It’s not every museum where you can watch a band play a six-song set, then make your way to the dive bar and drink with the band, the staff, and even the museum founders, but the Punk Rock Museum is not your typical museum.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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The Punk Rock Museum opened its doors on April 1, 2023, in Las Vegas. Housed in a 12,000-square-foot two-story warehouse next door to a strip club and a five-minute drive from the Strip, the museum is a collaboration of more than a dozen founders and partners, the most famous being Mike Burkett, better known as Fat Mike, lead singer and bass player of Southern California punk band NOFX.
I’d been curious about the museum since first learning about it last summer. I grew up listening to punk, playing in punk bands, and getting punk tattoos, and while it’s been more than a few years since I’ve been in the pit (full disclosure: I’m in my early 40s), I still throw on a Misfits or Dead Kennedys or Bad Brains record from time to time, though more for nostalgia than genuine enjoyment. I was skeptical upon learning about this museum. To begin with: Las Vegas? For a counterculture that has historically positioned itself against decadence and unbridled capitalism, it’s a peculiar decision to celebrate punk in a city that is founded on both.
But more important: Does punk need a museum? Museums are for exhibiting fine art or remnants of ancient civilizations, and neither category immediately calls to mind punk rock music. Museums are for dead or static things; punk, despite how you might feel about its current state, is still very much alive, and not just in the hearts of middle-aged nostalgists.
The first room you enter is the gift shop, which is a foreboding sign. Before seeing a single exhibit, visitors have the option of purchasing Punk Rock Museum T-shirts, hats, shot glasses, key chains, tote bags, or (perfect for the holidays!) Christmas ornaments. It’s like visiting the merch table before you’ve heard the band play a note.
Following the black arrows stuck to the floor with what appears to be gaffer tape, you then enter the museum proper—and this is where my apprehensions begin to fall away. Displayed behind glass cases is an extraordinary collection of concert posters, photographs, handwritten letters, instruments, and clothing from punk rock royalty like Sid Vicious and Darby Crash, organized, by and large, chronologically. Each room focuses on a particular era of punk rock’s five-decade history. We begin in the late 1960s and early-to-late ’70s, with artifacts and ephemera from proto-punk pioneers like MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, and New York Dolls, including a childhood crucifix owned by Dolls sideman Johnny Thunders, as well as his iconic 1959 Gibson TV Yellow double-cut Les Paul Jr. In the next room, we leap across the pond to the U.K., with relics (in various states of deterioration) from Sex Pistols, Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Clash. Perhaps, for some reason, you’ve always wondered about the fate of the stash Joe Strummer supposedly had with him before his death, in 2002? Rest assured. It has found a home here, wrapped in tinfoil and labeled “Joe Strummer’s last bag of weed.”
Needless to say, not all of the items in the museum are especially noteworthy or, for that matter, verifiable. A willing suspension of disbelief goes a long way here.
The next rooms follow a circuitous route through the punk and hardcore terrains of Southern California, Boston, D.C., and the Bay Area. Operation Ivy and Rancid fans will linger at the Seville Stratocaster left-handed electric guitar, played by Tim Armstrong (“bought for $175 by Tim’s mom when he was 14,” reads the attached tag). Old-head Green Day fans (myself included) will pause a moment to gawk at the instantly recognizable blue guitar, stickers and all, owned by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. I’m not ashamed to admit that I lingered longer in this area than others, reflecting sentimentally on my younger, less jaded years.
As Fat Mike told me when we spoke later: “Most people get a little teary-eyed when they get to the spot in the museum that was their childhood.”
The porous line between punk performers and fans is immediately visible in the D.C. exhibit, where an observant eye catches a white envelope sent to the Maumee, Ohio, P.O. box of 1980s hardcore band Necros. Next to the envelope is a handwritten note card: “Send me info on the band and when they’re gonna play in D.C. Sticker too please. Thanx. David Grohl.”
Strolling from exhibit to exhibit, a casual punk fan or layperson may be overwhelmed by the haphazard ephemera—personal artifacts from the museum’s cofounders’ collections—on display. The only context comes from a page-length, single-spaced printout at the beginning of each room or an occasional QR code. If you’d like a more informative museum experience, you’ll need to sign up for a guided tour, offered semi-regularly and led by a rotating roster of punk rock notables, like former Black Flag vocalist Dez Cadena or Greg Hetson, guitar player for Bad Religion and Circle Jerks. During my first visit, the tour guide was the stand-up comic and This Fool star Chris Estrada. While not someone I’d immediately associate with punk rock, Estrada grew up with this music, and he seemed happy to have an outlet for the random and otherwise inconsequential things he’s gleaned over the years. “I always joke around that I got a bunch of useless knowledge about punk rock,” Estrada told me. “My lady’s not into it, so I gotta share it with someone.”
I admit that I’d expected something more ostentatious, gaudy, synthetic. I was expecting the punk version of the Hard Rock Café or the House of Blues, but the Punk Rock Museum is more like a pop-up exhibit in some side street warehouse—which, essentially, it is. It feels slapdash and unfinished, whether by accident or design. It’s like entering into some old-timer’s basement and gawking at all the cool shit they’ve collected over the years.
Traveling here from Mesa, Arizona, Kevin Dodson was also visiting the museum for the first time. His tour guide was Angelo Moore, frontman for the eminent ska-funk-punk band Fishbone. Dodson was astounded by the collection. “Just to see the stuff that they’ve amassed, it blows your mind,” he told me. “Like, they gave you that?”
The Punk Rock Museum strives to be more than a things-behind-glass experience. The Pennywise band room—a faithful re-creation of the SoCal skate-punk band’s practice space built on-site by guitarist and museum cofounder Fletcher Dragge—hosts sets by visiting bands. The second floor holds a soundproof jam room, where visitors are allowed to noodle on guitars and amps previously owned by punk rock luminaries. (I watched two young men riffing dissonantly and off-key.) If you’re hoping to leave the museum with a more permanent souvenir than a T-shirt or key chain, the second floor includes a small tattoo parlor and (because it’s Vegas) a wedding chapel, which doubles as an events space. During my visit in late December, there was a book-launch party for Black Punk Now, an anthology edited by Chris L. Terry and James Spooner. A special exhibit, curated by Spooner, celebrating the presence and contributions of Black people to punk rock was accompanied by a screening of Spooner’s seminal 2003 Afro-Punk documentary and followed by a performance by Black-and-queer-woman-fronted Vegas band the Objex.
This exhibit, which is temporary, only points out the overall lack of representation in the museum itself. Punk rock has historically been regarded (erroneously) as overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, and hypermasculine, ignoring the presence and influence of women, Black and Brown punks, queer punks, and nonbinary and gender-nonconforming punk rockers. While the museum does include a few photographs or items of these groups in its exhibits, a lot more could be done to recognize punk fans from diverse and alternative communities.
I ended each of my two visits at the museum’s own dive bar, the Triple Down. Band stickers and graffiti intentionally adorn every surface, from the walls to the tables. Punk rock music blares from the speakers. Drink specials are appropriately named, including the Double Fatty (after Fat Mike) and the crowd favorite the Fletcher (after Pennywise guitarist Dragge): rum and Coke served in a tall Pringles can (the chips are served on the side). On each of my visits, the Triple Down was bustling, busier, in fact, than the museum. Locals mixed with tourists, tour guides mixed with tour guests, museum founders traded shots with certain magazine reporters visiting on assignment. It’s easy to forget that you are in a museum and not in a local punk watering hole. Even the bathroom is covered in stickers from local punk bands. “Vegas has a vibrant punk scene,” Burkett told me. “Just because no big bands have come out of here doesn’t mean it’s not a great scene.”
Before my visit, I’d worried that the museum was helping to turn punk into a novelty, another global brand whose only purpose is to sell memorabilia to middle-aged consumers. I know for certain that my younger self would have protested this place’s very existence, maybe even thrown a brick through the window. Rage against the museum, if you will. Does it make me a sellout that I enjoyed my visit? Maybe I’m the target audience, that sentimental middle-aged consumer whose wistful nostalgia supplanted his once-rigid idealism. So be it.
In this time when everything is disposable, it says something that a few diehards believed that these ripped, yellowed, broken, cigarette-burned, and ostensibly useless items were worth preserving. To preserve something is to acknowledge its value. When I first discovered punk rock as a teenager, I believed it was valuable and worth treasuring. Today, as a middle-aged sellout, I’m even more sure of it.•
Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and the author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. He is a regular contributor to Alta Journal.
