In my first essay in this series, I made the claim that Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991, was not just a great history of an important decade in music, but could be used as a manual for DIY know-how as people seek a return to analog style networking and making.  I looked at Beat Happening, Black Flag and The Minutemen to see what I could glean from them to see how it might apply to the ongoing decline of western civilization. The Decline of Western Civilization is after all, the name of one of the great documentaries on the early punk movement, as well as the magisterial tomes of history penned by Oswald Spengler.

​In this iteration I will be looking at the bands Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü to see what they have to teach in this regard. These essays won’t go into exhaustive detail about the history or music of these bands. Azerrad has that amply and entertainingly covered. The focus here is on what these groups, and the underground culture and independent philosophy around them, can teach for those of us who are seeking to downshift and become downwardly mobile in a world of limited resources.

One of the beauties of Azerrad’s book is how he gets into ethos of regionalism and self-sufficiency in local scenes that helped build a network that became national. As punk evolved from the first groups who were playing it, variations emerged. One of the most prominent was hardcore and it came from a bunch of kids whose energies were bubbling beneath the surface of the swamp in Washington D.C.

Punk owed no small amount of debt to their predecessors the hippies. Many had grown up listening to hippie music and the harder edged rock that bounced out of garages where bored kids gathered together and found something to do. Beer cans and joints were surely passed around. Yet some punks tied the failures of the hippies to the way they lost their minds on drugs, lost their will power and became beholden to the bottle. One such punk was Ian Mackaye.

Ian Mackaye loved listening to Joe Cocker, and his performance at Woodstock became a major influence. Another major influence was the teetotaler Ted Nugent whose prowess on the guitar and whose ability to riff wasn’t compromised by getting wasted. Nugent was one of the few voices in seventies rock music who lived a clean life, who thought getting drunk and blitzed on drugs wasn’t a way to open the doors of perception, but was stupid.

One anecdote involves a time when Mackaye and friends went to see a big concert. So many of the other people who were there were so fucked up that they couldn’t even remember the show. It was something of a wake up call, to be at event, having a sacred experiences, where others were so obliterated they couldn’t even experience the experience. In an interview for Loud and Quiet, he states, “It’s so obvious to me that it’s a put on, that you have to be drunk, a fuck up, use drugs, I mean why? Music for me is sacred; it’s bigger than that. I don’t buy it, I don’t agree with it that those are some kind of prerequisites. So, when you have some band going: ‘oh, we were out of it, we didn’t care,’ well I fucking cared.”

Another concert experience changed his life forever. It was when he went to see The Cramps in 1979 at a benefit concert for the Georgetown University radio station WGTB. The show “blew my mind because I saw for the first time this huge, totally invisible community that had gathered together for this tribal event.” In that moment Mackaye found a home and he has never parted ways from being a punk. It was never something he grew out of, but something he continually grew into, and it wasn’t long before he started assembling a band of his own.

So many of us who were exposed to punk had similar reactions. I remember feeling that way at my first all-ages show, Rancid, with The Queers at Bogart’s. So many people who were so different from the ones I saw at school where I’d be getting bullied, or at the end-times church where I was told what to believe.

Mackaye’s first band was The Teen Idles and they made a point of distancing themselves from the decadence of rock. They tried to “get away from a really corrupted music, you know, basically, your heavy metal bands that were into heroin, cocaine, just a lot of drinking. We just drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of Twinkies.”

But punk wasn’t immune from letting things get blurry, as I’d soon find out. Yet the importance of the straight edge philosophy remains, and it is likely we wouldn’t have it now in the way we do if it wasn’t for Mackaye, even if the role of figurehead is something he really didn’t want. Figureheads aren’t very punk after all, where part of the point is to think for yourself.

In a time when so many people are looking to political figureheads and will likely continue to do so the crazier things become during the years of decline ahead, thinking for yourself remains ever important. It is difficult to think when hung over, or otherwise intoxicated. The straight edge way looks to take responsibility for our own states of mind, and more importantly for what we do with our precious time here.

Ravaged by junk food and pharmaceutical products, mind onboarded into the simulacrum of screens, todays teens don’t have the luxury of pure boredom. What awaits them is a labyrinth where any wrong move might turn into a dead end, and possibly one with a monster lurking and leering at them as they find themselves up against the wall. To move through the labyrinth a clear head is necessary. In this respect straight edge is a counterpoint to the more Dionysiac extremes of the punk movement, especially when it is in its nihilist mode.
Granted, the nihilist mode can still be punk, but what Mackaye and his fellows helped to grow, was in actuality an antidote to the nihilism of McGovCorp seen all around them. For all the anger and aggression, it was a positive outlet, and a movement of positivity and hope, a Positive Force.

Teen Idles spearheaded the straight edge way of life, but it continued in his next band, Minor Threat. It’s hard to underestimate the impact and gut punch Minor Threat gave me when I first heard them in junior high. It was an awakening. The year was around 1991, just about ten years after this stuff first came out, and I had already been primed on years of heavy metal. I grew up on Cincinnati’s westside, where metal heads and hoods reigned supreme. Since I was a reader, into fantasy and science fiction, watched Doctor Who, getting into skateboarding and punk was a natural progression. From there the influence of punk came into my life full force.

One of the legacies of Minor Threat, and deeply intertwined with the philosophy of straight edge was the all-ages show. One reason for staying sober back when it was started was because you were too young to drink. Many clubs wouldn’t cater to people who weren’t going to buy any booze, but the punk rockers worked to get them in the door -partly because sometimes they were even too young to play the shows themselves.

The Teen Idles had been the immediate predecessor to Minor Threat and were also the beginning of Dischord Records. “After nearly a year of playing together, the Teen Idles decided to break up. It was late summer 1980 and the only thing left to sort out was what to do with the money in the band fund. All of the money we had earned from our 35 concerts went into a cigar box in my room, and we had managed to save over $600. Instead of splitting it up, the band decided to release a record.”

It was clear from the beginning that no label would be interested in putting out a Teen Idles “record, particularly since we were no longer a band, so we decided to do it ourselves. We turned to our friend Skip Groff, who ran a record shop called Yesterday and Today. He had put out a number of small releases on his own label, Limp Records, and was able to explain the basic mechanics of putting out a record. We came up with a name for our label, started designing the cover, and sent off the tapes to a pressing plant. Finally, in December 1980, the Teen Idles' "Minor Disturbance" E.P. (an eight-song 7") was released. This was Dischord Records #1.”

The label is still around today, continuing to document a wide range of independent music, and show that a good living can be made in music without compromising values. The independent integrity Dischord showed came full force later during Fugazi, when all aspects of the way the band operated punk as fuck.

The community around Minor Threat also helped plant a root for the tradition of the punk house, in this case Dischord House, where Mackaye still lives. It seems like things got tense inside that house where the band practiced and worked on records together.

In a time when it is sometimes preferable to blunt the senses the straight edge life, and the work ethic that went with it, has many advantages. Living in a punk house with people who aren’t druggies and drunks may be preferable to waking up next to someone you have to give Narcan to in order to revive them. Keeping the mind sober can also  help keep things clean when interpersonal conflicts do happen, and won’t exacerbate the flames with paranoia, as can easily happen when you are sped up or cruising along on cocaine.

​Minor Threat’s intense energy was hard to sustain over the long term as the band was worn down from the inside with conflict, and worn down from the outside as the scene, with so much unity at first underwent quick transformations.

The next phase of this journey takes us to the dark heart of Minneapolis where the raw melodic sounds of Hüsker Dü were carved from the frostbitten ice. The members of the band met in 1978 at Cheapo Records where Grant Hart worked as a clerk and Bob Mould liked to go hang out. Greg Norton had applied to the same job as Hart, and had met in the process, and though Hart was hired first, he eventually got on as well. Cheapo Records brought the trio together, and their love of records brought them to life where they exhibited the power of three. 

Outside the Twin Cities, Minneapolis was like many other places in the Midwest: a world of farmers. Those formers had been high on the hog in the 1970s. Things took a downward slump in the 1980s under Reagan’s aegis. The farms weren’t exporting as much and the costs of running a farm were growing higher, leading to bankruptcies and abandonment of land. For those in agriculture it was a rough time, almost akin to the times in the Great Depression. No one was doing things for them, they had to do it themselves, but not before sending their first single to local independent label Twin/Tone Records, home of The Replacements. That first single was rejected and so began a friendly crosstown rivalry between the different hometown punk bands.
Hüsker Dü got Reflex Records up and running with help from supporter, friend and fellow record store denizen Terry Katzman. The venture was begun with a loan of $2,000 dollars from Grant Hart’s mom. Out came their first 7” record in 1981 with the songs “Statues” and “Amusement.”

Reflex Records was short lived but during its day it helped solidify the regional scene by issuing several compilations and albums by other locals such Rifle Sport, Man Sized Action, Otto’s Chemical Lounge and Articles of Faith. Being dedicated to the artistic life of the people in your own area was an important component of punk philosophy. At the same time, working with bands from other parts of the country increased the analog network effect. They practiced this when they released the Minutemen EP Tour-Spiel was released in 1985.

In the meantime the Minutemen had released the Hüsker’s first full length album, and live show recording, Land Speed Record on their own label New Alliance, after they’d been introduced to each other by Black Flag. Things got done because people cooperated and networked. Their immediate follow Everything Falls Apart was their debut studio album and was released on their own label. By this time there were already some tensions in the band and the title track sums up the precarious nature of friendships and, could by extension be seen in the way that the center does not hold. “I got nothing to do / You got nothing to say / Everything is so fucked up / I guess it's natural that way.”

Meanwhile another track from the album, “In a Free Land,” rings still true today. “Why bother spending time / Reading up on things? / Everybody's an authority / In a free land / In a free land / Government authorize education / (Don't mean a thing) / They'll teach you what they want you to think / (Don't mean a thing) / Saturation, stars and stripes / (Don't mean a thing) / The only freedom worth fighting for is for what you think / (It don't mean a thing)”

These days there are even more authorities because the internet. But they were doing this before the internet and their album was self released as were many of the punk records back in the day.
 
Hüsker Dü was a linchpin in taking the energy of punk to build a new sound musically, and give birth to a wider range of styles that would be cloaked under the bailiwick “college rock” and “alternative rock” in the years to come. They did it first through getting fired up by the energy of hardcore, an impeccable work ethic, and the time they put into mining their imaginations for new grooves that melded melody with speed and intensity. (Speed as a drug also seemed to help in this regard.) Being from Minneapolis. I think the harsh winters in their city gave them some extra grit to keep going with their music when others might have caved in.
Before their masterpiece Zen Arcade came out in 1984, Hart spent a summer taking LSD with a bunch of runaway kids and drifters, while Mould was getting amped up on speed and keeping the edge off with alcohol. The mixture of a psychedelic mindset and an adrenalized mind in the two songwriters combined as they carved away and sculpted the block of their music to reveal its true form.  Not everyone was interested in clean living.

Ian Mackaye came from a stable home. His parents were civil servants and had been involved in the civil rights movement and the liberal end of the Episcopal church. Not all of the kids in the punk scene were so lucky and as supported as he was, and encouraged by their parents. This isn’t a comment about the parents of the members of Hüsker Dü as it is about the many punk kids who found themselves in the position of running away from home.
​
The quintessential masterpiece of music that came from Hüsker Dü was a concept album called Zen Arcade that explored the world of those kids who had been left behind by their Boomer parents -the world of Gen X runaways. The members of the band spent a lot of time hanging out with such kids. This was common throughout the punk scene. The underground was a haven for those who were escaping from bad situations at home, or just escaping period. No one else had made an entire concept album out of the issue. Yet no one had yet made a concept album in the idiom of punk, and the carved out that place for others to follow, proving it wasn’t just the gambit of prog rockers. The closest thing that comes to mind is the “Girl on the Run” single from Honey Bane, which dealt with the subject from the British side.It did follow the 1983 release of the Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, that also dealt with the theme of runaways.

​Zen Arcade came out in 1984. That was the same year the documentary film on homeless kids in Seattle, Streetwise came out. I remember watching Streetwise when my cousins moved into a new house and Betamax player with a bunch of Betamax videos was left behind. The film was among them. I’d already been shown Suburbia by older punks, but this one hit home in a different way, because it was all factual. Memories of the movie haunted me for years. Zen Arcade is just as haunting, though I didn’t hear the whole thing until years later.    

The album was written and rehearsed in an abandoned church in St. Paul that became a haven for runaways, musicians, and drifters. There record wasn’t a punk rock answer to Go Ask Alice, though. Heroin, speed and alcohol all overshadowed the band. Whether these chemicals were a help or a hindrance, I won’t deign to say, but they did seem to lend themselves to their inscrutable Dionysiac fury. Their struggle with these issues is highly relatable. Though some of us may have aspired to straight edge, as I did when I was first turned on to hardcore, it wasn’t much longer before I was turned on to the kaleidoscope of LSD and had close friends and family go down the scary path of heroin, meth addiction and homelessness. Their story is as important as those who refused and managed to live a clean life. Zen Arcade tells one of these familiar American stories.

The story follows a young man who is escaping a terrible home situation. Bob Mould lays it down on the song “On Broken Home, Broken Heart” where he sings about what is going on beneath the pretty exterior. “I looked at your house / I look through your window, deep inside, how you gonna cry yourself to sleep tonight? / Your parents fight / You don't know who's wrong or right, have to cry yourself to sleep tonight.” The theme turns up on the “Never Talking to You Again” which has the sound of proto folk-punk with its acoustic guitar strumming and accompaniment limited to backing vocals.

“Pink turns to Blue” tells another story all too familiar, and even more so with deadlier street drugs like fentanyl that have reduced the OD threshold. “No more rope and too much dope, she's lying on the bed/Angels pacing, gently placing roses 'round her head,” An unfortunate end to so many runaway kids escaping the abuses of Reagan era fundamentalism.

One wrong decision is all it takes to start on the road of getting hooked, and while I very much admire the ethos Mackaye and crew have built, and think it is important as ever, compassion for those who took the needle in their arms is just as important. During the long emergency we are even now caught up in, the hardcore pharmaceutical end of the drug problem is likely to revert to simpler and preindustrial means of making drugs from plants like poppies and the cocoa leaf. Yet there will still be teens running away from home, and dens where drugs are imbibed, just like in Victorian times.

In the deindustrial times to come, there will be plenty of reasons as ever to leave home, and get wasted. What new stories of homelessness, squatting and runaway teenagers will there be to tell? 

.:. .:. .:.
​
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. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

The words bohemian and discipline aren’t two that most people normally think of as going together. One might think that self-restraint and good habits such as regular exercise and keeping a clean house get tossed out the window when embarking on the path of the bohemian. Yet it takes quite a bit of dedication to live an unconventional lifestyle. For those who have devoted themselves to literature, music and art, and to the making of it, discipline is a must for showing up on days when the muse seems distant and far away. The rigors of being downwardly mobile, of toiling away in obscurity, of working dead end or menial day and night jobs while focusing on the great work during so-called leisure hours requires devotion and willpower. And while the development of these internal powers may be free, they do not come without effort.

Discipline is necessary if one wishes to escape the laziness of the mass minded. Regular practice is required if indifference to the approval or disapproval of others is sought. To be insulated from the arrows of the philistines and illiterati care must be taken.

Resisting the simulacra of experience in favor of real experience takes guts. Doing things which no one gives permission to do means living a life that will often be outside the comfort zone.

The Do It Yourself ethic that is central to Universalist Bohemianism and Down Home Punk runs on a fuel of willpower for making things, whether it’s a cupcake side hustle, a regionally touring band, or a print or skateboard shop in your basement. Nothing gets done until you do it. No robots, no managers.

In the age of Big Spectacle perhaps the biggest use of discipline comes in the form of cutting oneself off from the deluge of streaming entertainment in favor of the drip feed of slow culture. Savoring unmediated experiences instead of bingeing on things both pointless and forgettable. The discipline to turn away from distractions and focus on things that are important to you as an individual cannot be underestimated. The only way to be sequestered outside of massive influence and the constant pull of attention is to erect an unassailable garrison around the mind and life.   

If you work as an artist discipline is a trait the muses find appealing. If they see you showing up to do your work, and you finish your work, you, as a vessel, will be refilled.

Discipline was the keyword at the collective house where Sun Ra lived with his arkestra of musicians. What to some may sound like improvised chaos, is actually the work of painstaking precision. The hours and hours of daily practice spent making music, then talking music, thinking music, back to making music, brief pause to eat, sleep irrelevant (Ra was insomniac) back to the discipline. It come from the planet Saturn after all, this honing of the blade of life at the grindstone of work.
 
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), self described as anarchist in their organization, also had a focus on discipline. This was necessary for their other purpose of inciting individuals to get a life, live out their true desires, the ones that came from deep inside, the ones that weren’t inserted by television, church or state. Discipline and will become a foundation for living on your own terms outside ov control. As Genesis Breyer P. Orridge noted, “Thee Temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.”

The word discipline is also related to the word disciple. A disciple is a person who learns from another. The disciple of bohemianism isn’t out to coerce others into acting, following and believing everything they do and say, but is someone who can act as a model and inspiration. By becoming a peer leader, they show to other humans what can be done and accomplished, given time and discipline. Those thus inspired may carry on certain aspects of a teachers work, but in true Aquarian spirit, make use of it for their own personal goals and ends, all the while further developing and braiding the cord of initiation further into the future.

As it is written in Thee Psychick Bible, “We are not seeking followers, we are seeking collaborators.” I take that as meaning those who can share and exchange vision and relate to one another on the level of imagination. This is why the artists, punk rockers, decadents, writers, poets, painters and visionaries of the past have always been an inspiration. How did they achieve what they did? Even if they are dead we can still collaborate with them in terems of learning from the echoes of their minds they left in their finished works.

A SENSE OF DISCIPLINE

There is also the matter of the word discipline as a distinct area of study. In this case there are many Bohemian Disciplines. Three main aspects of bohemian life come to mind: the discipline of reading, the discipline of listening, and the discipline of seeing. First we can think of these in their relationship to literature, music and art, major areas of engagement for the bohemian. Then we can think of the use of our senses as disciplines. The same way a body craves exercise, so to do the use of our senses in less automatic ways.

During the process of deindustrialization unfolding around us, we as humans will also have to be less automatic, run less on autopilot, and bring more intentionality into our actions.
Disciplines around the five senses can also be explored within the sphere of universalist bohemianism by developing an appreciation for good food (while elegance and refinement are all well and good, one need not be a snob about it -all the finest cuisines developed out of peasant recipes, and todays foodies would do well to remember that).

Food always involves scent, but perfumes, cologne, aromatic soaps and incense are all ways to indulge the scent of smell. 

Touch may be indulged in with your loved ones from a simple caress, to massage and lovemaking.
The idea in all of these things is to approach them with more reflection and thought -an act that requires discipline.

Developing these senses is one way towards developing an artful life.

On another level we can think of writing, painting, drawing, and music making as disciplines that all add to the quality of life when creating beauty and wonder as gifts to share with others.

Secession is available in everyday life when we secede from every day thinking. But to stay the course requires work. Supreme aloofness to the viewpoints of everyone else cannot be achieved in a day. 

There is an aspect of bohemianism that has long taught of better living through chemistry. Rimbaud was just one in a long line who recommended the derangement of the senses as a path leading to the palace of wisdom.

It’s hard to maintain balance on the road of excess.

The Decadent Movement of the 1890s has a part to play in this matter. They saw correctly that the decline (décadence) of the Roman Empire came from the erosion of its culture, which came on the heels of the moral rot that had set in and taken hold. So it is now with the decline of western civilization which the Decadent Movement foresaw with the advent of industrial society. Charles Baudelaire adopted the term decadence in counterpoise to what he saw as the banality of progress, which he rejected.

Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress."
Baudelaire’s work represented “a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.” Yet Baudelaire also had a reputation for “dissoloute” habits, frequent visits to prostitutes and brothels, a taste for hashish, laudanum and drunkenness.

This aspect may be considered, from an astrological point of view, as one of the influences of Neptune and the way it promotes both drug culture and fantasy literature.

​Yet the Decadent movement, for all its excess, saw the shape of things to come. They were early trumpeters of what can now be seen as the perversity of Western society in a state that has moved from rigor mortis to terminal decay. Distancing oneself from the man in the crowd, creating an isolation around your mind, is necessary in order to not succumb to the various forces at work in the undertow and unweaving of culture.
Joséphin Péladan thought that art and living as an aesthetic ascetic was a suitable replacement for the pleasures of decadent society. Painting, music and literature all offered a way out from what we can now call the spectacle of mass entertainment. The movement from decadent decadence to aesthetic asceticism offers a mode of discipline for the aspiring bohemian monastic.

​The primary goal of the Universalist Bohemian life is to live life as a work of art. This brings the aesthetic vision to the fore in every aspect of what a person does. This vision was epitomized by the Decadent writer, artists, and mage Josephin Péladan.  He called it kaloprosopia. Everything about a person could be subject to kaloprosopia, and it could be worked on for the entirety of a persons life, so they consciously apply themselves to living up to their full potential. It was also a way of bringing the aesthetic out of just the studio, concert hall, gallery, reading room and salons and into the world. The person who practices kaloprosopia takes exquisite care over the refinement of their personality, over their choice of clothes -but not just as a dandy or person with a personal sense of fashion, but also their very presence as a person. Kaloprosopia can get down to the minutiae of an individuals  actions: the way they move their hands when conversing, certain types of gestures, the way they walk, word choice and way of speaking. All of it is an avenue for embodiment of a singular, individualist and individualized aesthetic vision.

“The law of kaloprosopia is to manifest the exteriorization of the character one claims for oneself.” Péladan wrote in the L’art idéaliste et mystique.

The notion of developing presence pertains to the inner esoteric arts though it is not limited to them. We have all known certain people who possess and transmit a certain and particular quality that seems to be effortless on their part -an aspect of their very nature. In my mind part of this comes from the way they may be connected to things outside and beyond them, to the inner planes and their openness to experience people, places and things.

Developing this presence is a goal of the Universalist Bohemian and was likewise an aim for Péladan. Another way to look at it is by using the term self-creation.

This idea may seem narcissistic. The idea of self-creation may conjure ideas of so-called influencers. It may all seem like mere ornamentation. However, for Péladan, who had seen his country transformed by industrialism, who had seen capitalism weaken the wills of his countrymen with an increasing commercialization of all aspects of life, it was a form of resistance to an externally imposed aesthetic viewpoint and allowed the true inner aesthetic of a person to emerge.

The word kaloprosopia itself is derived from the Greek καλός (beautiful) and πρόσωπον (person). As the digital age is in the process of disintegrating and passing us by, the chance to let go of collective identities and craft a personal one is as essential as ever. Doing so without the benefit of posting images and status updates to a corporate controlled social media company will give people the opportunity to start relishing our in-person interactions.

​For Péladan the object of life was “to remake the soul that God has given him: to sculpt it into work of art.” Another way to look at it is as self-reinvention. In times of change and crisis, whether personal, familial or on the broader scale of the collective, individuals can choose to pivot, change their tactics with tact, and instead of reacting to situations, pick a measured and proper response in line with a newer set of values, information, or just based on a hunch, rolling with intuition. 

For his predecessor Baudelaire there was a “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties … a kind of cult of the self.”

In America the idea of creating a cult of self has found even more fertile soil than on the embattled fields of ailing Europe. Here, individuality is an ethos and a creed. It came out of the land and seeped into the minds of the people who wrote the Constitution, and Bill of Rights and continues in our long conversation about what those things mean today. Personal freedom and the rights of the individual have long been championed by Americans of a variety of political persuasions.

When McGovCorp gets too big for its britches and the rights of the individual get trampled upon, ferment and fire start burning beneath the brows of the American imagination.

At such a time the cultivation of a beautiful person, and being a beautiful person becomes all the more relevant for what it can offer the greater good.

The alternative of self-creation lends itself to a more ugly world. When we refuse to choose for ourselves how we ought to live and be, others can step in and choose for us. The choices they make, as can be seen throughout history, are not always in the best interest of the person or the greater society. Particularly in a time of social decay and disintegration the appeal of mass mindedness and letting others do your thinking for you is great, because then you can abrogate any sense of responsibility for what happens in your life and what is seen going on around you in the world.

The tact of deliberately cultivating your presence, your appearance, and living an artful life, will in turn open up even further choices for freedom and opportunities to follow the path of your destiny. Modern society would keep us crippled in the mind. Self-confidence ebbs, depression and anxiety rue the day. Schools and workplaces mete out derogatory training so that the lowest common denominator is upheld. Rather than giving them tools and practices to help lift themselves up, sleeping dogs are let to lie, the willing are whipped, and the ability to thrive and live an excellent life for all is diminished.

To build the discipline it is necessary to get to work. The late artist Monte Cazazza, who gave us the term “industrial music for industrial people” for his friends in Throbbing Gristle has some fine words on the work it takes make an alternative culture, knowing that our own inner resistance was a big part of what needs to be overcome. In the Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook he tells us:

​“I think that psychology is half the battle. And probably anyone can do almost anything. It's just their lack ofself-confidence, and derogatory training, that stops them. And it's a really sad fact that makes the world a much less interesting place. It's humanity's loss that this is still continuing to happen. In some ways I've been lucky, just because of certain chances. But I also capitalized on those chances when they occurred, and tried to recognize them-but actually I've decided that I didn't capitalize on them enough! You should be doing work because you want to do it. You think it's valuable and worth doing. And maybe it's just part of your personality. That's a really involved and very complicated question, and I don't really think there is one total answer; there's all these different types of answers that enter into it. And as Mark Pauline would say, ‘All work is dirty.’ It's all dirty work no matter what it is, and that's the way it is. If people don't realize that, and they are going to get into these forms of activity, they should stay out of them if they don't expect that. And they should not interfere in our work-because it's hard enough to do already. No one is writing you big checks-all along, what you've done is because you wanted to do it.”

​That’s the kind of work that takes discipline.

.:. .:. .:.

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 universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

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. ​

​ "Your body belongs to you, and in the appropriate ritual, it has been given to you to explore the full dimensions of your being." -Fakir Musafar

Putting a sharp pointy object straight through the skin is a time honored practice among us humans. Piercings have long been a way we have sought to make ourselves beautiful. Wearing jewelry through the skin has been a part of our aesthetics of adornment dating back thousands of years.
​
But why do we pierce? The answer to this question has varied depending on the time and era. Some people have gotten piercings for magical, mystical and spiritual purposes; for others it is just a way of expressing themselves. Some get piercings for sexual pleasure, such as on the nipples or genitalia. There was a time in America when getting your ear pierced as a man, was seen as an act of outright rebellion. Getting another part of the body punctured was beyond the beyond of proper decorum, for either sex. Yet in other societies being on the receiving end of a needle for a piercing is a way to conform to the norms of the culture, be a part of the group, and fit in. It is much the same with those who belong to certain subcultures, such as punk, where a piercing can signify affiliation.
Piercings started to regain prominence in western society starting in the seventies, and underpinning their revival was a strong current of magic.

ENTER THE FAKIR

The late Fakir Musafar was often called the father of the modern primitive movement, for his pioneering work in body piercing, modification, ritual and teaching. Fakir was born on August 10, 1930 as Roland Loomis on what was then the Sissiton Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota, a baby of the Great Depression. There wasn’t a lot going on in Aberdeen, where he grew up, and by 1943, at age thirteen, he was a bored teenager, looking for something to do while the world was at war. He felt different, and knew there must be something different to discover out there in the wide world; something other than what was presented to him by straight-laced society.

Loomis took to haunting the school library, in search of anything strange. In one of the libraries dusty and forgotten corners he found what he was looking for in some old issues of National Geographic Magazine. His imagination became captivated by the pictures and articles he saw of people from other times and places. There was one issue in particular, from the 1920’s, where he saw photographs of people in India who had pierced their flesh with hooks and hung suspended from a cross arm high up in the air. The thirteen year old wondered why they were doing this. He also wondered what it felt like. The imagery called to him, touched something deep inside his soul.

A couple of years later Loomis learned that some Native American tribes also practiced piercing their flesh so they could either hang suspended from it, or be pulled for long hours against the these piercings in a ritual known as the Sun Dance. This set off an aha! moment for Loomis. The tribes who practiced these rites had been those of the Plains Indians, many of whom lived in South Dakota, his birthplace. These ceremonies had last taken place some fifty years before he was born.

There are a number of commonalities across tribal cultures that held the Sun Dance. A sacred fire, smoking and praying with the sacred pipe, and fasting from food and water were all typical. The songs and dances used were passed down over many generations. Traditional drums and drumming accompanied the song and dance, the latter of which was seen as an arduous spiritual test. Some Sun Dances involved a ceremonial piercing of the skin, a further test of bravery and physical endurance. The pain and blood were seen as part of the sacrifice involved in the ceremony, that was used for the benefit of the tribe. Some dances involved going around a pole that the men were attached to by a piece of rawhide pierced through the skin of their chest.

He also learned about the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan people of North Dakota. It was a four-day ceremony performed every year during the summer that retold their creation story. Like the Sun Dance, the Okipa involved dancing inside a lodge filled with their sacred objects, while men prayed, fasted and sought visions. The younger men demonstrated their bravery by being pierced with wooden skewers pushed the skin of their chests, and backs. These men were hung by ropes from beams in the lodge or from trees, while their legs were weighed down from other skewers sent through their thighs and calves. Crying was seen as cowardice. Those who could withstand these intense sensations the best went on to become leaders within the community.

Loomis started hunting out the places where the Sun Dance and Okipa ceremonies had taken place, and went to visit them on his bike. He found they had left behind a psychic residue and that this residue seeped into his own life as he absorbed the energies from the places where the Lakota, Arikira and Sissiton peoples had pierced their flesh, sometimes in rites where they hung from a tree. Loomis got to know some of the trees, as some were still there, holding memory on the living land. This became a tremendous inspiration to the young man.
​
He was so inspired by these discoveries he had to try piercing himself. He even felt like he had done these things before -perhaps in a past life. He claims his first experience of these past lives came to him at age four. His later anthropological studies gave confirmation to his feelings. So he started modifying his body. Loomis did his first permanent body piercing, on his penis, at age fourteen, conducted his first mini Sun Dance ritual and had an out-of-body experience as the result at age seventeen, and his first self-made tattoo at age nineteen. At first it was a private thing, and he kept it private, kept it secret for thirty odd years before he went public. 

While he pursued the inner calling of exploring the outer body his destiny had born him into, he also racked up some impressive skills inside the confines of the culture at large. He worked for the U.S. Army during the Korean War between 1952 and 1954, where he was an Instructor in Demolitions and Explosives. He taught ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray’s. Loomis picked up a B.S.E in electrical engineering from the Northern State University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, the city he’d moved to at age 25. His creative abilities as a writer helped him in his work in executive positions as an ad man in San Francisco. He also operated his own advertising agency in Silicon Valley for a spell.

Yet there was also isolation and shame around the things he was doing in secret, and those came from fear. Fear, that if he let people in his interests and practices, he would be deemed crazy, institutionalized, locked up and the key thrown away. Through his extensive research into other cultures, and long talks with native elders, he had learned that his interest wasn’t something that should be considered a sickness, a perversion or a mutilation of the body, but a practice that could lead into what some traditions called a “state of grace.” Rituals of piercing could be used as a way to access different modes of consciousness.
​
Loomis eventually came out of the closet as piercing freak, a process that started when he met Doug Malloy in 1972, an eccentric millionaire, and ally who proved to be the alloy that bound the disparate elements of the underground piercing scene together and brought them up to the surface.

AN ECCENTRIC ALLOY

Malloy was a man who led a double life. His first life was as Richard Simonton, an aficionado of organ music, steamboats, a family man and a businessman who worked for the Muzak corporation, selling their piped in sounds to corporations in California. The side of him that was Simonton led a fascinating life in his own right, but I don’t have space to get into that aspect of his personality in this context. Simonton tended to keep his fly zipped anyway with regard to his penchant for piercing his penis, except in sympathetic company, or when he wrote about the subject as Doug Malloy. His double life was also exemplified by his bisexuality.

Of his many interests, Malloy had made a study of the New Thought movement, even going so far as to meet Ernest Holmes, author of The Science of Mind, in 1932. His interest in metaphysical and spiritual topics prompted him to traveled extensively in India and the Philippines where he explored Eastern thought-ways. His mind had always been bent towards the unusual and different. Adorning his body with bits of metal poking through the flesh wasn’t so weird. At some point he started getting pierced.

In 1975 Malloy’s fictional autobiography titled Diary of a Piercing Freak came out, released by a publisher who specialized in fetish material. It was later republished in softcover as The Art of Pierced Penises and Decorative Tattoos. Malloy had also started to cultivate a network of like minded individuals. These included Roland Loomis, Jim Ward, Sailor Sid Diller and the Londonite tattooist Alan Oversby, better known by his alias Mr. Sebastian.

Malloy had also organized the Tattoo & Piercing group (T&P) of ten to fourteen people or so who would meet once a month for a “show and tell.” Malloy had seen some photos of the experiments Loomis was doing with his body that dated back to 1944, and invited him to be a part of T&P.  This group expanded the practice of piercing and tattooing as the individuals gathered would later help each-other execute further body modifications.  Together they developed a lexicon around body piercing, what each type of piercings was called, and what the best practices and tools were to do them.
​
Jim Ward, the other prong in the trifecta that catapulted the practice of piercing to what it is today in America, was a close friend of Malloy’s and co-founder of the T&P gatherings.

WARDEN OF THE BARBELL

In the course of his long time wandering, Doug Malloy had made a visit to Germany where meet Horst Streckenbach, better known as Tattoo Samy. Samy had been born in 1925 and got his first tattoo at the ripe old age of ten. By 1959 the rubble had stopped bouncing from the second world war and Samy opened a tattoo shop in Aschaffenburg. Later moved he moved it to the bigger burg of Frankfurt in 1964. There, one of Samy’s students was a guy named Manfred “Tattoo” Kohrs. Together they worked on developing some new styles of piercing jewelry, namely, the barbell. In time, Samy started to make trips to America, and on these visit’s he would come to LA to visit Malloy, who in turn introduced him to Ward and others in the T&P circle.

Ward was born in 1941 in Western Oklahoma, moved to Colorado at age elven, and by the time he was 26, was in New York city where he joined a gay S&M biker group, the New York Motorbike Club. That’s where he got on the nipple piercing tip, and started studying how to make jewelry. Ward stated, "The first barbells I recall came from Germany… On one of his [Samy’s] first visits he showed us the barbell studs that he used in some piercings. They were internally threaded, a feature that made so much sense that I immediately set out to recreate them for my own customers."

From his own studies, and from Samy’s innovations, Ward began to put his spin onto the piercing jewelry he was creating, including the fixed bead ring design. Meanwhile Malloy had encouraged Ward to start a business for piercing people and gave him the funds to do so. Ward ran this business at first ran privately, out of his own home starting in 1975. He dubbed his studio the Gauntlet. Malloy drew upon his contacts to help Ward build a clientele. Ward the placed ads for the Gauntlet in underground gay and fetish publications. 
​
His business started to boom. 

BODY MODIFIERS UNITED

Next up on Malloy’s masterplan for modifying the body of the American republic was to host an International Tattoo Convention, in Reno, Nevada. He did this with the help of tattooists Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy, and invited both Loomis and Ward to participate in the convention and show their piercings to the public. From this fixed point, 1977 on the timeline, piercings began to take off in tandem with tattooing.

Malloy asked Roland Loomis to demonstrate the various practices he had begun to adopt from other cultures, such as laying on a bed of nails or bed of swords for the convention. Malloy didn’t think the name Loomis was memorable, and he encouraged him to change his name for the event so as to receive more publicity. Loomis had revered the 12th century Sufi saint whose name was Fakir Musafar. This saint had also practiced piercing himself as a way to get closer to the divine. Loomis adopted the name for himself and it stuck.

His namesake was a mystic from Meshed, Persia (now Iran) who lived for sixteen years with six daggers embedded in his chest and back. He also had six horseshoes he kept suspended from twelve permanent piercings in his arms and shoulders. He believed, as did the man who took his name, that unseen worlds can be accessed through the body. From the unseen worlds the very source of being can be found. The stories around the original Musafar speak of how he was ridiculed and thought of as strange. He felt his message was going unheard and these rejections caused him to die of heartbreak.

At the convention Loomis “came out” as body piercer and started to go by his adopted name. Fakir Musafar became the mystical and magical pioneer around these practices in modern times laying out a metaphysical and cross-cultural groundwork for body modification. Meanwhile, Jim Ward, bolstered by the success of his private practice, took The Gauntlet public in 1978, and laid the framework for the commercial success of piercing with its first business.

All of this was synergerzied by the networking and business acumen and can-do spirit of Doug Malloy. Together these three exerted a lasting influence on the American body. As Musafar, Ward, and Malloy continued their crusade, they each also contributed further metaphysical, theoretical, and practical material to the growing scene. Malloy wrote the pamphlet Body & Genital Piercing in Brief, which continued the process of getting stories into circulation about the origins of various piercings, especially those relating to private parts. In 1977 Jim Ward started publishing Piercing Fans International Quarterly, which featured contributions from both Malloy and Musafar, as well as the coterie of metal clad pierceniks who had begun coming out of the shadows.
​
Fakir Musafar continued to develop the ritual dimensions around piercing and other more extreme forms of body modification, transforming himself in the process into a contemporary shaman and father of the modern primitive movement. Along the way he racked up some impressive experiences, within the body, and while hanging from hooks, in the planes beyond out of body.  

​

​We humans have been tinkering on ourselves from the get go. We have made tools to manipulate our environment as well tools to modify our bodies. Since we first donned clothes, we have looked for ways to use our coverings as expressions of individuality on the one hand, and kinship with our families, tribes, extended clans and culture on the other. These adornments extend to jewelry and piercings, and tattoos. Just as rings, bracelets and necklaces may be given to mark a stage of life or commemorate an event, so too may a permanent tattoo be used to mark a stage of life or transition in time. Examples of tattoos, piercings and body modification go back deep into ancient times of our human record. 
 
Many types of body modification are done by people without giving it a second thought, that they are doing something to their body, it is so natural and ingrained in the culture. Hair styling and dying in a salon by older suburban women is one example, as is the daily ritual of putting on makeup. To shave or not to shave, that is another question of expression. Painting nails, or even bothering to clip them are others. Expensive surgeries for breast implants and tummy tucks, and a quick nose job for leading ladies and men, not to mention teeth whitening, are all examples of what may be considered acceptable forms of body modification in a materialist minded America intent on keeping up appearances. Many contemporary life saving surgical procedures wouldn’t be possible without some extent of body modification.
 
Though there are many ways to modify the body, in the context of this article I’ll be writing mostly of those that were taken up in the punk community under the broader rubric and pan-subculturalism of “body modification” as relating to scarification, tatoos, piercings, implants, body suspension and some other techniques borrowed from traditional cultures and carnie culture. This first section deals strictly with tattoos.

​MY BODY, MY TEMPLE
 
Those raised in a Judaeo-Christian worldview, and who have stuck with the tradition, tend to view the body as a temple. This view seems to originate from a Bible verse attributed to Paul (who to be fair, could be as brilliant spiritually as he was off base, in my opinion.) He wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (NIV). Yet treating the body with the respect due to a deity isn’t only found in Christianity. We can see echoes of this principle at work in Hinduism, with their highly evolved systems of yoga and Ayurveda, and other religions.
 
It was the latter-day punk of the kitchen, Anthony Bourdain who said “your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
 
I think both viewpoints are valid, and it is useful with any binary such as this to try and triangulate away from the extremes. What about a temple inside an amusement park, or an amusement park inside of a temple? The carnival happens before the holy season of Lent. Festivals are held on high and holy feast days, and I can see the return of the festival where the passions of the body are indulged in periodically as a necessary steam valve in our future world with more limited resources. As in the period of festival, the sacred and profane can both exist within the collective body. So too in the way we adorn and modify our individual bodies can partake of the sacred, the profane, and points in between, as it has throughout history. 

​AN ELDER FORM OF ART
 
Tattoos can rightly be considered one of the eldest forms of art. Our evidence for this goes way back. An Egyptian mummified priestess of Hathor known as Amunet was one of humanities oldest examples of a tattooed person for some time. She was doing her thing during the Middle Kingdom Period (2160–1994 BCE) and hung out with some other priestesses who got tattooed as part of a ritualistic process. In this time, tattoos were reserved for women, and may have been part of magical rites regarding fertility and rejuvenation surrounding the worship of Hathor. Egyptain menfolk started getting ink during the 3rd and 4th dynasties when the pyramids were being built. The Egyptians were influencers, being the center of civilization for some thirty odd centuries, and from there the practice of tattooing spread outwards to other cultures who came to trade and learn, going deeper into Africa, and over into Asia and Europe.
 
Egyptians weren’t the first to make permanent marks on their body and the priestesses of Hathor had to give up their OG status when Ötzi the Iceman was discovered in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Ötzi was dated to between 3350 and 3105 BCE. The tattoos found along the preserved skin of Ötzi were line and dot patterns. Researchers noted how the placement of these lines and dots were along acupuncture points. This points to the idea that he was not just tattooed for adornment, but also for spiritual purposes.  Ötzi had a total of 61 tattoos. In 2018 tattoos were again found on Egyptian mummies using infrared that were of the same vintage as Ötzi. Numerous other ancient mummified bodies from other parts of the world have also been found with body modifications. This shows how widespread the practice was in early times.
 
The nomadic Ainu people brought tattooing into Japan around 2000 BCE. On those islands the magical aspect of the practice seems to have been downplayed in favor of simply having and enjoying them for their aesthetic beauty. Over the centuries the Japanese developed a tradition of tattooing that involved large pictures over big swathes of the body, creating what is now called a “sleeve.” This tradition was adopted by the Yakuza between 1600 and 1800 and still continues to this day. Known as irezumi in Japan, traditional tattooist will still "hand-poke" there work using ink is inserted beneath the skin with the traditional tools of sharpened needles made of bamboo or steel. Getting tatted up this way can take years to complete.
 
Starting between 1200 and 400 B.C. tattooing migrated from China and Russia to the Picts and also into the Celtic countries of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The Celts liked the color blue and used a substance known as woad to imprint symbols from their culture onto their body. These included spirals, labyrinths, and knotwork. 
 
Native American tribes were also invested in the practice of tattooing and associating it with spiritual power. They would prick themselves with sticks and needles and then rub soot and dyes into the open sores to form their pictures. Often these pictures were made in commemoration of battles they had fought or they were of animal powers whose strengths and abilities they wished to emulate, or of traditional symbols whose magic they wished to imbue into their life.
 
At the same time tattoos were flourishing in North America they were also flourishing across the Polynesian islands. The word tattoo itself comes from “tatu” as used by Polynesians and picked up by Captain James Cook -who also helped spread the tattooing habit to sailors, and bring it back into practice among that group after his visit to the islands in 1769. The Polynesians were all about the spiritual power of a tattoo, and they believed that it made the invisible powers a person had in the spiritual world visible on their body. A rich tradition of tattooing was carried out by these peoples, and it often involved rites of passage between father and son.
 
It was in Tahiti aboard the Endeavour, in July 1769, that Cook first noted his observations about the indigenous body modification and is the first recorded use of the word tattoo to refer to the permanent marking of the skin.
 
The Captain’s log notes how, "Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible... this method of Tattowing I shall now describe...As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing of their Buttocks, it is performed but once in their Lifetimes."
 
Sir Joseph Banks, the Science Officer and Expedition Botanist aboard the Endeavour was taken with the idea of getting a tattoo himself. Banks had first made his bones on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. Then he signed up for Captain James Cook's first great voyage that lasted between 1768–1771 where he visited Brazil, Tahiti, and then spent six months in New Zealand and Australia. He came back with a tattoo upon him and heaps of fame for his voyage and work. A number of rank-and-file seamen and sailors came back with tattoos from their voyages, and this class of people began to adopt the practice further, helping to reintroduce tats to Europe, where they spread into other branches of military men, and into the criminal underworld.
 
Yet tattoos had already made some headway back in Europe among the aristocracy by another route. In 1862 Albert, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, had a Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm on a visit to the Holy Land. Christian tattoo traditions can be traced back to the Holy Land, to Egypt and the Coptic tradition all the way back to the 6th and 7th century. The practice was passed on to a variety of Eastern communities including the Armenian, Ethiopian, Syriac and Maronite Churches. It is a standard practice within todays Coptic Church to get a Christian tattoo and show it as proof of faith in order to enter one of their churches. At the time of the Crusades this tradition was passed on Europeans who had come to the Holy Land where they received tattoos as part of their pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem.
 
These pilgrimage tattoos were one of the routes the practice went into the European aristocracy. Edward the VII got one after his pilgrimage, and George the V followed suit. King Frederick IX of Denmark, the King of Romania, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Alexander of Yugoslavia and even Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, were all tatted up, often with elaborate Royal Coat of Arms and Family Crests. 

​LE FREAK
 
Meanwhile in America Martin Hildebrandt learned the art of tattooing while in the U.S. Navy, which he had joined in the 1840s. During the Civil War he fought with Union soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, and often traveled from camp to camp tattooing his fellow enlisted men. The Civil War veteran, Wilbur F. Hinman, wrote that it was common for regiments to have tattooists among them who inked their fellows with "flags, muskets, cannons, sabers and an infinite variety of patriotic emblems and warlike and grotesque devices." It was also common for the soldiers to have their names and initials marked permanently on their body to serve as a way of identification should they be killed in action.
 
After his service Hildebrandt opened up a shop in New York City where he made tattooing his full-time job. His parlor was in a tavern on Oak Street in Manhattan, and opened between 1870 and 1872 and is most likely the first shop of its kind in America. Using vermilion and India ink, he tattooed people in black and red from across the spectrum of society. Nora Hildebrandt, who became his common law wife, also became a tattooed lady inked up by Old Martin. In 1885 she left to go on tour with a sideshow and he got arrested for disorderly conduct and was taken to the Insane Asylum where he died in 1890. But don’t blame that on his profession.
 
The carnie culture surrounding circuses, sideshows, and dime stores, with their freaks and tattooed ladies were another medium through which the practice of getting marked up permanently for life started to spread throughout the United States.
 
Becoming a tattooed lady was good work at the time, especially for those who wanted to have a bit more clink in their pocket and live life on their own terms. Dime stores, freakshows, and dime museums would often put ads in the paper looking for tattooed ladies, because they had become popular attractions. In the years that closed out the 19th century and opened up the 20th, it didn’t cost a fortune to get a tattoo, and if it was used as a way to make money, could be an investment. A full body job could be completed in less than two months and only set a gal back thirty buckaroos. Yet, if a tattooed lady was popular, she could rake in a Benjamin or two a week, give or take a little. Teachers in 1900 only made about seven dollars a week with room and board. Secretarial jobs might only earn about twenty-two dollars a week. Getting tatted up and showing it off to an eager public made sense, especially for those who wanted to leave behind traditional sex roles.
 
 
By the 1940s however, the craze surrounding tattoos had again abated for a time. People who had them were often considered outcasts, less-than’s, and, of course, freaks. Yet bikers, motor cycle clubs and other greaser types kept the tradition alive in the 1950s alongside the usual suspects of sailors, military men, and underworld inhabitants.
 
The cool factor started to creep back into the practice in the 1960s when Janis Joplin and other musicians, such as those in the Grateful Dead, started getting tatted up. Starting in the 1970s, tattoos started to move further into the mainstream and to people from all walks of life. Part of this had to do with the proliferation of subcultures where tattooing was seen as an acceptable form of self-expression. Freedom loving hippies, nihilistic punks, rappers and hip-hoppers and transgressive industrial music heads were all making modifications to their bodies.
 
In the 1980s tattooing got a magical boost from Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY). TOPY was an artistically-oriented occult and magic group that emerged from the industrial music subculture surrounding Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. One dimension of it was that it was like a "fan club" for Psychic TV except instead of creating followers their intention was to create leaders and get people doing their own individual creative work. Active between between 1981 and the early 1990s, the people involved were also heavily interested in piercing, body modification, tattoos and what I have taken to calling "gender blending". They did a lot of magical and occult work around these practices -and with their added influence, body piercing and tattoos went from something being done by counterculture freaks to being de rigeur. Their magic worked. The same could be true of some of their ideas about gender. TOPY is another example of a fringe group doing magic that went on to have a wider influence on the culture at large. They often included ritual elements as part of their piercing and tattooing works aligning themselves with the retro cutting edge of modern primitivism.

​CIVILIZED PRIMITIVES
 
Scholar Arnold Rubin’s had organized a symposium called "Art of the Body" at the University of California in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. He invited colleagues from the fields of anthropology, sociology, art history, archaeology, and folklore to come and share their work. There was a geographical and historical focus on body modifications from Europe and Euro- America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Basin (Asia, Oceania, and Native America). In 1988 he edited a book, “Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body” that showcased body art as a potent aesthetic and spiritual component of human behavior. The book started to circulate among the cognoscenti of the counterculture.
 
In Rubin’s book the term “Tattoo Renaissance” had been put forth to denote the 20th century moment where technology had changed tattooing practice. The tattooist went from just doing a job, often repeating the premade designs known as flash, to becoming a “Tattoo Artist” who made their own designs and fulfilled the dreams of their patrons, with a strong influence coming from Japan and Polynesian traditions of full body tattoos and sleeves.
 
Another book, "Modern Primitives: an Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual" put out by V. Vale and Re/Search publication came out a year later in 1989. V. Vale and Re/Search were stalwarts in the punk and industrial music scenes, where his zines and books of interviews always made a big splash. It ended up being another big influencer on many people in the underground music world and continued the push in this direction that was started by TOPY.  A lot of the focus of the book was on genital piercings, which had started to be practiced again in the west by the aristocracy with the story that Prince Albert had pierced his dick. The topic of piercing will be covered in detail later, so hold those thoughts.
 
By the late 90s tattooing had become pervasive among members of Generation X who had grown up in these subcultures, and the practice was passed on to their children, the millennials and zoomers for whom the question of the legitimacy around getting a tattoo is foreign.
 
In the 21st century tattoos, while in many ways, always personal, have become even more about a person’s identity. People get these most personalized forms of art to embody something about their inner life. At the same time, getting a tattoo has become much more common, so where before it had been a signifier of uniqueness and transgression, now it is seen as just another avenue for possible self expression. Where in the past just having a tattoo was enough to be a personal marker, now having a tattoo isn’t seen as such a big deal, especially among zoomers and millenials, who are more likely to have been tattooed at least once. These markings take on extreme personal significance, and may relate to family motifs, and names of loved ones, to mother-daughter tatoos (as abound in my immediate family) to those resonate with some particular core of their being.
 
As we move deeper into the Aquarian Age it will be interesting to see how Americans mark up their bodies as continued evidence of their individualism.

.:. .:. .:. 
​Read the other articles in the DOWN HOME PUNK series.

1973 marked a turning point for the future trajectory of Dial House and those who made a home there. It all began when Phillip Russell arrived. Even by crazy freewheeling hippie standards, he was an eccentric. Russell went by a number of aliases, his most famous being Wally Hope. According to Nigel Ayers the use of the name ‘Wally’ by hippies “had come from an early seventies festival in-joke, when the call `Wally!' and `Where's Wally?' would go round at nightfall. It may have been the name of a lost sound engineer at the first Glastonbury festival, or a lost dog at the 1969 Isle of Wight festival. There have been other suggestions for its origins, but it was a regular shout at almost any festival event.”[i]
From what I’ve read of the man it seems that one thing Phillip Russell had was a heart full of hope, for the earth and its people. It thus seems fitting he called himself Wally Hope. Just as his heart was filled and brimming, so his head was full of ideas.
​
One of his ideas was to take back the Stonehenge monument for the people of Britain, and he planned to do it by staging a Free Festival there. Wally thought Dial House would be the perfect HQ for his nascent operation. By that time Penny Rimbaud and Wally had become fast friends and Rimbaud was quickly recruited for the project, leading him to become a co-founder of the fest.  Despite significant backlash from the authorities, whom the hippies and proto punks thumbed their noses at, Wally’s inspiration and dedication led to the first Stonehenge Free Festival in 1974.

In The Last of the Hippies, Rimbaud’s book about Russell and the events surrounding the first few years of the festival he writes of his motivation in helping Russell see his vision come to be. “We shared Phil’s disgust with ‘straight’ society, a society that puts more value on property than people, that respects wealth more than it does wisdom. We supported his vision of a world where people took back from the state what the state had stolen from the people. Squatting as a political statement has its roots in that way of thought. Why should we have to pay for what is rightfully ours? Whose world is this? Maybe squatting Stonehenge wasn’t such a bad idea.”

That first year the gathering was small, and the gathered multi-subcultural tribe lived in an improvised fort around the ancient monument. It was essentially a megalithic squat. Expecting to be turned out by the System, the squatters had all previously agreed that when the authorities tried to remove them they would only answer to the name Wally. The Department of the Environment who were the keepers of Stonehenge issued the ‘wallies’ what amounted to an eviction notice: they were told to clear off and keep off. When the London High Courts tried to bring the people who had squatted at Stonehenge to trial they were faced with the absurdity of the names on the summons papers: Willy Wally, Sid Wally, Phil Wally and more. The newspapers had a heyday with the trials, and in a mercurial manner helped to spread word of what had happened, priming the pump and setting things into motion for another, bigger,  Stonehenge Free Festival the next year. The Wallies lost the court trial against them but as Wally Hope said, they had really “won” the day.

An article from the August 13, 1974 Times has it thus, “A strange hippie cult calling themselves 'Wallies' claim God told them to camp at Stonehenge. The Wallies of Wiltshire turned up in force at the High Court today. There was Kris Wally, Alan Wally, Fritz Wally, Sir Walter Wally, Wally Egypt and a few other wandering Wallys. The sober calm of the High Court was shattered as the Wallies of Stonehenge sought justice. A lady Wally called Egypt with bare feet and bells on her ankles blew soap bubbles in the rarefied legal air and knelt to meditate. Sir Walter Wally wore a theatrical Elizabethan doublet with blue jeans and spoke of peace and equality and hot dogs. Kevin Wally chain-smoked through a grotesque mask and gave the victory sign to embarrassed pin-striped lawyers. And tartan-blanketed Kris Wally – ‘My mates built Stonehenge’ - climbed a lamp-post in the Strand outside the Law Courts and stopped bemused tourists in their tracks.

The Wallies (motto `Everyone's a Wally: Everyday's a Sun Day') - made the pilgrimage to the High Court to defend what was their squatter right to camp on Stonehenge. . . the Department of the Environment is bringing an action in the High Court to evict the Wallies from the meadow, a quarter of a mile from the sarsen circle of standing stones, which is held by the National Trust on behalf of the nation. The document, delivered by the Department to the camp is a masterpiece of po-faced humour, addressed to ‘one known as Arthur Wally, another known as Philip Wally, another known as Ron Wally and four others each known as Wally’.

For instance, paragraph seven begins resoundingly: ‘There were four male adults in the tent and I asked each one in turn his name. Each replied `I'm Wally’'. There are a soft core of about two dozen, peace-loving, sun worshipping Wallies - including Wally Woof the mongrel dog. Hitch-hikers thumbing their way through Wiltshire from Israel, North America, France, Germany and Scotland have swollen their numbers. Egypt Wally wouldn't say exactly where she was from - only that she was born 12,870 years ago in the cosmic sun and had a certain affinity with white negative. Last night they were squatting on the grass and meditating on the news.”


[i] See: WHERE'S WALLY? a personal account of a multiple-use-name entanglement
by Nigel Ayers https://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/netnews/wally.html Nigel Ayers was a regular attendee at the Stonehenge Free Festival. He later went on to found the influential, multiple-genre band, Nocturnal Emissions. Nigel’s explorations of Britain’s sacred and mythic landscape, and megalithic sites, can see and heard throughout his body of work. 

If the druid hippie punks were the winners in the eyes of the public, the forces and people at play within the State were sore from the egg thrown on their face by the media. Someone had to be taught a lesson.  

In 1975 preparations for the next iteration of the Festival began and the counterculture rallied around the cause. Word of mouth spread it around the underground and handbills and flyers had been printed up in the Dial House studio for further dissemination. Things were shaping up for it to be a success. In May before the second festival was to be launched Russel went off on a jaunt to Cornwall to rest for a spell in his tepee before it began. He left in good spirits and high health. These activities weren’t going unnoticed by the State and the people involved in them unwatched.

Only a few days later he had gotten arrested, sectioned and incarcerated in the psyche ward for possession of three tabs of LSD. It just so happened that the police mounted a raid on a squat he had been staying in for the night. The cops claimed they were looking for an army deserter. Wally somewhat fit the description of “the deserter” because he had taken to wearing an eclectic mixture of middle-eastern military uniforms and Scottish tartans. When they searched his coat they found the contraband substance and nabbed him. Of course no one had really been trailing him, no one knew who it really was: the guy who’d made the British courts look like fools when prosecuting the hippies who had staged the Stonehenge coup. Upon his arrest Wally was refused bail, kept in prison, given no access to phone or the ability to write letters to his friends. His father was dead and his sister and mother had cut ties with him.

Held against his will in a psychiatric hospital, no one in Dial House saw him until a month later when they finally learned of his predicament. When they did manage to visit him he was a changed man. He had lost weight, was nervous and hesitant in his speech, and was always on the lookout for authorities. After their first visit they attempted to secure his release looking first to do so in a way that was legal. When they hit the blockades set in place by the System they hatched an escape plan but the psychiatric drugs Wally was being fed and injected with had taken a toll on all aspects of his health. To execute their plan would have caused him more damage. Rimbaud and the other plotters weren’t sure if he could physically and psychologically cope with an escape that would place him under further strain and demands. So they had to let it go, and leave he was, even though their hearts were tortured by this decision. 

Meanwhile the second Stonehenge festival went on whilst the visionary who had instigated it was suffering the side effects of modecate injections. This time thousands of people had turned up for it, whereas the first year estimates were in the realm of a few hundred to five hundred attendees. This time the authorities were powerless to stop the gathering.

Eventually Wally Hope was let go, but the prescription drug treatment the authorities had forced him to take while on the inside had taken their toll. He was in a bad way, incapacitated, zombie zonked on government sanctioned psych meds. Three weeks later he was dead. The official verdict was suicide from sleeping pills, but Rimbaud disputed this, and delved into his own investigation of the matter over the next year. Later he wrote about his friend and the case and concluded that Russel had been assassinated by the state.[i]

Other’s aren’t quite so sure and see his death as existing more in the grey area of the acid casualty. Certainly the System pumping him full of drugs had done him no good. It is hard to know how his own previous and pre-prison profligate experimentation with psychedelics precipitated his decline.  

Nigel Ayers who attended the festival in the years ’74, ‘75, ’76 witnessed the buildup of the legend surrounding Wally Hope. He writes of him, “I last saw Russell, seeming rather subdued, in 1975, at the Watchfield Free Festival.[ii] A few weeks later I saw a report in the local paper that he had died in mysterious circumstances. The next year at the Stonehenge festival, a whisper went round that someone had turned up with the ashes from Wally's cremation. At midday, within the sarsen circle, Sid Rawle said a few mystical words over a small wooden box and a bunch of us scattered Wally's mortal remains over the stones. I took a handful of ashes out to sprinkle on the Heel stone, and as I did so, a breeze blew up and I got a bit of Wally in my eye.”

[i] Footnote: All of this is detailed in Rimbaud’s book The Last of the Hippies: an Hysterical Romance. It was first published in 1982 in conjunction with the Crass record Christ: The Album.
[ii] This would have been shortly after his release from psychiatric confinement.

Punks weren’t the first subculture to cram a bunch of bodies into a house to share chores, living expenses and cut costs while working on projects they loved and do things they needed to do to survive. While various quasi-communal living arrangements have been enjoyed down the centuries in various forms, we only have to travel back in time to the late 1930’s and early 40’s to see the dream of a shared house established among the first nerds of science fiction fandom. Yes, I’m talking about Slan Shacks.

But what the heck is a Slan Shack anyway? The name Slan came from the novel of the same name by A.E. van Vogt, first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940 and later published as a hardcover by Arkham House in 1946.[i] In the story Slans are super intelligent evolved humans in possession of psychic abilities, a high degree of stamina, strength, speed and “nerves of steel”. Named after their alleged creator, Samuel Lann, when a Slan gets ill or injured they go into an automatic healing trance until their powers are recovered.

SF heads came up with the slogan “Fans are Slans” after Vogt’s book came out as a way of expressing their perceived superiority, greater intelligence and imaginative ability over non-science fiction readers, so called “mundanes”.  Though some considered this to be elitist, others just thought it was a natural reaction against the derogatory way science fiction and its fans were often treated by those who thought the pulps were trash literature. Later, when groups of fans and aspiring SF writers started living together as a way to share expenses, the homes were named Slan Shacks.

 According to the science fiction Fancyclopedia its “a tongue-in-cheek reference to Deglerism, which came to mean any household with two or more unrelated fans (or, provided three or more fans were involved, could include married couples).” The Fancyclopedia goes on to say, “Although many early New York fans, attempting to economize while seeking a pro career, shared apartments in the Big Apple, the first Slan Shack so dubbed came into being in late 1943 in Battle Creek, Michigan; it lasted only two years, breaking up in September 1945 when its occupants moved to California, but gave its name to the practice. The best known fans of the ‘original’ Slan Shack included E. E. Evans, Walt Liebscher, Jack Wiedenbeck and Al & Abby Lu Ashley.”[ii]

The Slan Shack or the idea of it if not the name, had actually been around a bit earlier than this, since 1938. One such group was the Galactic Roomers, a pun from the name of SF club the Galactic Roamers based in Michigan and centered around the work of writer E. E. “Doc” Smith. The idea was basically the same as a punk house, a place where science fiction fans could share the costs and loads of living, bum around and off each other, store their collections of books and pulp magazines, and decorate the place as they pleased. Other shacks group up out of fandom as well and these included, the Flat in London, England, then the Futurian House and in 1943 the Slan Shack itself. The name stuck for these dens of high geekdom.

The punk movement evolved out of and in retaliation to the hippie subculture, and the punk house is similar to the crash pads of the 1960’s. Andy Warhol’s Factory was a foundational precursor and model for the punk house as it developed in New York City.  Across the pond in Essex the Dial House formed in the late 60’s later to become the birthplace and home of the band Crass. I consider Dial House even more than the Factory to be one of the foundational templates of the punk house. It still exists today. The Positive Force house in Arlington, Virginia served as a locus for the Washington D.C. hardcore and straight edge scene of the mid-80’s. The alternative art and collaborative space ABC No Rio grew out of the squatter scene taking place in New York’s Lower East. Taking a detailed look at each of these places will give insights into what has been done, and what is possible. Let’s start with Dial House.
​

[i] Slan by A.E. van Vogt, 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan

[ii] See Fancyclopedia 3: http://fancyclopedia.org/slan-shack

Though the punk house is especially suited for urban areas, especially when groups of individuals take over an abandoned building or spaces to homestead, the principal may also be applied to a home on a piece of property in the country. The rambling farm cottage that became Dial House was originally built in the 16th century. Set on the idyllic land of Epping Forest in south-west Essex, England, one could easily imagine it as a haven for hippies and others in the back to earth crowd. But punks? Dial house was launched in 1967 and had been heavily influenced by the hippie subculture. In the book Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage described punk as bricolage, combing and mixing and blending together elements from all the previous youth culture in the industrialized West going back to WWII, and as he says, it was all “stuck together with safety pins.”[i] Various philosophies and artistic styles that could more broadly be described as bohemian were all collaged together by the nascent punk rockers. Anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor was taken and glued to something that had been dumpster dived from somewhere else.

Dial House was an alembic for this yeasty form of cultural fermentation and a variety of influences were baked into its foundation when they first started launching artistic spores out into the world in 1967. The building itself was the former home of Primrose McConnell, a tenant farmer and the author of The Agricultural Notebook (1883), a standard reference work for the European farming industry. By the late 60s the property had sat derelict, its gardens overgrown with brambles, and was ripe to be taken over by some starving artists who needed a place to set up shop.

It began with resident Penny “Lapsang” Rimbaud. Penny is a writer, artist, philosopher, musician and jazz aficionado who at the time was working as a lecturer in an art school. Two other teachers joined him on the property and they started working on making improvements, making the cottage livable and the land workable. They were able to sublet the property from an adjacent farm with minimal rent due to the amount of sweat equity they were putting in to make a perfect domicile for the wayward. 

By 1970 Dial House had become something of a bohemian salon. Creative thinkers of various stripes were attracted by the atmosphere Rimbaud and his cohorts had started to create. Seeing the possibilities afforded by low rent and collaboration Penny decided to quit his job in order to expand on the further potentials for developing a self-sufficient lifestyle free from the time constraints the cramping day job. He also wanted the place to be a free space open to anyone and everyone. Rimbaud said that Dial House would operate with an “open door, open heart” policy. To that end all the locks were removed from all of the doors. Anyone who wants to drop in and stay may do so, and is welcomed, though they are encouraged to help out with the chores.

Penny writes of his motivations, “I was fortunate enough to have found a large country house at very low rent, and felt I wanted to share my luck. I had wanted to create a place where people could get together to work and live in a creative atmosphere rather than the stifling, inward looking family environments in which most of us had been brought up. Within weeks of opening the doors, people started turning up out of nowhere. Pretty soon we were a functioning community.  

            … I had opened up the house to all-comers at a time when many others were doing the same. The so-called ‘Commune Movement’ was the natural result of people like myself wishing to create lives of cooperation, understanding and sharing. Individual housing is one of the most obvious causes for the desperate shortage of homes. Communal living is a practical solution to the problem. If we could learn to share our homes, maybe we could learn to share our world. That is the first step towards a state of sanity.”[ii]

The visual artist, print maker and skilled gardener Gee Vaucher soon joined the household to become its most long-term resident besides Rimbaud himself. The ground floor of Dial House transformed into a shared studio space while the upper rooms were reserved for accommodations. Later a couple of trailers were added to the grounds to accommodate the constant influx of visitors. At this point the house became an ever-shifting interzone populated by artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers who spent their time working on projects and helping to run the house and garden. The garden itself was run on organic principles, guided by Vaucher’s green thumb and intuition about plants. Under her guidance they were also able to set up a cottage industry producing small batch herbal remedies. The place was beginning to develop its own home economy.

With all of the life force bubbling up in the garden, and the creative passions of the visitors and long term residents stewing in the studio, it wasn’t long before new collaborative projects were created. Vaucher and Rimbaud had already been working together as members of the Stanford Rivers Quartet, where they explored the relationship between sound and imagery. The group found its inspiration from the Bauhaus art school, jazz and classical composers such as Lucio Berio and Edgar Varese.[iii]

In 1971 the Stanford Rivers Quartet expanded into an ensemble that sometimes consisted of up to a dozen players and changed their name to Exit. Even more artists and filmmakers got involved to put together “happenings" as was the spirit of the day, and these spawned into circus like proportions. The operational strategy of Exit was guerilla. Unannounced they would turn up at venues to play their music. How this fared for the audience, I’m not sure, but it was a strategy for getting their material out into the world without relying on traditional booking methods.

Around this time Dial House members became involved with various festivals including ICES 72.  Exit played at the fest and several related events were held at the House itself. Vaucher, Rimbaud and the other residents proved critical to its success and organization, producing and printing flyers in their print room, and helping the founder Harvey Matusow with the programming. One of the connections they made via ICES was with filmmaker Anthony McCall with whom they would continue to work. The print shop at Dial House became an integral part of their home economy and out of it was born Exitstencil Press.

A collective home with a print shop is potentially a viable way to earn an income, or at least print the kind of things you would like to view and read yourself and to circulate within the subculture. Other homespun efforts may be more or less viable as part of the home economy. Enterprising punks and science fiction freaks will find a way to get it done.

[i] Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage, Viking, New York, 2007

[ii] The Last of the Hippies: an Hysterical Romance by Penny Rimbaud, PM Press, 2015.

[iii] The Story of Crass by George Berger, PM Press, 2009.

If you live in a city you’ve seen the specter of homelessness.
Unless you are totally tuned out, indifferent and clueless, you probably understand that the chain of events that has led a person or a family to life on the streets has not been in their complete control. The rise and fall of the wheel of fortune, the ebb and flow of the tides of fate can be both boon and bane. It is not up to us to judge how people end up in the circumstances they inhabit. It will probably also never be up to us influence how they react and respond to the hand they have been dealt. Yet within each hand of cards life has given a person, there are certain plays and arrangements which can be made to make the most of a situation.

For the increasing homeless population of the world there is an opportunity to be found in something else industrial society has so carelessly discarded: buildings and home. Chances are, if you live in a city you have seen abandoned buildings boarded up somewhere (or everywhere), with knee high weeds surrounding the yard. Maybe you’ve even snuck into one of these empty houses, looking for ghosts, or as a dare or a cheap thrill, or perhaps just because you like exploring the ruins society has littered around us. The banks may see these empty homes as liabilities. In the eye of a green wizard, or anyone who doesn’t like to see things go to waste, these houses are resources.

Environmentalists have long taught the practice of the three R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Occupying an abandoned home is a way to do all three. It also seems like an obvious solution to the housing crisis in America. It’s quite unfortunate that obvious solutions aren’t always embraced by the System. They would rather seek some baroque way, involving lots of forms and red tape, to keep their fingers in the pie. Meanwhile space is wasted and homes left unoccupied suffer from the lack of care and grow sick with decay. Urban planners have a word for that and they call it ‘blight’.

Anyone who takes off the blinders provided by the infotainment industrial complex can see the sickness and decay at work, despite the new shopping centers being built next to the new shoddy suburbs planted on top of old uprooted trees. The world is awash with refugees, migrants, folks who have been displaced, folks who have been discarded from the official narrative in way or another. Where do they all go? There is a strong possibility that many of them will become squatters. It is quite fortunate that they don’t have to wait for permission to find a place where they can take shelter, make a life, make a home.

In his 2004 book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Robert Neuwirth reported on his visits to cities Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul. At the time of his writing it was estimated that there were roughly 1 billion squatters around the world, and that by 2030 that number would double to 2 billion. The squatters he reported on lived in all manner of conditions including shantytowns, favelas, shacks, and other improvised structures. His study was isolated to third and second world countries. It can be surmised that as the U.S. and other industrialized first world nations descend the staircase of catabolic collapse, the number of squatters and squatter neighborhoods in large “first world” cities will begin to rise.

Squatting is a response to circumstance and need and both existed in Berlin after WWII. By the end of the war it had endured 363 bombing raids, each one chipping away buildings that had been built in the 19th century. When the city was divided into two during the Cold War, new buildings were erected on both sides of the wall. These were called neubauten. These soulless, modern, purely functional buildings sat amidst others in serious states of disrepair.

The population of Berlin had also been sharply reduced by the war. Before WWII it had housed five million. In its aftermath, there were only three million. The vacant buildings left behind went on to become the squat-homes of a generation of young Germans deeply steeped in the counterculture, a post-war generation who rejected the values of their elders who had been complicit with the holocaust. Young college students could live there almost for free and they “declared squatting the natural response to a city on the edge of nowhere”. These students gathered together in masses, mobilized by being in close proximity with each other in the squats. In 1968 rioting ensued.

After the riots European squatting culture blossomed in West Berlin in the 1970’s. The city was ripe for the kind of intellectual and artistic fermentation about to take place there. It had already seen so much destruction that something was bound to emerge from the ruins.

The first formal squatting communes in Berlin were organized in 1971 in Marianneplatz in Kreuzbeurg. In S. Alexander Reed’s book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, he writes, “at any moment in the late 1970’s 150 unlawfully occupied squats operated in West Berlin, mostly in or near Kreuzberg. Just south of the Spree River and separated by the wall from the East Berlin borough of Friedrichschain, Kreuzberg was an impoverished, ugly part of Berlin. Those who lived there were generally vagrants, students, or Turkish immigrants who had come to Germany for postwar work rebuilding the country. Young anarchists and socialists took over entire streets and parks in the corners of West Berlin. Any given squat would house between eight and fifty people, either living rent free or paying a low-lease, sometimes attending the Berlin State School of Fine Arts or the Technical University, but fundamentally acting on anti-establishment rage. The numbers were too great for the police to control: phone trees powered by hacked communications lines enabled these young people to assemble by the thousands within an hour. The organizational soundness of the culture afforded an artistic scene complete with cafes (the Rote Harfe was a favorite), discos and makeshift libraries. Berlin’s constantly changing cast didn’t impede the microcosm’s day-to-day life, but instead, change was built into the scene’s basic operation. Indeed, a student’s political shift or change of drug habits might mean moving from, say, Albertstrasse 86 to Weinerstrasse 25. Some squats were ideologically dogmatic; others offered non-stop partying.”

Berlin was one of the cities where industrial music originated via the band Einsturzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings). They used custom-built instruments made out of whatever metal scraps they could find laying around alongside building tools combined with standard musical instruments to make a rough punk music mixed with noise. Their early music was as harsh as the sound of modern industry, with Bargeld's vocals shouted and screamed above a din of banging and scraping metal percussion. It was the sound of civilization falling.

Yet the punks weren’t satisfied to just sit back and let life pass them by, they responded, they participated, they acted. They did something, they did anything, and it was better than doing nothing. Taking action is part of the punk mindset. As Steve Ignorant of Crass put it in a 1997 interview, “There has to be an alternative to the dole, do something creative.”

What if the large number of unemployed people in the United States got creative instead of on opioids? What if instead of passively accepting what life has doled out, people reacted with the sense of primacy and immediacy embodied by the punk movement? Something new might emerge from the ashes of our failing state.

Since the Great Recession there have been increased numbers of people in the U.S. squatting in foreclosed homes. I predict that Detroit will become the first North American city to have whole neighborhoods of squatters on par with Berlin in 1970s and the cities Robert Neuwirth visited when writing Shadow Cities. A lot of people are already squatting there. According to the Detroit Land Bank Authority, a public agency that manages the city's abandoned properties, squatters occupy more than 3,000 home, in a city where 43,000 remain vacant. These vacant homes are a cause for concern among residents. Some try to adopt abandoned houses on their block in an effort to contain the spread of blight and structural decay. If a squatter moves in and actually works to improve the property, as many do, it can be a win-win for everyone.

Some folks in Detroit go a step further and homestead the vacant buildings, using them as spaces to grow food, raise chickens, and engage in other regenerative activities. Mark Covington decided to plant a community garden on one site as a way to deter the people who were using it as an illegal dump. In 2008 he had started by working three properties and by 2018 was creatively reusing twenty-three, having gotten some help along the way from neighborhood kids and other volunteers.

Taking over abandoned land and spaces is a logical response to dire situations. It may even be preferable to government sanctioned housing projects. It may also become necessity when rich people take over neighborhoods they were formerly afraid to even visit.

In Glasgow, Scotland folks living in the neighborhood of Gorbals have also had a long struggle with poverty. In the 1970’s the situation was harrowing. The city blocks in the district were semi-derelict. Young mothers lived in rat infested tenements where rainwater pooled on the floors. The non-profit group Shelter had made strides since that time in improving the living conditions of the people but there continues to be shortage of affordable living as the process of gentrification takes over places once seen as undesirable. “…at the end of last year [2014] Scottish Labour's former housing minister warned that Scotland is facing its largest housing crisis since the end of WWII, with the potential of a shortfall of 160,000 homes by 2035.”

Detroit and Glasgow are only two examples among a plethora where blight has set in and continues to spread.

One solution to housing problems is to squat and if you’re going to squat it might as well be in style, albeit cheap, salvaged, scrounged and grungy style. Punkers already know how to live grungy on the cheap, so why not take a few tips from those who have done it intentionally, from people who have avoided the rush to collapse by living that way now?
Enter the punk house, a place where members of the punk subculture dwell together, as a way to pool resources, and cut back on their participation in the financial system. Protection and safety is another reason to band together. In places like Detroit where the entire city system is under stress, law enforcement is underfunded and understaffed. Human predators seeking human prey have been known to hunt and kill in the derelict landscape.

A punk house doesn’t have to be a squat though; it could just be a low-rent house or space. What ties one punk house to another is a shared ethos for a communal/common living space, frugal living, a DIY lifestyle, and individuals contributing to a home economy. What makes one punk house different from another are specific aesthetics and tastes of the individuals living there for genres and subgenres of music (i.e. hardcore, thrash, black metal, dub). A greater variance is the ideologies some punk houses are organized around: vegan and straight edge, for example, or carnivorous hedonistic revelers for another. Some may be anarchist, while others are apolitical with many examples along such a spectrum.

Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of the punk band Crass wrote on his motivation to found the communal style artist sanctuary Dial House, “Individual housing is one of the most obvious causes for the desperate shortage of homes. Communal living is a practical solution to the problem. If we could learn to share our homes, maybe we could learn to share our world. That is the first step towards a state of sanity.”

Living together is nothing new for most of the world. It was a simple matter of course before the Cold War and the advent of the nuclear family. Multigenerational family living arrangements were a norm. Then the bomb exploded that sanity, and the boom economics of the American empire at its peak made it possible for individuals to be able to afford to live on their own and in smaller groups. The number of multigenerational homes was in overall decline in America from 1950 to 1980 when it went from 21% to 12% of the population. Now it’s on the upswing again thanks to the hole the Great Recession ate in Americas pocketbook. In 2016 it hit a record of 64 million people, back up to 20% of the population.

Even in the age of the nuclear family blood is still thick. Those who choose the Down Home Punk option and make a go at shared living arrangements may choose to bring in their blood, but I imagine there will also be a mixture of old friends and newcomers. We live in a time when many people have abandoned their hometowns for the allure of upward mobility. From these scattered tribes new weaves of extended, blended, multigenerational families will emerge. Different folks will simmer together in the stew pot of circumstance and need.

As a family they have a better chance of taking over an empty home, retrofitting it, rehabbing it, and eventually through the rites of the squatter, taking over legal ownership of the property. In a world made harsh, and in a world made by hand, whatever legal powers of state and law remain will be happy that gardens have been planted and homes on the brink of falling apart will have been made livable again.
The time exists now for right action. The time exists now to take a step. We don’t have to wait.

Penny Rimbaud of Crass offers just a smattering of possibilities awaiting those who are willing to take action. “Quite apart from direct action, there are things that we can do within the existing social structures that will weaken those structures while at the same time helping ourselves and each other. We can open up squats and start information services for those who want to do the same. We can form housing co-ops and communes to share the responsibility of renting or even buying a property. In places where we already live, we can open the doors to others. We can form Tenant Associations with neighbours and demand and create better conditions and facilities in the area. We can form gardening groups that squat and farm disused land, or rent allotments where we can produce food for ourselves and others that is free from dangerous chemicals. We can grow medicinal herbs to cure each other’s headaches. We can create health groups where we can practice alternative medicine, like herbalism and massage that create healthy bodies and minds rather than drugged-up robots that are the results of conventional medicine. Maybe we can learn to love and respect each other’s bodies rather than fearing them. We can form free schools where knowledge can be shared rather than rules laid down. Education, rather than being State training in slavery, can become a mutual growth and true enquiry into the world around us, a place where everyone is the teacher and everyone is the pupil.”
​
Though we may face the limitations of the natural world, and stumble against obstacles of our own making, we will still be able to tap into the supply of imagination. Availing ourselves of this resource we can begin to make adjustments to the predicaments of our age. All we have to do is put in the required hard work to make those adjustments real.

[This article first appeared on the Green Wizards website: http://greenwizards.com/node/906 ]

REFERENCES:
Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World by Robert Neuwirth, Routledge, 2004.
Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by S. Alexander Reed, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Steve Ignoratnt, interviewed bySid and Zillah (Rubella Ballet): https://youtu.be/IgNToZnyslE
Families Squat In Abandoned Homes As The Housing Crisis Grips Detroit by Kate Abbey-Lambertz, huffington post article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/detroit-housing-crisis-abandoned-homes-sq..., retrieved in July and August of 2019.
For another view read: Dead bodies, wild dogs, squatters in government-owned Detroit houses by Jennifer Dixon, Detroit Free Press https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2018/07/19/squatters-detroit-land....
Furthermore there is even a book about how to get by in Detroit due to its lack of services. It’s titled DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City Without Services by Kimberley Kinder, University Of Minnesota Press, 2016.
http://www.georgiastreetcc.com/about-us
Comparing the Slums of 1970s Glasgow to the Buildings That Stand There Today by Hope Whitmore https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3bjyg9/nick-hedges-scotland-slums-288
https://www.sentinelsource.com/news/national_world/homeless-man-targeted...
The Last of the Hippies: an Hysterical Romance by Penny Rimbaud, PM Press, 2015.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/05/a-record-64-million-ame...