Albums That Meant Something - Part 2 - Double Shot of Punkitude

During my bygone undergrad days, I took a course titled "The Sociology of the Vietnam War" where the mix of students was roughly split between Vietnam veterans and twenty-somethings with an interest in the subject. During the first class session, the professor, a compact dynamo of an ex-Marine who had seved a couple tours on the DMZ (and who would occasionally straighten his nonexistent tie in a nonexistent mirror while lecturing), announced a blanket ban on personal anecdotes about the war. His reason for this was, in his words, "because once we start flinging the bullshit around it gets too hard to stop, and next thing you know, we'll all be neck deep in it."

When I was a kid, I knew that my dad was a soldier who served with the Special Forces in Southeast Asia, and that would be the entirety of my knowledge on that front until I was a teenager and Platoon rekindled popular interest (and a wave of historical revisionism) regarding the Vietnam War. These days, it is impossible to hold even the most mudane conversation with the Old Man without having his in-country experiences brought up at least three or four times. I don't say this to belittle the man, only to illustrate a point -- as we get older, we tend to romanticise our individual "shining moments" (or "big experiences") and foreground them in our own personal mythologies. My wary ambivalence regarding such things has tended to color how I feel about my modest store of Punk Rock Stories^TM.

After all, I'm only in my mid-thirties. That's hardly an age where one ought to let past accomplishments decisively define oneself -- especially when said accomplishments weren't great shakes to start. Sure, I can cherry pick a handful of interesting moments, but the real truth is that they're tied into the context of a period full of embarassing fuckups, failed relationships, and obnoxious behavior, and the clouds of guilt continue to linger to the present day.

Which is just a long-winded way of stating that I'm a little self-conscious about discussing that period of my life. Sometimes, though, it can't be helped, like when writing about two albums that played a major role in my conversion from lukewarm thrash metal enthusiast to punk rockitude. I got into (or rather, "back into") metal in the early weeks of 1989, by a process of workplace osmosis. Most of my co-workers at the hospital were headbanging voc-tech or college students, and despite my soul boy leanings I started to warm up to the sonic assault of Slayer's South of Heaven and Flotsam & Jetsam's No Place for Disgrace after hearing them played for the zillionth time during the workday.

While I dug the music's aggro vibe, the small-c conservatism of the suburban metalhead culture didn't sit well with me. The accent on technical virtuosity and cartoony-yet-po'faced posturing felt self-limiting and in a lot of cases (like the time I got stuck listening to my co-workers gush over Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever) outright absurd. As a consequence, I found myself looking for something that better fit the undefinable qualities I was craving, and that something turned out to be the Repo Man soundtrack, the first punk album I ever purchased.

Alex Cox's 1984 punk rock sci-fi masterpiece was already a favorite film of mine, which is what led me, in the spring of 1989 to pick up a copy of the soundtrack. Hearing the songs outside the context of the film for the first time was a transformative experience. There it was -- in tracks by the likes of Iggy Pop, Fear, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and Suicidal Tendencies -- all the aggression that drew me to metal, with none of the excess and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, to boot. It's what I meant in my previous installment when I said that a great punk song sounds like something you've been waiting to hear since birth. The fact that my sense of fashion at the time -- boots, buzzcut, jeans, flannels, and t-shirts -- unintentionally matched the punk template presented in the movie only added to the sense that I'd found my subcultural place in the sun.

Iggy Pop - Repo Man (from the Repo Man OST, 1984)

Like any overly enthusiastic convert, I tried to turn my metalhead friends onto the wonders of the album, only to be given a response of "the punk stuff's cool, if rough, but what's up with that Mexican shit?" "That Mexican shit" referred to the tracks by L.A. punk legends The Plugz, whose Latin/space/surf contributions to the soundtrack (and the film's instrumental score, which itself deserved release as a separate album) best exemplified what I had been looking for that no morose power ballad could ever deliver.

From that starting point, my collection of punk albums grew by leaps and bounds during the summer of 1989. My purchases were largely centered around the SoCal hardcore acts featured on the Repo Man OST, which in turn led me to the Decline of Western Civilization, and so forth and so on. Money being tight at the time, I tended to shy away from unknown quantities in favor of a protracted game of Six Degrees of Punk Compilations (at least until I came under the tutelage of one of the cooks at the hospital, an old school punk rocker who offered valuable listening guidance). One exception to the rule was a near-blind purchase of 1982's This Is Boston, Not L.A. compilation, based solely on hazy memories of the title track being used in a Newbury Comics TV spot a few years previous. (The album was released on Newbury Comics' house label, Modern Method.)

Thirty tracks clocking in at under thirty-seven minutes total (the CD re-release includes six tracks from the Unsafe at Any Speed 7"), the compilation features a mix of local hardcore acts that push the "harder, louder, faster" aesthetic to the theoretical limit (Gang Green, Jerry's Kids, The F.U.'s) as well as midtempo punk by Cape Cod legends The Freeze and Marxist art punk by The Proletariat. I favored the latter bands over the former, but the compilation had the effect of opening up my eyes to the local scene and convincing me to track down whatever material I could find by any and all the bands featured on it. (Sadly, by the late 80's several of the bands had drifted into metallic or other unpleasant musical directions. I did like Jerry's Kids' cover of La Peste's "Spymaster" on the 1989 Kill Kill Kill LP, though.)

Jerry's Kids - Uncontrollable

The Freeze - Trouble If You Hide

Repeat plays of these two albums consisted the bulk of my listening habits for the long, hot summer of 1989...at least until I purchased The Clash's first album sometime in early August.