Like Houston, little is known on a national scale about the first wave New Orleans punk scene. According to Legionarie’s Disease frontman Jerry Anomie, New Orleans hosted some of the band’s wildest shows.

Henry “Wild Dog” Weissborn and Larry Holmes (aka Larry the Punk), founding editor of New Orleans zine FINAL SOLUTION (F/S), exchanged news about the local punk scenes. “Back in the day, every city had one fanzine writing about the music in their town, their bands. Henry had Houston, I had New Orleans, and Henry and I traded articles, traded fanzines,” Holmes told Wild Dog Archives. Launched in 1979, the same year as WILD DOG, F/S ran for nine issues until it folded in 1981.

In October 1979, The Normals hit the East Coast. According to an interview (below) in WILD DOG #3, the band was set to play with Neon Leon, a black punk band, at Max’s Kansas City in NYC and with The Battle of the Minorities, The Laughing Dogs, and Iggy Pop at the Zappa Club in Brooklyn. A few of the stops included CBGB’s on Halloween, The High Club in Philadelphia, and The Rat in Boston.

The Normals and other New Orleans punk bands are the subject of an upcoming documentary by Al Champagne and Pablo-Romero Estevez titled Almost Ready: The Story of Punk Rock in New Orleans.

(Original galley courtesy of Wild Dog Archives; promo photo of the Normals from Wild Dog #2.)