Free American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson Page B

and the like. My generation was in the no-man’s-land between the baby boomers and generation Xers and we were practically disenfranchised from contemporary rock music.
    Then came punk rock.
    We’d been hearing about the Sex Pistols on the news and in the tabloids, this outrageous London band that was offending everyone with their disgusting antics. To a teenage boy this was a call to arms. Here were people I could relate to. They didn’t have cars, they didn’t have money, they didn’t have girlfriends, and they were angry. Perfect.
    The first punk rock band I ever heard was not in fact the Pistols but the Damned. I heard their double-A-side single “New Rose/ Neat Neat Neat” at Craig Keaney’s house after school, and even with the volume down because his dad was sick it was an astonishing and dramatic revelation. The energy and sound was like a fight. It was adrenal and thrilling. Punk had arrived and I was in.
    Our parents and teachers despised punk, which made it even better. By the summer of 1977, I would leave my house in the evening to go and hang around street corners, spitting and smoking with my friends. I was forbidden by my parents to wear the painted ripped uniform that proclaimed my allegiance, so every night I went to my secret lair under the freeway bridge near my house to change in full view of old ladies riding the buses that trundled past. A lot of kids had a similar routine. Everybody had a little hideout in which to transform themselves into their punk alter ego. We called it getting “punked up.” We had punk names, too: Davie Vomit, Johnny Shite, Harry Bastard. I chose Adam Eternal because my great grandfather Adam had died in the First World War and I thought the word “eternal” sounded cool.
    Dressed like our nihilistic heroes from the London punk scene, we would broodily sulk at the sidelines of the Y-Disco until the DJ (Stuart again) would play a punk record, then all the girls would flee and the punky boys like me would rush the dance floor so we could do our punk dances, which were the Pogo—standing very straight with your arms glued to your sides then jumping up and down, as if heading an invisible soccer ball—or the Dead Fly—lying on your back and waving your arms and legs around as if you were a bug that had just been sprayed with some lethal toxin.
    I wanted to dye my hair but it would have got me belted at school and would have made me stand out too much from the other kids, inviting a kicking. Not all of my peers had embraced the new wave of music and fashion. I read somewhere that hair could be colored on a temporary basis by using food dyes, so I went to the kitchen cupboard, where ingredients for my mother’s occasional forays into baking fairy cakes or clootie dumplings (a heavy fruitcake much loved in Scotland) were kept. I didn’t find any food dye but I did locate a tiny bottle of vanilla essence. Reasoning that vanilla ice cream was blond in color, I thought vanilla flavoring would probably have the same effect on hair. I shampooed it in and of coursenothing happened except that I smelled fabulous and I was followed around by every dog in the neighborhood for about a month.
    Like all youth movements, we were sure that ours was striking terror into the heart of the establishment, but I think all we really did was give them a fit of the giggles. The music was sublime, though.
    I had never been very interested in playing music before punk arrived, but to really be into it properly then you had to be in a band. My brother had commandeered the attic with an old drum kit he had acquired from somewhere. He had played along with albums by his favorite groups, ones that I hated, like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. After a while he lost interest, so I seized my opportunity and kissed his ass until he let me use the kit. I taught myself rudimentary thumping beats and fills from whatever albums I could lay my hands on—British acts like the Rezillos, the Damned, the