Having lived in Orange County for over fifteen years – gulp – it’s always been interesting to me how much influence punk had and still has here. After exploding in 1977 in the UK and New York, punk – the music, lifestyle and the aesthetic – spread around the world and has since never really seemed to lose it’s grip here in Orange County. Throughout the 1980s the OC version of punk was hardcore – fast, thrashy music sung by angry tattooed males.  Prominent bands from the OC include Agent Orange, The Adolescents, Social Distortion, Offspring and of course some of the LA bands from up the road – including X, Germs and Bad Religion – would have all had an influence and are still revered.

If I’m honest it’s not my scene. I admire the punk spirit and, although I was too young to be part of it at the time in the late 1970s, I appreciate the radical paradigm shift it initiated both musically and culturally. I like the whole DIY aesthetic and the philosophy of anyone being able to play music – just pick up an instrument and form a band (or write a zine, design clothes, start a night, create a scene). Let’s reject all that happened before – hippies, staid prog rock, rock and roll, the Beatles (‘phony Beatlmania has bitten the dust’) etc – and start afresh, ripping up the rule book. The beginning is now.  Fuck what came before. I like the Clash, The Damned and see how the Sex Pistols were very influential (although they only released one album).  But most of the rest of it? Hmm, I could take it or leave it. And some of it? I find abhorrent and annoying. Which makes me think if the central point of the punk ethos is not being set in your ways and clinging on to the past – how come you still see so many middle aged men here with lots of tattoos wearing the de rigger OC punk look of Vans shoes, white socks pulled up to their knees and long Dickies shorts, of course topped off with their favorite band t shirt and a splattering of tattoos. How punk is it to be still rocking the same look from thirty years ago?

If I see three older dudes with tattoos shouting angrily over heavily distorted two chord guitar riffs on a stage anywhere I run a mile whilst putting my fingers in my ears. Trust, me I’ve been to various venues with this going on, the clientele looking like they’d stepped out of the Roxy in London circa 1977 whilst stopping off at a hair metal gig at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset circa 1987 on the way home. Come on people, move on! I also find a lot of it musically unsophisticated with poor songwriting and an overall production aesthetic and lack of quality that means it doesn’t age well. I get it, I’m missing the point. It’s all about the ‘bad ass’ attitude – perhaps if I’d been here in the late 70s / early 80s at one of the gigs as I slammed in the mosh pit, it would have been a life changing moment for me and I would have clung onto it ever since. That’s how youth culture works – in that very influential young adult period of 16 to 22 when you first really get into music and a scene that can define you perhaps for the rest of your life.  At that age you are young, bristling and open, an impressionable blank canvas waiting to be painted on, every experience is new and intense. You only have to go to a Bauhaus, The Cure, The Specials or Adam Ant show here – as I have – to see the fans totally dedicated to the acts they first saw forty years ago.  Dressing like them, singing along word for word, looking to the stage in worship and adoration. The nostalgia circuit is a huge industry (at least it was pre-pandemic) exploiting vulnerable middle aged adults desperate to re-live their youth. It’s like with some readings of drug addiction where the first hit is always the best and every subsequent snort, injection or inhale is trying to replicate that first high.

My youthful life changing experiences were all on dance floors as I lived through the emergence of acid house and rave culture in the UK from the late 1980s through the 90s.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Much like with punk, I wasn’t interested in what came before. I didn’t want to listen to guys with guitar’s whining about just being dumped – I worshipped the DJ who was skillfully soundtracking my ecstasy induced religious experience to a futuristic Detroit techno soundtrack. I was hugging strangers and feeling an abundance of love in a room full of sweaty strangers. I was dancing all night in fields, looking at the stars, then seeing the sun rise through a chemically tinged filter that offered the promise of a future of infinite possibilities. Okay, I am getting carried away a bit as I relive the memories – all of it true and valid. I am tingling as I think about it. So that was my experience, I am sure the punk guy would also look down on it dismissively, perhaps criticizing the music for it’s repetitive simplicity. In all cases and all scenes – as with pretty much most experiences in life, you had to be there to fully get it.