Pre-Punk
(This was written as an introduction to a brilliant “Ugly Things” article by Johan Kugelberg called “No More Jubilees: Punk Before Punk”, which aimed to have fun in illustrating the fact that Punk was not quite the totally radical break that it presented itself as. In fact, it was an idea that had been germinating in the US, in Europe and the UK for a few years.
“Ugly Things” is a great fanzine and is mandatory for anyone who loves 50′s and 60′s and 70′s pop culture…)
Punk arrived so fully formed that it seems extraordinary that there was a time when it did not exist. The idea was that this new movement had no antecedents. This was Year Zero: the end of all the past and the beginning of the future. Although necessary to clear the ground – littered with the dead-end residue of hippie styles that had been vibrant a decade or so before – this was, almost by definition, a total lie.
One listen to the Ramones or the Sex Pistols told you that they had a passing acquaintance with glam/ glitter rock at very least, let alone the hallowed Stooges / Velvets/ MC5 trinity. But Malcolm McLaren’s idea held firm: whatever everyone else is doing, do the opposite. And so, despite the Sex Pistols’ roots in glam and Brit beat and out-there freak rock, many fans believed that they were totally new. As for all intents and purposes, they were.
The roots of punk are contested ground. Naturally, there has been the trope that says: it was invented by New York and hi-jacked by Britain. So Richard Hell had a good haircut and a ripped T-shirt in 1974: do we still have to pay for it three decades later? His best song was stolen from the genius Rod McKuen: “The Beat/ Blank Generation”. (Even so, stack it next to “Pretty Vacant” and you know who was hotter.)
In fact, what became known as Punk during 1975 and 1976 had been floating around in various different guises in several cities during the previous few years: New York, Cleveland, Paris, and London to name but four. It was an international sense of boredom with the prevailing culture that saw misfits of all hues go back to maudit, maladjusted noise and try it on for size. Throw it at the wall, fuck you all: life stinks, it’s shit, I don’t care, oh woah oh.
Nationalism is so restrictive and uninteresting. Once you’ve got that out of the way, then you can have fun in tracing Punk through (musical) history. In the life-cycle of any clearly defined movement, there are five stages:
Vague inchoate beginnings in the different, often clumsy attempts at starting something new or hating everything or doing something/anything different or weird that at the crucial point moves into the tunnel of definition, when the mass media picks up on certain crucial elements of what becomes The Style, simplifies and summarises them, and then plays them back to the wider audience. The style then goes admass. Many new adherents come along, with no idea of where the style comes from, and so do the band-wagon jumpers, some of whom make the best records. But then, everything falls victim to boredom/ obsolescence. The job is done. The style falls out of favour, and becomes a joke, or even worse, the property of a few die-hards, playing the toilet circuit, until the revival. When the style is acknowledged as classic. The original documents are revered as sacred texts, and fans not born during the original moment set the whole cycle off again. Those who were there the first time think they’ve got everything wrong but nobody else cares.
All of these stages are fascinating, but perhaps the first the most so. It’s something to do with the vast, almost limitless possibilities on offer as well as the last-ditch desperation of young musicians shooting in the dark. In some cases, the Cleveland scene for instance, the wilful persistence in the face of indifference and hostility is borders on the mythic/heroic.
What follows then is UT’s Food and Wine Editor’s idiosyncratic (if that’s not a tautology) account of Punk before it was Punk. My own preference would be to amp up the following forgotten elements:
Early/Mid Sixties Brit Beat
That super-aggressive, unfunky wall-of-sound noted by Yank musicians when they first visited the UK. Have you ever heard Nero and the Gladiators? More specifically, note the following covers/ sources from 63 0n: The Ramones “Judy Is A Punk” –v- Herman and the Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am”; Dave Berry’s “Don’t Gimme No Lip” + the Small Faces’ “Whatcha Gonna Do About It” > Sex Pistols. Otherwise just listen to the way that the Big Three steamroller through “The Cavern Stomp” or the actual amplified bootstomps employed by the Dave Clark Five and the Honeycombs or the Rolling Stones’ one note onslaught on “Money” and “Not Fade Away” or the Kinks’ distortion monolith, “You Really Got Me” or the Pretty Things’ demonic “Rosalyn” or Eric Burdon leering his way through “It’s My Life”: ‘don’t push me’, indeed. ‘Sassiety’, as the Third Bardo would later have it, had a lot to answer for.
1966: the year of the bad attitude (or the best pop year ever)
1976 as the actual follow-up to 1966 ten years later. Beginning with the Wheels’ “Bad Little Woman” the year accelerates into maxed-out monsters like “Shapes of Things”, “Paperback Writer”, the Troggs “Lost Girl” (dwaaaang!), Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Tich’s “Hold Tight” (that fuzz-drum break), the Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”, the Turtles “Outside Chance”, the Who’s “I’m A Boy”, the Oxford Circle’s “Foolish Woman” etc and climaxes in the apocalyptic nihilism (on 45) of “Psychotic Reaction”, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby”, “96 Tears” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Just before everything is finally atomised by the nuclear explosion at the end of “Seven and Seven Is”, “Good Vibrations” comes in and it’s such a great record that it sweeps popular culture into a season or three of good vibes by which time the taut compression of 66 has gone – even if the bad vibes do return quickly enough. So: “Understanding” and “I Can’t Control Myself” are covered by the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks respectively in 1976.
“Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” is ripped off by Iggy and the Stooges for the (nearly equally) great “I’m Sick of You”, a lone voice in the desert nihil-epic from 1971 issued in 1977 by the great Greg Shaw, who knew a thing or two about 1966. (Iggy’s empathy with the year’s ur-group, the Yardbirds, was also displayed on his lyrical homage to “Heartfull of Soul” on “Search And Destroy”). The Velvet Underground are covered by everyone from 1976 on and are hailed as rock geniuses.
Glam Rock
This is more familiar ground. But note just how Sex Pistols-guitar “Dynamite” by Mud sounds. Remember the teen revolution shtick of “Teenage Rampage” and the dance-floor apocalypse of “Ballroom Blitz”, both huge Brit hits for the Sweet. But Punk had to negate glam, for obvious reasons, hence the Sex Pistols’ unpleasant attack on the Dolls’ David Johansen in “New York” (Punk puritanism > homophobia > cosmic sex fear –v- Glam polymorphous perversity, ‘I’m trisexual, I’ll try anything’.) Cuspal Street Rock straws in the wind, both from early 1976: Trevor White (ex-Jook) “Crazy Kids”, and Hello’s “Teenage Revolution”. Shame about the clothes, but the sentiment was there.
The point was, to be modern.
The cultural history is a different matter. We’re not going there.