In “What Happened to the Punk Rock?”, Spike Polite sings that someone’s closed down CBGB’s, cleaned up Tompkins Square Park and turned everything that he used to do for fun into a crime. He’s disappointed and perplexed. He wants to know how this could have happened. Spike has more of a right than other nostalgic New York punks to ask these questions because he isn’t being precious; he really wants to know. After all, he was away in prison for 11 years while it happened.

Jared Errington was found not guilty of the murder of Taite Walkonen. However, because he used the victim’s credit cards to satisfy his heroin addiction, the 28-year-old was sentenced to four to 15 years for robbery in 2000. At the time, Spike — which is how Errington is better known in the music world and downtown — was living with Walkonen, who’d developed an obsession with the punk crowd. The 51-year-old followed Spike and his friends, taking endless photographs of his band, Sewage. Walkonen’s family did not understand why the classically trained pianist and former NYU professor was so fascinated by a band once called Humyn Sewage, but apparently there was some homosexual interest because Walkonen asked Spike to arrange an S&M encounter in July of 1999. Once Walkonen was taped to a chair, Jonathan Cardwell, a 20-year-old punk whom Spike had met at one of his gigs and brought home, stabbed the older man to death. Cardwell, who had previously escaped from prison in Tennessee, is now serving life. Spike did 11 years and four months in New York State (sharing four of those years with me in Greenhaven Correctional Facility).

As jarring as any arrest, this particular incident also arrested Spike’s musical career, which looked like it was about to take off in the early 2000s. His band Sewage is respected for its authenticity, and Spike Polite is a punk’s punk. Back in 1991, when he was a runaway from a difficult upbringing upstate, the band formed on the benches of Tompkins Square Park. With the lines for heroin, riots by squatters and GG Allin eating his own shit on stage, the now-gentrified Lower East Side was unimaginable then and Sewage was in the middle of it all. (“Humyn” was dropped from the band’s name in 1993.) In fact, Sewage opened for GG Allin and the Murder Junkies on the very night Allin died of a heroin overdose. The entire scene had been expecting his demise, but Spike was there when it actually happened. He was also present at other hallmarks of the era, like the ‘91 Memorial Day Riot in Tompkins Square Park. He played the Pot Parade with Cypress Hill, and he led a tour of the Lower East Side which is still available for view at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sewage played with Joey Ramone and appeared in the commercial for Spike Lee’s film Summer of Sam. (The mohawks helped get that gig.)

By 1999, Spike Polite was not just a neighborhood fixture. He was in the music video for the Jessie Camp and the 8th Street Kidz song “See Your Around,” which MTV aired on the hour for three months that year — meaning that, during the time of the murder, you could see Spike singing or in handcuffs depending on which channel you were watching.

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