They should have been bigger...

In just a few weeks the city will be overrun by graying bikers blasting Steppenwolf and grumbling about their old ladies, but the annual Rockerbox Motorcycle Show in Riverwest, which runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Center Street, attracts a different, more youthful kind of biker counterculture—in particular, those side-burned . . .

It is often taken for granted that hardcore punk is—and perhaps should be—the domain of the young. Young adulthood is a scary time for most of us, and what better way to express one’s youthful angst than by identifying with a music scene that embraces those feelings of alienation and confusion? I don’t think I would have made it through adolescence with my sanity intact without records like Black Flag’s Damaged and Minor Threat’s Out of Step. Those albums provided me with a useful outlet for my youthful rage and, perhaps more importantly, made me realize that I wasn’t the only one feeling so, well, out of step. At a time when one’s identity is incredibly unstable, any sense of community becomes paramount, and hardcore punk became the one place where I felt truly accepted.

I once crossed a protest line manned by Protestant fundamentalists to hear Frank Schaeffer. A novelist, essayist and movie director, Schaeffer had also been a luminary in the rise of the Christian right.