Many high schoolers who grew up near Lambeau Field in the 1980s had one thing on their minds: punk rock.
“I wasn’t really a sports guy. I thought (punk rock) was just unusual, especially growing up in Green Bay which is very much Rust Belt, paper mills, factory workers and the Green Bay Packers,” Chris Pretti told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he said.
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As a kid, Pretti would listen to old promo records from regional classic rock station WAPL on repeat, bands like the Ramones, The Clash and Black Flag. He said the punk rock scene became a place where misfits found community.
Pretti is a director of a new film about Green Bay’s early punk scene. For Pretti and co-director James Baker, chronicling this history turned into a 12-year passion project. The finished product — a documentary called “Green Blah” — recently premiered in the city.
The film tells Green Bay’s punk story beginning in the late 1970s through the ’80s. As punk rock took off across the nation, Pretti and Baker said early Green Bay bands like The Tyrants and The Minors attracted the attention of fans.
The punk culture and scene that grew in Green Bay set the stage for larger groups like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys to perform in the city.
The documentary includes archival footage and dozens of modern-day interviews with members of the local bands and their fans. But it also shows the negative response some punk rockers received.
Pretti said today people don’t understand what it was like, because punk rock (aesthetic) is more mainstream and generally accepted. But at the time Pretti, who was in a band himself — A Buncha Morons — said he remembers even wearing Chuck Taylor tennis shoes and having shoulder length hair made him a target.
“I was skateboarding home from my high school and four kids pulled up in a car and started giving me grief. And it’s like, ‘Okay, really? I’m really that extreme,’” he said.
Despite pushback in the community, members of the punk bands and their fan base continued to perform, spike their hair and circulate handmade “phan-zines” to promote punk music.
Eventually punk rock shows in Green Bay went from having an audience of 50 people to shows at Kutska’s Hall with audiences of more than 700.
Pretti said he hopes the momentum and community that early punk rockers built in the ’70s and ’80s continues in the city. For him, it certainly has.
“Some of these friends that I met at the first punk show that I went to back in June of 1983, I’m friends with today,” he said.
To find showtimes visit greenblahflim.com.
