Bombastically titled and intimately illustrated, photojournalist Pat Blashill’s oral history, Someday All the Adults Will Die! The Birth of Texas Punk, revels in the genre’s nascent energy. Overlapping tales of discordant music and personalities hurl readers into the mosh pit alongside Texas’ most remembered and revered players, documenters, and fans,
and invites them backstage to see the music and the movement evolve.
Oral history is, if not the only way to tell the story of punk, then certainly one of the best approaches. The format is blessedly welcoming to the kinds of character-rich monologues that are abundant in the genre’s various retrospectives. Blashill’s pages contain all the fiercely contradicting viewpoints, loyally contrarian attitudes, and angst-fashioned reveries that have come to characterize punk, even as the very word itself squirms under the thumb of explanation, writhing to escape definition.
Even more punk than oral history is the losers-take-all approach that Blashill’s assemblage champions.
“This isn’t about a rise and a fall,” he proclaims in the book’s introduction. “It’s just a story about a moment in time.”
Indeed, it is just that. Acts like the Dicks, the Big Boys, Scratch Acid, Buffalo Gals, and Daniel Johnston crest their self-propelled waves of local acclaim and subcultural popularity just in time to feel the wind in their hair – before the rip current of self-destructive habits, interpersonal turmoil, or evolving tastes pulls them under the surface again. Though the bands’ episodic tales take on a tangled bell curve shape, their storytellers continue to document their impact.
Blashill’s pages contain all the fiercely contradicting viewpoints, loyally contrarian attitudes, and angst-fashioned reveries that have come to characterize punk.
In brief self-inserts, Blashill squeezes Texas into an imperfectly shaped spot in the puzzle of DIY history. It’s a tight fit, given that the state is large enough to contain at least three distinct scenes that interact to varying degrees. Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are most mentioned in this recounting. Austin, where Blashill attended the University of Texas, takes center stage as an avant-garde, queer-laced scene, rippling with the impacts of the psychedelic rock movement and hippie culture. San Antonio boasts Mexican culture-infused metal bands, and Houston finds nationally recognizable rhythms influenced by larger traveling acts. As Texan bands, and the larger-than-life personalities within them, burn bright and fizzle out, Blashill makes a compelling argument that these artists made a lasting impression on the international punk scene, both during its undisputed existence and in the turbulent aftermath of genre-bending post-punk and outsider art-rock outfits.
Punk’s initial rise and cyclical rinse through culture’s trend cycle have been well-documented and disputed. The question of what sounds denote the style, who can be included, and the validity and character of its political standings yip at the heels of both the genre and the movement. Clashes between groupie culture and feminism, queer-fronted bands and generalized homophobia, extremist glorification and anti-Nazism rear their uniquely adorned heads in Blashill’s retelling. Like an intrepid zine journalist only pretending to be half-stoned, Blashill tugs on the loose threads of the fabled genre’s faded T-shirt, asking political and cultural questions with a willingness to take accountability for intersectional failures of time, place, and whiteness within the scene and a skeptically nuanced eye toward historical revising.
“A lot of punk rock happens offstage: in record stores, student housing, secondhand boutiques, after show parties, and, of course, at the mirrors in teenage bedrooms all over the world. That’s where people reconstruct and reinvent themselves,” Blashill asserts at the start of Chapter 9, “Out on the Streets,” named after the Poison 13 song. Documenting these everyday, behind-the-curtain moments was where Blashill found his curiosity and niche as a photographer, a story that also has its place in these pages. Some of his raucous performance shots and intimate portraits are included in the book. More are lovingly described. Blashill’s signature eye for subject-befitting aesthetic touches illuminates the retelling’s words as much as its images. His interludes and bracketed elucidations avoid crafting insincere cohesion, but provide critical context and allow readers to follow along like part of the audience.
As a kid born firmly after punk’s first (and second) surges, engaging with the music’s history has often felt both chidingly expected and disdainfully exclusive, its recountings full of a woe-is-me infantilizing of all loud bands that came to be after punk’s initial ascent. Perhaps due to its snapshot-style hyperlocal focus – with national names acting only as stylistic touchstones and historical markers – and a do-it-yourself essence, Someday All the Adults Will Die! bridges the gap between a history made to memorialize those who enacted it and a guide to let everyone else in on the secret.
Someday All the Adults Will Die! The Birth of Texas Punk
by Pat Blashill
University of Texas Press
This article appears in September 19 • 2025.
