punk rock

Though I've touched on the fashion of the era (see; 'clothes horse'), there is much, much more to my 'punk' story. Popular music leading up to this time was fuzzily divided into two camps, both bloated legacies of the British Invasion (which was essentially repackaged American Blues). Half the kids in suburbia who took music seriously were having 'listening experiences' on their head-phones with groups like Jethro Tull and Yes- dreamy, poetic lyrics punctuated by slickly synthesized instrumentals and ten minute drum solos. The other half, as drawn to shiny objects as they were to outrageous personalities, were having a more direct experience with the music of Roxy Music and David Bowie, dressing and behaving like their idols. Participation in any of it generally required going to see them in sports venues, with the tallest people in the world in front of you, the scariest people in the world behind you, and flaming projectiles passing overhead. An American rebellion against this out-of-touch super-band stadium thing had already started with bands like the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges, long enough before this time that their records were starting to show up in the bargain bins at Woolworth's, has-beens before they ever were. Lou Reed and John Cale survived the Velvets to become personalities in their own right, their early solo efforts drearily esoteric yet still, enough to tide us over until something more user-friendly came along. This limping deconstruction from polished and over-produced to gutsy and raw is most brilliantly narrated by the artists themselves and their satellite of hangers-on in the book "Please Kill Me- The Uncencored Oral History Of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The scene which I am qualified to narrate, called by some the beginning of this new music and by others the end of it, reached a creative climax in 1976/1977 on the Bowery in New York at a club called CBGB's (the possessive form having no reasonable explaination). This was about a year after the wildly outrageous New York Dolls were tragically re-themed and mis-managed into oblivion by smarmy London boutique owner Malcolm McLaren and less than a year before he again pressed style way beyond substance with the calamitously imported debut (and simultaneous demise) of the Sex Pistols. If there is a Harold Hecuba in the story of Rock and Roll (see; "Here On Gilligans Island" by Russell Johnson with Steve Cox, pp220), it is he. After the Dolls, it was the Ramones who snatched new music from the jaws of mediocrity (witness- the meteoric rise of Peter Frampton) and focused it into deeply satisfying bursts of noise and frantic motion lasting barely over two minutes at a pop. History dutifully records the New York bands like Television and Blondie, and they were the catalyst for every bored scene-ster in the country to climb into an ugly car and drive to New York City to see what it was all about, but exciting music was coming from all over. A typical weekend at CB..'s would almost certainly feature the Ramones- notorious for stopping in the middle of a song to argue with each other; probably The Cramps, with an original line-up featuring Brian Gregory who cleverly butched-up his on-stage persona by spitting in several directions at once (dryer seating toward house right) and an absolute lunatic drummer named Muriel; and the Talking Heads, irreconcilable to the backdrop, with their Hush-Puppies, expensive band gear, and methodically organized set-list. I usually traveled in the company of girls with enough make-up in their purses for me to forge the hand-stamp of that evening, which enabled us free entrance. Girls like Nancy Spungen were there to bag a musician boyfriend, most of them hanging outside to maximize the likelihood of meeting guys like David Johansen and Johnny Thunders (too famous to endure the press of another band's fans inside), to avoid being tipped off their stilettos, and presumably to keep their outfits dry. And if the band was any good, you could hear them just as well from out front. Concepts of personal space dramatically disentegrated upon entrance. (My own tactic for managing the humidity was just to stay wet, periodically baptizing myself from the sink). Though the Sex Pistols tour of the southern U.S. was tracked like a storm on the nightly news, it fizzled out before they ever made it intact to N.Y.C. A couple of their singles which trumpeted the release of 'Never Mind The Bullocks' were on the jukebox and the photo spreads of mohawked English fans were enough to usher the look and the attitude from across the Atlantic. Television co-founder Richard Hell was the American arch-type for the original look which owed more to a lack of laundry skills than it did to anarchist leanings. A week of Voidiods' gigs saw the same striped shirt on the cover of 'Blank Generation' pass from one to the other of them. And I can state with no fear of exaggerating that the Voidiods smelled as loudly as they played. My own look was marginally Hellish with one foot in David Bowie's 'Thin White Duke', though the combined effect was neither, but instead something we callously referred to as 'bag-man chic'. My roommate at the time, Chuck, leaned more heavily toward the safety pinned, dog-collared aesthetic. He mixed it up a bit with fish nets and stilettos which proved a remarkable advance for him in the sport of boy-baiting. Acts like Elvis Costello (whose ass received the tip of my army boot the night he pushed me out of his way to get to the bar), The Damned, Magazine, and Ultravox were among the first Brits to actually play here. Though punk in America has come to be most strongly brand-identified with it's angrier British step-child, musically they barely caused a ripple. It actually wasn't until some time later when the Psychedelic Furs had pared away all the socio-political posturing and delivered some honest tunes that the UK became relevant to the American club scene. But I digress into the subjective. To list a few of the bands who lacked the mass-appeal of the Ramones and Blondie yet have managed to pierce through the fog of beer and quaaludes which has compromised my memory of so many others; Lance Loud of PBS's "An American Family" fame toured with an adorable band called The Mumps; Paul Zone's The Fast, a show that was perhaps too New Jersey for my taste yet preceded a memorable evening backstage hanging out with the Cramps; The Marbles; (Jim) Skafish who wowed us all with "Disgracing The Family Name" (which he demonstrated in a silk babushka with red lipstick smeared into his cheeks); and The Dead Boys, who, along with most of their fans, were almost too idiotic to suffer, though I did- (and was that Chuck I saw gnawing on the other end of a piece of raw liver with Stiv Bator?). Two albums with Bowie had sort of homogenized Iggy Pop into something finally marketable. With seemingly no evidence that the clock had ever stopped on his path of notoriety, he took back to the stage in small clubs to rightly displace Lou Reed as the true Godfather of Punk. In 1980, I think, Michael and I went to see him at the Hot Club in Philadelphia, causing a stir of our own- we wore leather jackets and jockstraps, checking our pants at the door. We both might have predicted that Iggy would wear just that outfit to perform the following night in N.Y.C. We spent the next four years taking our first stab at being grown-ups with a real job- an ironic twist landing us in the unlikely role of housekeepers for Deborah Spungen, mother of freshly-murdered Nancy. Soon enough Michael began singing for a band which ushered in the next chapter of punk-inspired mystagoguery for us. I don't recall that the mid-eighties ever found a snappy designation like 'punk'. Too many artists where on their way up, out, or back again to be assigned a cohesive motive- though ours was just to postpone for as long as possible assimilation into Ronald Reagan's strange new world. Michael earned his mark on now worthless slabs of vinyl as yet another 'Also Rocked', though the mere fact that he out-lived three of his band's managers is success enough. (I'll save musings on that sometimes remarkable post-punk era for later). I have to say that it worries me a bit listening to our son pound away on his drum kit, and at the same moment wondering what gutter Muriel is likely to have ended up in. I met the Cramps again backstage at a theater where I used to work, at over a decade later- I forgot to ask them.