Houston Punk Poster Art Lives On, Online

Honestly, it is well past time for something like this; I’m sort of surprised nobody’d done it sooner… Even still, {Ozone City Outrage} is pretty damn fascinating, esp. if you’ve lived through at least a little bit of what it covers.

No clue who’s behind the site (David from Left Of The Dial, maybe?), but they’ve managed to amass (and scan in, which is no mean feat itself) a ridiculously huge archive of punk-rock flyers — some of it’s old (sadly, Social Distortion playing The Axiom was a little bit before my time in this city), and some of it’s not (I’m pretty sure the show at The Proletariat with The Slurpees, Swarm of Angels, & {The Jonx} wasn’t that long ago), but it’s fun to look through.

I’m pretty sure I was actually at some of these shows myself, like the Joan of Arc show where Ben Murphy‘s old band Pop Deflation opened, or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion show at the Shimmy Shack (later to become Mary Jane’s, then Fat Cat’s, and now the Pearl Bar) with Woody’s Jukebox (Jerm Boor!) as the opening band. Hell, I’d forgotten some of these places even existed (oh, yeah, I remember Deep Phat now…).

My one complaint, though, is that there’re very few dates for when the shows themselves actually happened. I’m guessing that’s probably because, um, the folks scanning in the flyers have no clue, intervening years and long-gone venues and all, and I can’t really blame ’em for that, obviously. I’m lucky if I can remember last week, at this point.

At any rate, the blog’s an awesome way to easily blow an hour or three going backwards through all the collected flyers; Ozone City Outrage blogger, your garage/back closet is far cooler than mine, I can tell you that for sure. This is great, great stuff. Hopefully the thing keeps growing from here…