Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – Freaks In Uniforms

I have a confession to make and I’ll just come right out with it- I was a high school football player and damn proud of it. Not quite as heavy a admitting to having been a junkie or having spent time in prison but sill a significant revelation considering the unwritten rule that punks and jocks go together like whores and church. But that's the thing about unwritten rules they’re unenforceable and in reality no one really knows who came up with them in the first place-so that makes them that much easier to cast aside. our popular mythology would have everybody believe that a real punk would never play organized mainstream sports(too much rules regulations and uniforms) and anyone who played sports and listened to Punk was just a meathead co-opting an righteous underground movement and forever tainting it with Gatorade and sweat. While there is always some essence of truth in all myth Im calling bullshit on ours. Contrary to what John Hughes films would have you believe jocks and Punks are not mutually exclusive no ones gonna revoke your membership into our club for having thrown around a football or sacking a quarterback-in fact it just might give you a little more cred.
 
I always loved sports as a kid and played AYSO soccer and Little League Baseball. The trouble was I wasn’t very coordinated and there fore not very athletic. In soccer I was the equivalent of a hockey goon not a lot of skills but maybe i could take you out. When it came to little league I had a lot of hustle and a lot of heart but the biggest problem was that I didn’t whine and I wasn’t a blood relative of the coach. And don’t get me started on the politics. So after a while my interest in playing organized sports waned and by middle school I focused on cooler pursuits like reading about history and listening to KROQ -you know that little radio station in Pasadena that played weird music once upon a time. However I still loved watching football-especially the Raiders and Howie Long.

Now by the time I got to high school I loved Punk rock and alternative music, rode a skateboard and read Tom Clancy novels -yeah I know he’s kind of right wing but since I'm being honest here I gotta own it plus this was 1989 and there was still that nagging threat of Soviet domination. Sorry for the digression. Anyway these three facts made me a prime candidate for the type of kid that according to popular culture should get picked on zealously by the jocks and cool kids or so you’d think. So I turned things on their head and joined the football team. I had three main reasons. #1- if I was part of the team then the guys most likely to kick my ass and make fun of me would have to embrace me as one of their own-sort of #2 I might get to date a cheerleader-c’mon who among us hasn’t had the dream of being the outsider who gets the popular girl  and #3 I really did like playing football-a sport where its encouraged to run around and smack people. Well as luck would have it my  most dominant physical traits are absurdly long arms, a hard head and the uncanny ability to absorb obscene amounts of punishment. Oh yeah and the ability to run incredibly slow for a skinny kid. Not exactly the portrait of an all American athlete but it didn’t matter because the football team at my high school to put it bluntly sucked. Also the football team was made up of gangsters, hoods, metal heads assorted screw ups and yes a few bona fide pretty boy jocks. The great thing was the older and much bigger guys took me under their wing and looked out for me-nobody would fuck with me in there presence. Despite my awkwardness I busted my ass on the field and never backed down from anyone despite almost always being over matched and that earned respect out of guys that otherwise would have thrown me in a trash can or just plain ignored me. Yeah they still made fun of me and one of my best friends on the team asked me if I was gay because I liked that you know gay music. But I loved it I took some poundings and even dished a few out and I played varsity for three years. I even got a letterman jacket that I proudly wore with a mohawk-even though we never won a game. No one really thinks about me as an athlete but they do know I was a football player. Playing football didn't make me into an asshole jock but it did expose me to new people and helped develop my personal strength and character. playing team sports might be one of the most Punk rock things any of could do. As for uniforms I'm sure nobody else owns a leather jacket, Ramones t shirt, or studded belts right?
 

 

-Daniel N-

 

 
Read more from Punk Rock Academy Fight Song HERE

 

 

Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – The Process of Belief

So it seems like lately I only get around to doing this around the holidays and maybe that’s all well and good because that’s when I seem to be the most inspired or maybe it’s just become a subconscious ritual like paying your bills at the same time every month or putting on your right shoe before your left every morning, who knows. Anyway as fate would have it I like most of us this time of year have the holidays on the brain and it has decidedly colored my thought process. Obviously I’ve been thinking about what to get for who and how much cookies and tamales I’ll stuff myself with this year but more importantly I’ve been thinking about The Kinks and U2. Actually every year about this time I start to think about The Kinks and U2 because to me they are as big a part of Christmas as egg nog -yep I love that stuff, and the Christmas Story marathon on AMC.

Why do I have visions of Ray Davies and the Edge bouncing in my head ? Well it’s because I’m an eternal optimist and the holidays just bring it out in me. And at the risk of pissing off my English Teacher friends with a horrible transition sentence I’ll start off explaining the Kinks. The Kinks wrote one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time “Father Christmas” one that I think is filled with hope and a belief that things can get better. “When I was young I believed in Santa Claus even though I knew it was my dad”. The essence of that line applies to life all year long. Even if you stop believing that a fat guy with flying reindeer is gonna break into your house and leave you toys still hope for the best. Sure its essentially a song about a guy getting mugged and trying to fight off childhood bullies but its also about seeing a shitty situation and realizing that something good can still happen. Trust me I had a couple of Christmas’ when my family wasn’t so well off financially and I didn’t get all the cool stuff my friends got but I never lost heart or hope-two traits that serve a punk well. The U2 part of the equation is a bit more convoluted but also a bit more telling about my personality and my idealism and optimism. Now the other night I was watching Spectacle with Elvis Costello and his guest were Bono and The Edge and I started to flashback on why I cared about these guys and why they resonated with me. Because I’ve argued with some people who say that Bono is a pompous self serving ass whose voice is too breathy but I digress. I thought about going to see Rattle and Hum in the theaters with my parents friends teenage daughters and thinking how cool it was that I went to the movies with high school girls when I was in 6th or 7th grade. I thought about how weird Zooropa was. I thought about their early videos with Bono’s hockey hair and Adam Clayton’s fro. But what I really thought was how they’ve always been a band that believed that music can change the world and change it for the better. That’s what always stuck with me they just didn’t sing about changing things for the better they lived it. They continue to put their money where their mouth is and inspire others to do the same. But it’s not just about U2 wanting to make grand world wide changes it’s about The Ramones believing that rock n roll didn’t have to be populated by coke sniffing millionaires spewing 18 minute songs about unicorns and trolls or The Clash wanting to have a riot of their own  or any other band the passionately and convincingly provided hope and optimism preferably with a two and a half minute blast of machine gun like guitars.

That’s why we got into this to begin with because we BELIEVED in something, anything and we BELIEVE that there is some good or at least good music in this world. Whether it be about stopping genocide, ending apartheid or just something loud and fast to might allow us to make out with a cute girl(I already wrote about Punk rock love songs) in the end it all boils down to an unwavering faith in the ideal that things can always get better. Hope and Optimism aren’t exclusive to this time of year but they sure seem amplified. So in the end its not really about Christmas or any particular holiday but rather about still believing that all you need to change the world is “a red guitar on fire”. Now bring on the Festivus feats of strength.
 

 

-Daniel N-

 

 
Read more from Punk Rock Academy Fight Song HERE

 

 

Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – He’s my friend, He’s my alibi

Everybody has that one friend. The friend that could talk you into anything, get you out of anything and make you think twice about a whole lot of things. The type of friend who was both the angel and the devil on your shoulder-it just depended what kind of mood they happened to be in that day or even that hour. For me that friend was Herman we were friends since we were about four and he was my next door neighbor for a long while. Hell our birthdays were just three days apart. We were best friends, classmates, team mates and partners in crime who eventually went on two wildly different paths in life. We were a southern California version of a Martin Scorcese flick. One of the most you important things to know about my old friend was that his older brothers had given him the nickname of the weasel. Why you may ask? Well Herman’s brothers were two pretty big guys who were lineman on the high school football team and Herman was small, skinny, sneaky and well pretty much a weasely kind of a guy. Always up to something and always able to get out of most any situation. Herman was reckless, impulsive and care free. Now me on the other hand I tended to be more cautious, thoughtful and afraid of getting in trouble as a kid. My parents loved him but were always more than a little wary of him and his parents loved me and were glad that I was his friend.

We were a perfect fit. We were good cop bad cop in OP cords. He was my excuse to throw caution to the wind and I was his alibi. All he had to tell his mom was “it’s okay i was with Dan” and whatever fear of possible trouble was instantly abated in his mothers mind. The thing about Herman was that he could always convince me into doing something I wasn’t to sure of and it either ended up in me getting hurt, getting in trouble, having the time of my life and on several occasions all three. Over the course of our youth Herman would be responsible for some of my fondest memories and some of my biggest regrets. It’s because of Herman that instead of waiting for my mom to pick us up at elementary school we decided to take a short cut home and I fell into a bunch of prickly pears. It’s because of Herman that walking home from the roller rink in junior high we got chased by a bunch of high school kids who intended to kick our asses-he yelled a litany of profanities at them and then started to run like hell. I got caught, he out ran them and hid in some bushes. It’s because of Herman that I tried jumping off my neighbors roof into my pool and wound up with a concussion. It’s because of Herman we went joyriding in my parent’s truck at midnight and then had to push it home when the battery conked out on us at our friend Gus’s house. It’s also because of Herman that I became a Raiders fan (still not sure what category this falls under), learned to drive stick, played football, had my first shot of tequila and its because of Herman that I eventually learned to surf-which for kids from the San Gabriel Valley is no easy feat.

However as we got older we inevitably grew apart for the reason that Herman’s exploits and fun loving mischief started to take a decidedly more criminal slant. It started off with relatively harmless things like joyriding in our parents cars and then he got into shoplifting and then dealing some weed out of his bedroom window and eventually progressed into full blown drug fueled felonious acts-by him not me. As if following that Scorese script by the time we were 18 I was heading for College and he was heading for prison. Herman wound up doing a good stretch in California’s correctional institutions for a botched home invasion and I ended up doing a long stretch at Long Beach State. I lost touch with my one time best friend and have only seen him once since he first got locked up. About five years ago he showed up at a post wedding party for one our friends in San Gabriel. I was still wearing most of my tuxedo, sporting red hair and tattoos. He was wearing a wife beater, jeans and sporting jailhouse tattoos. We were both pretty drunk and talked for about an hour and I remember him asking me if I ever learned to surf and i told him yeah and it’s because of you. I haven’t seen him since but I’ve heard he’s still been in and out of jail. I do miss my old friend but sometimes the best thing a friend can do is not be there.

 

-Daniel N-

 

 
Read more from Punk Rock Academy Fight Song HERE

 

Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – Ghouls Night Out

So it’s the last week of October and it’s been a month since last you heard from me. I’ve had a million different ideas banging around my head but I haven’t had the time or inclination to put them to paper or computer screen. Work and family have taken precedent over music and writing-such is the bitch of turning into a responsible adult. I love my family and I love my job but sometimes I feel like the gap between my rebellious youth and my adulthood just keeps widening. What to do then to narrow that gap? Easy, watch it’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and reflect in the beauty of one of the greatest holidays ever. That’s right kiddies I’m talking about Halloween.

I know I run the risk of becoming yet another unoriginal cliché -“Wow, a insert your sub group or genre that loves Halloween, how original” yawn. But lets face it must clichés are rooted in the truth and the fact of the matter is Halloween lets all the normal people feel like a punk for one day. And for those of us who have to play Clark Kent during our work day we get to become Super Man again. We spend the majority of our year subverting our true colors save for the odd Friday were we can wear a Ramones t-shirt to work the rest of the time throwing on our mainstream costumes to help pay the bills. Then comes that one magical day when everybody gets to be someone different and we can be ourselves. More importantly it’s the holiday that breaks all the rules. You get to dress up as devils demons and ghosts and then go out at night and ask strangers for candy with your parent’s permission. You can walk into the grocery store dressed as a vampire pirate or robot and no one will bat an eyelash. It’s like being a kid and your mom would let you dress yourself in whatever you felt like. As a child I hated horror movies but always loved Halloween cause I got to wear a cool or on several occasions not so cool costumes (thanks mom) and eat candy till my stomach hurt except for those times my dad said he had to check it and would eat all the good candy. But like a beach ball at a Dodger game some moron had to ruin all the fun. I’m sure we all remember the Halloween scares of the eighties-stories of people putting razors in candy, crazed satanic murderers, etc.-that gradually sucked the fun out of this great day.

This led to several years of trick or treating at our church-which seems like an oxymoron but wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. My parents didn’t think I was going to hell because I enjoyed All Hallows eve they just didn’t want some deviant slipping a killer kit kat into my tick or treat bag. Over time I started to lose interest in and thought I’d outgrown the fun part of Halloween and I focused more on the mischief-toilet papering peoples houses and throwing pumpkins in the street but I just wasn’t the same and truthfully I missed the fun part of it. I missed wearing costumes. And I discovered that most of the bands I liked looked like they loved Halloween so the progression was natural. I loved wearing shirts with skulls and dying my hair and listening to the Misfits-c’mon you had to see that one coming. I think I dressed up more for Halloween while in college and immediately after than when i was a kid because it seemed like an extension of who I really was. My favorite costume was my Matt Skiba Devil-suit and tie, mini devil lock and poorly applied eyeliner and if I could have shown up to work like that I would have and honestly I don’t think many people would have noticed the difference. Truth be told my wife tells me that when I’m not in my work clothes it looks like I’m wearing a costume and to me that’s a compliment. I don’t love Halloween because I’m dark, brooding and into evil -I love it because it makes me feel young. So this year I’m gonna crank up my Misfits, TSOL, AFI, Alkaline Trio CD’s, watch the great pumpkin Charlie Brown, and practice the dark arts-okay the last one’s a lie-we’re taking our daughter trick or treating and feel completely normal. Oh and maybe I'll smudge on some eyeliner.

 

-Daniel N-

 

Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – The Separation of Church and Skate

Skating and Punk rock. Its like donuts and coffee, tequila and lime, Starksy and Hutch...they’re two good things that go great together. But who would think that they could come together in a church parking lot? Nowadays both are more widely accepted and pro skaters earn six figures and punk songs sell cars and CBGB is now a high end store and blah blah blah and all that's really beside s the point because its been said a million times over so I’m not gonna bemoan the watering down of the culture but celebrate the fact that I’m 34 years old, have a wife and family and I still love to skate and I owe it all to my confirmation class.

Now I do have to be upfront about a couple of things. Number one I was and still am a horrible skater. I’ve been skating since the 7th grade and I still suck. Maybe its because as much as I love skating I dreaded the thoughts of broken wrists and ankles in my youth and as an adult i dread the thought of what my wife would do to me if I broke any bones (sorry babe). And number two I was originally anti skating. Not so much anti riding a skateboard because long before I got “into skating” I’d always ridden a skateboard, though mostly on my knees, but I couldn’t stand the way most the kids at my elementary school seemed to be in it for the fashion, the haircut and because it was the “cool thing” to do. I’m sure we all remember California in the late mid to late 80’s-you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some one in Jimmy’Z shorts and the ever popular Tony Hawk bangs. Maybe I was just bitter because I couldn’t get my thick wavy hair to flop down over one eye but their attitudes just didn’t sit well with me. You could tell in a couple of years they would be over it and on to the next cool thing. So I pretended not to care about it but secretly drooled over my friend Eric M. latest issues of Thrasher magazine with shots of Christian Hosoi and stories about bands with crazy sounding names. I may not have looked like a skater but man I wanted to be one. The only problem was my mother didn’t really approve of it and being the religious woman that she’s always been objected to it mainly because she didn’t like most the graphics on most of the decks. Now by religious I mean goes to church on Sunday type and not crazy “everyone is going to hell” nutjob types. However after much begging and pleading and mentioning that my friend David M. from Sunday school skated my parents finally got me my board-a John Lucero with the cross on the bottom of the deck and the small elephant on top, I think mom must have thought it was a “holy board”.

So there we were, me and David in the church parking lot every week waiting for confirmation class to start skating around the parking lot. You remember confirmation don’t you? Those series of classes and tests you took at church  when you were in junior high to prove that you believe in Jesus and are a good Christian. Because he really cares if you can find the Sea of Galilee on map of the holy land? But regardless of confirmations intent to make me a good Christian boy (I think I turned out alright) it really helped me become a skater. We would skate in the parking lot and trade tapes for our walkmen and that seemed as important as anything else that the pastor was trying to tell us in class. We kept on thrashin’ and we managed to get confirmed (even though I did have to go to confirmation summer school to turn in some missing assignments). If it wasn’t for those two years I don’t think I would love skating as much as I still do. It was just this moment in time with this weird juxtaposition of two distinct worlds that seemed to be at odds but at the name time seemed completely natural for me and friend. So I kept on skating all through high school and college. I constantly got bothered by the university police for skating on campus, it’s kind of hard not to notice a guy with leopard spot hair and an old Caballero. No matter where I went I always kept my board in my truck. I’ve never stopped loving skating. When me and my wife rented our first house together me and my buddies built a small ghetto ass half pipe in the backyard. A couple days ago my principal asked me to start a skate club at my school-needless to say I said hell yeah. Duane Peters is pushing 50 and still rips, Tony Hawk is a mogul, Mike V. is still kicking ass and inspiring people. I haven’t seen my old friend David in more than 15 years but I hope he’s still skating. Maybe I’ll drive down to the church and skate around the lot for old times sake. I still suck but I still love it and I don’t plan on stopping. Oh and I still cant find the Sea of Galilee on any map.

 

-Daniel N-

 

Punk Rock Academy Fight Song – Kick It Over

I once kicked the school janitor square in the ass and got away with it! Now I’m not an advocate of random violence and I’m sure as hell not a spoiled brat who gets off on tormenting blue collar working guys. But I must say that I can write this with a mix of pride and disbelief. Pride because I stood up for myself and disbelief because after 20 odd years I can look back at this incident which could have landed me in a ton of hot water and use it to illustrate something positive.

The incident took place way back in 1984 as I was beginning the fourth grade at my new elementary school. In the interest of brevity I’ll spare the details of why I was at a new elementary school (besides that’s a whole ‘nother column) and cut to the chase. I was in the tiny school library looking through the card catalog (look it up kids) when the whole thing went down. The janitor -who had a reputation for being ornery to put it lightly- appeared with his monstrous vacuum and sunny disposition. Apparently I was standing in his path and he couldn’t spare the millisecond it took to utter a simple excuse me or even a “hey kid move” so he shoved me out of the way. Stunned and incredulous I knew I had to respond but how? Then as he bent down to plug the machine into the wall I launched my counter attack and delivered the afore mentioned kick. Nowadays if such an incident occurred the janitor would have been fired and I probably would have been labeled as some kind of troubled youth and sent to therapy or juvenile hall. But all I got back then was a quick meeting with the principal, where I explained that an adult needs to be able to respect kids or something to that affect, and the principal gave me the “lets not have this happen again’” speech. Not even a phone call home or detention. Maybe I got off because the janitor really was a jerk and someone, even a kid needed to put him in his place or maybe my eloquent defense had charmed the principal into overlooking the incident, who knows?

So why does this whole ridiculous incident merit any attention and where the hell is the positively in my ill advised response. Well because it serves to represent a couple of values that I always hold dear and maybe it’s also a metaphor for the way I view the world. It s always been the little kid versus the big angry janitor. Now on to the values, First of all always stand up for yourself and do not tolerate injustice in any way. I knew I was being wronged by someone more powerful than me and I knew that something had to be done. Now this in no way compares to Nelson Mandela fighting against apartheid or any other greats who have rallied against oppression, but the same principle applies. Besides I’m sure they were shaped by similar incidents of their youth. You can’t be complacent or apathetic. You have to be an agent of change and you have to be willing to deal with the consequences. The other half to this equation is that adults aren’t always right. This is something I try to impress on all my students. Just because someone has been sucking oxygen longer than you doesn’t give them the right to treat you badly or discount your feelings and opinions. Adults make errors in judgment, teachers sometimes get their own questions wrong and counselors sometimes put you in the wrong class only its a lot harder for us to admit were wrong but it shouldn’t. As grown ups we should be big enough to say we fucked up and smart enough to realize we don’t have all the answers.

Maybe I’m over analyzing a hazy memory from grade school. Putting too much stock in a fleeting moment in time or maybe it stuck with me because it did have such a huge impact on my view of right and wrong. Maybe that janitor learned you can’t disrespect kids just cause you are in a hurry. All I do know is that I listen to what kids have to say and I haven’t had to kick anyone in the ass in a very longtime.
 

 

-Daniel N-

 

 

 

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