I've never been one to indulge in nostalgia. I say it's because I am too busy living now to spend time looking backward, but really it's because I have been afraid of what I would see. Now, for some reason, I have opened that box and I can't do anything but watch all the sins and evils come rushing out - leaving nothing behind but a small fluttering thing called hope. Man, that's good writing.
*****
It's a fact - I was a punk before you were a punk. I quit being a punk before you were a punk, maybe before you were even born. This is my story, a story of punk rock days in a most unlikely spot, Denver Colorado.
I wasn't interested in popular music much in high school. The Rolling Stones and REO Speedwagon and whatever else people talked about had nothing for me. When I went to a record store I would start at one end and go to the other end, looking at every single record trying to find something interesting and unusual. I tried to cultivate an interest in oddball and prog-rock bands like Gong and Magma, but the one thing that really appealed to me was Tangerine Dream, because it bore no resemblance to conventional music. I was fortunate in seeing them perform live - three guys standing with their backs to the audience in front of big black boxes, flipping switches and pushing buttons, filling the air with oceans of sound. I did not care to rock or to roll, and the hippie drug culture seemed rather horrible, though to this day a paisley-skirted hippie chick is to me a dream of romance.
My mother married a man named Lou Snapp, whose sons Greg and Jerry lived in a hippie house next to a little record store called Wax Trax in a row of two-story brownstones, just off Colfax opposite the Ogden Theater. Greg and Jerry, their friend Dooley, and a changing cast of characters lived in archetypical hippie squalor, with an antique medical mannequin in a gynecologist's chair proudly on display in the front window. There was never anything in the refrigerator but a big jug of cheap wine, and I suppose they lived by dealing drugs and general theft and hustling. They had arranged to hook into the in-store sound system of Wax Trax and were awakened each day by Love Is The Drug or some such decadent gay/newyork sounds. I went to a party with them at Wax Trax one night, but it was all sort of creepy people standing around talking, so I just got good and drunk and staggered home. Wax Trax looked more like a porn shop than a record store with only a tiny display window in which I recall seeing a weird looking little 45 record, silver ink on dark blue paper, with a picture of the Queen of England and a bunch of cutout lettering like a ransom note. It was the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen, but I didn't know it.
One night I was watching TV and there must not have been anything on because I was watching 60 Minutes, the weekly lite news program, and they did a report on a weird thing going on in England called "punk rock." They showed some concert footage of what I now suppose were the Sex Pistols and The Damned, and even subtitled it so we would know what they were screaming about. I was amazed, simultaneously repelled and attracted. I kept it in mind to find out about this punk rock thing. I never thought to shop at Wax Trax, and bought most of my records at a normal chain store called Peaches. Someone there must have been fairly on top of things, because I bought my first punk rock records there in days to come. I bought a twelve-inch Sex Pistols record with a stark black and white cover there and took it home and played it and didn't know what to think. I thought it was an album, but it only had a couple of songs on it. I had no idea there was such a thing as a twelve-inch 45, so I was playing it at 33 rpm. I figured it out eventually, and there didn't seem to be much improvement, but I would play it again occasionally to try to figure it out, and I guess it just clicked after a while and I began to like it. I don't recall now what the songs were. There was a whole section of 7 inch imports at Peaches which was basically the Punk Rock section and I got all sorts of stuff there. They must have just bought a package from a distributor, which also included some domestic items. Their stock slowly diminished and they never replenished it, and I eventually shopped elsewhere. A couple of the lamer, unlistenable items I got there were a single from a band called The Police who looked cool but sucked, and one dreadful pompous thing from a guy who called himself Johnny Cougar, whose pretentiousness has not yet abated, even though he goes by his birth name of Mellencamp.
I somehow found out about a Punk Rock show to be held at a gay bar called The Broadway, and determined to attend. I didn't know what to wear, but I figured I should try to be as weird as I could. If you've seen the movie Velvet Goldmine, and cringed at the protagonist's first pathetic attempt to be "glam," well I was worse. I had seen a movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show - I went to the very first showing in town and liked it enough to go again to the very last showing, confident that I would never have another opportunity to see it - and it seemed to me to be the sort of weirdness I should try for. I had shoulder length hair at the time, so I shaved my legs and wore short short cutoffs and ripped up panty hose, lipstick and eye makeup. I was some kind of sight alright. The band that played that night was called The Front, and they did a couple of Sex Pistols songs I recognized. The big mistake the venue made was in serving the beer in bottles. People immediately began smashing their empties on the concrete floor until it was a sea of broken glass. Someone came around feebly sweeping it to the edges of the room until there were dunes of brown glass against the walls. All in all a grand success. At their next punk show they served in plastic cups.
I soon derived a more official punk style from the photos of the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello I avidly studied. I had dressed myself from thrift shops for a long time and there was plenty of good stuff to be had, sharp suits and pointy shoes, or just crazy and inexplicable items. I would change my clothes three or four times a day. I kept buying records. They seemed to have discarded the rules about what a record could be - seven inch records didn't have the huge hole that 45s used to and were likely to be played at 33 and have two songs per side, and sometimes they were in strange bright colors, with swirls and glitter. There were ten-inch records, and twelve-inch 45s. The covers had a crude garishness, trashy and threatening compared with the soppy airbrushed slop that was rock art at the time. Even if you didn't play them, they were exciting, especially if you were in a dead space like Denver, a sort of sink hole of culture from which you could peer out and wonder what it would be like to live someplace good. I learned they had British music magazines at the library and went once a week to read NME and wish myself in London where you could just walk into a club and see The Clash or The Damned like it was a normal thing to do. I must say to Denver's credit I rarely got yelled at from passing cars and never once was personally bothered by anyone despite my efforts to appear as bizarre or unconventional as possible.
I waited anxiously for the Sex Pistols album to be released, and when it finally came out the local stores only ordered a few copies which immediately sold out. It was out and I couldn't get it - all I could do was look at the display copy some stores kept, that amazing garish thing, and crave it. When I finally got one it was as if I had found a missing part of me. Crazy but true. I felt I understood their essence. People seemed to think they were "making a statement," but I could see that making a statement was one of the things they were cruelly mocking. They weren't trying to send a message or change people's thinking or revolutionize music or anything else. They were just kicking all that crap into the gutter and ridiculing all the people who were trying to pin things on them. That's why the second wave of punk bands, British and American, with their political posturing, seemed so pathetic to me - I was and am a Punk Rock Purist, a Sexpistolist. I kept encountering music that seemed to have real purity, Shadow by The Lurkers, The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X Ray Spex or Jocko Homo by DEVO, and when I heard their next record it seemed as if they had taken music lessons. When DEVO's album came out it seemed so pale and watery compared to the blunt derangement of Jocko Homo - they were playing pop songs, what a shame. Still, I bought and played all the records I could and felt uneasy when I couldn't swim in sound.
Somehow I started hanging out with some people in the nearby college town of Boulder, strange since it was a good drive away and I had no car. I guess I must have taken the bus. They were a sort of joke band called The Dancing Assholes - at least I thought it was a joke. They pretended they were a band, and every few weeks found a place to practice, making a lot of racket and getting kicked out. Ultra Vulture, Connie Clit and David Berkowitz. The Vulture was a weird looking creature who wore odd hats without having a talent for it, and a black leather jacket no matter how hot it was out. Whatever was under her clothes you didn't want to know. She gave me my "punk rock name." I was named after her laundry room, Kenmore W. Dryer. The W. was for washer. Almost anyone could play punk rock, or so you'd think, but the Dancing Assholes were just awful. They played a few gigs as a novelty band and Connie and I had a fumbling fling, then we just called it off and I never saw them again.
A few local bars and clubs occasionally tried out a "Punk Rock Night" but rarely repeated the experiment, although it was never as riotous as those shows at The Broadway. One guy who was always there, and deserves to be remembered, we called Commando Man. He wore an army jacket and boots, and a helmet. It was so uncool it was kind of cool. He was not in any other way memorable, except by just being into the music and being a real good guy. The last time I saw him, years later, I asked how he was doing and he said sadly, "I've been kinda depressed since Wally Wood died." Wood was a comic book artist, most notably for EC comics. I had the presence of mind to say, "At least John Severin is still hanging in there," naming another EC artist, and that seemed to cheer him up a bit. Commando Man, you are not forgotten.
End of Part One
