by Theo Greenblatt
In the early 80s, people used to mistake me for Nancy Spungen, which was interesting because Nancy was already long dead by then. Really she was nobody until she was dead, a pathetic groupie with a drug habit; her murder transformed her into a tragic heroine, and fame engulfed her—movies, books, and her image—a sullen vacant blonde slumped on a couch next to Sid was plastered in our media minds so that she continued to live. It wasn’t really flattering to be mistaken for Nancy, but in Greil Marcus’s terms, being mistaken for a dead woman might sum up the entire Punk experience—it was over before it started, and dead before it lived. As soon as the Sex Pistols flashed, exploded, dissolved in 1978, Punk was finished; everything that came after was just… well, “aftermath”. Not part of the real scene according to many. But a lot was still living in that aftermath. I guess it depends on your definition of “real.” There was momentum, color, and definitely sound.
I was never sure whether the attitude spawned the music, or the other way around. In any case, the two were synthesized—there was no Punk culture without the music. There were a lot of slightly overlapping circles of musical genre, and each had its own social style and mini-culture—really raunchy punk bands and cheesy pop, art school people and gimmick bands, people experimenting with ska and funk and jazz, kids who could barely play but had a great time on stage, and people who couldn’t play at all and just made up band names and wrote them on bathroom walls. I don’t really understand why all this music caught me, but it did and it still does. It demands movement but not grace—it smacks of abandon and revolt. Perhaps it resonates with some inner discord of mine, as yet unresolved. Certainly it generated discord, with those outside its influence.
The night David Minehan got hit in the head with a bottle by an irate John Travolta wanna-be, I thought punk was alive with meaning. It was in front of the Strawberries record store in Kenmore Square, on those long low steps that ran the length of the building. I don’t know what the disco kid was even doing on our side of the street; usually they stuck to Lucifer’s over by the Greek restaurant, and we held court at the Rat and the Deli, on the Fenway side. Pale, thin David, with spikes of henna red hair falling over his forehead, in his tight black jeans and faded t-shirt, was an unlikely combatant. He fronted a pop trio called the Neighborhoods, whose songs sounded gritty but had sugary titles like “Flavors” and “Prettiest Girl”. I still have a color Xerox mock-up of their first 45 cover that shows them riding the roller coaster at Paragon Park. There were a lot of meaner and more dangerous looking punks around than David Minehan. That’s for sure. Although I don’t think any of them were as mean as they looked—hardly any of us were, but that’s not to say we didn’t enjoy generating a little alarm here and there.
That hot summer night in front of Strawberries, the dirty looks percolated into some desultory name-calling—not so unusual, but this time it quickly escalated into real violence. I saw the kid pick up the bottle and smash it over David’s head, and some other kids rushed in to grab him before he could do more damage with the now-broken bottle. Suddenly it looked like a riot—fists flying, leather jackets flapping. Yes, we wore them regardless of temperature—like the grand dames of Beverly Hills in their furs. They were status symbols in a way. Or a measure of our commitment to… what? Fashion, maybe? Or anti-fashion. Anti-christ? Johnny Rotten? Meanwhile, the polyester suits of the disco boys reflected the orange light of the giant Citgo sign as it filled the sky and faded, filled and faded. The cops came and David was taken to the hospital. His girlfriend overwrought, or depending on whose version you believed, she might have just been milking the situation for attention and free drugs.
So what was the meaning I saw there that night? It was in the perception. Somehow suddenly (finally?) punk had pissed people off enough to throw bottles. It had acquired critical mass worthy of passionate opposition. It wasn’t anything we were really doing or saying, because mostly what we were doing was dressing up and playing music (or banging musicians), and what we were saying was that we didn’t give a shit about anyone else, but the refusal to conform—it irritated people. This wasn’t so much a “generation gap” like the sixties, old versus young. This was faction against faction—a war of values; or hell, maybe it was just a clash of fashion. Granted the British punks had more class or anti-class. They had more to complain about and they did it with more style, but we were still passionately uncaring.
Another night I stood in the rain in front of Spit, one of a string of nightclubs on Lansdowne Street, owned by the Lyons brothers, who like a family of American Malcolm McClarens, made a fortune by sussing out the latest music trends and creating an aura of exclusiveness around their ever-changing theme clubs—rollerskating, disco, eurotrash. They always nailed the latest and took it from avant-garde to passé. None of it touched them—they were businessmen, not punks. Although Pat Lyons did sport a pristine black leather jacket on occasion. In some ways people like the Lyons’ were responsible for the passing of every trend—as soon as you made it that far, you were a sell-out, washed up in terms of integrity. Just like with the music—home-grown Boston bands like The Cars were considered innovative and cool until they made it big. Once they signed to a major record label, much of their original fan base turned their backs. “New wave” was already “old guard.” If you succeeded, you failed—you could no longer be a true rebel. Cruel irony for some, but it lent righteousness to those who never played a venue bigger than the Rat, or Cantone’s, or maybe an opening gig at the Paradise.
I had some friends who started a quarterly newspaper—a step up from a fanzine; they were poor enough to have plenty of integrity, although they could always afford pot. I volunteered to handle the advertising and sold the back page to the Lyons empire, so we never had to pay to get into Spit—they gave us little plastic cards with the club’s logo—the word “Spit” splashed on them so it looked like something you coughed up on the sidewalk. We would wave our magic cards and the big guys at the door would wave us past the crowds—this was the worst kind of elitism, but our contempt and cynicism allowed us to take advantage of it.
That night I must have been waiting for someone, or waiting for the club to open, because I was standing in line in the drizzle, and a reporter from one of the TV news shows was there interviewing the kids going in—trying to make them look and sound as derelict as possible. His agenda was clear. He aimed his camera and microphone at the kids who looked least capable of responding articulately, with the purpose of pointing out to Middle America just how doomed we were. He kept cornering them and asking condescending questions, like when was the last time they’d been in school. I didn’t want their fatuous ignorance representing all punks, so I worked my way into his line of vision. Kohl-black eye make-up was running down my cheeks—the pink streaks in my hair, darkened by the rain, made me look like an accident victim. I was wearing Doc Marten’s and a torn men’s raincoat with a moth-eaten fur piece around my neck—three dead foxes biting each other’s tails. He rounded on me and asked what was the last book I’d read, gleefully anticipating my inept response. Instead, I tried to engage him in a discussion of Dickens’ Bleak House, I think it was; but he clearly hadn’t read it. Of course I didn’t make it onto the nightly news, but punk had meaning that night, too. It was about busting stereotypes and pushing back at the smarmy old white guys—or one of them at least—whose privilege it was to paint the media picture.
It was about visibility, too. The London punks we admired so much, who needed to be heard and seen, could only do it by offending people. There was no other way to stand out—they made visual and auditory statements that couldn’t be ignored—gravity-defying hairdos in shocking shades, eyes blackened and safety pins gouged through cheeks, clothing intentionally desecrated—a refusal to own or accept any homey status quo. We idealized and idolized them—they were fearless, nothing left to lose in Thatcher’s England. They had an intensity we strove to achieve, and probably never did, except maybe, just maybe, in moments like David getting hit with that bottle, when at least we stood for something, even if we didn’t really know what.
What could we rebel against here in the US? Hmm… boredom, mostly. But we needed to be seen and heard, too. It felt good to be noticed, even to be frightening. When I rode the subway in my flight-suit with the zippers all over, smattered with band badges—Buzzcocks, Dead Boys, Gang of Four—and dog chains clanking, red sneakers, cat’s eyes staring out from under spiky bangs, people were intimidated, took a step away, looked at each other as if to say, “Oh my god, this punk thing is for real!” I felt powerful in a way that I had never felt before. Punk carved out a borderland for the silent outcasts in middle class society, the kids who didn’t fit in. The popular kids—the jocks and cheerleaders and the preps, or the people who had found good jobs. They didn’t need a borderland. They would come down to the Rat or the Space just to watch, soak up a little atmosphere. Maybe they’d wear a skinny tie or cut the sleeves off their t-shirts, but it was tourism for them—like going to the zoo. They’d ogle the spandex-clad punk girls, and then go back to their frat house and have a laugh or a wank. I remember sitting on the jukebox at the Rat one night (yes, everything happened at night; we were, above all, nocturnal). That was my regular spot, on the jukebox—a good view of the stage and the door, and complete control of the music between sets. It was crowded, as usual, and people were pressed in all around. This clean-cut boy leaned over me, his beer breath moist in my ear, and said if I spread my legs a little further, he could stick it right in. Somehow I didn’t think he would talk to the girls at the BU mixer that way. Of course, I could be wrong about that, come to think of it. At the time, I was pretty sure he was feeling way too above me. I threw my drink in his face, and he backed up, spluttering. He pulled back as if to throw a punch, but someone grabbed his arm. I understood in that moment that I was an object, a curiosity, and was to some extent, responsible for that definition, too; but this was my life, not just a fashion statement. Then again maybe my life was a fashion statement.
Yes, there were people who seemed serious about living out some kind of vague anarchic or nihilist ideology—artists and musicians and students—people who were determined that nothing should have meaning, or that nothingness should have meaning; but the deadbeat drug addict hookers, and the transsexuals who looked good in leather—they weren’t intentionally nihilistic, they just didn’t fit in anywhere else. They were safe around us because we embraced dirt and deviance, and poverty and self-destruction. Some of the musicians played enough gigs to live off their music, and some had meaningless jobs to pay the rent—the more mundane, the better. Like my friend Merle, a bass player who worked in the shipping department at Sears Roebuck. I don’t know why they didn’t fire him a dozen times over: he called in sick—or begged me to do it for him—more often than he went to work. Disconnected from any need for social approval, Merle used to snag leftover food off plates that hadn’t been cleared, on our four a.m. forays to IHOP. He wasn’t that broke, he just didn’t care. Or didn’t care about anything but music.
A bunch of the guys, my newspaper friends, drove cabs to make money. They were pretty independent that way and could make their own hours around their gigs and drug deals. Kit, a tall, skinny guitar player was driving one night and picked up a bad-luck fare—a kid who robbed him, stabbed him, and left him for dead in the front seat of the cab. When the cops found him, they knew there wasn’t time to wait for an ambulance—he wasn’t dead yet, but he was getting there fast. They folded his lean, limp body into their patrol car and took him to the hospital where the doctors sawed open his chest and stopped up the hole where the life was running out. The music scene in Boston was small, and lots of people knew Kit—dozens of bands stepped up to raise money for his hospital bills. Not caring about anything found a limit there. We had a sense of community after all. They put together a concert, and made t-shirts to sell—The Kit Dennis Hole in the Heart Benefit. The front of the t-shirt had a blood-red stain over the heart, and the words ‘Not Dead Yet’ scrawled across the chest.
So, some people were living a righteous starving artist existence, or a snarling Johnny Rotten “I don’t care” existence, but the rest of us, well, I did live in a suitably dingy basement rear apartment of the last house on a dead end street by the railroad tracks, but I had a job in an upscale clothing store. I had to humble myself and wear a hat to work to cover my pink hair, but I wasn’t going to starve. I have to admit that I wasn’t committed enough to make myself totally ugly either, like some of the girls in the fanzines, and I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t escape vanity or middle class roots. JoAnn, for instance, moonlighted as a stripper at the Naked Eye and shot heroin recreationally, but she was an elementary school teacher by day. I’m pretty sure her colleagues had no idea she took off her clothes for money and fucked musicians in their tour-buses. Rita lived with her psychologist dad, and her boyfriend was a Harvard student with art school pretensions, and a parent-sponsored credit card in his pocket. Johnny Angel stalked the stage with his guitar and hurled himself willingly into the crowd, but he told me once he wanted to be a stockbroker. And another friend worked for a corporate giant record store—granted, he may have indulged in some subversive activities like “losing” merchandise to his friends, but he also ensured that the store maintained an inventory of independent singles and albums that we all bought from. He helped keep the dream of fame alive for a number of local musicians, and that was something a lot of them cared about in spite of themselves.
Which brings me back to the greatest irony of the punk scene: the music was the one thing it was okay to care about, but if Punk was all a big joke of Malcolm McClaren’s, and the Pistols were sell-outs, then any band that made it was a sell-out, too. Play your heart out for a recording contract, and as soon as you get it, as soon as people out there really start listening, people on the inside begin to resent and bad-mouth you. The only way to really make it, to really be Punk, was to never make it at all.
Now I look at kids dressing up as punks for Halloween, at bands like Blink 182, and chain stores like Hot Topic—commodified, commercialized punk, marketed for mass consumption and making money hand over fist for some corporate white guy at the top of the food chain. My first impulse is to denounce them all as posers, cashing in on the caché of the past—all authenticity lost. but then I look back and think that authenticity was no more than an attitude. It’s true that some kind of spark is lost now, but some of these kids—well, I know them, and they still have it. My daughter’s high school friends who hung out at my house with their badges and ripped clothing, their nose rings and ear spacers and scrawny, inked up bodies. They still wore Docs and dog chains and studded collars, but they went and still go a lot further than we ever did in the self-mutilation department.I can’t help thinking, in the post-Columbine world, that kids are even more in need of visibility, of recognition, than we were—that the impulse to get in someone’s face, god damn it, is more desperate than ever, and some of it is pure nostalgia. My daughter’s friends would go through my vinyl collection with reverence, discovering long forgotten picture discs and classic after obscure classic—Nervous Eaters, Sham 69, The Dickies, The Damned, the Rezillos. I rose to new heights of coolness as a mom when one of them unearthed the original Dead Kennedys 45 of “California Uber Alles,” inscribed by the guitarist, “To Theo, the girl with the blue eyes and exciting thighs, love, Ray.” Coolness tastes different these days. So there’s commodification, but we know that there always was, and there were always posers, and there were always people who were moved by the music and by each other, and there still are. I’m not taking it away from them, even in my mind. They need it as much as we did. In that sense, in the sense of kids who need to stand up and stand out, in spite of the mass marketing and the posers and the tourists and the people who don’t understand, it’s not dead yet.
Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, appears in The London Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, Harvard Review, Tikkun, the Flexible Persona (Pushcart nomination), and numerous other venues. Her short story, “Solitaire,” won first place in the 2017 London Magazine Short Story Competition. She holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island and teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI.