Premise: Four Iowa punk friends in their early 20s agree to see 100 shows that year, while also dealing with the ins and outs of their own personal lives and the wild world of 1984.
Sorry, no story so far. Working on research. But I'll post writing exercises, research, outlines, and whatnot. You can read my long treatment at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kCeqaT1Ug3zuEgjTeTTCby-1IJcreATvtH5tyAklFVM/edit?usp=sharing. Feel free to comment or make any suggestions.
Hello! I am Eleni Leventopoulos, one of the spring 2019 MNHS 3D Objects interns. A huge part of my internship was cataloging new acquisitions to the collection. There was such a wide array of objects, every day was a new discovery and challenge. One of my favorite finds was a pair of black leather punk boots worn by a Minnesota woman in the 1980s. The history of punk is fascinating and these boots help document Minneapolis’ place in that story by filling gaps in MNHS’ music collection. With its roots in the 1960’s garage rock movement, punk was more than just music. It enveloped art, culture, fashion, literature and philosophy. Anarchism, nihilism, and even minimalism influenced and paved the way for punk.
While studying abroad in 1986, the donor purchased these boots from a shop on the famed Kings Road in London. Since the 1950’s, Kings Road had been the place for youth fashion. The 50’s saw miniskirts, the 60’s brought legends like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles and by the 1970’s, the punk scene had moved in when Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren opened a shop at 430 King’s Road. Westwood is a well known British fashion designer who helped punk and new wave fashion enter the mainstream, while Malcolm McLaren was the promoter and manager for well known punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls.
Punk came to Minnesota with the New York Dolls in 1974 when they performed at the State Fair and spread the flames of punk to Minneapolis. Minnesota had embraced punk by 1979 when the Walker Art Center hosted Marathon '80: A New-No-Now Wave Festival at the U of M FieldHouse. Marketed as a “preview to Rock in the 80’s” M80 brought punk talent to attention.
“It was a rickety venue, but with all the assembled talent and excitement surrounding each band’s performance, [M-80] felt like something historic was happening...In my mind, it was equal to Woodstock or Altamont or the Beatles at Shea Stadium. There was a great scene building in the Twin Cities.” - Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, from his memoir See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
When the owner returned to Minneapolis in 1987, influential punk bands like the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, The Replacements, Husker Du, Babes in Toyland, and the Flamin’ Oh’s had formed in Minnesota. Punk had already splintered shot off into many directions, evolving to other sounds like harcore, ska punk, psychobilly, and new wave.
Popular punk hang outs in Minneapolis included Jay’s Longhorn, a club in downtown Minneapolis, the record shop Oar Folkjokeopus and CC Tap at Lyndale and 26th, Goofy’s Upper Deck, and of course, First Avenue and 7th Street Entry. It was here that the fashion of punk could be seen. Champions of the ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality, punks made and altered their own clothes. Punk fashion has evolved depending on the time and place, seeing influence of glam rock, skater touches, transformation into new wave and embracing androgney. Staple items of punk fashion included jeans and black leather jackets. These were decorated and personalized with pins, patches, paint, safety pins, spikes and studs. When the donor wore these boots around Minneapolis she would have fit right in...
Chicago was home to a number of underground music scenes in the ’70s and ’80s, but none perhaps more unruly than the emerging punk and hardcore scene in 1977. Inspiration came from the New York artists then playing Chicago, including Patti Smith, television, Lou Reed, and mostly, the Ramones. Its earliest hotspots were dance clubs, not concert venues. La Mere Vipere on Halsted Street was a gay bar that morphed into Chicago’s first great punk bar with an edge that would be reflected in some of the bands that eventually came out of Chicago – a mixture of British-influenced punk, art school vibe, New York new wave feel, and definitely not hippie contrariness with an antistyle style and plenty of attitude. La Mere was located on a stretch of Halsted Street south of Fullerton and it burned down under mysterious circumstances in April, 1978, only to be replaced by a liquor store. When saddened fans complained publicly to Patti Smith at her Park West show that “they burned it down,” she said, “So your club burned down. Start another one!” The punk/new wave DJ/dance clubs O’Banion’s, Lucky Number, Neo, and the Smart Bar followed.
Everyone was waiting for the Sex Pistols to hit town, and tickets to their 1977 New Year’s Eve show at the Ivanhoe Theater on Clark Street were printed and sold ($4 general admission). The band was famously falling to pieces in front of audiences across the country before they finally imploded on stage in San Francisco at the Winterland Ballroom. They never played Chicago.
The early Chicago punk/new wave bands were a mixture of inspirations and styles. Jim Skafish’s band Skafish was notable for its inventive musicality and the absolute eccentricity and unabashed ugliness of its lead singer/songwriter/musical genius, Skafish. Tutu and the Pirates were like crazed, fun-loving misfits from the ’70s basement rec room run amuck. The Immune System sported art school cool and minimalist aesthetics and Desmond carried working-class blues influences, but musically and theatrically it was dominated by the raging, roaming, intense vibe of its lead man, Jim Desmond. Plus there were The Dadistics. They could be heard at such places as Tuts, Gaspars, the Cabaret Metro (with the Smart Bar, Waves, and Stages all in the same space at different times), Misfit’s, Ruts, Medusa’s, C.O.D’s (which also burned down), and Exit.
Records could be found at Wax Trax on Lincoln north of Fullerton, and at Sounds Good on Ashland north of Belmont, which had a huge inventory of 45s, including Patti Smith’s “Hey Joe” backed with “Piss Factory.”
The shows were unpredictable and potentially explosive, even cathartic. They skirted the edges of chaos and good taste, and yes, they held a mirror up to society’s ugly underbelly, but mostly they were good, bratty fun, with city and suburban kids behaving badly and loving it. Stuffy, it wasn't; it was down and dirty. Dye your hair some shocking color and rip your stockings, honey. We’ll pogo til dawn.
There was something about Akron in the 1970s-80s that lit a spark for many local musicians and performers. The result was a particular sound and style that put the Rust Belt city on the global radar, at least for a little while. Maybe it was the younger generation’s distrust and discontent of the government born out of the nearby May 4 shootings at Kent State University. Perhaps it was the discovery of New York punk rock that changed local players’ perception of what they could create and what audiences wanted to hear. Maybe it was the grit, the bootstrapping and the surge of rebellious energy that tends to emerge from hard times. Maybe it was a combination of all those things, and more.
Calvin C. Rydbom, prolific archivist and Stow resident, aimed to not only explore the reasons Akron received international infamy through bands like Devo, The Bizarros and The Waitresses, but also encapsulate a very specific moment in the city’s history where creative folks were pioneering new sounds that attracted music fans and media well outside of the Rubber City.
Rydbom’s new book, “The Akron Sound: The Heyday of the Midwest’s Punk Capital,” is arguably the definitive resource for anyone looking to learn more about sounds coming out of Akron in the ‘70s and ‘80s....
“Wayne (Beck) was a mainstay in the party scene in the late ‘70s and ‘80s then went to LA professionally for many years, came back here and said, ‘You know, I think it would be cool to celebrate that time in Akron history,”...
Rydbom aims to define what exactly the “Akron Sound” is in his nonfiction book. It’s not necessarily New Wave, he writes. It’s not an actual sound like Seattle’s clearly identifiable grunge. It’s a little punk rock, but not every band evoked the sense of aggression and defiance common with the genre. Through his interviews with Akron Sound pioneers like Buzz Clic from the Rubber City Rebels and King Cobra and Chris Butler of Tin Huey, The Numbers Band, The Waitresses, Half Cleveland (and many other projects), there are jokes and guesses, but no one can really give a clear answer.
“Just different; it was just Akron,” Rydbom writes. “Just some really cool music by a bunch of young musicians who didn’t want to follow their folks into rubber factories.”
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Dave Rice: The upstarts were coming into the old guard’s headquarters. I use the image of the old guard being kind of crowded into the back half of the bar during a hardcore show looking like somebody farted, you know like “What is this horrible . . . oh my God.” Where the bald kids with bandanas on their legs were right up front. The hardcore thing was just deliberately nihilistic. And homophobic as fuck. Which, I mean—rightfully so—rubbed people the wrong way. But there were hilarious aspects, you know, I mean just the old punk scene was taking place largely at Bookie’s, which was an old gay club, so there was a lot of cross-over there. A lot of those people would come from that kind of Rocky Horror mind set, where even if you weren’t gay, you acted it.
Tex Newman (RUR, Shock Therapy, Country Bob and the Bloodfarmers, guitarist): There had always been a rivalry between the Elvis Costello people and us. And the big rock bands were also the enemy, and then the bands that wore their tiger-print pants. Bookie’s was punk rock, and the Freezer was for the hardcore shit.
The Women's City Club in a 1962 Photo. Women City Club Will sill Building.
John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): You want to talk about punk rock, I’m gonna go Stooges, MC5, real Detroit rock. Alice Cooper. The only thing that really carried that on after that was Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Destroy All Monsters, which were all my heroes from the other bands. Anything else that claimed it was punk rock in Detroit was just a joke. So I lived through that whole ’79 to ’81 thing where new wave took over. So you got all these old Bookie’s bands, you’re all coked out, you’re wearing suits and skinny ties, doing Animals covers or some obscure Brit-sixties shit, and you think you’re fuckin’ punk rock. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.
Larissa [Strickland] and I were living in the City Club, the old women’s club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for New Jack City. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody’s like, “We’re taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck it, we’re squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You’re cool, white boy, but you’re going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn’t go over in the ’hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn’t have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.
Chris Moore, AKA Opie (Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist): This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.
John Brannon: I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.
Cass Corridor
Chris Moore: Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.
John Brannon: Me and Pete Zelewski would go to whatever punk gig, and we’re always like, “Who’s this chick?” Larissa stood out. Then we started going to see L-Seven shows. We had Negative Approach together, but they were doing all these big gigs. They opened for Bauhaus at Bookie’s. We met them at some big outdoor gig, and we got along. Then my mother kicked me out of the house. Fifty cents, I take the Jefferson bus, come downtown, walk about three miles over to the Clubhouse from Jefferson, knocked on her door, and was like, “’Sup?” And I’d only met her twice. I’m like, “Um, I need a place to stay.” She says, “Come on in.” I had nowhere to go. I lived with her for about a year first, but we were best friends at that time. Then we actually became a couple.
Sherrie Feight (Strange Fruit, Spastic Rhythm Tarts, vocalist): You’d go to Detroit for a show, you never knew what to wear. So you’d kind of wear what the guys were wearing. The first time I saw Larissa, I was like, “Oh my God.” She was in a slip and combat boots, her hair bleached out, with this milky white skin and those eyes. I wanted to be like her, but there was no way. I was this rich kid and she was from down on Cass; we were from different worlds.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Vince Bannon: In 1981 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s. Bookie’s was, I don’t know, getting done. I was in business with another guy, and he took good care of everything, from what our security would look like and so on. But again, we were under the radar. We would have grown exponentially if the media in Detroit would have been supporting what we were doing. In cities like LA you had like KROQ, so you talked to the promoters. It wouldn’t be economic reasons; it would be media reasons. But we couldn’t influence radio. When we moved away from Bookie’s was the same time radio became really corporate. The stations were owned by corporations; Lee Abrams and those guys came in and said, “If you want to grow your radio station in Detroit, play much more Rush and much more Bob Seger and much more Journey.”
Mark Norton: We went through what I think is called the Middle Child Syndrome. As the middle child, we were fucked anyway. No one was interested in what we were doing. Everyone looked everywhere, but not in their own city or state for the latest trend. “Punk rock sucks.” It especially sucked coming from Detroit. I know where the Ramrods stand: we were and are the lost children between generations. We didn’t exist then, and we don’t really exist now—never did in the first place. We were a chimera, beat-down motherfuckers who knew right from the start in mid-’77, that knew every card in the house was stacked against us, and we liked it. The Ramrods set the stage for those who would know how to navigate the entire mess—hardcore. The hardcore guys came along and ripped the torch out of someone’s hands—it certainly wasn’t ours. We never had the torch in the first place. Bless you guys.
Skid Marx (Flirt, bassist): There were newer bands coming along, and there was a little bit of friction going on between the hardcore, younger punks and the Bookie’s crowd. There were new metal bands, too, that weren’t really Detroit bands or playing Detroit music.
Paul Zimmerman (White Noise, editor): One of the first hardcore bands I saw was Black Flag at Clutch Cargo’s. My wife-to-be and I had gone to a wedding, and we were dressed super-normal. We went in there, and their audience were all in uniforms, and we were like, “Uh oh.” They were all in black, and I’ve always liked black. I wore black to weddings, but that night I didn’t. So that night we were getting some funny looks, and finally she went to the bathroom and I heard this ruckus. These two girls in the bathroom go, “Look at Barbie. Come on, Barbie, huh, Barbie,” and she finally kicked one of the bathroom stalls open and went, “You want to fuck with Barbie? Come on, fuck with Barbie!”
Bob Mulrooney (Ramrods, Coldcock, Bootsey X and the Lovemasters, drummer, vocalist): There were a few hardcore shows at Bookie’s, and people were just going around grinding their heels into my shoes and just wanting to cause trouble. And they were all guys, and I don’t go out for that. I go out to look at girls, and there was no girls there. Hardcore was too negative. I like the look of the Gothic scene—not so much the records, but the Gothic chicks.
Gary Reichel: You’d hear that we were the old people and that we were resisting the new breed. But they never tried to be cool with us.
Dave Rice (L-Seven, guitarist, producer): Black Flag played Bookie’s in summer ’81 with Dez singing. The front was full of new kids. The back was where the older people stood wondering what was going on.
Brian Mullan (sound man, promoter): Bookie’s introduced me to what led me to hardcore. Actually it went backwards. A high school teacher of mine was sitting around with me and my twin brother after school doing an extra credit project. We went to school in a pretty shitty area, Benedict at Outer Drive and Southfield, so we were not having a whole lot of fun. The Catholic schools back then were about as good or bad as public school—no real difference. We grew up at 6 Mile and Greenfield. After the great white flight the house across the street was empty and a moving van pulled up one day and we were all happy: wow someone is moving into that house. The next day we woke up, and all the bricks were gone from the house, so we had to stare at a tar-paper shack for the next year. We all had paper routes for the News and Free Press. The News route was an afternoon route, and it was brutal because on Friday, they all knew you were out collecting. So some Fridays you’d get robbed and others you wouldn’t. Then we got smart and would collect Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so when they caught up to you Friday, their take wouldn’t be so great. So this teacher presented the question to us that day: “You guys aren’t having much fun are you?” “No, not really.” My brother and I had each other, but that was about it. He goes, “You didn’t hear this from me, but I think you guys need to go to this place, place called Bookie’s. It’s on 6 Mile before you get to Woodward.” My brother went before me, and he came back all jacked up and excited. “Man, I went to that place he told us about. It was crazy, man. The guitar player was wearing a wedding dress.” It turns out that it was the Damned. I went a couple weeks later, ’cause I lived on 6 Mile, took the 6 Mile bus. This guy Rob was working the door, and I’m thinking that I looked like I was twelve and there’s no way I’m gonna get in. But the guy just says, “Hey, man. How’s it going?” and he opens the door for me. There weren’t too many people around, and I didn’t know a soul. I was real nervous about going to this new place, and I looked up and there’s Gloria Love, who I didn’t know at the time, had never seen her. She was clad head to toe in leather, and she looked up at me, and she’s like, “Darling, we’ve been waiting for you.” She runs over and grabs my head and buries it in her breasts. I was still a virgin at the time. That’s very much a night that changed my life. That’s why I started going to Bookie’s, which pretty soon introduced me to hardcore when they booked Black Flag.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Mike Skill (The Romantics, guitarist, bassist): The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don’s dad was the principal.
Don Was: Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.
Chris Panackia: The Romantics eventually would play three nights at Bookie’s and sell out every night. They played the Silverbird on a Monday night and didn’t announce the show until just before doors. This was right when “Tell It to Carrie” was starting to hit and people were just waiting for them to explode. When they announced it on the radio, 6 Mile and Telegraph became a parking lot. There were probably a thousand people there that couldn’t get in outside.
Bill Kozy (Speedball, guitarist): I was real young, and my pals from Warren Avenue took me and to the Silverbird when the Romantics did a surprise show. Beers were 25 cents. It was this rowdy rock crowd, but things were different than that. The Romantics’ fans looked like late-seventies rock people.
Mike Murphy: People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened. Then the bands imploded or were erratic, and it was kind of strange that nothing ever happened out of that whole time, the first wave of punk rock. Bands were going to New York and playing shows and showcases.
Katy Hait (Sillies, vocalist, photographer): These bands from other cities would come in—Teenage Head from Toronto, Skafish from Chicago—and we were just as good as those bands. We joked about it because Detroit was such an underdog. Bands from LA and New York would become famous even though they weren’t that great.
Rock Band The Romantics Performing on Stage (Photo by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Kay Young (photographer): The music was really good, but no one hit like the Ramones or the Cramps did because Detroit was not New York. There were no record label scouts here.
Jerry Vile (The Boners, vocalist, artist, editor, White Noise, Orbit): The whole Detroit punk thing—nobody made it, and there are a lot of reasons. The record covers always looked like shit.
Vince Bannon (Bookie’s, City Club promoter; Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist): The Romantics were the only ones to pull out of Detroit in that era with any kind of substantial deal. You know it’s interesting: Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads told me that all these bands rolled into New York City because there were so many clubs besides CBGB that they would play. They could actually afford to live in the East Village and build a buzz. So you’re an A&R guy in New York, and this band is playing various buildings, and there’s a big buzz. Same thing in LA. The thing you have to remember is, what big bands came out of LA? The first punk rock bands were all signed to independents. It was out of New York where at that time the record capital was, and if you were to make it, you had to go and live in New York and do it. Also, anybody who really made it—from the biggest pop star to the rock-and-roll guy you think is totally underground—their ambition is through the roof. A lot of these guys that were from Detroit, they lived at their parents’ house, they go and play a gig, they come home, and Mom would make them breakfast in the morning.
David Keeps (Destroy All Monsters, manager): Bands from Bookie’s didn’t break out. The bands that did do something had heavy management, people who were willing to invest money in them to get them out of Detroit, like the Romantics. Also in Detroit you didn’t have these bands with money or commitment. You had to have both, and many didn’t. I don’t think anyone was poor; I think that they were mostly suburban kids living in their parents’ houses and didn’t have jobs. They weren’t like dole kids. It wasn’t as if you went to Bookie’s and all these people were from the projects or got ADC. There were kids who wanted to move out of their parents’ and lived in shitty neighborhoods.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich
Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.
Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’
Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.
Tesco Vee (Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor, Touch and Go magazine): We’d go to see everyone at Bookie’s, like the Revillos, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Gang of Four, the Effigies, and the Misfits many times. You know it’s funny—all the Detroit bands would warm up all those national acts—the Mutants, the Algebra Mothers, Flirt, the Cubes, the Sillies. We talked about them a lot in Touch and Go. It was like new wavy stuff, but still it was new music, and we covered new music, and it was probably just to fill up the pages. That’s not very nice is it?
Bookie's in Detroit
Steve McGuire (Traitors, bassist): When we hooked up with Don and they had this whole floor of an old Westinghouse factor at I-94 and Trumbull, with all this old equipment from United Sound and Sound Suite. It was our rehearsal place. I had quit high school and started living there and experimenting. When I first met Don I thought this was our ticket; we’re going to make it. I was so naive. There were blurbs of the Sex Pistols, and I thought the Traitors and the Sex Pistols were in a race, and whoever won would be kings.
Gary Reichel (Cinecyde, vocalist): They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we’ll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We’ll use the same equipment. You don’t have to worry about time between bands.” That’s how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.
Mike Murphy (The Denizens, the Rushlw-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics): No band got famous out of that whole era except the Romantics, and that’s freaky. It’s not that the Romantics weren’t Detroit, but they were not representative of that scene at all. But maybe that’s why they did get signed. When they were first working they were getting on all the good bills and paid for a rehearsal space and they were on salary, which sure isn’t like the rest of the bands. We were poor. I was working at a 7-Eleven.
Bangs’ description was undoubtedly important. For NME’s Nick Kent, “the whole concept of punk was his.” For Clinton Heylin, in From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, Bangs was “the godfather of punk journalism.” In 1975, Bangs wrote to a friend, admitting that he had “influenced a certain miniscule subculture of teenage misfits with rock’n’roll fanaticism and sometimes literary aspirations, who like to think of themselves as ‘punks.’”
However, in The MC5 review, Bangs didn’t use “punk” to call to mind a new spirit of rock’n’roll, but an old spirit of ill-informed journalistic excess... The Rolling Stone hype irritated him, and he paraphrased the earlier article, dismissing it with what would become his trademark sarcasm: “never mind that they came on like a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip — these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax!”
The word also seemed to conjure up Bangs’ own life. He was still then working on an autobiographical novel that he had begun in his teens, which he called Drug Punk... He discussed passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels, which had used the word “punk” frequently, with the San Diego Hells Angels chapter who lived next door. His friend Robert Houghton remembered that We’re Only In It For The Money, with ‘Flower Punk,’ was one of their favourite records of 1968....
After that MC5 review, through 1970, “punk” became popular. critics said Jim Morrison had a “street punk-choir boy voice,” or that The Rolling Stones had “a punk craftiness and sneering narcissism.” In the Fort Lauderdale News, there was the “lowest point in bad taste: the rock band of young punks at a remodelled nightclub which hung a placard on the bass drum with a phrase containing a four-letter word.” There are two types of kids: good kids and punks,” the Detroit Free Press suggested, though now “the good kids and the punk kids all have long hair.” In July 1970, in Fusion, Nick Tosches wrote a cover story called ‘The Punk Muse.’ For perhaps the first time, “punk” became more than a throwaway reference. It was now a recognisable, fashionable style.
“The Punk Muse”, 1970 (Source: Fusion/The Independent)
At the end of 1970, Bangs wrote a long essay called ‘ Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program For Mass Liberation In The Form Of A Stooges Review. Or, Who’s The Fool?,’ published in two parts in 2. Bangs called Iggy Pop “that Stooge punk.” As with The MC5 review, the description was both influential and called to mind earlier journalism; the previous year, in the Los Angeles Times, John Mendelsohn had described The Stooges’ first album as a collection of “whiny adolescently repulsive and barely distinguishable street-punk anthems.” Before that, in Fusion in October 1969, Iggy himself had described some of his audience as “punks.”
Bangs’ “Stooge punk” was a little different to the other “punks” of the time. This punk was “a pre-eminently American kid,” he wrote, vulnerable even, someone the “smug post-hippie audience” thought was “a fucked-up punk.” This was personal for Bangs: “his lifestyle was nigh-identical to ours,” he wrote later. In the issue of Creem that carried the second half of his Stooges essay, Bangs signed another review “Punko Bangs.” A few months later, he wrote that he felt “like some self-important punk’s notion of God sitting up here arbitrating the efforts of bands.” The same year, he called himself a “pompous punk,” someone with “pube punk fantasies.” For the first time in a couple of generations, someone had taken on the word willingly.
By the end of 1970, in New York, Suicide were advertising their early gigs as “punk music,” apparently inspired by Bangs. “I got the word from Lester’s piece,” Alan Vega remembered, “never imagining that punk would become a style of music.”
Punk was fashionable again.
Advertisement for Suicide in the Village Voice, October 1970 (Source: From The Archives)
“If punk America is dying behind the curdled MSG-free dregs of Hip and all the corny Experiments in New Designs for Living,” Bangs wrote in 1971, “then THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS.” Punk seemed to suggest a wider malaise that could be delineated by rock music. This “punk America” caused him to turn to nostalgic rock’n’roll: “you can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges,” he said, but they couldn’t compare to the “sneering punk snarl” of The Troggs.
This nostalgic usage was already common, particularly about fifties rock’n’roll. Ellen Willis had called Elvis a punk in 1969, and The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran would all be punks over the next few years. They were seen as forefathers: in a 1970 article on violence in rock, Rob Partridge in Record Mirror drew the links between the “romantic” punks of the 1950s and The MC5.
However, as Bangs had hinted at, it was the punks of the 1960s who first coalesced into a genre. In March 1971, in Creem, Greg Shaw wrote about The Shadows of Knight’s “hard-edge punk sound.” In April, in Rolling Stone, he praised The Guess Who’s “good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll.” The next month, Dave Marsh wrote his famous review of ? & The Mysterians, calling them a “a landmark exposition of punk rock.”
Both Marsh and Shaw felt they had originated the phrase “punk rock.” At the end of 1971, Shaw wrote about “what I have chosen to call ‘punk rock’ bands — white teenage hard rock of ’64–66,” and, according to the New York Daily News in 1976, he was “willing to take the credit for it even though he says he can’t remember the first time he used it.” Marsh remembered that, “culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better construed as a compliment.” He was, he said, “happier every year” to receive the credit for “punk rock.”
However, despite their influence, neither Shaw nor Marsh was the first to use the phrase. A year before either of them, in March 1970 in the Chicago Tribune, Ed Sanders, formerly of The Fugs, described his first solo album as “punk rock — redneck sentimentality — my own past updated to present day reality.” (While working on the album in December 1969, he also recorded a song called ‘I’m Just a Tired, Lonesome Street Punk,’ or simply ‘Street Punk,’ which was only released in 2008.) “No one sent me a check for coming up with the term,” Sanders recalled.
Wherever it originated, this “quaint fanzine term,” as Shaw thought of it, was growing in importance. Bangs’ ‘Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times’ was published in Creem the month after Marsh’s Mysterians review, again praising mid-sixties punk rock, particularly The Count Five... He planned to use the article’s title for what the Detroit Free Press anticipated would “probably be the definitive book on punk rock,” though it was never published...
Both the word and the music spread further still when Lenny Kaye used the phrase in the liner notes to his 1972 Nuggets compilation of sixties garage rock . “The New Nostalgia is here,” proclaimed a Chicago Tribune review, “with an emphasis on a single genre: punk-rock.”... Bangs wrote that Nuggets “proves that psychedelia and punk zap are just as much a real cool time now as they were when we might have invested some emotional space-born significance in them.”... By the new year, some fans of Nuggets were calling themselves “punks.”
Before long, punk was used to describe contemporary music. “Punk-rock has become the favoured term of endearment,” Ellen Willis wrote in December 1972, for “the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll.” Willis particularly liked what she called the “neo-punk sensibility” of Five Dollar Shoes, who she saw at the Mercer Arts Center in 1972, in one of the earliest references to underground New York rock as punk. (Lynn Van Matre had called Moogy And The Rhythm Kings “New York punk rock” in the Chicago Tribune that summer. Lillian Roxon also frequently praised a band called Street Punk, regulars at Max’s Kansas City.)
Although it was often used for artists that are now thought of as punk’s forebears — Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies —the word refused to be pinned down in the first half of the seventies, such was its ubiquity. Punk was used for a kind of “back to basics” blues rock.., heavy metal..., progressive rock..., and dozens of pop and rock acts with little else in common... The Monkees were “what punk rock is all about.” “Dion was the original punk,” according to Greg Shaw in Rolling Stone. For the Philadelphia Daily News, Connie Francis’ ‘Lipstick on My Collar’ “epitomized the adolescent worst of punk rock.”
“What Punk Rock Is All About”, 1973 (Source: Hartford Courant)
Soon, bands began to adopt the term. The Who included ‘The Punk and The Godfather’ on Quadrophenia in 1972. As well as Street Punk in New York, a band called The Punks formed in 1973 in Detroit. “Patrician rock is going down now,” Don McLean said that year, trying to shake off the success of ‘American Pie,’ “I like punk rock.” Brownsville Station released School Punks in 1974 and told journalists that they were “punk rock.” In 1975, Lowell George of Little Feat, once of The Standells and The Mothers of Invention, claimed that his current group, five albums in, were “just another punk band from L.A.” That year, The Tubes released ‘White Punks on Dope,’ reportedly about Jefferson Starship.
For much of the seventies, punk was often interchangeable with glam rock. For the New York Daily News, “punk rock” was a “subdivision” of “glitter rock” or “drag-rock.” Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade, and The Sweet were all called punk, and Roxy Music were “punk rock in space.” According to the Los Angeles Times in 1975, hitmakers Chinn and Chapman were “the masters of the English punk-rock sound,” but were “tired of the punk-rock wave that they rode to success in England.” In the British music weeklies, as Simon Reynolds observed in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, groups such as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Heavy Metal Kids were “punk before punk.” One headline about Harvey suggested “Thou Shalt Have No Other Punk Before Me.”
Indeed, the word was used frequently in the British press. As early as 1972, Charles Shaar Murray had described The MC5 as “punks,” after quoting Lester Bangs’ Rolling Stone review. Mick Farren often used the word for 1950s rock’n’roll, or those influenced by it. By 1973, NME was writing about “rock ’n’ roll’s punk-junk revolution.” In 1974, Melody Maker discussed “these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock,” and NME reported that record companies were actively searching for “punk.”
More than anyone else, Alice Cooper was the most high profile punk of the early seventies. He was “archetypal punk rock” for Grace Lichtenstein in The New York Times, and “mainstream punk raunch” in Rolling Stone. Punk was “a style that began and should have ended with Alice Cooper,” the Tampa Times argued. In Creem, Cooper won the new “Punk of the Year” category in the 1972 Readers’ Poll, with Lester Bangs placed in sixth. The next year, Billion Dollar Babies was “the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom.” After seeing a disappointing Alice Cooper show, a critic in Ontario wrote, probably for the first time, “punk rock is dead!”
Despite its popularity, punk still often betrayed the attitudes of those who used it, riddled with the problems of its etymology. In 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote to members of the Black Panthers, in a letter widely republished in the underground press, urging them to see the “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements as allies, and that “the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” Even where the word had come to mean a delinquent, it still sometimes echoed with homophobia or misogyny; liner notes to a 1973 compilation of The Sonics suggested that “it’s like if delta blues oughta be played by old black men, and if fag rock oughta be played by real queers, then it stands to reason that punk-rock oughta be played by punks!” For Ellen Willis, in 1974, “nouveau punkism… became an excuse for blatant male chauvinism and nihilistic trashing of every value and aspiration beyond (male) orgams and (male) violence.” In 1975, Let It Rock noted that “the term punk is bandied about an awful lot these days, it seems to describe any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off stage.”
Lester Bangs became sceptical about the term. In 1975, he wrote that “I try to completely dissociate myself” from people who think of themselves as “punks,” “because I don’t want to be the king of the punks or the king of the rock critics or any other such thing.” “This is punk?” he asked, when his friend Billy Altman took him to CBGBs for the first time, to see Talking Heads and Television. “This is just San Francisco all over again.”
“When there are no more punks,” Sid Vicious said, in January 1978, on the day of The Sex Pistols’ final concert, “that is when things are going to be okay.” The word had dogged the band, through tabloid controversy and critical admiration.
In America, the word had been attached to something recognisable as modern punk since at least Trixie A. Balm’s June 1975 review of The Dictators’ debut album in Creem, in which she praised their “punk aplomb” and “vinylized punk menace.” At first, calling The Sex Pistols “punk” was not to suggest they were new, but to compare them them to prevailing rock critical trends; in their first major review, in NME in February 1976, Neil Spencer said they played “60’s styled white punk rock as unselfconsciously as it’s possible to play it these days i.e. self-consciously. Punks? Springsteen Bruce and the rest of ’em would get shredded if they went up against these boys.” In May that year, Time Out described their set as “a mixture of Anglo-American teen/punk classics.” For Paul Morley, in his Out There fanzine, it was “controlled chaotic punk muzak.” Even for Greg Shaw, reviewing a gig at the 100 Club, “their sound is a straight blast of tortured punk rock.”
Bloomington’s thriving punk scene of the ’70s and ’80s paved the way for today’s punk bands. Pictured here, Seven Seconds performing at Ricky's Canteena, a Bloomington all-ages club, in 1984. | Photo courtesy of Chris Crewell
With few local opportunities to play professionally, most Bloomington bands had to play in friends’ basements and bars to be heard. Eventually, more venues started popping up around town to accommodate the growing counterculture. Bullwinkle’s nightclub, which was located in the basement of the building where Serendipity is now, became associated with the punk and new wave scene in the early ’80s, when longtime DJ Gary Indiana started booking shows upstairs, which soon became Second Story nightclub.
Before he went on to play guitar for nationally acclaimed groups, including the Lemonheads, John Strohm was active in Bloomington’s punk scene in the ’80s and has since chronicled his time in B-town in a series of blog posts for the Indy nonprofit Musical Family Tree.
“Those shows were life-changing,” he writes in his blog of the punk culture in Bloomington, which is often looked to as one of the most progressive in the country by musicians and fans. “I wanted to be a part of that world more than I’d ever wanted anything. … That became the singular, driving force in my life, which continued to be the focus for the next fifteen years.”
Wilkerson started his punk career when he bought his very first Korg MS10 synthesizer. By early 1981, he and his band, Amoebas in Chaos, were performing at Bullwinkle’s alongside some of the peaking local punk bands of the time. It was a small but welcoming community, he says.
“Everyone seemed to be glad to find kindred spirits,” Wilkerson says. “It was still a very small and marginalized subculture that was isolated from the mainstream.”
With their multicolored mohawks, safety-pin piercings, and aggressive fronts, the punk kids of the ’80s were a far stretch from the hippie counterculture of their parents. With the punk scene came a whole new world of invention and visual expression. Mike Whybark, who chronicled the ’80s Bloomington punk scene for The Ryder, and still does on Musical Family Tree, says this helped make the “punk experience” more authentic and intimate.
“It was all new, so it was explicitly cast outside of the mainstream marketing channels of American pop culture at the time,” he says. “It was disruptive and threatening to day-to-day political, behavioral, and sexual norms.”...
This is an edited version of an interview with the creators of a film about 70s South African punk. The rest of the interview talks more about how the film was made. I just stuck with the stuff about the punk scene.
What is punk, and how did your understanding of it affect the way you made the film?
Punk is an attitude of showing a middle finger to everything that is deemed important to others. It is about doing things for yourself independently on your own terms. If you put a soundtrack to that approach to life, you have punk.
How did punk reach Africa? For instance it [arguably] reached the UK via the Ramones tour. Any similar event of that nature, or was it more a slow seepage?
There was no single event or incident that caused to punk to reach Africa – the birth of the punk movement was more of a process, a slow build-up against the stifling conformity of the times. In the early 70s, Southern Africa still remained the last bastion of colonialism and censorship and social disapproval of popular culture was rampant. At the time the changing socio-economic situation in the UK caused a last wave of immigration of skilled tradesmen to South Africa, where they were welcomed by the apartheid government of the time due their skin colour. This also brought with it certain cultural influences, including the NME which was sold in South Africa six weeks after publication. Punk provided a necessary release from the imposed boredom of the times.
What kind of venues were found and what kind of ecosystem existed, or developed, to nourish these bands – if any?
Punk developed at first separately in each of the three main South African cities – when the musicians from various places began to meet each other, a network of small venues and later fanzines developed. Most of the scene was rooted in live performances and few records were available. The first attempt to do a punk / New Wave tour took place in December 1979, with Wild Youth from Durban, National Wake from Johannesburg, and Housewife’s Choice and Safari Suits from Cape Town. Most of these bands also played in townships and did semi-legal downtown street gigs, as the venues that would host multi-racial gatherings were limited.
Did punks get arrested for the political aspects of either their lyrics or the default politics of two-tone bands existing?
The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music
Actual arrests were rare, but police harassment was part and parcel of the entire scene. Bands were forced to change their lyrical content or remove songs from their releases – notably National Wake, whose lyric sheet was censored due to government interference. The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music.
What were the audiences like? Mostly white, mostly black or mixed?
Punk was the second important multi-racial music scene in South Africa apart from jazz. Rock music is generally a mostly white audience everywhere but in Southern Africa racially mixed bands were present from the beginnings of punk. Punk also often takes on local roots and draws on local music forms, and so there was an African identity present in the lyrics, music and visual style in the punk movement in all three of the countries we looked at.
Was African punk political from the get-go – something in the structure of the societies you cover – or did it move that way during its lifespan?
It was totally political from the start. During the 1980s in South Africa, the early 90s in Mozambique or Zimbabwe today, being involved in the punk movement was already a political statement.
Who were the primary opponents of punk in Africa? Were they religious leaders, political leaders, the police?
Definitely the police and the state. The scene was too underground to really have an impact on religious society as a whole. The government were always suspicious of the punk scene in all of the three countries we cover, with security police around gigs and so on.
How was punk regarded by musicians from other genres at the time?
Southern Africa is extremely rich in musical heritage, and even most rock musicians are taken quite seriously. A lot of cross-pollination always took place between jazz, reggae and African bands and the punk scene. More African-oriented musicians such as Mac McKenzie from Cape Town viewed the punk scene of the 1980s as a vehicle to reach broader audiences and different people but retained their musical chops and brought real musical skill to the punk style.
The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound.
How did punk change from country-to-country as it responded to the specifics of the society, events and politics of each place?
The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound. The politics and DIY aesthetic of the scene remained fairly intact everywhere...
Was there a “capitol” of punk rock in Africa in the 70s and 80s?
This was split between Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, each of which had its own scene with its own specific influences. Johannesburg was always more innovative but the other places had strong punk movements in their own right, all with their own unique characteristics...
What kind of response did you get – from the musicians you featured, and from others – when you said you were making a documentary on punk in Africa?
In the beginning people were quite resistant as a lot of them were traumatised by their involvement and in some cases had even left the country. But on the whole people were generally supportive and keen to be of help – in the end we were able to speak to almost everyone we wanted to get into touch with, and most were extremely helpful and generous in terms of sharing their stories, lives and archival sources with the project.
How did the musicians you featured react to the finished film?
The reaction has been hugely favourable from all of the musicians featured. One striking comment has been that across the various generations, many have commented that they finally understand their place in the larger history of local music, which is of course very rewarding. Until now much of this was completely undocumented.
Miss Melvis of Cleveland's Flat Can Co. She'll slay you.
In the late '70s and early '80s, most punks from the East and West Coasts agreed with their counterparts in the U.K.: Punk was a rejection of classic rock. Ramones vs. Aerosmith. But L.A.'s Black Flag screamed Fuck that! They dug the Sex Pistols and the James Gang. They worshiped all loud rock, regardless of hair length and fashion. If it rocked, it rocked -- plain and simple.
Black Flag should've hailed from Ohio, Michigan, or (gulp) Indiana, because their philosophy is a long-standing tradition among midwestern punks. Many of the best underground bands in Cleveland grounded themselves in a fusion of avant-garde weirdness and gritty, Friday-night bar rock. Rocket From the Tombs looked to Pere Ubu's new-wave futurism while nicking riffs from boogie monsters like Humble Pie. Cobra Verde concocts grand allusions to obscure European cinema, but grooves as if they're a bunch of surly drunks working third shift at the Dickey-Grabler Company.
Here, in middle America, there's nothing wrong with sucking down PBRs, cranking Double Live Gonzo!, and reading the 1924 Surrealist Manfesto -- all at the same time, mind you. You can dig high art and not have to abandon your working-class roots in the name of all that's hip in downtown Manhattan. That's a cool thing.
The Cleveland band that currently embodies this unique freedom is the Flat Can Co. Even the name sounds as if it was ripped from one of the decaying billboards painted on the sides of countless brick warehouses and machine shops in the Flats...
These four have never bought into the punk vs. classic-rock myth. In high school, sometime in the early '80s, I believe (Scott doesn't clarify), the Pickering brothers were wailing metal dudes, whose bands played punk shows. They were influenced by the legendary Pagans and Chicken Shack, a bombastic blues-rock outfit from the hippie era. Miss Melvis, meanwhile, has become a local guitar goddess, renowned for wrestling searing atonal noise from her six-string as if she is a cross between Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, free-jazz freak Sonny Sharrock, and no-wave idol Rudolph Grey. But here's the kicker: She doesn't listen to experimental guitar. She's a Cleveland bar rocker through and through.
Live, the Flat Can is something of a throwback to the late '80s/early '90s, when the Midwest underground ruled the indie scene with redneck punks like Halo of Flies, the mighty Cows, and the acid-fried Butthole Surfers. The six-foot Miss Melvis even resembles a Butthole, wearing a naughty nurse's outfit -- or sometimes even less -- while rolling across the floor straddling her axe. It's a true performance-art spectacle, even more so because Donadio and the Pickering brothers are so n-o-r-m-a-l-looking. Sporting all black (and not hip all black), these dudes resemble professional movers, not indie musicians.
But the utilitarian threads make perfect sense. Beneath the group's industrial-strength feedback, artsy use of extended improvising, and raging psychedelia lurks a beer-guzzling workingman's rock. Sure, it makes the head swim, but it also makes the ass shake. And that's what Cleveland has always been about.
Did you have a vocabulary and concepts for your identity and who you were as trans? Who did you identify with? Who were your role models? How did the culture of the 1980s make your life easier or more difficult? What other aspects of the 1980s shaped your identity as trans? How do you think your experience then differed from the experience of people now who have greater internet access to support and visibility in the media?
Anonymous
I was in my 30’s during the 80’s and it was a fabulous time, the dawn of what I consider the modern era in popular culture. At that point, I could still pass for a gay boy in his mid-20’s, but my trans side was becoming harder to suppress. In the 70’s, glam-rock androgyny provided an easy cover for being femme and flashy. By the time the 80’s arrived, that trend had migrated out of gay subculture into the pretty boy new-wave scene and I did too. There were lots of drugs and sex as well, and I was a pretty promiscuous crossdresser. But one step I was not ready to take was transitioning for real, to admit to myself that I didn’t just want to dress like a girl and party.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that I really wanted to be female all along. But in the 80’s, that was too scary a prospect to deal with. I dreaded electrolysis, knew I could never pass, and was afraid I’d be alone forever. There was no trans movement, no internet to research, and nothing but contempt and ridicule for outed transsexuals. The 80’s were politically reactionary, with both feminists and fundamentalists raging with openly transphobic bigotry and judgmental psychiatrists who denied hormones and surgery to all but those who could act like prim and proper straight girls. I was a skinny punk bisexual freak who could not even caricature that kind of standard.
But the 80’s finally gave way to the 90’s, the emergence of gender activism and third-wave feminism. What really broke the ice was the increasingly public visibility of genderqueer dykes and trans men, unheard of in the 80’s. The jargon changed as well, with people openly identifying as queer and transgender, and the political formation of the LGBT alliance. While trans people were still marginalized in both straight and gay worlds, there was finally a queer alternative where you could transition without having to go full-time stealth in heteronormative mainstream culture.
I had no useful vocabulary to define what I was. I was different. I knew that, physically, I was not a girl. I knew I liked being around girls and doing things that girls did. I knew it would be ‘bad’ to share that with anyone.
I had a sterile dictionary definition of transsexual, no idea how I’d even heard of the word. I knew roughly what a transvestite was. I saw my body self destruct and I didn’t have words for it. My voice broke. My mother said I became quieter. I withdrew. I was unlike anyone else I knew.
Boy George and similar others were making music. I didn’t really notice them. I didn’t feel it was anything to do with me. I didn’t really notice that they were doing anything unusual, I filtered it out.
I identified with no-one. I had no role models. Whilst Caroline Cossey might have been publicly outed in 1981, that news missed me. My parents didn’t read The News Of The World. Apparently, neither did anyone else I know, or else they just weren’t talking about it. I could not have named a single transsexual in the 1980’s.
When I turned sixteen, I started to grow my hair. That was, at least vaguely, culturally acceptable. My mum accepted it. My dad made fun of me. My grandmother hated it and tried to bribe me to get a haircut. I started sixth form college and first met people who identified as gay. I looked at them, was indeed friends with them, but knew that I was not gay. They were different. They saw themselves as men and I did not.
In 1989, I turned eighteen and started university. There was the lesbian and gay society (became the LGB Soc in 1990 and, I assume, the LGBT society around 2000). I had decided I wasn’t gay so I didn’t sign up. That position became difficult soon after when I started being attracted to boys/men.
There was no publicly available internet. There were no “lifestyle” programmes, that I can recall. It was almost a vacuum. I did find an item in one book that said, and I paraphrase slightly, there was a man who got a sex change, lived as a woman, was raped and went back to living as a man again. It was not encouraging.
That was part of my problem. There was very little information about being transgender. What little there was was not encouraging. It was almost organised transphobia in the media, designed to keep me in line. I saw graffiti in public toilets either depicting scenes of men in lingerie performing sex acts on each other or, apparently, transvestites soliciting for sex. Either way it made me uncomfortable and wondering, “I this me? Is this what I’m going to become?”
Given how much negativity I was subjected to in the 80’s I’m amazed I ever transitioned at all and didn’t just give up and take my own life. Fortunately the 90’s gave me a lot more information, some of it even positive.
Anonymous
Seeking help. Small College town. There is a doctor that can help your son. Doctor is contacted. He says he charges $200.00 an hour to help me. My mother realizes she cannot afford it. This doctor is at the college, now a university.
The son goes to the local library. There is a book. It mentions Dr. Money. Speaks of how Dr. Money has treated children who are intersex, damaged from circumcision. How they are raised female. Also speaks of Transsexual. The first time he learns about people who live as the opposite sex.
Through reading, the young person learns that the testicles are the reason he has become so masculine. He then realizes it is time to stop the process and tried to amputate them. Ends up in and out of the hospital. Multiple amputation attempts.
Seeking any help she can, she try’s to find help for her son. He is suicidal and mutilating his genitals. To no avail. There just is no support for a young man who is in need of effective therapy. After all what is transgender? No one has ever herd the term in small town USA. He is then considered Gay. Never given the chance to be recognized accurately. He lives with the stigma of being a gay man who wants to be a girl.
He try’s to work. No insurance. Unable to hold down jobs he ends up back at mom’s house. His father lives on the other side of the country and has turned against him because he is a sinner. His son is a terrible child. His father is a reverend of a Pentecostal church in Arkansas. He abandons his son and never speaks to him again.
Now time goes on and mom dies. Eventually I transition, it is the 90’s.
Today I struggle from the memories of the lack of support in the 80’s. Mutilation and suicide attempts.
Life was hard. I was confused and reactive to the hormones bathing my brain and body. I felt like I was going insane. I have major scars and my mother and I were all alone against a system lacking is support.
I am alive. I survived. I have memories. I have scars.
Today, the support available is a miracle compared to what I didn’t have in the 80’s. I only hope it continues to improve. That any stigma or labels that are hateful and derogatory fade in time and we are no longer killed or treated as if we have no rights for being born the way we are.
The 80’s were a nightmare as a transgender person/woman. Thank goodness they are past.
You can see what I, and others, had to say about this movie in this post.
Here I'm just presenting the movie itself and two trailers, plus a nice, long, clear discription of it.
THE ACTUAL MOVIE:
TRAILERS:
“Black punk rockers smoking dope with hope to cope
White punk rockers keep their head and fight for peace to rule”
(“Black Punk Rockers” by National Wake, lyrics by Khoza Brothers)
Punk in Africa will focus on the pivotal role of punk rock music, style and subcultures in recent and contemporary political and social upheavals as experienced in four African countries: South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and Kenya. In all three of the three Southern African societies, the punk movement played out against a rapidly intensifying backdrop of intense political struggle and open civil war; today in Kenya, a continually developing punk scene plays out today against a very similar level of societal breakdown, financial difficulty and political turmoil, while a parallel scene in the Afrikaans community uses punk as a medium to express questions of identity, belonging and political dissatisfaction.
The story told in the film covers several decades, from the early 1970s until today, and will
trace the relationships and unique features of the punk scenes in the various countries with a
strong focus on the central role of the punk movement in the anti-apartheid, anti-censorship
and anti-conscription struggles in the three major South Africa cities. Particular emphasis will
also be placed on the unique multi-cultural and multi-racial nature of the movement and how
this has influenced its political direction and African sense of self-identification until today.
The film will immediately open by establishing questions of African identity within the punk
contemporary punk scene in South Africa, leading into an animated credit sequence which
will combine visual elements of the internationally identifiable punk rock style and uniquely
African art and urban design, set to a newly recorded version of the classic political anthem
“Black Punk Rockers” originally done by South Africa’s first multi-racial band, National Wake.
This opening sequence will directly flow into the main narrative, which is primarily concerned
with the political and social impact of punk within the anti-apartheid movement. This begins
with a visit to South African rock legend Benjy Mudie, who explains the first stirrings of punk
in Africa in the early 1970s, from early music-inspired riots to the direct anti-government
campaigns of the 1980s. Through the stories of bands directly forged by this repressive
environment, such as Suck, National Wake and Asylum Kids, we examine the development
of punk rock as played out in Johannesburg’s underground music scene during the 1970s
and 80s, a story set against the backdrop of the Soweto Uprising, international sanctions
and border excursions into Angola. This will be emphasized by interviews with some of these
musicians, including founding members Gil Gilroy of Suck and Ivan Kadey of National Wake,
as well as archive materials demonstrating the political atmosphere of the time and
extensive use of rare and largely unseen rare Super 8 films and extensive photos of all three
of these pivotal and influential bands.
By the mid-1980s, this growing underground scene was exploding in all of the major South
African cities and taking an overtly political stance. The film will explore this in great depth,
beginning with a visit to Durban and an interview with confrontational Coloured punk rocker
and media provocateur Rubin “Wildman” Rose, one of the key figures of the 1980s
underground scene as drummer in the legendary band Powerage. Numerous period
fanzines and footage of early 1980s protest concerts will also be included. Others from
Durban to be interviewed include Dianne Coetzee, a veteran of the local underground punk movement and now of Billboard Magazine, and members of the politicised all-female band Leopard and Sibling Rivalry, one of the multi-racial ska-punk bands to emerge in the 1990s.
Similarly, a visit to Cape Town will investigate how the underground organisation and distribution of this protest-oriented network functioned within the state of emergency of the time, through an interview and extensive use of the archive of local punk legend Ernie Pap, as well as tracing the emergence of the first mixed-race “goema punk” band The Genuines, with testimony from founder Mac MacKenzie and producer Warrick Sony of the Kalahari Surfers. This section of the film ends with an exploration of the peak period of political struggle in late 1980s South Africa as experienced directly within the punk movement, when the anti-apartheid and anti-conscription campaigns intersected with underground music in semi-clandestine and racially mixed venues like the Johannesburg club Jameson’s. This will be told firsthand through the personal stories of the banned and harassed group Toxik Sox, long-time punk promoter and historian Bill Botes, and X-Ray and Neil, brothers from the Indian community of Lenasia who produced one of the era’s most important underground fanzines, set against an archival background of riots, police actions and UDF protests.
With the advent of liberation, negotiations and democracy, the punk movement in Southern Africa became less overtly political in orientation but more and more diverse socially, with increased freedom of travel allowing movement across borders. In South Africa this gave root to bands focused not on pure protest but on exploration of identity and mixed musical forms, often drawing on local indigenous traditions. The film will examine this primarily through Cape Town ska-punk band Hog Hoggidy Hog, formed at the time of the first free elections and today playing increasingly African-influenced music as South Africa’s longest lived punk band. This part of the film will feature extensive road trips to both Mozambique and Namibia, where the origins of those scenes and their political context will be explored, alongside contemporary issues: in Windhoek, members of the younger band Half Price explain the local situation through songs concerned with German-speaking identity, human rights and satires of the 2010 World Cup; in Maputo, drummer Paolo Chibanga of 340ml explains the development of the Mozambican punk scene in the immediate post-civil war era and the unique local sound, rooted in reggae, Brazilian and traditional African music as approached through alternative rock music.
The film will conclude with a survey of the rise of openly stated identity politics within the contemporary punk movement, moving across both borders and ethnic and class lines. This section will dwell less on archives and instead will feature several bands playing live to today’s socially aware and often politically frustrated youth, with trips to Pretoria and Nairobi in order to examine the contemporary (and exploding) developments in the Kenyan and Afrikaans underground scenes, both of which point to new horizons and directions within the African punk identity. At the film’s conclusion, we return to Johannesburg to examine the newly formed Afro-centric punk band Swivel Foot, who incorporate kwela and township elements in their sound as part of a fiercely felt multi-cultural identity as new South Africans. As they prepare to travel to play at an all-African festival in Swaziland, the band members return us to our main theme, present throughout – an examination of what it means to be committed, punk, and African, in a time of political challenges and uncertainty.
