ANGRY AS FUCK PUNKS & RIOT GRRRL CHILDREN

I’m standing stage right. I watch dust particles do somersaults in the rays of late evening sunlight pulsating above my head. They seem content, unlike the human population in the room. For us, there is tension, expectation.  The house sound system pounds the air with Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill. All four acts tonight are Riot grrrl children.

I’ve forgotten my Hearos. I’ll be paying for tonight’s rapture in yet another way.

Three young men stand near me. We are just a few feet from the lip of the stage. We are the only four people waiting for the gig to kick-off. Their heads are bowed to smartphone deities. I remember when I had skin like them; clear, wrinkleless, taut, shiny; free of the scars, wrinkles, sags, and other wear and tear a few more decades will add. I once was skinny with wavy black hair falling prodigiously past my shirt collar. I vaguely remember when the pepper was predominant, the salt but a rumor. They look so fresh, like they just crawled out of the placenta.

One guy has a tattoo on the back his neck.

“Wow, he’s gladly barreling into his decades”, I think.

The tattoo screams “BRAZOS” in Olde English font. I’ve never had a tattoo. Never wanted one. It took me a couple of days to realize just how misplaced his tattoo was. Yeah. I’m a little slow. It’s that introvert style of information processing.

We await the emergence of the WGSPA from behind the flimsy pale blue door lurking in the cool shadows behind stage left.

Another 30 to 50 people are in the building, milling about the sprawling roofless area on its west side digging into free food - I’m too intimidated by the crowd to get close enough to see exactly what kind of food is being served hot off the grill - swigging cans of Shiner, and lolling on picnic tables in the surly El Norte sun. A steady stream of new people present their driver’s licenses before they are allowed by a man with a trim black beard and black baseball cap named JC to march into the white wrought iron gate at the northwest corner of the building. By the end of the night, there’ll be more than 100 people inside.

I’m excited to see the WGSPA, but I’m bored and tired while waiting. I drift off with the music into remembrances of rock past; the decades of fanzines, cassette tapes, Doc Martens, t-shirts much too large for the tiny women wearing them, torn jeans, the glorious, all too short-lived resurgence of the miniskirt, Dickies, flannel shirts, and grunge everything - the pre-internet days, Faster Pussycat, Mudhoney, Bleach, Nevermind, Badmotorfinger, Superfuzz Bigmuff. These were the days when my most prized possession was a mix tape made for me by a raven-haired Italian lass from New Jersey with tracks by Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Morphine, Bratmobile, and other bands I can’t recall at the moment. I want to find that tape right now. I want to hear the clicks, whirs, and fuzz as gears, capstans, and rollers pull the acetate and magnetic imprints over the playheads. I crave the pops, cracks, and grinding from the phonograph needle coasting over gently rolling plains of polyvinyl chloride. All this “extraneous” stuff is as lovely as the music itself. It makes the music tangible, alive, warm.  It brings out the heart and soul of what the band recorded. It physically connects musician and listener.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins... but not mine…” Patti Smith sings over a loping bass-heavy piano gliding over exquisite phonographic hisses that sound like dried beans continuously poured on a saltillo tile in the next room punctuated by the intermittent pops and snaps of popcorn slowly cooked over an open fire. It is delicious, sensuous; verging on erotic, maybe pornographic. It’s an extraordinarily gracious welcome to the tape’s “side one”, the first tones of a gift from one New Jersey girl to another to me. It intertwines us -  all three of us.

The overtones are gentle, seductive, but the undertones froth with pissed-on rage that wants to grab you by the throat with both hands and shake you until you either die or come to your senses. Smith is angry. My friend is angry. I am angry. We’re all angry as fuck.

In the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, outrage poured from my ears. I bounced from town to town- Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Alpine, Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen, Tucson, Los Angeles, Denton, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Sacramento, and up the coast of Northern California, leaving a trail of broken dreams, of bands formed and splintered, songs half-written and forgotten, manuscripts rejected and lost, query letters swallowed by postal boxes never to be seen nor heard from again, disappointed people, pissed off people, and broken hearts. I somehow fell back to earth in Austin as did a lot of other folks I know who bounced angrily in the four directions. Dreams and regrets of Portland and Seattle still dance in my head.

“Why didn’t I keep going?” I wonder from time to time.

<<Sun.>>

<<You need sun, son.>>

In many ways, I’m still going, still bouncing, still wondering, getting charged-up by bands, rock and roll fantasies, punk rock girls, teenage riots, and not getting fooled again. I keep living for the sound and vision. I keep getting fooled over and over again like the starry-eyed stooge in a Neil Young song and somehow seem to like it. It’s just one glittering dream world fading into yet another and another.  Music is my love and she keeps breaking my heart. Every once in awhile, I get a pen- if I’m lucky.

Anyway...

I’m being hard on myself. 

Guess I can’t always be right. 

I’ve had a decent life, yeah. But something’s missing. I have no idea what. I keep looking to music to compel me to keep searching. She embraces me for awhile then sends me right back out there again. I’ve only realized recently she’s not the answer, only the guide.

One thing is certain, though…