Since Ground Control has given me this space to rant/ramble about popular music on a regular basis, I should probably introduce myself and my musical taste. I’m calling myself The Aging Punk not because I plan to write about punk rock every month. Far from it. But the punk rock explosion of the late 70s was one of my formative musical experiences. It still colors—in various ways—my feelings about music.
I was 20 years old in 1977. Rock music had become moribund and boring. And punk rock was going to save it. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
Now, punk rock in its early years was a much different beast from what we call punk today. Or rather, what we now call punk was only a narrow slice of what got included under the label then. In the beginning, anything with a D.I.Y. attitude was considered punk. And as such, punk stood for musical innovation.
To fully explain why I thought/hoped punk would save rock music, I need to go back another ten years. I first turned on the radio in 1967, when I was ten years old. I was searching for a novelty hit called “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”, by The Royal Guardsmen. I found one of the most productive and exciting years in all rock music. I found The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix. (I did also discover some bands a little more tuned to my ten year old tastes: The Turtles, The Cowsills, Strawberry Alarm Clock.)
Rock music in the next few years (during which I began to develop some actual taste and appreciation for it) remained incredibly innovative. Innovation became one of the main things I listened for. Adolescence is always a period of discovery, and rock music aided my adolescence by giving me a steady stream of new bands, new sounds, new approaches to music for me to discover.
However, by the mid-70s the rate of innovation had slowed considerably. All the greats of the 60s were either dead, broken up, or repeating themselves. Those musical developments which had seemed so ground breaking a few years back—everything from singer/songwriters through glam to prog rock—had already moved beyond repetition to self-parody. In 1976, Boston and Heart were considered the most exciting new bands. Decent bands, sure, but “the most exciting”?—please.
And don’t even get me started on disco.
Also, for a variety of reasons, the whole energy level of rock music had dropped considerably. Folk-rock and prog rock, however different they were, were both meant to be listened to, not danced to. And certainly not danced to maniacally. That attitude had infested much of rock.
Then, suddenly, there was punk rock.
Punk restored that lost energy. Energy which the bored and cynical youth of the late 70s desperately needed to burn off. That, in itself, was a huge step towards making music interesting again.
But punk also restored innovation to rock music. This may be hard to imagine today, when punk is one of the most rigid forms of rock music. But back then, punk wasn’t just The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned—the bands who created the blueprint for today’s punk. Talking Heads, Blondie and Television were all considered punk. As were Patti Smith, Devo and Elvis Costello. And many more.
Having a D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself, just in case there’s anyone out there somehow unfamiliar with the expression) attitude made you a punk band, far more than how your band actually sounded. D.I.Y. often meant putting out your own singles, and even albums, without the help of a large record label. But it also meant playing whatever the fuck you wanted to play, damn the tastes of the record companies, the critics, and often even the audience. That attitude led to a huge variety of music.
While I’m at it, let me make a quick comment about punk fashion. Just as the rigid style of the music had yet to solidify, the notion of punk fashion was still pretty fluid too. Although the various fashions we associate with punk were starting to appear—Mohawks, studded leather, dog collars—all it really took in those days was a pair of torn jeans and you were punk. (And you had to actually rip them yourself; no one sold already ripped jeans back then.) It also gave all us ex-hippies an excuse to cut off our long hair, which, frankly, we were getting pretty tired of anyway. Or maybe that was just me.
In the fall of 1977, I was in my second year at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and I was surrounded by punk rock. The other students around me took to it far more quickly and eagerly than the general public at that time. Hampshire College, one of the most liberal Liberal Arts Colleges in the country, attracted students from the fringes of society. It’s not surprising that they listened to radical, fringe music. This was not at all limited to punk, but punk had many fans there.
It also helped that Amherst, in the middle of Massachusetts, was only two hours away from Boston and four hours from New York City, the hub of American punk at the time. This meant that most of the bands came through town on a regular basis. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, David Johansen (lead singer for the New York Dolls) and Elvis Costello all played at one or more of the colleges in our immediate vicinity. And for those bands that didn’t come to us, like I said, New York was just four hours away. During my last three years of college I saw all the bands just listed, plus the Dead Boys, Iggy Pop, The Clash, Blondie, John Cale, Pere Ubu, the Stranglers, and PiL, many of them multiple times. It was a great time for live shows.
My frequent trips to New York often included a trip to CBGBs, whether I knew the bands playing there or not. CBGBs was, of course, the home of New York punk. By any objective standard, it was not a good place to see a band. It was a long narrow bar with the stage at the far end of the room. There were a handful of tables in front of the stage; if you scored one of those, you were set. Otherwise, sight lines pretty much sucked from anywhere else in the bar. Acoustics weren’t much worse than your average dive bar (which is what CBGBs was, in truth), which is to say, they sucked too.
It did have plenty of atmosphere, which was more important than sight lines or acoustics. Especially if you consider a smelly, graffiti plastered bathroom atmosphere. Or a dark bar with a ton of neon beer signs. Not to mention the wonderful neighborhood it was located in: The Bowery, a name synonymous with drunks passed out in the gutter.
But none of that mattered, because it was CBGBs, the place where it all started. Despite the lousy acoustic, bands just sounded better there.
But in a way, concerts were a small part of the excitement of punk. The true excitement was that of discovery. The true excitement was hearing a new song for the first time, that moment when someone returned to the dorms with a new 45, and played it for everyone (whether they wanted to hear it or not).
45s were the currency of punk rock. A band could afford to put out a single. Releasing a 45 was, in a way, the equivalent of posting an MP3 on a website. The music was now out there for people to discover, although it did take a little more effort to discover the great ones. Either your heard about them from some other fan, or you spent hours in the record stores which specialized in punk (which often entailed another journey to New York or Boston). But that was the fun of it—the thrill of discovery, of finding a great song and passing it on to your friends. Of hearing, for the first time, a slice of music so radical you almost didn’t believe it existed.
And there was so much of it to discover. The halls of my dorm were permeated with new songs and sounds. Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation,” “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” (about the transplant recipient of said organs) by Adverts, or some goofy song about buildings and civil servants by a new band called Talking Heads. There was Iggy Pop taunting his audience relentlessly on the live album Metallic K.O. The brilliant stupidity of Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso” (“Some guys try to pick up girls and get called asshole/ this never happened to Pablo Picasso”) or the totally weird remakes of 60s hits on The Residents’ Third Reich ’n’ Roll.
The punk explosion lasted pretty much through my college years (1977-1980). There was a near constant stream of new bands and new styles to discover. However, after about the first year, one major change occurred. It was merely a matter of nomenclature, yet it made a huge difference. Someone invented the phrase “New Wave” to cover all the “punk” bands who weren’t playing “punk” music.
Although it took a couple of years to play out, that effectively killed punk as a broad and innovative musical force, and made it into a narrow and rigid genre. Sure, some great punk bands arose in the years ahead (especially in Southern California, which got a little later start on the whole things than the East Coast), but most of them were following the now established punk rock blueprint, rather than creating anything truly new.
Meanwhile, the New Wave bands were freed to follow their more commercial instincts. Many of them (The Cars, Blondie, The Police) became the dominant pop bands of the early 80s. And the truly interesting and original stuff—The Residents, Pere Ubu, PiL, The Contortions—faded back into obscurity.
As for the D.I.Y. attitude – it faded from prominence, but never went away. Throughout the 80s it continued to produce such bands as R.E.M., Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and yes, eventually, Nirvana. The fact is, D.I.Y. has always produced some of the best rock music, including the garage bands of the 60s, and going all the way back to the original blues recordings of the 20s and 30s which eventually birthed rock ’n’ roll. Remember—at least in the beginning—that Sam Phillips’ Sun Records was a D.I.Y. enterprise.
So what does it all mean to me, my musical taste, and what I might write here?
To tell the truth, the immediate effect was to narrow my musical taste. I became quite the punk rock snob. I was proud of the fact that the only non-punk (or non-New Wave) acts I saw during those four years were The Stones, The Who, and The Kinks (all of which were considered, by punk fans, to be at least acceptable as forerunners of punk music). (Oh, and Sun Ra and his Arkestra, but that’s very much a different story.) I had nasty musical arguments with my friends who possessed different tastes. I was unrelenting in my scorn for any music which did not conform to my tastes, not just obvious targets like disco and jazz fusion, but Billy Joel, Steely Dan, The Eagles, The Grateful Dead.
I was drawn to punk by the loud, fast aggressive stuff—The Ramones, The Dead Boys, The Pistols, early Stooges (my original introduction to punk). At twenty I had a lot of angst and anxiety desperate for explosive expression.
But the truly original bands were the ones which stuck with me. Patti Smith’s poetry. The intertwining guitars of Television. Pere Ubu’s mix of straight ahead rock ’n’ roll and pure noise. The Contortions’ free jazz. The amazing wordplay and songwriting ability of Elvis Costello. The way every Talking Heads album built on the previous one, but added something new to the mix.
Punk embodied the two qualities I value most in music—energy and originality. It taught me that there was a lot of intriguing music being produced on the fringes, and that it just took a little effort to find it. When circumstances forced me to pretty much go cold turkey from punk (details on that next month), and when my hormones had calmed down enough for me to listen to quieter music, I realized that innovation (and energy) exist in all genres. So I started searching for just that, and that is much of what I will be writing about here.
So I may be an aging punk, but it’s still more about the attitude than the specific style. I’ll be writing about much more than punk rock. Still, rest assured I still blast my old Ramones and Clash CDs when my spirit needs it.
G. Murray Thomas writes and performs poetry because he can't sing. He can be found at myspace.com/gmurraythomas.
