TIMEezine at l'atelier bonita
established since december 2002
ONCE
UPON a
TIME
ezine at l'atelier bonita
established since december 2002
In 1978, one of my younger uncles received a copy of a book called “Rock Lives”. The book was a series of neo-realist paintings of the rock stars of the day in vaguely decadent settings. Bob Dylan in a fur-coat attended by two mellow black chicks, Bowie in a limo radiating 70’s cocaine paranoia, the Who-that sort of thing. The page I remember best, however, was the one that led my father to say, sarcastically, “Lookie there, those are some GREAT guys!” One that page, glared two ugly looking boys with short hair (nobody had short hair then), silly looking clothing bleeding and spitting in a theatrical manner. The caption read, “Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols”, and I didn’t have to know anything about them to know they were cooler than anyone in the room-or the book for that matter. “God,” one of my cousins snorted, “how could anyone, with half a brain, like THAT?!!?” I did, of course. A few years later, I went to the Serramonte Mall with my sister and our friend Sally Perez. After we had been kicked out of Mendel’s Music Store for playing the drums, we walked over to the bookstore and, amid the bargain books, found a copy of a book called “Rock n Roll Confidential”. Amongst the interesting photos of Billie Holliday shooting up heroin, and Elvis shaking hands with Nixon, was a fascinating picture of Iggy Pop, naked. Apparently, the population of those whom have not seen Iggy in the alltogether is a small and dwindling tribe, but that was my first time, and needless to say, that particular photograph (or the memory of it, anyway) has caused me much disappointment in later life. Several years later, in the same shopping mall, but with different people, I picked up a copy of “Lipstick Traces” by Greil Marcus, and learned how international Situationism informed the creation and execution of punk rock. This classed it up for me considerably. I was an undergraduate at the time, and a discussion of Guy Debord and The Society Of The Spectacle over the ice tray at parties was a good line, and one which usually separated the frat boys from the Philosophy majors-or at least the Philology majors. Call me a cynic, but I’ve always been more interested in the practical uses of philosophy than in the intellectual application thereof. Part 2-The Musical History Having seen the picture of The Sex Pistols (or the two interesting ones, anyway), I still had yet to hear any punk rock music. I was only eight years old, so it wasn’t as if I could run down to a record store, slap down my eight dollars and demand my Sex Pistols, please. Oh, children might be able to that now, but I didn’t even get an allowance. So I filed my desire to listen to punk rock away in that place in my brain where today I keep my desire to travel or to write (the “I can’t do it, so why worry about it” file), and forgot about it. I listened to what my friends listened to, which was the standard white kids line-up of AC/DC, Kiss, Judas Priest and the immortal Quiet Riot. I wore a blue jean jacket without shame, and said things like “stokin’” and “rad” a lot. We did listen to Blondie and The Knack, but that was New Wave and certainly not Punk Rock. Thankfully, I was saved from a lifetime of Motley Crue, by the appearance in our neighborhood of two new arrivals from England, the Leisegang brothers. Fifteen and twelve respectively, Jed and Sam Leisegang, had two things that set them apart from all the other kids in the two block area that was our lives at the time; their mother had to work during the day so she was never home, and they had an extensive record collection they had brought with them from London. They also had a gas-powered remote controlled racing car, and Jed was cute in a Leif Garrett, kind of floppy blonde way, but mainly it was the record collection that interested me. There, amid the Saxons and Status Quos and Rushes, was the day-glo green album I’d been waiting to hear for three years. “Never Mind The Bollocks…Here’s The Sex Pistols.” It was THE Punk Rock album, and I was certain as the sun rises in the East every morning, that it would be better, and louder, than anything I’d ever heard before. What it would sound like, I had no idea, probably like a vacuum cleaner fighting with an elephant, but I knew it would change my life. I was sure the lyrics would involve beer drinking and communism, because I’d seen a news report that said that was what most punk rock lyrics were about. And there would be deviant sexuality, guaranteed, because I’d read somewhere that Punk Rock had a lot of that in it too. Jed touched the needle to the vinyl, and…I was a bit underwhelmed. The music wasn’t that loud, and I really couldn’t understand what the singer was saying. As a matter of fact, it sounded like something you might hear on KFRC, right after Journey and before Greg Kihn singing “The Breakup Song”. I leaned back against the wall in Sam Leisegang’s bedroom, confused. Why did people hate this music so much? By the third song, it dawned on me, that people hated it because it was not adult music. It was unpolished, and I could probably play it if I tried. Adults liked The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and the Beatles-good music that took a lot of talent to play and required a lot of drug use to understand. That much was perfectly clear to me. I didn’t want to ever be an adult, I wanted to stay a kid forever. The album ended and someone put on some Rush, and the contrast seemed quite straightforward. I hated Rush and I liked the Sex Pistols, even if they weren’t as loud as I had imagined they would be. And not a little silly sounding, as well. Later I went down to Aquarius Records with my friend Lana, who despite her feathered hair and parachute pants, liked Punk Rock too. Aquarius was the Punk Rock record store, just as Streetlight Records was the snobby Rock n Roll record store, and I’d always been too scared to go in. God only knew what you’d meet inside there. Maybe someone would spit on me. Warily we looked around the stacks and ended up buying five singles: one with a yellow cover and a drawing of a vicious looking fish on it, one with a cute little black sheep on it, one with the words “Pay To Cum” on it-which sounded interesting, one with a goofy collage of household items on it, and one with a picture of a little boy lighting a fire. Flipper, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, The Buzzcocks and The Minutemen. Lana didn’t like the Minutemen, so I kept that one. Lana got a mohawk a few months later and I didn’t. I still like The Minutemen. Part 3 - The Love History Before any of us could go to see any Punk Rock shows, we’d stand around outside The Mabuhay Gardens or The Compound and watch the Punk Rockers go about their daily business. That seemed to entail fighting a lot, and a lot of beer drinking. I thought they looked vaguely ridiculous, but admired them in their ability to look vaguely ridiculous. By the time I’d reached high school, I was more of a New Wave chick (even the most Punk Rock of us liked Duran Duran-after all, we were teenage girls), but I would accompany Lana to some shows at a anarchist collective farm In Potrero Hill, known as, creatively, The Farm. The Dead Kennedys were lame, because my dad had voted for Jello Biafra in the 1982 mayoral election, and anyone my dad would vote for, even as a joke, couldn’t be very cool.. Social Distortion was better, and Black Flag was simply scary. The Minutemen were great. Plus, Punk Rock boys were quite a bit less likely to be homosexual than New Wave boys. At one Minutemen show Lana met a nice Huck Finn type with an impressive mohawk. I got the friend. Ah, the friend, I got stuck with a lot of those. This one was nicer than most, however. His name was Charlie Moore, and he was wearing a t-shirt that carried the slogan “I Found The Bed That Robert Frost Croaked On”, which I found fascinating. A dark little latte colored brick house, he couldn’t have been more than 5’6”, but had a really attractive conk-style haircut. I really wasn’t in the position to be very selective anyway, since my current suavicity, belies my past as a teenage geek. He liked me, I liked him, and at fifteen that’s all you really need. Even after Lana got sent to live with her mother down South, for making the miscalculation of sleeping with a skinhead on her birthday, AND telling her father about it, which is just plain stupid no matter how hippy-liberal your parents are, I still hung around Charlie. I knew enough not to introduce him to my Grandmother, of course. He was one half black and that would have sent her to an early grave. Let them all think I was at Maria Dominguez’ house, watching telenovelas, sneaking around was more fun than going on dates, which were considered very declasse in our circle. He liked to play Risk and was interested in the ancient art of falconry. I used to take the bus to Charlie’s house on Congo Street, and we’d retire to his room to listen to music. For you see Charlie Moore had a deep, dark secret, which, had it gotten out into the general Punk Rock populace, which would have left him open to a lot of ridicule and a possible beating. He liked country music (the horrah! The horrah!). That was a big no-no for any self-respecting Punk Rocker, especially one whose father was a black guy, since country has never been very popular in the urban community either. I didn’t and don’t particularly like country music, but I was willing to keep his little secret and listen to it with him. After all, I loved (and still do love) the sappiest, most corny music ever recorded (and not even in the ironic Gen-X way, I actually like it as music); the Carpenters, Frankie Laine, Steve and Edie and even Englebert Humperdink, and he helped me keep that secret. So, secure in our secrets, we used to lie on his bed and listen to George Jones and Tammy Wynette sing about D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Well, the course of true love never does run straight, and the short idyll of me and Charlie Moore was soon to end. I had often wondered exactly where he got his rather bottomless energy, since he could stay up for hours after I was exausted. Then there was his positively brilliant way of speaking in which he crammed everything into each sentence, as if he were making his last statement here on earth. That and the fact that his heart beat extremely fast should have told me something was going on. I have never been the most observant person, and I just assumed he was a bit faster than other people. Everyone has his own velocity, and Charlie’s was set at fast-forward, I thought. He could make sparkling puns on just about any subject, and since I fancied myself to be a modern day Dorothy Parker, I believed we were a two-man Algonquin Roundtable, without all the sex and alcohol. One rainy afternoon in December, Charlie and I were sitting at a table in the back room of the McDonald’s on Haight Street. I was drinking coffee and smoking a clove cigarette and thinking I was just about the grooviest person on the face of God’s green earth, when two boys walked in. I knew them by name as Whitey and Blackie (you see, one was white-Blackie-and one was black-Whitey, which seemed wildly clever at the time, and less clever as the years go by), a couple of Haight Street gutter punks, before that term had been coined. They greeted us, sat at the next table, and asked if we wanted any speed. I was shocked. I’d grown up surrounded by drugs of all sorts, and drug addicts too, but no one had ever had the temerity to offer them to me. It was so 70’s! “No!” I sputtered out (I really was shocked), and went back to talking to Charlie about the controversy over some political issue important at the time. Charlie was standing between our table and the neighboring table, and with barely a pause, pivoted around mid-sentence and snorted up a line of Whitey and Blackie’s stuff. He smiled one of his foot-long grins and said, “Oh, I guess you shouldn’t have seen THAT,” and kept right on talking. Well, that was it. The lightbulb finally went off in my head. That explained it all, the late hours, the impressive spieling, the velocity. Duh. I felt like an idiot, and not a little betrayed. He really should have told me about this side of his personality. Plus, I felt like a fool for being so moralistic, since I prided myself on having no morals whatsoever. Damn those Catholic school values, they come up to bite you when you least expect it. I couldn’t see him after that, because he was even more interesting as a drug addict that he’d been as mister straight-edge, and even at fifteen I knew that was something I didn’t even want to explore (although I certainly did later in life, after I got that Catholic piano off my back). A few months later, Charlie went to live in Maryland with his father, and I have never seen him since. Whenever I hear George Jones and Tammy Wynette , I think about him. I don’t listen to Punk Rock that much anymore, but I still like the Minutemen. ©2003 Heather M. Borstel |
|
_______________ Heather was born in San Francisco, California, at the dawn of the 1970s. She lives in the shadow of Twin Peaks, went to Catholic school and San Francisco State University, and is of average height, build and appearance. She enjoys contract bridge, falconry, Gandhian nonviolence and whipping up a nice pot of Vegetable Medley. Her favorite song is "Superstar" by the Carpenters, which she sings without shame at karaoke bars, and her favorite book is Anna Karenina. Heather was once said to have a wit which rivals that of Bennett Serf by her third grade teacher, but she has yet to find any evidence that Bennett Serf was witty. She has never had the stigmata, curses like a stevedore, and makes a mean White Russian. Heather would like the phrase "I told you I was sick!" chiseled on her tombstone. Photo credits: (c)2003 Stephanie Chernikowski, Bob Gruen, CBGB-OMFUG |
ONCE
UPON
a TIME
ezine at l'atelier bonita
established
since december 2002
