Ensminger - Left of the dial : conversations with punk icons

Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons

David Ensminger

PM Press 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-641-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913628

Cover by John Yates/Stealworks

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan, www.thomsonshore.com

Over the last few decades, punk has become a Culture Industry replete with jargon, history, and identikits, My own small journalism-meets-folklore attempts dont try to undo the myths, tear down the walls, and provide a portrait that is any more authentic than has been delivered via ratty fanzines and box store biographies, I simply try to recreate punk on a human scale, person-to-person, and ask questions that flow like ticker tape in the back of my mind, My mother taught me this.

Armed with a proclivity for retracing events, she asks questions effortlessly, She is curious and open-armed, while my father is much more reserved and probing, unsatisfied with glib conversation and sometimes testy in his demeanor, I straddle both personalities, unevenly, When interviewing, I am drawn instinctively to the biopic curves of people, their charisma (or lack of), but I also desire to unearth some kind of incisive truth about them, however complex or faulty.

Punk, imported by my scrawny older brother, hit me when I reached ten years old and affected the full spectrum of my life, It corralled me into its aggravated aggression (not just a rhetorical stance), its fetish for a code of individualism, and its tenuous relationship with ethics, Sometimes punk seemed to offer scalpel-like observations, or offer refuge, a black hole in the middle of normal youth cognition, a zone or rabbit hole in which I could disappear, Looking back, punk seemed to de-monopolize culture, All the shaggy hair and Peter Frampton images burned away, as did Hee Haw and Soul Train, for better or worse, My mind-forged manacles fell off and dropped down on my dirty sneakers, or so it seemed, right as teachers began to enforce culture-at-large.

In middle school, when I was instructed to put my Circle Jerks shirt on inside out (the same shirt I wore to Black Flag, my first large punk concert, in 1986), my usually grin-and-bear-it mother took to the phone line, condemning the moral police, whom she considered onerous, Parent culture was not always on the side of hegemony, I understood.

Shawn Kerris image of the skanker on that shirt later melded into my book Visual Vitriol, in which I was able to reprint her flyers and discuss her work to a new generationthose skankers to be. Touching her flyers, pathetic as it may seem to some readers, is my way of getting inside the skin of the times that were a few years beyond my reach due to the timing of my birth. Still, punk rock came to me like a secret language, a bold tonic, a soothsayer in tangled three chords, a golden oldie tune dynamited, a bold endless rush of saccharine, a feisty political gambit, and a creed I figured out on-the-fly

Even when utterly moronic, punk felt like reportage. Sometimes it invoked a careening left-wing manifesto, replete with sweat-drenched drama. Other times it dripped with vile images, a compiled list of terrors, including skulking and monstrous figures, figurative and literal, that inhabited Misfits and early Dead Kennedys tunes. It was also a sonic tattoo, a signature of angst worn on the body. It offered predatory-like declarations of autonomyleave me alonethat sometimes clearheadedly stared capitalism down, too, especially when soaked in Crass sentiments.

To critics, though, especially upon viewing films like The Decline of Western Civilization, punk seemed more or less akin to artless entanglements. Entrenched in ennui, punk become the calling card of germ boys and poison girls. Ensconced in its own destructive mythmaking, punk offered a study in psychosis. I saw punks sheer audacious change-stirring revelation; they saw recast antiauthori-tarian slogans shorn of context, a movement missing sober reflections, and logic that evaporated in millisecond guitar patterns. Punk was the trope of living wreckage, born of ill repute. I saw punk packed with conscience, from Better Youth Organization to Dischord, not mere discord. Punk was a genealogy of disgust, sure, and embodied enduring disagreements over its own aims. In punk dwelled a bent and unruly fanzine nation, a rough and ready van plowing down the road with Government Issue or Swiz.

Punk offered a bonus round of carelessness and overhastiness, unfazed determinism The list goes on.

This book represents my stabs at recovering punk in words, from the bottom up, directly from the participants, the pursuers of dreams, the folk of punk, the informants, and the living actors. Conversations become a kind of litmus testthis is what mattered, that opinion is bullshit, this is what happened, manin which the telling of stories, anecdotes, half-dim recollections, and off-the-cuff phrases becomes a landscape of memory. Each portion unlocks a satori, a glimpse.

Readers like me crave to touch the elusive identity of performers, though writers tend to understand that any identity is fictive, as Roland Barthes told us, no more than fragments of a multiple, like slices stolen from the locomotion of life. These fragmented identities, we dont realize until later, were made up on the spot, defined by double standards, or often reimagined, MDC never really had a steadfast plan, TSOL signed contracts in blood or flushed them down toilets, and the Dils hit the studio, aiming for compressed fury, not a diatribe that would box them in when they turned forty years old.

I am wary of canned Q&As, but I am also guilty of shaping and asking leading questions, Readers, I still hope, will feel immersed anyway, as if eavesdropping, In my own way, I tried to understand the essential selfhood of Mike Watt and others, and perhaps I did come close at times, while other times I spun around the subjects, ejected by them, experiencing no more than their piecemeal input, Sometimes I felt deluged in fieldwork, sometimes I felt immobilized by the speaker, spellbound, without tactics, groping, as if a voyeur, Sometimes I felt kinship and became close friends and cohorts, such as my experience with Peter Case.

I interviewed the punks on front humid porches next to hair salons; I interviewed them on tour buses between sips of spilled beer and off-color jokes; I interviewed them in dressing rooms dark and shabby; I interviewed them in vans reeking of mileage, petrol, and old clothes; I interviewed them on the phone, straining to hear every cell phone-bled vowel; I interviewed them using e-mail as clickety-clackety keyboards rattled through the weird silent night; and I interviewed them on the sidewalks and curbs, feeling the last heat emitted from concrete soaked in Texas sunrays.

These pieces, albeit in differently edited forms, found a shelf-life in Maximumrocknroll, Houston Press, Thirsty Ear, Trust, and Artcore, Many of them became the backbone of my magazine Left of the Dial, which ran for eight issues from 2000 to 2005, maintained by a network of volunteers, especially lead designers Russell Etchen and Ellen Dukeman, I later moved it online for a few years before I shifted gears and wrote for other sites, Many interviews became the research trove for Visual Vitriol, my book examining punk flyers and graffiti as urban folk art, The same book also detailed myriad subcultures, like gays and lesbians and people of color, which tested the democracy and pluralism of the movement, They all hark back to my zine