About the Town | 17th Annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival Starts with… Photos!

By Jacqueline Monahan
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

17th Annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival Starts with… Photos!

The May 22nd reception for “Disturbing the Peace – Punk at its Core 1969-2002” which took place in the Grand Ballroom of The Golden Nugget, featured a photographic exhibit illustrating “a visual timeline of the Punk aesthetic taking shape in America and England beginning in the late 1960s.”

Presented by Punk Rock Bowling Festival, Lethal Amounts and Juxtapoz Magazine, the exhibit kicked off a weekend of music and mohawk (the hairstyle) – a celebration of all things Punk.

Punk Rock 69078

Poster by Jesse Fischer

Photo credit: Stephen Thorburn

The exhibit took up half the space in the large room; the other half to an impending poker tournament. Outside, the casinos, restaurants, hallways, and poolside were filled with spiked hair, Doc Martens, metal studs, and strategically ripped clothing in denim and plaid. Leather vests and jackets bore badges and patches displaying band names and album titles. Never Mind the Bollocks, anyone?

Inside, photographs by Leee Black Childers (yes, three “e’s) Edward Colver, Mad Marc Rude, and Jesse Fischer covered walls and partitions, many greatly enlarged, and many in-your-face performance shots of the icons of a genre meant to push the envelope in sound and image.

Punk Rock 69090

Photo credit: Stephen Thorburn

Johnny Rotten, Debby Harry, David Bowie, Henry Rollins, Sid Vicious, Lou Reed, Divine, Jello Biafra, and a naked Lydia Lunch caressing a bomb were just a few of the famed and framed faces. Performance photos of Black Flag, Rancid, Wasted Youth, Darby Crash and the Dead Boys, The Cramps, Television, and Minor Threat.

Although some of the photos were in black and white, color was provided by many of the guests’ hair, in shades of teal, blue, green, yellow, and pink, proving once and for all that, more than just a musical genre, Punk is an attitude, one that was born in rebellion, held together with safety pins, and about as sedate as a primal scream.

Punk Rock 69070

Photo credit: Stephen Thorburn

About the Presenters:
Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival started in 1999 as a way to bring the independent music community together. Now a three-day outdoor festival in downtown Las Vegas, it includes four nights of club and comedy shows, a two-day bowling tournament, pool parties, and a poker tournament.

Lethal Amounts is a gallery that focuses on subversive and counterculture themes throughout history, addressing the social and artistic value of underground movements and highlighting taboo topics.

Juxtapoz Magazine is a leading contemporary and underground art and culture monthly created in 1994.

GALLERY

Punk Rock 69049
Photo credit: Stephen Thorburn