Five Questions and 10 Songs with the Punk Rock Museum Tour Guides: Jonny Two Bags

Meet your Punk Rock Museum tour guides! We’ll be featuring five questions—the same five questions—with each of the ongoing punk rock guides scheduled to show people around the museum in the coming months. Each one is also adding to our ongoing Punk Rock Museum x New Noise Playlist. Our first tour guide whom you can still catch today and tomorrow is Jonny Two Bags who has played with such legendary punk bands as Youth Brigade and the Cadillac Tramps and is currently a guitarist for the legendary SoCal punk band Social Distortion.

When did you get into punk and why? (Was it an older sibling, a certain band, etc.? Describe your initiation into the world of punk).

Summer of 1980, I met this dude Jeff O’Mahoney at Perry’s Pizza up in Mammoth. He had a bleached crop, an earring, playing Asteroids. We became friends, and he started turning me on to the music he was into. I hadn’t heard the Clash or The Pistols yet. I dug it. A few days later, I cut my hippie hair off. Due to the unfortunate aspect of being geographically challenged plus getting  locked up in youth camp for a year and a day, I wasn’t able to start hanging out right away.

What was your first punk show?

After I moved back to SoCal, I saw GBH, Bad Brains, and Kraut at Perkins Palace in Pasadena.

Honestly the entire museum is awesome; it’s impossible to choose any one part.

I like a lot of bands from all over the place, but I’m partial to the SoCal scene. The first bands I heard were British and I loved them but I really didn’t understand much of what they were writing about, on the other hand, when the Adolescents (S/T) Blue Record and Black Flag Jealous Again came out I totally connected. Coming from a miserable childhood, broken home, juvenile delinquency, skateboarding etc. I felt like I had finally found my tribe. I experienced so much more familial love than I ever felt from my real family.

What is your personal most prized punk possession?

My collection of four original drawings by Nick Blinko of Rudimentary Peni.

If you want to catch Jonny Two Bags before time runs out, tickets are available here. Stay tuned to meet the rest of your tour guides for the Punk Rock Museum!