Why?

I'm on record - I loved punk rock.  But the English punks - the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, even the Clash - had an artschool aura about them; much of it was for show, like a kid from Edina dressing goth to piss off the parents.  

American punks were for real; the Ramones really did live in garages and the streets; the Dead Boys, with their Cleveland roots showing, gave the London and New York punk scenes a healthy dose of rust-belt smog to counter Ian MacLaren's cynical, foppish conceptual sensibilities.  

And yet with so many punks, there was a lingering question; "What ARE you angry about?"  The Pistols were mad because they were bored.  The Clash adopted all the righteous anger in the world.  The Ramones?  Stu bless 'em, they never even pretended to be angry; they were a great garage band.  Stiff Little Fingers was mad because Ulster was still occupied; it's a stance that's made for a lot of unlistenable folk music - that SLF came across so well is a minor musical miracle.  Sham69 was mad because we weren't all Maoists yet.  

The punks were mad about something, even if it wasn't much at all.  It was something external, usually.  That anger - and, with the best of them (like Strummer and the Clash) the anger was turned into passion.  

Which, when I was 18, was plenty good enough.

But punk had no context.  Historically, even though it borrowed heavily from earlier forms of Rock and Roll, it was more theft than homage.  And punks, like teenagers the world over, believed that they were the first generation to feel what they felt.  

American "Heartland Rock" was at the nexus of a lot of different traditions; the sixties Garage Rock of ? and the Mysterians, the "White Soul" of Mitch Ryder and the Young Rascals and the Box Tops, the Black Soul of Stax/Volt and Motown, and of course all the rock and roll that had come before - Elvis, the Beatles, everyone.  It tied the present to a huge, rich musical past, that couldn't help but add a little bit of the universal to the temporal of the three minute single.

When it was hot - the Flaming Embers, the Box Tops, Springsteen, the Asbury Jukes, Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, Petty, Seger, Mellencamp - it can be unforgettable stuff.  

The Houserockers tied together that long, glorious musical tradition with the raw passion and anger of the punks - powerful, as literate as it wanted to be...

...and with a keen sense that you weren't the first who'd been there.  Unlike most punk rock, the Houserockers never rang hollow, never seem like a pose struck to get a club turned on.

When I was 18, the anger kept me going.  Now that I'm 40, it stays with me - because it's not about being an angry teenager.  It's about being an adult - a passionate, deep-hearted adult - who hasn't forgotten that feeling, but whose life isn't, can't be, about changing the world or pissing off the authorities or going out on Friday night and hooking up.

There are many artists whose music has grown to incorporate all these themes.  Most of them have no shortage of fan sites on the web; it's not hard to find appreciations sites for the likes of Springsteen or Tom Petty or Steve Earle - all of whose music I love.  

The Iron City Houserockers never got their due.  I'd like to change that.  This site is my part.