Skank or Die

"We Want to break down the barrier between performer and audience," Michael Vraney calmly explains as a few hundred early-arriving teenaged boys chant, "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" while pounding on the glass doors of The Beacon Theater on upper Broadway in New York City. "You'll notice the stage is as bare as we can make it. No floor monitors or cables. Just two amplifiers and two mike stands. We don't want anyone tripping on obstructions. You'll see. It does look like fighting. Sometimes we have more kids onstage than in the audience. But it's all under control."

Manager of a traveling rupture in the social fabric called the Dead Kennedys, Vraney seems an odd throwback to California mellow, except for the pallid skin and the dark circles under the eyes that have been watching the evolution of punk over the past few years. No, it isn't extinct. Sure, you watched it move from English working-class-youth movement to American fashion image, and then you lost sight of punk around 1979 as it became a small cult religion. But now this armadillo of sociomusical evolution is emerging rabid and snarling from under a rock in suburbia, much as the hippies slithered out in 1966 or so.

You don't (continued on page 190)Skank or Die(continued from page 97) believe it? Go to the mirror. If you think your hair's a little long, it's because punks have redefined the haircut. Turn on your radio. If you aren't hearing REO Speed-wagon, it's because punks broke down the door for new music (without ever actually profiting from it). Take a walk down the avenue. If the suburban window-shopping housewives are sporting fake leopard blousons and magenta hair, where do you think they got the idea? More to the point, take a good look at your girlfriend. If she looks like shit--and you don't care anymore--it's because punks created an alternative to Farrah Fawcett that even Farrah Fawcett was eventually forced into when she cut off her tresses. You saw it. You bought it. You owe it all to the punks--and you didn't even know hard core had a meaning outside of pornography.

Hard-core punk. It has its own martyr in the corpse of Sid Vicious and in several hundred thousand true believers scattered around the country. And it resembles early Christian Gnosticism in that there is no central, unchangeable Scripture. Adherents are encouraged to experience the Truth for themselves and to write their own Gospel in photocopied fan magazines--called fanzines or 'zines--or scream it over their own dissonant guitars, as opposed to accepting their Gospel on faith from a priest or Mick Jagger. While there is much disagreement over detail, this Truth seems to amount to an extreme distrust of the world the punks were born into and an intense desire to reject it before it rejects them.

This tendency to reject makes punk highly elitist but at the same time creates problems in discerning who the Chosen People are. Guys with purple Mohawks are denounced for conforming to a fashion and guys with normal hair are looked on with the same disdain that short-haired weekend hippies got in Haight-Ashbury. Which makes nobody elite. Which makes punk democratic. Easier to discern are the Unclean: heavy-metal enthusiasts, jocks (skate-boarding being the only Chosen Sport), parents, Republicans and anyone who does anything for money. Even so, punks often endorse Unclean sentiments just to be offensive to other punks. Which is what their Aesthetic of the Grotesque is about in the first place. Which is a good way to be identified as one of the Chosen. And if that's too much paradox for you, you can just fuck off.

I mean, here I am following around the Dead Kennedys, who would be the elite of the elite if punks had an elite, which they do and don't, but anyway, I'm standing here in this vortex of contempt for all civilized behavior, trying to make sense out of it for you, because you probably thought punk was just another bump on the historiograph of fads between the Nehru suit and Pia Zadora. Then again, how could you know it was alive and thrashing? Punks get very offended when normal people get offended by their offensiveness, and therefore they are one very isolated embattled minority, and therefore not many normal people are aware just how offensive they're trying to be. I concede the point. But that's still no excuse for you to expect logic.

"Did you see that episode of Quincy last week?" Vraney asks as the security guards decide that the growing horde of punks on Broadway could be bad public relations and open the doors to a riot of T-shirts: screaming mouths advising Voice Your Opinion; logos for the Multi-Death Corporation; pictures of Reagan with swastikas over the face; Magic Marker scrawls warning Wake Up or Die. "It was about some maniac who goes to a punk club to stab people with an ice pick. The whole point was 'This music kills.' With that kind of publicity, we'll probably get a few weirdos tonight, but we've had only one serious fight the whole tour. We just stopped the show and told them to quit. We are antiviolence. The whole point is getting people to think."

•

Selling T-shirts at a table in the lobby before the show, Dave--just Dave--has a serene look about the eyes, a shaved head, a small asymmetric patch of hair at the base of his skull and apparent pride in a recent two-day jail stint for writing Cancer is Macho on a subway poster of the Marlboro Man. "To the police, I was just Mr. Dead Cops," says Dave, who is lead singer for Millions of Dead Cops, one of four bands opening for the D.K.s. "They made me sit next to a guy who got arrested for attacking a 16-year-old girl with a machete and raping her on her birthday. It was a dose of cold reality--the police really are homophobic, brutal and racist--but I value the experience, because I'm singing about repression."

Such idealism I haven't heard since my former roommate burned off his eyebrows trying to make a fire bomb to protest the invasion of Cambodia. Could it be that for all the surface differences, this is just one more generation of nerds succumbing to the Angry Young Man archetype for a few years? Are these guys warmed-over hippies salted down with a little student-radical rhetoric?

"We don't want to get sucked into the consumer cycle of spending that knocked off the Sixties generation," Dave says. "We're saying, 'Look beyond your own needs.' Reagan elitists are destroying the Third World. We don't want all those people to hate us. Freedom to consume is not freedom. It's economic slavery."

Like the Dead Kennedys, Millions of Dead Cops espouse liberal-to-radical opinions when they aren't just being offensive and are distinguished from punk's nihilist center by their willingness not to reject everything (women, for example). They started out a few years ago, as the Stains, at the University of Texas, where they participated in anti-Klan and antinuke activities. "We wanted to make a radical art statement," says Dave. "We seek to promote youth pissed-offedness."

"This guy has a huge following," says a handsome, non-punk-looking boy who identifies himself as Tommy Guhn, president of the junior class at John Jay Senior High School in Katonah, New York. "All the Westchester hard-core scene is into M.D.C. I play bass for the Young Republicans, and we do his music. This guy's got the attitude. Read his lyrics. He should be a politician."

"Dave is showing us the way," concurs Raoul Duke, vocalist for the Young Republicans and a fan of Hunter Thompson's. "In Katonah, there's burnouts, jocks and hard-core. If you're hard-core, you're fucking shunned upon, man. They think we're juvenile delinquents. They don't realize we're serious."

"Fuck you!" shouts a kid with a red bandanna tied around his neck. "You don't support the bands. You're just weekend punks. If you were real punks, you'd be here every day. You're probably here just because you saw Quincy."

"We can't be here every day," says Tommy Guhn. "We still live at home."

"What does that have to do with it?" the kid spits. "You're no better than stoned-out hippies."

"We ain't stoned. We got the straight edge," says Tommy Guhn, "straight edge" being the no-drugs-or-alcohol movement within the punk scene.

"You can't do this to be different," the kid insists. "You can't do this to rebel against your parents. You have to know this is serious!"

"We are serious!" shouts the Westchester contingent.

"You aren't serious!" shouts the kid.

"We are!"

"You aren't!"

Tommy Guhn, a strapping lad, clenches his fists. "We are serious," he says.

"Yeah, well, most of these people I've never even seen before." The kid backs off. "They're shit. They're just here because they heard the Dead Kennedys were a big band. I'm here for Minor Threat, and they aren't even playing."

"Maybe we won't change anything," says Tommy Guhn, "but at least we'll make them think. You can't come to a show like this and not think."

•

In the beginning--1976--there were the Ramones for laughs and the Sex Pistols for rage. I saw them both, wrote about them a lot, thought they were great. Then Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend and overdosed on heroin. Sid had been one of the most charming guys I ever interviewed (that was before he fried his brain with drugs), and somehow the experience soured me on the romance of self-destruction. Those were the dark days of punk, in 1979. Entertainment conglomerates had figured out that it was not The Next Big Thing and, even worse, that it could not be controlled. They dropped punk completely. So did I, for that matter. But certain second-generation bands, such as the D.K.s, picked up the fallen banner and rallied the troops in a few small clubs on both coasts, creating a genuine grassroots movement among teenagers in need of music that Mom couldn't listen to. Thus isolated from compromise, punk became all speed and dissonance and fractured 16th notes with no back beat, no harmony and no whining about unrequited love. By the early Eighties, there were the Dead Kennedys for politics, Christian Death for nihilism, Black Flag for hard-core, Minor Threat for straight edge, the Anti-Nowhere League for fuckyouism (some punks consider this a heavy-metal band), the Circle Jerks for skank or die and the Butthole Surfers for God only knows, among a myriad of others who never got on the radio.

"Personally, I'm into the Dicks," says Dave, pointing to a cover story in the fanzine Maximum Rock 'N' Roll. "They're a Commie-fag band. Their lead singer is a 275-pound gay transvestite who puts raw liver in his underpants and lets it drip out so it looks like he's shitting."

Why does he do that?

"To destroy capitalism. He's a Maoist."

Dave, it turns out, really knows how to shred his vocal cords, and M.D.C. can orchestrate some major-league chaos with songs such as John Wayne Was a Nazi, Radioactive Chocolate and Corporate Deathburger. The Westchester contingent rises to the occasion with some fine stage diving, occasionally grabbing the mike and howling along with Dave, who finally exits with a nice "We are pissed off and we are here to talk about it."

Of the five bands playing tonight, only Bad Posture--notable for its seven-foot singer--is not political. "Boy, do they suck," says Duke, stomping back into the lobby. "Did you see what that guy is wearing? Pink tights. I mean, I don't want to get to know him as a human being."

"We're a drug-edge band," says 4-Way, towering vocalist of Bad Posture, taking up most of the aisle. "All our songs are about getting fucked up."

After four hours of No Thanks, Bad Posture, False Prophets and Millions of Dead Cops, one might assume that an audience would get tired. That would be to underestimate the power of skank, or slam dancing, as it is called in cities where skank still means an ugly girl with crabs. Skanking is one third pogo, one third truckin' and one third free-form flail. When 300 or 400 boys (rarely girls) with mange haircuts skank, it does look like a riot and makes for sensational television when commentators wish to bewail self-destruction among the young.

To understand its appeal, one must either do it--not recommended for adults whose bodies have begun to betray them--or remember the football or boxing of one's youth and summon up the incomparable high of getting punched in the nose. Combine that blast of adrenaline with the sheer joy of being allowed to violate anyone's personal space with impunity (sort of like mass Rolfing) and you've got enough energy to last right through puberty. Or at least through four opening acts.

The Dead Kennedys take the stage with the house lights all the way down, leaving band and audience in pitch-blackness. "What better way to celebrate your future?" Jello Biafra snarls with brutal sarcasm (his other vocal mode being righteous denunciation) as Klaus Fluoride lays down probably the most dismal bass line ever conceived outside hell. The house lights come up as D. H. Peligro (who, with his baby dreadlocks, looks like the first black to integrate the University of Mars) throttles his drums with amphetamized fury, and East Bay Ray punctures about 6000 eardrums with his power-dissonance guitar.

The fans summon up all their rite-of-passage energy, knowing that if they sit there and think, instead of skank, they will be immobilized with depression for the entire development of their secondary sexual characteristics. Personally speaking, I've already gone near comatose with guilt over squandering my life not killing Republicans. An upside-down cross shaved around his navel, Biafra seems the offspring of some unholy union between Dionysius and John Calvin, pouring out his message of doom with no escape except the skank. "A Hitler youth in a jogging suit!" he screams, leaping for the first of about 30 times onto the dancers. "Smiling face banded round his arm / Says 'Line up, you've got work to do / We need dog food for the poor.' "

"You watch!" shouts the kid with the red bandanna around his neck as a couple of his buddies dive off the 20-foot speaker towers. "If anybody falls down, they'll stop and pick him up. This isn't some Quincy bullshit."

•

It is nearly show time as small clumps of punks gather on the street outside the Lansburgh Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., on the 15th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. More of the T-shirts seem to be homemade than in New York, expressing a variety of philosophical (Socialism in The Material, Anarchy in the Intellectual), religious (Jesus Penis), economic (Have You Hugged Your Mortgage Banker Today?) and alimentary (Blow It Out Your Ass) concerns. But in attitude there seems to be a certain similarity.

"They are all naïve teenaged twats trying to offend their parents," says Jeff, vocalist for No Trend, one of three opening acts for the D.K.s (the others are Scream and Void). "They're just like hippies. What started out as a movement has become a fashion."

"We used to be into hard-core," says Chris, the No Trend bassist. "But it evolved into just another teen youth subculture with an even stricter system of social status."

"No Trend isn't part of any trend," says Jeff.

"We're anticonformist," says Chris. "We're just noise."

"Kiss Ass to Your Peer Group--that's the world's anthem," says Jeff. "These assholes are just trying to outdo one another with fashion. When they walk down the street, housewives laugh."

"What matters," says Chris, "is motives."

Jeff shudders and screams, "These people are nauseating me!" and runs into the building.

Lots of kids selling fanzines through the crowd for prices ranging from 25 cents to $1.25. Truly Needy (volume two, number two) has a heartfelt letter from a girl explaining why it might be demeaning to women to chant, "Giris are poop" at a Social Suicide concert, an interview with The French Are from Hell ("We're too heavy for Washington") and about 4,000,000 reviews. Thrillseeker (issue number two) prints NBC's address for complaints about Quincy.

No Trend hits the stage but is not entirely visible, because the promoter (a kid named Steve Plush) forgot to get spotlights and the overhead fluorescents do a better job illuminating the audience than the band. Jeff wears a ski mask and pours a can of Coke onto the front row, declaring, "You're as disgusting as your parents." His band does, indeed, play anticonformist noise, its members refusing even to conform to each other's tuning.

"Fuck you!" shouts a middle-linebacker type in a flannel shirt toward the rear.

Jeff pulls off his ski mask to reveal a face squashed by a nylon stocking tied in a topknot for a nice Genghis Khan effect. As near as I can tell, he is screaming either "We spread lies" or "We spread lice."

"You suck!" shouts the middle linebacker.

"Now you're ready for the real world!" snarls Jeff. "You're fucked up the ass!"

"You're fucked!" shouts the middle linebacker.

"I hate life," Jeff moans, leaving the crowd too confused to skank. "I wish I was dead."

"So die, motherfucker!" shouts the middle linebacker.

A short fat girl with a Mohawk and black eye make-up speaks briefly to the middle linebacker, who spits on her. She throws her beer in his face. He pushes her. Her boyfriend, the only guy in the hall bigger than the middle linebacker, punches him in the face, knocking his glasses about 20 feet across the floor. They throw headlocks on each other and roll around in the spilled beer for a while--flannel shirt versus black-leather jacket--much to the amusement of onlookers.

"He said No Trend suck," says the indignant girl. "He should have been listening. Their lyrics are deep."

"Yeah, I spit on her," says the middle linebacker later (it turns out he's a strawberry farmer from Virginia). "What are you supposed to do at a Dead Kennedys concert?"

"I'm a future dentist," says his friend, who won't identify himself by name, either. "I'm here because I totally agree with the Dead Kennedys when they sing Kill the Poor. Fucking drop the bomb on the bastards. And blow the Commies off the earth while you're at it. Ronald Reagan ought to use the Dead Kennedys in his next election campaign."

There it is: Today's youth takes responsibility for itself, and it can't figure out the irony in Kill the Poor, but what the hell?

"The Dead Kennedys are total anarchy, so you can think any way you want," says the future dentist. "Preparing for a profession has forced me to notice that people with money have all the power, so my interpretations have become more conservative."

•

Void gets halfway through its second song before a D.C. fire inspector, one T. R. Gardner, pulls the plug and rousts the promoter for not having the right permits. "Get on the P.A. and tell them the show is over," says Gardner, far to the rear of the crowd. "It's as simple as that."

"We have to play, or they'll take it out on the building," says Biafra, managing to project both reasonableness and urgency. "The promoter doesn't have enough money to make refunds. All we're concerned with is crowd safety."

"I'm concerned with life safety, sir," says Gardner. "You show me a certificate of occupancy and a crowd-capacity card or you clear the building. Most of the exit doors are locked. What do you think would happen if there was a fire?"

The D.C. punks seem to know instinctively to sit on the floor and save the threat of violence for a last resort. They are, nonetheless, very close to the last resort. The faces of the dozen or so cops change from horrified fascination with the female-punk aesthetic to barely concealed fear that their precinct is about to get thrashed. Gardner locks himself in a side room. Rumors sweep the crowd: The D.K.s never showed up; the promoter ran off with the money; a rival promoter informed on them to the fire inspector....

"This is a test," Biafra finally tells the crowd between blasts of feedback from a bass amp the band has managed to get working. "We can't lose our tempers or they'll make it impossible for us at other shows. The fire inspector says the show is over, for whatever reason. Even the police have pleaded with him. I'm sorry. We came all the way from California and we can't play."

The building's manager, a tall black man with a straw hat, motions for the microphone as the crowd boos. "We have someone negotiating with the fire marshal," he quakes. "We called him up at home and got him out of bed. We think we can work out some kind of compromise, so just be cool. Please be cool."

The crowd cheers and Biafra takes the mike back to lead them in a group sing a cappella until negotiations are complete: "If you've come to fight, get outa here," 1000 punks sing as one. "You ain't no better than the bouncers / We ain't trying to be police / When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy / Nazi punks / Nazi punks / Nazi punks--fuck off!" (The D.K.s are, in fact, later allowed to play for 40 minutes.)

•

"You've probably noticed I've kind of been avoiding you," says Jello Biafra in the parking lot of a flea-bag motel in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. It is four A.M., but Biafra's adrenaline hasn't quite filtered out of his bloodstream after a way-beyond-intense show at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Hall and a long radio interview at Brandeis University. "There is a conflict within the band and the scene as a whole about how far to take things. On the one hand, there is more meaningful thought in the lyrics of punk bands than in any other form of music right now. On the other hand, if you pander to big-business entertainment machinery--talking to the press--to get the message out there, you can wind up bringing in so many people who look on you as a zoo object that you destroy it for people who are trying to absorb what you're saying. Being portrayed as rock heroes to be worshiped would attract thousands of jocks wanting to hear songs like Too Drunk to Fuck."

Biafra grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and recalls being an extremely willful child, unable to accept anyone's word for anything once he discovered that Americans--as well as the ostensibly evil Russians--were capable of rewriting history for propaganda purposes. Still extremely willful in his opinions, he believes, among other unique ideas, that the neutron bomb was developed to kill poor people in America's inner cities. Fine points of political analysis are not, however, the message. "Our philosophy boils down to one sentence: Get people to think for themselves," says Biafra, filling the empty words of a thousand grade school principals with fresh meaning. Underneath his usual bristling paranoia, righteous creeds and occasional charm, the guy's just an American who takes his ideals seriously. "Use your own head instead of being told what to do and being used by others," he says. "We are very opinionated onstage, but we do listen to other people. If someone has a better idea, please tell us."

Well, maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't. Biafra is a great deal more admirable than likable; not the sort of guy you'd confide in unless you were damn sure he was in a good mood, lest you find your feelings in a bloody heap on the floor. It's been a flaw of the righteous throughout recorded history: unpredictable fits of temper when the world doesn't live up to their standards. Even Jesus could curse a fig tree. Whether or not Biafra, by sheer force of his righteous will power, can leave behind a few people who can think--I'd have to predict yes. What the hippies looked for in drugs and the student radicals in cant, the punks really are seeking in themselves. The first step in that direction is not being their parents--metaphorically and biologically--and if they have to shave their heads and be fools to do it, well, that takes courage. So, no, these guys aren't warmed-over hippies. They're punks, and they've learned an important lesson from history. They have learned that you, reader, and I can fuck off.

"Jocks and rednecks think anarchy means chaos and therefore give up their right to make their own rules to the police," says Biafra. "It may be that human beings are genetically incapable of real anarchy--taking responsibility for their own lives--or that we're hundreds of years away from it on a societal scale. In the meantime, our goal is to deassholeize their behavior."

A door slams at the rear of the motel, and two drunken women--one with a split lip, one with a bruised and terrified toddler--come staggering around the corner.

"Fuckin' Ramon," the one with the split lip rages as blood trickles down her neck. "I'm going to tell everyone what he did this time."

"No, no, I love him," the mother weeps. "Who will pay the rent?"

"I'm your sister. You can live with me."

"I love Ramon. What will I do? What will I do?"

The split lip turns to Biafra for justification. "He was going after the baby and I got in his way. My lip is clotting. I'm going to be scarred. Ramon did this. I'm calling the police."

Biafra and I actually call the police from an emergency phone on the street, and the split lip gets a free ride to the hospital. The mother runs back to warn Ramon, who hops the rear fence and escapes. Fearing she'll drop the kid, a cop insists on holding the baby when she returns. Unable in her drunkenness to understand that the child isn't being taken from her, the mother rends the silent night air with her screams until she is shoved into the back of the squad car and driven off to the police station for a night in the drunk tank.

"That," says Biafra, "is the saddest thing I ever saw."

"Punks get very offended when normal people get offended by their offensiveness."