SaintOfSpinners wrote:
I was lucky enough to start hanging around punk in 79 when I was 14. All the older punks were either gay or alternative enough to not give a fuck. Then when hardcore started to take over, '82, I felt like it was the death of punk, or at least my version of it. I am happy to have had a good, open start to such a great subculture.
So we're about the same age. Often times when Skullbrainers talk about hardcore or punk music, I'm totally lost because what they're talking about came after the OG punk explosion. Hope I don't annoy anyone by saying so, but I also felt like hardcore signified the death of the "original" punk movement. I remember thinking "punk is dead" in 1980, hahaha! That same year I saw Circle Jerks open for The Mentors at the Savoy Tivoli in San Francisco, and I was like, "what the hell is this fake nonsense?" There were a bunch of L.A. punks there whose look and attitude were
very different from what had gone before in SF. Kilts and mohawks, more mosh than pogo. Anyway, that's how things evolve ... I realized that my attitude was wrong, didn't want to be stagnant, and tried to adapt by getting into some of the better L.A. bands and others like Minor Threat as times changed. The really annoying thing wasn't really the way that hardcore changed everything, it was "the tyranny of the beat" in the '80s, the way that the surviving OGs were selling out to the dance floor and MTV. That almost never ended well. When bands like Gang of Four started singing love songs and using drum machines ... ugh. It seemed like it was all over.
When I was first going to punk shows, I was technically too young to be at most of them legally, but those were different times and the bouncers didn't care. Because I was naïve about so much, I thought that the SF punk scene was very much
not gay. I had no idea that in fact some of the bands I was seeing, (especially artier bands like Tuxedomoon and The Mutants) had gay members and many gay folks in their audiences. "Gay" wasn't the point, so it wasn't obvious. That's probably because at the time, the original "gay liberation" movement was still happening in SF, and ostensible identities seemed to fall into singular rather than blurred categories. Well, it's also because I just didn't realize how complex things
really were. Also as you say, people just didn't care, which was novel back then. In retrospect it all makes more sense.
It took a long time for the punk and gay scenes to consciously merge in SF. It really happened big-time starting in the late '80s/early '90s with the advent of bands like Pansy Division and the Chaos/Uranus etc. club scene. It was weird in a way, because the OG punk scene was long dead ... now the young new-to-the-city gay folks and their straight friends constituted the "punk" scene, and the OG punks, mostly older than me, had either moved away, died from overdoses, or disappeared from music. So in a way what has happening when at-the-time newcomers like Tom Jennings (from the linked article) showed up seemed oddly nostalgic, even if the players weren't old enough to have been there when The Dead Kennedys opened for The Clash and they both still seemed scary.
Great article, thanks for reviving some dusty memories.
