Weird: I woke up this morning with The Misfits' "Last Caress" in my head. Weird because I was never really a Misfits fan. Their whole shock punk with pseudo-goth overtones schtick never worked for me, and I always thought their music was kind of flimsy, especially when held up against bands like Black Flag, SSD, Wasted Youth, or Minor Threat. They were the KISS of punk rock.

There's no denying though that "Last Caress" is a great piece of songwriting, no matter how dumb the lyrics are. As catchy as The Damned's "New Rose" or Chron Gen's "Clouded Eyes." I didn't get those songs quite enough back then. The rawer, angrier stuff spoke more directly to me.

It's been odd watching punk age. I won't think about the generations of self-styled punk bands since 1985, which is the year I more or less stopped really paying attention or participating. For me, punk as an experience is twenty years dead, even though we all said it would never die.

So, by my terrible estimation, here's my twenty years since punk died (again) encapsulation.

Some guys grew their hair and became glam metal bands, like TSOL.

Others joined cults and sometimes killed themselves: various members of various New York hardcore bands, like Cause for Alarm and maybe Agnostic Front.

More than I'd care to mention became junkies and disappeared or turned themselves around and became self-obsessed with their rebirths. Some were friends. One was quite brilliant. I know he's alive and recovered, and I'm glad, even though we haven't spoken in 18 years.

Others got off that shit and kept playing, and have generally become irrelevant, like Social Distortion.

Others dissolved in bottles. Others couldn't handle themselves anymore and joined the military.

Mike Muir died of an illness.

Some made succesful careers for themselves as rejiggered, post-punk poster boys for sublimated angst expressed through sometimes good writing and speaking. Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra lead this category. They also formed new musical outfits that tried very hard to be great, and sometimes they were. Sadly, Jello Biafra's was not among them.

Other guys more or less walked away from it and made good brainy careers for themselves. A reader kindly informed me last year that one of the original members of Wasted Youth is now a statistics professor at the University of Minnesota. I think I heard somewhere that another one of them got his PhD in art history, but I could be making that up.

I always did like those guys. We went to the same high school. Maybe my school makes good brains.

Several other guys became lawyers. One former dear friend became a published international women's rights lawyer, working in the middle east. I'd link to her work but Google might bite me on the ass. Better to leave the past where it is.

One I knew about became a surgeon.

Many others drifted away into quiet, 'normal' lives, finding average jobs, getting married, having children, accomplishing nothing of special note but living respectable, productive lives.

One ran for governor of California (presumably not one of the aforementioned artists to have grown his hair and gone glam).

Others turned into self-parody: Danzig should have left the Evil Adonis on steroids routine to the World Wrestling Federation.

Another old pal's band never stopped, and are actually now something of folk heroes to lots of faux-angry kids. Too bad their music and image is about as substantial as a slice of Wonder Bread.

There are other guys who never really stopped either. They just rearranged their bands a bit and changed names, and although they occasionally come off more like curmudgeonly old cranks, there's no denying the vitality and integrity of bands like Fugazi, and a few other assorted ex-DC, possibly Dischord related groups. Unfortunately, Rites of Spring--that brief, vanishing star whose album I will always revere--spawned one of the most uniformly dreadful classes of terrible imitators ever cooked up in a sullen dorm room; a class who gleefully and fatally appropriated the prefix those originators worked so unsuccessfully hard to kill: Emo.

Extra credit should be awarded to the peculiar and interesting extracurricular efforts of Ian MacKaye with the dude from Ministry under the name Pailhead.

I've got the 12s. Neener, neener, neener.

The great and perpetually underappreciated Government Issue produced one of the great anarchic front men of hardcore, and conversely, ultimately also produced guys who "grew up" and joined genuinely awful Hard Rock bands elsewhere alluded to in this missive. They started lifting weights and wearing lots of black.

Tight black. Not good.

Some, loosely related to all things straight and alert, evolved into camp fire singalong groups, complete with catchy choruses and microphone antics. I think somewhere along the line they missed the point about thinking for yourself.

Other guys proved their creative mettle by refusing to get stuck, and marched out on to the crystallizing tundra of electronic music: Barry of The Necros, Tom from the Stupids, and Choke from Negative FX hold that banner aloft.

Then there were all those bands that seemed to come from Boston who went from punk rock to frat rock, and after failed straight edge binges, celebrated beer and contact sports, and now, thankfully, most of them are gone.

One or two bands sort of broke up for a long time and then got back together and actually seemed neither old and creaky, nor parodic and pathetic, but useful and important. So I was told that was how X's reunion thing went.

Then there were crazy people whose bands became completely amazing, like Sun City Girls and Scratch Acid.

There were the guys who learned how to play their instruments a little too well, and started hanging out with Glenn Branca and John Zorn, and their punk became Art. And I fear it has not aged well.

Car wrecks claimed a few brave men too, one of whose surviving bandmates went and formed a band that was superficially appealing but whom I can now only describe as the Jimmy Buffett of punk.

A few have become modestly succesful business owners. Probably one or two here and there are really successful. Don't know who, but there's got to be someone.

A former best friend pursued his M.B.A. and had big plans. I hope he's realizing them all.

Immigration issues and cattle ranches in far away countries claimed a few others.

Others muddled reggae and punk, and threw in avant-rock to boot, but somehow remained one of the most astonishing bands I've ever seen or heard...at every phase of its lifespan. Don't know where they are now though. Hopefully not yet with Jah.

One band broke through like a comet and by writing beautiful, honest songs and playing them with the ferocity of a jet engine, earned eternal fame as well as plaudits from all manner of useless mainstream music writers. They also probably became rich. They dissolved in a bizarre love triangle and heroin, and their careers have grown quieter, although still, by all accounts, worth paying attention to.

Come to think of it, they had a counterpart that was uneasily lumped in with punk. I never quite got my head around the idea of The Replacements as a punk band, but they sure deserved all the fame in the world too, because Tim is a masterpiece.

One turned her punk into spare, simple acoustic folk, and it worked. And she surfed too. Style points for that. She's also in The Decline, so she is immortal.

I think she also dated my sister once a long, long time ago, but that's another story for hopefully never.

Another from San Francisco went the folk/roots rock route too, but her group always seemed a little too forced; a little too strident a departure from the anger.

The mandolin didn't help.

Really didn't help.

Sounding like R.E.M. permanently disqualifies you from a berth in the punk rock hall of fame, which is too bad, as her original band ruled.

Remind me to tell you about the Anti-Mandolin movement a friend of mine then spearheaded. It was important.

In fact, there was a general tendency towards warbling coffeehouse folk music by a number of bands. Mainly in San Francisco (where else?), but tendrils of this unfortunate trend materialized in other cities too.

Another great San Francisco original whose Generic album is a singular masterpiece of absurdist dirge punk had the good sense to stop at its peak and the very bad sense to do so by dying from overdoses.

A pioneering Angeleno made an apparently miracle recovery from some terrible illness or injury. The dreads were a bad idea though.

Other brilliant, pretty much mad individuals withdrew into a world of rancor and spite, and managed to turn their labels into great back-catalog cash cows, even though they've contributed nothing new to the world for a decade.

Gone were not the best idea though. Good thing Rollins bailed out the rhythm section, only to drop them some years later.

I think a few of the even older guys--usually English (am I wrong in thinking of The Damned here?)--segued into that whole music industry, studio hackery producer, behind-the-scenes macher routine, the one where you hang out in studios, get your picture taken with reps from SSL and Neve, wear dark blazers over black T-shirts, dye your hair blond and wear narrow, mirrored sunglasses indoors and affect a mien not entirely dissimilar to Phil Specter, minus the murderous tendencies and twenty years of age.

A couple real old-timers evolved into really declassé versions of Hollywood street celebrities. Doormen with cachet. And cowboy hats.

Bad call.

But then, having your singer die of a heroin overdose might do that to you. Big high five in the sky to another Uni High alumnus.

Another of that lot has since found his way into a very big and successful sort-of alt/indie rock/whatever kind of band and they're on MTV and stuff like that.

One great pioneering band is almost completely dead, of all kinds of terrible causes. God bless The Ramones.

Finally, the ultimate cynical poster band for all things Punk® spawned at least one career that was almost more interesting and fun and productive of some thoroughly excellent music than any of the original Malcolm McClaren stuff, which, to be fair, wasn't bad either.

And no one else among the punk elite ever managed to talk their way on to the red carpet at the Oscars, even managing to covertly insult all the billions of dollars worth of assembled humanity.

Who am I forgetting?

There are a lot of bands and people I've heard nothing about. No clue about The Descendents, except for Bill Stevenson's long bout in Black Flag. Same with the Adolescents, The Dickies, Channel 3, America's Hardcore, Void (possibly the most deranged, disturbing hardcore band ever. How I loved them), The Faith, and many more.

Then there's El Duce.

Poor, sad, drunk El Duce, found dead on the railroad tracks.

R.I.P.

There you are. Two decades since I moved on, nearly a quarter century since I got involved, and nearly thirty years since its inception (not counting Iggy Pop and Wayne Kramer).

For all the radically dissimilar paths taken, do we have anything really left in common?

Why yes, we do. We're all ~40 years old, fattening, balding and greying.

So yes, we were always right: statistically, Punks not Dead.

Yet.