Boots & Bottles
Take the punk rock photo quiz
I’ve got a quiz for you today. If you are a student or educator the last thing you probably want to see on your screen right now is a quiz, and for that I apologize. But this is a punk rock quiz which means you can cheat or blow it off or give me mean looks.
The first question is this: What does this photo mean to you?
Okay, pencils down.
If you said “This is the image on the cover of Bad Religion 80-85,” you would be correct. Give yourself a point.
If you said “This is a photo by punk rock photographer Edward Colver,” you would be even more correct, give yourself ten points.
Hopefully, all of you know who Bad Religion by now, and if you don’t I can help you fix that. If you do know Bad Religion then you are undoubtedly familiar with Colver’s work whether you realize it or not.
Colver did the cover shoot for Bad Religion’s first studio album How Could Hell Be Any Worse. His shot of Hollywood on an overcast day bears an eerie resemblance to the skies in California last week.
Colver also did the cover for the Circle Jerks Group Sex, which turned 40 years old this year.
He also did Black Flag’s Damaged, featuring Henry Rollins, which as you might have guessed was completely staged.
All in all he worked on something like 500 albums. Jackets, sleeves, promo photos. He did it all. There was a week when 12 new records were released and Colver had a hand in them all. But the image that Colver is probably most famous for is this one:
It’s called the “Wasted Youth Flip” because the subject is wearing a Wasted Youth patch on the back of his leg, but it wasn’t a Wasted Youth gig. The photo was taken on July 4, 1981 at the Stiff Little Fingers, Adolescents, DOA show at Perkins Palace in Pasadena, CA. The flipper is Chuck Burke, a skateboarder whom, one can only hope, had some experience with difficult landings.
The image was so popular that Colver put it on the cover of his book, Blight at the End of the Funnel, which you should absolutely buy if you ever find it for anything close to its cover price because I’ve seen it listed as high as $1,500.
I like the photo so much I even used it as inspiration for a Rick & Morty-themed Vermin on the Mount poster I illustrated in 2017, though I don’t know how many people got the joke at the time.
Colver wasn’t just a photographer. He was a part of the scene. From 1979 to 1984 Colver went out five nights a week, sometimes taking in multiple shows a night. He was tall, gregarious, and good looking, and always dressed in black. Punks could tell if he was working a show because they’d see his hearse parked in front of the club. However many Edward Colver photos you’ve seen, or think you’ve seen, there are thousands more, many of which no one has ever seen. That’s not hyperbole. In my opinion, Colver’s work ought to be as well-known as Raymond Pettibon’s.
I talked to Colver the other day and he told me a story I’d never heard before. Colver was at the famous police riot the night Black Flag and DOA played the Whisky. The cops were out in force, which was typical for a Black Flag show in 1980. They’d show up en masse, shut down the streets, and wait for something to happen.
And something usually did.
On this particular night, it was an empty beer bottle hurled in the cops’ direction that set them off. They rushed the club just as ticket holders were arriving. (I believe there were two sets that night with an intermission in between and that’s when the riot happened.) Cops indiscriminately beat anyone who got in their way. Men, women, under-age kids. One woman got her leg broken. Another punk was handcuffed to a newspaper vending machine. The street was already blocked off and there was nowhere to go. It was a big nasty mess.
But let’s go back to the boots.
Punk Rock Photo Quiz Part 2
Take out a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Are you ready?
Whose feet are in those punk rock boots?
If you said “Bad Religion,” subtract 100 points from your score.
Everyone assumes that the people wearing the boots in Culver’s photo are members of Bad Religion. That wasn’t the case.
The punks wearing the boots were all friends of Colver’s from the San Gabriel Valley. (Colver is from Covina.) The photo was taken in the parking lot at Oki-Dog, the infamous punk hangout. It wasn’t safe for kids, especially punk kids, to hang out at or around clubs after shows, so they went to Oki-Dog where there was strength in numbers. (Though if you’ve read Do What You Want you know that shit still went down.) Colver hopped up on a picnic bench, composed the shot, and used up a roll of film on the boots. He had a vision and he executed it.
It turns out that the owner of one of these pair of boots, one of Colver’s friends, was the person responsible for igniting the riot at the Whisky. He threw the bottle.
I’ll withhold his name for the time being as he may not appreciate being outed like this, but he played in a couple of bands, including one with Tony Reflex of the Adolescents. It just goes to show how small the punk scene was in 1980. Everyone knew everyone because everyone was someone. They played in bands, took photos, wrote for zines, or pressed-up their friends records. Anyone could be anything they wanted to be. You didn’t need an invitation. You didn’t need to ask permission. You just did it.
That concludes today’s punk rock photo quiz. Thank you for your participation. Now got start a band or something.
Do What You Want Update
Last week the Winnipeg Free Press wrote a nice review of Do What You Want. I’d like to call your attention to this part:
Ruland brings the project together, adding an encyclopedic knowledge of southern California’s punk scene, which provides valuable context to where Bad Religion came from and how the band’s success impacted the scene as time went on.
I got a laugh out of this because elsewhere last week a fan said that Do What You Want reads like a Wikipedia page. I choose to believe that fan meant well (he liked the book), but to quote the best American movie by a British filmmaker in 1984, “it still hurts.”
Like I said he meant well. Or maybe not.