Life is waiting for the next thing to happen. Am I right, Brother? Might as well sideline it with a Michelada on the roof of a Dead Confederate palace and wait for the phone to ring or the mail to arrive. No use hopping in the CRV and heading downtown looking for kicks with every other hapless fool in the Live Music Capital of the World. Right?
I call bullshit on the lot of ya, but mostly on myself. I like a good Michelada in the afternoon. Yes the hated afternoon, when the young promise of morning is gone and the dreaded hammer of night is yet to fall.
Ian MacKaye was right about, well, everything. Time waits for no man and if you want to do something right you’ve got to do it yourself. Do you think the punk rock movement had time for Micheladas in the warm Texas sunshine?
I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much
-Bob Dylan
Tomorrow night we’ll be listening to Brother Sicko and Sister Amy Yates-Weulfing talk about No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens, so pull up a chair. Come on in and learn something for a change. I tell you good&cherished Reader cuz I am old enough to know-there used to be an underground. And it hummed along vibrantly in cities like D.C. and San Francisco and Los Angeles. But, you knew that already, didn’t you? Well, what about Philly?
Philadelphia-the town that gave Tom Hanks AIDS.
-David Yow
Philadelphia, where they shoot ya fer yer shoes. Heh. Yeah but ol Hostile City cain’t hold a candle to Trenton. You know, Trenton Makes, The World Takes? Yeah, that Trenton. Stanchioned down the foul river in that great backwoods quagmire of a state they have the nerve to call “New”, fucking Jersey.
I saw some shit at City Gardens, back in the day, heh. Indeed. I saw Gorilla Biscuits, Judge and Sick of it All there one summer night, back in 1989. That would be before Nirvana for all you teeny-boppers out there and before it all turned to shit. At least for me it did. I had to turn my back on the underground and head for greener pastures. But there ain’t a thing wrong with punk rock, Brother. Except that it’s all over now and there has been a no more profound or lasting social movement of the Twentieth Century. Aho but the Twentieth Century is over too and you can’t even see Thompson’s high-water mark from here (although my generation never really could to begin with). It’s gone, Brother. The way of the rhino. Ah but don’t too wise. In the New Century legions of American kids are recording, pressing, distributing, promoting and marketing their own bands. It’s all shit but that doesn’t matter.
I mean, for all I know or care the flame still burns but-there was a time!
Good Goddamn there was a time when it meant something. Christ it could mean your life in my high school or on the streets of Trenton. Back when there was such a thing as Nazi Skinheads and our music shocked the squares to their core so irrevocably and more profoundly than any whiteman blues band of the Flower Power Generation ever could. My point is that punk rock showed ’em how. Made ’em know. Punk rock didn’t need the music industry 40 years before Steve Jobs gave you GarageBand and rock&roll somehow became retro and cool again. Fuck you.
Whoops. I’m out of beer. This rant is over. Tune in tomorrow night and turn off your radio. Pop punk erodes your street cred and shrinks your testicles. It’s got to mean something to the folks back home, n’aw mean? You don’t? Oh well, whatever, never mind.
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Dying poet, hack journalist, antiquated troubadour. Farewell to Armor, Jim Trainer’s full-length collection of poetry is out now through WragsInk and available on Amazon.com. Trainer currently lives in Austin, TX, where he serves as contributor, curator, editor and publisher of Going for the Throat, a semi-daily publication, at jimtrainer.wordpress.org. Plato was right.
Going for the Throat 