The news of his death devastated me, but I am coming to a place of peace with it. He had been calling me more and more frequently during the last five years of his life, pleading with me to come visit. Sadly he died of addiction-related causes in October 2021. We broke up after some years but still communicated. He was able to kick that habit but replaced it with others, and although he had long stretches of sobriety, he always relapsed. My former boyfriend was like the young musicians described in the introduction to the photo essay: not settled into himself and making bad decisions. But, as the drummer’s girlfriend, I was a regular presence at shows. I was a shy, inhibited young woman, and the club scene intimidated me. He joined with a few women to form a band called the Bush Tetras, which became one of the hottest on the New York City scene. In 1978 I moved to Manhattan with my boyfriend, who was a punk drummer. Michael Galinksy’s photo essay “ We Were All Just Kids, Really” could not have come at a better time. None of it was easy, but all of it had meaning. I think finding that community saved me in ways I can’t even articulate. Being in a band connected me with hundreds, if not thousands, of others trying to make art outside the expectations and demands of the system. I felt a responsibility to capture these bands and that world specifically because it seemed like nobody else was. It was never wholly about music it was also about being part of a community of like-minded misfits and broken dolls. Others pulled through and thrived, but it was messy. Lots of people had heroin issues, and people I cared about became ghostlike, and some died. People made a lot of bad decisions in that time and place. We were all just kids, really, not so emotionally mature or settled into our sense of self. I was surprised to find it still there when I got home weeks later. I once went on tour with my bike locked up out front on the street. We had way more roaches than money, and I ate rice and beans four to five nights a week. Three of us lived in a tiny place where none of the rooms had doors. One guy somehow locked the door handle from the inside on the way out, and we had to break it off. Lots of bands I barely knew stayed at my New York City apartment on Avenue B. Sleeping on people’s floors can get old, but we brought cushions. We stayed with friends, family, or the first person who bought a T-shirt. We barely covered gas money on these trips.
We didn’t sell many records or draw crowds. To be fair, there was an enormous amount of boredom and long drives, too. I recall the sense of freedom and adventure that touring entailed. The thing I miss most about being in a band is the travel and connection with others. That fall I returned to New York with the sense of commitment to document the underground music scene there. I had just taken my first real photography class, and I was firing on all cylinders creatively for the first time in my life. Our first night there we went to a house-party concert, and it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen - explosive, tight, and chaotic. I think we paid a hundred dollars a month. It was right at the time when everyone was moving out for the summer from Brown University, and I found a double mattress on the street and dragged it back to my room. We walked down the street with a sign saying we needed an apartment, and within about an hour we’d arranged to sublet part of a house on Prospect Street. Two friends and I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1990 to focus on our band, Sleepyhead, which we had started in our New York City dorm the previous fall. It can be hard to get out from under the crush of irony. We struggled with the desire to be performers while also seeing performance as so much artifice. Despite our sense of hopelessness, we actually had songs with political content. We booked our own shows, made our own T-shirts and posters and zines. This cynicism drew us together, and we embraced noisy music that mirrored the dissonance in our heads, wrangling beauty out of chaotic feelings.īeing in a band felt vaguely like a political act, because we were working to create some kind of path outside of an industry that constantly tried to sell subversiveness back to the youth. During the late eighties there were a lot of people coming of age who saw and felt the failures of the older generation in ways that bred cynicism.
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