Out Of The Basement: From Cheap Trick to DIY Punk in Rockford, Illinois, 1973-2005

Description

Out of the Basement tells the story of underground music in post-industrial Rockford, Illinois. This is a bracing, candid, democratic and cutting edge portrayal of a rust belt city full of rebel kids making DIY music despite the odds. It combines oral history, brutally honest memoir, music history, and a sense of blunt poetics to capture the ethos of life in the 1970s-2000s, long before the Internet made punk accessible to small towners.

David A. Ensminger is a college instructor and the author of four books covering both American roots music and punk rock history Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2011), Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin' Hopkins (Univ. of Texas Press, 2013), Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons (PM Press, 2013), Mavericks of Sound: Conversations with the Artists Who Shaped Indie and Roots Music (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), and The Politics of Punk (Rowman and Littlefield, Jan 2016). Both the Boston Globe and The Economist have highlighted his research; meanwhile, he writes for publications like Art in Print, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Houston Press, Trust (Germany), Artcore (Britain), and Maximum Rock'n'Roll. He lives in Houston, TX.

David Ensminger writes a fascinating story about the development of punk in Rockford, Illinois. He weaves engaging personal narratives with interesting historical accounts of proto-punk, power pop, punk rock, and hardcore in this Midwest town. --Daniel Makagon, author of Underground: The Subterranean Culture of DIY Punk Shows A vivid portrait of late 20th century 'rust city kids' skateboarding through a kind of pulp noir 'dead-end America, ' sustained by punk and its DIY ethos. As so often happens, punks crafted community and beauty out of the ruins. It is, at once, both a typical story and a singular one, and Ensminger captures it all. --Michael Stewart Foley, author of Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables This latest dispatch from David Ensminger emits in vigorous detail the lineaments of the sweat-drenched musical underground nestled in his rock hard hometown. Wild, subterranean notations and sense impressions combine with slices of scholarly reflection and the author's own energy and timeless enthusiasm to deliver not only the glory of a youth movement on the page, but the nearly lost art of punk itself. --Denise Sullivan, author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop and Rip It Up: Rock 'n' Roll Rulebreakers