Bag Of Tricks
Earth Island, 2025
9/10
Most of my knowledge about punk rock life in San Francisco in the ‘80s comes from reading Maximum RocknRoll and the words of Larry Livermore and Ace Backwords. The stories they told made it seem like the Bay Area was the mecca of punk, where an endless amount of characters roamed the streets.
Ruby Dee Philippa lends credence to that idea with this first of three books that follows a rag tag group of punks, the band The Shits, and their groupies The Clits, as they roam from streets, squats and punk shows.
These aren’t the enlightened and politically driven modern day punks you might hear about today. Philippa assembles short stories about youngsters who sell and do drugs, have plenty of sex, steal, dumpster dive, fight and in general reside in between the cracks of society.
Even though most of us didn’t experience anything like what the characters in Bags Of Tricks do on a day to day basis, Philippa’s flowing prose makes for an entertaining read that will bring to mind the spontaneity, recklessness and overall looseness of young adulthood that we all miss in some capacity.
Philippa penned the book after reconnecting with old punk pals from her days in San Franciso, and the stories are mostly true. For someone like myself who has an interest in all things ‘80s punk related, this was an engrossing book about a time I would I could have similarly experienced.