Why Concert T-Shirts Matter
Joy Division
Never been more shivery-shy than when I asked (imagine the pipsqueakiest of pipsqueaks doing this) for a “men’s small, please” from the guy (Mike from the Stitches!) at Underdog Records, which was the most incredible record store, and down the block from my sister’s house in Laguna Beach. My Joy Division fandom at the point was kind of perverted and too-too-much. Because I was really young, short and didn’t yet have big tittays, I just wanted a shirt that I could wear without first soaking and then stuffing into the microwave for shrinkage, but Mike was like “Yeah! New wave shirts should be small, yeah.” Yeah! It’s fun when you can identify the genesis of your aesthetic sensibility, which you copied from an old punk in Orange County.
Black Flag
I can’t even talk about Black Flag because I have endured a lot of emotional pain (seriously serious) about the fact that, owing to my age (30!), origins (upper-middle-class suburbia) and station (white, increasingly conservative, increasingly boring, mostly law-abiding, mostly straight) I will never really be Black Flag, or for that matter, hardcore, or for that matter, punk. Once I was drinking a bottle of water on the road in rural Guatemala and this dude walked by in a dirty white classic Flag logo t-shirt, with a Black Flag tattoo behind his ear, and the essplosion of sexual attraction plus jealousy plus blind resentment was too much to bear, especially in the middle of a solo terror vacation like “rural Guatemala.” (Also, this was when a lot of hangings and car bombs and so forth were happening in a nearby town called Solola, and I was watching a lot of glossy Beyonce videos on my laptop in a “Lalalalalala I can’t hear you” kind of way.) I have several Black Flag shirts, all of which live somewhere in the Teen Archive at my parents’ house (along with my Sassys, love notes, cassettes and hemp jewelry). I can’t wear them like fashion because this is a band that I started to like after I’d already missed them, but a band who did their essential and influential magick on me, and when I see a chick who doesn’t know what Slip It In is wearing a Black Flag shirt I experience every hot twist of rage that women ever feel for other women, but all at once (guess what happened when my favorite shirt appeared in a fashion editorial spread?).
The Unicorns
I wore this shirt, which has a million lines of “The Unicorns” written on it, over a white long-sleeved waffle shirt to a severiously weird party that I went to in California. I was 24, and had done pretty much all of the stuff you’re supposed to do (except for heroin and anal sex, both of which I consider to be horrifying Final Trespasses) but c’mon. I grew up in Canada. Toronto-weird is like private kindergarten compared to the high-stakes, celebrity-oriented, purple haze of California-weird. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom waiting for my pulse to slow down and actively regretting wearing a pink t-shirt (pink!) even if I did have really ugly/cool bleached-out long hair with ugly/cool black roots in an “I don’t give a FUCK” ponytail. The upshot of this is that a famous person (I will tell you who if you email me!) said he liked my shirt, and who are The Unicorns? And I still have residual confidence from that small moment.
Misfits
I relied on these shirts a lot (uh, I have two of them) like six years ago when I thought I’d invented “high-low” and wore them with a conservo skirt and heels to an office job. Actually, to be honest, the Crimson Ghost-plus-pencil skirt is kind of my dream look, still, but I don’t even love-love the band, because they are scary, so I’m too appropriation-guilty to wear them most of the time.
Deadly Snakes
This is a now-over band from Toronto that you probably haven’t heard of, but I promise that they were appropriately dark and mysterious and loud and going to their shows during university (which means “fancy college” in Canada) made all of us feel fucking fantastic. They were so good. I stole my boyfriend’s Deadly Snakes concert shirt, which is a gangreney color with hot-orange type. “Deadly Snakes,” it says, then a picture of a coiled snake, then “Toronto.” It was literally the first time that I ever felt like “Toronto” was possibly cool. Now we are more or less “resolved” about it (ha, ha: I won!) but back then, my boyfriend was really mad at me for stealing the shirt, like “This is a character flaw of yours, where you’re selfish.” I love that shirt. I wear it sparingly and usually with leather stuff because I can’t pull it off on my own.
Bad Religion
I recently took off my sweater while I was teaching a class and discovered that I was wearing my Bad Religion t-shirt that has two sexy nuns making out on it. I guess that kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore? My students are adults, but I felt like I was accidentally transgressing a boundary in the most exhausted way. Also: this is not a great band, by any stretch, but I feel like they are important to punk, and Greg Graffin’s whole science-Ph.D.-plus-punk-daddy thing = respect. (He’s a drag to interview, though.) I bought this shirt at the Warped Tour, even though Bad Religion were so boring that I walked away and watched the Gallows instead, even though I actively dislike and avoid British punk rock (mostly because American hardcore is so much more from a context of book-reading and a Protestant work ethic, which are contexts that I feel safe in). Why don’t I have a Minor Threat shirt???