Discussion with Sam McPheeters
March 18, 2021 @ 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM • Free
Very stoked to have Sam McPheeters join us to discuss his book Mutations: The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk on Thursday, March 18. FREE! <3
Peep Pitchfork’s review or check out Austin Pratt’s write-up for the HP Book Club:
In what feels like an altogether new take on the late-century American underground punk music worlds, noted enfant terrible Sam McPheeters earnestly and curiously inquires and reflects on the culture and his deep time within as another type of fandom, not unlike Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek, or stamp collecting. This angle isn’t dismissive, however–McPheeters is a consummate geek; critical, self-aware, and yet still possessing the cool that owes to rocknroll. Now in his early fifties (!), novelist and once acerbic hardcore vocalist of wild and outlier punk projects Born Against, Mens Recovery Project, and Wrangler Brutes, now softens slightly to show up and give his story, already much publicly mythologized, but now-so less aggrandized and with much more connective tissue to unexpected territories of punk.
In “Mutations”, McPheeters writes to wrangle some huge lasso around this great big world and network, community, culture or whatever anthropologists may already call it; beginning (perhaps) in the late 1960s and (perhaps) continuing today. Aware of the difficulties of nomenclature, McPheeters insists on something, landing “hardcore punk” as the most proximate. Using select (and wildly disparate) individual bands and even venues as chapter essays, the book feels much like Michael Azerrad’s excellent “Our Band Could Be Your Life”, with a more personal memoir approach–each band defining “hardcore punk” through McPheeters by way of distinct genres, anecdotes, and even decades.
Find an in-depth audio interview from December with McPheeters on “Turned Out A Punk”, the excellent podcast hosted by Damian Abraham, vocalist for the progressive-art-hardcore-punk band Fucked Up, and geeky punk historian. McPheeters’ instagram/stories are also hilarious and incredible.
For fans of “Please Kill Me”, “Girl in a Band”, “Just Like Kids”, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” –Austin Pratt
