The Sound of Music was a smelly dump in the Tenderloin that allowed punk bands to play. One room, a small open cube with a bar on one side. My friends had a joke band called The Mohawks that played at the Sound of Music. Pretty much only there. The bassist was a guitar player from another band who switched instruments because he couldn’t play bass. That’s Punk. His real name was Garcia, NOT a Punk name, not in San Francisco. He chose the moniker Itchy Leper, which he got from the name of a gang member in a Mad magazine satire. Everybody called him Itch after that and “Garcia” disappeared.

Itch found a bald-look latex scalp at a costume shop, and glued a strip of shag carpet across the top for an instant Mohican. When The Mohawks played at the Sound of Music, Itch would wear this thing on his head but wouldn’t cement it to his skin. Long flaps of latex hung loosely in front of his ears on either side of his face, like a pink Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The effect was strange and horrible.

I did poster art for The Mohawks, the best thing about the band. My roommate Dave was a fan of ’50s TV cowboy star Ed Ames, and found an 8×10 photo of him to work with. I converted it into an illustration of Ames with a Mohican.

Apologies to Ed Ames, who was part Native-American. Art 1981 Gregory Kerwin

Dave was the guitarist for The Mohawks because he couldn’t play guitar – so he bought a no-name pawnshop guitar with stripped tuning screws. It had thick, amoeba-shaped plates of shiny chrome bolted to the front, very cool, but it couldn’t stay tuned longer than one strum. Dave duct-taped the useless chrome plates to the front to keep them from falling off. Greatest Punk guitar ever! When a random Hardcore punker with a real Mohican sadly wandered into the Sound of Music during a Mohawks set, the band would yell at him: “Sid’s dead!!”

Pre-Ames poster came out looking like LBJ in warpaint. Art 1981 Gregory Kerwin

Walking home to Valencia from North Beach or the ‘Loin, after hours, was always an adventure but better than taking the bus. The 26 Valencia, which stopped in front of our building, didn’t run after midnight and the 14 Mission was the only choice – forget it – full of rowdy drunks, street people and nocturnal parasites. If you were a skinny pale New Waver in a James Dean red jacket and wilting-gel pomp, you were guaranteed a punch or getting spat at.

So we walked, sobering up by the time we got home, airing out smoke-saturated hair and clothes. It was about two-and-a-half miles. This was before the world showed up for a dot-com or high tech boom, saw how beige Silicon Valley was, and hightailed it for the Mission District. In 1980 the city was depopulated and at 3 AM the streets devoid of life.

We drifted south from the dark, densely packed Tenderloin, crossed Market, and eventually made the big left turn into the Mission. We headed down Mission Street, avoiding Valencia because of the projects (Valencia Gardens!) across from the American Indian Center. We’d often stop at Happy Donuts on Mission for a snack, a brightly lit all-nighter.

A typical walk-home scenario was for an SFPD cruiser to drift up behind us. Then it would pull even and a cop would yell out the window: “Where are you going?”

US: “Going home.”

COP: “Go home.”

US: “That’s where we’re going.”

COP: “Shut up.”

US: “I was trying to tell you…”

COP: “Go home!”

US: “I am going home.”

COP: “Shut up!”

US: “I am shutting up.”

This could go on all night as far as we were concerned. It was silly and absurd, middle of the night, smelly, tired and half drunk, cops yelling at us from a car. We were young, emancipated, independent, and wanted this. We consumed Tortilla Flat like it was our life bread, got drunk on purpose. Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, On the Road, Hunter S. Thompson were manna from heaven. “Go home!” “That’s where I said I was going.” “Shut up!” “You asked me a question.” “Shut up!” Heaven.