punk is as punk does
i hate rockstars and all their preening, egotistical, self-aggrandizing bullshit. sure, i know they're all tortured souls underneath (aren't we all?), but why they gotta act like the world at large can kiss their ass (while dropping coin for their record/showticket/t-shirt/etc., of course)? that's why i'll never go to another show where i have to look at a jumbotron to see the band (and it's tiny). nah, i'd rather hear the other ones, the weird, asocial kids who get into music because it gives 'em a voice and a crowd to hear it (even though that sometimes means they wind up acting like BMOCs like the pricks described earlier in this paragraph; it's an interesting tension, at least).
there's a movie out now about the minutemen, who totally epitomized the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic of punk, whose main guy d. boon created scarcely a ripple in the consciousness of the public at large when he checked out in december 1985 (crashed the van coming home from visiting his girlfriend's relatives) -- certainly nothing, f'rinstance, compared to what attended the deaths of hendrix (who my best friend of the time, whose tastes ran more towards peter paul & mary and roger miller, persisted in calling "bobby hendrix," and whose music i couldn't listen to for 20 years after college because i'd seen one too many examples of the human wreckage that otherwise intelligent people could make of themselves in the name of "bein' like jimi") or cobain (who actually pissed me off more when he took the coward's way out -- playing ernest hemingway and eating the shotgun, mega-success and "the year punk broke" and wife and baby not enough to quiet the demons he carried within him -- primarily because my own kids really believed in him, saw him as some kind of spokesman or avatar, and he just wasn't up to the gig).
still, boon left his mark -- i mean, seriously, is there a better record than double nickels on the dime, the minutemen's sprawling trout mask replica for the reagan decade, substituting political consciousness for don van vliet's rampant tree hugger-ism? fugeddabout the mc5, these guys didn't need a toy political party to talk about what was wrong in america. and they didn't hew to anybody's musical orthodoxy, either. "punk rock is what we make it," they said. meant it, too; there's a marked absence of repetitive downstroke barre chords and four-on-the floor drums in their music, and plenty of other stuff -- funk, something approaching jazz, fingerpicked nylon-string acoustics, even a conjunto polka or two. not only that, but they were big enough to render props to influences as unfashionable as blue oyster cult and john fogerty (where'd you think the flannel shirts came from?). listening to their swan song 3-way tie for last in the car yesterday, i was struck (and a bit saddened) by how relevant its ruminations on war remain, 20 years after they laid it down. boon's buddy mike watt, whom he met by falling out of a tree, is my age, with as many tours under his belt as he has rings around his trunk, and he still climbs in the van to make the circuit of the punk dumps a coupla times a year in spite of having suffered a near-fatal illness a few yrs back and facing rock's law of diminishing returns. which only makes songs like the minutemen's "history lesson (part 2)" or watt's own solo "drove up from pedro" that much more poignant. yeah, your band could be my life. go easy, bro.
at carl pack's birthday party at the wreck room last week, i remember thinking, "wow, just from the people in this room, someone could write an oral history of punk in fort worth." carl his own self, chuck rose, professor blake hestir, carey blackwell, melissa kirkendall, lee allen, william bryan massey III -- throw in a coupla others like quincy holloway and tony chapman and we'd have our own little please kill me or our band could be your life or we've got the neutron bomb. pack's a stylin' mofo, and at age 40 (i refuse to say "even"), he could never be mistaken for anybody but himself -- moving faster behind the bar on one leg than billy wilson can on two, hopping in front of the mic stand or throwing away his crutches and lying on the floor, pretending to read from an upside down bible while bellowing "hey mister, hey mister / stick yer dick in / yer sister" while his long-in-the-tooth punk cohort cheers him on. or later, exhorting his "bitches" to "talk to your president," then holding the mic down by his crotch. you had to kinda feel sorry for his partners in the gideons, who played to 50 or 60 people with carl up front and maybe 10 as brother tex after he left the stage. that's what you get for learning how to play, i guess.
the gideons' music has all the nihilistic fury and none of the groove of the stooges at their best -- prompting steve steward from darth vato to remark later, "seeing those guys made me wish the me-thinks played out more." while the darth boys sometimes seem like more of a vehicle for kerry dean to work out his role confusion (am i a tcu fratboy? a dickies-bedecked white eazy-e wannabe? or a high school math teacher? why not be _all three at once_?!?!?) than a band, steward comes as close as any 24-year-old i know to having _the correct spirit_. steve grew up in lodi, california, where in the late '80s you could still go to see high school bands playing at vfw halls. he waxes nostalgic (play on words) about such punk arcana as split vinyl singles, even threatens to make one of his band with their buddies in chatterton (who represent a totally different strain of indie rockismo). "it'd be the most mean-spirited single ever," he says.
the me-thinks, of course, are the self-proclaimed "shittiest band in fort worth," whose endless stream of self-deprecating bullshit is as intentionally funny as most wannabe-rockstars' self-important horseshit is unintentionally so. left to their own devices, they'd probably never leave their mini-warehouse in haltom city, but they can occasionally be coaxed out to play a gig at the wreck room, where they invariably invoke the spirit of their proto-punk forefathers and the letter of lotsa bands from scandinavia that have flames in their graphics. head me-think ray liberio knows all about the importance of branding, being a graphic artist by trade. his latest brainstorm: the me-thinks are recording a double e.p., to be released on a single cd. genius. steward keeps threatening to book a warehouse someplace, buy some kegs, and charge the kids five bucks at the door to hear the me-thinks and darth vato throw down. now, that's a show i'd pay to see.
there's a movie out now about the minutemen, who totally epitomized the "do-it-yourself" aesthetic of punk, whose main guy d. boon created scarcely a ripple in the consciousness of the public at large when he checked out in december 1985 (crashed the van coming home from visiting his girlfriend's relatives) -- certainly nothing, f'rinstance, compared to what attended the deaths of hendrix (who my best friend of the time, whose tastes ran more towards peter paul & mary and roger miller, persisted in calling "bobby hendrix," and whose music i couldn't listen to for 20 years after college because i'd seen one too many examples of the human wreckage that otherwise intelligent people could make of themselves in the name of "bein' like jimi") or cobain (who actually pissed me off more when he took the coward's way out -- playing ernest hemingway and eating the shotgun, mega-success and "the year punk broke" and wife and baby not enough to quiet the demons he carried within him -- primarily because my own kids really believed in him, saw him as some kind of spokesman or avatar, and he just wasn't up to the gig).
still, boon left his mark -- i mean, seriously, is there a better record than double nickels on the dime, the minutemen's sprawling trout mask replica for the reagan decade, substituting political consciousness for don van vliet's rampant tree hugger-ism? fugeddabout the mc5, these guys didn't need a toy political party to talk about what was wrong in america. and they didn't hew to anybody's musical orthodoxy, either. "punk rock is what we make it," they said. meant it, too; there's a marked absence of repetitive downstroke barre chords and four-on-the floor drums in their music, and plenty of other stuff -- funk, something approaching jazz, fingerpicked nylon-string acoustics, even a conjunto polka or two. not only that, but they were big enough to render props to influences as unfashionable as blue oyster cult and john fogerty (where'd you think the flannel shirts came from?). listening to their swan song 3-way tie for last in the car yesterday, i was struck (and a bit saddened) by how relevant its ruminations on war remain, 20 years after they laid it down. boon's buddy mike watt, whom he met by falling out of a tree, is my age, with as many tours under his belt as he has rings around his trunk, and he still climbs in the van to make the circuit of the punk dumps a coupla times a year in spite of having suffered a near-fatal illness a few yrs back and facing rock's law of diminishing returns. which only makes songs like the minutemen's "history lesson (part 2)" or watt's own solo "drove up from pedro" that much more poignant. yeah, your band could be my life. go easy, bro.
at carl pack's birthday party at the wreck room last week, i remember thinking, "wow, just from the people in this room, someone could write an oral history of punk in fort worth." carl his own self, chuck rose, professor blake hestir, carey blackwell, melissa kirkendall, lee allen, william bryan massey III -- throw in a coupla others like quincy holloway and tony chapman and we'd have our own little please kill me or our band could be your life or we've got the neutron bomb. pack's a stylin' mofo, and at age 40 (i refuse to say "even"), he could never be mistaken for anybody but himself -- moving faster behind the bar on one leg than billy wilson can on two, hopping in front of the mic stand or throwing away his crutches and lying on the floor, pretending to read from an upside down bible while bellowing "hey mister, hey mister / stick yer dick in / yer sister" while his long-in-the-tooth punk cohort cheers him on. or later, exhorting his "bitches" to "talk to your president," then holding the mic down by his crotch. you had to kinda feel sorry for his partners in the gideons, who played to 50 or 60 people with carl up front and maybe 10 as brother tex after he left the stage. that's what you get for learning how to play, i guess.
the gideons' music has all the nihilistic fury and none of the groove of the stooges at their best -- prompting steve steward from darth vato to remark later, "seeing those guys made me wish the me-thinks played out more." while the darth boys sometimes seem like more of a vehicle for kerry dean to work out his role confusion (am i a tcu fratboy? a dickies-bedecked white eazy-e wannabe? or a high school math teacher? why not be _all three at once_?!?!?) than a band, steward comes as close as any 24-year-old i know to having _the correct spirit_. steve grew up in lodi, california, where in the late '80s you could still go to see high school bands playing at vfw halls. he waxes nostalgic (play on words) about such punk arcana as split vinyl singles, even threatens to make one of his band with their buddies in chatterton (who represent a totally different strain of indie rockismo). "it'd be the most mean-spirited single ever," he says.
the me-thinks, of course, are the self-proclaimed "shittiest band in fort worth," whose endless stream of self-deprecating bullshit is as intentionally funny as most wannabe-rockstars' self-important horseshit is unintentionally so. left to their own devices, they'd probably never leave their mini-warehouse in haltom city, but they can occasionally be coaxed out to play a gig at the wreck room, where they invariably invoke the spirit of their proto-punk forefathers and the letter of lotsa bands from scandinavia that have flames in their graphics. head me-think ray liberio knows all about the importance of branding, being a graphic artist by trade. his latest brainstorm: the me-thinks are recording a double e.p., to be released on a single cd. genius. steward keeps threatening to book a warehouse someplace, buy some kegs, and charge the kids five bucks at the door to hear the me-thinks and darth vato throw down. now, that's a show i'd pay to see.
posted by stashdauber at 4:02 AM
2 Comments:
Sweet. Yeah, we'll have to figure out that identity crisis. For the record, I was the frat boy--Kerry shut himself in his room learning Descendents songs. Thanks for these words. As dumb as it sounds, the present is the future's past. I'm glad to figure into the past.
Ken, you’re a true Wordsmith.
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