Punk Band Quotes

I’m in a band. I don’t go to church every Sunday. I love punk rock music. Sometimes I use swear words a lot. I respect and admire gay men and women. I’m obsessed with horror films. I know what shame feels like. And guess what old man? Jesus is still my Savior.

I mean, they're only the best punk band out there right now, named for the fucking apathy of a xenophobic fucking nation oblivious to the fucking terror its leaders wreak on the rest of the world because they're too busy worrying if their cat might be stuck up a tree or something.

Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the front man for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you're necessary, you're over.

It's the ballads I like best, and I'm not talking about the clichéd ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies. I mean a true ballad. Dictionary definition: a song that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with repetition, refrain, etc. My definition: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of his life in three minutes, reminding us of the numerous ways to screw up.

Standing out like a punk guitarist in a mariachi band.

It's shit punk.[..] That doesn't mean I think punk is shit [...] it means that when someone plays unk ina shit-like manner, it's excruciating. So either find yourself yourself a good punk band or move on, Tom. Because it kills me to say this, but you're actually a tiny bit gifted.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.

You know what punk is? a bunch of no-talent guys who really, really want to be in a band. Nobody reads music, nobody plays the mandolin, and you're too dumb to write songs about mythology or Middle-earth. So what's your style? Three chords, cranked out fast and loud and distorted because your instruments are crap and you can't play them worth a damn. And you scream your lungs out to cover up the fact that you can't sing. It should suck, but here's the thing - it doesn't. Rock and roll can be so full of itself, but not this. It's simple and angry and raw.

It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.

Funny, cute and kissable I've found a girl that makes me lose control Every night's like the first night Never gettin' old

Well?" Dad asked. "How do I look?" "Like you want us to follow you into an alley so you can flash us," Nick said. "Like you own sixteen birds with complicated backstories for each," Seth said. "Like you're the bass player in a Christian punk band called Please Us, Jesus," Jazz said, leaning her head out of Matilda. "Like you have red satin sheets on your bed and mirrors on the ceiling," Gibby said, her head just above Jazz's. "Like you know how to show a guy a good time," Burrito Jerry said. 'they've got a point, man," Trey said as Bob nodded. "I feel like you want to give me a body-cavity search with gloves you brouqht from home.

I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house. I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped.

All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.

Oh, the truth I must tell Is I'm lonely as hell Still looking for myself

Charlotte Caffey played lead guitar like it was a totally normal thing for a girl to do, which made it a totally normal thing for a girl to do. It didn’t seem shocking or revolutionary to me—they were just a fucking great band.

When I was thirteen I spent a lot of time pretending to like dance music because everyone at my school seemed to love it. If only I'd known it was OK to have different tastes to others and that one day my mind would be blown open by an older man who would introduce me to The Smiths, The Cure, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads and almost every other band I adore to this day. I also wish I'd been reassured that one day, yes, a boy would actually fancy me in spite and potentially, deliberately, FOR my zero boob/skinny legs combo. But mainly I wish I'd listened to my mother when she said learning to play the piano might come in handy in the future and would actually be something I would thank her for forcing me to do. Every Wednesday we would drive to Mrs Batten's house listening to The ArchersI, with me in the passenger seat trying desperately to think up excuses for why I hadn't practiced that week. Though it seemed very unlikely at the time, I am thankful for those piano lessons every time I manage to impress a boy by hammering out some Chopin when drunk (swot up, kids!).

The physicality and speed of the music, the sheer free abandon of the crown and the band joining together pulsing as one. Something awakened in me. I realized music could jar people out of their comfort zone, challenge them as to the very meaning of their existence. All the times in my life I'd wanted to disrupt things, to shake things up, and I now saw it being done in the healthiest way. Real alchemy. I fell in love with punk rock.

An essential difference between British and American punk bands can be found in their respective views of rock & roll history. The British bands took a deliberately anti-intellectual stance, refuting any awareness of, or influence from, previous exponents of the form. The New York and Cleveland bands saw themselves as self-consciously drawing on and extending an existing tradition in American rock & roll. (...) A second difference between the British and American punk scenes was their relative gestation periods. The British weekly music press was reviewing Sex Pistols shows less than three months after their cacophonous debut. Within a year of the Pistols' first performance they had a record deal, with the 'major' label EMI. Within six months of their first gigs the Damned and the Clash also secured contracts, the latter with CBS. The CBGBs scene went largely ignored by the American music industry until 1976 -- two years after the debuts of Television, the Ramones and Blondie. Even then only Television signed to an established label.

A band with their drums and guitars, and… Masen?

I had an idea for an Amish punk band.

and I thought, ‘What does a good punk band need?’ Something to fight against’, and so I became a lot more political.

Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky.

Loving a band with all your heart is something you understand when it happens to you. On the surface, others can see its a petty obsession, but they'll just never know the feeling of putting so much fail into a few people on the other side of the world. It's hard to explain it to them, the listening to a song after song on repeat, the waits for new albums, the excitement and surreal sensation when you finally see them live. They don't understand why the lyric books give you a sense of comfort, or why you paste photos of them on your bedroom walls. And they can't understand why one band could matter to you so much. And you think to yourself ‘Because they saved my life’. But you say nothing, because thy wouldn't understand.

But if you ever wonder why so many well-off kids were in nineties punk bands, that's why. They could afford to not get paid. They could also afford to look generous by donating their services more than we could.

One of the new species is Alviniconcha strummeri, named as a joint tribute to the research submarine and to Joe Strummer, the lead vocalist and guitarist of the British punk band The Clash. It was a nod to these hard-as-nails snails that live in the most acidic, most sulphur-ridden hydrothermal vents in the Pacific Ocean, close to the islands of Fiji. And like many of the band’s 1970s punk followers, the snails have spiky hairdos in the form of a bristly layer of protein known as the periostracum, which covers their shells.

The only thing that made the music different was that we were taking lyrics to places they had never been before. The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage. The New York bands were much more into their pain, while the English bands were much more into their rage. The Sex Pistols' songs were written out of anger, wheras Johnny was writing songs because he was brokenhearted over Sable...

...politically charged punk that combined activism and art. Forged out of a meeting of friends who decided they wanted to start a “girl riot,” the women gave rise to bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, addressing rape and violence in their songs, publishing zines, popularizing “girl power"...

Rock 'n' roll music, in the end, is a source of religious and mystical power. Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of your audience and make the noise, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, from the universe's infinitesimal genesis point... you're rockin' and you're a rock 'n' roll star in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit and rock 'n' roll band, no matter how down-to-earth their presentation.

She was the only woman on the whole record and hearing her gave me the first thought that someday I could be in a band.

I go up to The Sanctum and put on the most obnoxious head-banging punk music I have, a San Francisco band called Filth.

About the Ramones, an amusing punk-rock band that surfaced some four years ago, Linda Ronstadt is on record as saying, ‘That music’s so tight it’s hemorrhoidal.’ You

I give Iggy credit for deconstructing the very idea of entertainment.

I pretend to like metalcore but actually I have secret playlists full of pop punk that they’d consider practically boy bands.

She’s the reason he will probably become an embittered old fuck before he’s even of legal drinking age, distrusting women and writing rude songs about them, and basically from here into eternity thinking all chicks are lying cheating sluts because one of them broke his heart. He’s the type of guy that makes girls like me frigid. I’m the girl who knows he’s capable of poetry, because, like I said, there are things I just know. I’m the one who could give him that old-fashioned song title of a thing called Devotion and True Love (However Complicated), if he ever gave a girl like me a second glance. I’m the less-than-five-minute girlfriend who for one too-brief kiss fantasized about ditching this joint with him, going all the way punk with him at a fucking jazz club in the Village or something. Maybe I would have treated him to borscht at Veselka at five in the morning, maybe I would have walked along Battery Park with him at sunrise, holding his hand, knowing I would become the one who would believe in him. I would tell him, I heard you play, I’ve read your poetry, not that crap your band just performed, but those love letters and songs you wrote to Tris. I know what you’re capable of and it’s certainly more than being a bassist in an average queercore band—you’re better than that; and dude, having a drummer, it’s like key, you fucking need one. I would be equipment bitch for him every night, no complaints. But, no, he’s the type with a complex for the Tris type: the big tits, the dumb giggle, the blowhard. Literally.

If the early English and LA punk bands shared a common sound, the New York bands just shared the same clubs. As such, while the English scene never became known as the '100 Club' sound, CBGBs was the solitary common component in the New York bands' development, transcended once they had outgrown the need to play the club. Even their supposed musical heritage was not exactly common -- the Ramones preferring the Dolls/Stooges to Television's Velvets/Coltrane to Blondie's Stones/Brit-Rock. Though the scene had been built up as a single movement, when commercial implications began to sink in, the differences that separated the bands became far more important than the similarities which had previously bound them together. In the two years following the summer 1975 festival, CBGBs had become something of an ideological battleground, if not between the bands then between their critical proponents. The divisions between a dozen bands, all playing the same club, all suffering the same hardships, all sharing the same love of certain central bands in the history of rock & roll, should not have been that great. But the small scene very quickly partitioned into art-rockers and exponents of a pure let's-rock aesthetic.

Yeah, You rocked my world forever I know you still remember How we felt before Yeah, We should be together 'Cause nothing could be better Than the way we were Baby, let's go back to the way we were Let's turn back the clock This time we'll take it slow You can stay the night, This time I won't let go And when the morning comes, We can start all over, over again Why did we say goodbye? Let's go back tonight

They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. “People want what was best about the world,” Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present. He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.

How else could we identify another weirdo or outlier? These symbols intimated a belief system, a way of thinking not just about music but about school and friends and politics and society. It was also a way to separate yourself, to feel bold or try on boldness without yet possessing it. A little inkling of the nonconformist person you could be—you wanted to be—but weren’t quite ready to commit to. I papered my walls with band posters and what little I could find in mainstream magazines about alternative and punk, maybe a picture of Babes in Toyland from Spin or Fugazi from Option. The iconoclast images and iconography covered my room, a jarring contrast to the preppy blue-and-white-striped wallpaper I’d insisted on in elementary school. I resented the parts of myself that were late to adopt coolness, late to learn—I wanted to have always possessed a savviness and sophistication, even though I clearly had neither.

He’s a chameleon. Whatever is in, he wants to do that. He never really stuck to what made him what he was, which was rock and roll. If hip-hop is in, he’s a hip-hopper. If punk is in, he’s a punk rocker. If Tommy had fucking tits, he’d be a Spice Girl.

Rap, in all its far-reaching ambition, was now It. Our hardcore punk world simply couldn’t compete anymore. How much louder and faster and rulier could bands get? So much of hardcore is about limits—shorter, simpler, more speed, more volume—whereas breakbeats and hip hop are all about the limitless—limitless possibilities, limitless imagination. Punk rock had changed our lives, but hardcore had served its purpose. Now all we wanted was to be our own version of the Treacherous Three. No turning back.

I am still so grateful that a guy we'd never met put his time and energy into what most people considered a shitty opening band. It made me see myself as worthy in the underground scene. It also undid a lot of shit other men doled out to me on that tour.

I yelled "Revolution girl style now!" before "Double Dare Ya" like I'd been doing live and reassured myself that the session was meant to take a snapshot of our songs, not to make them sound perfect. Maybe being sloppy would inspire other girls to start bands.

Her eyes fall over the cassette tape high on my torso, musical notes stringing out of it, and the label on the tape reading The Hand That Rules the World. It was a play on words from a poem Ryen quoted in a letter once when she was encouraging me to start a band.

I guess that after three straight years of my not being anything -- not emo, not Christian, not prep, not jock, not ghetto, not punk, not hipster, not skank, not prude, just a half-assed band geek -- no one can believe I'd do anything so well defined as lie. I like my new superpower.

A kiss, then Brady said, “Hey, sweetheart.” As he pulled away, I turned, grinning ear to ear. “Hey, Brady—” I halted when I saw his shirt, mostly because I was laughing too hard to continue. My face went hot, from 98.6 to 200 degrees in a second flat. It wasn’t the only part of my anatomy to react, either. The shirt was white and clinging, hot as hell on him, of course. But stenciled in spray paint across the chest in the usual blocky lettering were the words FUCK ME, ETIENNE. “Tried to convince the band to change our name, but they didn’t go for it. I settled for the shirt.

Before I found out about Olympia's punk scene, I thought that everyone making music was untouchable and magical. But when I saw Tobi from the Go Team at the Smithfield Café, I realized, She's in the Go Team and she goes to the same coffee shop I do. If she could be in a band, maybe I can too.

It’s worth remembering that from the beginning, rock and roll was never based in musical training or technique, just as punk rock was never about being a good musician and No Wave was at its core about pure expression. Punk rock changed everything, including the whole idea of being a “rock star.

The deaf people there with balloons, holding them up and feeling the vibrations of the balloons to the Germs, all these fuckin' great bands, and using these balloons and dancing around. For a tough old punk, it just made your heart -- it gave you that beautiful feeling. They loved the music, and we were making money for them.

Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn't afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn't have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie-vs.-major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on.

A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead.

Big Jason walked into the club, stared at the band beginning their sound check and quickly walked over to the bar. Lily looked up from her rinsing and smiled. "Big Jason Gulliver, back in town. Raquel said Godzilla returned to Tokyo, I wondered how soon you'd drop by here". "Front me a soda, Lily. How's the night club racket?" Jason barked over the noisy band. "Guys still hitting on me, including your stupid friend King Steve", Lily shot a jet of soda pop from her beverage gun into a water glass. Jason chortled. "He's slow on the draw. You're a fuckin' dyke but a cool fuckin' dyke. I don't even care if you sleep with my girl". "Why thank you, Caveman", Lily smiled, handing him the soda with a cherry on top.

I cannot explain to you how utterly crazy these comments by my "punk family" made me feel. I had just seen the most important band in the world. All I wanted to do was to get their information so I could invite them to play at Reko Muse, All I wanted was to be near them. They were everything. I'd seen God and she was three women playing songs in a shack in the middle of nowhere.

The first time Amy Carter played live I felt like I was gonna puke all over the microphone. But by our third song, the feeling I had being Annie in grade school and the feeling I had opening for Acker morphed into one thing. We performed a couple of times at Reko Muse and then the band fizzled out when senior year started, which was fine. I knew who I was now. I was a singer in a band.

Anyhow, hey ho, let's go…Fuck, there was a band. Punk meets cartoons. Glorious dumbfuckery, standing there, legs spread, guitars scraping the floor. Three chords, two minutes and one finger right up Simon Cowbell's arse. Auto tune this, ya cunt. And The Clash. Strummer, king of the ad lib. 'Fill her up Jacko!' Don’t mind if I do, Joseph, don’t mind if I do. Thrashing it out on stage in yer Brigade Rosse tee

Another fact involves Iron Maiden’s self title album which introduced the new image of Maiden’s old mascot Eddie the ’ed to the new decade of the 1980s. According to the art sleeve creator Derick Riggs, the artwork was initially created for a Punk Rock band that ultimately rejected it, with Iron Maiden Picking up the bone. The design for the sleeve had come about by a concept based on a photograph of a burnt decapitated head of a Vietnamese soldier

Our fans were often the same age as us, and we would prove to ourselves and them that we were the real punks. We were zealots of a kind with a determination not to surrender our values to the big cities, but rather bring them our true punk values like respect for the people who were paying to see us. We’d make it our business to stop and talk, to sign autographs. We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to. And as the singer, I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd, by rubbishing the very idea they were a crowd. This was not just a nucleus of unstable atoms banging into each other; this was a gathering of sentient beings who for those few hours every night played the most important role in the drama, transporting the band and therefore themselves to some place neither had been before. Finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.

Maybe you are a nihilistic death-metal punk. You are deeply skeptical and pessimistic. You find meaning nowhere. You hate everything, just on principle. But then your favorite nihilistic death-metal punk band lead guitarist and his bandmates start to blast out their patterned harmonies—each in alignment with the other—and you are caught! “Ah, I do not believe in anything—but, God, that music!” And the lyrics are destructive and nihilistic and cynical and bitter and hopeless but it does not matter, because the music beckons and calls to your spirit, and fills it with the intimation of meaning, and moves you, so that you align yourself with the patterns, and you nod your head and tap your feet to the beat, participating despite yourself. It is those patterns of sound, layered one on top of another, harmoniously, moving in the same direction, predictably and unpredictably, in perfect balance: order and chaos, in their eternal dance. And you dance with it, no matter how scornful you are. You align yourself with that patterned, directional harmony. And in that you find the meaning that sustains.

Jim Adkins: ...There was a girl who wrote us, explaining how she felt like an outsider at her school because the punk rock kids wouldn't accept her, even though she liked us and a lot of the really obscure bands we toured with. And I just thought 'It's not worth your time to trip on this. Punk rock is and should be inclusive. That's the one thing I know. No matter what your definition of punk is, everyone would say that it's inclusive, it welcomes outsiders. Freak flags welcome. Wave 'em around. These chicks don't get it at all, don't waste your time trying to get their approval.' That's where the main idea for the lyrics to 'The Middle' came from.

You know how they say Black Flag got in a van, and they brought punk rock to the world? The Strokes got on a bus, and they brought “downtown cool” to the world. Along with the Internet, they were changing everything, not just music. They were changing attitudes. The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night. Sixteen-year-old kids in white belts and Converse Chuck Taylors with the greasy hair—hair that had been clean a week ago. Those kids had probably never even smelled the inside of a thrift store before Is This It came out. They found a band that they wanted to be like. They found their band. APRIL

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

They started calling people my grandfather’s age “generation ink”. He represents the era when extensive tattoos tipped into the mainstream. Now the old men and women sit together in the lounge room of my grandfather’s nursing home, watching daytime television. They don’t watch sport. Tattoos from their wrist to shoulders and across their chest, snake beneath their woolen cardigans and cotton shirts. Withered souls eternally painted in often incomprehensible scrawling. Faded colours. But that’s not to say that they regret getting inked. Far from it. It’s a part of who they are. As real and as precious as the blank skin they were born with. Their tastes in music haven’t mellowed either. They slowly approach the sound-system, leaning on their walking frame, and skip to songs by Pantera and Sepultura. Or Metallica, Slayer and Iron Maiden. My grandfather enjoyed punk and post-rock bands like Millencolin, Thursday, Coheed and Cambria or At The Drive-In.

I had a friend who would take me to church in South Los Angeles. She knew when the best touring gospel bands were coming through, and though I had absolutely zero interest in the concept of god and an open disdain for religion, I went for the music. The bands were on fire, the singing made me shiver with emotion, and the crowd was crazy into it. More intense than any punk rock concert; elderly women jerking their bodies around like wild, people yelling stuff out, the band thumping away like mad, and everyone in the room just absolutely focused, gone into it, believing. I loved it. On one of those Jesus Sundays I got to talking to one of the parishioners, and when I told him I didn’t believe in the Bible, that I was just there for the music, he was totally cool and welcomed me back the following week, even though I was shabbily dressed and the only white person in the place. That’s the first time I considered that church could possibly be a good thing.

Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.

Nico looked very tall and thin wearing a opaque black sweatshirt hoodie and dark inked skinny jeans. His outer physical structure was handsome and gaunt, straight jet black hair razored and clipped in angles, a few purple highlights, and his white skin toned the color of alabaster. She had always liked the slender salamander type. He totally looked punk rock tonight, and that made him look absolutely awesome! A curtain of fog parted in front of him, giving him even more of the illusion as if he was part of a rock band at a rock band concert. Katty now saw Nico with exaggerated clarity. Nico Rocket looked so freakin' hot! He looked so good-looking at times, especially within the dark scenes of rolling fog and a pitchy darkness. She randomly wondered what he looked like before he was bit and turned into a Vampire. Had he been a Renaissance geek just like her? Before she could really examine him and fantasize of what he must have looked like before turning into a Vampire, the fog closed in all around him again, surrounding him with a ring of solitary imprisonment. He now lurked as a shadow among the shadows, disappearing into the illusion of gray’s. She didn't like him for not showing up on time, but all had been forgiven as soon as she had seen him all dressed up in his Gothic best. So what if he didn't believe in punctuality? His hotness sure made up for the rest! Through the fog, she saw his bright red eyes pierce through the heaviness of the darkness. He then broke free from the fog, leaving a trail of the thickened smoke lingering far behind, and wide.

The craze surrounding the Beatles—as well as demonstrations and a near-riot by hundreds of kids in Leipzig in October 1965 after authorities there banned almost all the local Beat bands—elicited commentary directly from head of state Walter Ulbricht during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party: I am of the opinion, comrades, that we should put an end to the monotony of the Yeah Yeah Yeah and whatever else it’s called. Must we really copy every piece of garbage that comes from the West?

A hardliner by nature, Honecker was nonetheless more open to rock music. But rather than import music by decadent capitalist puppets like the Doors or the Stones, he determined the DDR should foster its own rock culture. This led to a string of officially sanctioned East German rock bands dominating Free German Youth concerts and DDR youth radio during the 1970s. Bands with names like the Puhdys, Renft, Electra-Combo, Karussell, and Stern-Combo Meissen aped Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, King Crimson, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Jethro Tull—and landed deals with the government record label, Amiga, the sole music manufacturer and distributor in the tightly-controlled East German media system.

Deedee dropped out of her ska-punk band and joined an eight-person madrigal chorus. She had a clot somewhere deep inside her that was connected to the people she had lost in the flood, or might lose in the aftermath, and the endless conversations where everybody compared notes on their respective tragedies only made her feel shittier. Just saying the words "My brother is still missing" made Deedee want to throw up and then head-butt whoever had asked. She needed an alternative to the dull repetition of facts, a way to share her uncut heartbreak without any particulars, and to her amazement she found it in these strange old songs about doomed lovers.

There was a certain sense of renewal. A lot of it was, we’ve got to out-punk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can. All they can do is be punks. Yes, that might have been a certain thorn in the side. The Johnny Rottens, “these fucking kids.” I love every band that comes along. That’s why I’m here, to encourage guys to play and get bands together. But when they’re not playing anything, they’re just spitting on people, now come on, we can do better than that.

Blue I emerge from our yellow linoleum bathroom blue at one end of our single-wide trailer and I have the length of narrow hallway to consider before reaching the living room blue Blue!? And I know my mother is furious You look ridiculous it’s all she says and I do I had torn the pages from a magazine lined my bedroom floor with them and studied those punk rock spiked hair white teeth high fashion popped collar leather studded glossy photos strewn across my small space like a spread of tarot cards telling me a future I would never get to not out here not in the white trailer rusting amber thick of trees stretch of reservation of highway that stood between me and whatever else was out there record stores the mall parking lots where kids were skateboarding and smoking pot probably kids with boom boxes and bottles of beer out there were beaches with bands playing on them and these faces these shining faces with pink green purple and blue hair blue I could get that at least I could mix seventeen packets of blue raspberry Kool-Aid with a little water and I could get that it was alchemy it was potion-making but no one told me about the bleach about my dark hair needing to lift to lighten in order to get that blue no one told me that the mess of Kool-Aid would only run down my scalp my face my neck would stain me blue Blue is what you taste like he says still holding me on the twin bed in the glow of dawn my teenage curiosity has pushed me to ask What does my body taste like to you his fingers travel from neck to navel breath on my thigh and here in our sacred space he answers simply Blue you taste blue and I wonder if what he means is sad you taste sad taqʷšəblu the name is given to me when I am three to understand it my child brain has to break it apart taqʷšəblu talk as in talking as in to tell as in story sha as in the second syllable of my English name as in half of me blue as in the taste of me blue as in sad my grandmother was taqʷšəblu before me and now I am taqʷšəblu too

It deeply saddens & disturbs me when I start to see poetry open mics only open to academics & students rather than a poetry mic that is open to the public, welcomes all & everyone, human beings, people of all ages to read their work. It smacks of a bizarre "primitive form of elitism" let alone it degrades the human spirit and sends the false message to kids that to be a professional writer or poet that you have to attend an over-priced college and have some sort of degree. That's like telling a punk rock musician that in order to join or form a band he needs a degree from Julliard. What completely ridiculous & arrogant nonsense. POETRY is for EVERYONE. As it should be.

(Leonard also noted that “Negative Amortization” would make a terrific name for a punk band.)

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Every night we’d go out and listen to bands play. Fort Collins had a music scene that was second to none for a town its size. Any night of the week you could find 10 or 15 bands playing. All of them were playing original music, too. No cover bands. I never understood going out to listen to music that you could hear on a CD. We mostly saw punk bands, including Suicide Fan Club, Armchair Martian, Baldo Rex, The Fairlanes, Fester, The Nobodys, Pinhead Circus, and others. Another local favorite was Where’s the Bishop, which merged punk and funk beautifully. It was such a great time.

As a fourteen-year-old spotty urchin, he came and banged on my door when I nearly twenty, and said, ‘As the main punk in Grantham, would you want to join my band? I need a face to sing for us.

It was a lot of fun in the beginning, going on tour in the UK, then going to Spain and getting thrown in jail for trashing the hotel… that made the Sunday papers! My dad always read the News Of The World and he saw the story about this wild Scottish punk band, and shouts to my mum, ‘What’s the name of that band our Karl’s in?’ ‘The Exploited,’ she replied. ‘Bloody hell! He’s in jail! It’s here in the paper!’ My parents had a fit; I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall at that moment.

I remember being in this local pub,” chuckles Deek. “It was called the Tap, and all the punks used to hang out there, and bands would play sometimes too. Wattie made a rare appearance which sticks in my mind as this bloke went up to him and said, ‘Wattie, don’t you think your new album is a bit too metal more than punk?’ Wattie headbutted the poor guy in the face, leaving him staggering backwards, covered in blood, and asked, ‘Is that punk enough for you then?

A lack of knowledge can create more openings to break new ground. The Ramones thought they were making mainstream bubblegum pop. To most others, the lyrical content alone—about lobotomies, sniffing glue, and pinheads—was enough to challenge this assumption. While the band saw themselves as the next Bay City Rollers, they unwittingly invented punk rock and started a countercultural revolution. While the music of the Bay City Rollers had great success in its time, the Ramones’ singular take on rock and roll became more popular and influential. Of all the explanations of the Ramones, the most apt may be: innovation through ignorance.

A lot of bands did take themselves too seriously back then… anarchist ones usually. It was some quest to them, fighting the system by not drinking bitter ’cos it contained fish! And not wearing leather jackets… they didn’t seem to notice that their Doc Martens were made of leather too.

We ripped off anyone who made a record, whether it was dripping paint on our clothes, sticking zips on our T-shirts… even down to our first drummer, Craig Newnham (whose brother Shaun was briefly the very first singer for the band), having a rat in his bass drum. It wasn’t that punk tho’, ’cos he told his mum it was a giant African mouse or she would have thrown him and it out of the house!

We’ve always been a very lazy band,” admits the vocalist, “And we’ve always spent most of our time drinking, so whenever anyone booked a studio, we’d get it done as quickly as possible so we could get down the pub. We never wanted to spend much time with the actual production side of things, so that got left to the guy in the studio, who probably had very little allegiance to punk. So we always had a bad sound, but I think a lot of bands back then often did.

No band ever thinks they’re going to sell out. Until, one day, they do.

I was a piano player, a singer-songwriter, and as a band we were, without question, the most unpunk thing at the punk show.

You think I’m hot stuff, don’t you? You, lying there every day, dreaming about rainbows. Well, I’m not. I’m just a Glendale Wunderkind. I know all there is to know about music, and there’s one like me in every Glendale on earth, every one-horse conservatory, every tank-town university, every park band. We can read anything, play anything, arrange anything, and we’re just no good. Punks. Like you. God, now I know where I get it from. Isn’t that funny? You start out a Wunderkind, then find out you’re just a goddam punk.

Iggy and Alice. Alice and Iggy. Iggy was the total street-punk sex god—no shirt, his private parts sticking out of his pants. But he was a great performer. The band was so basic and raw, but it didn’t matter how well they played. In fact, the Stooges made the Ramones sound like a string quartet. The Stooges were relentless, and no matter what happened to Iggy out there in the crowd—somebody in the audience might knock him out cold, whatever—the band would never, ever stop playing. The roadies had to revive Iggy and set him back upon the stage, but meanwhile the band would go right into the next song. The Stooges were serious customers. I hated going on after Iggy! He wore the audience out. Musically maybe we were the better band, and visually we might have been more stunning, but the Stooges rocked.

I particularly dug the subgenre of horror punk, which was basically just punk bands dressing up like zombies or ghosts and pouring fake blood all over the stage.

A pall in the hall of cigarette smoke, lager, sweat, hairspray, Old Spice, Evening in Paris, Brut – all the good ones.

I love my fans [and] Slayer fans,” wrote Lombardo. “But the fact is: Today's Slayer is not SLAYER. They can play all of the songs, but the heart and the backbone is gone.  If the current mindset was present at the beginning, we would have never made it this far.  We were not greedy sellouts, going through the motions on stage merely to cash a check. We were the epitome of the punk/thrash mentality. If they ever get back

. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.

Punker, what's compassion for a world this far gone? The streets don't give a fuck. It's a bummer, your care slides down its target like beads of rain on rock. There's no aquifer for any shit like this. Where does compassion go and can it be returned? You're Donn in this world, with the staff and the purple band. The artificer. Walking the bandoned suites of hell and your eyeballs thinking, what can be saved? Not their gear but its aspects. You started kung fu way later than the rest, and before that you saw compassion in a history spiel. Now it keeps washing up on your shore. Giving a shit might be made of parts, it might be made solo. It might be an invasive species or not. Punks evolved from dinos too. Not even cross time and distance. But the spikes on their heads are the same.

The patches are the stories. Hold onto that. And the muddy zigzag of ducktape against the cracked doorglass. There's four kids who sleep here, a nuff for the fingers on each otherses hands. There's room in each of them for one important thing. They're a band. It's not they're in a band. They're a band. Four spikes of ducktape, up and down, like mountain peaks or a sawblade. Every band's got a sign, something to sew on your jacket, gouge on the wall at a show. Four spikes up and down say MEATHEADS, and you picked a fucked window to knock at, tourist. They're the best band in the world.

She presses play and Andrea listens to the song. A guitar starts playing, then another and then drums; it’s an unusual sound; it seems like rock music but is strange, somewhat gothic and punk. It’s a melodic song, though, and his foot taps the beat without him realizing. A man’s voice, full of sadness, sings the first words:   "When routine bites hard And ambitions are low And resentment rides high But emotions won’t grow And we're changing our ways Taking different roads..."   Andrea knows it! He hears the song arrive from his distant past with a suitcase full of memories. He sees himself as a child, sitting in the living room, his little legs dangling from a chair. His father has just received a new CD from abroad and couldn’t wait to receive it so Gina the caretaker has sent it on to him in Clusone. He’s really excited and tells mom all about it. She’s happy too. Barbara has pigtails and is eating a piece of focaccia with olives, sticking her fingers inside to take them out one by one. She’s tiny, five years old or maybe younger. Andrea sees the CD on the table and wonders what is so special about it. There's a very pale guy on the front, with dark hair and a strange fringe. His mouth is right up to the microphone and everything else is black. It’s written in a language that he can’t read, though he knows that it’s English. His parents are so happy that he decides to take it and have a listen. He snatches the disc and CD player and runs off. He runs very fast...   "Then love, love will tear us apart again" sings Ian Curtis, the voice of Joy Division, his parents’ favorite band. It’s a compilation that came out in 2000, containing a special song, "Love will tear us apart again." Andrea runs to a little girl that he loves very much. He has fun all day long with her in the mountains. He runs to his inseparable friend, his dear... "Susy!" he exclaims, eyes open wide. She smiles and nods. He

Punk was the politicised pop experience again,’ is Peter Saville’s assessment. ‘It was for a generation for whom the established music scene wasn’t working … by the time you are floating helium balloons over Battersea Power Station you are not speaking for 15 year olds on housing estates. Pop had lost its authenticity and punk was super-authentic. Punk was the band standing next to you having a drink at the bar rather than ultra-beings that you queued up with three thousand others to watch. Suddenly music was part of your reality again.

There are a number of well and wearily trodden paths to a new man... Rather than catching up on your paperwork, you could squeeze in some 'best of a bad lot' power-flirting on the commute to work (and be gutted when, even though you didn't fancy them to begin with, ypur focus knocks you back). Maybe you're considering signing up for online dating or going to places where you should but absolutely never will, meet someone suitable? Since over the last year I've tried them all, I'll share what I've learnt with you. I've sat chatting to Belgian lawyers in Starbucks (willing them to be even a little more interesting); I've dabbled with online dating (where all the guys have done the Nick Hornby's Guide to Women course and are single parents with angelic but troubled kids, or run small, quirky yet failing businesses). I don't even want to think about going to another cultural event (to meet graduates of the Tony Parsons' Guide to Women course: bitterness over ex-wife, partially concealed by exterior of witty self-loathing, which in turn is momentarily obscured by an encyclopaedic knowledge of early punk bands).

Floridians have accustomed themselves to this nasty vermin [the cockroach] as just another of the Sunshine State's rogue inhabitants, not so different from its serial killers, native shit-kickers, oblivious tourists, faux-mermaids, cocaine kingpins, moron surfers, nouveau-riche snowbirds, spooky clairvoyants and Jimmy Buffet wanna-be's.

When you think of a punk rocker, you probably picture a leather jacket and a Mohawk, but two of the biggest punk bands were the Talking Heads and Blondie.

Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band's life. A few minutes later, both were done.

Kim, Di, and Gina took me to see The Dead Milkmen. Mojo Nixon was opening up for them. I was going to wear a t-shirt of The Sisters of Mercy, but Di specifically told me not to wear a goth shirt to a punk show. Di remarked, “I swear, some people will beat your ass if you have a t-shirt of any kind of band that is not hardcore. There was this kid who wore a Depeche Mode t-shirt to an Adrenaline O. D. show. They pulled his clothes off and threw him out into the parking lot.

Any harder edge may also have been a subconscious reaction to the accusations of ‘dinosaur rock’ that were being thrown at bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk – even anyone who didn’t listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols’ explosion into the media spotlight. Just in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt.

Punk was perhaps also a reaction to the decision by record companies to concentrate on what they thought of as guaranteed earners rather than taking risks with new acts – whereas in the 1960s they would have signed up anything with long hair, even a sheepdog. Nearly thirty years later the same is true once again. If a record company pays a huge amount of money for an established act, it is odds on that they will recoup the investment; they could spend the same amount on a dozen new bands and lose the whole lot. Financially it is perfectly understandable, but it does not foster fresh talent. One of the messages of punk was that it was possible to make records for thirty quid and some change. Although we could sympathise with the sentiments, we were, however, on the wrong side of the divide, as far as the punk generation were concerned. ‘Of course, you don’t want the world populated only with dinosaurs,’ I said at the time, ‘but it’s a terribly good thing to keep some of them alive.

Until YOT, conservatism thrived in the germy corners of punks scenes. When it popped up in public, it took the forms of extremists, usually skinheads, people whose shitty behavior forced a fight or flight response. The Youth Crew ushered in true conservatism, the norms and boundaries of William F. Buckley's America. It wasn't just that everyone started dressing like normals. This new scene fostered normal thinking. Hard politics were out. Fuzzy platitudes were in. Bands looked the same, sounded the same, and sang about the same very limited range of experiences and emotions.

It kept hitting me how incredible it was that the same guy who signed Madonna signed my band. I was starting to have dreams about her. Sometimes she and I were lovers, but sometimes we were just friends. I didn’t want to wake up.

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect.

I was terrified and devastated and thrilled by the vastness of human experience that was suddenly all around me. There were punk bands playing in the bandshell in Tompkins Square Park and illegal squats in all the abandoned brownstones. (The driver of our van was staying at one of them.) There were elaborate shantytowns popping up on the Lower East Side and even a faint bohemian aroma still wafting through the West Village. CBGB’s was still CBGB’s and Times Square was still nasty old Times Square. The City seemed to be in the hands of immigrants and artists, punks and queers, and I felt drawn to it like iron to the center of the earth.

punk rock doesn’t have to mean hardcore or one style of music or just singing the same lyrics,” he said. “It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art.

Punk was not something to grow out of; it was something to grow with—it was a valid, sustainable way to live one’s life. “That’s when I started to focus on the idea of what we were doing as being real, of being a working model of a real community, an alternative community that could continue to exist outside of the mainstream—and legitimately, and self-supporting,” says MacKaye. “I’m talking about working, paying rent, eating food, having relationships, having families, whatever. I saw a counterculture that I thought could exist.

The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.

The most punk rock thing about J’s stuff was how much he mixed all his influences,

punk rock as an alternative,” he says, “a real attempt to change the social order of the world.

Fugazi’s particularly dogmatic slant emphasized pragmatism, modesty, and fair play—not the first concepts to come to mind when discussing the indisputably punk rock Sex Pistols, for example. Far from complicating their lives, Fugazi’s conditions actually simplified things. If no club in a particular city could agree to Fugazi’s terms, the band would simply skip that town. Occasionally the band would pull up to a club and learn that their conditions had not been met. And they’d start packing the van back up. Sometimes the promoter would relent, sometimes not. If not, he or she would get a good, long look at the band van’s taillights. “The power of ‘No,’ man, that’s the biggest bat we’ve ever wielded,” says Picciotto. “If it makes you uncomfortable, just fuckin’ say no. It’s made life so much easier for us, man. I think bands are fragile, particularly our band—we’re super fragile, we’re control freaks—if things upset us, we can’t deliver…. That’s what it’s about—all this shit, just setting it up so we can go out and play without cares, man. It eliminates everything. It just slashes through all that crap.

None of us ever imagined that the band was a job,” Albini continues. “The band was always a diversion. It seemed unrealistic to think that we could make a living out of it. So we didn’t even entertain those notions.” “We didn’t want to save the world,” Riley concludes. “We just wanted to play in a punk rock band.

Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway.

We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you’re signing a contract because you don’t trust the other person to live up to their word,

Punk in small towns in ’88, ’89 was just too dangerous to the normal way of doing things,” Lunsford explains. “We found out how many walls there were in this free society that were blocking self-entertainment.

plain and simple fact was there were far more hippies in the Sixties than there were punks in the Seventies and Eighties. “That’s the reason this revolution took so long to complete a cycle that should have been done in three years,

I saw a lot of friends and acquaintances turn their bands which were previously something that they did out of passion into a shot at a small business,” Steve Albini told the venerable zine Punk Planet. “In the course of doing it, they ended up hating their bands in a way that I used to hate my job, because it became something they had to do: it was an obligation.

punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can’t be popular.

For a while, there effectively was no underground. “I thought that was the end of what you might call punk rock,” says Peter Prescott, “because punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can’t be popular.

MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. “I’ve always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it’s a family kind of thing,

Besides opening for such punk and roots attractions as the Blasters and the Plugz, they were billed with rockabilly performers like Rip Masters, James Intveld, and the Rebel Rockers, and with such other East L.A. invaders as Los Illegals and the Brat. They also made their first trip out of town as a rock group, traveling to Austin, Texas, for shows with Joe “King” Carrasco and Rank & File, the L.A./ Texas combine that would soon release their debut album on Slash; the latter, a country-skewed “cowpunk” group, featured brothers Chip and Tony Kinman of the early L.A. punk band the Dils and Alejandro Escovedo, formerly the guitarist for the San Francisco punk act the Nuns.

The band members were outspoken about their distaste for conformism, especially within the post-punk scene, where bands were already tailoring their music to contrived images, threatening to reverse punk’s hardwon gains. “It’s so much style over content,

No one could explain why a punk would ever follow any mainstream rule about how many songs you could put on a single.

no careerist goals whatsoever. “I don’t think any of us wanted to be rock stars,” says Miller. “That was what I thought punk had set out to do—to get rid of rock stars.

Along with Alice Bag (née Alicia Armendariz), front woman of the Bags, and the members of the all-Chicano, Chula Vista–bred quartet the Zeros, Humberto “Tito” Larriva was one of the first prominent Latino performers on the L.A. punk scene. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Larriva had arrived in L.A. in 1975. The singer–guitarist–actor (later featured as a heavy in several of director Robert Rodriguez’s films) had founded the wound-up punk trio the Plugz, sometimes billed as Los Plugz, with Chicano drummer Charlie Quintana and Anglo bassist Barry McBride in 1978. That year, a three-track single by the band became the second release (following a 45 by the Germs) from Slash Records, the fledgling imprint of the like-named L.A. punk magazine. It prefaced the Plugz’s self-released 1979 album Electrify Me, which included a high-velocity, lyrically retooled version of Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.” It

many of the 1977–1978 punk generation “flopped the hardcore testo rage rite,” and gravitated to a new breed of roots-based rock bands with a foot planted in the O.G. punk firmament. These included Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, a brawny, hard-drinking blues–rock unit fronted by “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a close friend of and sometime roadie for the punk band X; the Gun Club, a feral, unpredictable punk–blues unit led by vocalist–songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a blues devotee and frequent contributor to Slash magazine; and Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions, a cranked-up R&B unit featuring singer Fred “Phast Phreddie” Patterson, former co-editor of Back Door Man, the first fanzine to explore L.A. punk. By late 1980, the NYC-by-way-of-Cleveland psychobilly quartet the Cramps had relocated to Los Angeles. The Flesh Eaters—one of the earliest L.A. punk bands, led by singer–songwriter Chris D. (born Chris Desjardins), another Slash contributor and head of the magazine’s in-house subsidiary label, Ruby Records—would begin to probe punk–blues terrain with the 1981 album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, a swampy collection on which the bandleader was backed by members of X and the Blasters.

punk rock could be anything anyone wanted it to be.

punk placed no premium on technique or production values.

Punk rock was an idea, not a musical style.

Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. Scotty waits in the truck while Bennie deals with the rude assholes inside the clubs. We have to be careful with Scotty. In fifth grade, the first time his mom went away, he sat all day on the patch of grass outside his house and stared at the sun. He refused to go to school or come in. His dad sat with him trying to cover his eyes, and after school, Jocelyn came and sat there, too. Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty’s vision. He says he likes them—actually, what he says is: “I consider them a visual enhancement.” We think they remind him of his mom.

Around about this time, stuck as we are without a breath of wind in the doldrums, Casino cons his way into writing an entertainment column for a newspaper back in Norway. He files his columns every Friday, which is handy because the London music papers come out on Thursday and that allows him to steal every single sentence, so the wheeze doesn’t have to take up a great deal of his time. What a scam. He gets paid plus he gets journalist credentials, so every week the record companies send all their new releases for him to review. This, of course, he never does. Instead, he takes each week’s stack down the street and sells them to a record shop. Another angle he’s working is that, since he’s using his maiden name for the newspaper byline, he can drop the handle ‘Casino Steel’ into his columns every now and again, mentioning this up-and-coming musician who’s really making waves in London. So it turns out Casino Steel is making quite a name for himself, especially for a man who’s not making quite a name for himself.

what happened in Norway? The usual and then the startlingly unusual happened. Casino initially met with the anticipated wall of disapproval, the usual ‘No’ at every stop. And then at Mercury/Phonogram, during a meeting with the strikingly prescient gentleman of fine breeding and obvious good taste, the honourable Audun Tylden, he met with the absurdly unusual, a resounding ‘Ja’. According to Casino, Audun Tylden cranked up the tape machine, heard the first 15 bars of ‘Tumble With Me’, turned to Cas and yelled, ‘I love it!’ or, actually, ‘Jeg elsker det!’ This is stunning news, great news, unbelievable news. The Hollywood Brats finally have a record deal. There’s just one slight snag. The Hollywood Brats no longer exist.

Josh Woodard is a founding member and bassist of A Day to Remember, the metalcore, pop-punk band established in 2003.

So, there already is a punk band called The Misfits, and they’re not a bunch of illiterate girls with green hair. Glenn Danzig should sue. Also, why is the world so against misfits? What’s a misfit ever done to the world?

The prices paid for records by bands who were previously 'unknown' to PUNK ROCK collectors generally skyrockets after the group has been featured on a compilation series such as Back To Front. Within Europe, it is the Italian PUNK ROCK collectors who push up the prices, but what they are prepared to pay for obscure records pales in comparison to Japanese obsessives.

There is a long tradition of snobbish individuals attempting to derive social status from the cult of obscurity, and the results are at times hilarious. Series of punk compilation albums such as Killed By Death, or Back To Front appeal to the elitism of those who enjoy listening to records that their neighbours don't own. Of course, a lot of the music is damn fine but the fact that no one has heard of the bands enables those buying the records/CDs (or cassettes in the case of the Hardcore History series issued by Destroy Tapes of Hackney, London) to feel that they aren't part of the herd and are capable of searching out rare gems of culture.

Now look, Kim, during the week my body is a temple. At the weekends and on holiday it’s a student union, with a sticky floor. With a punk band playing.

But as awkward as the whole thing was, part of me feels glad that we were the guys to turn the son of a no-fooling rock legend on to the Ramones. To me that's what being in a punk band is all about.

My interest in these bands had as much to do with their sound and their look as it did with their do-it-yourself, or DIY, ethos and anarchist politics. It wasn’t about money for them. They sought revolution and freedom, and they approached making music as an act of political protest. These bands wanted to empower their audiences. I studied their lyrics, and, like them, I was fine with starving for my ideals. Fuck MTV and fuck major labels. Fuck commercial art. Fuck the whole capitalist system! I wanted nothing to do with any of it. All of these new records and cassettes I was discovering made music seem accessible in a way it had never been before.

From hours spent poring over the photos in these albums, I knew I wanted to lead my own band. I started coming up with band names like “The Leather Dice” and writing them on the back of my jean jacket with a marker. I practiced stage moves by strumming along to songs using a tennis racket as a guitar. Eventually, I decided I needed to upgrade to a real one.

Music helped me cope with these feelings. I discovered 80s hair metal—bands like Poison, Warrant, and Bon Jovi. The first cassette I owned was Def Leppard’s Hysteria album, purchased in a military PX because I liked the cover art of two faces screaming through a psychedelic triangle. But the band I became obsessed with was Guns N’ Roses. Their music appealed to me because it felt dangerous. I was afraid of my parents seeing the liner note artwork. The look of the band, particularly that of wiry lead singer Axl Rose, excited me most because it was androgynous. Hair was big, clothes were tight, lines were blurred. I often couldn’t tell if band members were boys or girls, and I liked that.

I was offered this advice recently: “Major labels don’t know how to sell 100k records. They can sell 500k, they can sell a million, if you’re Green Day, they can even sell four million. But that first 100k, that’s why they need you, that’s why they’re interested in your band, because you’ve demonstrated that you can sell that first 100k.

Every band is a foreign country, with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang.

When I became a punk, my main fight was against the people who were around me—friends,” said MacKaye in the essential 1983 hardcore documentary Another State of Mind. “I said, ‘God, I don’t want to be like these people, man. I don’t fit in at all with them.’ So it was an alternative.

Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—“Storming Tarragona.” Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. “D. Boon didn’t think our dads got a fair shake,” Watt says, “and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.

Punk was not something to grow out of; it was something to grow with—it was a valid, sustainable way to live one’s life. “That’s when I started to focus on the idea of what we were doing as being real, of being a working model of a real community, an alternative community that could continue to exist outside of the mainstream—and legitimately, and self-supporting,” says MacKaye.

Picciotto recalled when he was a teenager writing to obscure English punk bands like Rudimentary Peni, Dead Wretched, and Blitz. “Those fuckers wrote us back, and it blew my mind,” recalls Picciotto. “It was so cool to feel that connection. I’ve always kept that in mind. If someone writes you, you send them a letter back. It’s just a cool thing to do.

We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room until there was nothing left but punks. And then they played country music the rest of the night.

the cover of Land Speed Record is a photo of the coffins of the first eight soldiers killed in Vietnam; like many punks, the members of Hüsker Dü actually agreed with Sixties counterculture values but despised the hippies for selling out those values. “We’re doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the Sixties,” Mould said, “but the way they did it didn’t work.

...while riot grrrl is part of the punk rock/alternative rock feminism of the 1990s, it's by no means the majority of it. Despite the slogan, not every girl was a riot grrrl, and there's a huge swath of awesome women in '90s music who aren't riot grrrls. In no particular order: L7, Hole, PJ Harvey, Belly, Throwing Muses, Seven Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, Liz Phair, Bjork, Juliana Hatfield, Gwen Stefani/No Doubt, Shirley Manson/Garbage, the Breeders, Luscious Jackson, Elastica, Sleater-Kinney, and may more women were part of either the alternative or indie rock music scene. Beyond that, the decade was pretty amazing for singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Tracy Chapman, and Melissa Etheridge; for the R&B and hip-hop artists like Salt-n-Peppa, Queen Latifah, TLC, En Vogue, and Missy Elliott; and, at the tail end of the decade, all the pop you could ever want with the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Destiny's Child. So, if you read this book, then run to Spotify to listen to riot grrrl bands, and find they're not for you, remember: there's more than one way to be a girl, and there's more than one kind of music to power you to your goals. What you listen to will never be as important as what you do.

Turbo Sasquatch, or T-Squatch, was a Redwood original, a hardrock pop-punk bhangra electro surf hybrid that did highly danceable sambas. It was a supergroup, a mighty Voltron formed from three other successful local bands. Sometimes they had a dhol drum and horn section depending on the lineup, becoming Ultra Mega Turbo Sasquatch, a musical macrophage mashup absorbing other bands at will. They played only by the light of the full moon and were not to be missed under any circumstances. “The only band that matters,” it was said.

This is our space, this is real. Fuck stages and division between band and audience. Fuck rock stars and bands with bumper stickers, websites, and $12 ticket prices.

I try not to jump to conclusions about anything I feel I've seen or heard before. I try not to write off music my kids play me as "throwback" even if it closely resembles something that I thought was new when I was a kid. Sure, I want to put on the seventies' English band the Jam and say, See! Your new little punk bands are just shiny versions of this! But I'd be wrong. To diminish the new as nothing more than a rehash is a mistake.

I rush home and put the record on ['Horses’ by Patti Smith]. It hurts through stream of consciousness, careers into poetry and dissolves into sex. [...] She’s a private person who dares to let go in front of everyone, puts herself out there and risks falling flat on her face. Up until now girls have been controlled and restrained. Patti Smith is abandoned. [...] Listening to Horses unlocks an idea for me - girls’ sexuality can be on their own terms, for their own pleasure or creative work, not just for exploitation or to get a man. [...] Hearing Patti Smith be sexual, building to an organic crescendo, whilst leading a band, is so exciting. It’s emancipating. If I can take a quarter or even eighth of what she has and not give a shit about making a fool of myself, maybe I can still do something with my life.

Ari [Up] hides nothing from our audiences: if she’s in a bad mood, she shows it, and if we happen to be on stage when she’s not happy, she just does a shit gig. There’s no You’ve paid money to see this so I’m going to give you a good time, or I’m not going to let the band down – she’s just grumpy and uncommunicative. This is a good thing in many ways, we’re against faking it, we tell it like it is. People in bands are just like the audience: they have good days and bad days, we’re not pantomime or theatre, we’re no different to anyone else. We don’t see ourselves as entertainers, trying to make the audience forget their troubles for forty minutes. We see ourselves as warriors. We’d rather people confronted their anger and dissatisfaction and did something about it. Like Luis Buñuel said, ‘I’m not here to entertain you, I’m here to make you feel uncomfortable.

I know, I know, I was on acid, but I walked out of the club thinking I’d seen the perfect band. I felt like the blackboard of my mind had been erased. They managed to have both the most ferocious elements of punk rock, and the musical sophistication I found so important.

Duke is the band’s commercial breakthrough, particularly in Germany. It starts Genesis mania there, which leads into Phil Collins mania. It will sell hugely in Britain, too, but gets a terrible review in Melody Maker, and on a couple of occasions I’m anointed “Wally of the Week” in the music press. Why? There’s the old saw that the “inkies” (as Melody Maker, NME and Sounds are collectively known) are automatically suspicious of anything that becomes hugely popular—the perception is that something has been dumbed down so as to appeal to the masses. Equally, “prog” is fast becoming genre non grata at the indie-, post-punk- and New Wave–loving music papers. As frontman with Genesis, I am a target for such ire. Equally, I will hold my hands up and admit that, with all the success, it’s quite possible that I have been giving off an unintentional smugness.

I opened my mouth and said, “Because no one has listened to me my whole life and I really want to be heard.” She appraised me for a second and then said, “You should start a band. Most people go outside and smoke when someone gets up to do spoken word, but people wanna see bands.

In the 1990, there was a rock band in Russia called Bakhyt-Kompot, and they had a song that was musically terrible but an important expression of punk philosophy that articulated one of my own main preoccupations. The chorus went like this: "How come the Czechs have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Poles have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Germans have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it?" All the countries of the Soviet bloc and the Baltic republics were managing to "crack it," but not us. We had the oil, the gas, the ores and timber, infrastructure of sorts, and industry. We had a lot of highly educated people but it didn't help. I'm not talking about "like in America"; it wasn't even like in Poland. According to current official statistics, 13 percent of people were living below the poverty line; in terms of the average wage, we had been overtaken by China, Lebanon, and Panama. Someday I believe it will all work out and everything will be fine, but we have to face the fact that from the early 1990s to the 2020s, the life of the nation has been wasted moronically, a time of degeneration and failing to keep up. There is good reason why people like me, and those five or ten years older, are called a cursed and lost generation. We are the people who should have been the main beneficiaries of market and political freedom. We could have adapted readily to a new world in a way that was beyond the ability of most earlier generations. Fifteen percent of us should have become entrepreneurs, "like in America." But Russia didn't crack it. No one doubts we are living better now than we were in 1990, but, excuse me, thirty years have passed. Even in North Korea people are living better now than they did then. Scientific and technological progress, whole new branches of the economy, communications, the internet, ATMs, computers . . . Those who claim the rise in living standards relative to the 1990s is due to the exertions and achievements of the Putin regime re like stock joke characters saying, "Thank heaven for Putin! Under his rule the speed of computers has increased a millionfold." The comparison should not be between us as we were in 1990 and us as we are now, but between how we are now and how we could have been if we had grown at just the average global growth rate. We would easily have achieved what we watched in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and South Korea achieve. That is a comparison about which we can only feel sad. This is not some abstract exercise, but thirty years of our lives. And God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie ahead. For as long as Putin's group is in power, we will count the missed opportunities and be noticing how other countries have overtaken us in per capita GDP, and how those we have always looked down as little better than beggars have overtaken us in terms of their national average income.

Every concert ended up in chaos. We never were able to finish even one show: we were always stopped by the police." Many of their gigs presented more dangers than flying bottles. On stage - the band brandishing a repertoire of treasonous songs - they were beaten, shot at, and, in one instance, nearly electrocuted when someone threw buckets of water onto their improvised stage. Puente Encina says these unpredictable moments were also liberating. "Playing in constant danger was in itself an act of courage and rebellion... We had nothing to lose. Death could be waiting just around the corner. The worst possible outcome would be to die of boredom.

They hate sexism, not men.

I liked that once again Spitboy was defying stereotypes and preconceived notions about who we were, what we did, and how we did it.

we didn’t endorse separatism, and we didn’t want to be called girls.

had gotten somewhat used to the sexist attitudes about female musicians and people’s weird fetishes for female drummers by the time

Girls can’t play music.” “Who you telling we can’t play music?” I said to one of them at a party, getting in his face, “I’ve been playing an instrument since I was in third grade.

The two things people thought that surprised us the most were that we were mean and angry or wild partiers.

You guys have really improved.” People liked telling us that. They would use that word, too: “improved.” It was supposed to be a compliment “You’re a lot tighter now.” I’d clench my jaw every time. I had never heard anyone, especially a guy, saying that to another guy in a band. Imagine someone saying that to Neurosis or Econochrist.

Hey, if you want to prove your womanhood, shut up and spread your legs or play.” All the heads in the room turned toward the voice. “What did you say?” I asked over my vocal mic. “Shut up and spread your legs or play.

didn’t take anyone with us on our first tour, boyfriends or otherwise. That may have been a mistake, but we wanted to prove that we could do it all: write our own songs, play our own instruments, drive the van, navigate the interstates with a paper map, unload our own equipment, and change our own tires (and in only a matter of minutes).

Toxic Tunes was filled with songs by weird punk bands I had read about in high school but never actually heard. Where I grew up, it took an hour to drive to the closest record store, and that store certainly wouldn’t have sold anything that was on this mixtape. Just the group names and song titles by themselves sounded illicit. Dead Kennedys, the Meatmen, Butthole Surfers. “Too Drunk to Fuck,” “Tooling for Anus,” “Bar-B-Q Pope.

By this time, punk rock had got hijacked by politicos. I think that’s what killed it. Before then it had just been a genuine explosion of naive rebellion, a means for the young to express themselves in whatever way they imagined within the punk-rock guidelines. In that sense, punk was the last real youth tribe, but as soon as it got tied up with the propaganda, narrow politics, and sloganeering of activists, all the fun and imagination was kicked out of it. Punk rock was no exercise in socialism, I know that for a fact. Most of the punks weren’t at all political: even the swastika stuff was only there to wind people up. The political brigade didn’t understand rock and roll, or really know anything about it: for them, the entertainment was secondary to the propaganda. They didn’t subscribe to the star system which rock and roll thrives on, but they knew a big name when they saw it. The memorable April 1978 Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park in East London, for instance, was due to be headlined by the Tom Robinson Band, but the late addition of The Clash rather usurped their status as top of the bill. A world-class act, just back from the States, they were keen to lend their name to a noble cause. As guest vocalist on ‘White Riot’, the event also provided Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey with the opportunity to cast off the taint of fascism he had so unjustly acquired. I was very anxious not to be seen as a part of any narrow political agenda, but there was always a danger of that happening in a small place like England. I never wanted to be seen as being in anybody’s pocket. If you’re an avowedly political artist you’re a sloganeer, and that’s the end of it: a base hireling who propagates the ideas of others. The record companies only want your money, but those other people want your heart. To know any artist’s political worldview is unhelpful. It’s unhelpful for the artist, and especially unhelpful to an appreciation of their artistic products. That’s particularly true of actors.

When punk finally arrived in 1976 as a media phenomenon, Scotland appeared not to ignite. There was no Scottish equivalent of the Sex Pistols, The Clash or the Buzzcocks at a national level. The Rezillos came closest to embodying the kinetic energy but the explosion itself seemed to happen elsewhere. From the outside, Scotland looked like an absence in punk's foundational narrative. But the reasons for this were not aesthetic. They were structural. By the mid-1970s, Scotland faced a profound deficit in cultural infrastructure. There were few rehersal spaces, almost no independent recording studios capable of servicing new bands, negligible independent label presence (beyond the excellent and influential Zoom Records), minimal specialist press and, most crucially, a catastrophic lack of local radio provision.