Albums That Meant Something - Part 1 - Punk and Disorderly

The smell of rose red Manic Panic hair dye -- that strangely familiar melange of root vegetable and grandma's attic -- is what immediately comes to mind whenever I listen to the first Punk and Disorderly album.

I've been spending so much time discussing and mocking things comics-related that I feel like I've gotten away from the original purpose of this blog, which was...something I've never actually defined, but I'm sure it didn't involve an endless series of out of context Firestorm panels. In any case, I thought I'd try something a little different (roughly inspired by Bully's "Wodehouse a Week" feature) and focus on some albums that have strong personal significance to yours truly. First up is Punk and Disorderly, a 1982 compliation featuring some of the most popular tracks within the then-contemporary Britpunk scene. (As per my usual manner, expect it to be long on autobiographical ramblings and short on actual musical criticism.)

For all the "been there, done that" credibility my punk rocker days has bestowed upon me in my relatively small circle, the truth of the matter is that the late 80's and early 90's were a really depressing time to be into the scene. In fact, I'm not even sure there was a scene, per se -- a few holdouts and dead-enders mixed in with various fellow travellers and far too many photostated skinheads and hardcore enthusiasts, all atomized into little knots of a half dozen kids or less who tended to "know of," rather than "know" the other participants.

Punk's media presence (at large and in the Boston area) at the time was virtually nil. The local paper might write up the odd review of an Exploited or G.B.H. gig (both acts long since gone rather metal in sound and following) along with panicked articles about suburban skinheads, but otherwise there was next to nothing. Even the 'zine scene was fairly anemic.

Looking back on those days, I'm reminded a lot of A Canticle for Leibowitz and its numerous thematic imitators -- my friends and I halfassedly reverse engineering a subculture out of scattered bits and fragments with only the slightest framework (and the recollections of a few older scene vets) to work with. Some old fanzines or issues of Creem, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, taped copies of Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia, and Urgh!, a copy of the Who's New Wave in Music discography discovered collecting dust in the library -- all pored over and assimilated into the collective mythmaking process.

Musically, too, the options were severely limited...at least until one got a hold of a functioning turntable and access to the used vinyl scene. Otherwise one was stuck (even at the hipper stores) with the big name legends (Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Siouxsie, Dead Kennedys), the critical darlings (Wire, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Buzzcocks), and a slew of hardcore and demi-metal bands. If one dug around enough, it was possible to turn up bootleged cassettes of X-Ray Spex or the Slits, but those represented the furthest frontier of easily obtained material for the suburban punker. (I'm not saying that wasn't good enough, only that the horizons barely extended past the length of one's arm.) As a result, a lot of my peers gravitated to the then-thriving local ska and industrial scenes, with their frequent shows and (relative) wealth of recorded material.

So this was the environment I was operating in when, in early 1991, I was flipping through the "punk/hardcore/metal(?)" section at the Newbury Comics in Burlington and came across a copy of the Posh Boy re-release of Punk and Disorderly. The coal black sleeve and magenta lettering, framing a picture of honest-to-goodness leather jacketed mohicans, immediately got my attention. That I only knew a couple of the bands featured on the comp -- the Exploited, G.B.H. and the Dead Kennedys (and didn't particularly care for the first two) -- didn't matter as much as finding something that existed outside the usual narrow parameters.

Listening to the album for the first time was nothing short of a revelation, a first glimpse into a scene (and sound) outside the American hardcore and Class of '77 traditions (though certainly favoring the latter). The album served up a dark tapestry of nuclear nightmares (Vice Squad's "Last Rockers," The Insane's "Last Day"), political agitprop (Red Alert's "In Britain"), and terrace chants (Blitz's "Someone's Gonna Die"), with a sound that was simultaneously cruder yet more melodic than the SoCal hardcore I cut my punker teeth on. If the production on many of the tracks was pretty dodgy, it only added to the exotic ambiance -- as if my stereo was picking up stray transmissions from a distant time and place, which it was, figuratively speaking.

Most importantly, it opened previously unknown vistas of listening and record buying to explore, and a large percentage of the vinyl I acquired over the next couple of years was purchased with an eye toward the bands featured on the compilation or fellow participants in the early 80's Britpunk scene, meaning I bought scores of overpriced 7" singles and iffy Oi! comps (which frequently included mislabled and otherwise unavailable Britpunk gems amidst the slurry). It put me on a path that would eventually lead me to the transformative power of Crass and anarcho-punk scene, but that's a story for another time, I think.

UK Decay - For My Country - Punk and Disorderly also marked my first encounter with UK Decay's work, specifically this operatic track that finds the band in transition between their punk roots and groundbreaking gothic leanings. Thus started a fierce love affair with the band that has continued to the present day.

Demob - No Room For You - In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus stated that a good punk song sounds like the best thing in the world while it's playing. I'd amend that to say that a great punk song sounds like something you've been waiting your entire life to hear, which is how I felt when I first heard "No Room For You." It's kind of a more depressing punk version of The Kinks' "Come Dancing," though it actually predates that track by a couple of years.