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Can you can do much better than listening to some Radio Birdman to sate a punk rock fix? There is moral objectionability at a minimum, their name is revived from a Stooges lyrics reference (Iggy Pop's, not Moe Howard's), fiery guitar heroics from Deniz Tek, Rob Younger's throatily shouty singing, and a vibe that sounds like a time machine has been set up for regular trips to Detroit circa 1969 and mid-'70s CBGB's--just before the major label feeding frenzy that hit that legendary club. 

To answer my openings query in a word, no. I would hope that my  appreciation for the recently reunited Sydney rockers isn't wholly nostalgic. The band's 1978 U.S. debut, Radios Appear, was one of my first two punk albums, given to me at the local Musicland by clerks more interested in Southern boogie rockin' than the fresh racket made by shorter-haired mooks with much different ways of wearing their denim and leather. 

Such times weren't the kindest to a small town Wisconsin teen into something other than the dregs of the pop top 40 and, if you were just a touch more avant-garde, FM album rock playlists. That is to say that my appreciation of Birdman, The Dead Boys (the other subject of the Musiclanders' largesse), The Sex Pistols, et al was felt in a cultural vacuum. New Wave Rock, Trouser Press and the occasional other hip music magazine got my money at the newsstands in town--I may have been the only customer—where I garnered news of and refinement in the aesthetic I was cultivating. 

But anything resembling a fandom community for the music I was discovering wouldn't be available until I was old enough to take the Greyhound to visit friends (not all of whom were on the same page as I was musically) in Milwaukee and Madison. Even then, unity among music misfits in America's hinterlands probably didn't come into cohesion beyond tape trading circles and fanzines' pen pal sections until the World Wide Web. And by then, Nirvana and Green Day made punk a safe enough lifestyle option for Christian youth ministries to hire godlier descendents of the safety-pins-and-anarchy set to play their teen pizza bashes. 

In another way altogether, the punk rock of yore and the devotion to the Lord have recently intersected for me.

Radio Birdman played Madison earlier this month! I won guest list pass from my favorite radio station!! If I hadn't, it still would have been worth $20!!! They played a 17-song set and five encores!!!! It was great, restored my faith in rock'n'roll, and you' should have been there!!!!! If they come around by you on what's likely to be their final U.S. tour, I don't think I'm steering you wrong by imploring you to go!!!!!!

Alas, working from home and having most of my social contacts and friends in a church where I'm once again perhaps the only soul who likes much of the music--and food and movies--that I do (but being more at peace about it), leaves me with few people in my life among whom I can say "Radio Bridman" and have it mean anything. 

So, I go alone, a loner from about an hour away, in the front row, next to a guy who has the group's logo tattooed on his arm and bold enough to yell a request for Tek to lead into "Descent Into Malestrom." And to iterate my earlier affirmation, rock'n'roll hadn't meant that much to me in a long while. No offense to Randy Stonehill, who put on a wonderful, if not nearly so hard rocking, show I caught in Green Bay last spring. 

But it doesn't mean so much to me that I would permanently ink the emblem of a band-even a Christian one-into my flesh. I don't live for the music, and it only defines so much of my identity. That's where the Lord comes in. And that's where I only have so much in common any longer with probably the majority of those with whom I was sharing the lip of the stage. 

Maybe that goth-looking cutie I've seen at Subway with the Stooges bumper sticker on her car loves Jesus more than she loves Iggy?... 

Jamie Lee Rake