We all have our own stories. While our bodies, style, and habits may change over the years, our stories stay with us. Big or small, we all have that story of how we got into punk rock. Everyone remembers the details of that beginning. Who their early punk friends were. The first album they obsessed over. The transformative first gig. The first time in the pit. Everyone loves sharing that story over beers, around the campfire, with new friends, with the kids. These stories are timeless. They never lose their passion. We keep those stories dear to our hearts. We keep them alive by sharing.
This project started brewing in the back of my head years ago. When I started painting portraits, I had the thought that combining punk rock origin stories with portraits would be an interesting project. Two things I love so much. So Here we are.
If you are interested in my project, contact me!
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I went to Catholic school for 14 years. I had a pretty standard but boring start to things. I loved going to the beach. I hung out at the mall. I listened to rock and roll ...
I got called a poser by an older kid for wearing a Baja surf hoodie I got on vacation when I was in the 6th grade. I didn’t even know what poser meant, but it was said in a very derogatory tone. When I looked up what it meant I ...
The first records I remember are Millie Small’s 1964 hit “My Boy Lollipop” and Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Just Like Me” (from a collection called “The Best of ‘66”). They were castoffs from my older siblings and both suggested that the world was a lot bigger than my village ...
I was born in Upstate NY. I lived there until I was 14. Growing up I heard all kinds of music at a young age. From the music my mom and sisters dad and their friends grew up with to hip hop from my older brother and a college radio ...
I was a teenager in Huntington Beach California in the mid 1970’’s and so happy when I heard Rodney on The Roq for the first time! I didn’t like most of the music my friends did, ELO, Journey, Aerosmith, etc. Then, a friend’s older brother got the Sex Pistols “Never ...
My Punk Rock story is not always a ‘pretty one’. It is a miracle I am alive. I was homeless on the street at 14, very out of my mind, traumatized, mentally ill, drugged up, drunk. You get the picture. ‘Suburbia’ punksploitation? Shit I already was a real life ‘Suburbia/T.R ...
Being different from my peers made me seem difficult and troubled. Family members talked about me when I wasn’t around, and I overheard them talking about me when I was around. It was obvious that I was evolving in a way they feared, but they didn’t understand it any more ...
I grew up in the 1970s, and when I turned 15, I experienced live music for the first time when my boyfriend, who was 18, took me to see Rod Stewart and Faces. WOW! What an eye-opening experience! I knew that this was where I wanted to be, and I ...
I was 15 years old, and living in Long Island City, Queens with my parents, and “Punk Rock” was breaking in the US. There was a television news highlight on “punk” and I thought it was cool & scary. My friend from the neighborhood in Queens, NY, Javier, was a ...
I remember getting really into Patti Smith in summer of 78, friends of my mom had Radio Ethiopia, and I’d get real into playing it. My first experience with punk up close was the band Regressive Aid who I encountered in spring 1983. They were unclassifiable but very punk in ...
Punk Scene and Solid Eye
Punk Scene
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, there was a unique relationship between the art world and the punk rock scene in Los Angeles. I hung out with musicians in the Associated Skull Bands, including Monitor, Human Hands, BPeople and NON. Sometimes when the ...
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. Even though I’ve been in thousands of dark rooms to see bands play since then, ...
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 obviously couldn’t play a solo to save his life. I was interested to see the ...
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 met a kid named Eric and he said check this out…he made me a mixtape ...
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 Casey Kasem’s Top 40 or Country. Mother’s Records was a refuge for that, and I ...
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 street by myself to school the next year. My parents made this promise and then ...
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 Monica, the skaters and surfers who suddenly cut off their long hair and either dyed ...
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 I’m listening to a song by Void or Dirt or Red Cross or X. The outer ...
Photo by Gary Leonard.
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 in the doorways leading to the hallway and the kitchen. Shocking orange deep shag carpet ...
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 radio when I was in kindergarten (1969). The thing about 3rd through 5th grades is ...
I guess it was ‘75 or so, I was working at an appliance store in Burbank, CA and living in Santa Monica with Kidd Spike (then known as Jeff Austin) and his sister, Gaye. Gaye was my high school girlfriend, she and I had moved to CA a few years ...
My PUNK STORY:
My Punk story starts way, way before PUNK.
My dad (or DA, as we say with our family voice in Ireland) introduced me to “HardCore” Dixieland via record albums when I was only months old along with Dixieland live shows when I was around three. If anyone knows real ...
This first time I heard the two words, “punk rock,” was around 1977. My mom, brother and I had just moved to Beverly Hills. That place sucks. Anyway, one day, a girl from my 8th grade class, Joan, showed up with a choppy, short haircut, a single earring of a ...
I grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, and there was definitely a something-in-the-water thing going on in our sleepy little beach town. There was a decommissioned church that I knew as the arts & crafts church that I would sometimes go to with my mother, which apparently some referred to ...
I grew up an alien in a small suburban PA town. Never fit in with the locals & always felt like something was missing. Then I discovered the Clash & Dead Kennedys. It was what I was waiting for. The fury, the anger, the alienation, and the need to get ...
My story began when I came back from living on Oahu the summer of 1979. On the North Shore where I had lived since 1976, I was sheltered from all the music that was happening on the mainland, more specifically punk rock. We came back every summer and always tapped ...
Wax lips sink ships!
I guess it’s all Jeremy Freeze’s fault. He was my little brother’s best friend who lived down the street. He came over after school one day with a mixed tape of Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, and The Ramones. He had older siblings who got him into punk because ...
“TURN THAT BLOODY RACKET DOWN!! HOW CAN YOU CALL THAT MUSIC??!”
Perhaps not the best psychological approach to curb a teenager’s new-found calling, but it also signalled a sense that I was in the right ballpark.
My father was the most vociferous about it. Dad’s tastes in music had extended only so ...
My punk rock origin story is probably shared (at least in part) by quite a few others – not only in the area where I live, but other cities and regions as well.
I grew up in Oxnard, California – a beach town sixty miles northwest and a world away from ...
I grew up in Brooklyn and in the early ’80s. I was into the usual classic-rock, the Grateful Dead, Dylan, jazz (through my parents), some metal (mostly Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Celtic Frost), and rap (I religiously listened to and recorded the Friday night shows on WBLS and KISS-FM). ...
If you see me randomly walking down the street you might think I was just some middle aged woman in nondescript clothing with a generic haircut and a canvas tote bag. Inside of my head is probably a song by Void or Dirt or Red Cross or X. Looking back ...
I went to El Rodeo Elementary school from kindergarten through 8th grade. I always had friends in school, I played sports and did all the other things kids do. I had a love for music and remember hearing Devo and other popular bands from that time, seeing The Rocky Horror ...
At 17, in 1975, I left the safety of N. Miami Beach Suburbia for the wilds of Los Angeles to study photography and somehow found myself working as a paparazzo with the likes of Ron Galella of Jackie O fame.
In 1978, whilst living in an apartment in Hollywood, my across-the-hall ...
In 1981, I was 13 years old, and wasn’t really a fan of music around then, I was still into Star Wars, comic books, and figuring out Dungeons and Dragons, but music was a not-so-exciting thing based on what I was hearing on the radio and such. Sure, if I’d ...
I first fell in love with the superficial idea of punk as a kid in Soviet Union. When I was about 6 or 7 there was a program on TV that highlighted the corrosive effects of capitalism on young minds. Among others, it showed a bunch of teenagers with funny ...
My only parent was an unwed single mother at 15, and had my younger brother and I in the late 70s. We never met our “father” or any of his family, but I have been told that he tried to kidnap us once. My mom was very active in the ...
Ok, I have been avoiding this for long enough. It’s with clenched teeth I write this, deleting the second sentence over and over. Not sure how to say this, afraid to let out my big secret, to expose myself on the internet laid bare for all to see. Afraid to ...
I had been thinking about starting this project for about 20 years. Initially, I wanted to shoot photos of people because at the time I was really into photography. But I put photography on the back burner to have kids. Around that time, film photography was beginning to be replaced ...
The first time I became aware of punk rock I was in the 5th grade. The Sex Pistols were in the news and coming to the states and the hype was such that people were actually afraid of a rock and roll band. Between that hype, reading Creem magazine regularly, ...
My family was the stereotypical northeast liberal family. Grandma served in WW2 w/ the WAVES (the Navy Women’s auxiliary force) and my Grandfather served in the US Coast Guard before getting a deferment since he was a dentist. My parents marched in candlelight vigils for civil rights in the 1960s ...
In the 6th grade my buddy had an older sister that was in the Hollywood KBD punk band, Deprogamer. She’d come around once in a while and give him (us) magazines. She turned us onto Rodney on the Roq (ROTR), a KROQ, 106.7, DJ that dedicated the weekend nights to ...
Before Punk, as a pre-teen, I was all about making 8mm films that I shot with my dad’s hand wound Brownie. I began making films at the age of 11. This would be 1974, before I had any aspirations to play music. I first heard of Punk Rock from a ...
(In memory of Brady Rifkin.)
For most of 1977 I was 13 years old. I was a proghead, and from what I’d seen of UK punk, I thought it was silly. But I heard “God Save the Queen” on the radio and decided I wanted the single, and then figured I ...
People treated me as though I was insane. They would throw things out of their car windows at me while I waited at the bus stop. They would call me names too, oh the nasty world. Life was not so nice. Strange though, I was wonderfully happy and smiling then, ...
“MY PLEASURE!“ There are a multitude of reasons why I say this to those who enjoy any of my filmings. Of course I am proud of my filmings, and the music is great, paraphrasing D. Boon “Punk Rock Saved My Life “. I am so grateful that artists allow me ...
My first experience with punk was negative, in that I hated that my favorite music magazine at the time – Cream – was featuring more stories on the Sex Pistols and Ramones then my favorite band, KISS. I remember seeing pictures of Johnny Rotten, with his infamous sneer and acne ...
It’s all my uncle Mickey’s fault. Up until I was about 13 years old, my musical taste was pretty mainstream. It was 1980 and my uncle had started to discover bands that wouldn’t necessarily fully qualify as punk rock, but were at least off the beaten path. Iggy Pop solo ...
A couple years ago someone published an anthology of first punk rock gig stories called MY FIRST TIME or something. I was annoyed that they didn’t ask me because my first punk rock show was so much better than damn near all the entries in the book. December 1978. The ...
In 1977 I was 6 years old and there’s an intriguing song on the radio, It’s called Peaches and it’s by a group called The Stranglers. My intrigue is piqued as the BBC have bleeped a word out of the singer’s arrogant sounding vocals. Soon enough I’m hearing stories about ...