Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" piece notwithstanding, funny how Punk came to be so associated with British Rock culture in the mainstream... as, originally it comes from US slang describing a small time crook, a downtown hoodlum or a juvenile delinquent and was first widely heard in Hollywood Gangster movies of the 1930s usually involving the acts of Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney... and especially "The Dead End Kids" series, the street-wise granddaddies of punk!
Then, a group of Rolling Stone magazine rock critic dissidents (Lester Bangs, Greg Shaw, Lenny Kaye...) came to coin the term "Punk-rock" to generally describe the music of post British-Invasion/ pre-Hippie garage-bands in the States : the first time the term was ever used to describe that music was when critic Dave Marsh (who used to write for 16 Magazine in the Sixties!) wrote about ? and the Mysterians (96 Tears) still playing two or three chord stuff while most of their contemporaries had graduated to Heavy or Progressive... in the 1971 may edition of Creem ("America's Only Rock'n'Roll Magazine"); he writes about them being one of the major exponents of "punk rock".
While there were talks about "bands playing in their garage" here and there on sixties magazines (as early as Surf instrumental music!), one had to wait for 1972 and the fanzine "Flash" to classify ten sixties albums as being Punk Top Ten... That same year, Lenny Kaye used the term in the liner notes to the cult compilation : Nuggets, in reference to sixties garage-rock bands like The Standells, The Sonics or The Seeds. Greg Shaw's Bomp! fanzine (... yeah! Actually "Punk-rock" was born and bred in Fanzines!) uses the term randomly all during the Seventies, applying it to sixties Psychedelic-rock bands too. In may 1973, Billy Altman finally launched Punk Magazine.
That's where the confusion starts : "Punk" was totally an underground thing, like a code word for true Rock'n'roll fans in the know, that were fed-up with pompous Stadium Rock operas and what the mainstream Rock stations were serving them as "Classic Rock"... they had to search for their records in thrift stores and record bins out of the way, and loved their music obscure but retro. And then it came to mean a little arty scene out of New York specialised in situationnist Rock happenings (Television, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Dictators... ultimately the Ramones who are the true inventors of the Punk-rock sound as we now know; since the first British Punk bands in the aftermath of Glam, like the Damned, the Sex Pistols or the Clash were all fans of Nuggets and copying the Ramones' playing! Richard Hell actually created the Punk look with spiked hairdo and ripped clothes...), an intellectual movement that catered around CBGB's in Lower Manhattan from 1974 onwards.
Malcolm Mc Laren, who was a Factory admirer trying to emulate his idol Andy Warhol by doing with the Sex Pistols what Andy had done with the Velvet Underground ten years before, brought the whole "Punk" art concept back to London where it really hit the fan, developping into a full blown Youth movement and Social phenomenon, fuelled no doubt by the economy crisis situation going on at the time in Thatcher's England.
And since it was all started by rock critic dissidents raving about it in fanzines, the general media came to mix it all up, calling "Punk" the music played by these new bands (while it actually and originally meant what music these bands were favoring and listening to rather than playing : original Garage-rock of forgotten US sixties' bands!)... Real Kids bassist Jeff Jensen (a cult Boston band equivalent to New York's Ramones...) remembers that at a gig in 1974 : « A music critic for one of the free entertainment magazines at the time saw us and gave us an excellent review, calling us a « punk group »... We all more or less looked at each other saying : « Punk? ...What is that? ».
The only historic bands that truly made the junction between 77's Punk and '66 Garage were Detroit's MC5 and especially the Stooges :
... No wonder when the late Greg Shaw (R.I.P.) started the cult "Pebbles" compilation series in Nugget's wake in 1979, by then he had to add the caption : "Original Sixties Punk Classics" or "Original Artyfacts From The First Punk Era", as if to set the record straight and going back full circle as the true music purist he always was; Bless his Soul!
This is Very Proper- thanks!
Posted by: Linda Heck | January 02, 2012 at 10:38 PM
The term 'punk' had long been in use in US prisons by the 1940s— when hard-boiled crime writers whose style was mimicked by noir and crime writers in Hollywood, adopted it as slang for what we might now call 'lady-boys', the almost feminine male who becomes an object of desire to masculine inmates. The younger the 'punk' the fresher the meat, the better. The Dead End Kids were 'jailbait' by any other name, but 'punks' are what they became on screen. Burroughs used the term in that context, too. I'm afraid that I have to argue about McLaren bringing anything back to Britain, and especially not any kind of 'plan', other than trying to create a band who might upset people in the way that his first idol Elvis (see the first McLaren/Westwood emporium Let It Rock) but more recently the New York Dolls had —who were copying Alice Cooper, and not the VU at the time. Cooper called his band 'the nail in the coffin of hippies' in 1970, Lydon mimed to a Cooper song at his Pistols audition, Matlock writes about the impact School's Out had on a generation of pro to-punks in I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol. McLaren was in the right place at the right time, took full advantage of what unfolded and pretended it was all aprt of a 'plan'. It wasn't.
Posted by: Johnny Morgan | August 17, 2012 at 07:41 AM
By "plan", I meant thay Mc Laren had an agenda of his own... I don't known what goes in his head for not knowing the guy personally (do you?) but, he reportedly was a Control-freak (just like Jagger in the Stones was). He was an admirer of Warhol's and tried to do with the Pistols what Warhol did with the Velvets, my comparison had nothing to do with the music... The Pistols were pre-fabricated to begin with.
All I wanted to point out with that article is that "Punk rock" originally had nothing to with what it has come to mean to the general public via the mainstream media : it was originally an underground term used to describe the music and style of US sixties Garage-bands, and in that sense it got hi-jacked to become a marketing label. Period :)
Posted by: Astro Lemocker | August 17, 2012 at 11:48 AM