[“Blues and More”
column posted on the Bloomington (IN) Alternative, December 5, 2007]
My First Time:
A Collection of First Punk Show Stories
Chris Duncan, Editor
Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007
Yes, a
review-essay on a new book about punk rock.
So what’s that got to do with the blues?
Plenty, as you’ll see below. This
is exactly why my column is called “Blues and More.” Because, just as with the review last week of
the killer CD by the Killer himself, classic rock ‘n’ roller Jerry Lewis, I
wanted to be able to explore far more that is relevant to the living soul of
the blues than just genre-specific blues music itself. And a good look at My First Time fits
this format of doing blues—and more—exactly.
My First
Time is rich and intriguing, comprised of 43 retrospective vignettes of the
contributors’ initiation rite of passage as young adolescents and late
pre-adolescents into what they all regard as a positive life-changing
experience, the punk rock scene from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. Further, the book is graced by 20 photos of
key punk rock bands in performance and significant punk personalities, a photo
of punk pioneer Joey Ramone’s tombstone, and four flyers of classic punk rock
shows. And also, biographical notes on
the contributors, many of whom went on to become significant players in punk
bands and writers and editors for punk zines, founded punk rock record labels,
and were otherwise continuing participants in the “scene” up to the
present. Living proof that the punk rock
scene was anything but a transient fad. My
First Time is saucy, irreverent, straightforwardly honest, and has an
attitude—exactly like the music of which it is about!
I was an
eager aficionado of punk when it first emerged, absolutely blown away as a
thirtysomething New Left veteran by the in-your-face directness of the Sex
Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”:
God
save the Queen
The
fascist regime
We
have no future
We
have no future
(The
Sex Pistols,
“God Save the
Queen”)
And I too had my initiation rite of passage as an adolescent
and young adult when I discovered the music of my life, only it was
1950s rock ‘n’ roll and R&B; Bealtlemania, the British Invasion, and Bob
Dylan’s surrealistic folk-rock of 1964-1965; and, as a freshman in college in
1965, the electric blues.
And, in
common with these young punkers twenty or so years my junior, I, too, was
fleeing the “respectable whiteness” of “mainstream” social and cultural
sterility, I, too, was an harassed pariah and outcast in the “mainstream” world
in which I was forced to exist, but could never live in. So well can I identify with the vignettes in My
First Time. For me, Jerry Lee Lewis
was my Clash; Solomon Burke and Ray Charles my Sex Pistols; Sonny Boy
Williamson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf my Ramones; and the early Beatles,
Kinks and Who my Circle Jerks.
But that’s
enough about me. Let’s now turn to the
contributors in My First Time and let them describe so tellingly what
all this meant for them, and how, from these particular meanings, it crosses
and encompasses generations for all of us “old enough” to never have abandoned
our youthful ideals and dreams.
Andy Shoup
writes, “[H]ow you can think the world works within certain
constraints—according to certain rules—and then all of a sudden, you are
exposed to a new environment that makes you feel like everything you knew
before can get chucked right out the fucking window, and from that point on,
you want only to think about the New Way.”(14) And Jillian Lauren, “At least
when I went home the next day, to the purgatory of the suburbs, I wouldn’t feel
as alone as I had before.” (22) Anna Brown relates it to the political: “The next morning my ears were ringing, I
smelled like cigarettes, and I wanted more.
Not more drugs, but more of the feeling that I was in the right place
for once in my life. No one there
expected me to look a certain way, to be happy or well adjusted. You weren’t supposed to be happy. Fucking Multi Death corporations ruled the
planet; there were CIA-sponsored wars in El Salvador; animals suffered at the
hands of factory farm butchers!!! There
was nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with all of us. Everyone’s parents were a drag and school
sucked, but it was cool cause when you got to the punk show none of that stuff
mattered. It wasn’t our fault we were
pissed off—it was practically our duty.
After all, I learned, society made us this way.” (45) Russ Rankin tells
of how the legendary punk venue in Berkeley, the Gilman Street Project,
personified “how a community of aware, like-minded people were able to create a
space where a counter culture blossomed; where bands and audiences became one.”
(50) George Hurchalla speaks of this community as an ocean where “the ocean
would grow to be something even larger and more uncontrollable. Into this is where we would throw our
beliefs, no matter how half-baked or ill-formed, and watch them collide and
mutate and sometimes break. The best
thing about the ocean was that it was ours.
We had a motherfucking ocean.” (77)
Sto Cinders
relates, [T]his was where I truly belonged—not on a sports team or in the math
league or hanging out with the preps at their lame parties. I was a punk and THIS was my family.” (127)
Seeing the Ramones in Wisconsin shaped Steven Sciscenti’s life: “I did indeed become a Communist and did my
level best to be a faggot.” (92) And Joe Queer sums it all best in the ending
vignette: “It wasn’t a career move to be
in a punk band then. It was either
‘Welcome to Burger King, may I take your order?’ or punk rock. No in-between.” (181)
To be sure,
the newly-emerging scene of the roughly a decade encompassed here wasn’t an
idyllic youthful Arcadia. Slam dancing
and moshing could cause serious bodily injuries, the anger expressed by
audiences and bands alike mixed genuine rage with disingenuous posturing, there
was drug and alcohol abuse, and dangerous elements attracted to the scene as
well, with Nazi skinheads as much a part of the punk scene as the idealistic,
commutarian young I’ve quoted above. But
dystopia sidled with utopia in the youthful counterculture of the New Left and
hippiedom I was part of in the 1960s. My
friend Joyce Stoller says it well about both the Movement, and all movements
against the status quo: “The Movement
attracts both the best and the worst in society.” Because we’re all drawn to it because we’re
marginalized, outcast, despised and live as outlaws. Idealists and psychopaths alike. Nothing more—but also nothing less.
And the quintessential outlaw in
U.S. society, both historically and to this day, is the African American. The original Blues People of Black poet and
writer LeRoi Jones, the Invisible Man of Black novelist Ralph Ellison, the
heroic sociopath of white proto-Beat Norman Mailer’s alternately insightful and
silly “The White Negro.” (Alternately insightful
and silly—a good way to sum up the recently deceased Mailer himself.)
Which brings us back to the
blues. It’s everywhere, among all
peoples. Robert Johnson is a punk,
Wilson Pickett opens for the Clash, and we just as eagerly slam-dance to everything
Black America created that made us little white boys and girls try to forget we
were white by moving our feet and shaking our hips, be it Motown or Buddy
Guy. It’s there in the best of all
music, and that’s why it makes no sense to be genre-specific about what is
“real” and what is not. If it’s good, no
matter what, it’s soulful, and we can feel it.
Which is the essence of the blues.
And rock ‘n ‘roll and rock. And
jazz. And classical. And folk. And country. And ska and
reggae. And all of it. That is the blues, and this is more than
just the blues, this is what makes it more than just the blues. Precisely because the blues everywhere is
more than just the blues. Precisely
because it is the blues.
