Three chords and the truth: punk's nostalgics

It’s 30 years since the Brisbane punk band, The Saints, released their first and seminal album I'm Stranded on EMI.  Much has been written about the baby boomers monopolisation of both the media and cultural agenda. But very little has been written about a select niche of late boomers (1958-64) who, at BBQ's, dinner parties and the pub, are fixated by the “good old days” of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Saints and The Go-Betweens.

This article is about my generation: the nostalgic punks who fervently believed in three chords and the truth - and sod everything else. I call us The Lost Generation, because it’s groovier than being tagged with a letter of the alphabet.

Back in the l970s I admired Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page but there was no way I could play guitar like them. Garage punk blew Credence Clear Water Revival, Led Zeppelin and Steely Dan (so passé) out of the water while elevating Joy Division, The Buzzcocks and The Ramones, to name just a few.

I'll be 50 next year and it struck me as a strange generational hiccup that there are still people of my generational niche propping up a bar at 1.00 am, listening to thrash bands and subscribing to some sort of cultural “other” as signified by that music.

On September 20 Julien Temple’s documentary will be released in Australia. Called Joe Strummer: The Future is not Written, it’ll be a “must see” for all those who want a reminder of the power of The Clash. But as you sit in the cinema, remember that you’re also indulging in nostalgia; nostalgia as entertainment.

My case is this. There’s nothing wrong with “arrested development” but when nostalgia rules attitudes formed in a time that was closer to a fashion than a political force, then one is not far away from endorsing generational and cultural exclusion and prejudice.

By that I mean one is in danger of adopting a “closed loop” to other attitudes, beliefs and forms of music. When one predicates their tastes on a time long gone, then any new form of music, no matter how raw and innovative, bold or exciting, won’t hold a candle to “back then”.

I suggest that this “long look over the shoulder” to yesteryear, is akin to their older boomer brothers and sisters pining for the elusive Almost Famous rock star life with its fanciful escape from the banality and limitations of suburban existence.

Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces: "Punk is about damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself.

If you still follow Marcus’ credo and you’re 50 (and still dream of being the next New Order as you compose songs on your home computer), then reality has not yet whacked you in the face like a screen door. It will.

The Joh Show

I lived in Brisbane in 1978-79. A friend and I had driven from Adelaide specifically to hang out at Byron Bay and be beautiful, but we ended up broke and living in a boarding house in Fortitude Valley with a short tempered Irishman and a pedophile out on parole.

My friend was an avid fan of the poet Rimbaud and the barking mad writings of the Comte De Lautremont. Work wasn't a goer for him.  So I got a job catching chickens in huge pens in South Brisbane. I’d drive over the Storey Bridge at 5.00pm and back over again at midnight. The chicken catching paid for our beer and the cover charge to see bands at the Brisbane Hotel.

We bought food once at Woolworths. We then kept the docket, cut out the date and stole exactly the same food every week for six months and wheeled it through the exit lane with the impunity of youth. If anyone stopped us, we’d show them the original docket. Quite a saving.

One night we were watching The Riptides play at a legal aid benefit to about 300 people (mostly punks and fellow travellers) when the police busted the place at midnight and arrested 70 people, including me.

I spent two nights in the Roma Street watch house and because I was wearing army fatigues, the cops made me march up and down in front of the cells for two hours. Reasons to be cheerful? Not many.

Every time I walked down the street after that the cops would pull me over and interrogate me. I looked forward to seeing those chickens. They never yelled at me. The abuse politicised me and for the first time in my life, I knew the depths of real anger and there’s nothing nostalgic about that.

The BBQ stopper

And that’s exactly the type of story boring old farts of my ilk will tell you at BBQs or dinner parties. Notice how nostalgia is “sticky”. It attracts more nostalgia.

I can't remember my parents doing it. There was the Depression, then World War II and then I reckon they were happy to just to live in the moment. Don’t you hate it when your parents, born in the 1920s, “out Zen” you? The great mathematician and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “Those who live in the now, live in eternity”. Deep, sure, but hard to refute.

There's nothing wrong with a gaggle of middle-aged blokes drinking ales at a BBQ, all mentally strolling down memory lane from 1977 to the end of The Clash.

As the sausages blacken, the blokes start to bemoan the state of contemporary Australian music and the lack of airplay non-mainstream bands get. This is the B-side of the boomers highjacking the play lists of 70 per cent of the nations FM stations to play golden oldies from the 1960 and 70s.

This is where the boomers and the Lost Generation meet. They believe that the music produced back then (whenever) was seminal to the formation of modern Australian music (whatever that is). And they could be right.

Here's the tricky bit - and because they were listening to or even performing in bands to half full bars in one horse suburbs, that they too, were part of some sort of inchoate movement. It gives existential meaning.

I'm not going to tear down someone's delusion that because they followed a group of bands who sold bugger all LPs and had a miniscule following, that they were not, indeed, part of history. We're all part of history and quickly becoming it.

Critical curmudgeon Theodor Adorno told us that the masses would be easily duped by the offerings of the monolith he called “The Culture Industry”. He also told us that pop music featured standardised acts as interchangeable as auto parts - and that each of these acts would be promoted with a trick to market them as unique; a bandana in the pocket here, a quiff there, to fool the public into thinking they were different when they really were more of the same. He called this pseudo-individualisation. This was punk and post punk writ large. Remember Johnny Rotten’s last words, “Ever feel you’ve been cheated?” Exactly.

There's an argument that nostalgia in moderation is good for you. It staves off a whole raft of current problems that may include the mortgage, erectile dysfunction or the existential realisation that one day you will die.

Maybe hidden in the jangled melody line of The Stranglers’ Always the Sun, there’s an oasis of calm away from the aridity of middle-aged responsibility and neoconservative political philosophy.

I understand the attraction of a group of middle-aged guys and girls chucking the good old days around. Who can forget Radio Birdman at the Marryatville Hotel in Adelaide in 1977 (or was it 78?) Nic Lowe in Rockpile at the Cloudland Ballroom in Brisbane?

I miss that ballroom. I miss it more than Nic Lowe, although he did write Cruel to be Kind with its 400-year-old oxymoron nicked from Shakespeare.

It's only a matter of time before the MMM radio network gets sick of playing wall-to-wall golden oldies to the boomers. Yesterday I heard The Sunnyboys, Show me some discipline, boom out on a boomer station. Was it a fluke or were station programmers hunting for the next nostalgic demographic?

As John Strausbaugh wrote in Rock Til You Drop, "Colostomy rock is not rebellion, it's the antithesis of rebellion: it's nostalgia. And nostalgia is the death of rock."

One hopes that recent stage show of Count Down and the revival of bands such Pseudo Echo and The Reels is paying off for the boomers and Lost Generation songwriters and not just the producers.

Moving on

Let me tell you a secret. Back in 1978 when I was telling everyone in suits to “f**k off”, I desperately wanted to be liked and I would have killed for a job. Now, almost 30 years later I've had plenty of good jobs and I don't much care whether people like me or not. That's one of the good things about getting old. It's not disregard of others, it's the opposite. You take more notice of what people say.

To use a modern day cliché, you “move on”. I moved on to care about elderly people getting proper aged care; I care about our farmers and the drought; and I feel more at home in a country pub than a city bar. I care about education for kids from poorer families and I worry about the high rates of teenage depression.

In retrospect, the people who I thought were groovy and whom I trotted after like a puppy back in 1977 were pretty stupid and so was I. They couldn't explain why nihilism and cynicism had taken such a strangle hold on their world, except to say that it was “all stuffed”.

In retrospect, punk was the progenitor for this current generation’s quest for authenticity and independence, but it drips with nostalgia.

The punk empire of nostalgia is admittedly a small one, and at times, after a few drinks, I wander down those lanes of time. I play The Triffids (on vinyl) and I find a certain comfort there, like a worn pair of slippers or a favorite blanket. I loved The Triffids and anyone who doesn't well-up over Wide Open Road, hasn’t had a broken heart.

I do not disparage memory for where would we be without it? There would be no history and without these middle-aged tyrones guarding the gates of musical ephemera, how would future generations know that the guy from The Riptides, 20 years later, wrote a commercial hit about burning cane fields in Australia?

Surely there's a PhD thesis waiting on the interconnectivity of cane fields and Australian alternative music. There’s also a thesis waiting to be written why our generation has spent so much time living in the past rather than living in the present.

Remember, the future is unwritten and we write it now.