Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, is as much a how-to manual as it is a history of hardcore, punk, independent and alternative music in America over the course of a formative decade. How-to what? While it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty behind making a ‘zine, starting a record label, going on tour, networking with venues, radio stations, and people across the country to knit together local scenes, it does showcase the people and personalities who did these things, what their motivations were, and how they went about creating their own alternative system for promoting music and culture, outside the dominant corporate system. They showed it could be done, and left their tracks behind for others to follow. Our Band Could Be Your Life is then a kind of sampler of the DIY methods employed by thirteen different bands who worked with what they had to get their message out into the world and leave their mark.

            For those fortunate enough to have access to computers, digital technology and the internet, getting work made independently out to the public has never been easier. Yet new difficulties arise with the ability to communicate and share creations at unprecedented velocities. There are so many people putting out material, sharing what they make and create, the signal to noise ratio is vastly increased. The internet has also created, with its speed, an attention economy. Because new books, records, movies and material is being released at such a pace, there is a tendency for people to sit with it less. There is also the tendency to not dig as deeply for content because so much material is directed to people through social media and streaming services. 

               Yet how long will they exist? The energy cost to run server farms, let alone AI, is sky high, and even without the limits to growth imposed on the future of the internet, people are clamoring for things they can hold in their hands and do in real life. So many of us want to get back to analog. 

            The independent network created by the bands chronicled in Azerrad’s book do still exist, as do other related scenes and networks, but in many instances the growth of the internet has caused the local  scenes to atrophy. Local and regional scenes have always formed the nodes on the backbone of the national and international network. The internet has allowed people of like mind and shared interest to congregate digitally. Locally, their tends to be more friction between people. If you don’t like someone online you can just drop them or block them. But if you are part of a group who is doing something in a place, you don’t always get along. Such friction is of course endemic to the human condition, but it also gives rise to some of the great tensions between people that can result in great artwork and positive movements. It also helps foster the ability for people who don’t always agree on everything to still work together and get along to make something do agree on happen.

            Those kind of creative tensions between people are also chronicled in Azerrad’s book, which makes it especially useful for digital natives who would rather ghost someone they don’t get along with anymore, than try to work out or resolve something, or to work together despite differences and see where the clash of energies brings something useful to fruition. Perhaps in punk music, where there tends to be an excess of aggression and energy, that kind of clashing of energy is apparent across so many bands.

            For this piece, since I am making the claim that the book can be used as a DIY manual, I will be looking at each of the bands that Azerrad writes about and try to draw some lessons. There were of course, many great bands who embody the independent ethos who we can all learn from, but I am focusing on this book, because I do think of it as a manual, and want to celebrate it and bring it to people who perhaps haven’t read it before or aren’t familiar with these groups. One of the other things I like about his book is how it centers the story on the people who were in these bands, how they came together, their motivations and various aspects of their personal lives. I’ve noticed a tendency among some music writers and critics to be critical of the other music writers who take this personal approach. As an artist and writer myself, I have always been interested in reading about the lives of other artists in any kind of creative field: what their lives were like, how they got started, what they did to get their work out to the public, and see what I can learn from them and use in my own life, or just as importantly, what I can avoid doing and where I can save myself some trouble.  All that is to say I think the historical and biographical approach to music writing is just as valid as the approach that puts an artist’s background in the background to focus on the aesthetics of their creation.

​            So grab yourself a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life and let’s get to learning some of the skills that can stand us in good stead in the analog revolution. His book covers 13 bands, so I will be breaking down this essay into three parts. 

​BEAT HAPPENING

In looking at this book again, I started at the end and read the chapter on Beat Happening first because I was on a Beat Happening kick last month. I won’t hesitate to say they are probably one of my favorite groups covered in his book, though there are several others I’ll call favorite depending on my mood, and they can all coexist happily together.

The big idea here, for those of us interested in degrowth and downshifting to less energy intensive lifestyles, is the focus on regionalism and the very independent identity that emerged out of Olympia. That very specific Pacific Northwest identity went on to play a large role in the national and international scene with the kind of shambling lo-fi and primitive jangly rock pop that said “anybody could be a musician” that started to flower with Beat Happening and around some other groups like the Young Marble Giants in England, and The Clean in New Zealand. The lo-fi aspects and the sincere slice-of-life lyrics are features not bugs with Beat Happening. Thinking on that way helps place this kind independent punk music into the category of folk music.

Beat Happening got their start in 1982, but before that band member Calvin Johnson was swimming in underground music through the influence of KAOS-FM and Op Magazine, self-published by KAOS DJ and volunteer John Foster in the late seventies. As Azerrad writes, “At the time, the main genre of independently released music was grass roots folk, which happened to dovetail with two of the key ideas of the American independent rock movement: regionalism, as in the idea that a localized sound would both serve the tastes and needs of its community and defy the homogenizing effects of mass media; and egalitarianism, in that music didn’t need to be made by professionals as the big time entertainment business would have the public believe.” These two ideas are well embedded in the Beat Happening ethos.

The idea of the non-professional ties directly back into folk. Who are all the people playing banjos, fiddles and mandolins on the front porch? Non-professionals, but many of them were seriously accomplished as the first waves of folk music recordings, as collected by the likes of Alan Lomax, and compiled by the likes of Harry Smith, have proved.

On the other hand, virtuosity wasn’t always the point. Entertaining yourself, your family, and your friends was often the point. That meant singing songs while hanging the laundry or picking beans or doing some other chore, or playing an instrument after the work was done. Transfer that to the realities of life in a capitalist industrial society, with angry kids who don’t fit in to the rest of the system, and you have the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of folk music, namely, punk.

Folk music has always been regional. So have the sounds of independent music with each scene tending to produce a kind of specific style, even as it stays within the genre.

Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford hardly exhibited the kind of brutal energy that had bubbled up in other local scenes, such as the hardcore emanating out of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington D.C. They did partake of another punk tradition forged by groups like Crass who had both male and female singers, and whose voices alternated on and between songs. Such an approach became a staple of punk that isn’t quite as common in many other genre outside of occasional duets -and folk music. With Lewis up there playing in front of people despite her shyness, she influenced the wave of feminist rock music that later came out of Olympia and Washington state in full force via Riot Grrrl movement.  

​At the same time Johnson exhibited extreme individual vision in the way he lived. Like his friend Ian Mackaye who he had met when his family briefly moved to D.C., he was straight edge at a time when the punk thing to do was get wasted. He hosted quirky pie baking parties and pajama spend the nights in place of going out and getting trashed. Their ability to wear their emotions on their sleeves led to them becoming “a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”
And like many other independent bands, Beat Happening started their own label with Johnson heading up K Records, that helped them and others to live on the cheap, so they could put their energies into a creative bohemian life, all while staying dedicated to the local life where they started.

​BLACK FLAG

​Shifting back to the beginning of the book, we encounter a very different beast of a band, Black Flag. They kind of represent so many things Beat Happening are not. But that’s the beauty of the underground and of freedom itself: if you don’t like something, go off  and do your own thing, your own way with whatever tools you have at hand.

            Black Flag just hid their nerdiness anyway underneath layers of violence, chaos and copious bong hits that did nothing to mellow them out. Greg Ginn had started SST not even as a record label, but as an outgrowth of his involvement in the ham radio hobby. Total geek territory there. I mean, who gets on ham radio or listens to shortwave except total nerds? SST stood for Solid State Transistors and was a mail order business for the amateur radio gear that he made and sold. Ginn played music too, and had gravitated towards hard rock and heavy metal before the first wave of punk blew his mind. He wanted to get in on the action and he wanted to speed things up.

            Ginn was a nerd in another way too. He had a degree in economics, and his business sense put him in good stead when he decided to transform SST into an independent record label, and did it all by scratch, looking up vinyl pressing plants in the phone book, and seeing how to get everything done as cheap as they could. To that end, the band lived communally and subsisted on whatever they could scrape together. As communal living punks, they were some of the original pioneers of the punk house, a place where people live together and share expenses. In these times of exorbitant rent, which inhibits living a creative lifestyle centered on art and music, I wonder why more young people don’t band together to live in communal houses together of whatever kind, or find places to squat. These practices were what made the products coming out of the punk movement affordable to produce and share.

            But they weren’t just lazing about in their punk house. They worked hard, brutally hard. They had as much discipline as Sun Ra, and Ginn made the band practice up to eight hours a day like it was regular job. Their work paid off, not necessarily in financials, but in the way they rocked and could bring down the house with their visceral energy.

​            Black Flag toured relentlessly and they were one of the first punk bands to tour so vigorously across America, playing wherever they could. It was these forays in their van out into the wilds of the USA that helped build the network that other punk bands would then follow. They made tracks in space, wore down the path so that others could see it and go their themselves. A lot of those bands were SST bands, but because Black Flag networked so heavily across the country, other groups would call them up or ask about where to play in what towns. These venues, places like the Jockey Club in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati, became regional hubs that glued local scenes into place. They gave local bands places to play regularly, and touring bands a place to stop. It all helped tie the regional scenes back in to the national and international punk movement. Without the strength of a local scene, the larger regional and national scenes can’t be as easily supported. The great is in the small.

There was another Black Flag was like Beat Happening, but different. They challenged punk. Any subculture or movement will become ossified and what started out as rebellion and revolution is quick to become dogma that must not be deviated from. So when short hair became the norm in hardcore fashion, Black Flag grew their hair long. They also pushed the style of music, incorporating elements of jazz and metal into their sound, making them hard to pin down. It also helped keep what they were playing interesting to their own ears and as adventurous musically as they were on the road.

​MINUTEMEN

The Minutemen took the idea of combining musical styles and influences much further than Black Flag, and they did it in an even more economical way. The band came up out of the working class. Mike Watt and D. Boon’s fathers had both been in the navy. Watt’s father worked as a machinist for the military, and after D. Boon’s dad was discharged, he made money by installing radios in people’s cars. The pair met when Watt’s father was sent to the base in San Pedro and the family moved. Watt was walking around one day by himself in the park when D. Boon jumped out of a tree to ambush him. Boon thought Watt was one of his friends they were playing army with, but it wasn’t who he thought. None-the-less, the two quickly became inseparable and it wasn’t long before they started a cover band to play the music of their heroes such as Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later they were joined by drummer George Gurley.

Many of the original punk groups had been inspired by the hippies and had been fans of hippie music. What the punks disliked about the hippies was the way they had sold out, not necessarily their music or what they had once stood for. Now we can see the effect of that sell out at the generational level as the boomers gave up on projects such as the hippie-allied appropriate technology movement that could have changed the course of history if it hadn’t been abandoned when so many of them just decided to go corporate and get on board with Reaganomics. All these years later these gerentocrats are still holding the reins of power and trying to keep it as long as they can before passing it on, one of the issues effecting the cost of housing at the time of this writing. Understandably, many of the Gen X kids who would form the core of the independent music scene were upset with the direction the previous generation had taken after espousing such high ideals.

Minutemen took their name from two different groups, the militia from New England who fought in the American revolution, and as a lambast against them, the neo-reactionary Minutemen of the 1960’s who were stockpiling weapons in anticipation of having to fight a commie takeover. In this time of contracting wealth from the working and middle class further into the hands of an aging wealthy elite, the Minutemen have their own key revolutionary principle that we all can be learned from, how to “Jam Econo”.

The word econo was San Pedro slang for doing anything on the cheap. As a band they practiced extreme economy and frugality. This was as true of their songs that were often under the two minute mark, as it was for the way they recorded, the way the toured, for the way they tried to eke as much out of every penny as they could and stretch it far.

Some other terms from their oeuvre are also useful in todays compromised political environment. They didn’t just have lyrics, they had spiels. The spiel was a politically motivated lyrics and rants that they boiled down into their provocative short songs.

One of the things they railed against was when somebody compromised their values, like the hippies had done, to make things mersh, or commercial. This was something they wanted to avoid and did avoid. When pressed by their label to make something more widely appealing, they made an album called the Mersh Project that itself lampooned the very idea of commercial music. All of this was part of their fight against the boozh, or bourgeois. This was the biggest no-no of all for the working class band.

D. Boon was an avid reader of history and the ideas he read about informed their music just as much as the jazz, funk, and classic rock that they subverted into their own personal style of hardcore. It was a lyric from the Minutemen song “History Lesson” that the name of Azerrad’s book was taken from, and shows just how much the philosophy and music of a group can have an impact on culture.

Mike Watt boils down their philosophy. “We weren’t a lot of hot air -we almost did everything we set out to do… and in some way’s its because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band – we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.

​“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured. … that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”

I’ll return with more lessons learned from the bands in Our Band Could Be Your Life in a future episode of Down Home Punk, right here on Sothis Medias.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

A story half-forgotten I’ll tell you just now,
of the people who lived in the Oakley Hotel;
drunkards they were, drank out of sorrow & spite
spelunking in bottles to the depths of the night.
 
They had their own bar on the first floor of the place
where they drank like dry rivers until the floor was in face;
the flowing pace was set by well drinks ribald & cheap
upstairs on rusted beds, fucking, the springs loudly creak.
 
They drank until dawn while the piano was playing
until their livers were chewed by vultures buffeting.
Some called it a flophouse, rent was paid by the day
I called it a funhouse, where I learned how to pray.
 
Some weeks we were flush with lines of cocaine
other weeks, just lushes huffing paper bags of butane.
Insane as it was, our brains never cracked on the crack
except over horse money lost to horses down at the track.
 
When money was tight you could always find sterno
or if your looks were just right film amateur porno.
No shortage of drama, melt downs like 1986 Chernobyl
when thrown into jail over that brunette named Sibyl.
 
I’m not here to quibble, I can barely recollect
but one time I got so plastered I thought to genuflect
and recount all my sins in the safety of confessional.
Until the bottle called back, & I worked it professional.
 
There were times when the cops to our humble home called
to break up the brawls and stomps that had neighbors appalled,
and another fine fellow would be hauled to the slammer
just for flying off the handle at Old Ray’s stuttered speech stammer.
 
Behind us in the factory the welders and machinists did work
three shifts of hard labor at A&R Industries with hardly a perk;
we’d just sit there and drink, when they went home or went in
it didn’t matter what: beer, wine, bourbon, whiskey or whiskey and gin.
 
Sometimes there was nothing, we’d go find Robitussin
the walls would start breathing, and I’d start a cussin'
and my liver would hurt from where that old vulture had chewed
and eventually I’d sleep after my vomit was spewed.
 
There was the time we lit fireworks on the Fourth of July,
and that crack flash whizz bang spun into my old ladies eye.
Then the ambulance came down to check out her cornea,
but it didn’t stop the cruel laughter that gave her son hernia.
 
One night came the fire from a cigarette smolder
nobody would admit who had lit the tobacco briquette
no one had heard the siren sound, over the agro punk cassette
to my friends who choked on the smoke, I call it regret
and file it away, deep in my brain, in a do-not-touch-folder.
 
AA came for some when bottoms were hit
and some said AA was a bucket of shit.
Eminent domain put an end to us at the hotel in Oakley,
wrecked down by the ball of the law, not quite baroquely.
​
In the place it once stood now suburbanites go shopping
gone is that old sawdust smell, in its place fresh blacktopping. 

--
REFLECTION:

I am attempting to do my part to make poetry gutter punk again. This one in the Underdog Anthems series is about a real place in Cincinnati that my dad used to tell me stories about, a flophouse called the Oakley hotel, it was right behind where he worked as a welder and there was always lots of drama. Later, during my first stint in AA as a teenager, my sponsor, an older punker, had lived in the Oakley Hotel. He took me and some of his other sponsees around to Oakley Hotel one time and we were talking to a lady there. I accidentally knocked down her bottle of cheap whiskey and broke it or spilled it. (Memory is fuzzy.) He then drove us to the liquor store where we got a bottle to replace what she had lost. Years later my sponsor fell off the wagon and we’d get hammered together at punk shows… We've since lost track of eachother and I haven't seen him around in a long time.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​

It can be a funny old life, the things that happen to you, the people that you meet. My wife Audrey and I experienced a chance encounter when we took a brief pause in the routine to visit the great city of Cleveland a few weeks ago this past June. We wanted to spend some time slowing down, walking along Lake Erie, hiking in the metroparks, and doing some urban psychogeography in their wonderful downtown, where we stayed. It was a great visit.

After a first day of visiting the lake, eating at the excellent Cleveland Vegan, and exploring the old Arcade downtown, looking at the architecture, and finding a late night pho shop, the next day was spent once again hitting the streets. There were two places on my list I really wanted to go, though Audrey would tell you there are way more and that there are always way more. She wouldn’t be wrong, and it can be hard to put up with, that drive to go see or do one more thing, after which there is always one more thing. She puts up with a lot.

​The first stop after dipping our toes back into the lake at Edgewater Park was Zubal’s Books. Harvey Pekar had been on my mind since we were in Cleveland, as it rightly should be. I knew about Zubal’s from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where they visited the great store, that is housed in part, in an old Twinkie factory. We made some great scores there, a great book haul. I wouldn’t have known about that store if I hadn’t seen the clip. I’m really glad we went, and made it in time for the two hour window they are open to the public. Most of their business is mail order.

One of the titles I found was by Paul Feyeraband called Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, which proposes that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices.  It's closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me, we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald called Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before.  It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread or way science that could have been followed. These readings ought to go well alongside Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward A Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.

After visiting Eclectic Eccentric and the neighboring Loganberry Books, where I also nabbed some more titles, we ate Michael’s Diner right on the Rapid Transit tracks in Shaker Heights. I should have gone for the Polish Fish Boy. Then we went to the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes and walked around the protected wetland as the rain drizzled. Finally we wound up at our last stop for the day, Lake View Cemetery. This place was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, just a few blocks from where we live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries.  Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein. Something was in the air.
 
After stopping at President Garfield's memorial, there was just one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel.

We drove up to it and after I got out of the car, a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he'd gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he'd been the partner of Harvey Pekar's widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he'd just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn't have a headstone yet).  His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like we'd gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn't gone to that one last spot, I might not have met him. Meeting Lee Batdorf and having this encounter really charged me up and I'm very grateful for his friendliness.

When we got back home, and I got back to work at the library the next day, I put the graphic novel history "Harvey Pekar's Cleveland" on hold. When it came in, like some many other people in Harvey Pekar’s life, Lee was a character in this final work.  Zubal's books was also featured in the book. I hadn't read this one before, even though I'd read some segments of Pekar’s long running American Splendor and other works.

That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. When you go, make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to him by leaving a pen or pencil at him and Brabner’s grave.

Ordinary lives can transformed into the extraordinary through the medium of art. That is what Harvey Pekar did with his life and with the people whose lives he documented in his ongoing comic book series American Splendor. He celebrated the ordinary and gave it a lasting form.

The past decades have shown that when art is disconnected from everyday people it becomes a pastime for the elite. When it is embraced by working class intellectuals it can become a medium of shared experience, rather than a rubicon to be navigated through a maze of academic jargon and interpretation. When the artist in question also works a day job they stay in touch with the world of working people. When they also stay in their home town, in the Midwest, in middle America, they can’t be bent to change their form into the dominant styles. In the case of the writer who doesn’t sell out, they can’t be bought and made to write stories that conform to the preferred narrative trends of a culture in any given time. If they make their buck in some other way that doesn’t compromise their values, they can forge a path through life on their own terms with a foundation of a day job.

Such was the case of Cleveland comic book writer Harvey Pekar whose longest running day job gig was as a file clerk for the VA Hospital.

The boundary between work and play need not be so rigid anyway. There can be a flow between them, if artists weren’t always so eager to quit their day jobs and go pro. I don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with making a living out of what a person creates, but the potential to play to the tastes of the market must become a great temptation when paying the bills rides on paychecks derived from art, music, books.

If the work done is in accord with some kind of principle along the lines of what the Buddhists call right livelihood, it not only is rewarding in its own right, but becomes fodder for further creation, and gives an artist the grit needed to push past obstacles, to overcome the drudgery sometimes involved.  The creator who has not done much work, who has gotten to their position from nepotism, who don’t need to work, or didn’t reach the ability of being able to go full time in their chosen vocation, without having to grind onwards through shifts and shifts at the day job, will have a fundamental disconnect from people who don’t know what it is like to live a life of privilege.

As a writer of comics, music and highbrow literary criticism, Pekar sidestepped that issue by never giving up on his day job until the time of his legitimate retirement. He wrote and worked on his off time, and any time he could squirrel away on breaks and when things were slow on the job. In this respect Pekar is a patron saint of slackers everywhere. And like good slackers, he worked his ass off.

He read books and newspapers on his break times. He made phone calls to editors when he was on break. This grounding in the realities of work, made him the quintessential person to document what life was like in twentieth-century century Cleveland, in the twentieth-century rust belt of Midwest America. He was connected to his city and to the people who lived and worked there. Yet in the drive to create, he mastered the use of his free time, and distinguished himself as a comics writer, as a pioneer of the graphic novel memoir, of slice-of-life strips, as a jazz writer and record collector, as a keen collaborator with many of the great illustrators of his day.  

Pekar didn’t have outlandish style in dress. He didn’t need to don a beret to show he was an intellect of caliber. He could pay his own way through his work, and use his day job as a thrust block to generate the material for his comics.

​Thank goodness Harvey Pekar didn’t give a flying fuck about kryptonite. He hated superhero comics, and wasn’t interested in what some person with special powers could do. Who needs those anymore? He gave us the everyday everyman. The person on the street. These are the everyday people who populated his works. People your average non-corporate executive might run into while riding the bus home from work, or talk to in their neighborhood, or bump into at a convenience store. As he wrote about it later, “I don't ever write for entertainment, like no Hollywood stud or nothing. See, all that stuff, it doesn't mean anything! Plots and villains, all that stuff just to sell cereal and underwear.”

Pekar’s parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to America where they ran a grocery store. His father was a Talmudic scholar and his mom knew Hebrew and a good deal about Jewish religion and history. She was also an avowed communist until the USSR sided with Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. As a Zionist she would have rather had them side with Israel. Pekar’s parents worked all the time, and he spent a lot of time with his grandfather speaking in Yiddish.

Pekar grew up in a mostly African American neighborhood of Cleveland and got to see first hand the racial and class striations bifurcating America. He also came of age just as Cleveland had reached its industrial peak. Born on October 8, 1939 he was just entering the workforce when the 1958 recession hit. Having difficulty finding a regular give gave him lifelong respect for gigs.

Listening to the radio, going to used bookstores, and hanging out at the library were lifelines for Pekar and introduced him to a wide range of ideas. He was a bookhound and a record collector, with his main interest being jazz records. He started writing criticism in 1959 when his first piece appeared in The Jazz Review.

In 1962 Robert Crumb moved around the corner from where Crumb lived at 107th street and Euclid in the heart of Cleveland where hipsters hung out and bohemia swung. Crumb stayed their for four years working at the American Greeting Card company and the two became friends over their shared love of jazz. Here was one of Pekar’s entries into the world of underground comix.

He had been thinking about writing comics for awhile, the ideas percolating after conversations with Crumb, but they took awhile to gestate. In 1972 he drew some stick figure panels and showed his work to Crumb and illustrator Robert Armstrong. Both of these artists, already established in the scene, offered to illustrate Pekar’s stories. His first work in the medium ended up being a one-page piece called “Crazy Ed” that found its way onto the back of The People’s Comics a one-off issue by Crumb.

Over the next four years he wrote a number of other stories that were illustrated by a variety of artists and in appeared in various publications. Following the success and confidence building experiences of getting his stories illustrated and in print he started to focus on writing his own full issue series. It was 1976, two hundred years into the American experiment of independence, and the DIY spirit was everywhere inside the counterculture. His efforts with American Splendor fit right in with this mindset, as seen in the undergound comix movement, the underground press, and zine culture. His stories showed his life with frank realism and profound psychological depth. Ten years of effort paid off in 1986 when Doubleday released American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar collecting the first ten issues.

From his work, it didn’t seem like Pekar was pretentious. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a difficult grouch. His second wife had ambitions to become a career academic, and this was what eventually drove them apart. He didn’t want to leave Cleveland or the gig he had at the VA. She was determined to teach at an Ivy League school -though she never made it quite that far, but did get a gig of her own at a school in New England. Close enough for academic work, one can suppose. Her literary acumen was what got him into reading contemporary literary literature. I guess that’s called lit fic, and it turned out he really liked the stuff. But just to get back at her for leaving him, he started writing reviews for highbrow journal Review of Contemporary Fiction, where she would likely read his reviews. Yet in the way that he lived, he showed that a life of the mind isn’t limited to life of people in an ivory tower. Becoming a cultural critic requires no fancy degree.

His success at this point was in no small way related to his third wife and love of his life Joyce Brabner, who he had married two years before. Brabner was a caring soul who worked with people in prison and kids who were in trouble. She taught them how to write as a way of dealing with the monotony and drudgery of prison life. She wanted them to have an imaginative interior life. Something to help them cope. But she needed to cope herself. Noting the heavy emotional toll the kind of work she was doing took, she got involved in comics and fandom, something she’d loved since her childhood spent reading Mad Magazine. This eventually led her to become a co-owner of a comic book shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The shop stocked American Splendor, but one time, she didn’t get to read the latest issue before it was sold. So she dropped a note to Pekar in the mail asking if he could send them another copy. After this the two started corresponding, then talking on the phone together. Later she had some business to do in Cleveland and decided to visit Pekar while she was there. The two hit it off and got married the very next day. (Brabner is an American iconoclast herself and will eventually have an article dedicated to her own distinct life, work, and contribution to comics and culture.)

​The story of their courtship and early time together was told in “American Splendor No. 10” that he gave the title “Harvey's Latest Crapshoot: His Third Marriage to a Sweetie from Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship.”

Because Pekar wrote about the people in his life and the world immediately around him, she knew what she was getting into with him. Part of her attraction to him was his radical honesty, and this led to a degree of openness that served them both well, and they only parted at death. Brabner became a regular feature in his comics over the years, and later, when they took in a foster kid and made her their own (that right there should tell you what kind of people they were), Danielle Batone became a part of the stories. So did Pekar’s bout with cancer, and his struggles with depression.

Pekar said that his work was about “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It's the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

​After his death in 2010 one of his coworkers wrote “His writings in “American Splendor” reflected the way he was with us: a direct and unpretentious Everyman with an engaging, original slant on the issues of everyday life. Although tactful discretion was not one of Harvey's strong suits, he was on speaking terms with everyone from the lowest to the highest, and he kept his common touch despite literary fame from his comic books and movie. He added a unique, bright, off-beat note to the daily routine of our medical center.”

On Pekar’s gravestone his epitaph reads “Life is about women, gigs, and bein’ creative.”

As a life philosophy it is hard to beat. Let’s take a look at the three main components.

Life is about women. Married three times, and with girlfriends and hookups in between, its safe to say Pekar liked women. He is certainly not alone in this assessment. On his tombstone it all says he was a beloved husband and guardian. He was married to Brabner for twenty-six years before he passed away. He was Batone’s guardian from the time she was nine, seeing her into adulthood. She would have been around 21 when he died. These were the women in his life, along with coworkers and friends. Pekar had said in his comics that he is pro-feminist, even though his works sometimes showing him arguing with women. He was a passionate man, and perhaps a bit neurotic, but from reading his work, it seemed that Brabner and Batone helped keep this high-strung man grounded.

Then he said life is about gigs. Pekar came of age in 1959 when work was really hard to come by. This gave him a healthy respect for work. Pekar was a practical man, and he knew that to get by in a city that had started its economic decline when he was just starting to come up inside it, meant he had to find the gigs, the jobs. He went through a bunch of them before landing his perfect gig, a job as a civil servant file clerk for the VA. He did his work, he collected his jazz records, and wrote jazz criticism, he collected his books, and wrote literary criticism, he put together and self-published his comics, all in any spare scrap of time he could eke out of his existence. There was little money in the comics for him, and even after the film about his life was made in 2003, he struggled to pay the bills. But he schlepped on with the gigs and made his way. It would have been easy to not read, listen to music, and write, got to work, come home and watch TV. Instead, he took the subject matter of his ordinary relatable life, with all its grouchiness and grumbling, dialed it in to make it extraordinary and epic.

​The third prong of his epitaph is Bein’ Creative. The first two provide the glue that created the foundation for his further achievements. Through his efforts he wanted “to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing,” To get people to see the beauty in their everyday lives. People often think that in order to have a life, you need to have some money, or some kind of silver spoon handed to you so you can do what you want. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes what you need is a job, a 9 to 5 that forces you stick to a certain routine, a marriage that keeps you focused on the happiness of another person, and someone younger to care for and help bring up in the world. Beyond that, a bit of creative gumption to come home and keep working, work on the weekends, work early in the morning. That’s the kind of shit that turns a person into a working-class hero. That’s some real American splendor.

Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt

.:. .:. .:.

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