We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene

"Absolutely. One of the ghastly things is that people are selling their archival material on the market rather than depositing valuable records at places where scholars and others who simply have an interest in this sort of stuff can go through and peruse them. That’s one of the crimes that I discovered as I wrote my book, the many people who have sold precious archives that I didn’t otherwise have access to. One advantage that I devised was to use Maximumrocknroll, a nonprofit monthly zine of punk subculture founded in 1982 and based in San Francisco, as a way of cross-checking what was going on in other cities in the US. If I came across word of a fanzine that was say, out of Tulsa, Oklahoma – which believe it or not had a profound political punk scene – I would test by seeing if Maximumrocknroll was talking about it. Needless to say, I would also sometimes, trying not to do this too often, deploy the ‘bullshit detector’. Of course I didn’t remember every single moment of my engagement in the scene and what I knew was going on nationally, but I had enough experience of it to be able to crack through the thin veneer of the evidence and say, ‘OK, yes, this is something significant’. Russo’s book does this very well, and that’s one of the reasons that I chose it for my selection. The dominant way of writing punk history is to compile interviews alone. Some of your readers may be surprised at one of the books I did not include in my list, which is Please Kill Me , just a series of interviews with people on the scene pasted together. I find that sort of oral history to be dangerous. I don’t trust people’s memory. I don’t even trust my own memory! Exactly, you’ve got to know where people are coming from. It’s the music scene, and so you will always find self-aggrandisement somewhere, that ‘I was there for the formation of this or that or that band’ or whatever. What Russo does so well is to blend together the memoirs and the evidence which allows for a longer narrative rather than just a paragraph statement from any given individual. Like the author here that I suppose I most admire, Jon Savage, there’s a narrative development that goes beyond oral history. England’s Dreaming is such a good book because it’s not merely an oral history. He did conduct interviews, of course, and these have been released uncut in a follow-up edition, the England’s Dreaming Tapes . But for the most part, he’s going back to the record and recreating events in a way that’s actually quite alarmingly literary. It’s a beautifully written book. That’s no exaggeration. “Punk isn’t just about music. It’s about building a wider popular movement” One of the things that I wanted to reject and not fall prey to in my own work was the reliance on oral interviews with the participants. I kept that to an absolute minimum, and only contacted people and interviewed them when I couldn’t find a specific piece of ephemera, be it a zine, poster, bootleg recording, or a booklet attached to a record or something like that. True primary sources were key, and only having exhausted these I might consider an interview. Even when I did those interviews, I was quite hesitant about relying upon the person’s memory and what the person wanted to convey to me in terms of what they saw as being significant. The levity is a common thread in almost every single interview she chose for this book. Many of the protagonists say that this was an act of politicisation, that they became politically aware though Punk Rock. In my book too it’s one of the things that I wanted to emphasise. Punk isn’t just about music. It’s about building a wider popular movement that can include engagement in politics in different ways than was possible before. You can see this in the art of the time, you can see it in movies, you can see it in many different forms of self-expression. I wanted to get away not only from the over-reliance on oral history which dominates the study of punk, but also the way in which we usually tell the story as a narrative of different bands, their playlists and their members. This is an approach that usually silos things rather than giving you a wider perspective on what makes punk truly interesting as a social phenomenon. The forms of creativity that punk mobilised were much more diverse and inclusive than I believe people recognise. Another important artist here is Winston Smith , who did a lot of the Dead Kennedys’ promotional materials. Like Pettibon, he was knowledgeable about art history and the history of the avant-garde in modern pictures and painting. Pettibon would take part in the epic Minutemen discussions with Mike Watt, for example, in recounting the story of Surrealism , Dada and how they influenced him as an artist. He had this wonderful way of doing things where his technique would confront the viewer with a radical disjuncture – between the actual image and then the accompanying text, usually written either above or below in such a way as to be a provocation and a puzzle. This was part of what made him successful and it’s part of the power of punk. Like Winston’s cover art, Pettibon makes you sit up and say, ‘What is this?’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The iconography was in large part about the death of hippie culture and the hippie movement, along with the rise of key personalities in the 60s counterculture, like Charles Manson, the insane organiser of what he called ‘the family,’ which was mostly manipulated young women who went on murder sprees for him. This is intelligent, interesting, urgent, neck-snapping art that he created. Winston Smith in visual terms was continuing and innovating with a technique for cut ups that takes us back to Dada and the literary work of writers like William S. Burroughs , not to mention of course the Situationist International."