Mike Holmes is one of perhaps two people (the other being Micah Scott) who I would consider the Godfathers of the Minot Punk Scene. Mike and Micah both sang and played guitar in the local band that had the single greatest impact on me in those years, JESUS. Mike also authored the first zine I ever read, Life is Shit and I’m Planting a Garden. Beyond his writings, his energy on stage, and his passion for all things punk, there was a side of Mike Holmes that I wasn’t aware of at the time: he was responsible for bringing the first punk shows to Minot, and for cultivating the Minot Collective Cultural Centre (MC3) scene that was blossoming when I joined in the spring of 1994.

Mike grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. There, he got involved in the DIY punk scene and straightedge culture while attending high school in Wheaton and Sycamore, IL. A few weeks after graduating from high school, Mike joined the Air Force. As he explained it to me, he and his dad had some deep discussions about the future. “Dad thought the military would be a good idea for me.” So when his dad passed away of a heart attack at the start of Mike’s senior year, Mike decided to enlist in the US Air Force — at least in part, “because I thought it was something my old man would have wanted me to do.”

When we meet over video conference, in August of 2022, I am a little thrown by Mike’s voice, which is deeper than I remember and gravelly. As I learn later in the interview, his vocal chords are decimated from years of screaming in hardcore punk bands. “I couldn’t sing for a band now if I wanted to,” he tells me, with a note of remorse. Our two-hour-long conversation is punctuated by loud laughter [which I’ll signify with 🎸]. Mike is a barber in North Carolina. He has a dark beard and horn-rimmed bifocals. When he gestures with his hands or adjusts the straps of his suspenders, as he does often, I notice that his fingernails are painted fire engine red.

INTERVIEWER: I didn’t realize that you were in the Air Force. Is that how you ended up in Minot?

HOLMES: Right, so after basic training, I was in Colorado for technical school, and when my orders came up the guy says to me: “Holmes, I don’t know who you pissed off already, but you have orders for Minot.” And I was like, What’s a Minot? 🎸 I don’t think I fully realized what “a Minot” was until I was getting off the plane. I flew there from O’Hare — one of the busiest airports in the world — and I landed at an airport that had one gate and where they put your luggage through a hole in the wall. It was just like, Fuck, man. It was the first time I was ever on a plane where they wheeled the stairs up to you. 🎸 Like, did I just land on Fantasy Island or some shit? So then an Airman picks me up and it’s late at night and we’re driving from the airport to the base, and he asks me if I’m hungry, and I said, yeah is there a Taco Bell around? And he answers, “Well, there’s a Taco John’s…” And I was like, Ah, Fuck! 🎸 It’s gonna be a long couple of years! 🎸 Because Taco Bell was a priority in my life then, as it is now [pauses to take a prolonged sip from a plastic Taco Bell to-go cup]. And then, as we’re driving to base I saw a fucking tumbleweed roll across the highway. And I was like, Fuck! I always thought tumbleweeds were just like quicksand or anvils dropping on your head, just like a trope that only exists in cartoons, but no, there was no Taco Bell, but they got tumbleweeds.

This was ’90 — ’91, so not only were we years away from the internet, but cable TV hadn’t even penetrated Minot yet! And I’m not picking on Minot at all when I talk about some of this stuff, but because of that, it took a while for culture to transmit from city to city back then. In a lot of ways, like the way that people dressed, and the hairstyles, and the music they listened to… you just felt that something was a little off. Minot really felt like a different place than I had ever been before. Which is something that I think is completely lost in America these days, as you go from one town to the next you know you’re going to find the same stores and the same experiences.

INTERVIEWER: What was the scene like when you arrived there?

HOLMES: There wasn’t a scene. Minot had never had a punk moment. Minot had never had a punk show. Minot never had a punk band. Minot had NIXON PUPILS, and as beloved as they were, they were a power pop trio. Like that was something else. Minot was the last punk rock scene. I really think that in America, it was the last punk rock scene of note to be founded. Of cities that were able to support a punk rock scene, Minot was the last to get one.

People don’t really understand what an island Minot was, you know. Where I grew up [Sycamore, IL] was kind of an island too. It was out in the middle of the cornfields, but it was an island that was only an hour away from Chicago. Minot was a fucking island. It was a town of 30,000 people and the next biggest town was Max [population: 300] 🎸 It was just a little blip in the middle of fucking nothing. And so why would it have a punk rock scene? It would be ridiculous for Minot to have a punk rock scene.

INTERVIEWER: Then for you, coming out of that thriving Chicago scene to go to this town in the middle of nowhere with no scene, how did you cope?

HOLMES: It sucked. For my first nine months or so, I was hanging out with Airmen, going cruising, and listening to Bell Biv DeVoe. It did not nourish my soul. But what did nourish my soul is that I spent a lot of time writing to bands, who had listed their contact information in Maximum RocknRoll [punk subculture magazine founded in 1982]. And some of them wrote back, notably, KRUPTED PEASANT FARMERZ who I ended up becoming pen-pals with for quite a while. These bands would share other bands’ info with me and I started a real correspondence with many bands, labels, and distributors in that way. And then I met some kids on base. I think Dan Davis might have been one of them. Danny was a dependent, and we got to talking and he told me there was this kid downtown that I should meet, because he liked aggressive, primitive punk rock and he didn’t do drugs, and didn’t drink. So I told Danny I’d love to meet him, so that’s how I met Micah.

Micah and I, you know, we just fell in together immediately. I would go crash on his couch at his mom’s place, we’d go skateboarding, we’d listen to music, watch Kids in the Hall; we were just goofy kids hanging out, driving a hundred miles to Bismarck to get Taco Bell. 🎸 I had this book called Banned in DC, and it was a photo book of Washington, DC punk bands from, ’79 to ’85 — an amazing era. All these pictures of BAD BRAINS and MINOR THREAT and just the whole nine yards. Well, Micah and I used to pour over that book. Like just sit there on the floor with it, you know the binding is broke to shit because we’ve just got it flat. Just reading everything. Looking at the way people were dressing, looking at the descriptions of what happened at the door, we were just obsessed with it.

So Micah and I used to walk around downtown and press our faces against the glass of empty storefronts, dreaming about finding a place to have shows. There was a basement that was vacant and I called the landlord and asked if we could rent it out just for one night, and he agreed. Then I got in touch with this band out of Chicago called GEAR who played at the very first real punk show I ever went to. So it was a big deal for me to get them on the bill. I asked them if they would play a show here and they were into it. They weren’t on tour or anything, but they made the trip all the way to Minot, just to play that one show. They were like these guys in North Dakota want us to play, okay let’s go to North Dakota! So we did the GEAR show and NOBODY’S CHILDREN and CHEESE were the openers. But before GEAR could get on stage, we got shut down! The cops came around and said we needed to have security at any “dance” in the state of North Dakota. Even though this was not a “hop” by any means there was a band onstage, and by state law, a public performance by a band is considered a dance. So I felt terrible, because GEAR drove all that way — and it’s like a 15-hour drive — for that one show. A lot of people started to filter away but there were a group of us congregating on the sidewalk. And then the cop — in the first of what would frankly be many bro-moves from the Minot cops — was like, “You know, at this point, you’ve rented the place. You could have a ‘private party,’ and and we wouldn’t care, as long as there aren’t any noise complaints.” So the rest of the people went back downstairs and GEAR played for them. And they were the first out-of-town band to ever play at a punk show in Minot.

So after that, to be safe, we were hiring security for every show — and there were a lot of shows where security was paid more than any of the bands. I’ll say though, the fact that we could afford to pay rent and a couple hundred bucks to security, and still give the bands a little something, off the door sales — that’s pretty damn good. That’s better than a lot of punk scenes. Most of the out-of-town bands were happy if they could crash on someone’s floor and come away with enough gas money to get to the next town. None of them gave a shit if they got paid, and I certainly wasn’t making any money off of it. But I digress, so we’re paying all this money to security, and after a while — I can’t remember how long — we were talking to a cop who would come around during the shows, and he mentioned to us that while you had to have security at all public dances, private membership clubs don’t need to have security. So Micah and I looked at each other and we were like, Oh? We got you. Now, he didn’t come out and say ‘here’s how to scam the system’. We put it together, you know, but he was clearly aiming us in that direction, which again, was a cool instance of a Minot cop being a bro. I think they were getting tired of having to talk to us or whatever. So that’s when we started with the $1 annual membership dues 🎸.

INTERVIEWER: Did it take a while for the word to spread and the scene to grow there?

HOLMES: Surprisingly, no. NOBODY’S CHILDREN already had quite a following, so a lot of those kids rolled in right away or told their friends about it. We had a big scene. It’s wild that we could get 50–100 local kids to come to a show, and we had that two or three times a week at the height of it. You know, that’s hard to do in Chicago, so to do it in Minot regularly is crazy. And the same kids came out to every show, and they were cool. They were enjoying what was going on. The only time I ever heard of any friction was when JESUS was on tour in ’94. This band came through, I can’t remember who they were. But someone in the band made fun of a developmentally disabled person on the street, and kids weren’t having it. And again, this is ’94 so, not the ‘woke’ culture of today, but yeah they really hated that band and they told them off. They weren’t gonna let some punk band take the piss out of their locals. “You don’t come to our town and talk that kind of shit. We run a positive organization around here.” That was great.

We didn’t really know what we were doing. We were building the Minot punk scene as we believed every punk scene was run. Apart from my experiences in high school, we’d never been to other cities to see how scenes interacted between bands and promoters and stuff like that. We had only read in zines and books about the way that you should behave and treat one another, and we were just emulating that. There’s another interesting thing too, about Minot, and it’s something that I’m proud of, because I think that a lot of punk scenes take on characteristics of their founders, who instill certain values. I don’t think you can really find people who would say that Micah or I ever preached about straightedge or anything like that. The fact is, that people respected the Centre and the shows that we were doing and what was happening enough that they recognized that drugs and alcohol were not a part of what we were doing. And we never once had an issue with drugs or alcohol at a show. Never. Never once had an issue with a fight at a show. The scene was never plagued by vandalism. It just, it didn’t happen, like at all. We were out there picking up trash on the sidewalks in front of the Centre, because we didn’t want to shit where we ate. We were always cognizant of people looking at us and wondering what was going on. It just folded in really well that we wanted to show people that we weren’t about that life. That we weren’t destructive. That we can be a little weird and listen to a bunch of loud music but that we were not up to anything nefarious. Like I’m really fucking happy that that became the dominant mode of that scene because so many other scenes have been destroyed from within by those kind of toxic behaviors.

INTERVIEWER: I just want to acknowledge that I could not be who I am today without your presence in that scene. And I’ve heard that again and again from the people I’ve talked to in this project: they don’t know where they’d be if not for the MC3. Do you want to comment on the impact you had there?

HOLMES: Man, I get weird feelings about this. It’s difficult to walk a line between acknowledging the direct, massive support from Micah, Sarah [Micah’s then-wife] and from the scene at large. But at the same time, I feel a very paternalistic impulse in some ways towards the Minot scene, because I did put on the first shows there. I will say that it makes me really fucking proud when I hear about people who have been positively impacted by it. I don’t want to come off as arrogant about it but at the same time, I don’t want to bring some bullshit false modesty, because goddamnit, we did it. It makes me really fucking happy to hear about people who did something good after this, because, you know, and maybe this is me more than others, but you feel like a fucking failure a lot, or that you haven’t done anything with your life, or that you’re fucking useless. You know, sometimes you can look back at something you did in the past and go, Goddamn, that was really fucking cool. You’re looking back at that kid you once were and going, Fuck man, you really had it going on! That’s dope.

Q&A with Mike Holmes