What was the deal with Quincy punx? That was something of a har-har subcultural meme in the punx community for many years. Personally, I thought the CHiPs punx were underrated. They provided way more bang for the blitheringly paranoid youthsploitation buck. Quincy punx largely kept their mayhem indoors, with the confines of their punk-rock clubs and whatnot...
But the ChiPs punx took it to the next level. The ChiPs punx being a band called Pain, who had a song about how they "dug" pain, which was effectively their anthem, if only because it seemed to be the only song they'd been able to come up with. But anyway, they played the song on some rooftop, then hurled a perfectly good guitar over the side into the traffic below, causing all sorts of multi-vehicular chaos. This is more than petty mischief, it's wanton and malicious destruction, because punx love that type of stuff. They meant it, man.
Well wudduya know, it looks like some kind soul has recently down the excavation upped some clips...
Teevee is so educational. Y'see, that right there is why the Elks Lodge Massacre had to happen. Punx got no respect for nuthin'. Which is why they merited a belated expose' on the pioneeringly sociological carousel that was the Donahue show. Philthy phucking Phil Donahue punx, ladies and gentlemen...
And now that I see this again for the first time nearly 30 years, I'm reminded that the Donahue show was shot in Chicago. But this isn't the edition I remember seeing. The one I remember seeing must've been earlier, because it wasn't as boring and it involved a buncha West Coast punx, and at one point Phil read some of the lyrics to "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," and then some woman in the audience stood up and went on an obnoxious screed about how she'd been a "flower child" in the Sixties and had tuned in, turned on & dropped out & all of that, but if one of her kids came home looking like that then she'd have to THROW THEM OUTTA THE HOUSE.*
Speaking of such, as far as moral panics were concerned, none of these media punx compared to Dragnet Hippies. Talk about fuckin' menaces to society...
Of course the "Blue Boy" episode is a cult fave, but that's just the narcotics angle. What I'm talking about is the one where Joe Friday and his sideman go up against the seditious radicals & whatnot. Like the one where Joe sits on a discussion panel with a bunch of long-haired upstarts (chaired by a hippie played by Howard Hesseman), and he's the sole representative of "the System" that everyone else on the panel wants to overthrow. Or another episode where they ended up dealing with some kid who was getting involved with some group like the Weathermen or something, and in each instance these episodes ended with a long exposition by Joe or his partner Bill Gannon where they explained to the troublemakers how they were wrong -- that America was great because it was the land of freedom, the type of freedom that allowed (say) someone like them to say whatever they wanted or believe whatever they wanted, and etc etc. Which I guess was supposed to amount some sorta ideological checkmate, with them pointing out some sorta inherent contradiction that those hippies/radicals had yet to recognize or scrutinize in their own muddle-headed thinking about freedom.
And who better to deliver the news than Jack Webb, he being the big Establishment type that he was? Plus the way he'd already proven himself as a first-rate patriot & everything...
But Dragnet appropriately enough, went off the air in 1970. And it was odd to see Jack Webb, being the big law & order sort that he was, turn up again later in the decade as the man behind Project UFO...
The show was apparently based on the files of the USAF's Project Blue Book. It followed two Air Force investigators as they traveled the country investigating various sightings and close encounters. Each episode was based on some reported sighting and the Air Force's investigation, and each episode ended the same way -- with the agents debunking the sighting, offering a thorough explanation to the witnesses what it was they actually saw and mistook for an alien spacecraft. The show was solidly pro-Federal and might as well have been called The Swamp Gas Files, and it seemed a really bizarre stretch for Jack Webb considering the more pedestrian, no-bullshit ground he'd covered previously. But when you factor the prior Commies-under-every-bed/Red Scaremongering/John Bircherite business into the equation, perhaps it wasn't such a stretch after all.
Still, not sure Jack Webb decided to choose this particular vehicle to get his pro-Establishment message across. Conspiracy theories about Roswell and Hangar 18 were still fairly marginal at the time, and wouldn't go "mainstream" until some time in the next decade. Perhaps it just fit in with more general tenor of TV and popular culture in the early-mid 1970s -- all the TV special dealing with unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, and all the stuff about psychic activity with Uri Geller bending spoons with his mind and some other guy who could project pictures of faraway places into camera telepathically, intermixed with Carlos Castaneda or Edgar Cayce type stuff about astral projection or whathaveyou. And lots of things about UFOs, especially connected to Erich von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods and the other books he cranked that all had to do with ancient astronauts and their early interventions with the Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians, and the Olmecs and Toltecs and all the other early civilizations...
Sure, it was all very Mondo Cane. Being a kid at the time, I naturally found all of this stuff absolutely fascinating. It all fit right in with an 8-year-old boy's steady diet of Marvel comics, Evel Knieval, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Thing is, my allowance (if I even had one at the time) was pretty paltry, so I'm sure I wasn't the primary demographic that all this ad-leveraged programming was targeted to. Which means that grown-ups must've eating this shit as much as I was. Dunno, maybe it had something to do with the proverbial "temper of the times" -- somehow connected with all that post-'60s "alternative spirituality" and proto-New Age hokum. Modern life having changed so much and so rapidly in the preceding years that a lot of people were flummoxed and anxious and uncertain and couldn't tell what was what anymore, and were therefore open to entertaining all kinds of ideas. All bets are off, everything's up in the air.
But as far as the Sixties were concerned, TV was also quick to remind us that there was a good reason for Joe Friday & co were keeping a close eye on those hippies...
Yeah, my parent's generation was the first generation raised on TV, and in the 1970s they entered into adulthood and took the cultural reins. Part of that meant getting out into the world and pursuing a fulfilling and self-realized life in the supposed "Me Decade," which is maybe why I was part of that first generation for whom TV was a babysitter. And add to that we were coming up the third modern generation in which the society at large was phobic about its own offspring.
But back to punx...
Skip to Nashville at the beginning of 1978, which is where me and my mom were living at the time. An early-evening local news broadcast is on the teevee, and towards the end of the report, they have an item about a newsworthy event that was taking place over in Memphis. There was some band from England playing there, a band that epitomized the "punk rock craze" that people had heard about, and some curious folks were going to check out the "punk rock group" and see what it was all about. Cut to shots of the venue, and patrons coming out of the dark to line up at the doors, all of dressed in odd misunderstood approximations of how punx were supposed to look, all of which did actually make me think of Halloween at the time. I guess the anchorpersons thought the same thing, because they grinned and shook their heads bemusedly at the end of the clip.
Turned out the unnamed "punk rock group" was the Sex Pistols, making the Memphis stop on their ill-fated American tour, and the anchors weren't going to say the name on the air...what, it being prime-time/family-viewing hours in what was more or less the Bible Belt. But at any rate, my mother turns to me and asks, "Have you heard of this punk rock thing?" She was the adult who worked at a newspaper, I was the eleven-year-old who'd been stuck in some backwoods Southern Baptist school over in the next county -- how was I supposed to have heard of any "punk rock thing"? I shook my head to the negatory. She tells me, "It's this thing where the kids take lots of drugs and beat each other up, and they stick pins and needles through their faces." She shook her head is dismay, and added, "The world has just gotten so sick."
Me being eleven years old at the time, naturally I was intrigued. So: Flagged for future reference.
But it'd be roughly another full year before I'd hear any punk-rock music proper. Late at night with some syndicated program on the radio, and the deejay played the Ramones's "Teenage Lobotomy." I was immediately seized by its energy and its brashness, and was jumping and dancing around my room before the first chorus came round. So it was my introduction to something that would factor quite heavily into my teenage years and early adulthood. Maybe the speed and the volume of the music just happened to symbiotically complement the surges of hormones that came with adolescence. Most likely, yeah. But it was more than just that. Seemed like a lot of times, even at its most willfully stupid, the music made much more sense than a lot of the bullshit around me. And yeah, the Eighties were a big decade for bullshit.** Guess it all comes down to the signal-to-noise ratio. What differentiates one from the other, how you filter them, and how the right signal/noise gets transmitted at a time when it amounts to something of significance. ***
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* Of course, all of the above is the from 1980s. Media-wise, the rate of cultural dissemination was much slower in those days. American tabloidism was incredibly slow on the uptake about what a goldmine punk would be.
** And sure, I realize that all of the above is drivel, and that it constitutes me breaking my own format. But when you're having a problem with writer's block, you gotta find a way to punch through it; so consider it a freestyling exercise. But hey, this is America (dammit) and it's my blog, so I can do whatever I want.
And in all honesty, I gotta admit...there's gotta be nothing more utterly fucking boring than writing/reading about punk rock, yknow seeing how it's become so deeply enshrined and endlessly documented & yadda. There's very little of it that I listen to anymore, that I ever feel any desire to pull out and revisit. Maybe because so much of it made sense and seemed vital within a certain context, that context being mostly aligned with the Reagan Years.
*** Meaning (I guess) that one could file all such stuff under "culture studies." Which is ultimately a pretty pointless and empty category, if you haven't had pre-req companion courses in history.
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