractured and fragile egoist.

A life is destined for tragedy if it is left unexamined, to wind down a path into the fog, a careless misuse of the magic of evolution. So we look for something to grab hold of, something to ignite our passion, to wriggle (often uncomfortably) in our minds, demanding attention.  Music has that power. It is a palpable thing, a force, a motor. It is a thing to which we have to lend no meaning, it gathers in the mind and grows and we do not understand it's source. Maybe it is tied to the rhythms of the electrical pulses between our synapses, some chemical reaction brought about by a process, a catalyst, unknown to us. Any way you look at it, it has power.

Hardcore appealed to some part of my mind, some convoluted fold of brain matter, that needed to move, to scream, to unload. It swam in the reptilian and mammalian parts, in Broca's area and in the medulla, taking over, releasing: a vicious, a primal force, a motor of adolescence.

Not that I even considered such philosophical bullshit at the time. I was a teenager, a flesh golem, fighting against unseen forces, wrestling unnamed demons. I wanted to fight, to fuck, to destroy, no time for thinking, if you think, you hurt, you burn faster and the whole process just succumbs to inertia.

As long as I was moving, hurtling down Vermont Ave., the thinking could not waylay me; I could not afford to be introspective, the cabbies would kill me. I was always gathering speed, never recharging, life and philosophy would chain me down otherwise. The wheels rolled, the rhythm never faltered, always fast, always screaming. Because if the wheels stopped spinning, the music would stop, inertia would win, the cabbies would pounce.

Zombies, New Wave, the Fashionable Punk

Return of the Living Dead released in 1985. Being a big fan of zombies, Jo and I got tickets and saw it at a seedy little strip-mall theater in Southern Maryland. It was fantastic; we laughed and cheered and stood on our seats with every gruesome spray of arterial essence, every absurd and hilarious death.


What was not to like about zombies for a Punk? The perfect analogy for 80s society: mindless consumerism, perpetual dashing after nebulous goals, a lack of self-examination, just the relentless drive for self-aggrandizement. The heroes struggle to escape being consumed and integrated into this animal world, still possessed of the cloak of humanity, violently striking against the seemingly inevitable tide, unbowed. And in this particular vision of the zombie doom the director had inserted leather clad, be-mohawked "punks", deviant through and through, like cockroaches post-nuclear Armageddon, one of the few surviving beings of this apocalypse. Looking back at this more than 25 years later, of course, these "punks" were nothing more than comic relief, a sort of nod at the pathetic youth of the day, clowns in leather and studs.

Fittingly, T.S.O.L. is prominently featured on the soundtrack, all Friday night hair and Monday evening attitude, safe punk rock, the masses can handle this, clean up the guitars, give them new amps, let's make a buck on this revolution. This is how Hollywood sees the punks, how they can digest them without ending up with ulcers, no sickening glances in the tarnished mirror held by Black Flag or Bad Brains or Black Market Baby, just a superficial tease of the hair, a liberal hand with the mascara.

The movie industry never got it, any more than the record industry did. The record industry abandoned the punks the very second "New Wave" lumbered out of the slime left by The Clash and the Sex Pistols and delivered it's first romantic and tearful ballad, something introspective and self-pitying, skinny and pale and languid. Don't worry parents, no more horrifically fast rhythms, no more primal screams, just pop-y, can't-wait-to-kill-myself-this-world-is-too-hard English fops.

It is snowing, nature trying to hide humanity, cold, quiet. The '74 Malibu Classic station-wagon eases out onto Hwy. 301, a massive spray-painted ark, two laughing fuchsia haired punks in the front seat, talking about the movie, smoking, hoping the dove comes back with something better than an olive branch. The apocalypse they hope to harken is a new beginning, a chance for humanity to triumph over it's own self-made undeath.

Demos, The Scene, The Total Package

I remember buying my first demo at a punk show. The Volcano Suns were in town, sometime in '86 or so, with two opening bands, the names of which are lost in the fumes of many bottles of Rush and rivers of sweat. One of the now anonymous bands was selling cassettes at the show (at the Complex, mayhaps?) and as I happened to have change leftover from Little Tavern, I bought one. It wasn't particularly good quality, neither by recording standards nor in content, but I bought it anyway (and played it, rarely) to support "the scene". It was an investment in something I cared about, a way to screw the record industry, and a poorly plastic-wrapped middle finger aimed at AUTHORITY, all for three dollars. The art was a mimeographed drawing of something unpleasant, a child being mauled by a circus bear or something, which had been painstakingly cut from a larger piece of cheap paper, conjuring images of heavily-mascaraed girls toiling away in the bass player's parents' garage surrounded by thick clouds of clove smoke, a suitably morose English New Wave song crackling out from cheap boom-box speakers, torn fishnets and combat boots, fashionably listless.

The scene. It was all of the bands that ever sloppily hacked at a guitar neck and screamed into a mic, sticky-floored dive bars festooned with a decoupage of thirty-thousand flyers, the several hundred (or dozen) teenagers in heavy boots, the thrift store, half a dozen record shops, the bondage boutique, an odd restaurant or two, and anywhere mayhem might coalesce. It was the seedy neighborhood across town from the record industry where talent scouts stared straight ahead when driving through to meet their immaculately quaffed clients, just there off of Russ Meyer Blvd., down the street from the Independent Publishers. It was not an exclusionary system, it was openly hostile, go ahead, see if you can survive the denizens of DIY St., you fat bastards, we are lean here, we smell your engineers' fear, you are too weak to make an honest record, we will use your fat rolls of money to clean the rat shit off the floors of our clubs, we don't even drive here, we have burned all the cars, you are not in L.A., you festering pustule on Rolling Stone's scrotum, you bubble-gum pop assclown.

And sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut. Maybe it starts a business in a basement on 4th St., maybe it steals a copy machine and makes a free 'zine, maybe it just shares the nut with it's friends. Any way it goes, the music fan wins, has plenty for the cold winter months, and maybe has enough left over after Little Tavern for another nut.

Reflections, The Scots are Coming, Little Tavern

In 1985, I could easily ignore the massive edifices of government crowding me as I rode my bicycle down Constitution Ave. Granite federalist-style facades, tattooed with phrases reflecting their importance, great, stout temples to Democracy, the living manifestations of rebellion against tyranny. Washington, DC is the very epitome of a struggle for freedom, an unshackling, even the names of the avenues are the whispering ghosts of revolution and sedition. But to my sixteen-year-old senses it is just more big fucking buildings that are filled with people who don't understand, who don't see the bicyclist with the fuchsia mohawk and homemade Fear shirt weaving through traffic, riding off the terrors of adolescence, a revolution of one. As I turn onto 17th St., I wonder what Thomas Jefferson or John Adams or Thomas Paine would make of the Punks, crackheads, gang violence and the apathy of the post-60s youth. I bunny-hop the curb, cutting through West Potomac park, evading the vendors' trucks lining the curb, a Pakistani man waving a Lincoln Memorial shirt, shouting "symbol of A-mer-eee-ka!" in preposterously accented English leaps back from my advance, startled tourists gaping in my wake. I ride to the Pool and, sitting on the concrete retaining wall, I stare into the placid water, my reflection staring up at me, the water warping my my expression into one of cartoonish, raised-eyebrow inquisitiveness as though wondering whether the Founders could have imagined me, in my tattered Van's and bleached jeans and unnaturally colored hair, staring into the great mirror of democracy a few hundred yards west of the Capitol. A very fat woman in shorts and American flag tank top asks me in a flat, mid-western accent if she can have her picture taken with me as her two teen-aged daughters roll their eyes and sigh "Mom!", embarrassed and a little freaked out by the weirdo in front of them. I stare at her for a minute and say, "This isn't fucking London." Her husband immediately becomes engrossed in reading his Map of Tourist Places while she backs slowly away, herding her daughters along as from a suddenly snarling dog.

The Exploited were playing that night (a show that would become their live record, "Live at the Whitehouse", the cover of which, oddly, depicts the Capitol), the flame to the Punk moths that night. More F St. chaos, a finger to the eye of Washington politics, unnoticed by all but these young pariahs, congregation of the other side of the decade, gathering for the sermon of violence and rebellion, an anti-kaleidoscope, stark realism and sedition under white light, no hiding in lyrical abstraction. But the voice was different that night, a voice from Great Britain, where DC bands struggled for some ridiculous "legitimacy", only the Brits know Punk, own it, all snottiness and Real Revolution, Sid and Wattie and Rotten, the triumvirate of Punkitude, this DC Punk thing is not a threat. Even Dischord had to find a British press, but still we were true to our sound, the pulsing angry beat, our thing, we speak to our audience not the government, we concern ourselves with each other, we are personal, I against I. This is not fucking London.

The station wagon is a comfortable place to sleep after a show, drop off Jo and Billy and Danny, hunker down, wait for dawn, for the clearing away of the show-glow, time to worry about the next meal and gas money and cigarettes, it would be nice to have some meat, Little Tavern, daylight and a friend's couch, maybe a call to Chris, find a place to stay for a few days, some mischief. The wagon speeds down the Whitehurst, the marshmallow American made suspension bouncing across the expansion joints, "...In the city there's a thousand things I want to say to you, but when I approach you, you make me look a fool...", a sound of young lust from the back seat, to Rosslyn and beyond.

Back soon, reader.

The Count, Action Heroes, Cold Rides

Before the widespread use of cable television in DC, there were 5 basic stations available: the three big network affiliates, the public broadcasting network, and WDCA - Channel 20. WDCA was at least a few rungs above public access TV, but maybe a few rungs below the Big Three in terms of quality of equipment and talent. Mostly. Mostly, that is, with the notable exception of everyone's favorite perverted political pundit and vampire, Count Gore de Vol. Creature Feature starring the aforementioned blood-sucker, aired late night Saturdays in the late 70s and, after a five year hiatus, from 84 to 87. The Count would present such illustrious films as "Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism", "Corridor of Blood", and "Zombies of Mora Tao" (the latter title firmly cemented my deep and abiding fondness for zombies AND pirates) to an audience of mostly happily terrified children, potheads, and insomniacs, all the while attempting to get his little vampire in the cave of some scantily clad model with too much makeup and some preposterous Gothic outfit. His Hallowe'en specials were legendary: huge-breasted be-costumed models, cheap rubber-chicken jokes, political jibes for the beltway crowd, the television equivalent of Circus Peanuts, you know they are awful but you can't stop eating, a strange and tacky flower in the otherwise carefully tended arboretum.

Television held very little that could occupy Punks. The action heroes were steadfast supporters of the status quo, fighting the good fight, wronged little old ladies menaced by mustachioed gangsters, poorly dressed unshaven B-grade actors in stylized programs, long Hollywood stares into the camera accompanied by a pithy line or two, absolute drivel, cheap electronic Rock & Roll over unimaginative dialog. We would hunker down in the basement rooms of our friends, homemade Black Flag posters, worn skate decks, the cheap cassette player distorting, no conversation, no introspection, readiness unlabeled and unnamed, X Men comics, headless GI Joes, spray paint and Beta tapes of the Young Ones, "...New York's all right if you like tuberculosis, New York's all right if you like art and jazz...", the musicians we listen to are not our heroes, never were anyone's heroes, they don't want to be famous, they are the slashers in the film not the coeds, a riot without purpose or aim, unmotivated abdicative rulers, a force of nature.

A few Punks stand around the station-wagon, hands in pockets, it's cold, staring at the shattered glass of the rear windscreen, cursing the rednecks or wiggers or other nefarious assholes responsible, quick hits on the cigarettes, shivers, UK Subs were good, man, yeah that was intense, we are gonna freeze, those assholes are real dicks, we gotta get to Dave's, a cop car drives by, oblivious to the crime, the driver punches up a middle finger at the back of the patrol car and slaps the handcuffs hanging from the rear-view mirror, easing out onto V St., picking up speed, a laugh from the back as a beer bottle smashes on the asphalt, the Beltway looms ahead, potholes and orange drums, the tinny speakers screaming with the the awkward rhythm of rebellion.

As always, until next time.

Circles, Shoes, Revolution

People frequently lament the perils of driving in DC. I don't know why, as it is perhaps the simplest of cities in the world to navigate. It is a grid, letters North to South, numbers East to West, a planned city, planned by an apparent obsessive-compulsive, a Frenchman, offended and repulsed by the organic, fractal cities of Europe, the disorder, forcing a conformity of purpose on the inhabitants, a funneling of the masses toward the Capitol, the buildings squat and muscular. Many visitors complain about the Circles, however, in tones usually reserved for something unwholesome, unnatural, an abomination before God, those Circles, they force me to drive around them, it should not be, we could be here forever, hypnotized, hamsters on a wheel, passed by taxi drivers with bemused smiles, bike-messengers with dreadlocks, and civil servants. No matter how precisely I direct them, non-natives seem to always get lost, stopping at a convenient pay phone to ring for rescue, come down here, we have abandoned the car, it may still be ringing around DuPont Circle, we are frightened, screw our belongings, just get us to the safety of your strange, basement apartments, you Colombian hobbits, living underground, we know what you Godless heathens have done, we saw that you have sacrificed J St., gave it over to some alternate dimension, some sort of Druidic ritual, it has vanished, not even Dan Brown can find it, HELP US, all is lost, you fuckers, why would you do this to us.

In the late 50s in DC, when my Dad was in high school, he worked for a shoe store, which, as any Washingtonian knows, meant that he worked on F St., as by official decree of the City Officials, all shoe stores must be crammed into two blocks of said street. You could not throw an alpaca on F St. without hitting (and seriously annoying) three shoe salesmen. Thirty years later, I would find myself on that same block with a couple of dozen others, milling about a small, unassuming door compressed between two storefronts, a few dollars in my pocket, boots on, examining the decoupage of fliers on the lamp posts, a constancy of perception, sounds and smells from the gathered leather-and-denim around me, unfiltered, unexamined, nearly thirty more years before it all comes into focus. We were all skinny then, but wiry, full of frustrations, "...Face front, you got the future, shining like a a piece of gold, but I swear as we get closer, it looks more like a lump of coal...", our self-made troubles like prophecy, passers-by have all read the book, give wide berth, our speech is clipped, nearly accent-less, but the words are foreign, the language of those who have seen through the high school cliques, through the dirty panes to the electronic future, William Gibson's bastards, every science-nerd I knew had a Dead Kennedys record or Minor Threat, we will be the Information Age's seed, impregnating the future with the same screw-the-system-we-can-do-it-all-ourselves that begat the indy labels, hackers, pirates, Information Libertarians, self-educated crafters of an unintentional revolution.

More to follow.

Skinheads, Doormen, and Gay Bars

In the film No Way Out, Kevin Costner runs up an escalator from the subway platform and weaves through shoppers in a Mall, eventually bursting through some glass and steel doors onto Wisconsin Ave., half a block south of M St. To the average viewer, this was one of the more exciting and suspenseful scenes in the movie; to any Washingtonian, this was complete bullshit. There is no subway stop in Georgetown. Closest you can get is Foggy Bottom, then you would have to grab a bus to M St. DC's Metro System is one of the strangest, albeit remarkably clean, public transit systems in the country. It shuts down at midnight during the week, the steel caterpillars vomiting out their passengers and retreating to the fetid safety of the darkness below the city, not to be seen again until just before dawn, when they emerge to devour neatly clad attorneys and politicos who perform their weekly pilgrimage to the halls of power, up and down escalators in Metro Center, a million harried Kevin Costners, only seeing Federal Plaza or Farragut West by the light of day, never hearing the city exhale, a sigh that becomes a growl, a sound like boot laces slipping through eyelets, a gathering of momentum, a kinetic wind blowing through the cherry blossoms.

The station-wagon comes to rest on H St., a four thousand pound rhinoceros, a National Bohemian can for a horn, symbols in matte paint covering it's skin, who drives that piece of shit?, speed freaks, my dear, speed freaks, cross the street, ignore the skinny, crazed nightmares getting out, forget that you saw them slip down an alley, or memorize the location for the inevitable police inquiries, sweet Jesus don't let them smell us. Punk shows were rarely held in convenient, easy to locate places. The owners of those places see the great, churning flesh machine on the dance floor, the screamed, indiscernible words, and No Fucking Thank You, they will destroy the place, drink nothing but water, we won't make a dime, they all have sharpie Xs, mark of the Beast of  No Bar Tab, send for a Zepplin cover band, it is Thirsty Thursday, two-for-one tequila shots, bring in the college girls, more baseball caps, revenue.

The alley is teeming, bald heads and braces, torn jeans and battered leather, Elmer's Glue spikes, pressing toward a bar-stool occupied by a bored looking twenty-something with a flashlight and a sharpie. He pauses and examines IDs, but some kids just come up and poke out their fist, waist level, back of the hand up, accepting the mark, two strokes across the fist, the mark of almost there, funneled down the hall, the sticky floor, no "have fun", no recognition, this is the norm, bored apathy, this happens twice a week, never any lack of pimply kids, it will be LOUD, the sweat will flow, a proving ground, a den, a chapel. The doormen are universal here, they don't look threatening, earning a bit of pocket money, sometimes they become fans but mostly they wear their Bauhaus shirt, sitting, aloof, it's all been done, you are not new, I will outlive this.

The bald heads huddle in groups, the band is backstage, a few mohawks bob through the Doc Martens, no one cares, Skinheads are idle, looking forward to the adrenaline, at rest. To the uninitiated, this word, Skinhead, is foul, it oozes a stench, it is a word used to describe stock footage from a riot in London, but these Skins are strange, one, a woman, a black woman, stands with her hands in her pockets, her braces forming a looping W across her rear, she is deferred to, an American Flag shirt with Oi! printed over the stripes, blue laces, jeering the peace punks. The show begins, there is a revving, a generator starts, the drums are muffled, the space goes all sweaty and intense, these young men (mostly) are showing their grit, telling the world about their angst through a dance, ballet gone feral, a chaotic ritual. The bartender is a woman, working hard, strong triceps bulging, she is nice but firm, she is biding her time somewhat, her money crowd will wait, the Punks and Skins will shuffle out by 10, her friends will arrive then, the dance music will play, the lights flash, rhythmic, distracting, the whole thing will metamorphose, Skinheads fade into lesbians, the only place a lot of these punk bands can play, the only tolerant ownership, a back-alley gay bar, no one even blinks.

And now the kids head home, the show is over, the subway is still running, it's early, Rockville and Manassas kids ride home, the station-wagon lurches into traffic, "...you say it's the crossroads, the place we meet, all I'm seeing is a dead-end street...", speeding toward DuPont Cir., beer or vodka, friends will laugh, the lights will stay on, the music echoes, but the caterpillar will sleep.

Until next time. 

The Moon Isn't Big Enough

By the time John Lennon died, the hippies were either hunkered down in the woods somewhere smoking weed or finishing law school in an effort to change the world from the "inside". Their Peace, Love & Acid vibe was derided by everyone from Ronald Reagan to Jello Biafra as self-indulgent, bohemian childishness. They were changing not because of societal pressures, but because their heroes had been exposed as charlatans, snake oil salesmen disguising LSD induced psychosis as enlightenment. Syphilitic hedonists who, at the end of the day, were nothing more than nihilists in tie-dyes, contemptible cowards hiding from life, hookah at the ready. Rock & Roll had become a caricature: amplified guitars amplifying the sex and the drugs, forget philosophy, fuck Peace & Love, it doesn't get us high and it doesn't get us any tail, throw some half-dressed sluts on the stage! fire! sparks! pot smoke! cue the sexy muscle car film! LIGHTS, more LIGHTS, fucking blind them all, call out the Emperor, more Christians to the lions, TO THE COLISEUM! Keith Moon's vomit soaked ghost hovered above them, smiling benignly, raising Jim Morrison's arm in victory like boxers, winners of the belt of Dionysus, pathetic corpses. Of course, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, were already there, along with too many others to name. Some of them, like the Clash, were trying to change the paradigm, but others, like the Pistols were empty constructs, crass for the sake of publicity and fame, suckling at the teat but spitting on it at the same time, more snake oil, but they didn't even know it, so complete were the blinders of fame and heroin. In Washington, DC, though, something...odd was happening. Not to imply that it was the only place in the country, but the examples there are perhaps the most striking. A band of black music rebels, a kid in his parents basement, and the local high school kids were doing something, something new, something...well, pure. They made their own records, they distributed them, they managed themselves, they played everywhere, high school gyms, convention centers, tiny basement clubs, they had their own thoughts, their own morality, they were there for all to see, not an iota of make up, pyrotechnics, or flashy guitar riffs, just energy, pure and untamed, lightning and sweat. And they knew us. They were living our lives, they were in our heads, they were us, sulking, angst-ridden, moody, adolescent golems, slaves to our hormones, no challenges, no learning to hunt or handle a spear, no tribe, suburbanites who didn't even know there was anything to miss, hearts of lions, lives of sheep.
Whatever else might have been going on, it spread. The area around DC from '80 to '87 or so was alive, a giant, teeming algae bloom on the ocean of youth, shaved heads and blue hair, leather and flannel, boots and Chuck Taylors, unintentional raggedness, proud lower middle class, reasonably educated, tough kids. Tough mentally, tough-hearted, lean, sweaty kids, with too-big feet, lurching on a dance floor that twenty years earlier would have been filled with twisting, well-dressed folk, unaware that their children would be the Horsemen of melody's Apocalypse.
The Music had not died, thank you very much Don McLean, it had shed unnecessary pretense, eschewed twisting, poetic metaphor for plain, 20 point type, threw out the sinuous five minute, masturbatory guitar solo in favor of fast, stripped down, punch in the throat rhythm, impossibly fast, beautifully aggressive noise. Who really gives a shit what the Walrus means, when you get right down to it? Screw the Pinball Wizard, he's shriveled and impotent anyway, I want a tribal chant, a rain dance, I want my whole body to convulse, the carbon atoms speeding through space, a musical super-collider, hurtling me toward unknown levels of intensity for three minutes, nothing more, the rest is self-aggrandizing bullshit anyway. "...And I don't wanna listen to it, You don't wanna dance to it, We don't wanna hear it, Rock & Roll bullshit...."
But as often is the case, the critics arrived, punker than thou, we know what is good, what is bad, we are ARTISTS, for fuck's sake, we KNOW, you are suburban trash, Andy Warhol in hundred dollar leather pants and fire engine red manic-panic hair, the Corcoran set, "I was at CBGBs for the Jim Carroll show", music fascists, DEFINERS, reading Kierkegaard but not understanding it, carrying a copy of the Village Voice, bringing the New York art vomit vibe to F St., no one is interesting, you bore me all. And a lot of us believed them. We started to replace S.O.A. with Billy Bragg, threw out the Youth Brigade records, and bought The Smiths at Tower Fucking Records, for chrissakes, we are older now, we have learned, we are in our TWENTIES now. Punk is dead.

But that is FAR from the end of the story, my friends. Because it refused to die. It became City of the Living Punk, the zombie effect, we will eat your brains, we will consume you before you even have a chance to cannibalize your own. Fuck New York. We are DC.

I leave you here, for now. More to follow.

A Punk Rock Dad Looks Back

In 1984, contrary to Orwell's dire predictions, the world seemed ripe for a youthful revolution of proportions unseen, even by the standards of the 1960s. I was 15. The rock and roll phenomenon had splintered into a dozen fragments, carrying our musical shards to the limits of imagination. There were metalheads, hippies, new-wavers, roots-rockers, rockabillys, goths, rudeboys, too many cliques to list, all plummeting headlong into the future, careless, unyielding, full of arrogance and the bitter yet intoxicating feeling that we had all been duped but we knew it and we could fight, gouge out it's eyes and piss on it's shoes. We were like the first people out of Eden, still scratching at the places in our minds newly filled with the knowledge that we were no longer innocent, like the scar that still itches now and again from a long healed wound. We would devour the world and the other travelers with it, these splinters speeding along beside us, parallel, with the same destination but a totally different energy, competitors for the ultimate goal, whatever the fuck that was. We could win it. We would win it. The game will conclude in the Great Game Show Studio: a ramshackle concrete bunker, painted with crude symbols; a crass, uncultured, middle finger of a building, retched up from the absolute garbage pile left to us by the hippies who burned like a peace & love incense but didn't stick around to clean up the ashes. And we liked it that way. The peace & love generation begat the Fuck You generation. We were our own mythology. Our music was an exercise in violence. Our shows were like  flesh generators, churning out a high-pitched crazed energy, and we would point at others in our pack and say "That dude is the real deal. He really doesn't give a shit."
A '74 Malibu Classic Station-wagon hurtled down Indian Head Highway. The driver, a sociopathic, violent-tempered eighteen-year-old named Jinx, steered the titanic hunk of metal toward Washington, DC, the cassette player blaring "....And we see, all around, Media telling us what to believe, We carry on laughing.....", good British punk rock, putrid anthems. The passengers were varied: a Native American, a Korean American, a German/Irish mongrel, a Scot, all matte and jaded, black leather and homemade shirts, huffing White Out, sipping Mickey's Big Mouths, blotting out adolescence, screaming yet silent, a Church Youth Group gone horribly wrong, deviant, wild-eyed, green-blue-orange-haired, gritting their mental teeth, ignorant and happy, after a fashion. There would be a Show, some drinking, some fighting, music, mayhem, sex, drugs, drama as only adolescents can produce, their appearance and demeanor a big loogie in society's soup. These were the children of the '80s.

More to follow. Stay with me.