Shirt, $145, and pants, $195, Bill Hallman. Sweater, $150, Avnah. Earrings, $175, Lilly Porter. Belt, $69.50, Club Monaco, clubmonaco.com. Bracelet, stylist’s own.
Topshop dress, $58, Nordstrom. Leggings, $42, American Apparel, americanapparel.net. Valentino heels, $1,195, Saks Fifth Avenue. Lela Rose necklace, $299, Tootsies. Vintage belt, $18, Rag-o-Rama. Marc by Marc Jacobs purple bracelet, $148, Bloomingdale’s, bloomingdales.com. Large red bracelet, $28, and small red bracelet, $18, The Clothing Warehouse, theclothingwarehouse.com.
Dress, $375, Avnah. Tom Binns for Charlotte Olympia heels, $1,695, Jeffrey Atlanta, jeffreynewyork.com. Vintage necklace, $37, Rag-o-Rama. Bracelet and ring, stylist’s own.
Alexis shirt, $205, and Rebecca Minkoff vest, $598, Saks Fifth Avenue. Rebecca Minkoff skirt, $298, Neiman Marcus. Topshop gold chain necklace, $25, Nordstrom. Spike necklace, $645, and skull bracelet, $295, both by Ashley Pittman, Tootsies. Gold and rhinestone bracelet, $45, Loft, loft.com. Earrings, $7.99, and ring, $7.99, Target. Bangles, stylist’s own.
Equipment shirt, $298, Neiman Marcus, neimanmarcus.com. Topshop pants, $50, Nordstrom, nordstrom.com. Burberry jacket, $2,595, and Miu Miu boots, $990, Saks Fifth Avenue. Earrings, $79, and ring, $69, both by Dennis Higgins, Tootsies, tootsies.com. Gloves, $15, Psycho Sisters, psychosistersshops.com. Socks, $3.99, Target, target.com.
The Metroplex, which hosted many a punk band in Atlanta, on Marietta Street in 1988, soon before it was demolished. It’s now a parking lot. Julie James, who still lives in Atlanta and does graphics for TV sports, started going to the ‘Plex when she was just sixteen. “I was there every night whether I knew what band was playing or not,” she says. “There were these rooms upstairs that Paul [Cornwell] let some guys rent for pretty cheap, and sometimes I’d just stay the night.” Photograph courtesy of Julie James
The Restraints, with frontman Chris Wood. “I’d just hitchhiked up here in a near blackout from Florida,” says Mikel K, the “punk poet” who was on the scene in the early eighties, “and I’m at a show, crumpling my Heineken beer cans and throwing them at Chris. And he’s laughing. And the band is smiling at me. And I’m like, ‘I thought there was gonna be a fight.’” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
Punks at a gallery opening in the basement of Clark Brown’s Blue Rat. “The Blue Rat gallery was my first exposure to art on walls,” says Mikel K. Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
National hardcore punk band Bad Brains at the Metroplex, 1985, with action in “the pit.” Photograph courtesy of Russell King
Outside of Pershing Point apartments. “Every punk, every rocker, every artist, and every dancer came to that particular area to live,” says Andy Browne of the band the Nightporters. “It was like a whole Warholian-like mixture in a block in Midtown Atlanta.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
Punks visiting Agnes Scott College to see the Nightporters play. The band had a wide following, from guys in suits to street punks. Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
The Nightporters performing at Metroplex. “I grew up in England, and when my mom would go back, she’d pick up me and the rest of the band black jeans,” says Browne. “They were pretty much skintight jeans. And we had Beatle boots. And obviously our motorcycle jackets. Or mod jackets. Those Beatle boots went a long way, and when worn out, we’d just duct tape ’em up, as well as the back of our jeans when worn out. Duct tape was a fashion statement.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
The Nightporters behind the Blue Rat. “Fashion to me can be a really bad word or a really great word,” says Browne. “But we dug that whole kinda like, dress up, do something special thing, because it is special. People were trying to look different. Although now you look back and think maybe it’s kinda silly, but at least they were trying.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
Hanging out behind the Blue Rat. “[Punk] was more of a cherry-picking of all the stuff they thought was cool from the past,” says Jeff Clark of Stomp and Stammer, “and just sort of stripping it down and turning up the volume, and being a little bit more outrageous in attitude.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
Punk styles at the Little Five Points festival, 1985. Photograph courtesy of Russell King
1985 Little Five Points festival. “We all had each other’s backs,” Mikel K says. “One time I was about to get into a fist fight with a Golden Gloves boxer outside of the Metroplex, and Changa [center] talked me out of it. I never forgot that he did that.” Photograph courtesy of Russell King
“Phreddie Vomit was a big part of the scene,” says Mikel K. “He had several bands and is famous for falling through the roof of 688. Still to this day he has such heart and soul; he was such a great guy, and he had the look down.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
The Strand, a hair salon by Pershing Point and the Blue Rat, where many a Mohawk was made. “You know, I had a Mohawk for a while,” says Mikel K. “But I got rid of it because it was such a hassle to walk the streets of Atlanta with a Mohawk. You’d have guys throwing beer cans at you—empty beer cans.” Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
David Dickens, left, who worked at Metroplex, with a gravity-defying Mohawk at a Strand party. Photograph courtesy of Clark Brown
Fall looks are rife with studs, leather, plaids, and mesh, borrowed from the youth culture that lifted a middle finger at the corporate world in the seventies and eighties. Like it or not, this do-it-yourself style was long ago commodified and hung on the racks of upscale department stores. As evidence of its further evolution (or devolution?), the movement recently inspired an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—Punk: Chaos to Couture. Here’s a quick history of Atlanta’s punk scene, plus a modern take on the throwback style at East Altanta Village’s 529 Bar, one of a few local venues carrying on the punk legacy.
Atlanta’s Punk Origins
Thirty-five years ago, punk made a lasting impression on Atlanta’s music scene. On January 5, 1978, the hell-raising British band the Sex Pistols made an unlikely American debut at the Great Southeast Music Hall in a shopping center now known as Lindbergh Plaza. Fans lined up on the sidewalk next to a Winn-Dixie. Journalists swarmed the place, and there were rumors the band might attack the media. Vice squads from Atlanta and Memphis came to quell any violence.
When the Pistols finally came out in all their sneering glory, they played for less than an hour. Johnny Rotten wore a tuxedo vest and a tousled skinny tie; Sid Vicious was shirtless in black pants with a bondage belt and a chain necklace. They opened with “God Save the Queen,” closed with “Anarchy in the U.K.” A few of the 500 pogoing fans threw beer cans, and the Pistols cursed and flipped birds, but there were no riots, no truly indecent acts onstage. The crowd spat more than the band.
Reports are varied on the caliber of the music that night. Steve May, who was then doing production for Prince and later opened the 688 Club, was in the sound booth. “I’m not even sure if Sid Vicious had his bass plugged in for the first half of the show,” he says. “They were terrible.”
But what they lacked in quality, they made up for in influence. According to May, the highly publicized show helped change the perception of Atlanta music, exposing an alternative scene in a city then known best for Southern boogie.
Self-described groupie Jill Griffin, who now works at a health insurance company and still lives in Atlanta, remembers tracking down the band at a drag bar, the Sweet Gum Head, on Cheshire Bridge Road. After the show, Sid went home with one of her friends, and the next day, the band’s manager, punk icon Malcolm McLaren, showed up at Griffin’s apartment asking after Sid’s whereabouts. “Sid was just a hot mess,” Griffin says. Turns out he’d slit his wrist with a letter opener at her friend’s house and had to go to Piedmont Hospital for stitches. He continued the tour in Memphis the next night with a bandaged arm. Eight days later, the Sex Pistols played a show in San Francisco, then broke up for good.
The Pistols showed up in Atlanta just as punk was creeping out of the city’s underground. At the heart of the scene were a few club owners. There were May, who opened 688 on Spring Street in 1980, and Paul Cornwell, founder of the sometime punk club Metroplex, which opened in 1983 and hosted national acts like Bad Brains and Suicidal Tendencies as well as hordes of alienated youth in leather jackets and steel-toed boots. There were also Clark Brown of the Blue Rat Gallery, a little venue below Midtown’s Pershing Point Apartments, and Chris Wood, the outlandish front man for one of Atlanta’s first punk bands, the Restraints. A classic cult figure, Wood was known for stage antics like shooting a hypodermic needle into his head and swinging around a loaded pistol.
“Chris Wood and Clark Brown served as the father figures of the time,” says Andy Browne, singer-songwriter for the Nightporters, one of Atlanta’s best-known new-wave punk bands (a nostalgic low-budget documentary about the band, Tell It Like It Is, premiered at the Plaza Theatre in April). “They made sure the homeless waifs all had food in their bellies and beer and such. Pershing Point was home—it was ground zero for all the rockers, musicians, dancers, punks, wannabes, and just about every kind of lunatic you can imagine.”
But Pershing Point Apartments was leveled in 1985. A year later, 688 closed because of financial problems, and Metroplex shut its doors in ’88. The old clubs may be gone, but the punks who haunted them will tell you punk’s not dead. Various bands around Atlanta still channel the old-school rebellion. More than being about a place or an era, the fashion or even the music, according to Cornwell, “punk is an attitude.”
This article originally appeared in our September 2013 issue.