title: Dirty, Drunk, and Punk: The Twisted Story of the Bunchofuckinggoofs
author: Jennifer Morton
other shit: 223 pages. 2011, Insomniac Press
website: Dirty, Drunk and Punk
rating: 4/5 safety pins
I wish this book were bigger. I wish it were longer. Shinier. More expensive. And it cost me a pretty penny to begin with, seeing as how I had to order it from Canada and their dollar is up and shipping is expensive and I think Canada Post has Godot.
(more…)
The first draft of this posted started: As you have probably gathered by being on the same planet as me, I have some sort of Henry Rollins thing. It’s complicated.
And then there were like 1,400 words about Henry Rollins and a digression into my Glenn/Henry OTP. I deleted all of those words. You can thank me later.
The salient bits are that Rollins has a new book out called Occupants, which is photos from his travels along with essays for each of them. If you already like his written work, you will like this book. If you don’t, this isn’t going to convert you. If you have no idea, let me sum up all of his books for you: Winter is coming.
To promote the new book, he has been doing in-stores and signings across the country. One was at the Oak Park Public Library, and so off I went.
(more…)
Hello, loyal reader! It has been a while, hasn’t it? Work has been so busy that I’ve had no time to, for example, write love letters to Danzig and pretend they are concert reviews. (Or to even check my personal email.) And so it’s been nearly a month since my last string of updates, in which punk rock defeated pneumonia, leaving me quite sleepy but nicely bemohawked. And yet I have managed to go to some shows since then! I am a miracle of nature.
It would be better to do this after a year, but I felt like doing it today. Let’s look at pictures of my mohawk!
I started my mohawk in January, shaved it off mid-February, and then started over again in mid-March.
ETA: Wait, that is incorrect. I started it over again when NHL playoffs started, in early April, when the Hawks made it. My Hawk hawk! And then I decided to grow it until a wedding in September. And now I am sort of attached. /ETA
I’m only saying that because some of you people might be freaks who decide to look at the dates on the pictures, and wonder why there is a gap of several months in which my mohawk only grows a quarter-inch. It is occasionally hard to tell that the mohawk is getting longer, because I rarely put it up and my hair is curly. Most of the time, it just sort of sits on top of my head and looks insane. But whatever. Here we go!
(more…)
Saturday was The Big Day of Riot Fest, 11 bands on the bill, doors at 1430. Let’s not talk about what time I arrived at the sidewalk. I’d hurt my shoulder at the Danzig show the night before, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep, and it was difficult to talk myself into leaving the house, but leave the house I did. And I’m so glad.
(more…)
Okay, look. First I was going to be like, I will write reviews for individual shows and stagger them so it’s like I have regular content! And then I was like, fuck that, that sounds like work, I will write one wrap-up post like I usually do and pretend it’s because I don’t want to make you read many posts when you could read just one. I am saving you time!
But then what happened was that I showed up to work on Monday and a friend asked me about the Misfits set that happened on Friday night. He wanted to know what they played. ‘Hybrid Moments’? No. ‘Static Age’? No. ‘Teenagers from Mars’? No. No, no — ‘Bullet’? Yes! Yes, that one they played, and I remember my arms in the air and my head thrown back and I could hear the music fairly well but no vocals because the roar of the crowd was overwhelming, a few thousand people shouting the lyrics back at the stage in sheer bliss.
You guys, I love Danzig. I know he’s a tool who takes himself way too seriously and has no sense of humor. I recognize that he is a caricature of himself. I totally understand the people who make fun of him. I make fun of him! Often, and with much glee! (Although I will say that for every Danzig Is A Tool story I have heard, I’ve heard two from some fan he was nice to about how he’s a great guy.) I am not ever going to lecture you about how you don’t take Danzig seriously enough. I am not the person defacing stop signs.
But I love Danzig. I love his music and his stupid giant belt buckle and the way he holds a microphone and gives his water to the pit and his weird werewolf thing and his comics and his sometimes-collaboration with Hank III and his gross nonsense lyrics and his pile of motherfucking bricks.
(more…)
Actually, before I start talking about Riot Fest, I think we should talk about how I went to see D.R.I. on Sunday at Reggie’s. (It was an excellent show! The singer of the first band gave me one of his beers, hit himself in the head with the mic, picked me up by my hoodie, rubbed his bloody face all over mine, and was a very nice guy. I watched over his glasses for him. Here are the pictures.)
I felt fine when I left the house. My throat starting hurting about halfway through the show, and there were a few minutes when I got home in which every inhalation literally felt like my lung tissue was being ripped apart inside my chest. It was excruciating, and familiar: pneumonia. Sure enough, I woke up the next morning sounding and feeling like I had swallowed a rusty chainsaw, I couldn’t breathe, I had no energy for anything. Next day was the same. I had planned to go see a show (Malajube and The Besnard Lakes) that night but couldn’t do it — plus my mother always said that if I am too sick to work, I am too sick to play, and I thought that was bullshit at 7, but north of 30, it’s a little more reasonable — and on Wednesday, although I was feeling a little better, I was still having trouble breathing and so I did the responsible thing and went to the doctor. I was right: pneumonia.
Also note that Wednesday was my birthday, and X was playing that night. Pneumonia: NOT ACCEPTABLE. The doctor loaded me up with antibiotics and steroids, and I went home and crawled into bed and slept slept slept. I almost didn’t go see X, but… I mean. It’s X. I love X so much that it makes me ache a little, they are one of my very favorite bands, and with these old punk bands, I never know when I might get another chance to see them. Plus they were playing Los Angeles start to finish, which is basically one of the greatest records ever made in the history of music. Which is to say that I really, really, really wanted to go to the show, and I thought it would be okay. My breathing had gotten better, I could sleep on the train on the way there and back, the “opener” was a movie — X: The Unheard Music — and I could sit down for that. I didn’t think the pit would get too rowdy, and if it did, I could go to the back, or go home. I took my inhaler and my throat drops and my hand sanitizer and my camera and I got on the train.
And X, oh, X. They looked great. They sounded great. Exene in her beat-to-fuck cowboy boots and nonstop dancing and John Doe tearing it up with his long hair flying and DJ’s goofy gap-toothed grin and Billy Zoom’s creepy fucking smile and those rockabilly licks. I smiled and danced and sang at the top of my lungs and a few hours after the show I felt fantastic. I don’t know if it was the antibiotics or the music, but I like to think that punk rock saved me once again.
(more…)
Aside: Today is my birthday. Tonight I’m going to see X. I imagine I will weep through their entire set, but I’m going to try really hard not to.
title: What We Do Is Secret
author: Thorn Kief Hillsbery
other shit: 346 pages. 2005, Villard.
rating: 2/5 safety pins
I was skeptical of this book for a lot of reasons, most of them relating to my distaste for reading about Darby Crash. The title is a Germs reference; the cover blurb starts by talking about Crash. But then my local library redid their online catalog, and —
(more…)
title: My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories
editor: Chris Duncan
other shit: 181 pages, plus (short) author bios. 2007, AK Press.
rating: 3.5/5 safety pins
I will admit it, guys: There is not a lot I love more in the world than stories about How Punk Rock Saved My Life, and this book has many such stories. Most of them are pretty short, only a page or two, and they’re mostly by people who Do Stuff in punk. They’re in bands (Blag Dalia, John Poddy, Blake Schwarzenbach) or they write books (Michael Azerrad, Chris Walter, George Hurchella), something like that, but some of my favorite ones are by regular joes.
(more…)
Sometimes I spend an entire Saturday writing blog posts, and then I schedule them to be published every few days and feel really on top of my shit, and then I don’t even think about this blog for a month. All my news gets really stale, and then I write an epic post in one go instead of breaking it up and spreading out my amazing content. This is that post! Sort of. In September, I did some more traveling, got some more tattoos, and went to six shows. Short writeups of those shows (Koffin Kats, DOA, Okkervil River, Dave Hause, The House That Gloria Vanderbilt, and Fucked Up) to follow.
