Illustration by Drew Shannon
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One Sunday, my wife Cass and I decided to partake in one of the most exhilarating parts of adulthood – organizing our clothes into “keep” and “discard” piles.
I flipped through every ancient T-shirt I had, holding each one up for a millisecond of reflection before choosing its fate. Some took me back to hockey tournaments I lost or girls I dated or cases of beer I survived. But there was one shirt I held up a little longer.
In giant letters, the words THE CLASH could be made out between the holes and bleach stains, along with the faces of men that, in my house growing up, were considered royalty. Punk rock icons: Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones and Joe Strummer.
“No ...” Cass said.
Too late. I flung off the shirt I had on and began squeezing myself into the nearly 20-year-old artifact.
“Oh yes,” I answered, standing straight and proud with flabs of fat and frays of hair poking through each hole like a fleshy pasta maker.
With its supernatural hold, the shirt incited a flashback. I began reflecting on growing up with a punk rock dad.
“Hey, Dad?! What’s an Antichrist?” I asked, lowering the pink vinyl sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. “Sorry, can’t hear you, son!” he answered, turning up the dial on track seven, side two, Anarchy in the U.K.
I resumed flicking through a crate of Dad’s records, creating a stop-motion film of scowling faces and feral-sounding names. Dead Kennedys. Buzzcocks. The Damned. Anne Murray? He sheepishly said that one must’ve gotten mixed in from his sister’s collection during a move.
Along with street hockey and hot-dog roll-up snacks, listening to Dad’s punk records was one of my favourite childhood pastimes. For a kid raised in the era of CDs and MP3s, I felt like an archeologist examining fragile dinosaur bones. We’d pour a few root beer floats, drop the needle and strut around our woolly beige carpet, strumming air guitar and howling every chorus.
Hearing my great-grandfather’s forgotten score felt like he was speaking to me across time
Songs such as Drug-Stabbing Time, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue and Holiday in Cambodia filled the air in our home. Every corroded riff and tar-soaked voice broke down the walls of my sheltered, suburban existence.
At first, the music was just a bouncing beat to nod along to as a kid. But soon, the lyrics meant something, driving me closer to ideas such as rebellion, authority and other dark alleys of the world. Places I was too young to explore.
Soon, my skimpy allowance was reserved for band shirts and Chuck Taylor sneakers. I mastered punk guitar – which, being three chords and all, didn’t take very long. And my schoolbooks became littered with lyrics I’d written about cheating on a math test or stealing an extra milk from the school canteen.
One Halloween, we put our full punk fandom on display. While other families tricked and treated as wacky witches and smiling jack-o’-lanterns – mine terrorized the neighbourhood as a gang of punk rockers. We stomped around in combat boots and leather jackets, with chemically dyed hair and safety pins hanging from our cheeks.
My punk obsession survived every frost-tipped trend until I got to high school, where I discovered two main motivators for change: a job and a girlfriend. It became clear I wasn’t cut out to transition from fan to a professional punk.
I didn’t like confrontation. I couldn’t pull off leather. And probably most essential to a punk’s guide to better living – I even failed at smoking cigarettes. One week, I exhausted myself trying to get addicted. The week I chose to do so was in early February. And early February in Winnipeg is no time to be creating more reasons to go outside.
But just because I changed my image to a cleaner-cut version of my younger self, didn’t mean the echoes of punk rock left my psyche. In fact, the more life I experienced, the more important the music became.
Whenever I found myself at any will-testing teenage crossroads, my dad’s voice pointed me in the right direction. He told me, “The worst thing you can be is a follower,” which I always thought was from a Clash song, but turns out Dad was the original lyricist.
My dad never raised me to talk back, be violent or start riots. He raised me to be myself. The songs we listened to helped instill that. To the mainstream world, punk rock can be rough, harsh and ugly, but in our house – it was empowering.
I folded the disintegrating shirt carefully and placed it neatly in the “keep” pile.
Zac Easton lives in Minnedosa, Man.