I am pleased to announce that tomorrow, Substack reviews will continue with my review of Michael Mohr’s fantastic novel The Crew. Among other things, one of its most important themes is punk rock.
I originally intended for this to be a part of my review tomorrow. But when Mohr recently reviewed my novel - check it out here! - I realized that man, is he good at negating digressive temptations. (If he has them in the first place) Mohr knows how to keep on target like a bullet. So while I otherwise will do my own thing as I always do, as a courtesy I’ll make sure that my actual review is as digression-free as Mohr’s review.
Even so, the opportunity to give my own take on the history of punk rock was too much to resist. And while The Crew is a perfectly comprehensible novel with or without a deep knowledge of punk, a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. If you’re familiar with music history, there’s little need to read it. (though if your name is
and you want to know how the young’uns are writing, by all means: read on!) I care to placate neither critics nor punks with this take, however: for like the latter, I just don’t give a fuck. I dislike critics’ angles a lot of the time but respect the art; and I love punk rock but stand apart from the punks themselves. So there’ll be a little bit of both perspectives here that, if not a happy medium, is a medium all the same.So without further ado, let’s begin! And stay tuned for my review tomorrow!
Deciphering the origins of punk rock is a helluva pastime. At least to those into that kind of thing. What I often find, however, is that Americans will only discuss the American side and Britons will only discuss the British side.1 From my experience, American punks hold the British scene with respect; while the Britons hold the American scene in contempt. Either way, the transnational is a genuine blind spot in punk rock history.
Both scenes are a lot more intertwined than is apparent at first glance.
The primordial soup from which punk rock emerged in America is Detroit: the germs to have crawled out of this soup are The Stooges (Iggy Pop’s band) and the Motor City Five, who you’ll always find abbreviated as the MC5. I will return to The Stooges in a bit. But I think what punk historians often miss about this primordial emergence stems from their fixation on the live version of “Kick Out The Jams,” from MC5’s 1969 live album of the same name.
That live version, for the record, sucks monkey nuts. That’s part of the point, of course: and if I put on my Spock ears, American punk rock’s love of “being shitty” only makes logical sense genealogically when traced back to “Kick Out The Jams;” the same can be said of the song itself, which has no other redeeming factors apart from the iconic intro “Kick out the jams, mother fucker!”2 But if one looks past the “Kick Out The Jams” fixation and listens to a much better song - “The American Ruse” from their 1970 studio album “Back In The U.S.A.” - not only is the directional transition and progression from hippie love to punk rock hate a lot more obvious on the weather vane of musical winds. The reactionary target of punk rock is laid out bare for all to see: it being in reaction to…well, ‘the American ruse.’
Without attacking core American values (defending them, in fact), MC5 criticizes what the relationship to the United States has become for its future citizens in essence and practice alike: a relationship that can only be realized and fulfilled with a complicit hypocrisy of the highest order.3 “They told you in school about freedom/but when you’re tryin’ to be free they never let ya.” If that isn’t enough, there is no escape. “‘69 America in terminal stasis/The air's so thick it's like drowning in molasses.” The very air you breathe is akin to how Boromir describes the air of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movie: that basic act of life cannot be engaged in without engaging in the ruse even unthinkingly. The quiet reference to the hippie movement’s failure is also evident: I wonder what else is making the air thick? 😅
This hypocrisy, unfortunately, has only become more and more compounded since 1970. It is most blatant in tribal politics. How many of you are familiar with a fallacious argument that goes as follows: “Democrats did x, y and z, and it’s bad they did it.” “Well, Republicans did z, y and x. So who cares?”4 Hypocrisy is only really bad if one’s political enemy does it: while the left is more guilty due to the close chemical relationship between Marxism and the art of deception, conservative America have a lot to answer for as well.
In short, Americans have fallen into a lowest-common-denominator quagmire where rather than trying to get out of the muck, each side keeps pulling the other back down by the heels. For as the old saying goes: “misery loves company.” Hypocrisy does too, apparently. But back to punk rock.
While the song at the time would have been perceived as an anti-patriotic anthem, “The American Ruse” takes no political side. Its only ‘side’ is freedom. It doesn’t have to take a side: even before I heard this song, I’d felt much the same way. Conservative America of 1970, Left-Wing America of the late 2000s: there is no difference in this respect. Both are ruses in some form or another and hypocrisy is one of the many reasons I left the country.
What America shares with Britain has more to do with style: but they do share a link. This comes from a band forgotten to all but the most hardcore country rock aficionados and vinyl record collectors: Eggs Over Easy. Whose first album goes by the totally awesome name Good N’ Cheap. Because that’s exactly what that kind of country rock was back in the day, like cheap breakfast at a seedy diner. I’m happy to say that the core duo of the band was founded in my hometown, Berkeley CA. A town that would later be very important for punk rock. (But that, I’m sorry to say, is no longer “good n’ cheap”)
Eggs Over Easy would have been lucky to earn a footnote status in country rock had it not been for a little Švejk-like anabasis they stumbled into by accident. Achieving some success in the Greenwich Village scene,5 Eggs Over Easy attracted the attention of Chas Chandler, former bass player of The Animals. He arranged for Eggs Over Easy to record their first album in London. Before they knew it, they were on the way to Old Blighty.
Chandler had been helping a movie company, Cannon Films, shift into the music business. Eggs Over Easy were a part of that plan. But the plan fell through on Chandler’s end. Chandler advised Eggs Over Easy to stay in London for a bit longer than planned until he could work something out. So they did. Feeling the need to do something while they hung out, they performed their simple, “good n’ cheap” but honest brand of country rock in the pubs of London.
To what might be anyone’s surprise, it took off. What CBGB later failed to do took off in London of all places. In this way, pub rock was born. And without pub rock, there is no punk rock.
At its “purest” sound, pub rock is a kind of loose, often tasteless, country-rock Americana that, when bad, is shamelessly so. It is straight-up working-class music, and as the working class was not one to care for “cultured standards” pub rock was sticky in terms of picking up whatever influences it damn well felt like picking up. A characteristic that was not only essential for manufacturing punk; but one that punk took with it to make British punk able to assimilate an enormous variety of other influences. Pub rock was the most cheesy, cringey but honest and straightforward kind of country-tinged roots rock ever recorded.
Pub rock bands had names like Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers, Bees Make Honey, Ducks Deluxe, Starry Eyed and Laughing, Charlie & The Wide Boys, The Fabulous Poodles and The Winkies.6 (And yes, ‘winkie’ means what you think it means; check the album cover if you don’t believe me 😅) The most important artists to emerge from this scene concerning the development of punk rock were Eddie & The Hot Rods, Nick Lowe and Kilburn & The High Roads whose frontman, Ian Dury, would become one of the greatest punk poets. (Some of you may know his classy song, “Sex & Drugs & Rock N’ Roll”)
Links between pub rock and glam rock are also of interest to rock historians. But the greatest artist to have roots in the pub rock scene or style irrespective of their relationship to punk was the Dire Straits; a band whose lyrics give some order to my own novel, Calm Before an Earthquake. Songs like “Sultans of Swing” wouldn’t have been possible at that time and day without the roots rock of the average English pub. This goes to show that pub rock’s influence went well beyond its most famous role in enabling the rise of punk. Two other big names that come to mind are Thin Lizzy and Elvis Costello.
(A quick correction for
regarding Calm Before an Earthquake: Dire Straits are a favorite band of mine. The honor of all-time favorite band goes to the Dropkick Murphys. I will say this, however: the Millennial character, the keeper of the story, may well consider them his favorite band. Or else saw that parts and parcels of the story can be divided by concepts embedded in their music. Anyway, I am comfortable with that interpretation.)Pub rock, by the way, is a good way to put any upper-lip kind of ideologue in their place if they ever claim to care about the working class. Just put on a pub rock compilation or playlist at said snob’s house party and see how long it takes until they beg you to turn it off. I’ll give them three minutes just to be generous.
America, in the meantime, saw a small but emergent number of bands put the influence of MC5 and especially The Stooges to good use; musical innovation that would make Iggy Pop the godfather of punk rock. (Both Mohr and I appear to appreciate the especially persistent influence of the song “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog”) Influenced by the repetitive factory rhythms of Detroit, The Stooges laid the philosophical basis for punk rock’s reaction to the hypocritical, conformist and - dare I say it - “industrialized” society MC5 had in its sights. The Stooges’ genius lay in recognizing the extension of repetitive, factory-like industralization upon the human soul, where it didn’t belong; while at the same time creating a very human art from the influences of mechanization. This is important when understanding the mockery of the system punk rock represented. Just as the factory produced a mass-produced good that was cheaper, identical and ubiquitous next to the quality, individualistic designs produced in the artisanal market industrialization destroyed, so too do human beings follow suit.
Amplified by the failure of the hippies to achieve a revolution through free love and flowers, proto-punk bands (to use a more critical term) had artistic innovation in their sights. The most important bands in that respect were The Modern Lovers and - most of all - the New York Dolls, who completed the bridging of Stooges-type artistry with Kick-Out-The-Jams-style shittiness. Once blended, the artistry was up for the taking. And a lot of bands “took” it. The New York Dolls also had an impact on the pub rock scene.
The real spearheading of punk in America, however, came from The Ramones who began touring in 1974. Even then, they had already worked out the punk aesthetic after (ironically) being inspired to name their band after Paul McCarthy’s pseudonym when the Beatles, before their monstrous fame, were briefly known as the Silver Beetles. (Paul Ramon was McCarthy’s pseudonym)
The Ramones were a lot of things, but even with their penchant for more than the occasional cover song no one could accuse them of being unoriginal. If the MC5 complained about a lack of freedom, the Ramones did something about it. In the meantime, a chemistry emerged where the New York Dolls influenced the artistry of the lower tier of emergent punk bands while The Ramones - roots-driven like the pub rock scene - sailed fast and forward in an accessible ship of their own design.
While credit for the first American punk album should go to The Dictators (Go Girl Crazy!, 1975) whose place in punk history is all too often overlooked, The Ramones were indisputably the first punk band. 1976’s The Ramones was, in the same vein, the first great punk LP if not the first to hit the shelves.7
In the meantime, in 1975, a pub rock band with a classy pub rock name, Bazooka Joe, allowed an up-and-coming band called The Sex Pistols to support them. It was all uphill from there. New York provided the artistry, but London provided the sticky pub rock formula as well as the left-wing ideology that fueled the rise of the Sex Pistols and their Bromley contingent of fans. (punk rock was also embraced, however, by Neo-Nazi skinheads who had a relationship to punk that was all their own; street fights between disagreeable punks soon became a thing, hearkening back to Weimar Germany)
Another pub rock band the Sex Pistols backed, the 101ers, had a lead singer named Joe Strummer. Inspired by what he heard and saw, he would become a legendary name in punk rock after he left the 101ers to become a member of the Clash who, alongside the Sex Pistols and to The Ramones, form the Holy Trinity of greatest punk bands ever. (Though the British might challenge this alignment with a more localized canon, since The Damned were also of great importance)
In the meantime, the big year - 1976 - was running its course. The Ramones released their self-titled debut while the The Sex Pistols released what would be their sole album: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. After their new and crazy bassist, Sid Vicious - who, in an amusing side story, got tossed out of a recording studio by Freddie Mercury after asking him and the other Queen members if they’ve “brought ballet to the masses yet” - died of a drug overdose in 1979, the Sex Pistols remained icons more than anything from that moment forward. But 1977 other punk bands kept the “revolution” going, with The Clash’s self-titled debut an especially important and masterful landmark in the genre’s development.
The exile of Bob Marley in London around that time also led to a curious artistic cross-pollination of reggae and punk. The Police - who also started in the punk rock scene, though few out there would call them punk nowadays - were the most successful band as far as that chemistry is concerned. The crowning moment in the eyes of many was The Clash’s third album, London Calling. (released in 1979) In terms of punk’s undercelebrated diversity of influences, London Calling exemplifies the breadth of the punk rock musical language and all its potential. I don’t know if “phony Beatlemania” did actually bite the dust that year: but The Clash could quite easily convince you that it had.
The punk band with (in my opinion) the strongest artistic-philosophical statement was Devo. Like Kraftwerk did with robots, Devo was represented by devolved human beings. Devo’s anthemic “Jocko Homo” features their great proclamation: “Are we not men? We are Devo! / Are we not men? D-E-V-O.” Devo, in this context, served as a conduit for the following message on behalf of the punk movement: actual biological devolution was preferable to all the hypocrisies, money and bullshit normal society shoved down people’s throats with the understanding that this was some kind of normal, benevolent reality. Its emptiness and lack of meaning were driving people crazy, enough to make a nut like Sid Vicious a beloved idol: was devolution, with all its ramifications as a word, really the worst path? (It did, of course, have some irony to it: I’m just giving one possible reading relevant to this post)
There is a lot more to unpack about the punk period, and those more in the scene can do it better than I can. What one might call the “explosion” of punk subsequently caused punk itself to (arguably) disintegrate (or devolve?) into an explosion of offshoots. The biggest in terms of genre were New Wave (represented by Blondie, Talking Heads, The Police, The Cars and, for that matter, Devo) and Post-Punk, which in turn would spawn Goth Rock. (as represented by Joy Division and by Bauhaus with the latter) This implosion has gone on to profoundly influence and define popular music to this day; Joy Division’s emergence in particular had a very profound effect on the entire industry, since “dark music” was virtually nonexistent before them and hadn’t been since (I would argue) Modest Mussorgsky or certain film soundtracks. Those who listen to early R.E.M. tracks like “Radio Free Europe” can also see how punk played a big role in formulating alternative rock.
Personally, I see the explosion as symptomatic of emotional need: punk rock was angry, but people couldn’t only feel angry all the time. They also needed to feel happy (New Wave) and sad/depressed/melancholic. (Post-Punk)
In Britain, Oi! emerged at some point as a more working-class-oriented punk sound. (Sham 69, The Business and Cock Sparrer are among the best representatives of that style) In the United States, punk rock eventually turned into hardcore though Oi! would also make inroads of its own. (My all-time favorite band, the Dropkick Murphys, came from Boston’s oi! scene) The Misfits, who have a strong cult following, created horror punk.
The West Coast (mostly Los Angeles but also the SF Bay) also developed punk rock scenes that became huge in the 90s: the biggest names in West Coast Punk included X, the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, The Adolescents, Social Distortion, Pennywise, Rancid and NOFX, to name a few. Stylistic offshoots associated with the West Coast include cowpunk (The Long Ryders and, to an extent, Social Distortion, though some might debate that); ska punk (Operation Ivy and Sublime); and pop-punk, represented most famously by Blink-182, The Offspring and Berkeley, CA’s very own Green Day. I am obliged, as a Berkeleyan, to point out that calling Green Day punk has been a crime for some time now even among fans of their older stuff; but like it or not they came from the punk scene same as the others.
Michael Mohr’s recently released debut novel, The Crew, is set in the waning days of the West Coast punk scene which also represents the end of the punk era in general. A time Mohr was just old enough to experience and I was just young enough to miss (for better or for worse) as everyone in the Bay Area had become gangster rap sycophants by the time I was in high school.
Punk rock, unfortunately (though understandably), decided to take partisan sides when President George W. Bush launched wars in Afghanistan and, most egregiously, Iraq. In the music itself (not counting the whole fascist/anti-fascist dynamic which is a different affair) punk rockers had (on the whole) been careful about making sure their music focused on “the system” and “the Man,” irrespective of who was in charge. (An exception was Anarcho-Punk, an exceptionally shitty offshoot that had no problem taking partisan sides) It didn’t matter if a Republican or a Democrat was in charge: both were “the Man.” In the US, the glory days of punk took place both under a Republican president (Gerald R. Ford) and a Democrat president (Jimmy Carter). Both were “the Man,” and both were part of “the system.”
The issue with taking a side is: it’s a double-edged sword. When you take sides to go against “a Man” rather than “the Man,” one automatically takes sides with “the other Man.” In other words, punk rock engaged in a treasonous compromise and sold what was left of its soul after failing to comprehend what is, in fact, a very elementary equation. (Too much devolution, perhaps) This is why nowadays, the Internet likes to call a noteworthy anti-establishment band from the latter days of punk Rage On Behalf of The Machine, rather than Rage Against The Machine. Some punk bands - I believe Pennywise succeeded at this - broke out of that Bush-era position and saved their integrity if only for themselves. (To quote their 2012 song Let Us Hear Your Voice: “There’s a rebellion on ice/and we’ve paid the price”) But they are survivors, nothing more, as are newer bands like The Interrupters who - awesome as they are - I suspect have many Antifa members as fans. And if any “group” lives to serve The Man, it’s Antifa.
That, as far as I’m concerned, is where the Saga of Punk Rock meets its end as a societal force. When George W. stabbed America’s reputation in the back - the country whose freedoms MC5 stood for - punk rock killed itself. To quote a song called “Homecoming” from Green Day’s much-maligned yet artistically superb 2004 rock opera, American Idiot: “[St.] Jimmy died today / he blew his brains out into the bay.” (In an article from the music magazine Guitar Legends, St. Jimmy has been described as a "swaggering punk rock freedom fighter par excellence.")
Michael Mohr’s excellent novel captures the SoCal punk rock scene (Ventura County in particular) in that last moment before the ultimate, “earthquake-like” demise. As a last note, I invite you to check out Mohr’s favorite band Social Distortion. You might recognize their song “Story of My Life,” which had at times managed to escape the ruts and gutters of the punk underground in the radio era. They are also a favorite of mine. But not only is their music accessible to those unaccustomed to the punk sound: it is unusually mature without losing any ‘cred.’ (As far as I know) A stark indication that while punks were all too often their own worst enemy, it did not change the ultimate truth and meaning of what punk stood for.
The great tragedy of punk is that it came into the world too soon. Subculture and scene aside, it is today that we need punk and its cherishing of nonconformity, more than it was needed even in the late 70s. We need it more than ever. But while its practitioners are either jaded or ethereal, the music remains.
And no one will discuss the Australian side of punk rock history, a sad thing for fans of The Saints who are to 70s punk what the Easybeats are to 60s rock and AC/DC to hard rock.
Vulgarity in pop music was, ironically, one of the few “accomplishments” the hippie movement could lay claim to. Fans of the Jefferson Airplane album Volunteers will know what I’m talking about.
This isn’t so far from Christian thought as it might seem when one understands that, from that perspective, the ‘American ruse’ is founded in large part upon an embracing of the sin of greed and a failed attempt to reconcile Christian morality with the glorification of the sin of greed. MC5 don’t mention the legacy of Mammon in the song, but the base hypocrisy is the same. Later classic punk songs would take note of the consequences of moneylust, be it “Career Opportunities” by the Clash, “Dead End Job” and “Landlord” by The Police or “Alternative Ulster” by Stiff Little Fingers.
Credit for coining this fallacy - titled ‘two wrongs make a who cares’ - goes to Devon Tracey, also known as Atheism-is-Unstoppable.
It is also worth noting that the founder of CBGB, the greatest New York punk venue, originally started it as a country music venue; nice idea, wrong city, but if he was aware of country rock groups like Eggs Over Easy making ends meet in Greenwich Village it would explain his logic.
Tragically, the Winkies were unable to capitalize upon an opportunity to record and be produced by Brian Eno, though they did accompany him on his one-and-only solo tour.
While albums like The Ramones were as important as they were excellent, it is worth noting that punk rock has also been very singles-driven for much of its history. It is both a mockery of chart singles and a reaction to the album-rock era in which punk emerged.
Extremely thorough. The only thing you left out was Ian MacKaye and the "straight edge" scene. I always thought he was cool. I was a huge Police fan, but mostly because they were singing about spiritual things. As you can imagine, having known me for a year now, the darkness and alienation of Punk never had any appeal to a guy like me. But I read about it and informed myself about it. It certainly added some vigorous, alert-and-aware energy to a decade of mellow music and disco -- and some of us at least welcomed that.