PUNK ROCK REPUBLICAN

In March 1979, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Carly Simon, The Doobie Brothers, Tom Petty, and Poco played a series of huge benefit concerts organized by Musicians United For Safe Energy called ‘No Nukes’

The next year Ronald Reagan won anyway.

In 1979 those concerts about summed up FM radio. The baby boomers who’d heard Jimi Hendrix on the radio as kids were now the grown ups who programmed the stations and they weren’t about to play the Buzzcocks when they already had their Eagles. The baby boomers never were as cool as their parents.

Punk’s main hurdle was demographics. It didn’t have the numbers because it was between generations. If you were fifteen in 1977 you were too young to have been personally involved in boomer Vietnam. But you were old enough to have bought the band Generation Xs albums as they came out. That meant being too old to be part of that next generation that stole the name. Richard Hell and the Voidoids tried calling us the Blank Generation but nobody noticed.

Because punk didn’t conquer the world a myth developed that it didn’t want to. That’s ridiculous. Punk meant making it on your own terms. The Sex Pistols never put out a California soft rock single just to get airplay - and never got any. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t want to rule radio.

Another myth is punk’s anarchist philosophy. The song ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is about how stupid, lazy and egocentric anarchists are. Getting drunk and fucking with tourists while fancying themselves down with the struggle. It will be eternally hilarious that anarchists adopted the song as their anthem.

So to say that punk rock is about anarchy is to be wrong. But by necessity it was an incubator of anarchy’s cousin self-sufficiency. If punks didn’t do it themselves no one else was going to.

The major labels had signed the original wave of punks. But when their albums couldn’t break unit sales of one hundred thousand copies the labels weren’t about to sign anymore of them. So there we were all of eighteen years old in 1980 with nothing to look forward to but some brand new sexually transmitted disease called AIDS, some TV show called ‘Thirty Something’ where they were still worried about herpes and record labels on the hunt for the next Phil Collins. No future fused with no investment.

So we recorded our own records and put them out on our own labels. We booked our own tours. Started our own fanzines. In those pre-internet days Tim Yohannon’s Maximum Rock and Roll achieved global distribution and by encouraging anybody everywhere to be their own reporter for it we found out that there were punk scenes as far away as Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, and as close as suburban America. We didn’t submit applications to the National Endowment of the Arts.

If the printing press fueled the Protestant Reformation then the Xerox machine fueled punk rock.

Our demographic inadequacy bled through to everything. Punks weren’t only condemned to follow behind boomer music and popular culture but the boomer take on the world too. If you watch documentaries on the JFK assassination the entire boomer generation of news anchors were all on the scene. They all remembered exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy got shot because it was their big break. I wasn’t even two years old when it happened but I remember where I was when Sid Vicious died. Not hogging a camera.

The boomer media that turned its backs on us didn’t lecture us on how to think so much as it couldn’t imagine any other way to think. The boomer media that labeled others totalitarian had totalitarianed us into oblivion without even noticing. But the digging and thinking required to stay abreast of underground music was good practice for digging and thinking independently in that era of the Big Three Networks.

Ronald Reagan was elected president in the middle of all this. He quickly moved to deploy Pershing II and Tomahawk cruise missiles in Europe. Much more importantly he pushed for the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative derisively nick-named Star Wars. A space based missile defense system designed to make the Soviet Union’s massive advantage in nuclear warheads a moot point.

The mainstream media was up in arms. The boomers were up in arms. The peace movement was up in arms. I was still young enough that I’d never been through anything like this before. I assumed that they all knew what they were talking about. Maybe Ronald Reagan warmonger was going to bring down a nuclear Armageddon on us all.

President Reagan has never been called punk rock but he responded to his critics by calling the Soviet Union evil and joking about bombing them. He backed up his talk by fighting Cubans on the island of Grenada, arming and training the anti-communists of Nicaragua, and then daring Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

And it worked. After enduring almost ten years of criticism from the people who’d put ‘Hotel California’ into heavy rotation and gave us Abba - Ronald Reagan’s strategy prevailed and the Soviet Union collapsed. And of all the things to finally do it, it was Star Wars. The weapons system whose critics labeled Reagan a wasteful senile old fool had driven the Russians crazy. While Reagan’s warmonger America had been wasting 5.6% of its GDP on military spending the consumer paradise of the Soviet Union was investing 28% of its GDP on their vain attempt to catch up to technology that didn’t even work yet. That’s as hilarious as adopting ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as your anthem.

In the face of cold hard reality the boomer media, the left, pop culture, and even a lot of punks refused to admit Reagan was right. And they still haven’t.

I was doing everything else by myself up to that point. Why not think for myself too?