The Tarot Card of Hardcore Punk.

A few notes about my first big punk show in 1983.

(In memory of Ricky Kulwicki) 

The first Black Flag record I bought was the Jealous Again ep at the mall. I must have picked up and put down the record several times during the course of a summer. I had known only a couple of Black Flag songs from a cassette tape Jimmy’s cousin had given him. The real reason why I hesitated buying the album was that it only had five songs on it, but somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about the artwork on the front and back cover. There was something devious about it that went beyond the obvious imagery; it touched on a different level of consciousness, like the artist was making a comment that even complex ideas and thoughts such as violence can be easily deflated with a couple of simple words. The front side showed an illustration of two busty cheerleader cowgirls with pistols parading in a sort of a slam dancing motion against a bright yellow background. The flipside is a continuation with one of the girls holding a freshly fired pistol in her hand while her jock lover in his letter jacket is gasping on his knees after being shot just above the eyes. She says to him “Before you die…tell me that you’ll always love me.” It was the caption that really put the hook in me. A couple of years later in high school when I started taking art classes it dawned on me that perhaps the album cover was a nod to and a parody of one of many Roy Lichtenstein’s damsels in distress paintings.  

I played the Jealous Again ep to death on my parent’s laminated Formica console stereo in the living room. It was a real process to slip on a disc, records were easily scratched and grooves severely worn by its’ uneven plastic turntable. When my parents were out of the house on bowling league nights, I’d bring down that record and the handful of other albums I that Jimmy and I collectively owned from my bedroom and crank the volume. The best part of the ritual would be sitting in the swivel chair spinning and rocking back and forth to which I eventually wore out the bearings.

One evening I decided to sit at the kitchen table and compose a letter to the band since they had an address on the back of the album. To my surprise I received two pieces of mail from them, one was a hand-written letter from Rosetta on the back of a flier stating that band was out on tour and the other was a folded flier with tour dates. I got super stoked when I saw that the band was coming to the Mercury Cafe at the end of the month. I found the Yellow Pages and looked up the number to the Mercury and took a marker and scrawled it on the back of the Jealous Again album cover. I called the cafe and the person on the other end of the line said the date was cancelled and that it might be moved to later in the fall. The band never did make up the date.

First piece of mail from Black Flag. 

The following spring I found out from a couple of the high school punks that Black Flag was coming to town, to the Rainbow Music Hall. This would be my first big punk show and getting permission from my dad would be like winning the lottery. I had to sell it in away he’d let me go. The good news was that it would be Sunday matinee and that I would go along with Jimmy. Sadly, Jimmy’s dad reneged last minute and I had to scramble to find another friend from school. Donny was a newly punk converts who only lived a couple of blocks away, he got the green light from his folks. We got into the car and my dad laid out the ground rules of when and where he would pick us up and told us “there better not be dope or alcohol at the show.” We assured him there wasn’t.

We dressed in what we thought was our punk best, little did we know we came across like punks on parade complete with thin wrap-around pink “punk” sun glasses. We waited in line and paid our six dollars and hung around the lobby. Thinking that we had to “up” our coolness, we spotted a cigarette machine in the corner collectively thinking “what could be more punk than smoking?” We put our change together and slipped it into the coin slot and pulled on the Marlboro socket with no luck. We tried a couple of others only to get lucky on a pack of Kool menthols. Since neither of us smoked we assumed all cigarettes were the same. We opened the pack, pulling out a stick and each putting one in our mouth only to figure out that one essential component was missing, a light. We must have looked inane wandering the lobby asking other punks for matches or a lighter. One chick with torn stockings in a skirt, wearing a leather jacket over a leopard print shirt with dyed pink hair offered us a light. She figured we could return the favor by bumming one of our smokes only to decline once she found out they were Kools.

The first band was about to go on and we rushed into the hall to find orderly rows of folding chairs. I asked Donny how were suppose to slam dance? I guess whoever booked the show thought it was going to be some sort of Captain and Tennille concert. We found empty seats near the front and sat down just as the Blitz Girls went on. In my opinion and speaking for the majority of the audience, having them open was a terrible idea. The band played away at their lame set of new wave songs while dodging food and cups between heckles from the crowd.

The Frantix were next. The restless crowd had enough of the folding chairs and when the band broke into their first song people stopped being polite and the scene on the dance floor became a free for all. Flying chairs went in every imaginable direction; Donny and I definitely ducked a couple of times with some near collisions. Punks were recklessly dancing in the newly created pit, slamming and tripping over the mangled seats. Most chairs were thrown under the stage or off into the sidelines. The band relentlessly cranked through their discordant brand of punk belting out tunes like Face Reality and My Dad’s a Fuckin’ Alcoholic. They set the tone for the afternoon and Black Flag would righteously finish it.

I remember seeing a girl and her younger brother taking a Polaroid in the lobby.

Unknown to me at the time, Black Flag’s roadies had a pseudo cock-rock Van Halen wannabe band whose mission was to piss-off as many punk rockers as possible in their fifteen or so minute time slot. They called themselves Nig Heist-the name alone was offensive. The band both aesthetically and musically was the antithesis of what we thought punk stood for. Imagine four guys on stage in quasi arena rock clothing wearing long hair wigs, provoking the crowd with a diatribe of insults picking on various audience members and playing blatantly sexist songs like Woman Driver and Put My Love Into Your Mouth. After the first couple of ditties most of us got it and went along with the joke such as flipping them off, yelling obscenities or throwing empty cups on stage. The band fed off the crowd’s tension like gasoline on flames; they brazenly begged for it. Truth of the matter was that Nig Heist constituted as nice break from the seriousness of what embodied punk and a reminder that contemporary hard rock bands embraced this sort of nonsense. They were purely mocking and taking the ethos of rock stardom to the extreme. Yeah, rock music was saturated with a heavy dose of sexism in both behavior and attitude and sadly most fans condoned it by ignoring it. When Nig Heist pulled through town again a little over a year later with Black Flag their gimmick became more refined and biting, really reaching for the jugular. Long-time Denver promoter Barry Fey would have the band arrested for their lewd stage antics. After the set, Fey got on stage and what seemed like an apology said something to the effect of: you’ll never see shit like this on my stage again.” More about this incident in a future post. 

The Minutemen were next and I was vaguely familiar with their latest album, What Makes A Man Start Fires from hearing a couple of songs on the radio. Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs was my favorite song of theirs at the time. Sadly, my appreciation for the band’s unique style and sound didn’t develop until a couple years later when my scope of punk expanded. I mostly remember them firing off one frenetic tune after another while bouncing around on stage and just like that their set was finished.

When Black Flag hit the stage it was like the end of the world. They had stacks of menacing amps with their bars logo painted on them. Greg Ginn flipped the switch on his see thru guitar and Chuck Dukowski and Dez Cadena added to the massive cluster of feedback and noise to drench the room. Henry Rollins came on stage and the band broke into the wall of sound. The songs were packed full of power, rage and energy. Henry looked crazed with cuts all over his body; he mentioned something about getting them in Chicago a couple of nights before in his book Get In The Van. Donny and I thought they were heroin marks, what did we know about drugs, what else would make a man act so crazy and intense on stage? We lived inside a bubble and didn’t know anything about Henry’s beginnings in the 

Washington DC scene with all the straight edge stuff. The man was high on adrenalin seeking to annihilate anything that stood in his path. One thing for certain, the pit was a monster and as much as we talked about going into it, we were easily weeded out after a couple of fruitless attempts, which was mainly being tossed around like a rag doll. We lost our “punk” sunglasses and cigarettes while others lost shoes and items of clothing. The floor between songs looked like a sweaty battlefield littered with ripped and broken Salvation Army items. Henry was really down on the stage divers, speaking about a girl who got her eye knocked out from some dude at one of their shows. Getting kicked in the face with a combat boot wasn’t much fun or having older wannabe jocks under the guise of punk climb up on your back trying to jump up on stage. Black Flag was indeed the soundtrack to the anarchy that raged in the pit that afternoon.

My dad wasn’t coming to pick us up until six. By then the bands had already loaded out and the empty parking was a sea of empty cans of cheap beer, broken bottles and fast food wrappers. Donny and I walked across the street to McDonalds and spotted the vocalist for the Frantix, I took out my torn ticket stub which was a photocopied Tarot Card (The Death card with a skeleton numbered XIII) printed on yellow paper, and asked him to sign it. It caught him off guard; he had to borrow a pen from one of the cashiers and was a little hesitant on signing it. When we left I told him that I like the T.V.O.D. song and walked outside just as the sun was disappearing into the Rockies. When I got home I called Jimmy and told all about the show but more importantly we were going to immediately start a band.

How Black Flag got me into trouble.

Two Eighth Grade Black Flag Tales.  

Punk Rock, mohawks, dyed hair, and crazy music will hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s world; you won’t get sent to the office or have your parents called. In fact, the principal might be all buddy-buddy and say something like “nice hair dude.” The landscape for us punks back in 1982 was quite different; people crossed the street when you walked their way. The reality is most people didn’t know how to deal with punk.  They were cowards and afraid of something different. Choosing to be punk in the early 80’s was essentially agreeing to be fucked with; to get your ass kicked by jocks and rednecks, to be called a slut and whore if you were a female. If you didn’t fit in before you were punk, you definitely weren’t after you became one. Your family thought you were crazy and wanted to lock you up or send you to a shrink.  The friends you grew up with didn’t really want to associate with you anymore. You modified your clothes and made your own band t-shirts with markers. You went to watch bands in the sketchy part of town near the slaughterhouses or around the corner from the Jesus Saves Center, which was across the street from the gay biker bar. If you saw another punk on the street they were your friend-no questions asked. Most of the world was against you, especially cops and authority figures. That’s the way it was.

Back in the mid-90’s, I posted the following eighth grade memories on a Black Flag fan website. Most people’s reflections had to do with seeing the band, mine didn’t. When you read the second story, maybe you’ll find it ironic that I grew up to become a middle school teacher. Chew on that thought for awhile.

Story number one:  My first memory of Uncle Joe and Aunt Flora was during the mid-70’s when they drove out from Los Angeles to Denver with their kids crammed in the backseat. I mostly remember the night they left, everyone piling into the car and the long goodbyes and the promise from my dad of going to visit them in California. When they drove off, more than anything, I wanted to be in that car; for a six year-old, it wasn’t fair they got to go back to Disneyland and the beach. I imagined California to be a utopia lined with palm trees, a giant landscape of infinite dreams and possibilities.

My dad kept his promise.  In the summer of ‘77 we packed-up our Thunderbird motorhome and made our way to the Golden State. The first leg of our southern California tour was hanging out with la familia in Logan Heights (Barrio Logan), San Diego followed by a short stay with my dad's military buddy at a posh community of the Huntington Beach yacht club. Los Angeles couldn’t come soon enough; we were at the edge of the Magic Kingdom. When we finally arrived it was all I hoped for; from Mickey Mouse to the obviously fake Jaws attacking our tram at Universal Studios to swimming in the Pacific Ocean. The best part of the trip was staying with Uncle Joe and Aunt Flora and meeting my cousin, Veronica aka Pumpkin. In my mind she was the coolest because she had a skateboard and taught me how to roll down the sidewalks in Huntington Park. Her mom went and bought me a board so we didn’t have to take turns. Inside the walls of my uncle and aunt's house was a weeklong party. The drinks kept pouring and my mom and aunt danced celebrating life and the recent  Pacific Bell phone bill. It was silly and simple fun, good times at its best.   

In 1983 my parents flew out to LA to visit Aunt Flora who was in the hospital; I was left alone with my older brother George. It didn’t click how sick she was. I was more or less a self-centered 14-year old boy who locked himself in his room and listened to his albums. I was excited they were going to the city where punk and hardcore ruled and I desperately wanted them to bring me back something cool. I asked if they would buy me Black Flag’s Damaged LP and a t-shirt from the band. My mom said she would try her best. One of my cousins did find the record and my mom had to carefully removed the ANTI PARENT STICKER from the cover. As for the t-shirt, they settled on stopping at an iron-on letter place in the mall. Visualize a green shirt with yellow iron-on letters spelling out Black Flag with the bars going in the wrong direction. You could have imagined the look on my face when they pulled it out of their suitcase. Everything about it was wrong. I laugh about it now. In a sense they made a mockery of the band. Here’s a powerful five-piece playing night after night annihilating their audiences, living on the edge of reality and then the kryptonite comes out of mom and dad’s suitcase. That afternoon they took down one of the most powerful bands and didn’t even know it.

One of the growing pains in life is the lack of foresight in truly appreciating the moment, especially in the self-involved world of adolescence. I accepted the shirt politely. But I couldn’t and didn’t wear it because of how I thought I would be perceived by fellow punks. The truth is, no matter what group you try to fit-in with, your presentation is a form of visual coding (semiotics), and as much as punk professes individualism, there are still rules. In present day, the design and color combination has a biting irony to it. I now fully appreciate the efforts that went into making the shirt while my aunt laid in the hospital dying. I would kill to have those moments back, but mostly what I wish for is for my mom, aunt, and uncle to keep rambling about the phone bill while dancing the night away.  

Story number two: I received a small packet in the mail from Black Flag. They sent a poster, stickers, fliers, tour dates and a personalized note. I was stoked. I brought the goodies to show my fellow punker friend Rob in Spanish class. Henry Rollins had stuck an extra MY RULES (the middle finger) sticker in the package and I passed it along to Rob. The bell rung and class was starting with all the contents still spilled out on my desk. Ms. Hendrex walked down our row attempting to get class going and firmly asked me to put the stuff away or she would take it. I told her nonchalantly, "You take it away and I'll kill you." She paused for a second and more or less dismissed my response, perhaps she would deal with it later. She continued walking to the front of the class. When her back was turned, I stood up from my seat and flipped her off. She turned back around and my finger was still in the air (I was slow and stupid). She violently yelled for me to get out of her room. I was sent to the office. She came down after class to where I was sitting and crying (you don’t know my dad!) She was also crying and angry. She told me that she never wanted to see me again and asked my advisor to remove me from her class. He did. I was suspended for 3 days and grounded for weeks.

When I returned back to school, I went to go see her on several occasions to say I was sorry. She never did accept my apologies. Two years later in 10th grade she transferred to my high school. One afternoon I was walking through the hall with my notebook that had a MY RULES sticker on it. We passed each other and it was an awkward moment since we recognized one another. We didn't say anything, but I had a gut feeling she saw that sticker.

Special thanks to Ana Medina and Monica Zarazua for editing

Reagan, World War III, and Chuck Dukowski

Reagan and World War III

As Punk crept into the national psyche it became more visible; it was a dark plague that disrupted the illusion of normalcy, a wake-up call that the Leave It To Beaver days of America are in the books. Reagan’s red scare fear tactics had Americans conditioned that we were on a brink of a nuclear war and if that didn't shake up your paranoia how, about  Russian paratroopers awaiting invasion orders; yes fools, World War 3 was lurking round the corner. My eldest brother Tom, a US Marine, made it sound that war with the Commies was inevitable. In my mind he was an expert in military matters. Like most other Americans, it was something I worried about. I was unaware at the time, but with the music I was identifying with coupled with the threat of human extinction I started to develop existentialist leanings. Why would God allow such things to happen? There was some far out Amazon tribe we were studying in Social Studies class, I remember thinking how they would be affected by nuclear winter because the Superpowers didn’t get along. What did those people do to deserve that? Here it is 30 years later and it all seemed like we’d been swindled by the powers that be. Was there ever a genuine threat of total annihilation? Sadly, that idea got recycled; America traded in the Russian boogieman for the Muslim one. I bought that load of shit growing-up, but not this time, thank-you-very-much.

Chuck Dukowski getting set for the Munich show.

April of 2013: I was fortunate enough to tag-along with my favorite band FLAG (Black Flag) for their 3-show European stint. The line-up consisted of four former Black Flag members (Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, Dez Cadena, and Bill Stevenson) with Descendents/ALL guitarist Stephen Eagerton. Chuck and I had a couple of conversations about power and war, he asked me about my first-hand experience of going through the 2011 revolution in Egypt. After Mubarak fell, the people were without police and a government; that absence empowered ordinary citizens. He was interested in hearing how people protected their neighborhoods and cleaned the city their own volition; Egyptians embraced ownership. Without rules and rulers, it was astonishing to observe to how well people behaved and took care of each other. Living in Egypt and getting the opportunity to travel around the world over the past four years I have come to a somewhat simplistic realization that most people just want to be happy and left alone to live their lives, in short we want to be loved by family and friends without outside factors dictating our lives. I would argue that humans aren’t born wanting to hurt one another; we are conditioned to. Chuck chimed in and said that most world leaders and power hungry individuals are sociopaths. He made a point that many soldiers/fighters in third-world conflicts don’t have enough money for food but carry high-priced weapons and shoot rounds or costly bullets. The question is: who supplies these people and what rewards do they hope to reap? Punk taught me not to accept answers at face vale, but to dig deeper. 

Special thanks to Ana Medina and Monica Zarazua for editing

It was only suppose to be a phase.

By the time I came along, my parents had already honed their child-rearing skills from practicing on my older siblings; I’m sure any shock value I brought into the home had already been played-out. To them, punk was just a phase I was going through. My mom told me that my oldest brother had a hippy-Jesus moment. I remember finding his brown leather fringe vest with Jesus patches in the basement; it looked like something that would pair well with moccasin boots. My parent’s leanings were more socially conservative; after all, my father was a former Air Force master sergeant. It was ok to be into punk but leaving the house looking like one was an invitation for a good whacking with his belt; my hand-drawn band shirts and ripped jeans initially stayed in the closet. When Jimmy spent the night we’d spike our hair with Knox gelatin, one time we tried adding food coloring only to learn that it stains your skin. Writing band names on the backs of used army jackets from second-hand stores and making homemade band t-shirts was our version of arts and crafts. Sneaking our homemade fashions to school was another challenge. The trick was to run from the school bus to the bathroom for a quick wardrobe change and do it again after the last bell hoping not to miss the bus. 

Aside from getting bullied and a couple of fistfights, the remainder of seventh-grade was gradually getting more involved in music and making like-minded friends. There was a small clique of us punk and new wavers that started hanging out in what was called the commons; wooden benches surrounded by pale yellow brick walls. One of my closet friends C.R. Smith (RIP) got into skateboarding and punk, plus I met Al Curatolo, Rob Wallach (Wally), Stephanie Sheer, Frankie Martinez, Dylan Smith (RIP), Jeff Shesol, Diane Tomayo and a couple of others who identified themselves with this new style of music and attitude. Wally had connections with some of the older punks from the high school across the street who would help steer our aesthetics; Chris Clayton and Tommy Caldwell (Splodge) were the main culprits. We learned about places where bands played like the Mercury Cafe, The Packing House, The German House, and The Dustbowl from these guys; we looked up to them even though they would make fun of our homemade shirts. At the time, I’m certain they thought we were poseurs.

Jimmy’s father thought his family needed to pursue the American Dream on the edge of Aurora near the abandoned missile silos and the National Guard airbase. The landscape is how I imagined Kansas to look; flat and barren. At least in the winter we would occasionally cross country ski and when it wasn’t snowing we’d skate down blocks of unfinished houses, it looked like a manufactured ghost town. One snowy Saturday afternoon, we hid behind one of the contractor’s billboards and lit a small fire to keep warm only to accidently catch it on fire. We would spend the eighth grade and the rest of our school years apart; the commute to his new school would be an hour away.

In one of the rare times of doing something punk related, without Jimmy, I somehow managed to convince my parents to stop by Wax Trax Records on the way to go visit my aunt who lived in the Lincoln Street Projects. I saved up my allowance and lunch money, and if I knew I could make money donating blood, I would have done that too. The record store is a Denver institution smack in the heart of the Capitol Hill. The Mercury Cafe was conveniently around the corner. Howard’s, the self proclaimed “world’s worst liquor store” was on the same block. The brown décor of Jim Dandy Fried Chicken tied the neighborhood’s ambiance together.

Wax Trax was certainly not my parent’s brand of music shopping; their first impression was an assault to the senses from the posters, fliers, and music. They were caught off guard. After letting it all sink in, and feeling overwhelmed with excitement of finally stepping into punk rock paradise, I raced to the counter and asked where the hardcore section was. I was no longer in the shitty mall chain record shops with their pathetic selection; Wax Trax was indeed the promise land. I picked up Black Flag’s Everything Went Black along with their TV Party ep in which my dad said the people on the cover looked like drug addicts and drunks, I told him the cover mocked people who were addicted to watching TV, which was true. In retrospect, I’ve always had a suspicion that punks from my generation found comfort in 70’s television shows, there is a optimistic sense of nostalgia that is lived out in the likes of the Brandy Bunch and other family dramas and sitcoms, maybe it was glimmer of hope to the grim reality of high divorce rates and dysfunctional homes. Even the destitute Walker family living in the projects of Chicago in Good Times was an intact nuclear household. In addition to buying records; I asked if they carried the fanzine Flipside from the Rodney on the Roq compilations. It was sold-out, but one of the workers, Geoff Paxton told me about a new zine from the bay area called Maxiumrockandroll (MRR) and handed me an issue. It instantly became my hardcore punk bible; the pages were jammed with interviews, scene reports from around the country/world, and thought-provoking articles on social issues. What more could a budding young teen anarchist ask for. I would buy it every month for years to come, well into college. It was my first exposure to punk culture from a global perspective, it went beyond the southern California centered Flipside. 

Special thanks to Ana Medina and Monica Zarazua for editing