Roughly an hour and twenty minutes from where I grew up, Minneapolis, MN was the first real city in my life. I say “real,” of course, suggesting, falsely, that the population of a place and the integrity of its placeness are somehow intrinsically related, as though mere mass equated substance. While I realize that it doesn’t, it does, when speaking of cities and my tumultuous relationship with them, seem, at the very least, a subjectively sound description of my experiences. I also say “real” implying that one can in fact meaningfully enter into an actual relationship with a city, that the streets, clubs, neighborhoods, cultures and sub-cultures define together a certain, almost human personality, a living energy at once directly present and impossible to name. Though I have lived in many other places, in many ways, for better and for worse, Minneapolis is the only sizable city in my life that matters. I love her very much, though I doubt I could ever live there.
Driving west on I-94, I first traveled to the Twin Cities as a teenager to see the band Mr. Bungle at First Avenue. While the show itself remains, fondly, a blur of distant, half-developed images, a loose and unclear memory consisting mostly of the amalgamated bodies of other people, a sweaty and thriving organism, it, as a point of original relation, seems particularly apt for at least two reasons. The first is that Minneapolis is absolutely inseparable from my experience of music, especially live music, and of a way of living which seems so often to accompany both the creation and consumption of that music. Secondly, when in a city for any real amount of time, I am simultaneously taken up by a feeling of liberating anonymity and paralyzing isolation. The mass presence of other people, especially urban people whose lives are influenced, to a large extent, by the pace of the city as a whole, not only draws me in upon myself, but their persistent being there in such force also pulls me out. A sea of living streets and buildings, the city washes me away.
In the mid to late nineties, for a period of about three years, my experience of Minneapolis was almost exclusively defined by record trips to Extreme Noise to buy patches, studs, and the latest hardcore album. Then, depending on who was playing, though it rarely mattered, my friends and I would burrow our skinny teenage bodies into the Bomb Shelter, a small, unventilated basement venue which quickly became the context and locality of those formative years as a young punk-rocker in Middle-West. Though eventually I would come to love the place and call it home, the first time there my friends and I walked in and immediately felt uneasy. The Twin Cities hardcore scene at that specific time was, perhaps, arguably the most productive and thriving punk scene in the country, though I couldn’t prove that. Centered around Extreme Noise, a volunteer-run, cooperative record store now located on West Lake, the anarco-punk collective Profane Existence, the nation’s largest distributor of hardcore music and literature, and the creative efforts of a rotating cast of degenerate musicians including the likes of Civil Disobedience, Code 13, Misery, State of Fear, and Man Afraid, the scene in Minneapolis was the home of almost every band I listened to. But being there for the first time, in the place where these bands actually played and whose members were likely standing in the room beside us, this was a vastly different experience then putting on a seven inch and listening with headphones in my bedroom at my parent’s house. Strangely, I felt incredibly self-conscious, more so even then when standing in the hallways of Memorial High School where I stood out utterly among the throng of kids in designer jeans and t-shirts. But in Minneapolis, at the Bomb Shelter, we simply weren’t punk enough. Our clothes lacked the distinctive grime and actual tatter of the locals. We were too clean, too sober, too still going to High School and living at our parent’s houses to blend in, too bright and wide-eyed and not on heroin to hide the fact that we were different. The worst thing that one could be at that age was a “poser,” someone who looked the part but couldn’t play it. I remember standing around for a while, awkwardly looking at people, the people looking back. One girl I remember in particular, the blaring shortness of her skirt. She had this kind of patched together leopard print tube top on, and when she caught me staring at her, she flipped me off and snarled. In the underbelly of the city, the room was bleakly concrete, dimly lit. The air, stale, tasted like a rancid mix of body sweat and Grain Belt. When I walked out, I found my friend Josh in an alley down the block, his t-shirt turned inside out, rubbing dirt and toothpaste in his hair.
Though I have continued coming back to Minneapolis, my relationship to the Bomb Shelter, and to the scene in general, exploded beyond repair on a violent summer night, July if I remember right, 1997. I’ve never been quite sure of the details. In the aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, everything I’ve read has happened at a slant. There is a tendency, I think, and an understandable one, especially on the part of the oppressed, to romanticize this specific kind of violence as a means of making sense of it, to paint those who were beaten, pepper sprayed, and jailed as purely innocent, victims of police barbarity, martyrs of the cause. While this is true, it is not the only thing that’s true. What is inextricably true and what I do remember is the heat. When magnified by the warmth of bodies packed together in a room without access to the outside air, the temperature must have made us angry. The penultimate band had finished. People were pouring up the stairs and into the street to cool their bodies down and breathe. I don’t remember how it started, or who started it, but a fight broke out. This, sadly, was becoming increasingly common. Of all the fights I’ve been in in my life, all but one of them has happened at a punk show. I don’t know why this is the case, or what could have been done to make it less so. The anger which united us and which gave weight and credence to the idea of punk also turned us in upon ourselves. Like most things, our weakness was our strength.
That night, when people started, yet again, to rip and tear at each other, the only thing to do was try to stop them, which is what we did. Specifically, I remember a guy trying to pull a girl off another guy. She had his dreadlocks in her hands and she was yanking, hard, with everything she had. Then someone started hitting him. In the intense frenzy of the moment, without the time to talk or consider what actually is going on, one person’s attempt to stop a fight looks, to another person, a lot like the fight itself. Despite their good intentions, a person tries to put an end to violence and becomes it. In no time at all the sidewalk, and then the street itself, filled with about twenty drunk, sweaty, and extremely angry people, screaming, punching, and kicking at each other. Bottles broke and blood was drawn. Unsurprisingly, someone called the cops.
I’m not sure exactly what stopped the altercation. Maybe everyone just got tired. In hindsight, it was probably because Defiance started playing. Either way, when the cops finally got there, all three hundred or so of us were off the street and in the basement of the Bomb Shelter. I was standing in the back when the first officers arrived, guns drawn, and started pushing through the crowd. Though I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the band, I could tell, by the expressions on the faces of both the officer and the kid being questioned next to me, that whatever their conversation was, it wasn’t friendly. Soon a small crowd assembled. Soon the kid got struck across the face, hard. We pounced before his body hit the ground, almost as though we’d been waiting for it, as though a part of us wanted it to happen.
From that point on, the night became a fog, a blur of lights and largely disconnected images. I remember waking up to the fact I had climbed onto the back of another person, much larger than me, that I had my arm around the person’s neck and I was squeezing. When I realized the person was a policeman, it was too late. I had committed, on instinct and without thinking, to a course of action over which I no longer had control. Then the world went black. When I woke up again, it was on the ground to the sharp sting of pepper spray. Someone grabbed me, my friend Jake, I think, and carried me, quickly, up the stairs and into the street. There, the street was filled with cop cars. It was filled with lights and sirens, men with shields and helmets. It was filled with people, blind and running, with people throwing rocks, bottles, whatever objects happened to be at hand. Anyone who wasn’t in a uniform was being sprayed, beaten, and arrested. We got the hell out of there, fast.
When I finally stopped crying, I was on the front lawn of a hospital sitting in the spray of a sprinkler. My friends were with me. We had managed, somehow, to find each other. Though the hospital refused to treat us, we were, for the most part, safe and un-arrested. At seventeen, this was suddenly the only thing I’d ever seen and been a part of that mattered. With the initial rush beginning to subside, with the burning in my eyes and the pain in the back of my head beginning to subside, I began to anticipate going back to Eau Claire and telling people what we’d done. The question of my authenticity as a kid who looked and dressed the way I did, who listened to the music and held the political views I did, was no longer on the table. I fought a cop and got my ass kicked. Finally, I was punk enough.
Looking back, that moment in Minneapolis was also the beginning of the end of my affiliation with the people and politics of that specific place, a part of the world which made me passionate and feel alive because it taught me how to hate. This is not to say that the punk scene didn’t encourage us to care about each other, that it didn’t breed a sense of community or fuel the more creative aspects of our nature, it did, but I spent so much time as a teenager trying to not be like my parents or the guy in a plaid shirt in line at the post office, the woman pushing a cart of food and plastic products through a Wal-Mart, that I was unable, for a good portion of my life, to pay attention to and credit fully the things which made us similar. I’m not sure exactly when or why I started drifting away from punk rock, probably because I started smoking pot and fell in love, but it happened. I got sick of seeing fights. And I’m glad it happened. I needed it to.
At this point in my life, I can’t speak to the quality of punk in Minneapolis, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve been gone too long, both from the place itself and from the scene in general, from any scene in general. Plus, I don’t listen to the music, though I’ve heard the musicianship has gotten better, which is good. One could make an argument, I suppose, that I’ve sold out, gotten older, and given up. And while I wouldn’t want to take that away from them, I tend to credit the changes I’ve gone through more as a matter of clarity than anything, an attempt to feel at home in my own real skin and not the costume of an idea whose parameters, ultimately, have proven incredibly isolating and restrictive. The question of whether punk is dead or not just doesn’t seem important. These days, when I visit the Cities, it’s to see the people that matter most to me, most of whom are playing music there, constructing a new scene from the remnants of the old. We’ll go to shows sometimes and dance. We’ll stand outside the bar, talking, and the lights of Minneapolis. Every now and then a person walks by who looks the way that I did when I used to think it mattered that I look like that, and I'll wonder what he thinks of when he sees me, if he thinks I'm just another asshole, some person drinking beer outside a bar, which is exactly what I am.
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