minneapolis 1984: mcpunks

"They can raid this corner all they want, but we're here to stay.  We are city kids and the city is where we want to be."

A. Slater, 19, Minneapolis, 1984

The McDonalds at Hennepin and Lagoon in Minneapolis was home for a brief window of years in the 1980's to a tiny movement of kids who got called mcpunks.

We might have even called ourselves that, though I wouldn't much know because I was younger and more of a hanger-on than anything else...

What unified the mcpunks was the fact that we were too young to go most shows, we had time on our hands, we were into punk music and the rebellion it stood for and not much else. Minneapolis in the early 80s was a youth magnet. You could get to Hennepin and Lagoon easily by bus and the Uptown theater across the street showed double features like: Buckaroo Bonzai and Repo Man or Wizards and Lord of the Rings. There was a coffee shop that served espresso on the first floor of the the theater and hard-drinking rockers could be seen there in their black leather, torn black hoodies and dark jeans at all hours of the day.

We were across the street. At McDonalds. We were all under twenty.

The management made it pretty clear that we weren't welcome, but the accomodations weren't exactly in high demand: a beat-up outdoor playground with a few picnic tables surrounded by spiked metal bars that got locked up at night.  

Like the 7-11's immortalized in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused you could hang out at the scene and just meet people and talk. (Hmm, kinda like the blogs...) We'd talk about shows, about bands, about records...about life and politics and, uh, stuff. Minneapolis, at the time I started hanging out, had just received a visit from the Dead Kennedys and that show, more than anything, had galvanized a ton of kids to go punk, to rebel, to join punk's second wave. Of course, there were also kids who were out for trouble regardless of the music or the times.  I remember one bleeding kid driving up in a stolen car...an idiot straight out of Repo Man. Like all of us, he came and went.

Now, the music club, First Avenue, would try to do a few all ages shows every month or so for the youth and it didn't really matter the band, it could be Black Flag, it could have been Bad Brains, it could be Flock of Seagulls. We'd all show up. (Okay, uh, not so many showed for Flock of Seagulls. Hey, I'm not proud...I was there.)  There was something unifying about these shows, about how in this seemingly big city, you'd leave your neighborhood or suburb and end up someplace where you were surrounded by other kids like you, kids you recognized. You went from feeling like a freak to feeling like you were a part of something, a movement.

And, yeah, in the early 80s there was a spirit in the air, and it had managed to filter through to the heartland, embodied in the beat up cargo vans of musicians who spread the message: Punk. Oppositional culture. Reggae. Independent music and radio. People talked politics. Kids rode skateboards and changed the way they dressed. People circulated videos of the scene from different parts of the country.  Tapes from Mabuhay Gardens. CBGBs. Washington DC. LA.  We tuned into community radio to listen to Maximum Rock 'n Roll and homegrown shows. Punk was political and cultural: punk asked questions about diet and consumerism, about government, about personal freedom, about racism and poverty, about sexuality and chemical dependency, about commercialism and hype.  Punk talked frankly about AIDS.  Punk got kids talking and writing and photocopying; punk got kids making music.  

(As a side note, punk was also the one of the sources of the DIY ethic that pulses through the blogs.)

There was one common theme: resisting the status quo, fighting back against Ronnie Reagan and his buddy George Bush. The odds seemed hopeless and insurmountable but that didn't matter to us. It never does to kids.

Now, admittedly, we mcpunks were the 'little kiddies' of a much broader and more complex punk scene. We were happy, however, to be a small part of the furniture in the room. And since we were new and since the kids messing around with crime and drugs hadn't yet permanently labelled the scene with the gutter punk moniker that seems to have hardened into a fixture...literally and sadly...on our streets to this day, we were also a visible reminder to our city that kids were unhappy with things. We were fed up. Our hanging out at that crossroads in Minneapolis and other cities sent that message.  To paraphrase the Replacements, a band that seemed not much older than us at the time: the kids won't follow.

(If you like the Replacements, follow that link and watch the video of Johnny's Gonna Die...trust me it's a nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers the scene.)

I can't put my finger exactly on what got me thinking about this other than to reflect on how innocent this oppositional culture was, how available and pure it was if you sought it out, how stupidly hopeful we were. And at times, how reviled. Hell, I used to get chided by older folks in St. Paul just walking down the street with my hair uncombed or my shoes untied, and I was a nice, albeit unkempt, boy. Most punks came in for much worse.

Things have changed. On some level, as stupid as the whole idea of 'mcpunks' was, there was also something to it, something real and alive.  The fascination with subverting the dominant paradigm meant that punk became a place for cynics and idealists to hang out. I find myself thinking about that right now. The question of what young folks are doing and thinking, of where the punk spirit of our times resides, where it points and where the kids are hanging out because they have to, because they've got no place else to go.  I ask myself what the kids are debating and talking about. It's an active question, one prone to romanticizing but, in my experience, nevertheless, a question essential to understanding this moment in history, and vital to understanding the social and political movements that have arisen, and will arise, to change and challenge it.

Yeah, in this, I sound like just another wistful old punk scratching my head about the millenials. Laugh out loud. I'm not that old, and I never was pure punk. But, like the rest of you, young and old, I've still got my eyes and ears open; and I'm convinced that, when it's most needed, politics and culture do link up. They have to. In fact, maybe some of what we've got going here online affilliates with what some of us punks went through twenty five years ago. You think?

In honor of that, here's what proved to be a prescient lyric from the Replacements.  It's from their 1984 album Let it Be: (you can hear a sample at the link, or even, uh, buy the thing from their original indie label, Twin/Tone, it's worth it.)

Here come Dick, he's wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, y'know she's sporting a chain
Same hair, revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss

And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

Don't get him wrong and don't get him mad
He might be a father, but he sure ain't a dad
And she don't need advice that's sent at her
She's happy with the way she looks
She's happy with her gender

Mirror image, see no damage
See no evil at all
Kewpie dolls and urine stalls
Will be laughed at
The way you're laughed at now

Now, something meets Boy, and something meets Girl
They both look the same
They're overjoyed in this world
Same hair, revolution
Unisex, evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss
And tomorrow Dick is wearing pants
And tomorrow Janie's wearing a dress
Future outcasts and they don't last
And today, the people dress the way that they please
The way they tried to do in the last centuries

And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

I pick that lyric because, on some level, that was the world we were trying to make and, in some ways, an ideal vision of the world we aspired to. You wouldn't get many folks to say it at the time, but punk rebellion, behind the anger, the zaniness, and the front was always about justice and equality; it was about a radical vision of a society where individual freedom, and, yes, love, were the governing operating principles that bound us together, or, if need be, let us stand apart. You could say we just had a funny way of showing it.

If you ask me, Paul Westerberg, a wise soul, knew this.  He was spot on in asking "tommorrow who's gonna fuss" about cross-gender styles and punk fashion.  He seemed to know, in 1984, how little fussing we were actually in for.

You see, in my view, and I admit, I'm in the minority...punk was not about the hair styles, the pose and the posture. Instead, it was a love of equality, the equality of love, and a hunger for justice that resided at the heart of what made punk rock.

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{This essay, some rights reserved, originally appeared on the blog k/o}