Hard Core Logo is fiction. And it’s Canadian. But it really has a lot of that punk feeling.
Based on a pretty good book–but the movie is better than pretty good. It’s been called a “mockumentary” & compared to This is Spinal Tap. Although it’s got plenty of black humor/humour, it is not a comedy.
Another state of Mind chronicled a tor with Youth Brigade and Mike Ness’ band. The SF crowd shots were sliced in from another show. I was thewre at the SF show.
Plus, it’s got Paul Simonon (of the Clash), Steve Jones and Paul Cook (of the Sex Pistols) as members of the touring bands and Barry Ford, who had some minor ska/reggae hits and pops up on Trojan Records comps, as the bus driver and the soundtrack.
If you can find a copy of Susan Seidelman’s movie Smithereens it’s worth a watch (not that I’ve seen it since 1986 or something). It’s about a young woman in New York fucking up her life during the early punk years and it’s got Richard Hell in it.
Just started Please Kill Me and wanted to thank you guys for recommending it. It’s fun and very readable. I’m only a few pages in, but I can tell this is going to be a good read.
Hate to disagree (actually I don’t hate disagreeing at all…) SLC Punk was most like my every day life from 1985 to 1989 as a member of the fan side of the punk scene.
Another by a Canadian author, “I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk” and “I’m On The Guest List” by Chris Walter. Both books are autobiographical and although he is self publishing, he is talented.
I’m sorry, but that whole “I never do any drugs at all, never, none. Okay, just this once I will take one pill. Now I am dead,” bs was straight out of an after school PSA.
Meh, one pill or many with booze, I don’t remember but I thought his death was more just a bit of dark humour or perhaps weak irony. I had friends die in far less glamourous ways - which can happen when you are very drunk & drugged up and I definitely didn’t see that part of the story as preachy.
It is a coming of age story, from a suburban kid turned punk, and perhaps the plot was nothing more than that, but the world of the young punk was 100% authentic.
Everything from the violence to the infidelity, to the dilapidated apartments & houses, to the music, set the scene in such a way, I was going back to the 1980’s when that was my life.
And just like Stevo there came a day when I realized the clothing & hair was not what punk was really about, and I too was sick of the violence, deaths, and living in dilapidated buildings, I got my hair cut, and went back to school - leaving that life behind.
YMMV. It struck me as an outsider’s view of what they took the punk subculture to be. I mean, warring tribes? Sure, the scene’s got its share of fighting, but nothing ever as formalized as all that.
Funny story: the band Eight Bucks Experiment played at our local venue one time about three years after SLC Punk came out. They played the band in the show scene in the movie, and they were really playing that up. Except that no one had heard anything about them other than that, no punks I knew liked that movie, and they weren’t very good in general. So they showed up to an empty room and then tried to get the guy who booked shows there to pay them a $500 “guarantee” that they hadn’t actually arranged beforehand. he finally gave them $20 out of his own pocket and they left without ever playing.
Maybe the view of it has more to do with where & when you were part of the scene. For me it was the mid to late 1980’s across Canada, and also visits to Seattle & Portland.
The scene in the movie was the scene in a small conservative city, from a teenager’s view. It was neither from the adult, or established older punk’s point of view - the story is about the teenager who is engrossed in a culture they only partially understand because they aren’t mature enough to be real to themselves yet - and of course realizing that the hardcore dress code doesn’t make you more hardcore, and that although you think your life is so radical and hardcore, you are far less a rebel than the older punks who have left the scene and have day jobs and dress in regular clothing but still go to shows. Those older people are not sellouts, they just have grown up and understand themselves.
The tribes thing was overblown for sure, but the feelings were there. When I was in the scene, the fighting between the different groups in the cities I lived in & traveled to there were wars against the (nazi)skins and punks. There were also fights between headbangers & punks too, but fighting the skinheads was almost ritualized, that portion didn’t stretch to far from what I had seen in more than one city in my travels. Also regarding headbangers & rednecks, you never got stuck while hitchhiking in a hicktown? Yeah - those guys declared war on punks the moment they saw them! As for Mods & New Wavers, those were just other people who went to the same bar & some of us dated people in those scenes (once it seemed we’d slept with everyone in our own).
And I wouldn’t have paid to see Eight Bucks Experiment either…
I wouldn’t recommend this for a first read on the broader subject of punk music, but Stephen Lee Beeber’s The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGBs is a worthy book on the subject of Jews in the NY punk scene.
Same scene, different experiences. I’m from a smallish hick city, isolated from most big areas. we didn’t have splits like that in the scene (except for any nazis that came around, obviously) because our population wasn’t big enough to specialize that way. We were more like the crowd in Suburbia - mods, punks, nonracist oi skins all hanging together - because otherwise it would have been tiny, splintered groups with not enough numbers to draw in shows.
Once straightedge hardcore started getting big, they split off, but they mostly fought among themselves. Not with us.
Now I’m one of the old guys holding down one end of the bar and watching the scene ebb and flow. It amazes me sometimes how long the whole thing’s lasted.