This is the first of what will hopefully be a monthly column. The idea was to write a faux-MRR style column, much like how my radio show is faux-live. Since this is my first column and all, I will have to give you a least a passing summary of how I got into punk rock because I think it is important to establish some context of how I got here. I will try to keep it brief and not bore you with endless nostalgic stories from my childhood.
I found punk rock in 1986 and never looked back. By found I mean I literally found an unlabelled tape at my local skate spot. It had the Repo Man soundtrack on one side and something that at the time I thought sucked and sounded like U2 on the other side. In retrospect the B side was probably something great, like THE BOOMTOWN RATS or something, but that kind of shit never appeals to 12 year old boys, TV Party does.
At around the same time I also discovered WCVT. This was the local college (Towson State) radio station. They played a mix of everything underground, but most importantly (for me), a weekly local band show, hosted by Skizz, the drummer of BERSERK.
When I entered high school I was turned on to all sorts of bands by the older punks and even more when I entered college. I went to shows almost weekly from 1988-1993 before dropping out of the “scene” in 1994, thanks to how fucking horrible the 90’s were for music (an opinion I plan to detail in a future column). I sold all my records except for the classics and hid in a bar for a few years, just listening to old CLASH and RAMONES albums. Again, I mean that literally. My leases didn’t line up in August of 1996 so I spent the month couch surfing with only a CLASH and a RAMONES greatest hits tapes. The first two albums I listened to when I moved in to my new apartment and got all my records out of storage were NAKED RAYGUN - Jettison and THE 13th FLOOR ELEVATORS first album, but I digress.
What pulled me back was the dawn of the mp3 age, which also luckily coincided with a huge punk reissue and comp boom. All of the sudden all this impossibly rare stuff was now available and I went at it with a collectors zeal that I would have never been able to financially achieve with vinyl. My show and by default, this column, is largely the result of these last 8 or 9 years of research.
It is almost fair to say I discovered “punk rock” in these last few years. I had heard all the major bands and was already a fan of all the ‘77 stuff of course, but I had also been in a HC/pop punk/emo-core scene, a BORN AGAINST and JAWBREAKER scene. I hadn’t heard most of the bands that are now my favorites. No one listened to bands like THE VIOLATORS or CHRON GEN when I was growing up, all the skinheads I knew listened to MURPHYS LAW not CRUX.
This is one of the major reasons I have enjoyed doing my show so much, not because I got more positive feedback than I expected, but because it has forced me to listen (critically listen) to eps and albums each week. I am in essence doing the show for myself and if other people happen to like it, that’s just an added bonus. This may be why, in my mid 30’s, I still have a childlike enthusiasm for this music. Much of what I play each week is new to me, and I can’t see myself ever exhausting it. Sure there has to be a finite amount but, as an example, each major city in the US has an entire history that unless it was one of the big national scenes, I know nothing about. I have no idea, at all, what happened in Australia and New Zealand after like 1982. South America? Save for one or two bands, the entire continent is a blank to me. I could go on and on.
That ties into another major reason I started doing the show, which was for what you could call educational reasons. It frustrates me to no end when people who grew up listening to crap like CONVERGE or god, even worse, REFUSED drop out of the punk or hardcore scene and then take an incredibly snide attitude towards all of it. Of course they think it sucks, they grew up listening to complete shit and I am willing to bet they have never heard THE DIODES or CRISIS or THE KIDS or ULTRA VIOLENT or THE PAGANS or any of the rest of the huge diaspora that is punk rock. Maybe I am just naïve, but I think that if more people actually heard the music that I love they wouldn’t be listening to all the stupid shit they do. It seems a lot of people are just lazy about music. Even in the “underground” (a theme I definitely need to explore more in a later column) many people seem to just move from one hype band to a next, in the infinitely disposable MySpace modern style. I am not sure if that is better or worse than getting stuck in one specific time and place and listening to shit like CLICKITAT IKATOWI for the rest of your life, or never even realizing that underground punk rock exists and making Amazon lists of the “Best Punk Rock Albums Ever” that include 4 WEEZER albums, 5 GREEN DAY albums and two bands called GOB and OZMA. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up people.
This is especially sad considering how good punk rock and hardcore have been in the last few years. It’s nearly impossible to keep up and I am sure I am missing many quality releases each year. There have been several bands, like CRIMINAL DAMAGE and NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS for example, that I feel have easily earned themselves a spot in the canon. If slightly downtuned, mid tempo, melodic punk rock isn’t your thing, we are also in a bonafide golden age of early 80’s style hardcore. There is also a strong new pop punk scene happening, ala the MARKED MEN and the HEX DISPENSERS and more fucked up and fuzzed out garage punk than I could ever be bothered to listen to.
The only thing that is missing is punk rock punk rock. The charged, studs and bristles type punk rock. The studded leather jackets are all busy with crust, d-beat, raw punk and other things that all sound like metal to me. There needs to be a movement to reclaim spiky punk rock from the Punkcore Warp Tour bands. That and a peace punk revival, then I would be happy.
Photo by Enrique Cubillo of