Pics from a punkhouse show in Columbus, Ohio, 2009

Taken from the FlickRiver site at https://www.flickriver.com/photos/jimmybuttons/sets/72157619359629785/

Taken in: United States / Ohio / Columbus / University Area
Taken on: June 5, 2009
Sets appears in:   • lotus fucker, nukkehammer, sacrifidelus, penis geyser @ 15th house 06.05.09

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.

A look at the 70s/80s Akron, Ohio, alternative and punk scene

This is an edited version of an article about The "Akron Sound" Museum and the book, "The Akron Sound".

‘AKRON SOUND’ MUSEUM & BOOK CELEBRATE THE HEYDAY OF THE MIDWEST’S PUNK CAPITAL

CALVIN RYDBOM, WAYNE BECK COMMEMORATE THE ERA THAT PUT AKRON MUSIC ON THE MAP

by Brittany Nader

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.”

Read the full article 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 6 of 10: The scene and being a woman in the scene

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

Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. *At that time if you saw someone who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.

70s Detroit band, Flirt (Courtesy of Rockee Berlin)

Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): That scene had girls, but they all died. It’s weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.

Hillary Waddles (scenester): There were girls, but we were all people’s girlfriends. It just wasn’t the time for that yet—girls didn’t get in bands; you didn’t get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.

Gloria Branzei (scenester): It was a little dick fest, and they didn’t like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.

Hillary Waddles: Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn’t like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.

Gloria Branzei: It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone’s ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.

Tesco Vee: Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.

Sherrie Feight: Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.

Jon Howard (scenester): There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn’t get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam’s Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of ’81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Rea-sons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.

Read the full piece here.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 2 of 10: The Romantics and nobody else making it

 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

Romantics '78 - Sue Rynski

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.

Read the complete 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.

Article on the 80s Bloomington, Indiana, punk scene

This is an edited version of an article on the punk scene in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 80s...

Since the ’70s, Bloomington Has Been a Midwestern Haven for Punk

by Sierra Vandervort

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

It’s 1976: The Ramones have just released their first studio album, and the Sex Pistols are still a basement nightclub band in Sheffield, England. Before punk rock seized American counterculture, the Gizmos had already recorded their first EP in Bloomington, their hometown. The protopunk band sent some of the initial shock waves of punk throughout Bloomington, inspiring young musicians across the city to join what would become a revolution in music.

Soon, punk and new wave groups started popping up throughout Bloomington and Indianapolis. The Dancing Cigarettes, Moto X, Rosebloods, Walking Ruins, The Slammies, Pit Bulls on Crack, Dandelion Abortion, the Zero Boys — suddenly everyone was starting a punk band.

“Most everyone was just happy to be part of something that was fun, rebellious, and socially satisfying,” says Indiana-music historian and ’80s punk musician Rick Wilkerson. “Before punk, it wasn’t really possible to start playing in a band unless you were already an accomplished musician. Punk allowed that rule to be broken. All you needed was an instrument and desire.”...

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.”...

Read the complete article here.

Description of a Cleveland band and the Cleveland scene

This is an edited version of an article that I felt captured the midwestern punk scene well...

True Midwest Punks: The Flat Can Co. Embodies The Workingman's Bohemia

by Justin F. Farrar

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.

Read the complete post here.

Reviewer description of the midwest's punk scene

An edited version of a review I found where the guy gives some good description of music and the scene in the midwest...

The Inarguable -  Cornfields and Black Lace: The Midwest Post-Punk Resurgence

When one thinks about the Midwest, only two things come to mind: Chicago...and endless cornfields, because apparently that's all that happens to be out here. If that isn't bad enough, the general consensus about music out here runs the gamut from Nachtmystium to Slipknot. Yes sir, we Midwesterners sure have an outstanding reputation. Deep beneath the wallet chains, Tripp pants, and drug addictions, something much more glorious (and legitimately downtrodden) in seedy late bars and warehouses throughout our fair land. Call it post-punk, peacepunk, goth rock, or one of its many other names, it is impossible to deny the presence of such new greats as Cemetery, Anatomy of Habit, Population, and Kam Kama (more on the last two later), among many others, in this burgeoning Midwest scene.

In post-punk's early '80s heyday, the Midwest United States proved to be one of the most reserved regions in the country. With the no wave scene to the East, deathrock to the West, and darkwave's earliest beginnings with San Antonio's Lung Overcoat to the South, Middle America found itself in the position of the middle child: appreciated, but only in passing. Though success found itself by way of notable Lincoln, Nebraska act For Against, the first to blur the line between post-punk and "dreampop," many groups like Chicago's short-lived DA! ended up swept under the proverbial rug...

Kam Kama's scope strays from post-punk's usual "doom and gloom" outlook for something much more...nostalgic, which is exceptionally fitting for Middle America. I don't know if many of you have ventured outside the Chicago area, but most of the Midwest hasn't been able to keep up with its concentrated metropolitan areas, leaving most places somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s, complete with bright, albeit fading, neon clothing, boom boxes, and headbands. Sounds straight out of a John Hughes movie? Well...it kind of is, and Kam Kama's The Tiled House carries that sort of happy, albeit faded feeling which accompanies those sorts of memories. The Tiled House's ethereal, subdued guitars and nasally, endearing vocals (courtesy of bassist and Fosdyk Well member Scott Ferguson) echo the sort of nostalgia one feels when flipping through their high school yearbook's yellowed pages or watching a dusted VHS of home movies. It's a happy sort of sensation, but with a longing for times past.

Read the complete review here.