Tim B. over at Stupefaction posted an entry a couple of days ago that showcased some of his collection of rock ephemera and it inspired me to do some digging in my closet. Here's what I came up with.
By the time I left high school in 1985, I was pretty firmly fixated with hardcore punk. Sure, I still liked a bunch of slackjawed heavy metal and synthy new wave, but bands like the Circle Jerks, D.O.A., Black Flag, Kraut, Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys were taking up most of my time. As such, when I arrived at my college the following fall in the deep, verdant heart of the midwest, I immediately sought out kindred spirits. This was a harder task than you might think. At the time, being a fan of this sort of music wasn't exactly commonplace.
In relatively short order, I befriended a gent named Jeff who lived a floor below me in my dormitory. A hulking skateboarder with a bleached-blonde mohawk, Jeff wore his musical tastes pretty much on his sleeve. Conversely, while I was deeply entrenched in the music, culture and factual minutia of hardcore, I looked about as credibly 'punk' as a cast member of 'Eight is Enough.' Regardless, I befriended Jeff and several other likely candidates at my school and soon joined a scowly gaggle of hardcore heads who'd frequently swap vinyl and attend shows at relatively dingy live venues in sorta-nearby Columbus, Ohio like Stache's, Mean Mr. Mustard's and the Newport Music Hall.
While I may not have felt comfortable dressing the part, I became a somewhat fanatical collector of another visual staple of hardcore culture, that being flyers. Flyers were handmade promotional notices of upcoming shows that you'd find pasted to walls or stapled to telephone poles, usually penned and illustrated by local scenesters . Where mainstream rock acts traded in huge, glossy posters, flyers boasted unique, original art fully in line with the do-it-yourself aesthetic of the genre. I traded countless flyers with Jeff downstairs and soon amassed a vast collection. I ended up covering every square inch of my dorm room with these things for the first couple of years of college. It (unintentionally) had a bit of a girl-scaring effect, but I loved the way they looked.
After a couple of years, I got a bit bored of the narrow, monochromatic scope of hardcore and started to re-explore other music. But I never renounced hardcore entirely. I packed all my flyers away in a box and forgot about them. Tim's post the other day prompted me to dig some of them out, dust them off and scan them for your perusal. I'd love to say I was lucky enough to attend all of these shows, but that would be untrue. I did see several of them, and I'll continue to cherish these as mementoes of same. I have some lovely ones from the series of shows at the Rock Hotel and the Ritz here in NYC, but they were too big to fit in my scanner. In any case, here are some of my old favorites. Please enjoy. Rise above.
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