I'm wanting to elaborate a little on some of the writing immediately below. If I'm rejecting the mallgoth culture, looking beyond the obvious commercialization of rebellion, why is that? What was different about the earlier experience?

The closest I can get quickly to explaining what we experienced in the post-punk years starts from the sublime. It's perhaps best known to us today from Edmund Burke's writings, but they're really quite tedious and he takes quite a long time to get to the point. Instead, I found the following: 

"Arthur Schopenhauer, in "The Will and the Representation" (1819), explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss, and by so doing attain a certain dark grandeur." 

The quote is from Simon Morley, editor of the book "The Sublime" and he's done us a favor because I can vouch that Schopenhauer isn't exactly a fast read, either.

In any case, that abyss is where we were perched in the early post-punk years, and it was a surprisingly wide-spread phenomenon among the folks I spent time with. We'd pretty much universally rejected middle class suburban values, torn the whole framework down, and in the process created our very own abyss. It took a little while to build a new framework. In my case, the void lasted from sometime in late 1978 into sometime in 1980, I think. For sure by April 1981 I'd pretty much worked through it, because by then I was helping a friend find the way. While there was not any one day that was before or after, a milestone was July 14, 1981. That night I met a young woman at Exit, I'm not really sure who picked up who, but we spent the night together and pretty much talked through the entire process of nihilist destruction followed by gradual rebuilding that we'd both been through. I only saw her once more after that plus a couple of phone conversations, but parts of that night are still very vivid memories. We shared a lot of interests, had read a lot of the same books, and it was very easy to talk about it.

That was four months after I'd seen Bauhaus play for the first time, and talked to Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash after the show. They had been, and continued to be, on the same trajectory, passing through a lot of the same interests as me... well documented in their lyrics. It was about a month before The Fall and the afterparty that went into the next morning, and for sure Mark E. Smith understood all this in his own irreverant way. It was more than three months before I met Siouxsie and drank beer with her, an hour or two isn't really enough to get to know someone but my sense is that she hadn't dived that deep into the abstract although I think a couple of others in the band had. Finally, it was a good two and a half years into listening to Joy Division and more than a year after Ian Curtis committed suicide, those songs were much more personal and emotional than they were about philosophical ideas and they never toured the US so I'll never know for sure. It certainly was a fitting soundtrack for the inner city experience of the time, and it appears that Manchester was in some ways like Chicago and other large cities.

The places are an important part of this narrative and possibly hard to comprehend for many today. These were still the cities of white flight, urban wastelands with numerous boarded up buildings and vacant lots and with gentrification barely started in a very few select neighborhoods. Violent crime rates were near all time highs, much higher than today. The US was deep in recession. We'd fled the suburbs, many of us, for bleak, gray but inexpensive inner city neighborhoods where most whites were afraid to go. Barely a week went by that we didn't hear of someone we knew being mugged, and most every month there was another overdose or suicide. The music, the writing, the art grew out of that chaos and anarchy. If some of that music wasn't very upbeat, that's because it reflected daily reality. Still, most were trying to find a way forward, not a way down. Many of us did find paths forward.

There were malls then, mostly in suburbia, but they had little or nothing that we wanted. It was essentially impossible to buy post-punk fashion there, mostly it was constructed by odds and ends, retro stuff from Goodwill stores or resale stores or scrounged and repurposed in some other way. A lot of us were very anti-materialist, and the concept of buying shiny new ready-made coffin shaped backpacks would have horrified us. It kind of still does.

It's been argued that goth goes back to the 60s or 70s, that the Velvet Underground and The Doors were precursers. There were references to "gothic" in a few places in the late 1970s. But it was probably 1982 or later before anything like what we now call goth began to come together in any organized way. Most of us, the first and second waves of post-punk, were gone by late '82 or early '83 and much larger, more mainstream crowds were beginning to descend on the clubs. Where post-punk was more often than not led by British bands, goth became much more American. The earliest examples maybe still had some things in common with us. Early Christian Death, at least through when I saw them (February 4, 1984, in San Francisco; with the classic Rozz Williams/Valor Kand/Gitane Demone/Constance Smith lineup), I'm pretty sure Rozz had read some of the same books that I had. After the surrealism of Catastrophe Ballet that began to drift. I didn't see 45 Grave til sometime later, and while they had a better sense of humor than they're often given credit for, that's about where my interest ends. After that it quickly seemed to become an angst-ridden fashion show. 

My goth experience was mostly later and as a photographer. I worked mostly with alternative models, and by 2003-2009 that often meant goth. Some of those young ladies were brilliant, a few of them understand much of what I've written above. I wasn't working with average people though. They poked fun at mallgoths more than I ever did. We sometimes wondered if it was possible to fake a counterculture look for the camera, and usually the consensus was no, putting on clothes and makeup did not equal authenticity and that it wasn't hard to tell.

That's enough for now. Perhaps I'll find a few photos to go with the stories.