Kevin C. Smith

I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh – which was undoubtedly the worst of both worlds. We didn’t have a big city to freely explore nor did we have access to unspoiled nature. We had the mall and corporate media. These were still the days of a monoculture with a handful of corporations acting as gatekeepers that controlled what records showed up in the mall record stores, what songs got on rock radio, what shows were on network TV, and what movies shown in the cineplex. Despite this stranglehold, various media still managed to reach us that was produced outside of this system. I had started buying records at the dawn of the 80s and quickly got bored with REO Speedwagon, Journey, and Styx and started to realize that there were other options available. One of the ways this happened was through comic books. My brother and I were obsessed with superhero comics and, although we could buy the latest issues at the mall newsstand, if we wanted back issues we had to beg our dad to drive us to a little store in the city on weekends. Half the store was comics staffed by the nerdiest crew imaginable while the other half of the store was music but only the music that mainstream record stores wouldn’t touch. The walls were festooned with punk, hardcore, and thrash metal posters and many of the employees were also in local bands and looked like it, sporting perfect mohawks and leather jackets with immaculately placed spikes. To say I was intimidated would be an understatement. But gradually I found myself spending less time looking at comics and more on records and, to my amazement, no one admonished me back to the other side of the store. That revelation, that there was a world of music and culture that existed independently of any corporate control, opened up new horizons of how I saw the world.

Cable TV was another way that these various subcultures reached us as it was still relatively new and in places untamed. Night Flight was a seminal show on the USA Network that had free reign of the airwaves from 11PM until 3 in the morning showing a haphazard array of cult films, rock documentaries, and underground music videos with a lot of their material reaching back to the transgressive high weirdness of post-hippy but pre-punk 70s. Decades later, I was invited to a film festival by the show’s founder Stuart Shapiro after having written a blog post on the – I thought largely forgotten – show and his gonzo stories of chemically enhanced all night editing sessions did not disappoint. (I would later write a book trying to make sense of this strange, transformative decade that I was born into and punk’s role in it called Recombo DNA: The Story of Devo, or How the 60s Became the 80s (Jawbone Press, 2013).) And on a good day we could also pick up college radio stations which had no restrictions at all on what they could air. My small circle of friends with similar interests would tape anything we deemed worthy to cassette or VHS and we would pass these around like holy relics. And of course, there were the independent record stores. If one of us managed to have a car we could spend the entire day hitting up as many as possible and occasionally even buy something picking through the used records, rare imports, and bootlegs. Though punk was just one strain of this musical underground, and we missed its heyday by a good decade, it still somehow spoke to us. It told us that you could turn liabilities into assets, you could preemptively disarm others’ criticisms against you by acknowledging them yourself and amplifying them as to be unmissable. You could own your own faults and shortcomings to such a degree that they became undeniably cool.

“We tried putting a band together with his sister on guitar and we were so incompetent that we couldn’t even play punk rock.“

My friends and I would hitch rides into the city to see bands play in disused foundries, carpeted Masonic Temples, school gyms, and any other available spaces. Sometimes we knew the bands, sometimes we didn’t but oftentimes we couldn’t pass up an all ages show – what else was there to do? (One that we did sit out was a band called Nirvana on a Sunday night in summer of 1989. Oh well.) I never got the impression when listening to arena rock that I could do what they did but when I heard punk rock and hardcore I was inspired to take up an instrument. Nobody wanted to play bass and it was less gear to carry around than drums and less strings than guitar so that decided it for me. I switched schools near the end of my junior year from a large, suburban school to a small, private one in the city. The school was filled with misfits and populated with artists, punks, skaters, Deadheads, skinheads, and goths. I felt right at home. I met Justin, who was a freshman, (as I did everyone else) on my first day. He played drums and we bonded over skating and exchanging records and tapes. I sold him my copy of Social Distortion’s Mommy’s Little Monster on vinyl for $5 (I was already over it) and he taped me the Germs’ GI on cassette (still my favorite punk album) as well as giving me his older siblings’ VHS tapes of the Residents’ avant-garde films and Ralph Records videos. Perusing his numerous older siblings’ record collection that he inherited I distinctly remember the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges amongst others. We tried putting a band together with his sister on guitar and we were so incompetent that we couldn’t even play punk rock. I drifted into another fully formed band that just needed a bass player to learn their songs and then we promptly went nowhere. A few years after graduating high school I ran into Justin on the street as he and his companions harassed me for having long hair by calling me a “hippie” before he finally recognized me. Though my musical tastes had largely moved on, he had assembled the band that we had fantasized about and in the process switched from drums to guitar and vocals. They have been releasing records and touring relentlessly ever since, never much altering their sound or look, and steadily building a dedicated fanbase. A review of a new album of theirs or poster for an upcoming concert would occasionally catch my, somewhat amused yet bewildered, eye over the years. They recently broke up after Justin was accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault spanning the last three decades and is currently a fugitive from the law and his whereabouts unknown. I can’t say that I listen to much punk rock anymore – except for the rare occasions when nostalgia hits – or that it’s particularly relevant to my life now but the sense of freedom and license that it gave me at a young age has never left me and never will.

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watercolor and gouache on paper. 9″x11″

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I met Kevin through the Northern California art scene where I became a fan of his urban landscapes. Beautifully blended oils both etherial and mysterious.

August 23, 2026 – SSilk