The aggressive, physical nature of punk was something that was naturally exciting. You could expect to have someone elbow you in the head neck or shoulders but shows were a physical exchange that existed because the trust shared between people jumping into and off of everything in the room. Much of what I recall as a skateboarder in the scene in the midwest was intelligent, surprisingly respectful, but anti-establishment.
For me punk represented a rejection of a small-town mentality that would memorialize a last-place high school football team’s efforts on the front-page and relegate a national merit scholar to corner of the paper leading the obituaries. The plain-spoken, practical and self-starter “makers” mentality was not foreign to the mid-west ethic, and the fast, loud, and sarcastic critique found a niche even in the farm towns of the mid-west hit by the economic malaise of the 80’s. The wheat-filled landscape of Kansas literally changed as the collapse of the American farm ushered in new ways of farming benefiting from corporate leadership. The plight of the young teen in urban centers was central to the punk movement, but the most significant impact of the music was probably seen as much in the punks that flocked to the cities from suburbs and the hinterlands hundreds of miles removed.
The film recounts the tensions in the punk scene rejecting or embracing ways of dealing with the frustration of youth, and I think is an important theme in punk in 80’s that is grossly ignored. While the punk image in the minds of some is dominated by the mindless drunk brawling, the film recounts the bands that totally changed the tone of American music, bringing to public view that at least some thought drinking and drugs wasn’t cool.
Punk was something I experienced from friends cassette tapes–no doubt carrying a long lineage of friend to friend bequeaths long predating my copy. Friends and shows were the only ways to experience the culture until Hollywood picked up the topic. I was always surprised to hear punk described as something mean-spirited. The midwest is no Oz paradise and there is no shortage anywhere of the awful things people don’t discuss in polite company. The punk scene I knew though must have been muted by the otherwise clean-cut, farmboy values of actually caring about each other and wanting to make things better if you could.
It’s funny now 20 years later thinking about it, and even more ironic that I was at a show in Redding, CA with Agent Orange thrashing in a mosh with a really cool guy I met at a steakhouse. I suppose I should be happy to say I was a punk in high school.