I look at these old photos and see something I haven't seen in a long time, and I miss it.

I don't know if it was that the guys on stage weren't stars, or if it was that the kids in the crowd had become stars too. Probably both. Doesn't matter. What matters is we were the same. A punk show in 1980 was not an event performed by a bunch of characters on a stage and witnessed by a bunch of fans in the audience. There was no separation, no idolatry. We were all participants.

Punk changed everything.

All of this was incredibly empowering, which was especially thrilling to us, because we had not been the most empowered feeling bunch of youth. I mean, kids in general aren't empowered...when you're a kid, your entire life has been spent under the rule of various dictatorial regimes...we'd all been taught about the greatness of democracy in history class, but no teenage kid has ever participated in one: the home is a dictatorship; school is an autocracy; Church is a theocracy...all a kid has ever experienced is do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do & might-makes-right, and those of us that became punks were at the bottom of just about every societal food chain there was. There's a reason why high school football players don't concern themselves all that terribly much about fascist regimes - they are, for their brief moment, the fascist regime of their school.

The punk scene was a celebration of our fucked-upedness. In the early days, that was revolutionary. All any kid really wants is to fit in, and what we're taught at home and in school is that we've got to; that we need to become good citizens and economy-fueling consumers buying fridges and cars and records and the magazines which tell us which fridges and cars and records to buy in order to keep up with the mythical Joneses, to keep the machine rolling, and if we don't, the machine is gonna roll right over us. The main difference between the punks and the hippies is the hippies thought love was gonna change the world or some such shit. We didn't buy it. At best, we reckoned love was a marketing ploy to sell more Peter Frampton records, and at worst it was some shit Daddy said before slipping his fingers into your cooch or fondling your dick. Love was not gonna save nuthin'

Every youth movement before us - every new underground - seemed an underground of "cool" - an elitist thing - the coolest, the hippest, the most in the know - and kids wanted in desperately because that made them the coolest and the hippest too...

Punk turned that shit inside out. We were not the coolest or the hippest or the most in the know. We were the ugliest, the most fucked up, the biggest losers and rejects, and instead of trying to hide it, we were gonna make a virtue of it and shove it in your faces. All the torn up clothes held together by duct tape and safety pins, the homemade haircuts...now sold at the mall, more expensive versions in Beverly Hills - that wasn't fashion. It looked as ugly to us as it did to our parents, which was the entire point. "We're desperate, get used to it" is a lyric from an X song. That pretty much sums it up.

Not that we didn't like the attention. It was negative attention, everybody treating us like freaks, but hey, we were freaks, and we'd always been freaks. Up until punk we'd been invisible. Suddenly the disenfranchised kids that had always been viewed as a hidden disease or deformity like a too-small dick that isn't flashed around or talked about in polite society could be the festering boil smack dab in the middle of society's forehead. You couldn't help but notice us. And it was great that people were afraid of us. That was a new one.



There was something innately egalitarian about all of this.

I'm not so certain that it was actually planned that way - we were a bunch of self destructive kids exploding with a newfound sense of freedom, most of us didn't reckon we'd live to see 30. Planning was not high on the agenda. It's more like just the way it worked out.

We were tired of caste structures. We felt like we'd suffered invisibly and ignominiously at the bottom of every hierarchy we'd been part of since exiting the womb. We were enjoying the attention our outrageous behavior and appearances got us every time we stepped out on the street, and we weren't about to surrender that shit to anyone, especially not some band made up of a bunch of losers just like us, a bunch of guys on a stage openly inviting us to hate them as much as they hated themselves...and the scene was too young for there to be established "superstars" anyhow—the closest thing to that was the Sex Pistols, who had spectacularly fallen apart almost immediately. Most of the time the shows took place in dives where the stage, if there even was one, was only a foot and half high; the bands and the audience were often literally as well as figuratively one.

I'm saying this over 20 years later. I've had lots of time to process what the experience meant to me. I could probably spend the next ten years talking about the meaning of something that happened in barely a third of that time and still feel like I'm just scratching the surface. It feels to me now like history was being made, and ya know it felt like that at the time too, although I don't think any of us could've articulated just how exactly we were making history or what it was gonna be, 'cause the deal with history is that some time has gotta pass before it can become that, and anyhow a bunch of self destructive, anarchic teenage kids getting their first taste of freedom in a world they are convinced is not gonna last much longer, and even if it does, they probably won't, a bunch of kids hell bent on self negation, negating tradition, negating history, negating everything, aren't overly concerned with the legacy they're gonna leave.

I'm pretty sure that if you could've stopped me long enough to get me to talk seriously about the meaning of stuff you'd've heard words like destruction, ugly, piss, fuck, shit... but you wouldn't have heard me say "innately egalitarian".

It's obvious from the pictures, though, that I intuitively understood this even then. These aren't photos of a band on a stage taken from the passive perspective of an observer in the audience but shots of the crowd and the band together creating the event in tandem, all of 'em equal participants.



The Black Flag shots were taken at the Skyline Club in Austin. Kira Roessler is playing bass, so this has gotta be 1984. This was at the height of their national fame, yet you've gotta pick Henry out of the crowd in some of these shots; the band and audience have become that merged. It was SST night, I guess; the Meat Puppets opened the show. I recognize half the kids in the audience, including a lot of folks who were also in bands—there's Mikey Offender, who played in the Offenders and in MDC, Gibby Hayes and Teresa Nervosa from the Butthole Surfers, and while I don't see King from the Buttholes in these Black Flag shots he's in the crowd in just about all the other shows I've got on film...

It's not a selection of shots I've picked to illustrate my thesis. This is just about all I've got from that show, and from those days. I wasn't very archivally minded back then, and most of the film has been lost or destroyed. That the union of crowd and performers figures so prominently into all my film means that it wasn't just a point I wanted to make and a moment I wanted to capture, but the single point of it all, the thing that had the most meaning to me.

It's the nexus, what gave birth to the whole DIY thing that has become the ethos of all the alternative & indie stuff that's followed. It wasn't really an ethos then, but rather born out of two things: necessity and naivety. We had to, and we didn't know any better not to. We made our own clothes 'cause you couldn't buy 'em stores. We used kool aid to dye our hair because they didn't have Manic Panic. We put out our own albums because nobody else was gonna and because nobody told us it impossible, (or if they did we weren't listening). There is no doubt in my mind that every band out there would have preferred to have been on Virgin Records than do it themselves, but Virgin wasn't having us. All that crap about DIY integrity came much later.

The bands were no more important than the crowds at their shows. When Tim Kerr from the Big Boys and later Poison 13 said from the stage every show "If you don't like us go start your own band" it wasn't meant as an insult but as an exhortation. Anyone with the balls to get on a stage could be a performer, anyone with access to a Xerox machine could make a fanzine, anyone who could get their hands on a Fostex 4-track could make record...The youthful naivety that said anything is possible combined with a notion that everyone was equal combined with a fear that everything was fucked up and we didn't have time to wait combined with an aesthetic that rejected gloss and celebrated imperfection, primitiveness, and general fucked-upedness is what made DIY possible. The fact that no one else wanted us made it necessary. You needed 'em both for it to happen.

It's stuck with me ever since. All of it. My photography has remained lo-fi. I still rail against false beauty standards, which made my fashion photography days an unbearably uncomfortable sell-out. The word "slick" remains an insult unless I'm talking about a pimp, and my preferred subject matter has remained the freaks & weirdoes & rejects that I've always felt a part of.

I spent a lotta time trying to get away from all of that, trying to reinvent myself, trying to make those feelings be just a phase I was going through, but I kept getting drawn back to it. For a long time I had this idea that I had rejected society and it was up to me to turn around and embrace it whenever I decided to grow up. Yeah, it was a rebellion, but for some of us it was more than just standing in opposition to whatever it was you believed in. Some of us actually stood for something ourselves. I didn't think I was one of those people. It's taken me 20 years since those days to figure out I actually believe in something, and that what I believe in is the same stuff I've been saying all along. Turns out it wasn't just a phase, and maybe I've grown up after all.