Punked Up

What’s a museum for an anti-institutional movement doing in Las Vegas?

BY Lissa Townsend Rodgers

Our hometown of gaming tables, showroom stages, and celebrity chef restaurants is developing a reputation as a home to something else: weird museums. From neon signs to cursed dolls to Tommy guns, collections of the unusual have succeeded where fine art has failed. The newest addition to the roster may be the most unexpected — not just for Las Vegas, but anywhere — as the Punk Rock Museum prepares for its expected April opening. How does a cultural movement founded on sweat, spit, safety pins, and smashing institutions turn itself into, well, an institution?

“Punk rock is more than just ‘smash the state.’ There’s passion and creativity. Its influence has reverberated through art and other music forms and education, even the way that people approach doing business,” museum

The museum’s collection will be organized chronologically, from early ’70s Blondie relics to last year’s Amyl and the Sniffers merch. But there will also be a focus on the punk scene of various cities. “Before the internet, you had this sort of tribalism of San Francisco punks and L.A. punks and New York punks and Chicago punks and being able to show that sort of tight-knit group — the shows and the clubs and the photos and some artifacts,” Fiorello says. The relics of punk rock tend to be ephemeral: flyers, setlists, T-shirts, ’zines, cassette tapes, and 45s, although there are some sturdier items such as club signage and leather jackets. There are also guitars, but their durability may depend on museum guests, since visitors will be able to actually play the instruments used by bands such as Rise Against, Sick of It All, and Pennywise.

There’s one thing Crawford would like to see — or hear — within the museum: “In addition to the flyers, photos, and usual ephemera, I think keeping an audio archive that includes first-person accounts of various shows, events, and personal stories would be a nice addition — kind of like a punk rock StoryCorps, if you will.” And the museum will have its storytellers, although you won’t be able to press play on them without getting your hand smacked: Members of bands such as Agnostic Front, Anti-Flag, L7, and more will offer personally guided tours for smaller groups (and a bigger ticket price).

The Mob Museum, the Neon Museum and the Atomic Museum, among others, all represent major parts of Las Vegas history. But punk rock is a minor part of the city’s past … at best. While there was indeed a scene here, it was no New York or Los Angeles, or even Boston or Minneapolis. Which is actually part of the reason the city was chosen, according to Fiorello. “People have big thoughts on New York punks to L.A. punks, or L.A. punks to San Francisco punks. But Las Vegas is a very neutral city,” he says.

If punk is neutral on Vegas, there was a time when Vegas was definitely not neutral on punk. (Former Desert Companion editor) Andrew Kiraly, who booked and played shows back in the ’90s, recalls struggling to find places to put on bands. “The punk scene had to deal with really strict laws, so we had to go kind of DIY,” he says. “We had venues like the VFW hall on Main. There was the Tubes — that was a series of drainage tunnels. Losee Road — empty places at the edge of town, industrial infrastructure meets desert. There was a place called the Caves because they were actual physical caves.”

If Las Vegas is a punk rock Switzerland, it’s also a place that’s fiscally feasible for both the museum and its patrons. “If we were going to put that same size, 12,000 square feet, of a museum in New York City, it would cost an exponential amount more money, and the same goes for Los Angeles or London,” Fiorello says. “Vegas is set up for people from everywhere to be able to go there, stay there at a reasonable price.”

Of course, it’s not as though the Punk Rock Museum is in a corporate casino or tourist trap. It’s on Western Avenue near the train tracks, down the street from a 7-Eleven, next door to a strip club. And Las Vegas’ one globally renowned contribution to punk culture will be represented within the museum: The bar will be an outpost of the legendary dive, the Double Down Saloon. “In Las Vegas, punk bars and (Double Down owner) P Moss kind of go hand-in-hand,” Fiorello says. “We’re lucky to have him involved.”

Fiorello continues, “Moss did say something very right on the money. He said, ‘You don’t know what this space is gonna become. You have to open it and let people come. They gravitate to what they like, and it takes on a life of its own, and it becomes what it’s supposed to become, not what we think it’s supposed to be.’ He meant the bar, but that’s the spirit of the museum, the spirit of punk rock music.”

It’s also a spirit that has found a home in a town that never wanted to give it one. Punk indeed. ✦

BOOKS Ballad Buster

A country western singer’s last tour is fodder for a subtle critique of music-industry sexism

BY Gabriela Rodriguez

IN ONE SCENE of Stephanie Clifford’s recent novel, The Farewell Tour, a close friend of main character Lillian Waters dies. Waters, a country western musician, can’t make it to the funeral because she’s got a show scheduled at the Golden Nugget — an extremely important gig in for an artist like her in the 1970s, when the scene is set. It underlines not only Las Vegas’ significance in the music industry at that time, but also the sacrifices passionate women musicians such as Waters must make to succeed.

Indeed, the entire story is constructed around a door closing. The novel begins in 1980 with Waters’ career-ending medical diagnosis. A seasoned musician, who’s had her share of ups and downs, Waters embarks on one last summer tour to pay homage to herself, her fans, and country music writ large.

Toggling between that timeframe and flashbacks to pivotal moments in Waters’ career, Clifford explores the challenges women in music face. Waters struggles to make herself more palatable to listeners by adjusting her hair, clothes, mannerisms — all while racing against time. Bits of her true self occasionally spill out, until she can no longer maintain the industry’s curated version of her.

Many details give the book depth, from the history of socalled “hillbilly” music in Washington state during the Great Depression, to rich descriptions of key country figures throughout the genre’s eras. But the most compelling element is the main character herself. Waters is a refreshing and intense artist whose candor kept me rooting for her at every stage. Her story of redemption, unrequited love, and growth brings the reader along on tour. It’s a gig you don’t want to miss.

The Farewell Tour, by Stephanie Clifford, 352 pages, $24.89, Harper

Top Notes of Empathy

Gayle Brandeis breathes new life into harrowing, heartbreaking, and joyful moments

BY Scott Dickensheets

THE ACT OF breathing is richly symbolic in ways that author Gayle Brandeis finds useful for her new essay collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. It neatly illustrates the body’s permeability: We pull the outside world into us — oxygen, pollutants, whatever else — change it, and force it back out, underlining our vulnerability but also our capacity for transformation. Like creativity, breathing is both a conscious choice and involuntary function. Breath is a potent metaphor, she tells us, “because it exists right at the nexus of body and mind.”

The book is thematically arranged according to different modes of breathing (“Quiet Breathing,” “Painful Breathing,” etc.). Brandeis, a UNR creative writing instructor, has led the sort of episodic, often-challenging life that can nutrify a gutsy essayist: bouts of debilitating disease, heartbreak, and, most intensely, a mother whose operatic swells of mental illness ended in suicide. The wrenching “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” juxtaposes her child’s birth with her mother’s death just days later. “Joy” is typical of her method: In writing about her mother’s favorite perfume, Brandeis braids memory and experience with snatches of science and history into a complex meditation on grief and the power of the senses. Despite the foregoing, this book is not a downer — there’s a revitalizing warmth to “Shadow Son,” in which a young man can’t accept that Brandeis isn’t his birth mother. There are top notes of empathy and social justice throughout.

The book’s last essay describes how a scary bout of COVID unplugged Brandeis’ ability to write — which, in one of Drawing Breath’s most surprising turns, she’s okay with. “The world doesn’t need more of my voice,” she says. Maybe it needs something else from her: the pay-it-forward generosity to “empower other voices.” It’s as if everything that’s come before has finally allowed her to breathe easy.

Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss, by Gayle Brandeis, 226 pages, $18.95, Overcup Press ✦

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