“We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.” (-Dr. Cornel West)
‘Last time I had any surplus income to burn on collecting records was in 1995-a terrible year for me when my Catholic school best friend overdosed while attending some prestiegious engineering school in Seattle and the hometown Catholic school jocks all blamed it on me cause I was his friend with the black hat and chain wallet and the priests were telling his mom that he was in Purgatory, but with enough donations to the church, we might be able to pray him into Heaven. I loved his mom, so when all the casserole bringer private school parents and his brother’s preppie athlete friends were scapegoating me for my beloved brother and believer and chauffer wouldbe drummer/manager’s untimely death convinced her I was somehow to blame, they gave his leather jacket to a girl he was in love with and she got on a plane and brought it straight to me because she knew him intimately and how much he loved me. So then I was outta town on tour with the kickass punk band of the day, when I got the call about how somehow my car had mysteriously caught on fire. It was a bad time to be me in the hick states, I’ll tell you that. All the rich druggy sons of CEO’s were cos playing as alternative idie rockers on their parent’s dime. I was not into grunge/aleternative or Matchbox 20/Creed/Nickelback/Bush/Three Doors Down bullshit, at all. So the last couple underground bands I remember being at all that excited about were the Humpers, Candy Snatchers. Electric Frankenstein, Guitar Wolf, and American Soul Spiders. Oh yeah, also the Remains from Japan who became the Golden Arms.
What passes for humor in the correction guard culture of the tank plant towns of the Midwest is some fat wrestler chortling too loudly to his ever presnet pack of male bonding jock weightlifter Gold’s gym buddies, “Hey! Look! It’s Devo! Hiyk! Hituk! Hiyuk!”, whenever he sees some lonhgair in a leather jacket. Or ya know, Boy George, Ramones, Any Dick In A Band. In later years, I moved to a former hippie enclave that got multimillions-madeover by Nike honchos and hoteliers into a rightwing intolerant sports tourism frathouse town, and it became Marilyn Manson, or Ozzy! Or when encountering the shitlib safespace navel studies elitists at the protest that was supposed to be about income inequality but got hijacked into Genderology, or whilst helping feed the housleness community, one would be chastized for presumed “cysborn heteronormative pass privilege”, it was funny how the imperial think tanks who infiltrated the rich colleges had even hijacked the glossary of people’s movements and handed some once marginalized college kids a whole toolkit of extra special rights, sacred cow sensitivity, protected class privilege, special backstage laminantes and check your own privilege checklists they never really checked into, encourgaing them to feel exclusive or higher ranking, ivory tower cloisted, hoity-toity above the ungentrified and coarse riffraff begging for spare change in the sleet by the offramps, who deserve to be demonetized and “get a job” cancelled, and constantly degreded for refusing to share their own private preferences, chickenhawk political sports team, or second hand identity vicarious identifying. If one did not present as sufficiently middle class property owning soccer mom, one was at risk of being herded around by class patrols and receiving the stop n frisk “show me your papers” treatment from the private cops and Wackenhutt/Pinkerton thugs and alphabet gangs who patrolled the gentrification zone and the library and bus stop downtown, you’d always see skateboarders with their hands up being patted down on every corner by these hardon, looking for senseless conflict, ex jocks with nightcsticks, tazers, oversized forearms with Popeye anchor tattoos and walkie talkies, even some of the guys. I never did much like the university people, lotta fratboy igorance and future Nurse Ratched bureaucratic sonder commandoes seeking positions of power to hassle people for not belonging to their oh so elite and exclusionary starbellied sneetches (“Dr. Seuss is CANCELELLED! RETRO-ACTIVELY!!”, temporary secretarial social clubs, or V.I.P.scolding committee sororiety cults, one lady who called herself an activist used to call the kkkops on people for smoking outside behind the nightclub. Other various Gladys Kravitz and Ropers would call the kkkops on loud autistic kids for existing in their posh Buddha statue zipcodes, offending their P.C. pet pitbulls, Shiva and Bohdi Tree, or not being stereotyped as gender woke enough. On script hut-two college kids would follow you around calling you a white male and I’d tell ’em, “so’s your daddy who bought you all your shit and pays for your fancy tuition”. Heck, summa my best friends are white males. Funny thing about all these duped rube marketing groups “self indentifying” as this or that, is they got no manners, in spite of bleating on and on and on about other people’s etiquette, or standup comedians free style riffin’, they feel totally comfortable trying to define you or me as some two word dismissive soundbite-they just don’t want you treating them like they treat you, reminds me of all those AOC Met gala people insisting their assistants and all the little people be cloth masked while they were not. Elitism is a drug of the bourgeoise. it was the Dick Cheney police state “See Something/Say Something/Every Pedestrian’s A Suspect” era, when Tesla driving, social climbing snitch squads had been conditioned to believe one acquired power, authority and class mobility by vigilante deputizing one’s self the neighborhood watch, and rattin’ outy their neighbors for precrime Surveillance Agents fun and profit, and feeling morally superior while doing it. Every letter to the editor ever published by the local newspaper was some insufferable rich person complaining about the homeless and almost all of them insisting they, too, had been homeless, like back at sports college in the seventies before they married up the hard way, it was a fuckedup place to be. There really was no punk scene or place to go that was not being dominated by greedy rich people and all their authority trip reindeer games. They said they were a vibrant and diverse human rights city, but that wasall just transparent real estate code for “as long as you are rich”. So now I live in a dead end desrt ghost town where you can be a pedestrian but still have to worry about rattle snakes and unleashed desert dogs roaming free on every block, but everybody’s poor in the deadend desert so as long as you avoid the ten trendy businesses on the two streets that are home to the overpriced bar, coffee shop, art galleries, airbandb and ripoff tourist trap boutiques, people will mostly leave you alone, except I got a teenager so the school aged people and teachers and administrators still hassle him for being different. Society sucks. In the eighties, the record store I worked at sold those red plastic Devo hats, I think I never bought one cause I was so sick of never knowing if my name was “Fag!” or “Devo!” Or “Boy George!”, growing up back there.
They started institutionalizing me at about 12, and nobody’s sorry, they still say I had it coming for challenging dominant status quo narratives and being unable to pass as conformist or whatever. Rocknroll was taboo, and kissing. One of my roommates, Fat Jerry had a tiny transistor radio he hid behind the ceiling panels thatw e could listen to some nights if the older hall monitors were allies of ours. We could sometimes get an A.M. station from Lexington, Kentucky and I mostly remember how we all liked “Sultans Of Swing” and “Big Log” by Robert Plant. Our other roommates, Thin Jerry and Mikoto from japan were always doing hotboxing where you try to hit the other guy’s hand, there was a kid from japan named Masahiro who gave us cool punk rock haircuts ala Billy Ifol. A kid named Druggy stole two different chicks off me-Carol and Jennifer, he was Ronnie Milsap’s first cousin, Johnny. Purple haired beauty school dropout named Bryan Curd shared my love of Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and the Thompson Twins. That place was full of creeps and superstitious fear mongering rabid fanatics.
Veglam 
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