Lost Notes S2 Ep. 1: Teenage Offenders: Reckoning with a Punk Past

Lost Notes: Groupies

KCRW

Music History, Documentary, Society & Culture, Music

4.7 • 721 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2019

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Freeze were an early American punk band. Now, 40 years later, two members reckon with the lyrics they wrote as teenagers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Rob Rosenthal. He teaches radio journalism. There are days when Rob the 17-year-old wouldn't
0:09.5	recognize Rob the 56-year-old. Yeah. So Rob, do your students ever find out about your teenage punk past?
0:18.7	Yeah, totally. Somewhere along the way, someone will kind of spring it on me.
0:23.4	So Rob, we learned something about you last night, and immediately I'm kind of jazzed.
0:29.7	I feel like because I'm an old goat now, it gives me a little bit of street cred.
0:33.3	And then immediately following that feeling is the feeling like, oh, but wait, did they find that song?
0:40.5	Rob was a founding member of the Freeze.
0:42.6	They formed in 1978, and they're still the longest running punk band to come out of Cape Cod.
0:48.6	Like a lot of punk bands of the era, they sang about what they were against.
0:52.5	Religion, jocks, conformity.
0:55.2	We were supposed to change the goddamn world with this music.
0:58.2	That was what was supposed to happen.
1:00.4	But they also had a song about a kid accidentally locking himself in a refrigerator and dying.
1:06.4	They were teenagers.
1:07.5	They wanted their songs to be shocking, transgressive.
1:10.3	But they were actually pretty crude.
1:11.6	Like if the freeze had sung racist lyrics, somehow I would have been right there and I would have said,
1:20.6	no, what the hell is that? Get that shit out of here. Yet for some reason, it was okay for us to sing
1:26.6	a song that treated women this way.
1:30.0	Hi, I'm Jessica Hopper, and from KCRW, this is Lost Notes. This season, we're talking about
1:37.3	legacies, and on this episode, a former punk rocker tells the story of wrestling with his own legacy
1:42.9	about going back to a song that he wrote 40 years ago and owning up to it.
	...

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