In 1990 I finally got to the point where the bands on Decline of Western Civilization sounded good, I went to my first punk show (Fugazi in Dayton, Ohio) and more importantly, I made my first Homemad GERMS shirt. In true fashion, I got a roll of masking tape, a couple cans of spray paint, a plain white T-Shirt, made a stencil of the famed GERMS Circle-1 symbol and made one. Later I had the idea to add long sleeves from a pajjama top, but got bored of sewing and only got one sleeve done, so yeah, the shirt only had one sleeve that, surprisingly enough, wasn't uncomfortable at all. I it was my favourite shirt in the whole wide world.What I didn't relay though, is that I made my GERMS shirt and a CRASS one and a couple more Crass-type slogans because finding a band shirt was almost impossible. A few years later, my GERMS shirt vanished. I'm pretty confident it was my mom and dad who invaded my basement bedroom, retrieved the shirt, and threw it away. It's still a touchy subject that my mom and dad, to this day, haven't confessed to doing or more importantly, not doing it,
But society caught up to my size and before long, it wasn't so unheard of to find a bands shirt, in my size, AND readily available. So, eventually, I received a Unknown Pleasures T-shirt (Joy Division) for a present.
Now, every time I put it on I'm reminded not only how at one time I never thought I would own an 'official' band shirt and that one time I got interrorgrated at a Starbucks at 9am from two guys who were really into Faith No More about who, what, why, where and how Joy Division operated. I just finished Peter Hooks' Joy Division book so I guessed that I did ok because they still talked to me every now and then, and when the occasion arrived, the one guy with a pompdour would roll his car windows down, blast Faith No a More (or was it Ramstein?) at a loud volume waIting for me to look at him and validate his coolness being represented by that loud volume that sounded uninteresting.
I never looked at him.