On the day Ted Kennedy died, Facebook, like every other public forum out there, was awash in sorrow and encomiums for "the lion of the Senate." I was scrolling through my Friends page when I came upon this entry, like a grenade going off at a tea party: "TED'S DEAD, BABY! BURN IN HELL, TEDDY!"

That was my friend Fishboy, being in-your-face take-no-prisoners conservative Fishboy. We've been friends for almost 20 years, and though we've never seen eye-to-eye politically, I treasure Fishboy for being one of the only people I've ever met of whom it can be honestly said that he doesn't give a good goddamn what you think of him. Fishboy is also uncompromising when it comes to his music. A true believer in the Church of Shred, he likes it fast, crunchy and hard on the eardrums.

I was thinking about Fishboy the whole time I read Kill the Music by Michael G. Plumides, Jr. (Booksurge, 2009), a memoir of a young jock with a taste for hardcore during the New South music boom of the late '80s. Plumides was a college radio DJ who became a club owner and a mover-and-shaker in the nascent Charlotte, NC alternative scene. While the book is far from perfect, it's an interesting read for its unique perspective, that of a die-hard fan who got burned, battered and jailed for his efforts but never stopped being a fan. Like Fishboy, Plumides loves his music and doesn't care what you think.

Civic pride tells me to give Athens the credit for jumpstarting the alternative music scene in the South, but in reality the scene came into its own more or less simultaneously in college towns throughout the region—here, Chapel Hill, Knoxville, Charlotte, Columbia—a network of venues and kids hungry for new, edgy sounds. After all, it mattered just as much for Guadalcanal Diary and Flat Duo Jets to come to town as it did for Pylon and Oh-OK to spread the Classic City mojo far and wide.

Michael Plumides was a DJ at WUSC, the radio station of the University of South Carolina, but not very comfortable there, his party-jock sensibilities and love of hardcore putting him at odds with his superiors who tended to favor Morrissey over metal. During his tenure at the station, however, he represented the crunchy end of the alternative spectrum, scoring interviews with Lemmy from Motörhead and Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, which he recalls in the book, while paying the rent by hosting keggers in his house. After graduation, Plumides bounced around the scene until winding up in his hometown of Charlotte, NC. Back in the day, Plumides' father had run a notorious strip club, and young Michael found himself following in Dad's footsteps by opening a club of his own, the now-legendary 4808. The first band to play there was Danzig, and the 4808 carved out its niche as a place to see the kind of metal and punk acts Plumides loved: Bad Brains, Corrosion of Conformity, Social Distortion, but also a then-unknown Widespread Panic.

As anyone who has ever worked a nightclub or, God help you, run one knows, there's a lot more to it than simply opening the doors, collecting the money and seeing bands every night. There's liquor distributors to pay off, esoteric permits to nail down, cops and inspectors to watch out for, patrons trying to sneak in or drink underage or stomp some heads, and staff with their inevitable mountains of personal baggage. Plumides experienced all of these headaches and more, especially the attentions of the local constabulary who weren't terribly partial to a club that catered to thrash bands with amps turned up to 11 and their antisocial fans. The powers that be finally succeeded in nailing Plumides after GWAR brought their trademark sex-violence-and-graphic-blasphemy sideshow to the 4808, and Plumides was arrested.

Plumides makes his arrest the capstone to a list of axes to grind that he's saved up over 20 years, and that's one of his memoir's main failings. He unearths every one of his old grudges—against his bosses at the radio station, against rival club owners, and against Tipper Gore and her crusade against indecent lyrics. Plumides attempts to couch his experiences in the context of a protracted campaign against him and against edgy music in general, thus dressing himself up as a hero of the First Amendment and of rock and roll itself. It doesn't help either that Plumides has a lot to say about the hot girls he's nailed with his talented and tireless member (he references Ron Jeremy). Plumides has a book in being a mover in a vital music scene, one which has not yet been documented nearly enough, but he comes close to blowing it with his need to be a stud as well.

Still, Plumides doesn't care what you think. Self-published, it's his book, literally. And while I mentioned a few weeks ago that self-publishing is a bad idea, here it fits in a punk DIY sort of way. Granted, it would be nice if the person credited as an editor had actually done something, if not keeping Plumides' ego in check then at least correcting the typos and malapropisms rampant throughout the book, but again, it's a raw book on a raw subject, so grit your teeth. You've been warned.

As a manifesto against censorship, Kill the Music fails completely. As a chronicle of the '80s alternative scene it's no Party Out of Bounds, but it serves. But as a memoir of someone who did something you and I will never be able to do, it works—clumsily, but it works. Maybe I'll send a copy to Fishboy. He can read it while listening to Sabbath and patrolling the border with Oklahoma.

John G. Nettles