Babylons Burning

I was part of the second wave of punk rock in S.F when I was young. I got in at the tail end of the art punk scene and at the beginning of hardcore which I liked for the energy and because it served as a most excellent soundtrack to my party girl life. Yet, I never really liked it for itself.
I was the punk rocker that kept my ears tuned in to college radio and while I heard and witnessed many local bands, my true love was always British post punk, second only to British original punk.
My friends from high school were with me on that one, but my friends on the scene were hardcore. The two groups never liked to mingle except for having me around.
My fondest memories of the time involved getting the doormen at the Mabuhey Gardens and upstairs at the On Broadway to let me in for free. They liked me just for being me, so I rarely paid anything to see the bands that I have now forgotten I had ever seen play live. Most of their names elude me too. Dirk Dirksen, concert promoter, used to call me and my high school gang the “Yellow Journalists. I don’t know why to this day.
Fast forward all these years and I was at the library last week. I have a lot to do, like housework, homework and knitting. I don’t need yet another book.
I am bored with the selection at this library but my daughter volunteers there and in an effort to save gas, I hang around while she works for one hour on Saturdays. The way I use a library is that I wander around hoping that a book will fall off the shelf and hit me on the head to get my attention. So I was wandering around and found myself in the music section and while I am glad that the book Babylons Burning:From Punk to Grunge by Clinton Heylin didn’t fall of the shelf and hit me on the head, it’s magenta spine with dayglo green text caught my eye.
I actually hesitated for a moment, but had to take a look. The cover has a Xerox of John Lydon in his Johnny Rotten days and a photo of who I thought at first was Keith Levene (guitarist in Lydons post Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd). On closer inspection, I realized it wasn’t Levene but Kurt Cobain.
The fact that the similarities came to mind in the first place told me I had the right book, so I checked it out and finished it is three days flat.
While some parts are really boring to me ( I never cared much about the Ohio scene for example) and the other parts about pre punk really really bored me (Television never moved me and Patti Smith, while being a great artist, comes across as nothing but a prima dona, while I have met Johnny Thunders and the remains of the New York Dolls and they were amusing but that was about all), the rest of the book is a treasure (despite inaccuracies such as stating that the Mabuhey Gardens were owned by Dirk Dirksen when in fact, Ness Aquino owned the nightclub and the property upstairs that was used exclusively be Dirksen known as the On Broadway) the rest of book seems pretty on target. I know for a fact though that the Undertones toured the U.S before the book states they did because I actually talked to them on the phone one night while they were being interviewed on a late night college radio show. The conversation went like this:
One of them: Can you come down and party with us at the station? We’ll wait for you.
Me: I can’t, I’m 16, my dad would kill me.
One of them: You should come down anyway, he won’t know, bring your sister (who was giggling in the background)
Me: She is 11!
One of them: Please?
Me: Gotta go. Bye.

The book brought back lots of memories of bands that I once adored and forgot all about, but am finding on Youtube. Look under my Heros tab to see some of them. So far, I only have Magazine but that will soon change.
As to the book, I think it is natural that the inaccuracies exist because it seems everybody has a point of view in the music business and they want their point of view to be known as the truth. Such was punk rock.