Punk – The Original - John Holmstrom and crew

This book is a fairly slight (unfortunately) compilation of the irreverent, highly relevant, original punk rock zine, Punk. It contains bits and pieces showing the mag’s various attributes – the comix, the caricatures, the photo stories told in comic format starring the local punk rock heroes, and, of course, plenty of goofy articles about the local scene.

Oddly, though Punk was primarily a New York City oriented rag, a large portion of this compilation is made up of a huge Sex Pistols article, a couple Sid Vicious pieces and a story on the Clash. Because I’m a purist jerk, I would have preferred that they had more of their local stories, but these are interesting insights regardless.

I wish that they had been able to include more in this book – I have a Sniffin’ Glue (the Brit punk zine) comp that has everything they ever wrote in one tome – but this is still a fun look back at what punk rock was originally all about. Needless to say, any rock’n’roller should own this.