Book It!

Punk Rock auto-bios are now a thing. But mine? Well, it'll take care of all of that.

Reading is fucking fundamentally fundamental!

The one thing that’s always struck me as strange is how much and how aggressively all of the so-called bright and shining lights of punk rock lore have worked to destroy their legacies. Guess we should have seen it coming since one of our earliest ethos had everything to do with destroying stuff, but it’s almost seemed like they were honor bound to do so.

The Black Flag melt down of the last few years, the swelter of lawsuits that swirled around it, Jim Ruland’s great book about it concluding with the image of SST, the once and mighty, now dismasted. The Dead Kennedys, again with the lawsuits, and last I heard Biafra stating that a condition of his return, pre-the death of Peligro was a signed and publicly released letter of apology. Bad Brains and homophobia, bipolarity and thievery. Cro-Mags and stabbings and lawsuits. The Ramones, collectively RIP’d with their enduring drama. Johnny Rotten shilling for Trump in a distinctly non-ironic way.

To a band: tons of squandered future promise rivaling any of the hippie generation’s well-publicized flameouts. And that’s before we even get to punk rock/hardcore flame outs, suicides, overdoses and prison rides. Add in COVID casualties and I think the class of the 1977-1987 folks, outside of Iggy who’s always been the insider’s outsider, takes the cake for taking nihilism to heart.

[I]t got harder to get jobs with the Internet trumpeting out claims of a generalized insanity connected to OXBOW and before that Whipping Boy. And I both needed to, and LIKED, eating.

None of that is in any way admirable. What IS admirable is the amount of totally worthwhile ink spread on what was really the doings of a handful of people for a period of time shorter than the amount of time Americans were bogged down in Vietnam.

Reading these books on and about the life and times of people you actually knew was preceded by the totally strange inability to start reading their books. It’s like watching bio pics of people you knew or knew of. It’s at once both too familiar and too strange. Bio pics on The Germs, Joy Division or the Sex Pistols always felt like a weird kind of porno to me. Good for people who hadn’t been there but sort of a drag for those of us who had.

However, the books? Quasi roman à clef’s written or dictated by the people who were there about people who were there are a totally different story. Diaristic and always confessional they thrive on the author’s ability to both know what the truth is and be able to deliver their best version of it.

They also feel like they were written for an audience of, if not one, then 100, about the number of people who would have been at any matinee at CBGBs on any given Sunday.

My take on these is that the most trenchant of the bunch is Harley Flanagan’s Hard-Core: Life of My Own. Not only was it preceded by the drama that had spilled over from his purported stabbing of former members of the band, his arrest and him, ultimately, being found not guilty, it details a life of life-altering madness beginning with Flanagan telling his hippie mom and stepfather that he was going on tour with a band of 20-year-olds when he was EIGHT, Allen Ginsberg publishing a book of his poetry when he was FOUR, and him making the backstage scene when he was 10 with the likes of Joe Strummer, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry and more.

Now, total disclosure, Flanagan sent me the chapters before he had found a publisher, so none of this was surprising to me. Not the least of which was because I had first seen him when I was 16 and he was 12. He was drumming for a band I had seen and I spent the whole show wondering if I was really seeing what I was seeing when I saw him perched up, barely visible above his drum kit.

This photo has been approved by NYHC.

Outside of that the drugs, the fights, the violence, all of it, some of which I lived through with him all rang crystal clear and true. At one point, later, someone had told me that Harley had robbed her and I asked him about it and his answer was as complete and candid as the book: “Yo…Eugene…I’ve done LOTS of foul shit, man.” And that was it. It answered it all. It answered everything.

In terms of revelations though Roger Miret’s My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grit, Guts & Glory, published a few years after Flanagan’s, was an eye opener with Miret detailing a home life not an inch short of horrific. We knew each other from time spent on the streets and at shows and a lot of this stuff was assumed but over the years it’s become clear that there were lots of non-musical reasons people were there. Abuse, physical and sexual, broken homes and the shit-end of every kind of stick you can imagine.

Flanagan’s book didn’t so much hint at a happy ending here though Harley’s found one, is touring with his band again, is a father to two sons, a black belt in jiu jitsu and married to a lawyer of some note. Miret’s happy ending is written all over his face and his place in the Southwest where he’s settled with his wife and two kids when he’s not out touring the world with Agnostic Front. Their stories tell the whole story of their stories and I read both of them at a breakneck speed.

Nancy Barile’s I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-and-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion is a raconteur’s delight with Barile, who has all of the receipts, names all of the names and was everywhere worth being for as long as it made sense to be there, killing it page after page. A school teacher by trade now, and incidentally married to Al Barile from SSD, Barile’s recall is stunning, the writing sterling and total disclosure, I was more than proud to be able to publish her first few stories in the benighted OZY.

So it was into this arena that I refused repeated requests from the folks at Feral House to publish a memoir. My take on my takes was that no one would want to read it and moreover I doubted I could be truthful in the way that’s needed when you write something like this. I was an editorial professional and it got harder to get jobs with the Internet trumpeting out claims of a generalized insanity connected to OXBOW and before that Whipping Boy. And I both needed to, and LIKED, eating.

Besides which I had kids and most significantly did I really want to tell all of what I knew? You see it was the old scene politician at work here and here I wanted to avoid hurting people’s….feelings?

Adam Parfrey at Feral would ask every few years, and every few years I would say no. Parfrey passed on, unexpectedly, and his mighty co-staffers, mostly Christina Ward kept at me. Without her framing what she saw the book look like I’d have maintained my resistance but none of us have clocks at home that run backward, Parfrey was dead, and while my kids can read, wouldn’t they welcome an unexpurgated view of whoever it was that they knew as “Dad”?

You have my solemn promise that I won’t regret it. Wait…I mean YOU won’t regret it. Yeah. Sure. That’s what I mean.

So, A Walk Across Dirty Water And Straight Into Murderer’s Row happened. It doesn’t singularly focus on punk rock, or hardcore. It also doesn’t spend much time going too far into the Life of OXBOW, instead covering birth to about the age of 27. But it goes dirty ugly into the headspace that preceded the moves that got me to OXBOW, to Whipping Boy, out of New York to Stanford, and before that all of the Sturm und Drang drama of New York’s collapse in the late ‘70s. This combined with a barely concealed desire to be in the most dangerous places at the most dangerous times, makes for a read that is…interesting.

But my favorite part of the book so far? The preface and foreword and back cover blurbs written by those who punched my tickets in the most direct of ways. Lydia Lunch, Harley Flanagan, Thurston Moore, Jimi Izrael and Steve Albini.

Will anyone want to read the full book? This I have no way of knowing. Will it hurt your feelings? Well, that depends. Is it truthful? Devastatingly so. Will it make me more employable? Definitely not.

So, as this is my first and final job, my ask is that you pre-order it since, as of it’s pub date this summer, I know it’ll hasten my retirement from the working classes and hasten my involvement in the classes of cats sitting in lawn chairs outside of barber shops saying shit like, “lemme tell YOU something….”

You have my solemn promise that I won’t regret it. Wait…I mean YOU won’t regret it. Yeah. Sure. That’s what I mean.