October 14, 1978. It was the fall of my senior year in high school. My buddy’s parents were out of town and you know exactly what that meant: throw-down! The keg was flowing and the party raging. It must have been about midnight. I was walking down a long hallway [...]

When it comes to the history of punk rock, there are few individuals who can truthfully say they’ve seen it all.  Cheetah Chrome was present at the creation.  In 1974, Chrome was the guitarist in the seminal Rocket From The Tombs, the Cleveland proto-punk outfit that included David Thomas, Peter Laughner, Craig Bell, and Johnny [...]

Like everyone else who loves music, I sometimes despair that it has all been done before.  I get bored and frustrated by the lack of creativity that characterizes the pop form.  I pull out my old records.  I long for the days when a song could make my skin tingle and my hair stand on [...]

I am a firm believer that the best music has the power to transport its listeners to another place and time.  That new geography might be foreign to us — it might even be unpleasant — but ultimately the sounds that move us there (as well as our own ability to suspend disbelief and take [...]

It seems like The Runaways are everywhere these days.  A new biopic starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie opened this month to strong critical reviews.  The ageless Joan Jett is gearing up for another summer of touring in the US and Europe.  And now, former Runaways front-woman Cherie Currie [...]

“Punk rock is dead!  Long live punk rock!”
I have been hearing some variation on that riff for the better part of 30 years.  Like most truisms, there occasionally has been some basis in fact.  The wild eclecticism of punk’s “First Wave” gave way to New Wave’s radio-friendly pablum.  The hardcore intervention of the 1980s reinvigorated [...]

During my long association with Verbicide Magazine, I have unleashed a torrent of words, a tsunami of syllables, an army of independent clauses marching aimlessly in search of a point.  When I consider the breadth of that writing, I can only shake my head in wonder at the patience of my editors.  I’ve written about [...]

I guess in the name of full disclosure I should start off by mentioning that I am a former resident of New Orleans. I moved there in the late ’80s — a wayward twenty-something searching for new beginnings, trying to make sense of myself and the world. To say the “Big Easy” was [...]

I’ve wanted to write seriously about Chesnutt for years. I hoped one day to do a long interview with him for Verbicide. I figured that now that I was back in Georgia the opportunities to talk to his friends and family might present themselves and I could do an even longer piece. Why not? Even with his personal life in turmoil, his career was on an extraordinary trajectory.

Lou Reed once asked, “What becomes a legend most?” No doubt the unfailingly modest Lou Barlow would blanch at being called a “legend.” And yet when you take the long-view, few artists have been as prolific, productive, and influential over the last 20 years. Barlow burst onto the scene as the bass-player in the seminal [...]

It was around 3 a.m. when the rain started. At first it was just a fine mist beading up on the cracked windshield. But by the time we hit I-77 in deepest, darkest part of West Virginia it was coming down in steady black sheets. There was an ill-wind blowing and our little car, weighed down with life’s possessions, swayed ominously with each gust.

In 2000, I hooked up with a merry band of anarchists and hitched a ride to DC for the IMF/World Bank protests. I was living outside of Boston at the time. We had left around midnight, and sometime around 4:30 a.m. we pulled into a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. I was shocked [...]

Originally published in Verbicide issue #25
In the fall of 1979 I was an angst-ridden college freshman struggling to find a place in a university culture that felt truly alien to me. I was experiencing the usual growing pains — I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I sure as hell wasn’t [...]

Originally published in Verbicide issue #24
Winter 1984. I’d been living in the Washington, DC area for about five months. To be specific, I was living in a shitty little apartment down the street from the Dischord House in Arlington, Virginia. It’s hard for me to describe how excited I was to finally be in the [...]

Originally published in Verbicide issue #23
The phone rang at 5:30 in the morning and unfortunately I was already awake to answer it. In fact, I’d been more or less conscious for 72 hours, riding out the effects of a Human Growth Hormone/Viagra cocktail. Hey, I’ll try anything twice. I couldn’t find my pants. There appeared [...]