Our Punk Rock Pasts
Recently I've been sucked back twenty years (actually a little more than that!). I found The Secret History of the Cedar Valley website. I stumbled on this time machine while doing some other random crap on the internet and now I'm obsessed...
Go back to 1983, I bought my first Dead Kennedys album, really started hating Cresco, and discovered that there were alternatives to what Crestwood High School seemed to offer.
Skip forward three anger-filled years and the discovery that Black Flag is playing in Cedar Falls! Oh My God! There are other people in Iowa who are interesting!
So 1986 and 1987 were filled with going to and helping put on punk rock shows (notably The Aggressive Chubbies and Crock Of Dookey playing in the orchestra rehearsal hall at Luther) and getting drunk. That show that we threw together in Jensen Music Hall was hilarious. We made such a mess of that room, fortunately Shreenu (spelling??) wandered in and told me that he would clean up the mess as he was working maintenance in that room the following morning. That was how the Theta Chi's kept me from getting expelled (momentarily) from Luther. If that mess had gone uncleaned my ass would have been grass as I had signed out the room. But, hey, about 50 punk kids smoking clove cigarettes and slam dancing in the orchestra hall was worth it. Ahh, cloves, the sweet smell of rebellion.
So anyhow, when I find this site it hits me like a bat to the head... Someone (Matt from Crock Of Dookey) actually made an art exhibit at Wartburg that detailed a lot of that time period and what we were up to.
Couple that with the Editors new album and it is like 1987 all over again. If you haven't heard the Editors, I thought the first time I heard it that there was some undiscovered Joy Division albums that had been unearthed. Very cool stuff.
It's a wacky world.
