Ever seen the movie "The Decline Of Western Civilization"? If you haven't shame on you, do yourself a favor and search for it in google video. The movie's a pretty famous documentary that was made by Penolope Spheeris (the same person who directed "Wayne’s World"), chronicling the 1980 L.A. punk scene, and features such usual suspects as Black Flag, The Germs, Fear, and the Circle Jerks, as well as lesser known but equally good acts like Catholic Discipline.
Anyway the movie opens up with skinhead kid identified only as "Eugene" talking about why he likes punk music,
"It's something new and it's just reviving like old rock n roll, and it's like it's raw and it's for real, and it's fun. You know like it's not bullshit there's no rock stars."
He shows up a few more times later in the movie talking about how he doesn't know where his parents are, why he hates living in L.A., and other various topics.
After I watched the movie for the first time I wondered what happened to all the kids who were interviewed for it, particularly Eugene, but didn't bother to do any research on the subject. It wasn't until over a year later when I was reading the book "American Hardcore" that I found out more information on Eugene. Apparently he had burned down a Los Angeles squat house that he had been evicted from, with the attitude "if we can't have it no one can".
Now I was intrigued. I went online and googled "eugene decline of western civilization". One of the firsts things that came up was this site, www.art-for-a-change.com/Punk/pdraw8.htm.
In addition to seeing this cool photo the author drew of Eugene and a friend of his for an L.A. Weekly piece on the city's punk rock scene, I learned this bit of information, "Eugene has been a professional Folksinger for the last 20 years, traveling the globe and producing 3 albums of Folk material."
3 albums of folk material? Now I was even more intrigued, I had to find his stuff. After some searching I found his myspace page, www.myspace.com/theeugecd. Apparently he's now going by the name "Euge", and as for his music, it's good. I highly suggest you to listen to his songs, it's folk music, which I'm not a fan of, but many of them have punk elements to them. My favorite is easily "I'm A Drifter". After searching for the lyrics to the song, and having no avail, I decided to write them down myself, as they were too good not to be exposed to the internet. So here you go the lyrics to, "I'm A Drifter" by Euge:
People like to sing about love you oughtta sing about guns instead
You wanna shake my hand I oughtta hit you upside the head
You wanna save the world you oughtta save your soul instead
The world aint changing only streetlights change
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
The world aint changing only names have been changed
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
The world aint changing only streetlights change
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
The world aint changing only names have been changed
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
People like to sing about love you oughtta sing about guns instead
You wanna shake my hand I oughtta hit you upside the head
You wanna save the world you oughtta save your soul instead
The world aint changing only streetlights change
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
The world aint changing only names have been changed
But I've changed my mind about you you're as square as you can be
Thank you for this
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