Various
Artists | Towncraft Matson Films
Reviewed
by M.R. Smith
At
CollectorScum.com, unser the entry for Arkansas in the website's
state-by-state discography of early American punk rock (roughly
spanning 1976 to 1983,) contributor and Arkansas native son Dan
Bailey devotes a few paragraphs of explanation as to why there are
absolutely no records to be listed for his home state. Apparently,
he says, a handful of folks were brace enough to start punk bands
in the Fayetteville area, in the state’s northwest corner,
around 1980, but none of them made records. Lack of vinyl evidence
aside, it does make sense that Fayetteville would be a punk hub,
since it’s Arkansas’ biggest college town. But what
about Little Rock, the state’s well-known capital and largest
city? Any action there? Not so much, apparently. Actually, even
less than that: Although Bailey, a Little Rock resident, understandably
€gures that due to his city’s size there must have been something
happening there prior to the mid Eighties, his intense research
has so far yielded nothing in the way of documentation. It seems
that, early on at least, the town’s name was—pardon
the tired pun, Little Rock scenesters—all too appropriate.
But it wouldn’t stay that way forever.
While
punk rock may have taken 10 years to hit Little Rock, once it €nally
got there it found a tiny, excitement-starved crew of young thinkers,
a close-knit bunch that was ready to make up for the lost time with
its fanatical devotion to the D.I.Y. ethic. Why all the extra energy?
Youth. Unlike the university students in Fayetteville and similar-sized
municipalities, Little Rock’s pioneering punkers were almost
all high school and junior high school kids. And by living, literally,
in the middle of a cultural vacuum, they were not only less affected
by outside musical trends in the pre-Internet age but were also
starting with a clean slate, since punk seems to have had no real
local precedent at the time. Besides the rednecks and parents they
were rebelling against, there weren’t any too-hip older rockers
to laugh at them if they got it wrong.
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