Last night, the Jackpot Records film festival screened the documentary You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk, 1977-1984. As the subtitle states, it is indeed a history of the Chicago Punk scene from it's small beginnings as a weekly record party inside a failing gay bar, to its inevitable surge and fractioning: the old guard giving way to the kids giving way to the then~rising hardcore scene giving way to the suburban embracing and co~opting of the "punk" image, etc.
Watching it last night brought back a lot of my own memories of being a teenager during the death rattle of the Mobile, Alabama scene. The scene that had existed just a few years before ~~ with local heroes the Vomit Spots in their prime, and which saw then young, upstart bands such as Southern Culture on the Skids and L7 passing through town ~~ was long gone. Few local bands were starting up, so a lot of the stuff that was going on was from bands on the road. Biloxi, MS's the Grumpies, Montevallo, AL's Nowhere Squares, even San Francisco's !!! passed through town in their infancy (when they were still being billed as "former members of the Popesmashers and the Yah Mos"). Granted, it was a fun time, but watching the documentary last night made me long for those days when scenes weren't so "scene" oriented: when you didn't have to have a mohawk or a spiked leather jacket to exist, when a multi~act bill wasn't just slight variations on the same sound/theme/approach, when people were still eager to experiment rather than emulate. And granted, I haven't explored much in the way of Portland's "punk"/DIY music scene, but what little I've heard coming out of it all sounds like the stuff I was listening to 15 years ago.
And while it seems that Mobile, AL's scene is experiencing a bit of new life, I'd be surprised if it wasn't just more of the same.
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