Punk Rock Saved My Ass: An Anthology of True Punk Rock Stories

By Terena Scott

Here are the true stories from people whose lives were transformed and empowered by the frenetic, questioning, creative energy of punk rock. Written by musicians, teachers, artists, librarians, nurses, bakers, parents, and social workers, the stories are funny, sometimes tragic, and always surprising. You may never listen to a punk rock song again the same way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780979715273

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Wismar

Introduction Why punk rock saved my ass

By Terena Scott © 2010

This is not another book romanticizing or denigrating punk rock. Nor do I claim to understand, or even be, punk. Nowadays, everyone claims to be a punk, especially marketing executives who want to shake up the status quo. You can buy books on everything from punk decorating to punk knitting. Despite how the term punk has been ripped off, there is no denying the mystique of punk. Our culture is fascinated with it. Countless movies and books celebrate the great bands and singers of classic punk, like Sid Vicious and Jello Biafra. We can’t seem to get enough of those tragic, train wreck stories. But there’s more to punk than junkies and self-destructive celebrities. Punk has inspired and saved the lives of thousands of people by providing a sense of belonging and a code for living. I’m one of them.

I love punk rock music, but I would never call myself a punk. I’m a hippie-punk, if there is such a thing, although when I’ve asked I was told no. One friend even said he’d punch someone in the mouth for calling him that. He is definitely a punk.

Regardless of what cultural category I fall into, one fact is irrevocable: I love punk music—Iggy and the Stooges, The Clash, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Joan Jett, Bad Religion, Rancid, Bad Brains, Generation X, M.D.C., Dead Boys, Cramps, The Avengers … I love the chaotic, destructive energy that screams, Why? Why is the world fucked up? Why are corporations in control? Why is there a hole in the ozone? Why are we so complacent? No other music can reach the same howl of rage as punk when demanding social justice.

I grew up in Northern California, the nirvana of counter-cultural ideals, where I played hide-and-seek in the pot fields with other hippie kids. We were raised on the ideals of the 1960s, convinced that by the time we were adults the revolution would have come and we’d all be living John Lennon’s Imagine. And my dad was making it happen; he was a community organizer who stopped a nuclear power plant from being built on the Mendocino Coast. At age three I cut the ribbon to open my dad’s environmental center on the very first Earth Day. We were recycling before it was cool.

But something odd happened while I grew up. Slowly, the revolutionaries set down their flowers and bought BMWs. Although my dad remained a hippie and didn’t buy a new car, he stopped fighting the man, preferring to drop further from society and let someone younger do the fighting. Problem was, no one picked up the gauntlet. Reagan got elected and the revolution ended. They had won.

My parents divorced and my mom, tired of being broke, married a middle-class, conservative guy with a steady job. We moved to Kelseyville, the Pear Capital of the World, population 1700, where I went to high school. When we were old enough to drive, my best friend Nellie would pick me up in her VW bug and drive us to school, where we would sit in her car in the parking lot, drinking OJ and vodka from a thermos while listening to the Talking Heads. One morning, a group of kids walked by the car and paused when they heard our music. One of them said, I knew you two were punks.

Punks? Were the Talking Heads a punk band? We’d heard of punk music, but in Kelseyville they weren’t exactly playing it on the radio, nor were any bands coming within a hundred miles of us. No one wore band shirts or dressed punk. To our tiny high school, the Talking Heads were absolutely punk.

After high school, I went to Humboldt State University in Arcata, the school for hippie kids. The university radio station played the Grateful Dead and reggae. College students wore their hair long and dressed in flowing gypsy skirts or organically grown cotton pants with T-shirts declaring Jah Love, No Nukes, and Save the Whales. There was a drum circle on campus every lunch break and avant-garde performance art every night, usually from the dance or drama departments.

By that time, I was more goth than hippie, preferring Sisters of Mercy to the Grateful Dead. Later, the Seattle sound attracted me, especially the fury of Soundgarden and the longing of Nirvana. The music was considered the third wave of punk and was my gateway drug to harder, classic punk. I dressed in baggy pants, heavy boots, and flannel shirts like the rest of the grunge crew, but I found the grungers more insipid than the hippies. They didn’t even bother to go to the demonstration. The hippies talked too much after smoking too much dope, but at least they’d leave the house to protest.

Stop the Nicaraguan Occupation. Fuck yeah! Stop the killing. I wanted to scream against the Reagan–Bush policies in Central America. How many people were being killed in my name? The war crimes had to stop. I’d join the hippies at the protest and chant for the downfall of the Bush regime, but after a good protest, complete with drumming and a performance piece from the Underground Puppet People, the hippies would go home to discuss more politics and smoke another bowl. I would go home feeling more depressed than before I protested.

The glorious revolution was proving yet again to be utter bullshit.

And then, I fell in love with my math tutor, Greg. He was blond and gorgeous in a nerdy, math genius sort of way, complete with glasses. His smile made me forget everything he taught me about math. We went out a couple of times and then moved in together to begin a tumultuous, mad, lovely relationship that lasted four years.

T-shirt iron-on design for a one off show. Baton Rouge, La. 1986 by R. Wismar Another time where the T-shirt was better than the band.

He wasn’t what I imagined a punk must be. He didn’t have spiked hair or ripped clothes decorated with chains. He didn’t smoke or fight or spit at people. He even got along well with his parents, who obviously adored him. But one day, he introduced me to punk music.

It was a rare sunny day in Arcata. I was sitting outside the front door on the steps when Kill the Poor by the Dead Kennedys suddenly blasted through the speakers. The sound blasted me out of my dreamy, warm reverie, startling me awake. The music was so angry, so intoxicating, so much like everything I was feeling inside.

Greg came outside to join me on the front step and I asked, What’s that?

Dead Kennedys.

We listened to the entire album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, and when Greg went to work I played it again while studying the liner notes and lyrics. Over the next few weeks I played the rest of his collection, listening to classic punk and newer, second-wave bands. The music thrilled me, challenged me to get out of my post-1960s depression and really listen to what was going on. The revolution I’d been longing for was right here. The whole world wasn’t complacent and comfortable with the way things were. Thousands of people were just as angry and catalyzed as I was. When the hippies dropped the torch, the punks picked it up.

My relationship with Greg ended dramatically as most relationships do when you’re twenty-three and fucked up. But my love of punk music remained. I went to shows and tried moshing once, but was promptly tossed out of the pit by a six-foot-tall skinhead, so I took it as a sign I should stay out. Inspired by the DIY movement, I discovered that I could make my own art without the need for approval from any corporation. Want to be a writer? Write. Want to publish? Start your own press.

I never dressed like a punk or embraced the lifestyle of a punk. There was a subculture of people that I had nothing in common with and trying to pull off being a punk would be disrespectful and even worse, I’d get my ass kicked for being a poser. I was still enough of a hippie-chick to not want to fight with everyone. I still had optimism about the future. Yes, it sucked, but there was still a chance it could get better.

But I needed the angry charge of punk to keep me believing that there were still people in the world who were pissed off about the status quo, who believed a revolution was possible. The love professed by the hippies was too passive. I didn’t love everybody. I hated George Bush and Rush Limbaugh and Walmart. I didn’t want to love them, I wanted to kick their collective asses!

Eventually I married a real punk, a man who came close to suicide before he discovered Punk Rock in the seventh grade. His story, Just Another Fat Kid in Baton Rouge, inspired me to create this anthology because I knew he wasn’t alone in his tale of punk salvation. All I kept hearing were junkie stories. I wanted to hear the ways punk positively transformed a person’s life and made that person who she is today. Punk transformed my life by pulling me out of my post-revolutionary hippiekid depression when the flower children dumped the revolution and then bitched about how we Gen-Xers were apathetic. Gee, I wonder why? If your parents traded in their ideals for stock options and espresso machines you’d be a little unmotivated, too.

But that’s a different book. This book is about how punk can inspire. Some of the stories are tragic, some funny. Some will make you wonder if punk did anything for the writer at all, or doubt whether they even are punk. There are essays, interviews, lyrics, and poetry written by punks in England, Spain, California, Massachusetts, Alabama, and places beyond. All celebrate one thing: the passionate, raw, creative, powerful force that is Punk.

Terena Scott

Ukiah, California

August, 2009

Circle Jerks photo by Nicole Lucas

Punk didn’t save my life, it made my life.

By Michael W. Dean © 2010.

Reprint rights retained by author.

My friend Skip Lunch in China found a link online from the publishers of this book asking for stories about how punk rock saved my life. Skip thought it would be something I’d dig, and he was right. Skip turned me onto punk rock in college, in upstate New York, in 1981, when I was seventeen. I’m pretty sure my friendship with Skip has saved my life a couple times in the past twenty-five years.

Punk didn’t save my life. It may have almost killed me at points Maybe that’s unfair, I probably would have been a junkie and a drunk anyway, but it certainly went hand in hand with the lifestyle I built up around myself touring in bands in the hardcore punk circuit in the mid-’80s to early ’90s. But punk didn’t get me sober either.

Punk was hugely influential to me, but more for the DIY ethic than for the music. I loved some punk music, but was mainly into Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Still am.

In 1982, I moved to Washington, D.C., squatted in an abandoned factory, and saw all the Dischord bands nightly, live in their prime. Go see that movie American Hardcore. I was at most of the D.C. shows shown in that film.

With two or three exceptions, that film is mostly guys who don’t have much going on these days, getting all misty eyed about the good old days. It reminds me of Grandpa Simpson talking about WWII.

I don’t get sentimental when remembering the early ’80s Washington, D.C., hardcore scene. Partly because I have so much great stuff going on in my life now that has nothing directly to do with music. And partly because, while I was there, I didn’t really feel accepted. I’d come from out of town, and also I loved to get drunk at shows filled with people who were aggressively straight edge. I was an outsider among outsiders.

I look back at my early punk days with happiness, and a bit of sadness, but it’s not sadness for something past. More like sadness for Fuck, I could have died so many times.

Brian Childers was a great friend of mine. He was smart as hell, funny, generous, gregarious, and talented. I played guitar in his hardcore band The Beef People (we put out a 7-inch EP in 1984), and he played bass and sang a bit in my band Bomb for one tour. (Bomb didn’t sound like a normal punk band, but we were punk in every other way, including the bands we shared bills with: Toxic Reasons, DOA, Scratch Acid, Flipper, Tex and the Horseheads, Coffin Break, Seven Year Bitch, Gwar, Plasmatics, Citizen Fish, MDC, Tribe 8, etc., etc., etc.) Brian also sang in the kick-ass New York hardcore band Crawlpappy.

Music was his life.

Punk couldn’t save him either. He passed away recently, from complications from alcohol abuse. I miss that motherfucker something terrible.

In 1983 my friend Tom Howard told me, Minor Threat saved my life. I was about to commit suicide when I first heard them, and their music gave me a reason to live. I said, You should write them a letter and tell them that. He said, They probably have a pile of letters like that. And they probably do. Punk rock saved a lot of people. I’m just not one of them.

When I wrote to Medusa Publishing and pitched writing something for this book, one of the editors wrote back:

I’ve browsed through some of your plethora of links (both from your email and your CV) and am intrigued by your statement that even though punk rock didn’t save your ass, it has helped make you what you are today. (Especially intrigued after reading your comment in the O’Reilly article about some crusty old punk.)

I kinda took that as