image: Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch‘s blood spattered art installation from the Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK, 2004) looks more like a dorm room from my university days than a museum piece. My dorm rooms usually had more stolen milk crates and concrete blocks, though they probably had similar levels of bloodstains, biotoxins and broken glass.
The 1970s are remembered a lot more fondly by people who didn’t live through them. Early in the decade, Watergate blathered on for a seeming eternity. Nixon’s inglorious 1974 exit forever took the blush off the rose of unquestioned respect for American presidents. Saigon fell in 1975, recording the first official loss of a war by the US. After about 1977, nobody mentioned the war anymore. We’d all grown up with Dan Rather’s deadly urgent battlefield news reports from Quang Tri and Da Nang, slotted in the middle of grandfatherly Walter Cronkite’s solemn notations of the daily body count on the CBS Evening News- and really didn’t need to hear any more. Politics was all about war and lies… remarkable how we’re right back there again.
By 1980 or so, the Vietnam War had been officially ‘over’ for a few years. I burned my draft card nanoseconds after it came in the mail, but otherwise didn’t bother to make a big issue of it. With the war and conscription ended, there wasn’t much to protest about, but failure to register for the draft meant no student loans. Going off to live at uni was a sure way for young men to escape the family home, so everyone registered (including me), whether or not they intended to bolt for Toronto if ever called for duty (which I certainly did).
Most people my age were somewhere between bored and annoyed with traditionally acceptable ways of being. We’d fully had it with blind American nationalism, ‘good Christians’ and the ‘nuclear family.’ The late 70s and early 80s hosted the first generation of American men in half a century who didn’t have compulsory military service to dissipate their teenage rages. Late ’70s male teen angst was a bitter fury against compliance and the commonplace, with few places to vent the rage other than screaming along with offensively loud bands in foggy, beer-soaked bars and impromptu conversions of unprofitable old movie theatres into concert venues. The big difference between the teenagers of the early ’70s and this new crop of nonconformists was that we were almost completely apolitical except for the odd stab at Reagan and his yuppie minions.
Soon after the all-too-mellow Eagles, Bob Seger, Peter Frampton (and the zenith of Zep), but predating the vomitously commercial ‘hair-metal‘ were the Ramones, Elvis, Lydia, Devo, Sex Pistols, Clash, Misfits, Pretenders, The Damned, Buzzcocks, Black Flag and myriad other assaults on the unsuspecting senses of nervous jerks who naïvely thought they were going to be entertained. Instead, we were flogged, bruised and scorched by storming amps which pummeled speaker cones into confetti. Punk always seemed to sound better with cheap speakers which were first slashed with a switchblade.
Normal was a freshly painted, air-conditioned apartment in the ‘burbs on easy dosh from a cushy job. Vacuous, polished and blow-dried yuppies, adored by their greedhead bosses and Reaganista politicians, politely snorted coke together in disco toilets while admiring each others’ golden parachutes.
Rebellion was no longer tie-dyed. It was tightly wrapped in motorcycle leathers, tatty t-shirts and safety pins jammed through some convenient bit of skin. "DIE YUPPIE SCUM" was a common urban graffito. A dim, musty basement flat generated the incubation atmosphere for bouts of furious, black depression. Dark funks and far too much caffeine begot notebooks full of rabid lyrics, haphazardly splattered to suit a pawnshop quality electric guitar. The cheap, tinny twang was always fed through an amp so distorted that it didn’t matter if you could actually play or not. Punk wasn’t about product.
Peace was something that happened after you passed out in a grubby, sweaty heap on the floor of your flat in bloodied, beer soaked club clobber. Of course, one had to break in through a window because keys always got lost while slamdancing.
Hangovers were cured with 3 pots of bad coffee, a handful of Sudafed tablets and a half a case of cut-price beer. Cuts, scrapes and bruises mysteriously appeared in the light of day. If they weren’t obvious enough, you could always rip your t-shirt a bit more in appropriate places to proudly let them breathe. If you were lucky enough to find any on the cheap, leather pants and steel-toed boots would preserve your nethers for the next night out. Bad moods were a good thing. Sneering derisively at a mindless Skinner’s rat inspired society was unusually satisfying.
image: Lydia Lunch
25 years down the track, the coals of disgust at blind conformity are still smouldering. However, the leathering up, slamdancing and booze courage is now just a bunch of hard work. My rage against the machine-people just comes out a little differently.
Even so, it’s not like I can’t think of a few people who don’t really need a good body-slam into the edge of a stage… where a badly tuned garage band with a manic, machine-gun drummer is thrashing the kit and a sickly pale singer with bad teeth is yowling up chunks of hot lung.
-weez
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Beautifully written Weez – poignant, romantic, prescient and sad, I felt I was there and am glad I was not.
Comment by suki 08.13.05 @ 2:19 pmSuki, thanks. I was there, but I sure don’t want to go back… kinda. What I really want is my 18 year old body with my 43 year old brain. Youth is wasted on the young, they say, but youth comes with some nasty psychological side-effects that I wouldn’t re-live on a bet.
Comment by weezil 08.15.05 @ 9:22 amLeave a comment
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