It was not my intent to open the Pandora’s box of punk rock for young Z over breakfast on Sunday morning. In the gamut of kid’s music, punk has some things going for it – loud, simple chord structure and often amusing, repetitive lyrics. It also has a number of fairly obvious negatives. But when my iPod randomly spun “Pretty Vacant” while Z was eating his yogurt, I got giggles galore by doing my best Johnny Rotten impression. So, I decided, damn the torpedoes, never mind the bollocks, let’s get hardcore, Baby Z. Oh, and his Mum was still in bed, so had little input in my parenting decisions.

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I’ve never really been much of a punk rocker. They heyday of punk was about a decade before my time, and by the time I got exposed to the genre it was hackneyed and kind of commercialised. For example, you could buy your own pre-safety-pinned leather jacket at the Oaks Mall in Gainesville. I came to age toward the end of earnest jangly rock and the beginning of grunge, so while I appreciated the paths laid by punk, it wasn’t really what got my musical groove going. I mean, I loved a bit of “Blitzkrieg Bop” but when someone turned on The Adverts, I rolled my eyes and wandered to more melodious pastures.

For a while, when I first moved back down to Georgia, I ran around with The Punks (TM). I can’t really remember why, but when I first moved to Athens, I was adopted into this group despite not really looking the part. I liked my jeans loose and boot cut rather than tight and peglegged, and my boots made by Tony Lama rather than Doc Marten. I had never sported a mohawk and my tattoos were a bit more reserved than most of the Athens punks. Nonetheless, they took me in and for a year or so were my best friends in town. They allowed me to be different, to stand out from the crowd and feel OK about it. By sticking with a group, I had both figurative and literal protection from the drunk frat boys that populate the streets of downtown Athens after closing time. (The irony here is that about five years earlier I was a drunk frat boy staggering the streets of a different Southern town). I could turn up any time of day at the local punk bar (Lunch Paper at the time, for my Athenian readers) and find a friendly face. Basically, I could be different in the cozy confines of a group of similarly different people.

Hanging with the punks didn’t make me a punk. I found the rules a bit stifling – which music you could and couldn’t listen to (Black Flag, yes; Nirvana, no), which beer you could drink (PBR, yes; Sam Adams, no) and so on. Thus, I was never a very good punk. But, in that year of cheap beer and additional tattoos, I learned to love punk rock. I had been exposed to the basics – The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The New York Dolls – but I never really got them until I started wandering the streets with my Georgian punk friends. I never really got the angst, the sense of persecution, the anger that these early punk rock bands shouted from the rooftops until that first year of dodging drunken alumni looking for someone to take their frustration out on after the Dawgs got smoked by Bama. I understood how three chords, strung together apparently at random, could provide succor when some bowhead from Macon made fun of your fashion decision. From the granddaddies, I branched out and learned to love artists like Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Dead Kennedys and Pere Ubu. These were people who had changed rock music forever and from which sprung some of the “grunge” and “alternative” artists that I held up as heros.

I stopped hanging with the punks after a dark winter night following a particularly heavy session at the local. We headed to the Waffle House for some 2 a.m. sustenance. The details are hazy, as they would be after a night of PBR and Jim Beam, but something instigated a stand-off between my group of punks and a group of African-American guys across the restaurant. Starting off, as these things do, with a misinterpreted glance and escalating through strong words and big talk, it ended up in the parking lot with circling threats of violence. Fortunately it never got physical and everyone ultimately went their separate ways. For me, however, it was the beginning of the end of my running with these guys.

Something happened after that night, a veneer was stripped away. You see, in that Waffle House confrontation I saw my friends for what they were. Which, at the end of the day, was not much different from the drunk frat boys that they battled with. They hung together as a group, a group that relied on internal rules to dictate their behavior. The frat boys had their rules and uniforms, rules and uniforms that repulsed the punks. But as I stood back and watched that night, I saw my friends in their uniforms bridling against another group that they were different from and it got a little bit ugly. I saw the fear and insecurity that all that leather and all those piercings were failing to hide. And I saw a nastier, darker side that I didn’t know was there. It had never occured to me to discuss race with my friends, and it became clear to me from that night on that I had less in common with them than I had thought. From that night on, I decided that I needed to make my own way in the world, without a group, a herd, a tribe, to protect me.

I still like a good three-chord shoutfest now and again, though.

————–

And so, apparently, does Baby Z. He’s reached a stage of his development at which he approves quite strongly of disorder. It seems, in fact, that the idea of order offends him in some way. If you put his toys in the toybox, he rips them back out again. Given any kind of paper (news, toilet or other) he rips it to shreds and  scatters the remains to the four corners of the room. Given a container of any sort, Z will not rest until those contents are fully removed and preferrably destroyed. Maybe that’s why he appreciated The Sex Pistols so much.

“I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!”

My little anarchist grinned and giggled the whole way through “Never Mind the Bollocks”. I thought of pulling out The Ramones, but thought the boy might start pulling up the carpet or shaving a mohawk on the dog.

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The Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” is available from The Sex Pistols - Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

 
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