Great Moments In The History of PUNK

One of my best comic strips ever!

Back in 1986, SPIN Magazine published an issue that featured several articles devoted to “The 10th Anniversary of Punk.” SPIN was a great publication back in the day: They covered a lot of controversial topics (like the origin of the AIDS epidemic), and provided great coverage of the music scene back in the day. They devoted a lot of coverage of the anniversary of Punk in their Volume One, Number Nine issue: Senior Editor Glenn O’Brien interviewed Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in an in-depth interview that covered a lot of interesting topics. (Glenn was one of the first journalists to cover punk rock, and went on the host the TV Party from the Mudd Club and was quoted saying “PUNK Magazine was the most important magazine in the world in 1976”. Truer words were never spoken.)

I think it is significant that back then, Glenn O’Brien and Scot Chien recognized that the punk movement began ten years before, by recognizing that it began in January 1976.

Glenn and Scott Cohen approached me about doing a comic strip so I put together this three-page comic strip for the issue. They ran a lot of other interesting content about the state of punk rock in the issue, some of the content holds up, some doesn’t. But the issue is an interesting cultural artifact!

I am happy to say that my three-page comic strip has held up pretty good: It’s even part of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame permanent collection (last time I looked: If anyone near Cleveland can confirm this I would appreciate it. I also donated the artwork for the back cover of the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, I hope that is still on display!)

This comic strip shows the hysteria and crazy shit that I had to deal with when I was trying to publish PUNK Magazine back in the day. There was so much resistance to the punk movement back then. Crazy shit from the mainstream musicians back in the day. And it still goes on, 50 years later. End of the Century filmmaker Michael Gramaglia and I had lunch recently, and he told me about the hatred of punk rock that he’s heard from some of the people in the music industry that he’s worked with over the years.

Well, whatever. I hope you enjoy my comic strip. Sucks that I couldn’t have done more stuff for SPIN back then, but that’s one of those stories for another day.

In other news, the effort to buy a building for an “Underground Archive/Museum” is going well. It looks like we will raise the first stage of funding in the next week or two. Then a more serious effort will be necessary.

To contribute, you can visit the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-new-york-underground-museum-punk-lives

The idea is to put punk rock in a larger cultural context. New York has been the host to many subcultures, from the Bohemian movement to the Jazz Age to the Beat movement to the YIPPIEs to punk rock. And most of it happened on or near the Bowery and Bleecker Streets. We lost CBGBs, but this is an opportunity to have a place to give people who visit New York City’s East Village to revisit the rich history of the area.