Punks Grow Up

It was about 9:30PM or so. After a night of ministry at the church.

I took my wife's van because I knew she was low on gasoline and thought I'd do her a small favor of filling the tank because she had a full day of driving the next morning...which also means I had to pick a CD from my stack. See, when we got married and merged the CD's (the cassette tapes, too. The vinyl was pretty much all mine, but I had to sell all that in the Great Electric Bill Payoff of 1990)...well, her music collection sounds a lot like a VH-1 "I Love the 80's" soundtrack and mine sounded a lot like "he tried to save money on therapy by listening to angry music." This reality transferred to the van, and I learned that unless I wanted to listen to Prince or John Cougar Mellancamp, I'd better grab a disc from my side of the collection. It was Social Distortion.

I'm alone at the grocery store/gas station and in a crabby mood. I forget why. I had my long hair down and the van door was open and the music was kind of loud and I'm leaning on the van, pouting about the state of my life. This could've been every day of high school for me.

A guy pulls up at the pump across from me and gets out, removes gas cap, slides credit card (removing QUICKLY so as to be in compliance with the LCD screen), presses his octane choice and inserts the nozzle--setting it so he can do his windows while the pump does the dirty work. He notices me standing there.

"You're kidding, right?" he says to me.

"Excuse me?"

"Long hair. Jeans. Birkenstocks. Punk music playing. You can't be very anti-authority if you live in Flower Mound and drive a mini-van."

I laughed out loud and he went about getting the bugs off his windshield. I mumbled something to the effect that he must not be watching television much or he would've seen the Ramones trying to sell him Pepsi or Iggy Pop trying to get him on a Royal Carribean cruise. We both laughed again, exchanged pleasantries and were off. I've thought about that incident a lot since it happened because it highlights the tension I often feel between who I was and who I'm becoming and how my environments shaped so much of both.

Well, I've been on a reading kick as of late. Summer schedules, a lousy baseball team, and TV re-runs have added some time to my day and I've been scrounging up reading materials...and to mix it up every now and then I grab books that aren't in the "Christian" realm. This helps my sanity. If you've read much in Christian retail/publishing these days you know precisely what I mean. Sometimes, when I'm in Barnes & Noble, the books grab me.

One that grabbed me was in their Father's Day display which was right by the entrance. Now, I must not be much of a man because the books on flashy cars and guns and wars didn't do it much for me, but one cover caught my eye:



The lead singer of Pennywise is more punk than I ever was and it was funny listening to him have the same thoughts about PTA meetings and Bunko and having daughters and what a joy they are and how much better life is because they're in it and how much he loves his wife and the stuff he wrestles with (like, how do you be genuine and sing songs that talk about anti-authority while wanting them to respect not only your authority but also that of teachers, policemen, etc.?).

And, there's a lot of common sense parenting stuff (the book was listed as a parenting book and shelved accordingly) about turning off TV's and what music to let them listen to and the importance of balancing your work & marriage & family. Good, solid applicational stuff. There's also funny observations about the normal things all married couples deal with. One, when he forgot his wife was off to play Bunko and they had a scheduling conflict: "Bunko is basically a dice game women play that is really just a thinly veiled device the mommies of America have come up with to give themselves a night off twice a month in order to gather in someone's living room and drink white wine and gossip."

But in the end he was talking to his tour manager about the schedule he wanted to keep because of his family responsibilities (his bandmates didn't have kids) and this was causing conflict. His manager said that other bands like his are experiencing similar infighting. "This is the graying of punk rock. It's never happened before," said his manager.

The book ends this way:

"Punk rock as a musical form is entering its middle ages. Jazz and blues are old an gray and staring mutely at a TV in a nursing home. Rock 'n' roll is a senior citizen eating at Sizzler and shouldn't be behind the wheel of an automobile. Hip hop is approaching thirty, rolling in dough but starting to look for tax shelters and emo and screamo are young teenagers driving by us with their [butt] hanging out the window. A lot of us graying punk rockers are sitting around looking at each other, saying, "What happened?"

"The music and spirit of bands like the Clash and the Ramones flow through my veins...no matter how old I get or what clothes I have on my back. It's not fashion or age but a way of looking at the world and finding your place in it..."

Yeah...guys in Social Distortion get their first gold record writing songs like "I Was Wrong." Funny what your 40 does to your view of your 18.

Punks do grow up...in wisdom and stature.

And I like the movement more now than I ever did before.