Quick Take
Santa Cruz journalist John Malkin collected some 250 interviews with many of the greats of the punk genre, including the Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Pussy Riot and many more. The result is a new book, “Punk Revolution! An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism,” that offers a freewheeling and wide-ranging history of punk’s headlong dive into political activism. Malkin will be on hand to talk about his book at Bad Animal in Santa Cruz on Saturday.
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When journalist John Malkin began interviewing musicians for what would one day become his book “Punk Revolution! An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism,” he was working on the extreme outer orbit of the media industry. In his interview requests, he said he was representing Free Radio Santa Cruz, an unlicensed “pirate radio” station that covered Santa Cruz County, barely.
At the time, Malkin expected people to resist his interview requests. “In the early years, when I said to Noam Chomsky or Yolanda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, or punk rock people, that I was with Free Radio Santa Cruz, I thought for sure, they’d be, ‘Why would I bother doing an interview with you?’,” he said. “But in the punk rock realm and in the anarchist underground, people generally really liked that idea. Greg Graffin of Bad Religion said, ‘Oh, we tour sometimes with a transmitter and do a pirate radio station of our own wherever we are.’”
With that kind of street cred, Malkin was able to collect some 250 interviews with many of the greats of the punk genre, including the Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Pussy Riot and many more. The result is a freewheeling and wide-ranging history of punk’s headlong dive into political activism. “Punk Revolution!” is written, oral-history style, in the voices of the musicians and political figures who lived in the liminal space between the music industry and political dissent. Malkin will discuss the book in an event Saturday at downtown Santa Cruz’s Bad Animal.
“I’m really looking at punk rock as a potentially revolutionary movement,” said Malkin, a longtime Santa Cruz writer and musician, “and examining how well it has done in that endeavor.”
When the punk movement first exploded in the late 1970s, Malkin was a teenager who had just moved from Los Angeles to much more conservative Orange County. “It was only an hour away,” he said of the driving distance from L.A. to the O.C. “But, in fact, it was a world away.”
He became fascinated with scruffy garage bands singing about police brutality, CIA adventurism, white supremacy and colonialism. It’s an interest he’s been able to sustain in the decades since.
Malkin’s new book chronicles punk’s role in a swirl of issues, from U.S. wars to defiance against the powerful in authoritarian countries like Russia and China, to punk’s influence in the fall of the Berlin Wall, to its power in the early days of the gay rights movement.
The book builds to a final assessment on how well punk has done as a social justice movement. Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys suggests it has done “a little too well,” while Jonathan Richman said there was no punk movement, saying: “It was just a bunch of guys playing in rock bars.”
Underneath it all, said Malkin, his book is less about music and more about the messy and often painful process of building a better world.
“All revolutionary movements start with, ‘Y’know, I’d like to live in a peaceful environment. How do we get there?’ And, somehow, wars come out of that. How is that possible?” Malkin said. “So that’s the ultimate investigation in some ways. And I’m using punk rock as one realm to explore all of that, because it’s a realm that really spoke to me.”
John Malkin will be on hand to talk about his book “Punk Revolution! An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism” (Rowman & Littlefield) at Bad Animal in downtown Santa Cruz at 2 p.m. Saturday.
