Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground

HR of Bad Brains at Hard Art Gallery by Lucian Perkins

I've sung the praises of Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85) before and I'm gonna do it again.  Right now.  This book is phenomenal!  Here are some scans from Banned in DC that I never got around to using.  It's unbelievable that there's anything left over that I didn't already use because I wore this book out making Shotgun Seamstress zine.  

Favorite picture of Dag Nasty with Shawn Brown by Mary Diaz

Darryl Jennifer (Bad Brains) outside Ontario Theater circa 1979

Banned in DC is my favorite punk photo book.  It was compiled by Cynthia Connolly, Leslie Clague and Sharon Cheslow and features more black punks and women than any other punk book I've ever seen.  Also, so many punk books suffer from misogynist or racist words or imagery (I love the Touch & Go book, but that blurb about Penelope Houston of Avengers makes me wanna hurl!) and Banned in DC completely avoids this.

Outside Wilson Center 1-28-84 by Amy Pickering

This is the picture I was writing about in the SS No. 2 article called "black punk zine that never happened."  It's hard to see, but the flyer this guy is holding says Trouble Funk, Government Issue and Grand Mal.  In that article, I wrote about seeing this photo and trying to imagine a punk show where a black go-go band and a white hardcore band played together.  I love nostalgia, what can I say?

Void (Sean Finnegan, John Weiffenbach, Bubba Dupree and Chris Stover's sneakers)
by Rebecca Hammel

Bad Brains at Hard Art Gallery by Lucian Perkins

This photo exhibit called "Hard Art" came through New Orleans over a year ago.  It featured the photographs of Lucian Perkins, who was a beginning photographer at The Washington Post when he got the assignment to photograph the goings on of the early 1980s Washington, DC hardcore scene. I recognized some of the photos from Banned in DC and figured that one of the ladies who compiled the book would be present at the exhibit.  I also assumed that Lucian Perkins was a woman!  Have you ever seen those pictures of Bad Brains playing for an almost all-black audience at a housing project in DC?  There's a woman carrying a baby up front and little black kids just staring up at HR with wide, white eyes.  Those are Perkins' photographs, and it completely floored me to be able to see them, full size in real life.  I was smiling like an idiot the whole time.  Lucian Perkins wasn't there at the art show, but Alec MacKaye was.  I gave him a couple copies of my zine to pass on to the photographer so that he could see how his pictures inspired my project.  Somehow, the zines ended up in the hands of Cynthia Connolly, which is rad because she ended up writing me a nice letter.  We wrote back and forth a few times talking about Glen Friedman, women in punk, photography and representation, the infamous Lefty, and more.  Excerpts from our exchange are below.

Cynthia then...

... and Cynthia now.

February 9, 2012
Cynthia!
Thanks so much for writing.  I'm impressed that my zines actually made it into your hands!  So, yes, I've only recently begun to realize how influential Banned in DC was and is on me as a musician, artist and black punk...

.......

Anyway, the point of Shotgun Seamstress was to make DIY, punk and anti-consumerist ideas accessible to young black kids.  Since my network is comprised mostly of white punks who are adults, it is always a challenge for me to get my zine into the right hands, but I do try.  Just recently, I've been invited to speak to high school kids of diverse racial backgrounds and those experiences have made me feel like my ideas have finally been communicated to my target audience.  Feminists and people of color are always talking about the importance of representation.  If a young black girl sees a black female medical doctor, for instance, in a magazine or on TV, she is more likely to believe that she herself can be a doctor one day than if she'd never seen that image represented in the media that surrounds her.  So with my zine, I knew it was important to include powerful images of black punks expressing their identities fearlessly and that's where Banned in DC comes in.  

I've had Banned in DC for years and I also owned Glen E. Friedman's Fuck You Heroes for a while until I realized that the only woman in the entire book wasn't a musician at all, but was scantily clad and posing with a gun.  I sold it to Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, but not before ripping out that awesome picture of Junkyard Band, that go-go band from DC.  It's a picture of the band when all of the members were very young, some not even teenagers yet.  I used that image in SS #2 and I still have that page from the book.  I also remember going to Powell's and digging through their punk book section hoping to find other images suitable for my zine but, to my surprise, it was slim pickings.  Banned in DC is a very unique book in the way that it documents not only tons of black punk rockers, and not only tons of women, but also events and shows that must have been very specific to the DC area such as punk shows featuring both hc and go-go bands.  The more I look through that book and learn about it, the less I am able to tell if what you all captured was representative of the punk/hc scene at the time or what you all thought was most interesting and worth photographing.  Maybe you can tell me.  

.......

xo Osa



Dear Osa,
This is all very interesting what you are saying, as I don't know if Glen will even admit, but I was a big influence on him and his work.   I used to argue with him all the time about the way he represented women, and I totally agree on the fact that representation to younger adults inspires them and makes them believe that they can do the same.  I think the reverse example can also keep people in the place that they are.  (I lived in Alabama for a year in the poorest county there and seeing most not working and nothing to do, with nothing to show what they can do, they stay in that stagnant place.)  Anyway, Banned in DC to me represents what I remembered mostly from the time I moved there in 1981 to 1986.  79 and 80 I was not there and what you see are the photos I could find.  I decided to collect stories from people because I noticed that people loved to tell stories in DC....  Which I never thought at the time was anything really "regional" but it is!  I grew up in LA, and that is not how people talked of their life... In these stories. 

Peer Pressure (David Byers, Tom Berard,
Toni Young and Danny Ingram)
by SFW.  Toni Young was the
coverstar of SS No. 1.  She was also in the
band Red C.

 Toni Young was amazing.  She died of pneumonia and everyone thought maybe she had AIDS, but no one knows.  It was sudden and sad... And that was in the late 80's when the first book was published. So, I dedicated the first book to her.  She was amazing  and I wish she were here today as I would like to know what she would be doing. She was a bit of a partier, and hung out with Vivienne.  Vivienne works for the Guggenhiem.  She also hung out with Tina.  And Tina owns her own restaurant in Rehoboth Beach and does catering as well.  I think she owns a house out there as well.  So, I think Toni would have gone in a creative direction if she were with us.

My best friend is still Nicky Thomas, who is black.  [Nicky is an ex-member of the all-girl Dischord band Fire Party. -ed]  She and I went to China in 1992.  When I made Banned in DC I don't think I knew her much, but she was going to shows with her brother who made her hold his coat.  A typical thing that "girls" did a lot.  So, in order for me to be sure the 'ladies" were represented, I made the few photos I had of them really big in the book.  With the exception of "Lefty" who I had a hard time with, as she was sort of violent and called herself a Nazi and I really didn't get that.  (She hung out with skinhead dudes mostly and this REALLY confused me.  She was black, called herself a Nazi Skin and hung out with White guys who were "skins"...)

Anyway, I tried to make the women big.  I also decided to make the book as I knew if I didn't some dude would...  And I really didn't want someone 'WRITING' about it. Actually, some dudes are making a film about the DC scene and I have YET TO BE INTERVIEWED, which really is starting to piss me off.  They are interviewing a bunch of dudes.  Anyway, women were really involved, and made zines and were at the shows, but since a lot were NOT at the foot of the stage they were NOT photographed... and I wanted to be sure they are represented none the less!

..........


-Cynthia Connolly

Go here http://www.cynthiaconnolly.com/ to see Cynthia's photographs and learn about current events & exhibits.