It must have been hard for a guy with a last name like "McPheeters" to become a luminary in the punk world, but the author seems to have done it: he sang for NYHC types Born Against and art-punk types Men's Recovery Project and Wrangler Brutes, published a zine, went out on tour, and got into a couple of nuclear-level scene feuds. Somewhere along the way, Sam seems to have become a real writer, too. While I wouldn't recommend this one to anyone whose knowledge of punk rock doesn't extend further than the Sex Pistols or the Ramones, it's prime reading for anyone who could at any point in their lives have named their top ten SST Records releases or had complex feelings about anything released on Dischord Records.

"Mutations" has, at times, the loose, digressive, overly opinionated feel of the sort of zines that the author used to write for, and it serves his material well. He looks back on his past self with bemusement and, sometimes, with genuine shame, but there are times that the screaming baboon featured on the cover emerges and the author's old adrenaline come roaring back like it's 1988 all over again. It makes for an invigorating read, especially when paired with the author's humor, which is more than a little reminiscent of the sort of barbed jokes that are one of the genre's calling cards. "Mutations" also succeeds when the author shows us that he's still a fan of the genre: McPheeters writes affectionately about Die Kreuzen's first album, Sam Preston, the Cro-Mags, and many other lesser-known individuals and groups. The obvious sincerity of his enthusiasm made me revisit some of my old punk records. And it made me see some of them in a new light: before reading this one, I'd pretty much written off the New York punk scene as one filled with nothing but testosterone-saturated meatheads. McPheeters doesn't fit that stereotype at all, and he's careful to distance himself from it.

McPheeters is far too smart to either ask or answer punk's fundamental -- and fundamentally irresolvable -- question "What is punk, really"? "Mutations" does, however, go a long way towards showing readers what it once was. Refreshingly, the author seems to have no interest in all in score-settling, and has developed something that punk, as a genre, isn't often credited with -- a sense of historical perspective. It's not just that he either played with, met, or wrote about most of the punk underground's big players at one point or another. He also takes the time to describe, for example, just how important Maximum Rock and Roll was to the scene, and why this joke or reference that likely seems hopelessly obscure now meant a great deal, at one point, to the kids that made up his audiences. The author, who seems aware of the perils of spending your life in a youth-centric subculture, strives to avoid coming off as a nostalgic grouch, but there's also no ignoring the fact that this is a book about a past that has definitively vanished. In offering this assessments of the passions he felt as a young man, McPheeters paints a picture of the way that a specific subculture operated at a specific point in time. I'm not sure how much it will mean to anyone under the age of twenty-five, but, in doing so, he provides a fairly good answer to the old "what is punk?" question: a unique, possibly non-replicable movement and sensibility that -- given its participants' often limited budgets and even more limited musical talents -- did a surprising amount to define the sensibility of late twentieth century culture. The author was fortunate enough to witness it, and motivated enough to play a not-inconsiderable role in it. He's also a good enough writer to have written a pretty good book about it. Recommended if you can still still recite the lyrics of Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized" by heart. ( )