Known for The Fest, Less Than Jake and Hot Water Music, Gainesville became a creative hub in the 1980s and '90s for many of punk rock's greats. Whether playing at the Hardback or wild house parties, earnest acts like Against Me!, Spoke and Roach Motel all emerged and thrived in the small northern Florida city. Radon burst onto the scene with chaotic energy while Mutley Chix helped inspire local torchbearers No Idea Records. Through this succinct history, author Matt Walker traces each successive generation's contributions and amplifies the fidelity of the Gainesville scene.

Punk: The Definitive Guide to the Blank Generation and Beyond

Radical subcultures in an unlikely place Told in personal interviews, this is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown. The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Terry Johnson, Ryan “Rymodee” Modee, Gloria Diaz, Skott Cowgill, and others tell of playing in bands including This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, operating local businesses such as End of the Line Cafe, forming feminist support groups, and creating zines and art. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of living, acceptance for the marginalized in a rapidly changing world, and building a sense of family from the ground up. Including photos by Cynthia Connolly and Mike Brodie, A Punkhouse in the Deep South illuminates many individual lives and creative endeavors that found a home and thrived in one of the oldest continuously inhabited punkhouses in the United States.

Listen to Punk Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre discusses the evolution of punk from its inception in 1975 to the present, delving into the lasting impact of the genre throughout society today. Listen to Punk Rock! provides readers with a fuller picture of punk rock as an inclusive genre with continuing relevance. Organized in a roughly chronological manner, it starts with an introduction that explains the musical and cultural forces that shaped the punk genre. Next, 50 entries cover important punk bands and subgenres, noting female punk bands as well as bands of color. The final part of the book discusses how punk has influenced other musical genres and popular culture. The book will give those new to the genre an overview of important bands and products related to the movement in music, including publications, fashion, and films about punk rock. Notably, it pays special attention to diversity within the genre, discussing bands often overlooked or mentioned only in passing in most histories of the movement, which focus mainly on The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ramones as the pioneers of punk.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay is about a singer-songwriter named Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protege, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. This illuminating anti-hero story propels the characters through time, story, and philosophical discourse with sharp asides, short stories, dialogues, and monologues. A musician's book for the punk scene insider, with so many truths that "punks" (whatever) have had to reconcile or deny, that it's like holding up a mirror and seeing something beautiful and ugly. Engrossing and compelling, the novel wrestles with the "punk ethos" and features a punk/rock-inflected inside look at life on the road: magical, honest, and pure, but also destructive, dangerous, and out of control. The author, a writer and musician best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady, was once named #1 of the top ten accordionists in punk rock. He is also the author of the travel book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (a New York Times "Season's Best Travel Books" pick) and is a lecturer in writing about music at UC Berkeley.

Punk rock culture in a preeminently average town Synonymous with American mediocrity, Peoria was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled fury of punk rock. Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett explore the do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the 1980s and 1990s. From fanzines to indie record shops to renting the VFW hall for an all-ages show, Peoria's punk culture reflected the movement elsewhere, but the city's conservatism and industrial decline offered a richer-than-usual target environment for rebellion. Eyewitness accounts take readers into hangouts and long-lost venues, while interviews with the people who were there trace the ever-changing scene and varied fortunes of local legends like Caustic Defiance, Dollface, and Planes Mistaken for Stars. What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a youth culture in search of entertainment but just as hungry for community—the shared sense of otherness that, even for one night only, could unite outsiders and discontents under the banner of music. A raucous look at a small-city underground, Punks in Peoria takes readers off the beaten track to reveal the punk rock life as lived in Anytown, U.S.A.

Get In The Van by Rollins is the ultimate punk rock road book. This might, however, be the ultimate punk rock book, period. Jon Resh was a member of Spoke. You've probably never heard of them. He was a never a star. But he records in hilarious, wry, painful, and simple prose, the small victories, minor tragedies and humdrum existence of playing in a band. The pure joy of the bar E, the fumbling attempts with groupies, the hernias and cut fingers, life on the road, and all the mundanities of going deaf, and failing totally to make a living from it. Pure genius. Get In The Van by Rollins is the ultimate punk rock road book. This might, however, be the ultimate punk rock book, period. Jon Resh was a member of Spoke. You've probably never heard of them. He was a never a star. But he records in hilarious, wry, painful, and simple prose, the small victories, minor tragedies and humdrum existence of playing in a band. The pure joy of the bar E, the fumbling attempts with groupies, the hernias and cut fingers, life on the road, and all the mundanities of going deaf, and failing totally to make a living from it. Pure genius.