Scrambled TV Porn or Punk Rock?
Now that our latler-era Millennial asses, or the much more despised term “Geriatric Millennials,” are fading into the ether and our cultural relevance is just about kaput, many of us have taken to the YouTubes for a historical look back at the moments in our lives that shaped us.
These YouTube videos take many forms but the ones I seem uncontrollably drawn to are about Punk Rock albums that came out one hundred million years ago in the early nineteen hundred and nineties when I was a preteen. The ones that ushered an entire generation of pimply, greasy, squeaky-voiced kids into the spiked and studded bosom of Punk Rock.
My first encounter with Punk Rock wasn’t an album at all, or at least not at first. It was a late-night, public access television show that appeared like Brigadoon, in the wee hours of the night.
What? My Brigadoon reference isn’t “Millennial” enough for you?
Guuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh, fine. It appeared just when I needed it, like the Room of Fucking Requirements. Happy? I’m not.
As a preteen middle schooler, Friday nights were spent playing freshly procured video games from the local media rental depository, and eating junk food all night long. Typically these things were done with friends during a “slumber party” where gaggles of boys converged under the roof of one lucky parent’s house to partake in said activities together until sheer exhaustion took hold and released them all into sweet slumber. The inner workings of a preteens boys slumber party are varied and precise, but junk food and video games were essentials.
When the sugary and salty snacks were depleted, when the video games had been conquered, and when the idea of sleep first creeped into existence, usually around midnight, one world-weary slumber party participant would start telling the tale of the fabled “Playboy Channel,” the television station that was populated exclusively by Playboy magazine models wearing nothing but a smile, but you could only view the nude frivolity if you were eighteen years of age, or older, and had paid the local cable television monopoly for unfettered access. However, another way was possible. You could turn the television to a specific channel number and what was normally a scrambled, wavy, bendy, psychedelic mish-mash of what was typically on the channel, in this case naked ladies, would magically, at midnight, become unscrambled and all would be revealed to whatever twelve year old boys were awaiting with their anxious eyes.
Believing this fully we awaited the promised hour then turned to the station the wisened young partier had claimed was the promised land.
What I saw changed me forever.
In a darkened basement, awash in the television’s warm, glowing, warmth, I was presented with a group of lengthy, slender people, with flowing black hair, wearing strategically placed, black leather clothing accessories, but instead of frolicking playfully or baring secretive flesh, they were screaming at me, and were decidedly not naked ladies, but the fully clothed, male members of what I would soon find out was the band of musicians known as The Ramones.
As the television continued it’s presentation, the group of weird-looking, oddly dressed men played their instruments, loudly, as what was clearly unveiling itself as a music video, showed images of ugly men, hiding in caves trying on ludicrously comical wigs, a crying baby whose head was the adult head of the lead singer Joey Ramone, throwing a fit while his parents, bathed is grotesque neon lights tried to feed him some indescribable slop.
A parade of hairy, bearded, leather-clad men, and assembled freaks danced through the television until at one point a shadowy silhouette of a shapely female figure appears. The rest of the boys suddenly snapped back to reality assuming we had indeed found the Playboy channel and all this grotesquery was the mere cable television bridge toll we had to pay to gain access, but all hopes were dashed when the screen was pulled back to reveal a large, bulbous, slimy man in a diaper playing with Barbie dolls like a psychotic marionette.
The boys recoiled in disgust but I no longer cared if any naked ladies ever showed up. I was transfixed by this freak show of carnival images and thunderous, furiously fast music played by these lengthy weirdos.
The music video came to it’s conclusion and written on the screen it said the band were called “The Ramones,” and the song was titled “Substitute,” which appeared on a music album entitled “Acid Eaters.” I would, much later, come to discover that what I had just witnessed was The Ramones cover version of the British, classic rock band The Who’s song “Substitute,” featured on an entire album of cover songs by The Ramones but none of that mattered at that moment. All that mattered was whatever this was.
Now, I had been growing a taste for music by this point in my life. As a child without my own means of playing music I was at the whims of my parents’ tastes, which, being Baby Boomers, was mostly whatever nineteen hundred and fifties, or sixties, top forty songs were playing nonstop on the local “oldies” radio station, or some slightly more contemporary musicians like William Joel, Phillip Collins, and Linda Rondstat. Through MTV and VH1, also cable television channels that featured music videos, MTV focussing on what was happening at the time, and VH1 featuring more of the lighter side of Rock n Roll, and Rhythm and Blues music, I started to to develop my own individualistic music tastes represented by Michael Jackson, Amy Grant, Boyz 2 Men, and such safer fair.
Not too long before the Ramones encounter, thanks again to MTV, and my growing friend base of miscreants, I, like most early nineteen hundred and nineties youths, was into Grunge music, the warble-y voiced, apathetic, flannel-clad musical genre from the Pacific Northwest. Granted, punk in nature, but I didn’t fucking know anything about that as I sat, mouth agape in dumbstruck silence while The Ramones existed in front of me that night.
This… This was like nothing I’d ever heard, or seen, before. The group of boys declared this music video transmission boring and went to do some other typical slumber party activity, in this instance, a pillow fight, to take out their aggression on each other having been denied the sight of boobs.
I didn’t move from that spot. The Ramones were but the first music video of the night.
While the pillow fight frenzy played out around me, I was lost in a new world full of weird, spike-haired, dirty young men, screaming and jumping around, riding skateboards, being disrespectful to adults, and making the loudest racket I had ever heard, all with foreign band names like Rancid, Pennywise, Youth Brigade, NOFX, and The Bouncing Souls.
The procession of rowdy visuals and frantic music came to an end and the title of the show that had collected all this noise was revealed…
“PunkTV.”
“Punk,” I thought. “So this is punk?”
From then on I was a devoted Punk TV convert. Every Friday night I would do my damnedest to stay up as late as I could to catch a glimpse of the show. Sometimes it would appear, sometimes not, which would then lead me to other late-night viewings. Mostly USA’s (yet another nineteen hundred and nineties television channel) after hours movie block “Up All Night” with hosts Rhonda, the bubbly, blonde smart-ass, and Gilber Godried, screaming his gravely jokes at maximum shrill. “Up All Night” fostered my other growing interest; trashy movies, as they featured exclusively B, C, D, and F grade horror shlock movies like “Critters,” “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” “The Stuff,” or various gore-soaked, boob-filled, Troma Entertainment flicks like “Class of Nukem High,” or the ever-lovable, gross-out fest, “The Toxic Avenger.”
I started diligently saving my weekly pittance of an allowance and taking on extra chores to save up the bucks to buy Punk Rock compact discs. When asked what I wanted for the annual gift giving holiday of Christmas that year I gave my folks a litany of Punk album titles I’d written down from Punk TV. Cooly enough, they actually got me “Acid Eater” by The Ramones featuring their cover of “Substitute” from the music video that set me down the punk path I’d ingested instead of nudie Playboy Playmates.
I don’t believe in pre-ordained phenomena, or any kind of fate, but it wasn’t much longer after that that Green Day would drop their music video for “Longview” on MTV and usher in a whole new Punk Rock era, and I was there, on the very cusp of it, when it went off like an atomic bomb.
My mother wandered into the room where I was watching the television, enraptured by Green Day’s youthful, dirty appearance, singing of their up and down relationship with masturbation. Catching sight and sound of what was entering her young son’s eyes, ears, and mind, she disgustingly asked, “what in god’s name is this?”
“Mom,” I said. “This is Punk Rock.”
