Toxic Reasons

These are a handful of recently unearthed old shots of mine. The band is Toxic Reasons, whose album Independence I remember as being really great: big, thick, slower Brit-punk style, a nice change of pace in those early hardcore/thrash days. The show was at a place in Austin called Voltaire's Basement, which was (you guessed it) the basement of a used book store called Voltaires, which I sorta remember as specializing in a lot of anarchist stuff, poetry, and other things that good American citizens shouldn't read. It was not a posh joint.

The year was maybe 1983. Maybe 1982. Doubt it was earlier or later. And these shots capture well what the scene was like in those days, at least as I remember it.













Toxic Reasons formed in 1979 in Dayton Ohio and kicked around for a long time. Punk was taking place all over America, but the only bands anyone seems to remember came from the bigger scenes: Boston, DC, SF, LA, Austin/Houston, and the OC. That last one is kinda tragic 'cause the OC spawned almost nothing but bad jock-rock, real boy music, antithetical to what punk meant, at least to me.

Here's a coupla links I found on Toxic Reasons:

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/liveperformances/ToxicReasons.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Reasons

And there's a sort of slip-shod collection of my old punk stuff here:
http://www.punkerotic.com/austin/