Bubble gum cards have a long and rich history of being a fun way to waste spare change while indulging our inner desire to collect useless junk for dubious purposes. Who amongst us didn’t spend way too much of their allowances trying to complete that jumbo picture of Curley-Joe (as if there could have been any other kind) on the back of the 3 Stooges cards?
Punk rock’s mainstream exposure was at its apex in 1977, leading to a set of punk rock bubble gum cards foisted on the impressionable youth of the Netherlands. Neder punk seemed to be loosely defined to include no actual Neder bands, but did include Dwight Twilley, Split Enz, and these 2 shots of our boys. Go figure.
It’s obvious to me that whoever made these was not a baseball card guy. They left the backs of these things blank, and missed the priceless opportunity to post useless filler on the back of these as my old baseball cards used to have, such as “Eddie was voted Most Likely to Die a Fiery Death in high school,” or “Young Johnny Rotten was voted Most Vile by his peers in 1st tier.”
The problem with buying bubble gum cards is that the companies always salted the packs with a zillion copies of nobodies, the Joe Schlobotniks of the world, thereby forcing you to buy a lot of packs to find the stars. Judging from my stack of approximately 75 1968 John Bocabellas that were accumulated while searching for that Nolan Ryan rookie card, if my luck with punk rock cards held true to form, I would have wound up with 65 Babys and zero Sex Pistols.
Please tell me that these came with beer-flavored gum!
— Salvi C.
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