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Before the Internet, the process of going punk, especially if you lived outside a major urban area, involved a lot of research with an extremely spotty library of resources. Those resources consisted of whatever you could get your hands on: you might have some zines if you were lucky, or get tips and mix tapes from an older punk if you were very lucky, but more likely you’d have to settle for things like making note of the band shirts that the cooler members of Guns n’ Roses wore in videos and photo shoots, or just blindly buying records that looked even vaguely “punk.” The amount of randomness built into this exploration, coupled with the fact that no one really had an entirely clear idea what they were doing, resulted in constellations of weird microregional variations on what “punk” was: in Jackson, Michigan, for instance (Prison City Punks represent), it was an inexplicable combination of G.G. Allin and Cap’n Jazz, while across the state in the Kalamazoo area the punks were super heavily into Amphetamine Reptile-brand noise rock.
