No one is innocent
Never mind the graying of punk, here's the Sex Pistols.
PUNK'S NOT DEAD
. It's just getting creaky.
Punk knew it was getting
old when it made the choice between going out and getting some
sleep. So now it wobbles off to bed at 11 p.m. in order to get
a full night. Punk tells itself it wants to stay in and keep
an eye on the kids or walk the dog, and it needs to get up early
so it can go to the gym before heading to work. Because punk
really needs to go the gym, or it feels like the crap it used to
find stuck to the bottom of its Converse.
Don't get me wrong, punk
continues to be true to itself – it still loves an underdog,
loathes hypocrisy, and of course, hates Bush, both the president
and the band. But it's getting tired. When broken beat or hip-hop
try to drag it out to a club, it waves its hand dismissively, says
it's been there and done that, and it would rather go home, put
away a six-pack, settle in with a good book, or fall asleep in front
of the TV after Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Still, punk
sometimes wonders where all the years went. In its darker moments,
punk considers Botox.
Funny then, when I checked
in on my old friend, that I discovered it's more a part of the pop
mainstream than ever. Perhaps punk simply found its own comfort
level – or maybe a weary, restless culture just caught up to
it and its angry ways. The tide has been shifting for years, ever
since 1991: The Year Punk Broke (as the title of the documentary
goes), and rock-via-grunge grudgingly acknowledged its existence
again. Or maybe it's been happening since that last Sex Pistol's
money-grab, er, reunion outing, the Filthy Lucre World Tour in 1996,
which gave past and present punks that strange yet all too familiar
feeling of pride mixed with repulsion. Shortly thereafter
came the hordes of old-school punks, playing out like living-museum
showcases: Television, the Buzzcocks, the Damned. Some, like Wire
and Siouxsie and the Banshees, even put out albums; a few, such
as the Fall, never stopped.
Punk's younger turks
by affiliation or just style – from Green Day, AFI,
and Rancid to Good Charlotte, Blink 182, and even Avril Lavigne
– are entrenched in the rock landscape. The trend-sniffing
Hilton sisters go out with members of Sum 41; the Dixie Chicks are
busy working bondage pants and sometimes even a King's Road-style
phallic pompadour. The widely touted savant of Michael Lewis's recent
best-seller, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,
Oakland A's manager Billy Beane, announces to the media that he'll
be attending the upcoming Sex Pistols show. Even that all-American
appliance peddler Sears is hawking togs like studded belts and "Punky
Turtle" T-shirts in its back-to-school ads.
The purity of punk
If all that wasn't proof
that punk should be getting out and flaunting its triple-bleached
roots, there's old-school SoCal punk vocalist Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L.
(True Sounds of Liberty), running for governor in a packed field
of assorted hopefuls and/or publicity hounds. As recently as two
years ago, on "In My Head" off T.S.O.L.'s last album,
Disappear (Nitro), Grisham spat lyrics such as, "I'm
sick of politicians / Sick of institutions / Sick of everything
they stand for ... Sick of their lies / Sick of their crimes,"
so it's tricky reconciling Grisham's proto-Misfits black-and-white
face paint and his goth-thrash tendencies from back in the day with
the almost slick presentation of a more buttoned-down Citizen Grisham
on his Web site. Picture Glenn Danzig up against Dianne Feinstein,
though when I talked to Grisham by phone from his home in Huntington
Beach, he delivered a satisfyingly pitbull-like attack on issues
that matter to him.
"At first you might
think, punk rock guy running for governor – he wants cops to
wear clown suits," said the 42-year-old Grisham, a Hayward
native who says service runs in his family (his brother is the city
manager of Pinole). "But I'm serious about this. This is the
only chance for a fringe candidate to step into the position of
governor. It may seem funny, but it's not going to be funny when
registering your car costs 10 times the amount your car costs. Or
when health insurance won't pay for your wife's mammogram."
Married with two daughters
and running as an independent, Grisham says manual labor jobs and
a recent back injury have made him passionate about improving health
care and defending the rights of undocumented workers, all while
somehow advocating fiscal responsibility. And though his label is
mad at him for not talking about T.S.O.L.'s new CD, he doesn't see
any conflict in railing against the government while rallying to
join the establishment. "I was raised on bands like the Dead
Kennedys and the Dils; I was raised to question government, so I
think there's nothing more natural than someone coming out of a
punk rock band getting inside," he said. Before getting off
the phone, he offered one vivid metaphor, describing voters getting
bent over the back of a car and reamed by their government. "I
have to stop cussing," he added.
The boy, or rather, candidate,
can't help himself. And that may be the key to why punk keeps bobbing
up to the surface of today's zeitgeist and why Grisham says
the staffers at his local voter's office are already encouraging
him to run again, for anything. Maybe we're all looking for authenticity
and honest answers after years of disappointment and lies. After
the boom, bust, and failed promises of the dot-com years
and now in the midst of economic hardship, we're searching
for something that's pure, real and isn't diluted by the marketplace
or putrified by commerce. The cultural and musical dissonance of
punk seems to parallel our own internal conflict.
Sign of the times
Portland, Ore., music
writer Richard Meltzer remembers the first wave of punk – and
actively looks at the experience of aging in his latest book,
Autumn Rhythm. Those meditations on mortality, however, were
far from his thoughts when he first started going to punk shows
in Los Angeles from 1977 to '80. "It was the best music in
L.A. since bebop in the '40s. I had my band [Vom, whose recordings
were recently included in a spoken word release with Guided by Voices'
Robert Pollard] in '77, and we did some shows. But seeing all these
bands do it – it was not really rock 'n' roll, as such. It
was something else. Rock had become conspicuously choreographed
insincerity: it was pose and nothing but. Punk was not about the
same marketplace – it wasn't selling the same product, because
there was no market for it. Two hundred people went to every punk
show in L.A. – the same 200 people."
Now millions are looking
to punk signifiers like studded cuffs and ripped T-shirts –
for what? Perhaps it offers an outlet for rage, that feeling of
frustration with a government that ignores them. In some sense the
dot-com explosion was fed by a similar urge to tear up an old order
and give way to a younger workforce that got piercings and tats
in the early '90s, colored its consciousness with punk values by
way of Nirvana, and yearned to vent its disgust with its parents'
rules. That's why there's bands like the Bay Area's One Man Army.
They have the barking, buzz-saw urgency of the early Clash down
and, when I talked to them last fall in a Richmond District café,
they resembled members of the Exploited and Toy Dolls. They don't
set out to imitate the Clash, vocalist-guitarist Jack Dalrymple
said. "It just kind of comes out that way because that's what
I love."
"They were just
the coolest," raved bassist Heiko Schrepel from behind wraparound
shades. "They looked amazing, and every album was different."
Standing its ground
I can second that emotion.
As a teenager trapped in prep school, I already had a working radar
for cool, and we all knew who and what was hip. X was just a rumor,
passed to me in geometry class like a quickly scribbled note from
cool boy Jonesy, known for his skinny pants and high tops. The
Ramones were the buzz thanks to repeated airings of Rock 'n'
Roll High School on HBO, but otherwise Devo and the B-52s were
the only wavos capable of infiltrating the radio airwaves. The Pistols,
the Clash, Minor Threat, Black Flag, and dozens of other punks were
worlds away, mostly accessible only by hard-to-find imports on my
podunk isle. Jonesy's female counterpart, Brooke, did her damnedest
to imitate Sue Catwoman with her flippy Norma Kamali skirts and
spiky hair, but she eventually got expelled for talking back to
teachers and trashing the girls bathroom. Still reeling from those
years and obsessed by the Clash, I started Hawaii's first all-girl
punk band. And now I'm getting the bright idea that it's time to
get that old group back together again! Of course, for users and
abusers like Meltzer, it can be downright depressing to watch those
reunions and to realize that punk is no different from any other
musical genre.
"There are people
who are demolished by the process of aging and, yes, a lot of them
are musicians I know," he said. "There's this band, the
Dictators – I knew these people when they were 19 years old,
and now they're 50, and it's not a 100 percent cheery sight to do
the same damn thing at 50. At one time they were a parody of youth
rock 'n' roll, crazy hellions, the whole rock persona of 1973. But
basically they're doing a version of punk nostalgia. Rock was something
that was most interesting when it was about process, and it wasn't
about maintaining your foothold on a static piece of land. What
are you going to do when fissures develop under your feet?
"Rock 'n' roll has
interested me least when it's been about staying the same,"
he continued, gaining steam. "People in their 40s and 50s doing
rock 'n' roll as lifetime pursuits are embarrassments – it's
not that you should not be doing this at that age, but it's the
equivalent of never aging. The equivalent of liposuction."
I agree, but that doesn't
satisfy the need to cozy up to my chum punk. Maybe we need punk
because it was always more honest, even as it was getting hoary,
gray, and whiny about its failings, fuck-ups, and frenzies. So you
turn to the Sex Pistols, who busted up before they could have truly
cashed in – perhaps making them the purest of the lot. When
the Clash let you down with lousy songs, when the Buzzcocks got
too monotonous, when Elvis Costello lost you in the musical chairs
of his genre jumping, the Pistols remained untouchable–because
they had left the building long ago.
Real deal
So I was pleasantly surprised
by a prickly but amiable John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, who is
in the middle of the current Sex Pistols tour and talked to me on
the phone from Chicago while he chowed down on a seafood salad and
suffered through a ragweed explosion. He's still one of the fastest
wits in the West and is just as quick to get a Mohawk when you venture
that his band might actually be part of the establishment he despises.
With little of the reported Filthy Lucre millions coming their way
and no label or sponsorship support, the band is on tour for
the last time, he said, as a thank you to the fans. They've had
to borrow, if not beg, Limp Bizkit's equipment, and they've been
royally spat on by "the posh section" at their recent
Toronto concert, where Lydon says 9,000 Canadians went absolutely
"mental." "There are far more worthier people to
be spat on than I," he drawled with malodorous Cockney cheer.
We talk about the eagerness
of the audiences and the sing-alongs, which amaze him; "punk
cliché" fashion, which disgusts him; the distinct lack
of appreciation from institutions like the "Rock 'n' Roll Hall
of Shame," which appalls him; and the fact that the Pistols
had to "really fight" their way through resistance, coping
with jail time and even death, which he's still eager to trumpet.
"Here you are today, and you have all these young punk bands
all record-companied and sponsored, and they're all nice millionaires....
And I don't see no Dignations comin' to granddad!" he said
with a chuckle.
Nonetheless Lydon wants
to give back – to the Iraqi people specifically – and
bring the Sex Pistols to Bagdhad. "I don't necessarily want
to go, but I think somebody should. The madness that is going on,
and the death that is following, is a real, real serious tragedy,"
he said. "I have no qualms about playing for the troops, but
in their own country or maybe after I play for the population, because
nobody's entertaining them, and don't you think they need it? They've
had a very miserable 20 years, apparently. Well, the Sex Pistols
can give them a very miserable 20 minutes. Then they can decide
whether they want democracy or not."
So what if a few Midwestern
dates have been canceled or rescheduled due to, Lydon said, "promoter
fear"? "They're just worried about people going insane
or mental or our crowds being misbehaved. I think that's the biggest
problem. What they've got to realize is, a Sex Pistols crowd is
not like that. We are the real deal. We are the real hardcore, and
we don't need to damage plastic Porta-Potties. I take on governments
and institutions, not plastic upholstery."
The toilet flushed. There
went the seafood salad.
Otherwise the 47-year-old
Lydon seems to be settling for more sedate pursuits, including working
on a film version of his autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No
Blacks, No Dogs: The Authorized Autobiography Johnny Rotten of the
Sex Pistols, with Penelope Spheeris – and learning to drive.
It seems essential in L.A. where he lives with his first and only
wife, Nora, the mother of one of the Slits. Domestic bliss –
very punk. Next he'll find himself developing an unseemly fondness
for his bandmates, and who knows, they might even record again.
"We're such an odd
quid lot, we just might," he said. "Things cannot be written
in stone with humans who you care about. I wouldn't do anything
to hurt them, and likewise. We're not fond of each other, that's
not the word. Ha-ha-ha. We're very, very close in a very strange
way. Being in band is like a sick marriage. The loyalties come out
onstage. The point is to not let each other down, because you got
to imagine how perplexing it can be for four old punks to trot out
on a stage, where we haven't been able to rehearse, and remember
songs from 25 years ago. But when you mean something, it's not too
hard to remember – it's like remembering where you live."
Sex Pistols
play Wed/3, 8 p.m., Warfield, 982 Market, S.F. $35-$45. (415) 775-7722.
One Man Army play Sept. 20, 8 p.m., Slim's, 333 11th St., S.F. $11.
(415) 522-0333.
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