Not Giving a Damn

about my bad reputation

Kathy Gerstorff wrote a cool story yesterday about her granddaughter and Joan Jett:

https://readmedium.com/haircut-introduces-9-year-old-to-rocker-joan-jett-fd5f6d0c9f82

One day I’ll have a cool granddaughter, too, and when I do, I’ll tell her some stories about my indebtedness to rockers like Jett and other pop culture artists and artifacts. Maybe I’ll even tell her the things I did in my first couple of years at grad school, at UT-Knoxville, where the campus strip “came alive with a thousand eyes, and all of them watching you/me” (see Jim Stafford for more help).

One of the advantages of attending a mammoth university is that even embedded in the Deep South, such wide open avenues allow us to blend or form new identities, or even figure out who we are with music in the background, and sometimes not even so far back.

In 1980–1, when I felt comfortable enough to make my way in and out of bars with a pack of other literary/arty friends, I saw the changes, “them changes” (see Buddy Miles for meaning), and I had to make some decisions, about allegiances, and the ties that bind. I had been both a Neil Young hippie/junkie, and a prog rock devotee. Now, I wanted to know what was new and going on around me, but I had no idea how far to go, what to embrace, and whether, with the meagre funds at my disposal, to invest in whims and seemingly passing fads.

For instance, in that year, I still shopped only at first-run record stores like Cats and School Kids, buying Pink Floyd’s The Wall, John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy (feeling so guilty about all the bad vibes I had emitted about Ono), and then “breaking out” by also purchasing The Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta.

In my periphery, though, I had also noticed some used record stores and other rock forms building. I had already embraced The Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, but mainly for their cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” which to me sounded like David Bowie having a bad dream of himself playing in a nowhere bar, say like Hobo’s in Knoxville. Of course I had every Bowie record I could get, so why did I think I was off or strange? I loved Kraftwerk and The Cars, but I felt a need to be faithful to my rock buds, Bruce and Jackson and the classier sounds of The Moody Blues.

But friends love to help you enter doors, and I had a couple of good ones then — more than a couple actually, but let’s stick to Les and Mary and Carol — the wilder group who confronted me with “Rock Lobster,” “Police on My Back,” and “Oliver’s Army.”

And the doors: walking into clubs where local bands were proving themselves every weekend night and sometimes on Wednesdays, or even Mondays when the times called for desperate measures.

Kandy Kreme and the Wet Dream

The Squad

The Five Twins

The Hostages

Slamming, pogoing, diving into people I didn’t know, wanted, to know; students from my comp classes looking far more interesting than when we were dissecting “Araby” or the comma splice. I’d dance with them, and they’d call me “Terry” then instead of “Mr. Barr,” and no, nothing inappropriate ever happened, though temptation (at least as New Order knew it) filled the air waves.

While others were gathering for pre-football-related bonfires and revelry, my friends and I packed ourselves into these clubs, and whatever we, or you, might have thought or think, we definitely became a part of a scene, certain in our appearance (mohawked, pierced, lapels out), and refusing to go home and sometimes staving off endings by sitting in pizza joints afterward, listening to jazz, until those owners blew too much up their nose and out their pockets.

We’d walk everywhere — a habit I’ve always loved, being accosted only once that I can remember, and losing only a quarter of my funds and maybe only a little more of my brave front.

So, there was one moment in one night that continues to stand for me. Kandy Kreme was playing, and while they did some original tunes, one of their most popular songs — at least to their crowd — was a cover of that Joan Jett song that you were likely wondering about up front:

“Bad Reputation”

Anthems come and anthems go; we are only here to remember, to play them again, and think about how we loved it all: the slamming, the odor of beer, the bodies coming together in punk and new wave and no wave and hardcore unison.

Rock has always embraced rebellion, and sure, looking back, things can get distilled into humor or parody, or plain old embarrassment. But I’m proud and not a bit humiliated to say that such moments, having a band play its heart out for less than no money, rivals that education I was giving and receiving.

No one can prepare anyone else, including me, for what will come in a text or a classroom or a seedy club. I’m just glad that I could love Dickens and Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf, Jett and Strummer, Costello and whoever Kandy Kreme really was, a waitress in a pizza parlor, waiting for the man, a miracle, or just another set to begin.

Hey Pierce McIntyre, thanks for starting Plethora of Pop and inviting me in. Please check out the other writers here like Paul Combs, Penelope Mayfield, Chris Zappa, If Ever You’re Listening, and Randall Radic.