Punk Turns 30

It's Goner Records birthday Charlie Brown! Scott Rogers and Shelby Todd enjoy each other's company over margaritas and chips and salsa... The Memphis record shop loved by people (and their pets) is turning 6 ! Goner is the label (and later the shop) that launched or sustained some of the very best garage, punk and punk-informed rock n roll music of the 90s and 00's... as well as iconoclast (to garage/punk, that is) elegant pop... John Hoppe shows off Goner's extensive selection of records Here is a small photographic tribute.... YOU can wish them a happy one by visiting their website and buying some great music, made in Memphis and elsewhere. Goner artists Harlan T. Bobo, King Louie and Jack Oblivian in Goner Alley, 2005 The King Khan and BBQ Show released their first collaboration through Goner Inside Goner with Tom Shannon of the Cheater Slicks and Eric Friedl, co-owner Zac Ives, Goner co-owner What do you get when you cross Canadians, Brits and a Japanese fella? I...

As I have said, and will keep saying -- 2010 is the Year of the Memoir... another punk rocker from the 70s, Belinda Carlisle has a book entitled: Lips Unsealed: A Memoir, due on June 1. Back in the 70s, when this photo was taken, very much like Cindy Sherman was doing, I was creating a series of stills with a vehemently female pop culture focus. While Sherman's renowned Untitled Film Stills (which were produced during the same period of time that Belinda Carlisle, Pleasant Gehman and I produced our series of campy female images) feature herself as the protagonist in a postmodern salute to female film star cliches, the series I created with LA Punk Rock It Girls, Belinda and Pleasant were postmodern salutes to fashion photography and pulp fiction book covers. Only in retrospect is this girl power punk rock / art zeitgeist truly apparent. I'm not taking this opportunity to compare myself to Cindy Sherman (whose work I admire and collect), but to observe that our generation...

2010 is the Year of the Memoir (although in the Lunar calendar - the Chinese New Year that we celebrated on February 14, it is the Year of The Tiger). Patti Smith has a brilliant memoir entitled JUST KIDS and she is currently touring behind it. If you are in England, you're in luck, for the tour brings Patti to you next month! Click here for tour dates. Photo above was taken at the California Theatre in San Diego, CA. May 1978.

I saw the Slits in Los Angeles on November 11, 1980 -- that's winter in most places. But as you know, the warm California sun and all... November and December in LA can be the most temperate months of all! Look at those gals! They're wearing summer clothes and enjoying the mild weather on a winter's evening on the Sunset Strip. Its 28 degrees from where I write at this moment... and that's balmy for winter in many locales. But its bitter. The wind bites. Snow falls occasionally. I wear my socks to sleep because it's that cold to me! Winter is the time to hunker down and scan a whole bunch of old material for new viewers. 2010 brings the Punk Turns 30 Archive Restoration and Preservation Project forward. As many readers know, last fall, there was a flood in the warehouse where many of my pictures (as in negatives and slides) were stored. Thanks to good pals who were my proxies, nearly everything was rescued. Now I'm restoring it. 2010 brings more in t...