Born a little late for post-punk, these post-post punk albums were my jam. (Much to the annoyance and concern of my parents.) 

I first became aware of punk rock sometime in the 1980s before I hit ten years old. I mean, I’d seen that punk rocker destroyed in the worst Star Trek movie ever, The Voyage Home, and I’d seen the Terminator rip the clothes off a bunch of street punks in the namesake film. I probably even saw some occasional weirdos in real life. But I was primed for punk because I was already amped on heavy metal. By the time I was skateboarding in the sixth grade I was ready for an explosion of sounds from the past, and I was lucky enough to meet an older skater punk when he moved on the street introduce me to both the classic and then current punk sounds. This was the early nineties, in the Midwest. Post punk had already happened in England so I suppose most of this stuff is not really post-post-punk, but post-hardcore, skater punk and pop punk. But Post-post punk just sounds better.

So lets take a look at some of the albums that shaped me as a teenager.

Our story starts in California, the birthplace of skateboarding, and home to some of the best punk bands on the planet. First up is Bad Relgion.

​Bad Religion hit my brain and body like a heretical gnostic revelation. I was raised in the “end times” fundamentalist Christian church, some say cult, The World Wide Church of God. I stopped attending around age fourteen. My exposure to punk and bands like this played no small part in my quitting the church I'd been brought up in. Songs like “Turn on the Light” burned with exquisite energy. The lyrics to Bad Religion’s music was always smart and sharp, but listening back I feel differently about some things now. I don’t share the same animosity towards religion as lead singer and lyricist Greg Graffin, though I’m not a big fan of conventional religion, and certainly not fundamentalism. Yet there are alternative streams of spirituality that have given me just as much juice as the alternative streams of music. Punk music has always been political, and the political message in Bad Religion was always front and center. The resonance within the songs “Heaven is Falling” from Generator and “You are the Government” from Suffer are perennial in their message. Others seem to have lost some of their bite, or I just got older, and lost some of my bite. With that in mind, perhaps the song “When?” is more appropriate now.  Quick short pounding songs like “Blenderhead” with its abrupt stop caused my head to spin in a good way, and there is no denying how fun Bad Religion is. I got the opportunity to see them live at least once and the energy they brought to the stage was just as palpable.

Second on this listicle is another band from Southern California, NOFX. Like Bad Religion they helped define the sound of the time. And like Bad Religion, their lyrics could be equally astute and intelligent, but unlike them, they didn’t always take everything so damn serious. They could be funny as fuck, and irreverent as hell. That was part of their long-lasting charm.

The first album I heard from NOFX was Ribbed, from 1991. At twenty-eight minutes long, each moment is packed with feral ferocity. Some of the lyrics are rather juvenile, but the music is so good its rather simple to overlook the juvenilia of it and get besotted with its powerful vibrations and sarcastic whimsy. The fact that they could rip, riff and write a catchy hook all while keeping the adrenaline flowing guaranteed their ascendancy. It’s all on full display in the song “Nowhere.” The follow up albums, White Trash, Two Heebs and A Bean, and Punk in Drublic continued the fun. 

Staying in California we’ll move along to check in briefly with Operation Ivy and their one album Energy, still a favorite. Members of the band went on to form the more famous and commercially successful Rancid. I like a few Rancid songs, but they didn’t really have anything on Op Ivy.
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Operation Ivy was part of the force that kickstarted a wave of suburban American ska, for better or worse. The fast snotty delivery of the lyrics wound up over top of the tightly syncopated, yet still slightly sloppy playing, as if they are just managing to keep it all together, without it falling apart. These bass and guitar rhythms hit a lovely sweet spot. Songs like “Artificial Life” have only proved too prescient of the way binge watching TV would become even more acceptable with streaming services.

Next up is The Queers. I first saw The Queers at my first real concert experience, when they opened up for Rancid at Bogart’s. The Queers would continue to play Bogarts regularly for the next several years and it was always a good time. I liked them better than Rancid, and still like them better than Rancid. Anyway, enough Rancid dissing. They have their place.
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Their album Love Songs for the Retarded remains a go-to classic. By today’s standards this album title would even offend the punk rockers themselves. Don’t let that stop you from listening. All most all of its cues are taken from the Ramones, with just a bit more distortion and a lot more beer. Songs like “Teenage Bonehead” and “Fuck the World I’m Hanging Out with You Tonight” showcase what they are all about: fun rock and roll, drinking beer, and having fun. One of the great things about The Queers is the backing vocal harmonies recalling fifties rock and pop, you know, the same stuff the Ramones were inspired by. At the bottom, they are fun, irreverent, uncouth, all the things you expect in punk. With great riffs, heaps of distortion, songs you can sing and shout along to, nodding your head with many shared experiences. This is the kind of music that could take you to the imaginary land of Riverdale, and hang out with Archie and the gang, if they guzzled forty ouncers and cough syrup.

Now I need to turn my attention to Fugazi. I still have a signed ticket stub from Ian Mackaye somewhere in a ziplock bag of teenage memorabilia. That was from a show at Bogarts where I saw them for $5. Can you imagine seeing a band of their caliber for five dollars today? It’s hard to imagine but that was the case back then, and many of the other shows I went to weren’t much more expensive, allowing teenagers and threadbare bohemian types to get in on the culture. Because that is what it was about, the culture, the music. By all accounts, Fugazi made a tolerable living as a band that toured quite a bit. They just didn’t need to live like Taylor Swift lives. They also didn’t want to screw over their fans. Hence five dollar concerts. I think this DIY business model could easily be done again today. (It is for sparsely attended noise and other underground shows.) Bigger groups with larger followings could still do so. At a lower cost, they are also more likely to sell out the show. The Fugazi show I went to was certainly packed to the gills. And the band was kind enough to hang out with everyone afterwards in the alley behind the venue. That is the kind of approachability we need to see more of these days.
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Their second album, 1991’s Steady Diet of Nothing was the one I had on tape that fueled so many bus trips on my headphones to various skateboarding destinations around Cincinnati. Listening back, it sounds killer as fuck and as fresh as Friday. No surprise there. Fugazi;s music has aged extremely well. That’s why it remains a favorite, and continues to garner new listeners. The opening bits of “Reclamation” bring on waves vitriolic adrenaline. I’m ready to go take on the world again. “Nice New Outfit” with its shouted backing vocals over exacting rhythms makes me smile and want to go climb a telephone poll and scream at the top of my lungs. It just continues to get stacked on up from there. It’s really hard to turn this album off once you hit play, but why would you want to put a pause to such an unrelenting pulse? 

Moving on to the band Screeching Weasel, for a rather different kind of sound again. Here the pop and the punk fuse together again. Frontman Ben Weasel had helped write some of the songs on The Queers album Love Songs for the Retarded. Perhaps that’s why My Brain Hurts shares such a stylistic similarity. The tracks are catchy. The lyrics are juvenile and touching. Songs like “Veronica Hates Me” glow with angst and unrequited love. “Teenage Freakshow” with the light vocal harmonies in the background and simple organ pouncing recall some lost times in Riverdale again. Hanging out with Veronica.
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What interests me now about  Ben Weasel is the time he spent at the Élan School in Poland, Maine, where he was sent after being expelled from his previous school in Illinois. These boarding schools that were all part of the “troubled teen industry” are a special interest of mine, having known several people sent to such places (some family). Some of those people and punks I never heard from again. But that’s another story for another time.

Another favorite group of mine from the era was Blatz. I only had one copied tape from them, and it was their Shit Split album with the group Filth. I didn’t really care for the Filth side as much. What I loved about Blatz was the coupled male and female vocals, hearkening back to the anarcho punk tradition started by Crass and their ilk, where dual male and female vocalists were de rigeur. Blatz also weren’t afraid of using phasers and flangers on their guitars which was unusual for punk bands. Blatz came out of the same 924 Gilman Street Project scene as Op Ivy, but their sound was decidedly more feral and hedonistic. Songs like “Homemade Speed” and “Fuck Shit Up” were fun favorites, and they mined noir territory in the lyrics to “Lullabye” and “Berkely is My Baby (And I Want to Kill It).” Actually, nihilism is good word to describe the style of Blatz. The working class anger they espouse at people going to school and anomie at hypocritical hippie’s drips with rawness even now. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded live, which adds to the menace.
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I wonder if they’ve mellowed at all with age. But if they had, I’m not sure I’d want to listen to the kind of music they may make now. So if you feel like perhaps you are mellowing too much in middle age, put one of these albums on and let it rip.

My memories of radio are tangled up with the shenanigans I pulled playing around on phone lines and my love for the original Doctor Who series. I first saw Doctor Who when I was ten years old and I was mesmerized by the stories and the sounds.

            All those sounds in the show were the product of the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC. In 1958 an inspired woman named Daphne Oram helped to found this early electronic music studio under the auspices of the British Broadcasting Corporation. She had been inspired to explore electronics when she heard about experiments taking place at the Radiodiffusion Television Francois by Pierre Schaeffer with musique concrète, that is the manipulation of prerecorded sounds on lathe cut records and magnetic tape. But Oram had also been inspired by a prophetic book written by Francis Bacon in 1626 called The New Atlantis and had tacked a passage from it onto the wall of the music studio as a kind of mission statement for the work they would pursue.

            Hands down, the most famous musical creation from the Radiophonic Workshop is the theme song for Doctor Who. Delia Derbyshire was the electronic musician who realized the score for this innovative song, recording sounds made on audio oscillators onto tape, and editing those tapes and layering them up to build the memorable song. Doctor Who gave me my first taste of electronic music and I fell in love for life.

​            I became so obsessed with Doctor Who as a young kid, that if my family was invited out to dinner at another family’s house on a Saturday night, I would try to connive a way for us to get home by 10 PM so I could tune into the show. Doctor Who aired on Channel 48 WCET, a PBS station, and when they had their periodic pledge drive they would put the telephone number out on the TV and have people call in to pledge their support. I was so obsessed, I would get irritated with the announcers when they cut the show off in the middle to stop and ask for money. 

I called the pledge drive number, just to see what would happen, even though, as a ten year old I had no money. The phone rang and a few seconds later and I could hear it ring over the television.

            This gave me a thrill like no other, hearing something I did cause a sound to be heard on our TV set. So, I called it again and again on multiple pledge drives. I did start feeling guilty about doing that, especially when the announcer on the TV would say, “and we have another call, a pledge of support for Doctor Who!”

            I kept on doing this on every pledge drive until I got old enough to fear getting caught in my early teens.

​That time period, in the late 80s and into the early 90s, was also the last golden era for making prank phone calls. Caller ID wasn’t yet prominent, and many people still didn’t know you could dial *69 to see who called last. Playing on the phone was a good way to pass the time, and it became a bit more intense for me in the seventh grade after I read a book by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling called The Hacker Crackdown. It introduced me to the concept of phone phreaking. Before hackers learned to infiltrate computer systems with their modems over the phone lines, phone phreaks figured out ways to make free calls and otherwise explore Ma Bell’s network of wires. I found the prospect of being able to do this very inspiring and tried to learn how to do it myself, though resources were scant, and I had missed the heyday of phone phreaking by over a decade.

​As a thirteen year old most of my attempts at phone phreaking were actually just phone pranking. I’m surprised I didn’t get in more trouble from my exploits than I did. But I did get in trouble, and I probably should have gotten in more trouble than I did. One weekend when I was skateboarding with a cousin in his neighborhood of Green Hills, I spotted a phone lineman’s handset, near one of those green phone boxes you see in the burbs. It had been left behind and there was no one in sight, no van from Cincinnati Bell anywhere nearby. So I took it, and justified my taking it by saying I had found, which I had. Finders keepers and all of that. It turned out the case not only had a linemans phone with wire clippers for testing the lines, but it also had a little computer in it that you could hook up to a phone jack and use to make calls. For some reason I thought you would be able to get free calls using this because it belonged to the phone company, and who would charge them?  I was spending the night at my cousins that weekend, and his parents left on a date after ordering us some pizza. I convinced him that we should call up some of these 1-800 numbers I had seen on late night TV for something called “Chat lines.” Apparently, if you called these numbers, and yes, they really were 1-800 numbers, there would be an eager young woman eager to talk to you on the other end. I convinced my cousin that because we were using the handset from Cincinnati Bell, we wouldn’t get charged. I was wrong, and needless to say, when his parents got the phone bill, they weren’t too happy. 

Later, another friend of mine figured out that the little computer included in the lineman’s set had a modem inside and it could be used to dial into the Bulletin Board System that were around before the internet as we know it today existed. We dialed into some Bulletin Boards and poked around and had some fun. Then one day, when I came home from school, I got scolded by my mom, before I’d even had a chance to do anything wrong. The security department from Cincinnati Bell had visited our house and had asked if anyone had a lineman’s set. My mom had seen me using it, even though I had tried to keep it hidden. Apparently every time a call was placed with this box, it sent out a trace signal back to the Bell HQ. They wanted their equipment back, and they came and got it, and that ended my fun with that bit of equipment. I’m actually glad I was at school when it happened, but that kind of ended my career as an aspiring phone phreak, though not as a phone pranker. Meanwhile my love for the stories about the phone phreaks who could whistle tones at the right frequency into the phone and enter Ma Bell through the back door never disappeared.

​Around the same time all of this was happening, I had became enamored with the community radio station WAIF 88.3 FM. In the sixth grade I started to call in to one of their summer talk-shows so I could hear my voice come back over the air. They didn’t have any way of screening their calls, so they didn’t know it was just going to be some bored kid. Hearing my voice come back over the radio, usually with feedback, because I had failed to turn down my own radio, never stopped being exciting. Then, towards the end of high school, I discovered the Art Damage program. This was a revelation in terms of audio and what can be done with sound. It turned me on to the music of Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound, John Cage, and dozens of other artists I was only just then getting a clue about. It also did the essential work of cuing me into what was going on here just below the radar in Cincinnati. Just as I had with Doctor Who, I became obsessed with Art Damage and tuned whenever I could, and taped the programs off the air so I could listen back to the cassettes later.

Eventually I got onto radio in a legitimate way, but was still quite illegal. This happened during my brief tenure as a student at Antioch College on their pirate FM station Anti-Watt. Anti-Watt covered the village of Yellow Springs and I had my own show called The Psychedelicatessin on the station with a few friends. It was a free-form radio show of live collage music inspired by the experimental group Negativland and their radio show Over The Edge. At college I was more interested in hanging out at the radio station, the recording studio, and my job there at the student library than I was in my classes, so I eventually did the smart thing and dropped out. I had always been a big reader, and a writer. The problem with college was I wanted to read lots of the books I was finding in the library that weren’t assigned to me in class, and I wanted to write about things that also weren’t part of those same assignments. The copious amounts of weed I smoked back then might have also had something to do with it.
            After I dropped out of college, I came back home, got a job at the public library, which allowed me to continue my autodidact education, and I promptly began my life as a bohemian. I started going to noise music shows, poetry readings and art openings. I made zines, wrote poetry and essays. I got involved at WAIF and became a programmer for the longstanding experimental music show Art Damage after I met some people who were involved in that scene through my job. Later I joined the team of the more eclectic On the Way to the Peak of Normal. All told I was on the air regularly between 2001 and 2014. Now I am an occasional programmer for my friend Ken Katkin on his show Trash Flow Radio, when he needs to get away for the weekend.
            When I left WAIF I thought I would use my new free time to devote to writing, but I found I actually couldn’t quit radio. I had always been interested in shortwave radio and ham radio which I’d been exposed to from my great grandpa and the Boy Scouts. I had met a ham radio operator on the bus and he told me about classes being offered by the local Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society and I decided to go ahead and take the test and get my license from the Federal Communications Commission as part of my general obsession with radio and alternative forms of communication. Through the web of connections available in the friendly ham and shortwave communities I met Pete Polyank who introduced me to Frederick Moe and it has been one of my supreme delights to participate in his projects, such as Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations.
             I did end up putting more time into my writing, and my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory became a way for me to explore all of these different interests, neigh, obsessions with telephony, radio and music as it explores interconnected history between radio, the phone system and how research into speech synthesis at Bell Telephone Laboratories gave rise to electronic music as a happy by-product.
            Time keeps on moving, and I still try to bring a bohemian attitude to my life. Some things are just more important than having a better paying job. Things like radio, like friendship, like literature, like family. It’s not always easy to balance interests, let alone obsessions, with the day to day duties and chores of daily life. But balance is overrated, and I’ve found, at least for me, it works better if I weave these things into my life. After all, they are not separate from who I am and what I do. As time keeps moving on, and no TARDIS in sight to help me rewind or fast forward, I hope to continue to weave my inclinations towards the three R’s -reading, writing, and radio- into a life interfused with friendship and family.

This article originally appeared in Frederick Moe's Radio e-APA.