Ha! Back in the day, Oingo Boingo and a few other West Coast bands played something they called the “Turd Town Tour� every few months, which meant they came to Salt Lake City three or four times a year. They even did a Halloween show here in 1980 or ’81. Good times.

Black Flag was another regular visitor around the same time. Take my word for it, the sight of Henry Rollins stomping around the stage in Mormon temple garments isn’t easily forgotten.

Rollins is brilliant--and disturbed.

And in my mind, a self-righteous, bullying, dogmatic, loud-mouthed, Grade-A asshole.

Said by a guy whose Punk Rawk credentials are, as LMA knows, impeccable.

P.S. Even when I was a self-described left-anarchist punk, I never saw Oingo Boingo or frontman Danny Elfman as "reactionary." Self-conscious art geeks, yes. One-dimensional righties, no.

Songs like "Only a Lad" and "Capitalism", even under all the lame quasi-ska instrumentation and funhouse arrangements, sounded like the words of someone who'd been, as the saying goes, "mugged by reality" at a relatively young age, and was sick and tired of wading through the swamp of leftist groupthink and nonsense that's been pretty much the only accepted boho/hipster political stance since Jack Kerouac drank himself to death.

Absolutely. It was at your parents' place back in high school that I first heard the Dead Kenneys.

When I think of right wing and rock Ted Nugent always comes to mind. Those aren't pleasant thoughts.

I'm sorry, but I do love the Motor City Madman. He may be in that category of Lovely Stylized Hard Rock inasmuch as all his songs sound the same--but it's okay because I like the sound. AC/DC would be another example.

But I don't think in Nugent's case his actual music is political, like Oingo Boingo's was: he just liked to play a particularly aggressive style of rock. It's not like the songs were all about guns and hunting (though that wouldn't be a bad idea). And the lyrics were pretty tongue-in-cheek, for the most part, unless we accept the premise that poontang really was all he thought about.

Oingo Boingo was SO obnoxious. Hard to believe he went on to be a decent composer

Aren't you up past your bedtime, young man?

Mikal--in response to your second post, you'll have to recall what a True Believer in the Church of Leftism I was in those days. (And whom I lived with for some of that time.)