Minnesota Historical Society's entry for punk boots in their Collections Department

This is just a small piece written for some punk boots in the Collections Department of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Collections Up Close: Punk Boots

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...

See the original piece here.

A look at the 70s/80s Chicago, Illinois, punk scene

This is an article that gives a quick view of Chicago punk and alternative music in the 70s and 80s.

Remembering Chicago the 70s and the 80s: Punk

Credit: Psycho Cindy

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.

Interview with a person who did a documentary series on the 70s/80s Minneapolis punk scene

This isan edited version of an interview with the person who did the documentary series, Minnesota Hardcore, covering the 70s and 80s Minneapolis punk scene.

‘Minnesota Hardcore’: A Q&A with producer who chronicles the Twin Cities’ ’70s-’80s punk scene

David Roth: “I didn’t want to punch home a thought, like ‘This is what this meant,’ but if you get enough people talking about it, you get the understanding of how exciting and energizing it was.”

By Jim Walsh

For punk rock fans, one of the best binges of late has been producer David Roth and Twin Cities Public Television’s newly released documentary “Minnesota Hardcore,” which chronicles the loud, fast and furious hardcore punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s in the Twin Cities.

Augmented by archival footage and photography, and with narration provided by Cows/Heroin Sheiks lead singer Shannon Selberg, Roth expertly traces the scene’s beginnings as an offshoot of the first wave of punk, with bands like Hüsker Dü and Final Conflict leading the way, and also its evolution amid hard-and-fast rules that were born to be broken as the original architects of the scene grew up and moved on. Along the way there are smart and funny insights from a host of experts, including Peter Davis, Dale T. Nelson, Lori Barbero, Michelle Strauss Ohnstad, Doug Anderson, Chris Patrick, Tom Hazelmyer, Danny Murphy, Dave Pirner, Tommy Stinson, and the late, great music champion Terry Katzman.

Roth talked with MinnPost about the making of “Minnesota Hardcore,” which can be streamed here.

MinnPost: What is your story with hardcore? Where did you grow up, and how were you introduced to the music?

David Roth: I grew up in south Minneapolis, near Uptown. And when I was 12, my family did a yearlong move to England (in 1979), because my dad was an English professor. So I got exposed [to a lot of new music]. When I was in England, too, I was a rude boy. Ska had just exploded, so I was not into punk rock. I actually was really into the second wave of ska in 1979 — The Specials and Madness, and I had every Two Tone single from 001 to like, 14.

But in England, we’d walk to the bus, or to the train station to go home, and everyone would pick up the NME on Tuesday. Everybody was into music. So you had The Jam, you had The Specials, you had Stiff Little Fingers on primetime TV once a week.

Also, seeing that movie “This Is England,” that felt like that you’d lived through it, and at that time the [white supremacist movement] National Front was peaking. I had no idea about hardcore until we moved back to America. My sister Jennifer was the one who always got the cool records first, and the Dead Kennedys’ “Rotting Fruit” was the first thing she got. And she bought me Black Flag’s “Damaged” for Christmas that year, and I really didn’t completely understand Black Flag.

David Roth - Photo by Matt Mead

And then I became friends with [Replacements bassist] Tommy Stinson in seventh and eighth grade, and started kind of hanging out with him and he would take me to Replacement shows, and one of the first times might have been a REMs-Replacements double-bill at Goofy’s Upper Deck, or Regina High School. That was some of the first [live music] I saw, and I just remember the bands playing half-hour [staggered] sets, and the nuns walking around looking really confused at what was going on.

MP: What about records, and discovering more hardcore records?

DR: I would hang out at [legendary south Minneapolis record store Oarfolkjokeopus], and I’d ask Terry Katzman, “Are the Dead Boys good?” and he’d go, “Oh yeah, yeah, get that!” I wasn’t into hardcore yet, but I think going to some of those shows with Tommy and then being exposed to … I remember very clearly when Twin/Tone [Records] got the first Discharge EP.

That was one of the most memorable moments, because I was sort of hanging out with Tommy, and we’d go back to Peter [Jesperson]’s apartment at the Modesto [building in south Minneapolis], and we were in Terry Katzman’s basement apartment, and they were playing Discharge. They were like, “What does this mean? What’s going on here?” Like, they were all really concerned with how fast it was, and just how it was the most noise they’ve ever heard.

Not long after that I was able to sneak into Goofy’s Upper Deck and see Discharge live. So it all kind of had to do with being able to get into shows. And when I got back from England, [Soul Asylum leader] David Pirner, because I was this little 14- 15-year-old punk rocker with no friends, said, “There are a group of punk rockers in Northeast, and you should call this guy. He gave me Paul Paiement’s number, who was playing in the Blue Hippos, and I took a 4 bus over to Northeast and started hanging out with those guys and getting into their shows, and they were playing hardcore, and I was like, “Wow, people are playing hardcore here.”

So, long story, but to me that was kind of a part of it: It wasn’t a straight dive into hardcore; it was an evolution of culture and music that led up to it.

MP: You were hugely impacted by that scene... Did the story burn in you to tell it all these years?

DR: Yeah, definitely...

It’s funny how punk has always been demonized. Even to this day, 40 years later, 50 years later, punk is still [villified]. But in the mainstream it’s starting to get a lot of documentaries about it right now, and a lot of people really looking at it. So yeah, this has been burning in me for a long time. I even started talking with [musician and archivist] Ron Clark; we were talking about making like a Goofy’s Upper Deck documentary for a while because I definitely wanted to explore some of this stuff...

MP: But that’s what generates a scene in part; that secret handshake underground thing. That original hardcore scene lasted about two years. Part of the allure is that it was an underground movement that only a few true believers really took part in. What would you tell people who weren’t there? Why was it important?

DR: Part of it had to be the context of our culture at that time. What was it that 15- to 20-year-olds could do as far as us youth activities, culture, music, being a part of something, participation? I tend to look at it like this for some reason: In the mid-’70s, there was maybe one PG movie released every week, or maybe every month. There was a dearth of stuff for kids to do that wasn’t school-related, and so I think it was kind of perfect timing for that, and I think it was this idea at that time that we could actually make something. We could make a band or make a fanzine and other people could see it, and it would help enrich our sort of community. There was something really infectious about wanting to be a part of it. The participation.

Fifteen-year-old “Minnesota Hardcore” producer David Roth chicken-fights his way through a Minor Threat show. - Photo by Suzanne Beauchaine

MP: That’s a great point. It was participatory, for bands, fans, everyone involved.

DR: It had to be, right? If you didn’t have anybody at the show, the show sucked. It felt like it sort of just spontaneously grew, like, you’d see someone at Goofy’s that you hadn’t met before, and after that then they were part of your club.

MP: Have you ruminated on why it happened, sociologically? Watching it, I thought about the oppressive ’80s with Reagan/Thatcher, gang life, youth culture, and the need for speed and chaos and headbanging, post-Ramones and Sex Pistols, etc. Then again, I like how Hazelmyer says, “Fast, sloppy, and move on to the next thing. You know, you weren’t writing a thesis; you were making a flier for a show in a garage that was probably gonna get shut down by the cops.” He’s right, but your thesis is valuable because it validates a little-known but really important scene. As you did interviews and compiled archival material, did the importance grow? Did it morph from personal passion to realizing that you were documenting something that people will watch and learn from 50 years from now? 

DR: ...A theme that I was trying to kind in there is that any music scene is a continuum. One of the things that also inspired me about hardcore and all of this was [Otto’s Chemical Lounge singer] Dale T. Nelson, and his tales about the Twin Cities in the late ’60s. I couldn’t even imagine how cool it was, with all these garage bands playing in clubs that kids could get into.

...The funny thing is you were kind of talking about street gangs, which I’ve been thinking about a lot, because I almost felt like there was this really almost magical period in the beginning of hardcore where it really wasn’t like gangs. But within four or five years, Minneapolis was full of gangs and a group of those were little punk rock kids. That’s actually my next documentary, about the [‘80s anti-racist punks] The Baldies. It’s kind of a sequel, how this little group of skinheads from [Minneapolis] Southwest High School who started an anti-racist gang that grew into one of the largest anti-racist organizations anywhere.

MP: It’s very moving to see [late producer/engineer/record store guru] Terry Katzman on screen. His enthusiasm and support was so genuine, and so emblematic of that time. What do you remember about your interview with him?

DR: ...I remember standing next to Terry Katzman at Goofy’s Upper Deck while he did sound, and I remember him being incredibly excited by Social Distortion, and I remember him just being so enthusiastic about music. He was always just kind of there with a reference or something; he was an institution around here.

MP: Punk rock was so influential in how you live your life. I was singing/screaming in my band at the time, and part of the fun of your doc is seeing my old buddies on camera talking about the old days. It’s sweet to see the footage of all this angst and chaos and all the mosh pits, juxtaposed with, say, smiling [Rifle Sport singer] Chris Johnson and his kids, talking about the past almost like it happened to someone else. In your subjects, and in you, how did that rebellious spirit live on into adulthood?

DR: [He was] the most crazy destructive punk rocker you knew, and now to see him … You know, a lot of people watching this will have no clue what Chris Johnson was like on a Saturday night in the 7th Street Entry. But there he is, 25 years later with these two adorable kids and this really stable business. How do you reconcile that? Part of the documentary that I have never been able to reconcile is some of the excitement and possibility of those times with the reality of growing up and becoming an adult. You can’t make money out of hardcore so either you become a squatting crusty who doesn’t need money the same way, or you kind of have to enter society.

MP: Whenever I think of the phrase DIY, I always think about those early days of punk, and visiting the Spanish Fly/Reflex Records/Twin Tone Records offices, where, especially, Hüsker Dü was doing it all themselves, from posters to art to records to tours. That was part of the fun of it: Making it up as you go. “Minnesota Hardcore” captures that so well, and itself feels very DIY, even though it’s via public television.

DR: I think that’s interesting because I do think about that too. There was a certain knowledge that I wasn’t going to have the kind of time or money on this doc to make it look like a Hollywood doc, so part of that [DIY] thought process went into making it. I did have some help with graphics, and there’s only so much original footage, and you want to give the spirit of the punk rock aesthetic so it can be a little bit more homemade. It some ways it was really cool that way, and it really reminded me of making a fanzine.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 10 of 10: Why Be Something You're Not? TV show

   This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

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.

by Steve Miller

John Brannon: We started going on tour, and we’d have to sneak Opie out of the house because he was fifteen. Opie, Graham—those kids were still in high school. I’m sure, looking back, the parents probably realized what’s going on. Opie would tell his folks, “Oh, I’m going to spend the night at Graham’s house,” and then we’d go out. DC, Philly, and New York, and then be back in time for him to get to school.

Andy Wendler: We did our first real tour with the Misfits. We had made great friends with them, and Corey and Barry were pestering ’em like, “Hey, can we get on those bills?” I don’t really know why we got along with them so well, other than the fact that Jerry and Doyle might as well have been from Ohio. They were just such great, good-natured guys, and we really hit it off with them. Glenn, for whatever he’s become now, was incredibly articulate and artistically talented and had an eye for just really clever, almost iconic graphics. I don’t know—that really appealed to us. We were like, “Wow, they’re like the Ramones but scary.” On the Misfits tour we took Corey’s dad’s ratted-out old Suburban. It was tight, and we had to sleep on top of the gear in the back. It got horrible gas mileage, but it was cheaper than buying or renting something.

Corey Rusk: Russ [Gibb] started showing up at the Freezer. He was hanging out and absorbing it all. Maybe it reminded him of his youth in the sixties. He saw that I was involved in some of those shows at the Freezer. Honestly, I’m socially awkward, and it was more enjoyable to me to have a sort of take-charge attitude and be more like, “I’m gonna do a bunch of the work to make these shows happen, even though I’m not making any money from it.” You know, it’s not my club. I’d do a lot of the flyering, and Russ saw that in me and started trying to talk to me. I totally blew him off in the beginning, like, “Is this dude a cop, or what the fuck is he doing here? Why is there someone this old here?” I was sort of suspicious of him.

Russ Gibb (Grande Ballroom promoter): One of my ex-students came to me and said, “Have you heard Negative Approach?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, there’s a place called the Freezer Theater.” So I went to see them, and they were rehearsing in some fucking little place on Cass somewhere; it looked like a little storefront or something. I saw them and I said, “Wow, this is interesting.” They’re doing things that the MC5 were doing. Now this is fifteen years later. You know, click, click, click, click. Of course I saw money!

John Brannon: He locked onto the scene and saw something that was going on, and he was really into the idea of the youth presenting their art. He had his students come out and tape all these TV shows, and they became the first kind of public access TV shows. And they were doing it on this extreme hard core punk.

Corey Rusk: I don’t think Russ needed to make a living teaching school. And here he was in 1981, teaching media at Dearborn High School. He put a bunch of his own money into helping fund Dearborn High School having its own high school TV studio and station that was probably as good as the local public television station set-up. You look at how forward thinking was this fucker? 1981 was the year that MTV started, and the bulk of America did not have cable TV then. You know, like MTV is a household word, now, but it just like this bizarre upstart concept in 1981, and so for Russ to really see that the future of music was in music video in 1981 and to put his money where his mouth was—to say, “I want the kids in my class to have this experience, because this will prepare them for what is gonna be the future.”

Russ Gibb: We started a show my students did, “Why Be Something That You’re Not?” It had a lot of the bands playing at the Freezer on it.

John Brannon: We were writing the soul music of the suburbs, and the Freezer was perfect. If you want to nail what soul music was for that time, the scene—even though it’s basically a white scene—it is our soul music, man. We’re creative, we’re bored, we’ve got nothing going on—man, we’re creating this shit. The whole thing about being in a band at that point, there was no separation between the kids and the audience and who’s on stage. It was music for the people.

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 8 of 10: The City Club

  This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

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.

by Steve Miller

Corey Rusk: The Freezer was the all-ages reaction to the City Club situation. Somehow we managed to get into a lot of those City Club shows, though we were underage. But the Freezer was just so cool, it didn’t matter.

Brian Mullan: City Club was the old woman’s club off Elizabeth right downtown, a block off Woodward. It was one of Vince Bannon’s big to-dos. Any time there was a big show, whether the Dead Kennedys or the Exploited, the Cramps or whoever, the security guys would always beat up on the punks. So there was a backlash. Bannon was the Establishment, a businessman, and in retrospect I don’t begrudge him that.

Rob Miller (Bloodshot Records, cofounder): I had a humiliating night at City Club. I got a fake ID at the Lindell AC bar and tried to get into a Fear show with it, and the door guys, they laughed at me.

Chris Panackia: Vince was booking bands at City Club before it was opened. And he still was running Bookie’s. The fucking agents went crazy. He goes, “Oh, I got this great place,” and he wouldn’t tell them until they got there. About four or five hundred people in the ballroom could see the band at City Club, but you could put a lot more people in it. In a two-month span he did the Dead Kennedy’s, the Fear, the Cramps, the Rockettes, the Stray Cats, Duran Duran, Haircut 100, Killing Joke, Gun Club, Human League, Circle Jerks, Sparks, the Flesh Eaters, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. It was the best place to be. The Circle Jerks show was during the Grand Prix downtown, and you got in free if you brought a helmet. One guy brought a helmet.

Vince Bannon: In ’81 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s at the City Club, which is what it was. Clutch Cargo’s was the name of the production, and it was at the City Club.

Corey Rusk: We’d go to City Club because they got bands we wanted to see, plus we would be on some of those bills; Negative Approach played there a lot. The Freezer wasn’t there to put those larger places down. I would help organize those bands at the Freezer, though, and we started get-ting out-of-town touring bands that were open to playing different places. Like when the Misfits played at the Freezer. It was just such a huge time for music. At least to us.

Rob Michaels: There was no consciousness at all of “Hey, this is the town that the Stooges and MC5 were from.” There was this Stooges residue, and there were people we thought of as that. It wasn’t like people didn’t know about those records, but there was no sense of “Hey, this is Detroit and this is what came from here.” It was this sense of “We made this.”

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 7 of 10: The Freezer and Cass Corridor

 This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

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.

by Steve Miller

Andy Wendler: The Freezer was on Cass and Willis in downtown Detroit. The guy who ran it was a speed freak, and we could get away with anything we wanted. It was right around the corner from where John and Larissa lived in the Club-house at that time, which was right between Cobb’s Corner and the old Willis Art Gallery.

Hillary Waddles: The Freezer was a crappy place. We went over to the Burger King to use the bathroom. No way I was gonna use the Freezer.

Cass Corridor by Steve Pepple

Corey Rusk: Even though it was so inner city, and at the time Cass Corridor was really, really bad, it seems to have gotten cleaned up over the years. At the time all the people living in the slummy areas where the rental halls were at were not accepted. Punk rock was not accepted and was not mainstream, and if you looked like a punk rocker, you weren’t cool; you were a freak. It’s amazing that all these white kids invaded all these inner-city neighborhoods for these punk rock shows, and whatever violence problems there were, were usually between the white kids.

Keith Jackson: A lot of us were from the suburbs, and we all wanted to be down-town where it was tough. And it was. There was no interference, which was fine. Cops never came around, and you were really on your own going to see bands. That stuff out of LA seemed phony to us; they would hang out and then go back to their parents’ homes, and it seemed pretty easy. But at the time in Detroit you could go to a show at a place on Zug Island, and there were no cops, no security. You would bring in generators into a burned-out building, and that was your club. I stabbed a dude in the ass one time at a Subhumans show at Zug Island. There was this huge fight that broke out, and I mean it just kept on going for most of the show. He punched my girlfriend and I had a four-inch blade I carried around, and I stabbed him in the ass.

Corey Rusk: We were probably mildly entertaining to the residents. They just looked at us like we were freaks too, and we weren’t the white people that they had problems with. We had no race problems.

Brian Mullan: Roaming the Cass Corridor at whatever ungodly hour, we all wore jackboots, had our hair cropped or shaven. …Nobody really got hurt down there because nobody had money. At the time I was taking the Jefferson bus to Nunzio’s to run sound. I made like $15 a show, and then I sold loose joints. I was just surviving.

Andy Wendler: We’d get fucked with occasionally, but we had numbers on our side. We were never there alone. There would be forty kids skateboarding down the middle of the street. John and Larissa had respect in the neighborhood, back when thieves used to abide by that kind of thing, because they lived in the neighborhood. So if you were with John and Larissa, you got a little bit of a pass. It was a big heroin neighborhood in those days, and they were amongst it. The guy who owned Cobb’s Corner got shot in the backroom one night. That was a money thing—he had it. One time the Detroit police pulled up at the Clubhouse and said, “What the hell are you kids doing? Go back to Roseville, you idiots. What are you doing down here?”

Cass and Henry in 1980 by Frank Smitka

Keith Jackson: One night I was with Kirk Morrison from Dead Heroes. City Club had just opened, and we were outside and we heard gunfire, which wasn’t unusual. But a bullet went through my jacket and shattered my collarbone. Some guys dragged me into Detroit Receiving by my arm and said, “Our friend got shot.” The cops actually came to the emergency room and talked to me. They said, “Were you returning fire?”

Tim Caldwell (artist): I was in jail one night, and a guy told me the cops came into the apartment building right by the Willis Gallery because he had let loose from the rooftop with a machine gun. He hid on top of the elevator while they searched the premises.

Dave Rice: I lived in a few different buildings around there, briefly in the Clubhouse with this guy Darryl. Darryl and his brother and this friend of ours, Jenny, were there, and a couple of guys came in with their shotgun and just, like, cleaned the place out of as much gear as they could carry. Okay, gotta get a new amp. Gotta get a new guitar. I always played like this slap-together pawnshop crap anyways, so it wasn’t like I lost a ’59 gold top or anything.

Gloria Branzei: Those guys thought they were scaring the people in the neighborhood, but they were fooling themselves. I was in the shooting dens, and I knew what they thought; they just thought we were fucking crazy. But they sure weren’t scared of us.

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 3 of 10: The start of hardcore

 This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

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.

by Steve Miller

Clutch Cargo's

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.

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 1 of 10: Bookie's

This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

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.

by Steve Miller

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.

Read the full piece here.

Des Moines, Iowa, alternative magazine on a bar that played punk shows in the 80s

This is an edited version of an article from the alternative magazine, CityView, on the bar, So's Your Mother, that played punk shows in the 80s.

Des Moines Forgotten: 2000 Forest Avenue

By Kristian Day

The original sign for So’s Your Mother that was hung on the corner at 2000 Forest Ave.

The second floor of 2000 Forest Ave. was once the home to two infamous music venues in Des Moines. The first was called So’s Your Mother. The bar opened its doors in the 1970s and was more of a hippie place but eventually transitioned to a punk bar in the 1980s. It was part of the old nightlife in Drake’s Dogtown neighborhood around Forest Avenue and Harding Road (which is now MLK).

Mark Heggen of Des Moines remembers the last show for the band A Testament of Youth on April 27, 1983: “The final gig of ATOY was somewhat infamous for the lead singer doffing his clothes as the set went on, until he was down to a jock strap. One of the Mother’s staff had had enough of him at that point and demanded ‘Put your goddamned clothes back on,’ but it was too late by then, and the farewell set ended with the singer still in the near-altogether.”...

A Testament Of Youth’s final performance at So’s Your Mother on April 27, 1993. Photo by Mark Hegge

(A Husker Du performance) was the center of a tragedy that has never been laid to rest, as it was where Diane Schofield was last seen in 1975. The case is still open today....

From the Husker Du Database

So’s Your Mother transitioned in 1989 into the Laughing Iguana, which was opened by local scene legend Jeff Wright (who went on to open Hairy Marys with John Limke). The venue was the center of a lot of great music with bands like Moveable Feast, House of Large Sizes, and even Smashing Pumpkins, which played the 300-person capacity venue in January of its opening year....

The Laughing Iguana closed its doors, and the building was eventually demolished around 2000.

To read the full article, go here.

Labels: 2000 Forest Ave, 80s, A Testament of Youth, ATOY, Des Moines, Flying Iguana, Husker Du, Iowa, Iowa alternative scene, Iowa punk scene, Iowa venues, Midwest venues, music venues, research, So's Your Mother

An alternative magazine's article of a Des Moines bar that played punk rock in the 90s and 00s

This is an edited version of an CityView article about Hairy Mary's, a music venue in Des Moines in the 90s  and 00s that played punk rock.

There was something about Mary’s

By Jared Curtis

Five years after its closing, the legend of Hairy Mary’s remains

The downtown area seemed barren in comparison to what it is today. Many buildings were used as storage, which is exactly why Jeff Wright and John Limke thought it would be the perfect area to open a new live music venue on Southwest 2nd Street (the current home of the High Life Lounge and el Bait Shop).

“We opened the original Hairy Mary’s in 1991 in an old empty warehouse,” said Wright, who owns Church of Choppers and along with Limke and Brad “Fatty” Smith also owns FTW Company, GT Lounge, Kung Fu Tap and Taco and Big Tomato Pizza.

The name was based on a local beauty that caught Wright’s eye...

The neighborhood was so desolate, some local officials didn’t even know Mary’s existed.

“I remember being outside, and we had been open for probably a year, and a police officer rolled up and asked about the bar,” Wright said. “I told him we had been open for a year, and the cop said, ‘This is my beat, and I didn’t even know you guys were here.’ It was a totally underground club, and we were a lot better known nationally than we were locally.”

Photo courtesy of The Iowa Underground Archives    

 

The building was a perfect location for the venue, but the former tenants left something not so desirable behind.

“They used to store hogs in there, and when we had big shows like the Smashing Pumpkins or Mudhoney, the wood would start to sweat, and you could smell the hogs,” Wright laughed. “I remember we probably had 800 people in there, and it was so hot and sweaty, steam was rising off the building. People actually called the fire department because they thought the building was on fire because there was so much steam rising from the body heat.”...

The club, considered the CBGB of Iowa — an iconic music venue in New York City where bands like The Ramones and Blondie got their starts — was so well known on the national level that the music magazine Alternative Press voted the bar Best Live Music Venue.

“Bands loved playing there because we liked to party. There were a lot of wild times down there,” Wright said. “We didn’t set out to open theme bars or throw bacon festivals; we did it for the love of music.”

Other bands that played the original location included Fugazi, Monster Magnet, Firehose, Clutch, X, Supersuckers, Ween, Dumpster Juice, House of Large Sizes and a relatively unknown Dave Matthews Band...

Although the parties were known to survive many challenges, the secret service shut one celebration down during the floods of ’93.

“The water was close, but for some freak reason, we had power, and the bar was dry, so we just moved the speakers outside and started partying,” Wright said. “Then the secret service came by in the row boats and told us to stop and turn the music off because Bill Clinton was going to be coming by as he toured the flood areas. The cops made us close everything down, but we just moved everything to [Mike] Clabaugh’s house.”...

The bar also had a strong following of regulars who came down regardless of who was playing. Kim Huch Hanson, who is married to Bobby but didn’t know him at the time, was one of those people.

“I hung out a lot and remember eating a lot of Pop Tarts there. I think you could get a package of Pop Tarts for like 50 cents. And you could get them hot or cold,” she laughed. “I remember the night before Lollapalooza. There weren’t a lot of people there, but it was so cool to see all of these bands that I was going to see the next day get up on stage and jam together.”...

“Those guys brought the party environment to Des Moines, and people are still talking about it,” Kim said. “Mary’s was the perfect storm, and I have lots of good memories. Bands heard it was a wild place and actually wanted to stop and play Des Moines. There have been other venues in Des Moines, but there will never be another place like Mary’s.”

All good things must come to an end, though, and after advancing the metro music scene in only a handful of years, Hairy Mary’s closed its doors in 1994.

“We were totally burned out,” Wright said. “Working 10 bands a week for years takes its toll. We sold it and moved on to our other ventures.”

But that wasn’t the end of Hairy Mary’s.

The second location

In early 1997, Shawn Crahan of Slipknot had taken over the Safari Club, located at 2307 University Ave. But as Slipknot began to attract more attention from record labels, the bar became a burden and Cranhan closed the Safari Club in late 1997, selling it to another owner.

“Shawn sold the bar to a kid who was running it into the ground, so Jeff approached me about joining up with him and John to reopen Mary’s,” Fatty said. “I was in the media/bar business at the time, but I loved live music so we decided to do it.”

The bar was remodeled from its previous incarnations and reopened in 1998.

“We gutted the place but still wanted to keep it punk rock,” Wright said. “I travel a lot, so when Fatty and I go out of town, we try and search out the Hairy Mary’s of the towns we’re in.”

To many, one of the most memorable aspects of the University Avenue location was the bathroom. When patrons talk about the bar, the bathrooms usually come up. But Wright says you can’t always judge a book by its cover.

“People always said the bathrooms were bad, but we kept them clean. Those bathrooms got bleached and scrubbed as much as any other bathroom,” Wright said. “It just had a graffiti look and feel to it.”...

“The scene revolved around the bar, which you don’t really see anymore. People were there every night, no matter who was playing,” said (David "Davo") Wilkins, owner of Axiom Body Piercing Studio at the Skin Kitchen... “The new Safari Club was being promoted by other people from out of town, but when Jeff, Fatty and John came back, they brought it back to the local, independent promoters.”

Wilkins believes a lot of the shows taking place wouldn’t have happened if the Mary’s crew wasn’t involved.

“All those guys were very supportive of me and the shows I was putting together,” he said...
“That was the beauty of the job, catching bands right as they were on the way up,” Fatty said. “I remember seeing At The Drive-In the first time they came through, and there were like five people there. The next time they stopped, we were well over capacity.”

Other bands that played at the new location included Queens of the Stone Age, Mastodon, L7, Biohazard, The Melvins, High on Fire, Linkin Park, Murder City Devils, Fu Manchu, Cursive, Fear, Earthride, William Elliott Whitmore, Exodus, Captured! By Robots, Hatebreed, King’s X, Misfits, Agent Orange, Slipknot and North of Grand...

A motocross event also brought back some fond memories for Fatty.

“There was a motocross event in town, and they all showed up and were driving dirt bikes in the bar,” he said. “One dude put his bike on top of the bar and caught the bar on fire, and people went nuts. It was a blast.”...

“The type of bands that played there were underground. Their motive wasn’t about being signed; it was more about touring and making it across the country,” said Ramirez, who is a co-owner of Bombay Bicycle Club. “It’s nothing like it is now, though. When I was booking the club, I was on the phone all day, aggressively calling people. There was no email or Facebook. It was calling people and promoting shows with flyers.”

Des Moines’ location in the middle of the country offered a unique experience for bands and fans a like.
“I remember seeing a lot of Bay Area bands play their first Midwest date at Mary’s, and the same goes for the east coast bands. Their furthest show west would be at Mary’s. They would be on a bill together, and a year later you’d see them touring together in another part of the country,” Ramirez said. “As much as people think of it as a live venue, it was the locals that kept that place alive. Just like any other bar, you need a great group of regulars, and Mary’s had that.”...

Local act The Vandon Arms even started a band so they could drink for free at Mary’s.

“We all lived together and would have drunken sing-a-longs. We thought we could put a group together and get free beer if we played Hairy Mary’s,” said guitarist Clint Meek...

“I have played in a lot of rock and roll bars, and Mary’s was by far the best venue,” Clabaugh said. “A lot of bars only had cover bands, but Mary’s was the first to say no cover bands, and they opened the door for a lot of local bands to get on stage. There was only one Hairy Mary’s, and there will never be another one like it.”

You can read the complete article here.

Labels: 90s, Des Moines, Hairy Mary's, Iowa, Iowa alternative scene, Iowa punk scene, Iowa venues, Midwest venues, music venues, research, venues

An introduction to the history of a location that many punk bands played at in Des Moines

This is an edited version of the first of a series of posts by a long time Des Moines punk rocker about a location that housed a couple of the venues playing punk rock in our fair city. And I threw in a video he did about the location at the end.

2307 UNIVERSITY

by Davo Wilkens

The History of Safari, Hairy Mary's and Lefty's

https://davoaxiom.com/chapter-01-safari-nite-club

2307 University Ave was the location of 2 of the most important music venues in Des Moines, Iowa. Safari Nite Club and Hairy Mary's were not only this first venues to really open up to the idea of doing all ages shows on a regular bases but they were the home of the local music, a tour stop for countless national acts, a club house to those that hung out there and the room in which Slipknot cut it's teeth and got signed...

Just the first Mary's would be a novel in itself and I have to state from the start that if it wouldn't have been for owners like Tony, Shawn, Jake, Jeff, John and Fathead, I would have nothing to write about. They had the vision and often the martyr like precedence to forge ahead when any rational person would have given up.

Many would have to ask why write anything about the place in the first place. It was a dump, the sound system was substandard and crowd tend to be a little on the, well, let's say a little on the rough side. If you really did a count on average attendance at the club in the 12 years that it hosted the Underground Music scene it would be around 50...

Now Des Moines has countless venues for live music. Nice clean places with sound systems that work and bathrooms that don't have the scent of rotten flesh but the thing is none of them are a club house, a center point to a developing and evolving music scene,,, You see you didn't see Punk bands or Metal bands or even bands that wrote their own music in nice clean, safe and well organized clubs. No those shows were usually in venues in the worst part of town, with bathrooms that didn't work and often completely without security...

Other installments of the series:

• Chapter 01 - Safari Nite Club
• Chapter 02 - The Change
• Chapter 03 - Summer of 96
• Chapter 04 - Axiom Promotions
• Chapter 05 - Shawn's Safari
• Chapter 06 - Club Bauge
• Chapter 07 - The second coming of Mary's
• Chapter 08 - The post Script, the last song
• Chapter 09 - It's Ain't Over - Lefty's Live Music

DaVo's Vlog #5 - A history of the venue at 2307 University Ave in Des Moines that is currently Lefty's Live Music. In the past it was Safari Nite Club and Hairy Mary's. Also live foot at Lefty's Live Music from Emily Davis and the Murder Police, Mountain Sprouts and Barnyard Stompers.

Labels: 2307 University, Davo Wilkins, Des Moines, Hairy Mary's, Iowa, Iowa venues, Lefty's Live Music, Midwest, Midwest venues, music venues, research, Safari Nite Club, Slipknot, venues