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« Part three of a four-part series. Click here for part one. »
In part two of this series--when discussing the Happy Go Licky cover of "White Lines"--I said there would be more about the mindset of the underground music scene that so attracted me. That rationale, an ideal of self-reliance and the rejection of the mainstream cultural agenda, made me reconsider how I was living my life. There are so many histories about the underground music of the '80s being sold now, and while I find them generally to be interesting, I can't help but think they are wrong. Not wrong in that they shouldn't be written, but wrong in that these countercultures were creations that can be realized only in their actual creation. To anyone who wasn't there, much will be missed or misunderstood. So, rather than spend time refuting other histories, I believe it's important for those of us involved to put down our own histories, in our own words, with our own thoughts on the importance of the experience. There are as many authors as there are participants.
Prior to my introduction to punk rock, back when I would stay up late calling the local radio station to request "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," I saw the distinct difference between entertainer and spectator. As a kid, I had my fantasy world where I could while away hours dreaming about the lives of Pop Stars and my everyday reality. The two never mixed. The disturbing thing about punk rock was not the screaming or the wild hairdos or outfits; it was the fracture it put in the barrier between the fantasy world and everyday reality. There were no stars; they had all been brought down. What's more, the idea of a pop star life, the thing I whiled away hours dreaming about--all the things that separated them from us (bodyguards, autographs, limousines, mansions, yachts), all that shit was pointless to punk rock. These people weren't untouchable, they didn't have managers or fan clubs and they wrote you back. And they apologized for taking so long to do so. What. The. Fuck?
My interest in punk rock revealed a crack in the façade of everyday life, and eventually, after some years, grew to me standing near the rubble of the existence I once knew. Over the course of a decade or so, from my teenage years to my early twenties, everything I had learned about life and how to live it were questioned, challenged, and thrown out. In place of what I once understood as "the way it is" now stands a new set of values and beliefs. Beliefs that are rooted in a punk rock mindset, but now stretch into every facet of my everyday life. To say that the music of that time changed me would be a gross understatement.
Hearing those songs for the first time (Poison Girls "Persons Unknown," The Pop Group "We Are All Prostitutes," Bad Brains "Big Take Over," This Heat "Testcard," Big Black "Kerosene," Suicide "Cheree," Wire "Mr. Suit") was different than hearing Meat Loaf or Whitney Houston or Wham or Wang Chung for the first time. The songs on the radio were inescapable and homogenized, there was very little to think about. These new songs, they were not like that at all. One record was a benefit for an anarchist center, another was about burning your home town to a crisp, and some of the lyrics talked about world affairs in a way that contradicted everything I was learning in high school. Besides disrupting my understanding of the "right" way to play music, these songs gave me the sense that music was an arena open to anyone. Not only that, but songs weren't limited to singing about how much you love someone, or how much you miss someone you onced loved. It was liberating. I mean, listen to this shit, if this crazy dude can be in a band, why can't I?
The next logical step was to get an instrument. My mom was broke, so my aunt agreed to rent me a bass guitar from a music store 20 miles from our house. With the bass rental came weekly lessons at the shop. Every week my mom would give me a ride to the store and this huge fat dude who breathed loudly out his nose would sit six or seven of us in folding chairs in this little stuffy room, each of us armed with a music stand and some photocopied tablature score of a popular song. He'd sit in front of us, with a boom box at his side, and play along with the cassette several times through the course of an hour. The first song I learned was "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett. There I was, a 14-year-old bass player who didn't drink, stuck in a room full of guitar players, trying to figure out what the fuck a "lost shaker of salt" had to do with anything. Completely bored with being told to "just play the root notes" after a couple weeks, I decided to ask one of my sister's friends, Torsten, if he would give me lessons. Torsten was in a local punk band, Intestinal Fortitude, and the first song he showed me how to play was "Horror Epics" by The Exploited (admittedly, a rather goofy song, but more suited to my practical purpose). The differences between "Margaritaville" and "Horror Epics" are many; chief among them is the role the bass plays. You can't even hear the bass in Jimmy Buffett's lame ass song ("living on spongecake..."? C'mon), but it's central in The Exploited song. I can't remember ever practicing "Margaritaville" outside of that tiny little room in the back of the music store, but I practiced "Horror Epics" in my room every day for a month until I could play it fast enough to keep up with the tape. I quit going to the lessons at the music store and gave them their bass back. Torsten let me borrow one of his. Intestinal Fortitude used to practice in the guitar player's dad's electrical shop in the local industrial park. A cavernous, metal-walled shop where every sound was reverberated throughout the 40-foot ceiling, the shop was not ideal for sound, but it was perfect for making as much noise as you wanted because no one was out there on the weekends. Torsten would let me tag along to their practices, and after a while, the band decided to have a show; inviting a few of the other local bands to play as well. This was to be my first punk show, and I was excited, especially since Torsten and many of the other dudes were older than me. Not to mention I was learning all the Intestinal Fortitude songs, so I had a vested interest in seeing the songs "performed," like, in front of people. It wasn't until the night of the show that I realized what an underground network was. I don't remember seeing any fliers for the show, but there poured into the industrial park that evening caravans of punks from towns all around, filling the electrical shop and overflowing into the parking lot outside. We rolled up the big doors of the shop so people outside could hear.
That night--the show, all the kids from other towns who'd come, the energy--knocked my fucking socks off. Prior to this, If I remember correctly, I had only been to 3 concerts: Alabama at the Oakland Coliseum (my dad and I sat way up in the nosebleed section--"18 wheeler... roll on!"), Twisted Sister and Y&T at a water park when I was 12 (lotsa makeup!) and the Charlie Daniels band at a garlic festival (front row sitting on a bail of hay watching him fucking shred his bow during "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" was pretty awesome, I must say. Plus, the whole cowboy hat pulled down so you can't see my eyes thing was pretty spectacular). The Intestinal Fortitude show was such a shock compared to the concerts I'd been to before. First, there was no real stage. People were all over the fucking place, jumping, diving, running, dancing... the line between performer and attendant was gone. Second, this was ours; there was no security, no concessions stand, no light show, no backstage. Everyone was working together. It was my job to make sure the microphone didn't get unplugged from the PA system. And while it was general pandemonium, everyone was aware that the night was ours, so fucking it up would work against us. There were guys climbing the rafters in the shop, people were slamdancing and stage diving onto the concrete, sexy punker chicks with blue hair and safety pins through their ears, and there I was... clutching on to the mic cable making sure it didn't get caught under some dude's combat boot. As with any great show, the cops showed up and told us all to go home. Afterwards, however, I was filled with energy and inspiration. I wanted to join a band with my friends. And I did. I wanted to put on a show with my friend's bands. And we did. I wanted to record our band. And we did. That punk rock mindset, the ideal of inclusion and self-reliance, had taken the tools and means of creative expression out of the unreachable control of the "entertainment" industry and put them in our hands. There were no more rock star fantasies. Everything was alive right now.
Our little collective was an incongruous bunch of latchkey kids, loners, quiet types, momma's boys, nerds and miscreants. The bands we formed, often with overlapping members through the years, were equally disparate. To offer detailed biographic information of the time and the bands would be useless, as you've never heard (and never will hear) any of the music and likely don't know any of the people. Suffice it to say the band members and names and songs were as collective as any incestuously self-contained family. These people, my dearest friends, have been my main inspiration since that ridiculously fantastic Intestinal Fortitude show in the electrical shop. Most of those people, my then friends, are still my friends today. Through high school, college, odd jobs, awkward phases, first loves, first heartbreaks, children and suicides, we've remained close. Like a dirty snowball, we've picked up people along the way, making our collective even more ragtag as time goes on. It's strange to other people that our little group has been together so long ("You still talk to your high school friends?"). In my mind, I credit this long association to the mentality we all developed and shared back then, in our "formative" years.
Taking control of our lives in such a creative way bound us together in a manner that other people (those who are shocked that we're still friends) simply don't understand. Those people think it's weird, but I pity them, because I have this network--the same network I had when I was 14--that understands what inspired me then and continues to inspire me today. People that were in my U.S. History class in high school (both years!) are still people I hold dear today. We've made our own history. We've documented our culture rather than adopting some bullshit "Margaritaville" culture as our own. So, I say it would be useless to offer biographic information of our bands not because it doesn't mean anything (quite the contrary, in fact, it means everything) but because it's not a history yet. We're still living it.
We had no dream, we just lived one,
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