Jim Ruland
When I was 15 my mom took me and my younger brother to see the Ramones at the Wax Museum. It wasn’t just my first punk rock show, but the first rock concert I attended.…
Category: Punk Rock Origin Stories
John
When I was a young tween/teen, I thought punk rock sucked. I saw the Ramones on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert when I was 13 and thought all the songs sounded the same, plus the guitarist…
Big Pete Markowicz
I was a lost kid that did not fit in with the guidos surrounding me in the suburbs of Clifton, New Jersey. I was about 12 years old and was in the boy scouts. I…
John Colle Rogers
Back in 1984 I was a metalhead in North Dakota, a musical wasteland in many ways where we were tasked with finding alternatives on our own if we wanted to stray from the clutches of…
Peter Landau
My childhood was idyllic until my family was part of the middle-class exodus from New York City in the early 1970s. I was eight years old and would have been able to walk across the…
Lawson Desrochers (aka Lawson Jealous)
Like everyone, I had heard about the Sex Pistols and the Clash, even dug some of their tunes early on, but punk truly came to my world in 1981 via the older kids in Santa…
The Discontent of Girls
As a woman “of a certain age” (as I refer to myself,) one might view me as simply a woman in nondescript clothing with a nondescript haircut leading a normal life. However inside my head…
Billy Lorance
Full-blown hippie life was before me as a child. Our house had waterbeds, water pillows, water couches, and water pipes. Psychedelic colored bean bag chairs adorned the living room floor and coffee colored beads hung…
Joe Mendelson
My overwhelming passion for rock music began in 3rd grade, although I have a very distinct memory of being completely mesmerized by The Who’s I can see for miles that I heard on my sister’s…