The Jacket
A Fictional Tale
Mark Barry
© 2016

Hello there.
I’m a leather jacket. I have a story to tell that you may be interested in. I assume you are interested in punk rock? You must be to get this far. You may believe what I am about to tell you – if you can suspend disbelief long enough to comprehend that the story is being narrated by a coat – and I hope you do.
This is a true story.
This is a punk story.

Technically speaking, I am a vintage Schott Perfecto leather jacket. That brand is much better known as a Brando. Named after the man who made leather jackets ultra-cool way before Arthur Fonzarelli did. Marlon Brando, in the biker flick, The Wild One.
I’d like to tell you that I knew that particular coat, but I would be fibbing. It was said that James Dean was hardly ever seen without his Perfecto, but I don’t know that relative either. It was a big factory and those two relatives were way before my time: It’s like you Americans asking a Brit if they know the Queen!
Call me Brando. Or if you’re normal, with a healthy degree of skepticism, you can just call me The Jacket.
The Jacket.
That’s cool. I’m happy with that.
At the moment, I’m writing to you from a rack in BackSlash, the popular Nottingham vintage clothes shop on the top of Market Street. It’s nearly Christmas. Life outside the shop is unseasonably warm. I overheard the sales staff saying that because of El Nino, it’s going to be like this for a while.
The rack is opposite the changing rooms round the back of the shop. I hang with twenty other coats and jackets of all kinds, mostly associated with music. I share with the soul boy scarlet Harringtons, the Stax Crombies (and the felt collars); the voluminous Mod Parkas (and the arctic ones, which are completely different entirely); the Pitmen’s Donkeys, the Quo Denims (some bleached, some stained and patched, some still smelling slightly of Patchouli), and the sleek, super-shiny, uber-cool Bryan Ferry leather box jackets.
Every time I hang next to one of those, I can almost hear Slave to Love in the stitching.
I’ve been pretty transient, as you shall see, and it is fair to comment that I have had something of a, ahum, colourful history. Probably wouldn’t have been traded or sold so much if people actually knew where I’d been, and who I’ve seen, (and who actually owned me), but there you go.
My makers, the Schott Family, are originally Russian, but I was made in New York in 1968. In their main factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I’m nearly fifty. Jet black (natch), scuffed, scratched, mildly wrinkled, nobbly, nicked, nipped, tucked, dented and bruised, but surprisingly well preserved. There is a five inch slash on the underside of my left arm, which has been stitched (I’ll tell you about that later), but you can scarcely see it. Different matter if it were on the upper half. Thank God, I am made of Kansas cowhide. At Schott’s, they make coats to last – and I wasn’t cheap.
I found my way to Britain sometime in 1975. I was originally owned by an old-school Steppenwolf biker in Minnesota (name of Dave, with a big passion for British metal, like Sabbath and – especially Zep). I can handle music like that, and I would tap my feet to it like a good un – if I had feet that is, which I don’t, but it was while I was in Minnesota that I discovered punk and that was that. Dave and I went to see MC5 in Detroit one night in early 1972. In hindsight, they didn’t look like punks. They looked like hippies – I mean, the lead singer, had an afro! – but the speed. The power. The fuck-you attitude. In your face. In your face. They looked like they would jump into the crowd at the first sign of a heckle and kick the fuck out of anything that moved. They were beasts, and I loved every second of that night. I have never forgotten it. The stink, the tobacco smoke (I have a tiny scorch on my bottom belt from that very night), the sheer adrenaline, and the sweat of the mad pogoing and moshing going on around me. It was something else.
Screaming guitars, a drummer who looked as if he was going to pass out through his crazed exertions, and at the front, the lead singer with bad, bad, bad gold teeth – a hybrid of black-power soul singer, west coast hippie and starving mugger, breathing fire and brimstone into your terrified mush.
Kick. Out. The Jams.
I was stunned, as much as a jacket can ever be stunned, and simultaneously hooked. Up to that point, and metaphorically, of course, I used to watch Dave’s bands with a polite and slightly jolly smile inside.