Over Christmas, my youngest, now 17, asked, “Dad, were you a Punk?”
Nope.
No one born after the Port Huron Statement was a Punk.
Oh, we may have thought we were Punks, listened to Black Flag and X, dressed the part, and smoked cloves at shows in smelly hotel basements. But we were not, absolutely not, part of that movement. We had nothing to do with its formation and contributed nothing but our parent’s money for records, T-shirts and tickets. We were Punk consumers only. We are now called Generation X, but we had no name then even though a few tried to give us one.
The media seemed at a loss for what to call us. Hunter Thompson later called us a “generation of swine.” Another guy tried to call us The Zero Generation. We are the children of the silent generation, the greasers and be-skirted girls of the 1950s. We didn’t participate in Punk’s birth, but we witnessed its death.
Punk Rock, not Altamont, was the true end of the Sixties. A seedy end to an era doomed to seediness. Punk was a smelly, sphincter-period on the ass end of a run-on sentence. Punk’s demise was almost perfectly co-incident with my generation’s coming of age.
Real punk, born in the despairing streets of Liverpool, London and Manchester almost overnight in 1976, had it origins in the U.S. The British punks were heavily influenced by The Stooges and The New York Dolls as well as Jamaican reggae and ska.
British Punks had a lot to be angry about. The U.K. was sooty, unemployed and couldn’t keep the lights on. Their music was angry, political, obnoxiously Marxist, and oozed with a nihilism that shocked the general public. Not a few years before, the Punks were late-coming hippies hoping for grass on a sunny hillside. It didn’t work out. John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols was famously asked what he had against hippies: “… they’re complacent,” he replied.
When British style Punk ricocheted back across the Atlantic it squatted mostly in Los Angeles and New York. It arrived amid a growing “New Wave” music scene in a morose nation about to change direction. By 1980, Elvis Costello, Devo, Blondie and The Talking Heads had all appeared on Saturday Night Live. Those acts were America’s understanding (and my) of the “New Wave.” Real Punk was largely kept off the air.
But in 1981 the band FEAR played on Saturday Night Live at the behest of John Belushi. The New York punks in the audience destroyed $20,000 worth of stage equipment. It looked stupid and the music sucked. Punk was fun for young males in the “pit” but on TV it was silly and ugly and, in this case, contrived. I remember laughing so loud I woke up my parents.
FEAR’s appearance was Punk’s public high-water mark. Sid Vicious, Darby Crash and Ian Curtis were already dead by then. For that matter, so was John Lennon, John Bonham and Bon Scott. Rock and Roll seemed to be dying all at once.
But it was time to clear the palette anyway. Music of all sorts, Nashville included, had become a moribund, over-produced tedium. Music wasn’t fun. My generation didn’t want to wait years for bands like Fleetwood Mac to slow-fart another somnolent, un-danceable record. Oingo Boingo, The Talking Heads, Van Halen, Bad Manners…they were fun, humorous and quirky.
By 1983 my generation was in college and starting from zero, as it were, but still experiencing a popular culture not of our making. Saved by Zero was a hit that year. Punk still lingered in the amyl fumes.
I started writing about it. Again, too late to matter. In early 1985 I worked on a series of phone interviews (4 of them) with Chuck Dukowski, co-owner of SST records and the former bassist for Black Flag. I produced nothing from the effort. I will X-plain.
The second interview was in early June. All was going well until we got on the subject of my ge…ge…ge... generation. Dukowski bristled with the standard invective: you all only care about dressing the part, poseurs, skinny-tie Reaganites, suckers of consumerism, etc. I then mentioned the latest (May 23, 1985) issue of Rolling Stone.
Dukowski went ballistic.
The article on everyone’s mind (EVERYONE I knew) was The Zero Generation by cultural king maker Aaron Latham. Latham, the reporter known for starting the Urban Cowboy fad with a single article, was perhaps trying again to create another cultural movement ex nihilo by naming a generation that was starting ex nihilo. The article was about the illegal underground clubs entertaining youth (my generation) in Los Angeles and the kooky, nihilistic entrepreneurs who ran them. Dukowski knew nearly all those interviewed.
I lost my notes long ago, so I paraphrase his words:
That’s all a bunch of bullshit written to get the kids to buy fashion and pretend they are in a counter culture. You think Rolling Stone doesn’t know what their up to? You’re a f$#king idiot if you don't!
He went on like this for while and used the word, “fashion” a lot. The interview ended amicably. In fairness, he was not really wrong, though he failed to say just how Rolling Stone would profit from more kids buying illegal liquor and second hand clothing. Latham, on the other hand, wasn’t reporting this phenomenon for journalism’s sake alone. His modus operendi was to first write about cultural phenomena and follow it up with a screenplay and movie (as he did again with Perfect). I suspect Dukowski knew this about Latham. He had reason to feel bitter: Punk had become a niche market and SST could barely pay the bills. He may have also felt betrayed by some in the article, like Mad Marc Rude, and SST associate.
There was one glimmer of hope for SST and that was the Minutemen. Their short, likable songs had something different, namely musicianship, and their album, Double Nickles on the Dime had sold well. The hope died in December when the lead guitarist, D. Boon was killed in a late-night car accident. That very morning Scott Sturtevant (the late Slim the Drifter) and I were talking about interviewing the Minutemen. “Uh, Harry, I just heard a bad thing.” I phoned Dukowski to confirm. I knew immediately I would not write a damn thing. It seemed morbid to continue. Let the era pass.
I had an epiphany: these things were before my time. They did not shape me nor I them. Dukowski was invested, I was not. Punk changed D. Boone’s life, not mine. I was not functioning as a proper journalist, I was being a fan from far, far away.
Above: D. Boone waxes nostalgic about his own era.
American Punks claimed a victim hood that really didn’t exist. Reaganomics and Thatcherism were for real, we were doing alright and the left stood stupefied, mouths agape. The era was ripe for satire. The British spoofed the scene in 1982 with The Young Ones (which arrived belatedly on MTV in 1985). New literature emerged with MyBright Lights-Big City*, Less than Zero and Neuromancer. Though two of these novels were written by latter-day baby-boomers, they represented (to us) a clean break from all before them. So did some music: Jesus and Mary Chain, New Order and Sonic Youth were ascendant; Dwight Yokum and others were quietly reviving country music. Miami Vice was a hit.
That isn’t to say affluenza, Shoegaze, Grunge and new-found honky-tonk, et cetera, were an unquestionable good. The River’s Edge, a 1986 downer film, was one way the world saw my yet-to-be-named generation and how it might end. A lot of it remained decadent and self-pitying till the very last Gen-Xers burned down Woodstock ‘99. Much the same way the late-boomer Punks ended things. Ironic.
Yes, Millennial friends, we did walk up-hill in the snow to change the channel on the analog TV. We also had no internet or cell phones and went to public libraries. Circumstance does not make us better, necessarily.
(We also saw the Berlin Wall fall, rode Bradleys at 73 Easting, breached minefields and charged up stairwells on 9-11. So put that in your vape pipe.)
But circumstance can instill a sense of grace, force us to seek God. We must be honest with ourselves: we were born into a cultural and economic malaise but benefited from an unprecedented economic revival. In that sense, we are not much different than the baby-boomers who came before.
Let’s be careful how harshly we judge or how much we X-splain.
P.S. All clove cigarettes ever did for me was make me crave ham.
So what really mattered to me then:
Can't say I was ever a fan of punk (I'm older than you--not something I grew up with), but this was a fascinating trip down (some of my) memory lane. I did read Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City (which I think singlehandedly ended the "2nd person narrator" idea).