Misfits find a home – and a history – in the ongoing story of punk

For Judith Peraino, it started with a T-shirt.

In October 1981, she had just seen Devo at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom. Between the band's anarchic, experimental sound, their distrust of conformity and government power, and the crowd's frenzied response, Peraino was enthralled. This was the punk rock she'd been reading about in Rolling Stone.

The next day, walking the halls of her suburban Illinois high school, she was wearing her Devo concert shirt with pride - only to have someone shout "queer" at her.

"It was a crystallizing moment," said Peraino, professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences. "I was then slowly coming to the realization about my queer sexuality, and here was this music that seemed to signal that publicly, yet it was so defiant."

That unruly outsider spirit, as well as the myriad ways it has been documented over the decades, infuses "We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond," published March 15 by Cornell University Press. The book, which Peraino co-edited with former Cornell colleague Tom McEnaney, draws upon the vast archive of punk-related ephemera in Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections, from rare flyers and photos to fanzines and letters.

The book is an outgrowth of the exhibit "Anarchy in the Archives" and the five-day Punkfest Cornellthat Peraino and McEnaney co-curated in 2016 as way to publicly celebrate the archive's début.

Katherine Reagan, the Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, began building the collection in the early 2000s, and by the time it was unveiled, punk was seeing something of a resurgence in the mainstream.

"There was this real flood of interest, and a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of history, where people were recognizing how important punk had been and continued to be in the culture," said McEnaney, now an associate professor at University of California, Berkeley.

The archive, which is one of the most extensive collections on punk music in the world, provided Peraino and McEnaney with an abundance of material for their book, but no obvious structure. For that, they looked back to one of their favorite momentsat Punkfest: a panel conversation on punk communities between Downtown Boys vocalist Victoria Ruiz, fanzine writer Aaron Cometbus and journalist John Savage - three different generations of punk discussing what the genre meant to them.

"That became the book's backbone, like, let's just think about that panel and the conversation that we want to represent in the different parts of this book, across regions, across generations, and especially thinking about diversity of participants," Peraino said. "There's a big tent element to the misfit culture. That is what we were trying to also make sure was written into this project."

'Alternative worlds that can sustain'

Among the "misfits" highlighted in the book are the infamously elusive, synth-crazed L.A. visionaries the Screamers, trans punk pioneer Jayne County and Orlando Xavier, singer for the Berkeley hardcore band Special Forces.

True to the diverse, egalitarian ethos of punk, the book doesn't only spotlight musicians, but also the people who were equally pivotal to its culture, such as fashion designer Anya Phillips, who is the subject of an interview with another early New York City punk fixture, Sylvia Reed.

Reed is an art designer who eventually became Lou Reed's second wife, but it's her experience attending shows with Phillips in the 1970s that provides crucial context for the era.

"The conversation with her became one about the experience of two women of color in the CBGB scene," Peraino said. "What was that like? And it's a beautiful interview of her really talking quite honestly about the difficulties, the stereotyping, the complexities of that particular subjectivity for both herself - she is of Mexican descent - and Anya Phillips, who's Chinese."

While the common narrative about punk is that of a largely white, straight, macho male subculture, Peraino said, the reality is that women and men of color and members of the LGBTQ community have always been fundamental to local punk scenes across the country.

The authors also sought to capture the unique identity of those regional scenes.

"We were really interested in how does punk travel across the United States, and the world," McEnaney said. "And how does it get differently picked up and shaped and transformed by these specific communities in D.C. or in L.A. or in Chicago."

McEnaney grew up amid the flourishing Bay Area punk scene that nurtured the likes of Green Day and Jawbreaker in the late '80s and early '90s. Like Peraino, his initiation into the culture came in the form of clothing. After seeing a friend wearing an Operation Ivy shirt during gym class, he made a beeline for the local music store and asked to hear the album, which he promptly bought, along with a Bad Religion album. Soon he was playing in a band and became a regular at 924 Gilman Street, the fabled all-ages, volunteer-run venue that distinguished itself by banning alcohol, sexism, racism and homophobia.

Gilman Street is an important part of the story, Peraino said, because it exemplifies the communal, DIY roots of independent scenes that rejected the infrastructure of the corporate music industry.

With its assortment of handmade flyers, comics and cassette J-cards, "We're Having Much More Fun" gives readers a tactile sense of those scenes. But what it doesn't offer is a single authoritative treatment.

That's very much by design, according to McEnaney.

"As much as we're telling a story, we're also kind of presenting other people's stories," he said. "This is a collection of other people's interviews, of essays, other people's collections, that we're giving a framework to."

For every faded fanzine and photocopied flyer that survives, thousands more were lost or thrown away, he noted. But in many ways, punk rock is an archivist's dream.

"We're really lucky there has been a kind of collector's or archival impulse in a lot of punks to not just make history, but preserve history, which goes against these stories of punk as 'no future' and as a kind of burn-it-all-to-the-ground ethos," McEnaney said. "There's this genuine aspect of punks making things and building alternative worlds that can sustain and rival all of the aggressive attempts to tear things down in mainstream discourses."

'Where do you go when nothing else looks like you?'

For anyone who thinks punk itself is a moldy relic that's no longer relevant, McEnaney points to a photo in the book, from a 2020 protest, in which "Black Lives Matter" is scrawled on the same signboard as the Dead Kennedy's searing 1980's adage "Nazi Punks F**k Off."

"There's something about the iconography of punk rock that's connected to a specific politics that is in the street today," McEnaney said. "The archives are not sitting in boxes. They're being carried around in the street. People are putting punk to use."

For Peraino and McEnaney, that has meant bringing the music into the classroom. For several years, they co-taught a course on the history of punk, which Peraino continues to offer.

"The students who come into the class only have a fuzzy sense of what punk is, but they're attracted to it nonetheless," Peraino said. "There is, again, this question of the misfit, the sense of where do you go when nothing else looks like you or expresses your point of view? Where can you find community? Where can you find music that is expressive of your anger and your rage or your cynicism? It's not about romance. It's not about a lot of what other pop rock songs are about."

Quite often the subject matter is historical in nature, she said, whether it's the Sex Pistols razing Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee with "God Save the Queen" or the Ramones evoking World War II with "Blitzkrieg Bop."

Cornell has hosted some of punk's own history - the Ramones played Bailey Hall in 1981 and Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin, Ph.D. '03, has lectured on ecology and evolutionary biology- while Ithaca has spawned plentyof noisy punk bands over the years. The city even gets a shoutout in the book from fanzine writer Aaron Cometbus, who, coming of age in Berkeley, developed a personal connection to the local scene via the comics of Ithaca-born artist Bobby Madness: "His illustrations were unapologetically bleak yet still bursting with hope, the basic recipe for punk." Cometbus's later visits to Cornell, and the warmth he found in its library, inspired him to place his archives at the university.

Peraino and McEnaney have done their part in fostering that kind of inspiration. As the final project of their co-led class, students were required to produce their own little piece of punk - form a band, play a show, make a zine or shirt - learning, in effect, how to retell a history by participating in its present creation. The results, Peraino said, never disappointed.

McEnaney still has some of the shirts.