http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Chion/CMS%2011-09-2011.mp3
It was Good Friday, 1982, and I was up in the balcony at the Lit Club in Hartford, a punk rock epicenter housed in the Lithuanian American Club in Hartford.
National acts like Black Flag, Killing Time and the Circle Jerks played the Lit in its heyday, but its local heroes were Jack Tragic and the Unfortunates. Jack was a West Hartford Hall High dropout, and the group had a punk hit called "I Kill Hippies."
I wasn't super comfortable up there in the balcony, and that was before the punks started threatening me. "You've been set up. You've been set up by the Hartford Courant," one guy kept yelling. Actually, if I had been a punk, my first single would have been titled "Set Up By The Hartford Courant." The only other person up in the balcony who looked like me and not like them was a guy I recognized. A sportswriter who had done a tour in a Vietnam. What are you doing here? I asked him. "I miss this," he said. "It's the closest thing I've seen to Saigon."
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***This episode originally aired November 9, 2011.***
