Left of the Dial

David Ensminger

Description

Left of the Dial features interviews by musical journalist, folklorist, educator, and musician David Ensminger with leading figures of the punk underground: Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat/Fugazi), Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Dave Dictor (MDC), and many more. Ensminger probes the legacy of punk’s sometimes fuzzy political ideology, its ongoing DIY traditions, its rupture of cultural and social norms, its progressive media ecology, its transgenerational and transnational appeal, its pursuit of social justice, its hybrid musical nuances, and its sometimes ambivalent responses to queer identities, race relations, and its own history. Passionate, far-reaching, and fresh, these conversations illuminate punk’s oral history with candor and humor.

Rather than focus on discographies and rehashed gig memories, the interviews aim to unveil the secret history of punk and hardcore ideologies and values, as understood by the performers. In addition, Ensminger has culled key graphics from his massive punk flyer collection to celebrate the visual history of the bands represented. The book also features rare photographs shot by Houston-based photographer Ben DeSoto during the heyday of punk and hardcore, which capture the movement’s raw gusto, gritty physicality, and resilient determination.

Interviews include Peter Case (Nerves, Plimsouls), Captain Sensible (The Damned), Tony Kinman (The Dils), El Vez, Charlie Harper (UK Subs), The Deaf Club (an oral history of the landmark San Francisco club), Mike Palm (Agent Orange), Gregg Turner (Angry Samoans), Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi), Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Gary Floyd (Dicks, Sister Double Happiness), Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE), Shawn Stern (Youth Brigade), Kira Roessler (Black Flag, Dos), Jack Grisham (TSOL), Keith Morris (Circle Jerks, Off!) Fred “Freak” Smith (Beefeater), U-Ron Bondage (Really Red), Vic Bondi (Articles of Faith), Lisa Fancher (Frontier Records), Dave Dictor (MDC), and Thomas Barnett (Strike Anywhere).

Sujets

• Queer
• Subculture
• Archive
• Music journalism
• American Hardcore

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868869
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE Tales from the Zero Hour
Peter Case (Nerves, Plimsouls)
Captain Sensible (The Damned)
Tony Kinman (The Dils)
El Vez (The Zeros)
Charlie Harper (UK Subs)
The Deaf Club: An Un-oral History
PART TWO Hardcore Sound and Fury
Mike Palm (Agent Orange)
Gregg Turner (Angry Samoans)
Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi)
Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys)
Gary Floyd (Dicks, Sister Double Happiness)
Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE)
Shawn Stern (Youth Brigade)
Kira Roessler (Black Flag, Dos)
Jack Grisham (TSOL)
Keith Morris (Circle Jerks, Off!)
Fred "Freak" Smith (Beefeater)
U-Ron Bondage (Really Red)
Vic Bondi (Articles of Faith, Alloy)
Lisa Fancher (Frontier Records)
Dave Dictor (MDC)
Thomas Barnett (Strike Anywhere)
Credits
About the author
Introduction
Over the last few decades, punk has become a Culture Industry replete with jargon, history, and identikits, My own small journalism-meets-folklore attempts don’t 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 Kerri’s 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 generation those 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 autonomy "leave me alone" that 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 punk’s 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 test "this is what mattered, that opinion is bullshit, this is what happened, man" in 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 don’t 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 No Deposit No Return, which my father spun out in small batches on a Xerox machine at his factory after-hours, I was a teenager trying to emulate the basics of DIY culture, mirroring the cut-and-paste aesthetic bible Sniffin’ Glue, He was the patient and helpful father who probably still doesn’t quite understand me.
Thank you, PM Press, especially Ramsey and Craig, for seeing the worth in this project, I thank the entire editorial staff at PM Press for their patience while sifting through hundreds of pages of transcripts the whole barrage of my career, thus far, Though this digital era of print may not be the same as the early 1980s, when my brother returned from Chicago with stained punk rock singles and fanzines that smelled like used cigarettes, I still believe print sits in a reader’s palm with purpose. These are the words of punk participants centered on the legacy of punk’s sometimes fuzzy political ideology, long-term legacy, rupture of cult