Mike Hudson was founder and lead singer of legendary Cleveland punk band the Pagans. Their first single, "Six and Change," is considered by collectors the Holy Grail of punk records, selling for as much as $900 on eBay.
While many of the original punk bands have been unjustly overlooked by history, the Pagans found a legion of new fans in 2001, when a reissue of their first full-length effort, The Pink Album, was released on the German Crypt label and cracked Rolling Stone's alternative record chart. In 2004 the Pagans played at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to commemorate that institution's addition of band memorabilia to its permanent collection.
Hudson spent five years as book critic for the Irish Echo newspaper in New York City, edited newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and wrote for the Associated Press, Hustler, Master Detective, Field & Stream and other national publications. He is currently editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter.
A spoken-word recording of several of his short stories entitled All the Wrong People Are Dying was released by the British Overground label in 1998.
Hudson's first book, Niagara Falls Confidential, written with his wife Rebecca and published by Tuscarora Books in 2007, turned into an instant classic, becoming Amazon.com's top-selling book on Niagara Falls.
Publication of Diary of a Punk coincides with the release on Chicago's Smog Veil label of The Blue Album, a live set the Pagans recorded on tour in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1988.
Diary of a Punk is a classic rock and roll memoir that dishes the inside dope on the groundbreaking American punk rock movement and many of its top stars. In a prose style reminiscent of Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs, Hudson paints a stark insider's portrait of a life lived outside society's boundaries.
from DIARY OF A PUNK ...
Having lived much of my life in exile, I still have a physical reaction every time I hear some rube tell me how they ventured down to the Flats on a recent visit to Cleveland. They might as well have gone to Disneyland. Fern bars, overpriced strip joints and chain restaurants where the dingy dives along Old River Road once smoked and stank and farted and belched. You can't even see the fucking river anymore. They built big barriers blocking it off because too many idiot suburban kids fell in and drowned. But on hot summer nights we'd sit there, the Pagans and the Dead Boys and all the rest, legs dangling off the edge over the inky black Cuyahoga water, that water that burned, tugboats heading out to the lake and big ships unloading their cargoes of iron ore. The ear-splitting pneumatic crack from the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company across the river and the night lit crazy with bright work lamps, bridge lights strung and open flames shooting up, licking at the darkness. The rotten-egg smell of burning sulfur. It was beautiful hell and we owned it, and we loved it because it was ours. That crooked river. Today the rubes pay seven bucks to sit there in plastic lawn chairs and they're not even allowed to smoke cigarettes.
They erased it all as best they could, changed it as much as it could be changed, but the records were out there, they existed and there was nothing they could do about it.