Punk Turns 30

"Rock 'n Roll is just.....lawyers" - Stiv Bators , CFNY-FM radio interview 1980 I actually had no idea that Stiv said that. I only just now read it on David Quinton Steinberg 's myspace blog. David, as readers of this blog know, was the Teenager from Toronto who stepped up to the plate, replacing Johnny Blitz in the Dead Boys for their last go-round before Stiv morphed that unit into the Stiv Bators Band... the band I refer to as the Disconnected Band, after the album they recorded with Stiv. I don't know if David knew at the time that he was interested in anything beyond playing rock n roll... would there be some growing up? A career not on stage? Twenty-eight years after these photos were taken, David, no longer a teenager, is one of Canada's most well-respected lawyers. And not just any kind of lawyer... he's one of the most well-respected entertainment lawyers in the biz. Its not difficult for me to imagine the wide-eyed teenager pictured above ...

Avengers - Penelope Houston only looks summery in her white dress... they were all punk furious 1977 was known in the punk rock world as The Summer of Hate (1967 in the hippie world was the Summer of Love - "If You're Going to San Francisco," The Monterey Pop Festival and all that). Spike Lee and Michael Imperioli would have you believe it was the Summer of Sam... which if you lived in NYC, I guess it was - with the serial killer who called himself the Son of Sam wreaking havoc... we on the West Coast had our own serial killer... The Hillside Strangler - and F Word put words and music to that scare. Tonight in New York City, The Stalkers and Live Fast Die, two of my favorite NYC bands, would invite you to have a Summer of Hate... not to hate on one another... no - but rather to identify the things that still piss off a young punk rocker or the wary citizen. So if you are in Williamsburg Brooklyn NY tonight, June 28... in just a few hours, you can go get your punk on wit...

On this date in 1974, the Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio... that pretty much signaled the beginning of the end of individuality in some ways. While making supermarket check-outs faster for the customer, it increased worker productivity for the stores, and what it did for inventory control for the stores and the product distributors... well... it completely removed the human element and let the digits do the talking in terms of calculating what sold, etc. etc. Bar codes first actually existed as far back as 1966, but the supermarket scanning first happened in 1974. I don't remember when UPCs started appearing on record albums, but I do remember that artists - both the recording artists and the artists who designed the covers were pretty concerned/upset about this. The record album seemed to be the last bastion of individuality and artistic expression and there was some Big ...

Camero Werewolf of Live Fast Die, Williamsburg, Brooklyn - NY - 2007 You absolutely have to click the link that is the title of this post! New York Magazine's Summer Guide 2008 - The Summer Issue... "Punk Like Them" is the name of the article. Thirty plus years after NYC homeboys The Ramones revitalized a bloated music scene with their short, fast, furious and fun songs, kids are still seeking the Holy Grail of Punk Rock - NYC's St Marks Place. Man oh man, do I feel old. Not aged, mind you... but old like "old fogey." After reading about the protagonist of the "Punk Like Them" piece, I just had to roll my eyes (you might too). Punk rock may be a statement or response against the mainstream... but back in the day (and here's where I sound like an old fogey)... we earned everything we achieved (and in so doing, made the world safe for future punk rockers and punk rocker wannabe's). Dee Dee Ramone on stage with Stiv Bators & Jimmy Ze...

Back in the day, bands - punk rock and other, would pile into their trusty owned, borrowed or rented Ford Econoline, Dodge or Chevy vans (American made big ass gas guzzlers that could hold 15 people or a band, their assorted gear, boxes of merch and mattresses) and just hit the road. Back in punk rock's early days, gas was below 79 cents a gallon... this I remember because in 1979, in Los Angeles, gas was just hitting 79 cents a gallon (79 - 79 cents - that's how I remember). These days.... of course, its a whole other story. Gas is averaging $4 a gallon. For the average punk rocker or other independent band, this is just devastating. The title of this post links to a story on Yahoo describing how "high fuel prices put brakes on indie band tours." That's what traffic looked like in 1978. Notice the VW Beetle - The People's Car was one of the cars of choice for the cash-strapped punk rockers. Even before the overall zetigeist for vehicles was energy effi...

Tim James strikes a campy pose outside the Hotel Chelsea in NYC, a landmark of culture for the ages The Chelsea Hotel has probably always been on my radar...from my earliest memories of literature that didn't involve Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter... it was the Dylan Thomases and Brendan Behans, titans of a British Isles literature that held nothing back... and the Existentialists of the modern era, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir... Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road there... it is an endless litany of literary figures and of musicians and artists as well, but none hit closer to home than homeboy, Lance Loud. Young, handsome and buff, Lance was the inadvertent star of reality TV before such a thing existed. As the oldest child in the Loud family, whose lives were lived on PBS in the series An American Family , Lance's move away from the nest in cozy Santa Barbara, CA was documented for the nation to see. He landed in New York City at the Chelsea Hotel. Famous f...

Lance Loud, famous for being Lance Loud, lead Mump, journalist, AIDS activist, and the man who inspired me to move to NYC On this date in 1981, the AIDS epidemic was formally recognized by medical professionals in San Francisco, California. AIDS - an acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome - was first identified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that same year when five men in West Hollywood, California presented identical symptoms of the disease and died because of it. Without going into politics or science, I just wanted to acknowledge and remember some of my friends in the punk rock population whose lives were cut short by this disease... these people should not be forgotten Above - Bradly Field of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, and Joseph Fleury, Mumps Manager at Duke's at the Tropicana, Los Angeles, CA Kevin Kiely, Mumps bassist On the right - Black Randy, RIP - with Paul Roesseler (still very much with us) Jeffrey Lee Pierce's poor health ...