Punk rock is a
rock
music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United
States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Rooted in
garage rock and other forms of what is now known
as
protopunk music, punk rock bands
eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They
created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs,
stripped-down instrumentation, and often political,
anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces
a
DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many
bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through
informal channels.
By late 1976, bands such as the
Ramones, in
New York City, and the
Sex Pistols and
The Clash, in London, were recognized as
the vanguard of a new musical movement. The following year saw punk
rock spreading around the world. Punk quickly, though briefly,
became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the
most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject
association with the mainstream. An associated
punk subculture emerged, expressing youthful
rebellion and characterized by distinctive
styles of clothing and adornment and a variety
of
anti-authoritarian
ideologies.
By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more aggressive styles such
as
hardcore and
Oi!
had become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians identifying
with or inspired by punk also pursued a broad range of other
variations, giving rise to
post-punk and
the
alternative rock movement. By
the turn of the century,
pop punk had been
adopted by the mainstream, with bands such as
Green Day and
The
Offspring bringing the genre widespread popularity.
Characteristics
Philosophy
The first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively modern,
distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early
1970s rock. According to
Ramones drummer
Tommy Ramone, "In its initial form, a
lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately,
what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the
likes of
Hendrix started noodling away.
Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that
what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n'
roll."
John Holmstrom, founding
editor of
Punk magazine,
recalls feeling "punk rock had to come along because the rock scene
had become so tame that [acts] like
Billy
Joel and
Simon and Garfunkel
were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock
and roll meant this wild and rebellious music." In critic
Robert Christgau's description, "It was
also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism
and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth."
Patti Smith, in contrast, suggests in the
documentary
25 Years of Punk that the hippies and the punk
rockers were linked by a common anti-establishment mentality.
Throughout punk rock history, technical accessibility and a
DIY spirit have been prized. In the
early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to
what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical
effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands.
Musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to
Holmstrom, punk rock was "rock and roll by people who didn't have
very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express
themselves through music". In December 1976, the English
fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous
illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is
another, this is a third. Now form a band." The title of a 1980
single by New York punk band
The Stimulators, "Loud Fast
Rules!", inscribed a catchphrase for punk's basic musical
approach.
Some of British punk rock's leading figures made a show of
rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader
culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated
predecessors: "No
Elvis,
Beatles or the
Rolling Stones in 1977", declared
The Clash song "1977". The previous year,
when the punk rock revolution began in Great Britain, was to be
both a musical and a cultural "Year Zero". Even as nostalgia was
discarded, many in the scene adopted a
nihilistic attitude summed up by the
Sex Pistols slogan "No Future"; in the later
words of one observer, amid the unemployment and social unrest in
1977, "punk's nihilistic swagger was the most thrilling thing in
England." While "self-imposed
alienation" was common among "drunk punks"
and "gutter punks", there was always a tension between their
nihilistic outlook and the "radical leftist utopianism" of bands
such as
Crass, who found positive, liberating
meaning in the movement. As a Clash associate describes singer
Joe Strummer's outlook, "Punk rock is
meant to be our freedom. We're meant to be able to do what we want
to do."
The issue of authenticity is important in the punk subculture—the
pejorative term "
poseur" is applied to those
who associate with punk and adopt its stylistic attributes but are
deemed not to share or understand the underlying values and
philosophy. Scholar Daniel S. Traber argues that "attaining
authenticity in the punk identity can be difficult"; as the punk
scene matured, he observes, eventually "[e]veryone got called a
poseur".
Musical and lyrical elements
Punk rock bands often emulate the bare musical structures and
arrangements of 1960s
garage rock.
Typical punk rock instrumentation includes one or two electric
guitars, an electric bass, and a drum kit, along with vocals. Punk
rock songs tend to be shorter than those of other popular genres—on
the Ramones'
debut album,
for instance, half of the fourteen tracks are under two minutes
long. Most early punk rock songs retained a traditional rock 'n'
roll
verse-chorus form and 4/4
time signature. However, punk rock
bands in the movement's second wave and afterward have often broken
from this format. In critic Steven Blush's description, "The Sex
Pistols were still rock'n'roll...like the craziest version of
Chuck Berry.
Hardcore was a radical departure from that. It
wasn't verse-chorus rock. It dispelled any notion of what
songwriting is supposed to be. It's its own form."
Punk rock vocals sometimes sound nasal, and lyrics are often
shouted instead of sung in a conventional sense, particularly in
hardcore styles. The vocal approach is characterized by a lack of
variety; shifts in pitch, volume, or intonational style are
relatively infrequent—the Sex Pistols'
Johnny Rotten constituting a significant
exception. Complicated guitar solos are considered self-indulgent
and unnecessary, although basic guitar breaks are common. Guitar
parts tend to include highly distorted
power chords or
barre
chords, creating a characteristic sound described by Christgau
as a "buzzsaw drone". Some punk rock bands take a
surf rock approach with a lighter,
twangier guitar tone. Others, such as
Robert Quine, lead guitarist of
The Voidoids, have employed a wild, "
gonzo" attack, a style that stretches back
through
The Velvet
Underground to the 1950s recordings of
Ike Turner. Bass guitar lines are often
uncomplicated; the quintessential approach is a relentless,
repetitive "forced rhythm", although some punk rock bass
players—such as
Mike Watt of
The Minutemen and
Firehose—emphasize more technical bass
lines. Bassists often use a
pick due to the
rapid succession of notes, which makes
fingerpicking impractical. Drums typically
sound heavy and dry, and often have a minimal set-up. Compared to
other forms of rock,
syncopation is much
less the rule. Hardcore drumming tends to be especially fast.
Production tends to be minimalistic, with tracks sometimes laid
down on home tape recorders or simple four-track portastudios. The
typical objective is to have the recording sound unmanipulated and
"real", reflecting the commitment and "authenticity" of a live
performance. Punk recordings thus often have a
lo-fi quality, with the sound left relatively
unpolished in the
mastering process;
recordings may contain dialogue between band members, false starts,
and background noise.
Punk rock lyrics are typically frank and confrontational; compared
to the lyrics of other popular music genres, they frequently
comment on social and political issues. Trend-setting songs such as
The Clash's "
Career
Opportunities" and
Chelsea's
"Right to Work" deal with unemployment and the grim realities of
urban life. Especially in early British punk, a central goal was to
outrage and shock the mainstream. The Sex Pistols classics
"
Anarchy in the U.K." and
"
God Save the
Queen" openly disparage the British political system and social
mores. There is also a characteristic strain of anti-sentimental
depictions of relationships and sex, exemplified by "Love Comes in
Spurts", written by
Richard Hell and
recorded by him with The Voidoids.
Anomie,
variously expressed in the poetic terms of Hell's "Blank
Generation" and the bluntness of the Ramones' "Now I Wanna Sniff
Some Glue", is a common theme. Identifying punk with such topics
aligns with the view expressed by
V.
Vale, founder of San Francisco fanzine
Search and Destroy: "Punk was a
total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the
black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual
taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any
generation in such a thorough way." However, many punk rock lyrics
deal in more traditional rock 'n' roll themes of courtship,
heartbreak, and hanging out; the approach ranges from the deadpan,
aggressive simplicity of Ramones standards such as "I Wanna Be Your
Boyfriend" to the more unambiguously sincere style of many later
pop punk groups.
Visual and other elements
The classic punk rock look among male U.S. musicians harkens back
to the T-shirt, motorcycle jacket, and jeans ensemble favored by
American
greasers of the 1950s
associated with the
rockabilly scene and
by British
rockers of the 1960s.
The cover of the Ramones' 1976 debut album, featuring a shot of the
band by
Punk photographer Roberta Bayley, set forth the
basic elements of a style that was soon widely emulated by rock
musicians both punk and nonpunk. Richard Hell's more androgynous,
ragamuffin look—and reputed invention of the
safety-pin aesthetic—was a major
influence on Sex Pistols impresario
Malcolm McLaren and, in turn, British punk
style. McLaren's partner, fashion designer,
Vivienne Westwood, credits Johnny Rotten
as the first British punk to rip his shirt, and Sex Pistols bassist
Sid Vicious as the first to use safety
pins. Early female punk musicians displayed styles ranging from
Siouxsie Sioux's bondage gear to
Patti Smith's "straight-from-the-gutter androgyny". The former
proved much more influential on female fan styles. Over time,
tattoos,
piercings, and metal-studded
and -spiked accessories became increasingly common elements of
punk fashion among both musicians and
fans, a "style of adornment calculated to disturb and outrage". The
typical male punk haircut was originally short and choppy; the
Mohawk later emerged as a
characteristic style. Those in hardcore scenes often adopt a
skinhead look.

UK punks, circa 1986
The characteristic stage performance style of male punk musicians
does not deviate significantly from the macho postures classically
associated with rock music. Female punk musicians broke more
clearly from earlier styles. Scholar John Strohm suggests that they
did so by creating personas of a type conventionally seen as
masculine: "They adopted a tough, unladylike pose that borrowed
more from the macho swagger of sixties garage bands than from the
calculated bad-girl image of bands like
The
Runaways." Scholar Dave Laing describes how bassist
Gaye Advert adopted fashion elements associated
with male musicians only to generate a stage persona readily
consumed as "sexy". Laing focuses on more innovative and
challenging performance styles, seen in the various erotically
destabilizing approaches of Siouxsie Sioux,
The Slits'
Ari Up, and
X-Ray Spex's
Poly
Styrene.
The lack of emphatic syncopation led
punk
dance to "deviant" forms. The characteristic style was
originally the
pogo. Sid Vicious,
before he became the Sex Pistols' bassist, is credited with
initiating the pogo in Britain as an attendee at one of their
concerts.
Moshing is typical at hardcore
shows. The lack of conventional dance rhythms was a central factor
in limiting punk's mainstream commercial impact.
Breaking down the distance between performer and audience is
central to the punk ethic. Fan participation at concerts is thus
important; during the movement's first heyday, it was often
provoked in an adversarial manner—apparently perverse, but
appropriately "punk". First-wave British punk bands such as the
Pistols and
The Damned insulted
and otherwise goaded the audience into intense reactions. Laing has
identified three primary forms of audience physical response to
goading: can throwing, stage invasion, and spitting or "gobbing".
In the hardcore realm, stage invasion is often a prelude to
stage diving. In addition to the
numerous fans who have started or joined punk bands, audience
members also become important participants via the scene's many
amateur periodicals—in England, according to Laing, punk "was the
first musical genre to spawn
fanzines in any
significant numbers".
Pre-history
Garage rock and mod
In the early and mid-1960s, garage rock bands that came to be
recognized as punk rock's progenitors began springing up in many
different locations around North America.
The Kingsmen, a garage band from Portland,
Oregon, had a breakout hit with their 1963 cover of "
Louie, Louie", cited as "punk rock's defining
ur-text". The minimalist sound of
many garage rock bands was influenced by the harder-edged wing of
the
British Invasion.
The Kinks' hit singles of 1964, "
You Really Got Me" and "
All Day and All of the Night",
have been described as "predecessors of the whole three-chord
genre—the Ramones' 1978 'I Don't Want You,' for instance, was pure
Kinks-by-proxy". In 1965,
The Who quickly
progressed from their debut single, "
I
Can't Explain", a virtual Kinks clone, to "
My Generation". Though it had
little impact on the American charts, The Who's mod anthem presaged
a more cerebral mix of musical ferocity and rebellious posture that
characterized much early British punk rock: John Reed describes The
Clash's emergence as a "tight ball of energy with both an image and
rhetoric reminiscent of a young
Pete
Townshend—speed obsession, pop-art clothing, art school
ambition". The Who and fellow mods
The
Small Faces were among the few rock elders acknowledged by the
Sex Pistols. By 1966, mod was already in decline. U.S. garage rock
began to lose steam within a couple of years, but the aggressive
musical approach and outsider attitude of "garage
psych" bands like
The
Seeds were picked up and emphasized by groups that were later
seen as the crucial figures of protopunk.
Protopunk
In 1969,
debut albums by two Michigan
-based bands
appeared that are commonly regarded as the central protopunk
records. In January, Detroit's
MC5
released
Kick Out the
Jams. "Musically the group is intentionally crude and
aggressively raw", wrote critic
Lester
Bangs in
Rolling Stone:
Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each
other in their primitive two-chord structures. You've heard all
this before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and
the Kingsmen. The difference here ... is in the hype, the
thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing which
conceals these scrapyard vistas of clichés and ugly
noise. ... "I Want You Right Now" sounds exactly (down to
the lyrics) like a song called "I Want You" by the Troggs, a British group who came on with a
similar sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember
"Wild
Thing"?)
That
August, The Stooges, from Ann
Arbor
, premiered with a self-titled album. According to
critic
Greil Marcus, the band, led by
singer
Iggy Pop, created "the sound of
Chuck Berry's Airmobile—after thieves
stripped it for parts". The album was produced by
John Cale, a former member of New York's
experimental rock group
The
Velvet Underground. Having earned a "reputation as the first
underground rock band", VU inspired, directly or indirectly, many
of those involved in the creation of punk rock.
In the early 1970s, the
New York
Dolls updated the original wildness of 1950s rock 'n' roll in a
fashion that later became known as
glam
punk. The New York duo
Suicide
played spare, experimental music with a confrontational stage act
inspired by that of The Stooges.
At the Coventry club in the New York City
borough of Queens
, The Dictators used rock as a vehicle for
wise-ass attitude and humor. In Boston,
The Modern Lovers, led by Velvet
Underground devotee
Jonathan
Richman, gained attention with a minimalistic style.
In 1974,
an updated garage rock scene began to coalesce around the newly
opened Rathskeller club in Kenmore Square
. Among the leading acts were the
Real Kids, founded by former Modern Lover
John Felice;
Willie
Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, whose frontman had been a
member of the Velvet Underground for a few months in 1971; and
Mickey Clean and the Mezz. In 1974, as well, the Detroit band
Death—made up of three African
American brothers—recorded "scorching blasts of feral ur-punk", but
couldn't arrange a release deal.
In Ohio, a small but very influential
underground rock scene emerged, led by Devo in
Akron
and Kent
and Cleveland's The
Electric Eels, Mirrors and Rocket from the Tombs. In 1975,
Rocket from the Tombs split into
Pere Ubu
and
Frankenstein. The Electric Eels
and Mirrors both broke up, and The Styrenes emerged from the
fallout.
Britain's
Deviants, in the late
1960s, played in a range of psychedelic styles with a satiric,
anarchic edge and a penchant for
situationist-style spectacle
presaging the Sex Pistols by almost a decade. In 1970, the act
evolved into the
Pink Fairies, which
carried on in a similar vein. With his
Ziggy
Stardust persona,
David Bowie made
artifice and exaggeration central—elements, again, that were picked
up by the Pistols and certain other punk acts. The
Doctors of Madness built on Bowie's
presentation concepts, while moving musically in the direction that
would become identified with punk. Bands in London's
pub rock scene stripped the music back to its
basics, playing hard, R&B-influenced rock 'n' roll. By 1974,
the scene's top act,
Dr.
Feelgood, was paving the way for others such as
The Stranglers and
Cock Sparrer that would play a role in the punk
explosion. Among the pub rock bands that formed that year was
The 101'ers, whose lead singer would soon
adopt the name Joe Strummer.
Bands
anticipating the forthcoming movement were appearing as far afield
as Düsseldorf
, West Germany, where "punk before punk" band
NEU! formed in 1971, building on the Krautrock tradition of groups such as Can. In Japan, the anti-establishment Zunō
Keisatsu (Brain Police) mixed garage psych and folk. The combo
regularly faced censorship challenges, their live act at least once
including onstage masturbation.
A new generation of Australian garage rock
bands, inspired mainly by The Stooges and MC5, was coming even
closer to the sound that would soon be called "punk": In Brisbane
, The Saints also recalled the raw live
sound of the British Pretty Things,
who had made a notorious tour of Australia and New Zealand in
1965. Radio Birdman,
cofounded by Detroit expatriate Deniz Tek
in 1974, was playing gigs to a small but fanatical following in
Sydney
.
Origin of the term punk
Prior to the mid-1970s,
punk, a centuries-old word of obscure
etymology, was commonly used to describe
"a young male hustler, a gangster, a hoodlum, or a ruffian". As
Legs McNeil explains, "On TV, if you
watched cop shows,
Kojak,
Baretta, when the cops finally
catch the mass murderer, they'd say, 'you dirty Punk.' It was what
your teachers would call you. It meant that you were the lowest."
The first known use of the phrase
punk rock appeared in
the
Chicago Tribune on
March 22, 1970, attributed to
Ed Sanders,
cofounder of New York's anarcho-prankster band
The Fugs. Sanders was quoted describing a solo
album of his as "punk rock—redneck sentimentality". In the December
1970 issue of
Creem, Lester Bangs,
mocking more mainstream rock musicians, ironically referred to Iggy
Pop as "that Stooge punk". Suicide's
Alan
Vega credits this usage with inspiring his duo to bill its gigs
as a "punk mass" for the next couple of years.
Dave Marsh was the first music critic to
employ the term
punk rock: in the May 1971 issue of
Creem, he described
? and
the Mysterians, one of the most popular 1960s garage rock acts,
as giving a "landmark exposition of punk rock". In June 1972, the
fanzine
Flash included a "Punk Top Ten" of 1960s albums.
That year,
Lenny Kaye used the term in
the liner notes of the anthology album
Nuggets to refer to 1960s garage bands such as
The Standells,
The
Sonics, and The Seeds. The fanzine
Bomp! also used
punk in this
sense. In February 1973, Terry Atkinson of the
Los Angeles Times, reviewing the
debut album by a hard rock band,
Aerosmith, declared that it "achieves all that
punk-rock bands strive for but most miss." Three months later,
Billy Altman launched the short-lived
punk magazine.
In May 1974,
Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn
reviewed the second New York Dolls album,
Too Much Too Soon. "I
told ya the New York Dolls were the real thing", he wrote. "And
now, we've got the album to prove it.... It is, in fact, perhaps
the best example of raw, thumb-your-nose-at-the-world, punk rock
since the Rolling Stones' 'Exile on Main Street.'" Bassist Jeff
Jensen of Boston's Real Kids reports of a show that year, "A
reviewer for one of the free entertainment magazines of the time
caught the act and gave us a great review, calling us a 'punk
band.' ... [W]e all sort of looked at each other and said,
'What's punk?'"
By 1975,
punk was being used to describe acts as diverse
as the
Patti Smith Group—with lead
guitarist Lenny Kaye—the
Bay City
Rollers, and
Bruce
Springsteen.
As the scene at New York's CBGB
club
attracted notice, a name was sought for the developing
sound. Club owner
Hilly Kristal
called the movement "street rock"; John Holmstrom credits
Aquarian magazine with
using
punk "to describe what was going on at CBGBs".
Holmstrom, McNeil, and Ged Dunn's magazine
Punk, which debuted at the end of 1975,
was crucial in codifying the term. "It was pretty obvious that the
word was getting very popular", Holmstrom later remarked. "We
figured we'd take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted
to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock 'n' roll. We
wanted the fun and liveliness back."
Early history
New York City
The
origins of New York's punk rock scene can be traced back to such
sources as late 1960s trash culture
and an early 1970s underground rock
movement centered on the Mercer Arts
Center in Greenwich
Village
, where the New York
Dolls performed. In early 1974, a new scene began to develop
around the CBGB
club, also
in lower Manhattan. At its
core was
Television, described by
critic John Walker as "the ultimate garage band with pretensions".
Their influences ranged from the Velvet Underground to the staccato
guitar work of
Dr. Feelgood's
Wilko Johnson. The band's
bassist/singer,
Richard Hell, created a
look with cropped, ragged hair, ripped T-shirts, and black leather
jackets credited as the basis for punk rock visual style. In April
1974,
Patti Smith, a member of the
Mercer Arts Center crowd and a friend of Hell's, came to CBGB for
the first time to see the band perform. A veteran of independent
theater and performance poetry, Smith was developing an
intellectual, feminist take on rock 'n' roll. On June 5, she
recorded the single "
Hey Joe"/"
Piss Factory", featuring Television guitarist
Tom Verlaine; released on her own Mer
Records label, it heralded the scene's
do
it yourself (DIY) ethic and has often been cited as the first
punk rock record.
By August, Smith and Television were gigging
together at another downtown New York club, Max's Kansas
City
.
Out in
Forest
Hills, Queens
, several miles from lower Manhattan, the members of
a newly formed band adopted a common surname. Drawing on
sources ranging from the Stooges to
The
Beatles and
The Beach Boys to
Herman's Hermits and 1960s
girl groups, the
Ramones
condensed rock 'n' roll to its primal level: "'1-2-3-4!'
bass-player
Dee Dee Ramone shouted at
the start of every song, as if the group could barely master the
rudiments of rhythm." The band played its first gig at CBGB on
August 16, 1974. Another new act,
Blondie, also debuted at the club that month.
By the end of the year, the Ramones had performed seventy-four
shows, each about seventeen minutes long. "When I first saw the
Ramones", critic Mary Harron later remembered, "I couldn't believe
people were doing this. The dumb brattiness." The Dictators, with a
similar "playing dumb" concept, were recording their debut album.
The Dictators Go Girl
Crazy! came out in March 1975, mixing absurdist originals
such as "Master Race Rock" and loud, straight-faced covers of
cheese pop like
Sonny & Cher's
"
I Got You Babe".
That spring, Smith and Television shared a two-month-long weekend
residency at CBGB that significantly raised the club's profile. The
Television sets included Richard Hell's "Blank Generation", which
became the scene's emblematic anthem. Soon after, Hell left
Television and founded a band featuring a more stripped-down sound,
The Heartbreakers, with former New
York Dolls
Johnny Thunders and
Jerry Nolan. The pairing of Hell and
Thunders, in one critical assessment, "inject[ed] a poetic
intelligence into mindless self-destruction". A July festival at
CBGB featuring over thirty new groups brought the scene its first
substantial media coverage. In August, Television—with Fred Smith,
former Blondie bassist, replacing Hell—recorded a single, "Little
Johnny Jewel", for the tiny Ork label. In the words of John Walker,
the record was "a turning point for the whole New York scene" if
not quite for the punk rock sound itself—Hell's departure had left
the band "significantly reduced in fringe aggression".
Other bands were becoming regulars at CBGB, such as
Mink DeVille and
Talking Heads, which moved down from Rhode
Island. More closely associated with Max's Kansas City were Suicide
and the band led by drag queen
Wayne
County, another Mercer Arts Center alumna. The first album to
come out of this downtown scene was released in November 1975:
Smith's debut,
Horses,
produced by John Cale for the major
Arista label. The inaugural issue of
Punk appeared in December. The new magazine tied together
earlier artists such as Velvet Underground lead singer
Lou Reed, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls with
the editors' favorite band, The Dictators, and the array of new
acts centered around CBGB and Max's. That winter, Pere Ubu came in
from Cleveland and played at both spots.
Early in 1976, Hell left The Heartbreakers; he soon formed a new
group that would become known as
The
Voidoids, "one of the most harshly uncompromising bands" on the
scene. That April, the Ramones' debut album was released by
Sire Records; the first single was
"
Blitzkrieg Bop", opening with the
rally cry "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" According to a later description,
"Like all cultural watersheds,
Ramones was embraced by a
discerning few and slagged off as a bad joke by the uncomprehending
majority." At the instigation of Ramones lead singer
Joey Ramone, the members of Cleveland's
Frankenstein moved east to join the New York scene. Reconstituted
as the
Dead Boys, they played their first
CBGB gig in late July. In August, Ork put out an
EP recorded by Hell with his new band
that included the first released version of "Blank
Generation".
The term
punk initially referred to the scene in general,
more than the sound itself—the early New York punk bands
represented a broad variety of influences. Among them, the Ramones,
The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, and the Dead Boys
were establishing a distinct musical style; even where they
diverged most clearly, in lyrical approach—the Ramones' apparent
guilelessness at one extreme. Hell's conscious craft at the other,
there was an abrasive attitude in common. Their shared attributes
of minimalism and speed, however, had not yet come to define punk
rock.
Other U.S. cities
In 1975,
Suicide Commandos formed
in Minneapolis. They were one of the first U.S. bands outside of
New York to play in the Ramones-style harder-louder-faster mode
that would define punk rock. Detroit's Death self-released one of
their 1974 recordings, "Politicians in My Eyes", in 1976. As the
punk movement expanded rapidly in the United Kingdom that year, a
few bands with similar tastes and attitude appeared around the
United States. The first West Coast punk scenes emerged in San
Francisco, with the bands
Crime and
The Nuns, and Seattle, where the Telepaths,
Meyce, and
The Tupperwares
played a groundbreaking show on May 1. Rock critic
Richard Meltzer cofounded
VOM (short for "vomit") in Los Angeles.
In Washington, D.C., raucous roots-rockers The Razz helped along a
nascent punk scene featuring Overkill, the
Slickee Boys, and The Look. Around the turn of
the year, White Boy began giving notoriously crazed performances.
In Boston, the scene at the Rathskeller—affectionately known as the
Rat—was also turning toward punk, though the defining sound
retained a distinct
garage rock
orientation. Among the city's first new acts to be identified with
punk rock was
DMZ. In Bloomington,
Indiana,
The Gizmos played in a jokey,
raunchy, Dictators-inspired style later referred to as "frat
punk".
Like their garage rock predecessors, these local scenes were
facilitated by enthusiastic impresarios who operated nightclubs or
organized concerts in venues such as schools, garages, or
warehouses, advertised via inexpensively printed flyers and
fanzines. In some cases, punk's do it yourself ethic reflected an
aversion to commercial success, as well as a desire to maintain
creative and financial autonomy. As Joe Harvard, a participant in
the Boston scene, describes, it was often a simple necessity—the
absence of a local recording industry and well-distributed music
magazines left little recourse but DIY.
Australia
At the same time, a similar music-based subculture was beginning to
take shape in various parts of Australia.
A scene was
developing around Radio Birdman and its main performance venue, the
Oxford Tavern (later the Oxford Funhouse), located in Sydney's
Darlinghurst
suburb. In December 1975, the group won the
RAM (Rock Australia Magazine)/Levi's Punk Band Thriller
competition. By 1976, The Saints were hiring Brisbane
local hall to use as venues, or
playing in "Club 76", their shared house in the inner suburb of
Petrie
Terrace. The band soon discovered that musicians were exploring
similar paths in other parts of the world.
Ed
Kuepper, coleader of The Saints, later recalled:
One thing I remember having had a really depressing
effect on me was the first Ramones album. When I heard it [in
1976], I mean it was a great record ... but I hated it because
I knew we’d been doing this sort of stuff for years. There was even
a chord progression on that album
that we used ... and I thought, "Fuck. We’re going to be
labeled as influenced by the Ramones", when nothing could have been
further from the truth.
On the
other side of Australia, in Perth
, germinal punk rock act the Cheap Nasties, featuring singer-guitarist
Kim Salmon, formed in August. In
September, The Saints became the first punk rock band outside the
U.S. to release a recording, the single "
Stranded". As with Patti Smith's
debut, the band self-financed, packaged, and distributed the
single. "(I'm) Stranded" had limited impact at home, but the
British music press recognized it as a groundbreaking record. At
the insistence of their superiors in the UK,
EMI
Australia signed The Saints. Meanwhile, Radio Birdman came out with
a self-financed EP,
Burn My
Eye, in October.
Trouser
Press critic Ian McCaleb later described the record as the
"archetype for the musical explosion that was about to
occur".
United Kingdom
After a brief period unofficially managing the New York Dolls,
Englishman
Malcolm McLaren returned
to London in May 1975, inspired by the new scene he had witnessed
at CBGB.
The Kings Road
clothing store he co-owned, recently renamed
Sex, was building a reputation with
its outrageous "anti-fashion". Among those who frequented
the shop were members of a band called The Strand, which McLaren
had also been managing. In August, the group was seeking a new lead
singer. Another Sex habitué,
Johnny
Rotten, auditioned for and won the job.
Adopting a new name,
the group played its first gig as the Sex
Pistols on November 6, 1975, at St. Martin's School of Art
and soon attracted a small but ardent
following. In February 1976, the band received its first
significant press coverage; guitarist
Steve Jones declared that the Pistols
were not so much into music as they were "chaos". The band often
provoked its crowds into near-riots. Rotten announced to one
audience, "Bet you don't hate us as much as we hate you!" McLaren
envisioned the Pistols as central players in a new youth movement,
"hard and tough". As described by critic Jon Savage, the band
members "embodied an attitude into which McLaren fed a new set of
references: late-sixties radical politics, sexual fetish material,
pop history,...youth sociology".
Bernard Rhodes, a sometime associate
of McLaren's and friend of the Pistols', was similarly aiming to
make stars of the band
London SS. Early in
1976, London SS broke up before ever performing publicly, spinning
off two new bands:
The Damned and
The Clash, which was joined by
Joe Strummer, The 101'ers former lead singer.
On June
4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free
Trade Hall
in what came
to be regarded as one of the most influential rock shows
ever. Among the approximately forty audience members were
the two locals who organized the gig—they had formed the
Buzzcocks after seeing the Sex Pistols in
February. Others in the small crowd went on to form
Joy Division,
The
Fall, and—in the 1980s—
The
Smiths.
In July, the Ramones crossed the Atlantic for two London shows that
helped spark the nascent UK punk scene and affected its musical
style—"instantly nearly every band speeded up".
On July 4, they
played with the Flamin' Groovies
and The Stranglers before a crowd of
2,000 at the Roundhouse
. That same night, The Clash debuted, opening
for the Sex Pistols in Sheffield
. On July 5, members of both bands attended a
Ramones club gig. The following night, The Damned played their
first show, as a Pistols opening act in London. In critic
Kurt Loder's description, the Pistols purveyed a
"calculated, arty nihilism, [while] the Clash were unabashed
idealists, proponents of a radical left-wing social critique of a
sort that reached back at least to ...
Woody Guthrie in the 1940s". The Damned built
a reputation as "punk's party boys". This London scene's first
fanzine appeared a week later. Its title,
Sniffin' Glue, derived from a
Ramones song. Its subtitle affirmed the connection with what was
happening in New York: "+ Other Rock 'n' Roll Habits for
Punks!"
Another Sex Pistols gig in Manchester on July 20, with a
reorganized version of the Buzzcocks debuting in support, gave
further impetus to the scene there. In August, the self-described
"First European Punk Rock Festival" was held in Mont de Marsan in
the southwest of France.
Eddie
and the Hot Rods, a London pub rock group, headlined. The Sex
Pistols, originally scheduled to play, were dropped by the
organizers who said the band had gone "too far" in demanding top
billing and certain amenities; The Clash backed out in solidarity.
The only band from the new punk movement to appear was The
Damned.
Over the next several months, many new punk rock bands formed,
often directly inspired by the Pistols. In London, women were at
the center of the scene—among the initial wave of bands were the
female-fronted
Siouxsie
& the Banshees and
X-Ray Spex and
the all-female
The Slits. There were
female bassists
Gaye Advert in
The Adverts and
Shanne
Bradley in
The Nipple
Erectors. Other groups included
Subway
Sect,
Eater,
The
Subversives, the aptly named
London, and
Chelsea, which soon spun off
Generation X.
Farther afield,
Sham 69 began practicing in the southeastern
town of Hersham
. In Durham
, there was
Penetration, with lead singer
Pauline Murray. On September
20–21, the
100 Club Punk
Festival in London featured the four primary British groups
(London's big three and the Buzzcocks), as well as Paris's
female-fronted
Stinky Toys, arguably the
first punk rock band from a non-
Anglophone country. Siouxsie & the Banshees
and Subway Sect debuted on the festival's first night; that same
evening, Eater debuted in Manchester. On the festival's second
night, audience member
Sid Vicious was
arrested, charged with throwing a glass at The Damned that
shattered and destroyed a girl's eye. Press coverage of the
incident fueled punk's reputation as a social menace.
Some new bands, such as London's
Alternative TV and Edinburgh's
Rezillos, identified with the scene even as they
pursued more experimental music. Others of a comparatively
traditional rock 'n' roll bent were also swept up by the movement:
The Vibrators, formed as a pub
rock–style act in February 1976, soon adopted a punk look and
sound.
A
few even longer-active bands including Surrey
neo-mods
The Jam and pub rockers The Stranglers and
Cock Sparrer also became associated
with the punk rock scene. Alongside the musical roots shared
with their American counterparts and the calculated
confrontationalism of the early Who, journalist Clinton Heylin
describes how the British punks also reflected the influence of the
"
glam bands who gave noise back to
teenagers in the early Seventies—
T.Rex,
Slade and
Roxy Music". One of the groups openly
acknowledging that influence were
The
Undertones, from Derry in Northern Ireland. Another punk band
formed to the south, Dublin's
The Radiators From Space.
In October, The Damned became the first UK punk rock band to
release a single, the romance-themed "
New
Rose". The Vibrators followed the next month with "We Vibrate"
and, backing long-time rocker
Chris
Spedding, "Pogo Dancing". The latter was hardly a punk song by
any stretch, but it was perhaps the first song
about punk
rock. On 26 November, the Sex Pistols' "
Anarchy in the U.K." came out—with its
debut single the band succeeded in its goal of becoming a "national
scandal".
Jamie Reid's "anarchy flag"
poster and his other design work for the Pistols helped establish a
distinctive
punk visual aesthetic.
On December 1, an incident took place that sealed punk rock's
notorious reputation: On
Thames Today, an early evening
London TV show, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones was goaded into a
verbal altercation by the host,
Bill
Grundy. Jones called Grundy a "dirty fucker" on live
television, triggering a media controversy. Two days later, the
Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and The Heartbreakers set out on
the Anarchy Tour, a series of gigs throughout the UK. Many of the
shows were cancelled by venue owners in response to the media
outrage following the Grundy confrontation.
Second wave
By 1977, a second wave of the punk rock movement was breaking in
the three countries where it had emerged, as well as in many other
places. Bands from the same scenes often sounded very different
from each other, reflecting the eclectic state of punk music during
the era. While punk rock remained largely an underground phenomenon
in North America, Australia, and the new spots where it was
emerging, in the UK it briefly became a major sensation.
North America
The
California punk scene
was in full swing by early 1977. In Los Angeles, there were
The Zeros,
The Germs,
The Weirdos,
X,
The
Dickies,
The Bags, and the relocated
Tupperwares, now dubbed
The Screamers.
San Francisco's second wave included
The Avengers,
Negative Trend,
The Mutants, and The Sleepers.
The Dils, from Carlsbad
, moved between the two major cities. The
Wipers formed in Portland, Oregon. In
Seattle, there was The Lewd. Often sharing gigs with the Seattle
punks were bands from across the Canadian border. A major scene
developed in Vancouver, spearheaded by the Furies and Victoria's
all-female Dee Dee and the Dishrags.
The Skulls spun off into
D.O.A. and
The Subhumans. The K-Tels (later
known as the
Young Canadians) and
Pointed Sticks were among the area's
other leading punk acts.
In eastern Canada, the Toronto protopunk band Dishes had laid the
groundwork for another sizable scene, and a September 1976 concert
by the touring Ramones had catalyzed the movement. Early Ontario
punk bands included
The Diodes,
The Viletones,
The Battered Wives,
The Demics,
Forgotten
Rebels,
Teenage Head, The
Poles, and The Ugly. Along with the Dishrags, Toronto's The Curse
and B Girls were North America's first all-female punk acts. In
July 1977, the Viletones, Diodes, and Teenage Head headed down to
New York City to play a four-day showcase at CBGB. Punk rock was
already beginning to give way there to the anarchic sound of what
became known as
No Wave, although several
original punk bands continued to perform.
Leave Home, the Ramones' second album, had
come out in January. September saw Richard Hell and The Voidoids'
first full-length,
Blank
Generation. The Heartbreakers' debut,
L.A.M.F., and the Dead Boys',
Young, Loud and Snotty, appeared
in October; the Ramones' third,
Rocket to Russia, in November.
The Cramps, whose core members were from
Sacramento by way of Akron, had debuted at CBGB in November 1976,
opening for the Dead Boys. They were soon playing regularly at
Max's Kansas City. The
Misfits formed
in nearby New Jersey; by 1978, they had developed a style known as
horror punk.
The Ohio protopunk bands were joined by Cleveland's
The Pagans, Akron's Bizarros and
Rubber City Rebels, and Kent's
Human Switchboard. Bloomington, Indiana,
had MX-80 Sound and Detroit had
The
Sillies.
The Feederz formed in
Arizona. Atlanta had The Fans. In North Carolina, there was Chapel
Hill's H-Bombs and Raleigh's Th' Cigaretz. The Chicago scene began
not with a band but with a group of DJs transforming a gay bar, La
Mere Vipere, into what became known as America's first punk dance
club. Tutu and the Pirates and Silver Abuse were among the city's
first punk bands. In Boston, the scene at the Rat was joined by the
Nervous Eaters, Thrills, and
Human Sexual Response. In
Washington, D.C., the Controls played their first gig in spring
1977, but the city's second wave really broke the following year
with acts such as Urban Verbs,
Half
Japanese, D'Chumps, Rudements and Shirkers. By early 1978, the
D.C. jazz-fusion group Mind Power had transformed into
Bad Brains, one of the first bands to be
identified with
hardcore punk.
Australia
In February 1977, EMI released The Saints' debut album,
Stranded, which the band
recorded in two days. The Saints had relocated to Sydney; in April,
they and Radio Birdman united for a major gig at
Paddington Town
Hall.
Last Words had also formed in
the city. The following month, The Saints relocated again, to Great
Britain. In June, Radio Birdman released the album
Radios Appear on its own Trafalgar
label.
The Victims became a
short-lived leader of the Perth scene, self-releasing the classic
"
Television Addict". They were
joined by
The Scientists,
Kim Salmon's successor band to the Cheap Nasties.
Among the
other bands constituting Australia's second wave were Johnny Dole & The Scabs, the
Hellcats, and Psychosurgeons (later known as the Lipstick Killers)
in Sydney; The
Leftovers, The
Survivors, and Razar in Brisbane; and La Femme, The Negatives,
and The Babeez (later known as The News) in Melbourne
. Melbourne's
art
rock–influenced
Boys Next
Door featured singer
Nick Cave, who
would become one of the world's most celebrated
post-punk artists.
United Kingdom
The Pistols' live TV skirmish with Bill Grundy was the signal
moment in British punk's transformation into a major media
phenomenon, even as some stores refused to stock the records and
radio airplay was hard to come by. Press coverage of punk
misbehavior grew intense: On January 4, 1977, the
Evening News of London ran a
front-page story on how the Sex Pistols "vomited and spat their way
to an Amsterdam flight". In February 1977, the first album by a
British punk band appeared:
Damned Damned Damned reached
number thirty-six on the UK chart. The EP
Spiral Scratch, self-released by
Manchester's Buzzcocks, was a benchmark for both the DIY ethic and
regionalism in the country's punk movement. The Clash's
self-titled debut album came out two
months later and rose to number twelve; the single "
White Riot" entered the top forty. In May, the
Sex Pistols achieved new heights of controversy (and number two on
the singles chart) with "
God Save the Queen".
The band had recently acquired a new bassist, Sid Vicious, who was
seen as exemplifying the punk persona.
Scores of new punk groups formed around the United Kingdom. Though
most survived only briefly, perhaps recording a small-label single
or two, others set off new trends.
Crass, from
Essex, merged a vehement, straight-ahead punk
rock style with a committed anarchist mission.
Sham 69, London's
Menace, and the Angelic Upstarts
from South
Shields
in the Northeast combined a similarly stripped-down
sound with populist lyrics, a style that became known as streetpunk. These expressly working-class
bands contrasted with others in the second wave that presaged the
post-punk phenomenon. Such groups
expressed punk rock's energy and aggression, while expanding its
musical range with a wider variety of tempos and often more complex
instrumentation. London's
Wire took
minimalism and brevity to an extreme.
London's Tubeway Army, Belfast
's Stiff Little
Fingers, and Dunfermline
, Scotland's The Skids
infused punk rock with elements of synth
and noise music. Liverpool's
first punk group, the theatrical
Big
in Japan, didn't last long, but it spun off several well-known
post-punk acts.
Alongside thirteen original songs that would define classic punk
rock, The Clash's debut had included a cover of the recent Jamaican
reggae hit "
Police and Thieves". Other first wave
bands such as The Slits and new entrants to the scene like
The Ruts and
The Police
interacted with the reggae and
ska subcultures,
incorporating their rhythms and production styles. The punk rock
phenomenon helped spark a full-fledged ska revival movement known
as
2 Tone, centered around bands such as
The Specials,
The Beat,
Madness, and
The
Selecter.
June 1977 saw the release of another charting punk album: The
Vibrators'
Pure Mania. In July, the Sex Pistols' third
single, "
Pretty Vacant", reached
number six and The Saints had a top-forty hit with "
This Perfect Day". Recently arrived from
Australia, the band was now considered insufficiently "cool" to
qualify as punk by much of the British media, though they had been
playing a similar brand of music for years. In August, The Adverts
entered the top twenty with "Gary Gilmore's Eyes". As punk became a
broad-based national phenomenon in the summer of 1977, punk
musicians and fans were increasingly subject to violent assaults by
Teddy boys, football
yobbos, and others. A Ted-aligned band recorded "The
Punk Bashing Boogie".
In September, Generation X and The Clash reached the top forty
with, respectively, "Your Generation" and "
Complete Control". In October, the Pistols
hit number eight with "
Holidays in
the Sun", followed by the release of their first and only
"official" album,
Never Mind the
Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Inspiring yet another
round of controversy, it topped the British charts. In December,
one of the first books about punk rock was published:
The Boy
Looked at Johnny, by
Julie
Burchill and
Tony Parsons.
Declaring the punk rock movement to be already over, it was
subtitled
The Obituary of Rock and Roll. In January 1978,
the Sex Pistols broke up while on American tour.
Rest of the world
Meanwhile, punk rock scenes were emerging around the globe. In
France,
les punks, a Parisian subculture of Lou Reed fans,
had already been around for years. Following the lead set by
Stinky Toys,
Métal Urbain played its first concert in
December 1976. The new punk band's brief set included a cover of
the Stooges' "No Fun", also a staple of the Sex Pistols' live show.
Métal Urbain's debut single, "Panik", released in May 1977, was
perhaps the first non-English-language punk rock record; with its
"near
motorik beat ... gruff guitar
riffs, shouted lyrics, and the occasionally swooping synth line",
it is also one of the earliest examples anywhere of a style that
would become identified with post-punk. The single "Killerman", by
Gasoline, and Stinky Toys' "Boozy Creed" also came out in 1977.
Other French punk acts such as
Oberkampf and Starshooter soon
formed.
In West Germany, bands primarily inspired by British punk came
together in the
Neue Deutsche
Welle (NDW) movement. Ätzttussis, the
Nina Hagen Band, and S.Y.P.H. featured
"raucous vocals and militant posturing", according to writer Rob
Burns. Before turning in a mainstream direction in the 1980s, NDW
attracted a politically conscious and diverse audience, including
both participants of the left-wing alternative scene and
neo-Nazi skinheads. These opposing
factions were mutually attracted by a view of punk rock as
"'against the system' politically as well as musically".
Briard jump-started Finnish punk with its 1977
single "I Really Hate Ya"/"I Want Ya Back"; other early Finnish
punk acts included
Eppu Normaali and
singer
Pelle Miljoona. In Yugoslavia,
punk rock acts emerged in Croatia (
Paraf),
Slovenia (
Pankrti), and Serbia (
Pekinška patka). In Japan, a punk
movement developed around bands playing in an art/noise style such
as
Friction, and "psych punk" acts
like Gaseneta and Kadotani Michio. In New Zealand, Auckland's
Scavengers and
Suburban Reptiles
were followed by
The
Enemy of Dunedin. Punk rock scenes also grew in other countries
such as Belgium (The Kids,
Chainsaw), the Netherlands (The
Suzannes,
The Ex), Spain (La Banda
Trapera Del Río, Kaka De Luxe), Sweden (
Ebba Grön,
KSMB),
and Switzerland (Nasal Boys,
Kleenex).
Punk transforms
By 1979, the
hardcore punk movement
was emerging in
southern
California. A rivalry developed between adherents of the new
sound and the older punk rock crowd. Hardcore, appealing to a
younger, more suburban audience, was perceived by some as
anti-intellectual, overly violent, and musically limited.
In Los
Angeles, the opposing factions were often described as "Hollywood
punks" and "beach punks", referring to Hollywood's central position
in the original L.A. punk rock scene and to hardcore's popularity
in the shoreline communities of South Bay and Orange
County
.
As hardcore became the dominant punk rock style, many bands of the
older California punk rock movement split up, although X went on to
mainstream success and
The Go-Go's, part
of the Hollywood punk scene when they formed in 1978, adopted a pop
sound and became major stars. Across North America, many other
first and second wave punk bands also dissolved, while younger
musicians inspired by the movement explored new variations on punk.
Some early punk bands transformed into hardcore acts. A few, most
notably the Ramones, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, and Johnny
Thunders and The Heartbreakers, continued to pursue the style they
had helped create. Crossing the lines between "classic" punk,
post-punk, and hardcore, San Francisco's
Flipper was founded in 1979 by former
members of Negative Trend and The Sleepers. They became "the
reigning kings of American underground rock, for a few
years".
Radio Birdman broke up in June 1978 while touring the UK, where the
early unity between
bohemian,
middle-class punks (many with art school backgrounds) and
working-class punks had disintegrated. In
contrast to North America, more of the bands from the original
British punk movement remained active, sustaining extended careers
even as their styles evolved and diverged. Meanwhile, the
Oi! and
anarcho-punk
movements were emerging. Musically in the same aggressive vein as
American hardcore, they addressed different constituencies with
overlapping but distinct anti-establishment messages. As described
by Dave Laing, "The model for self-proclaimed punk after 1978
derived from the Ramones via the eight-to-the-bar rhythms most
characteristic of The Vibrators and Clash ... It became
essential to sound one particular way to be recognized as a 'punk
band' now." In February 1979, former Sex Pistols bassist Sid
Vicious died of a heroin overdose in New York. If the Pistols'
breakup the previous year had marked the end of the original UK
punk scene and its promise of cultural transformation, for many the
death of Vicious signified that it had been doomed from the
start.
By the turn of the decade, the punk rock movement had split deeply
along cultural and musical lines, leaving a variety of derivative
scenes and forms. On one side were
New
Wave and post-punk artists; some adopted more accessible
musical styles and gained broad popularity, while some turned in
more experimental, less commercial directions. On the other side,
hardcore punk, Oi!, and anarcho-punk bands became closely linked
with underground cultures and spun off an array of
subgenres. Somewhere in between,
pop punk groups created blends like that of the
ideal record, as defined by
Mekons cofounder
Kevin Lycett: "a cross between
Abba and the Sex
Pistols". A range of other styles emerged, many of them
fusions with long-established genres.
Exemplifying the breadth of classic punk's legacy was The Clash
album
London Calling,
released in December 1979. Combining punk rock with reggae, ska,
R&B, and rockabilly, it went on to be acclaimed as one of the
best rock records ever. At the same time, as observed by Flipper
singer Bruce Loose, the relatively restrictive hardcore scenes
diminished the variety of music that could once be heard at many
punk gigs. If early punk, like most rock scenes, was ultimately
male-oriented, the hardcore and Oi! scenes were significantly more
so, marked in part by the slam dancing and
moshing with which they became identified.
New Wave
In 1976—first in London, then in the United States—"New Wave" was
introduced as a complementary label for the formative scenes and
groups also known as "punk"; the two terms were essentially
interchangeable.
NME journalist
Roy Carr is credited with proposing the
term's use (adopted from the cinematic
French New Wave of the 1960s) in this
context. Over time, "New Wave" acquired a distinct meaning: Bands
such as Blondie and Talking Heads from the CBGB scene;
The Cars, who emerged from the Rat in Boston; The
Go-Go's in Los Angeles; and The Police in London that were
broadening their instrumental palette, incorporating dance-oriented
rhythms, and working with more polished production were
specifically designated "New Wave" and no longer called "punk".
Dave Laing suggests that some punk-identified British acts pursued
the New Wave label in order to avoid radio censorship and make
themselves more palatable to concert bookers.
Bringing elements of punk rock music and fashion into more
pop-oriented, less "dangerous" styles, New Wave artists became very
popular on both sides of the Atlantic. New Wave became a catch-all
term, encompassing disparate styles such as
2
Tone ska, the
mod revival based
around
The Jam, the sophisticated pop-rock
of
Elvis Costello and
XTC, the
New Romantic
phenomenon typified by
Ultravox,
synthpop groups like
Human
League and
Depeche Mode, and the
sui generis subversions of Devo, who had gone "beyond punk before
punk even properly existed". New Wave became a pop culture
sensation with the debut of the cable television network
MTV in 1981, which put many New Wave videos into regular
rotation. However, the music was often derided at the time as being
silly and disposable.
Post-punk
During 1976–77, in the midst of the original UK punk movement,
bands emerged such as Manchester's
Joy
Division,
The Fall, and
Magazine, Leeds'
Gang of Four, and London's
The Raincoats that became central post-punk
figures. Some bands classified as post-punk, such as
Throbbing Gristle and
Cabaret Voltaire, had been active
well before the punk scene coalesced; others, such as The Slits and
Siouxsie & The
Banshees, transitioned from punk rock into post-punk. A few
months after the Sex Pistols' breakup,
John
Lydon (no longer "Rotten") cofounded
Public Image Ltd. Lora Logic, formerly of
X-Ray Spex, founded
Essential Logic.
Killing Joke formed in 1979. These
bands were often musically experimental, like certain New Wave
acts; defining them as "post-punk" was a sound that tended to be
less pop and more dark and abrasive—sometimes verging on the
atonal, as with Subway Sect and Wire—and
an anti-establishment posture directly related to punk's. Post-punk
reflected a range of
art rock influences
from
Captain Beefheart to
David Bowie and
Roxy
Music to
Krautrock and, once again,
the Velvet Underground.
Post-punk brought together a new fraternity of musicians,
journalists, managers, and entrepreneurs; the latter, notably
Geoff Travis of
Rough Trade and
Tony Wilson of
Factory, helped to develop the production
and distribution infrastructure of the
indie music scene that blossomed in the
mid-1980s. Smoothing the edges of their style in the direction of
New Wave, several post-punk bands such as
New
Order (descended from Joy Division),
The
Cure, and
U2 crossed over to a mainstream
U.S. audience.
Bauhaus was one of the
formative
gothic rock bands. Others,
like Gang of Four, The Raincoats and Throbbing Gristle, who had
little more than cult followings at the time, are seen in
retrospect as significant influences on modern popular
culture.
A number of U.S. artists were retrospectively defined as post-punk;
Television's debut album
Marquee
Moon, released in 1977, is frequently cited as a seminal
album in the field. The
No Wave movement
that developed in New York in the late 1970s, with artists like
Lydia Lunch, is often treated as the
phenomenon's U.S. parallel. The later work of Ohio protopunk
pioneers Pere Ubu is also commonly described as post-punk. One of
the most influential American post-punk bands was Boston's
Mission of Burma, who brought abrupt
rhythmic shifts derived from hardcore into a highly experimental
musical context. In 1980, Australia's Boys Next Door moved to
London and changed their name to
The Birthday Party, which evolved
into
Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds.
King Snake Roost and
other Australian bands would further explore the possibilities of
post-punk. Later
art punk and
alternative rock musicians found diverse
inspiration among these predecessors, New Wave and post-punk
alike.
Hardcore
A distinctive style of punk, characterized by superfast, aggressive
beats, screaming vocals, and often politically aware lyrics, began
to emerge in 1978 among bands scattered around the United States.
The first major scene of what came to be known as hardcore punk
developed in southern California in 1978–79; the movement soon
spread around North America and internationally. According to
author Steven Blush, "Hardcore comes from the bleak suburbs of
America. Parents moved their kids out of the cities to these
horrible suburbs to save them from the 'reality' of the cities and
what they ended up with was this new breed of monster".
Among the earliest hardcore bands, regarded as having made the
first recordings in the style, were southern California's
Middle Class and
Black Flag.
Bad
Brains—all of whom were black, a rarity in punk of any
era—launched the
D.C.
scene.
Austin, Texas
's Big Boys, San
Francisco's Dead Kennedys, and
Vancouver
's D.O.A. were among
the other initial hardcore groups. They were soon joined by
bands such as the
Minutemen,
The Descendents,
Circle Jerks,
The
Adolescents, and
TSOL in southern
California; D.C.'s
Teen Idles,
Minor Threat, and
State of Alert; and Austin's
MDC and
The Dicks. By
1981, hardcore was the dominant punk rock style not only in
California, but much of the rest of North America as well. A
New York hardcore scene grew,
including the relocated Bad Brains, New Jersey's
Misfits and
Adrenalin O.D., and local acts such as the
Nihilistics,
The Mob,
Reagan Youth, and
Agnostic Front.
Beastie Boys, who would become famous as a
hip-hop group, debuted that year as a hardcore band. They were
followed by
The Cro-Mags,
Murphy's Law, and
Leeway. By 1983,
Minneapolis's
Hüsker Dü and Chicago's
Naked Raygun were taking the hardcore sound in
experimental and ultimately more melodic directions. Hardcore would
constitute the American punk rock standard throughout the
decade.
The lyrical content of hardcore songs, typified by Dead Kennedys'
"
Holiday in Cambodia", is often
critical of commercial culture and middle-class values.
Straight edge bands like Minor Threat,
Boston's SS
Decontrol, and Reno,
Nevada
's 7 Seconds rejected the
self-destructive lifestyles of many of their peers, and built a
movement based on positivity and abstinence from cigarettes,
alcohol, and drugs. In the early 1980s, bands from the
American southwest and California such as
JFA,
Agent
Orange, and
The Faction helped
create a rhythmically distinctive style of hardcore known as
skate punk.
Skate punk innovators
also pointed in other directions: Big Boys helped establish
funkcore, while Venice,
California
's Suicidal
Tendencies had a formative effect on the heavy metal–influenced crossover thrash style.
Toward the end of the decade, crossover thrash spawned the
metalcore fusion style and the superfast
thrashcore subgenre developed in multiple
locations.
Oi!
Following the lead of first-wave British punk bands
Cock Sparrer and
Sham
69, in the late 1970s second-wave units like
Cockney Rejects,
Angelic Upstarts,
The Exploited, and
The
4-Skins sought to realign punk rock with a working class,
street-level following. Their style was originally called
real
punk or
streetpunk;
Sounds journalist
Garry Bushell is credited with labelling the
genre
Oi! in 1980. The name is partly derived from the
Cockney Rejects' habit of shouting "Oi! Oi! Oi!" before each song,
instead of the time-honored "1,2,3,4!" Oi! bands' lyrics sought to
reflect the harsh realities of living in
Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the late
1970s and early 1980s. A subgroup of Oi! bands dubbed "
punk pathetique"—including
Splodgenessabounds,
Peter and the Test Tube
Babies, and
Toy Dolls—had a more
humorous and absurdist bent.
The Oi! movement was fueled by a sense that many participants in
the early punk rock scene were, in the words of
The Business guitarist Steve Kent,
"trendy university people using long words, trying to be
artistic ... and losing touch". The Oi! credo held that the
music needed to remain unpretentious and accessible. According to
Bushell, "Punk was meant to be of the voice of the
dole queue, and in reality most of them were not.
But Oi was the reality of the punk mythology. In the places where
[these bands] came from, it was harder and more aggressive and it
produced just as much quality music."
Although most Oi! bands in the initial wave were apolitical or
left wing, many of them began to attract a
white power skinhead following.
Racist skinheads sometimes disrupted Oi! concerts by shouting
fascist slogans and starting fights, but some Oi! bands were
reluctant to endorse criticism of their fans from what they
perceived as the "middle-class establishment". In the popular
imagination, the movement thus became linked to the
far right.
Strength Thru Oi!, an album
compiled by Bushell and released in May 1981, stirred controversy,
especially when it was revealed that the belligerent figure on the
cover was a
neo-Nazi jailed for racist
violence (Bushell claimed ignorance).
On July 3, a concert
at Hamborough Tavern in Southall
featuring The Business, The 4-Skins, and The Last
Resort was firebombed by local Asian youths who believed that the
event was a neo-Nazi gathering. Following the Southall riot,
press coverage increasingly associated Oi! with the extreme right,
and the movement soon began to lose momentum.
Anarcho-punk
Anarcho-punk developed alongside the Oi! and American hardcore
movements. With a primitive, stripped-down musical style and
ranting, shouted vocals, British bands such as
Crass—the scene's "moral leaders"—
Subhumans,
Flux of Pink Indians,
Conflict,
Poison
Girls, and
The Apostles attempted
to transform the punk rock scene into a full-blown anarchist
movement. Revolution and terrorism were primary lyrical topics.As
with straight edge, anarcho-punk is based around a set of
principles, including prohibitions on wearing leather and the
promotion of a vegetarian or vegan diet.
The movement spun off several subgenres of a similar political
bent.
Discharge, founded back in
1977, established
D-beat in the early 1980s.
Other groups in the movement, led by
Amebix
and
Antisect, developed the extreme style
known as
crust punk. Several of these
bands rooted in anarcho-punk such as
The
Varukers, Discharge, and Amebix, along with former Oi! groups
such as
The Exploited and bands from
father afield like Birmingham's
Charged
GBH, became the leading figures in the
UK
82 hardcore movement. The anarcho-punk scene also spawned bands
such as
Napalm Death,
Carcass, and
Extreme Noise Terror that in the
mid-1980s defined
grindcore, incorporating
extremely fast tempos and
death
metal–style guitarwork. Led by Dead Kennedys, a U.S.
anarcho-punk scene developed around such bands as Austin's
MDC and southern California's Another Destructive
System.
Pop punk
With their love of the
Beach Boys and
late 1960s
bubblegum pop, the Ramones
paved the way to what became known as pop punk. In the late 1970s,
UK bands such as
Buzzcocks and
The Undertones combined
pop-style tunes and lyrical themes with punk's
speed and chaotic edge. In the early 1980s, some of the leading
bands in southern California's hardcore punk rock scene emphasized
a more melodic approach than was typical of their peers. According
to music journalist
Ben Myers,
Bad Religion "layered their pissed off,
politicized sound with the smoothest of harmonies";
Descendents "wrote almost surfy, Beach
Boys–inspired songs about girls and food and being young(ish)".
Epitaph Records, founded by
Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, was the base
for many future pop punk bands, including
NOFX,
with their
third wave ska–influenced
skate punk rhythms. Bands that fused punk
with light-hearted pop melodies, such as
The
Queers and
Screeching Weasel,
began appearing around the country, in turn influencing bands like
Green Day and
The
Offspring, who brought pop punk wide popularity and major
record sales. Bands such as
The Vandals
and
Guttermouth developed a style
blending pop melodies with humorous and offensive lyrics. The
mainstream pop punk of latter-day bands such as
Blink-182 is criticized by many punk rock
devotees; in critic Christine Di Bella's words, "It's punk taken to
its most accessible point, a point where it barely reflects its
lineage at all, except in the three-chord song structures."
Other fusions and directions
From 1977 forward, punk rock crossed lines with many other popular
music genres. Los Angeles punk rock bands laid the groundwork for a
wide variety of styles:
The
Flesh Eaters with
deathrock;
The Plugz with
Chicano punk; and
Gun Club with
punk blues.
The Meteors, from South London
, and The Cramps, who
moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1980, were innovators in the
psychobilly fusion style.
Milwaukee's
Violent Femmes
jumpstarted the American
folk punk scene,
while
The Pogues did the same on the
other side of the Atlantic, influencing many
Celtic punk bands.
The Mekons, from
Leeds
, combined their punk rock ethos with country music,
greatly influencing the later alt-country movement. In the United States,
varieties of cowpunk played by bands such as
Nashville
's Jason &
the Scorchers and Arizona's Meat
Puppets had a similar effect.
Other bands pointed punk rock toward future rock styles or its own
foundations. New York's
Suicide, who
had played with the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center,
L.A.'s
The Screamers and
Nervous Gender, and Germany's
DAF were pioneers of
synthpunk. Chicago's
Big Black was a major influence on
noise rock,
math rock,
and
industrial rock.
Garage punk bands from all over—such as Medway's Thee Mighty
Caesars, Chicago's Dwarves, and
Adelaide
's Exploding White
Mice—pursued a version of punk rock that was close to its roots
in 1960s garage rock. Seattle's
Mudhoney, one of the central bands in the
development of
grunge, has been described as
"garage punk".
Legacy and later developments
Alternative rock
The underground punk rock movement inspired countless bands that
either evolved from a punk rock sound or brought its outsider
spirit to very different kinds of music. The original punk
explosion also had a long-term effect on the music industry,
spurring the growth of the independent sector. During the early
1980s, British bands like New Order and The Cure that straddled the
lines of post-punk and New Wave developed both new musical styles
and a distinctive industrial niche. Though commercially successful
over an extended period, they maintained an underground-style,
subcultural identity. In the United
States, bands such as Minneapolis's
Hüsker Dü and their protégés
The Replacements bridged the gap
between punk rock genres like hardcore and the more expansive sound
of what was then called "
college
rock".
A 1985
Rolling Stone feature
on the Minneapolis scene and innovative California hardcore acts
such as Black Flag and Minutemen declared, "Primal punk is passé.
The best of the American punk rockers have moved on. They have
learned how to play their instruments. They have discovered melody,
guitar solos and lyrics that are more than shouted political
slogans. Some of them have even discovered the
Grateful Dead." By the end of the 1980s, these
bands, who had largely eclipsed their punk rock forebears in
popularity, were classified broadly as
alternative rock. Alternative rock
encompasses a diverse set of styles—including
gothic rock and
grunge,
among others—unified by their debt to punk rock and their origins
outside of the musical mainstream.
As American alternative bands like
Sonic
Youth, which had grown out of the No Wave scene, and Boston's
Pixies started to gain larger audiences,
major labels sought to capitalize on the underground market that
had been sustained by hardcore punk for years. In 1991,
Nirvana emerged from Washington State's
grunge scene, achieving huge commercial success with its second
album,
Nevermind. The band's
members cited punk rock as a key influence on their style. "Punk is
musical freedom", wrote singer
Kurt
Cobain. "It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want." The
widespread popularity of Nirvana and other punk-influenced bands
such as
Pearl Jam and
Red Hot Chili Peppers fueled the
alternative rock boom of the early and mid-1990s.
Emo
In its original, mid-1980s incarnation, emo was a less musically
restrictive style of punk developed by participants in the
Washington, D.C. area hardcore scene. It was originally referred to
as "emocore", an abbreviation of "emotive hardcore". Notable early
emo bands included
Rites of Spring,
Embrace,
The Hated, and
One Last
Wish. The term derived from the tendency of some of these
bands' members to become strongly emotional during performances.
Fugazi, formed out of the dissolution of
Embrace, inspired a second, much broader based wave of emo bands
beginning in the mid-1990s. Groups like San Diego's
Antioch Arrow generated new, more intense
subgenres like
screamo, while others
developed a more melodic style closer to indie rock.
Bands such as
Seattle's Sunny Day Real
Estate and Mesa,
Arizona
's Jimmy Eat World
broke out of the underground, attracting national attention.
By the turn of the century, emo had arguably surpassed hardcore,
its parent genre, as the roots-level standard for U.S. punk, though
some music fans claim that typical latter-day emo bands like
Fall Out Boy don't even qualify as punk
at all.
Queercore and riot grrrl
In the 1990s, the queercore movement developed around a number of
punk bands with gay, lesbian, or bisexual members such as
God Is My Co-Pilot,
Pansy Division,
Team
Dresch, and
Sister George.
Inspired by openly gay punk musicians of an earlier generation such
as
Jayne County,
Phranc,
Darby Crash and
Randy Turner, and bands like
Nervous Gender,
The
Screamers, and
Coil, queercore
embraces a variety of punk and other alternative music styles.
Queercore lyrics often treat the themes of prejudice,
sexual identity,
gender identity, and individual rights. The
movement has continued to expand in the twenty-first century,
supported by festivals such as
Queeruption.
In 1991,
a concert of female-led bands at the International Pop Underground
Convention in Olympia,
Washington
, heralded the emerging riot grrrl
phenomenon. Billed as "Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now",
the concert's lineup included
Bikini
Kill,
Bratmobile,
Heavens to Betsy,
L7, and
Mecca Normal.
Singer-guitarists
Corin Tucker of
Heavens to Betsy and
Carrie
Brownstein of
Excuse 17, bands active
in both the queercore and riot grrrl scenes, cofounded the
celebrated indie/punk band
Sleater-Kinney in 1994. Bikini Kill's lead
singer,
Kathleen Hanna, the iconic
figure of riot grrrl, moved on to form the
art
punk group
Le Tigre in 1998.
Punk revival
Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of
the early 1990s acknowledged the influence of earlier punk rock
acts. With Nirvana's success, the major record companies once again
saw punk bands as potentially profitable. In 1993, California's
Green Day and
Bad
Religion were both signed to major labels. The next year, Green
Day released
Dookie, which became a
huge hit, selling eight million albums in just over two years. Bad
Religion's
Stranger Than
Fiction was
certified
gold. Other California punk bands on indie label
Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist
Brett Gurewitz, also began garnering
mainstream success. In 1994, Epitaph put out
Let's Go by
Rancid,
Punk In
Drublic by
NOFX, and
Smash by
The
Offspring, each eventually certified gold or better.
Smash went on to sell over 11 million copies, becoming the
best-selling independent-label album of all time.
MTV and radio stations such as Los Angeles'
KROQ-FM played a major role in these bands'
crossover success, though NOFX refused to let MTV air its videos.
Green Day and
Dookie's enormous sales paved the way for a
host of bankable North American pop punk bands in the following
decade. The Vans
Warped Tour and the
mall chain store
Hot Topic brought punk
even further into the U.S. mainstream.
Following
the lead of Boston's Mighty
Mighty Bosstones and two California bands, Berkeley
's Operation Ivy
and Long
Beach
's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the
mid-1990s. The original
2 Tone bands
had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much
closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at
78 rpm". Ska punk bands in the
third wave of ska created a true
musical fusion between the genres.
...And Out Come the Wolves,
the 1995 album by Rancid—which had evolved out of Operation
Ivy—became the first record in this ska revival to be certified
gold; Sublime's
self-titled 1996
album was certified platinum early in 1997.
By 1998, the punk revival had commercially stalled, but not for
long. Pop punk band
Blink-182's 1999
release,
Enema of the
State, reached the
Billboard top ten and sold
four million copies in less than a year. New pop punk bands such as
Sum 41,
Simple
Plan,
Yellowcard, and
Good Charlotte achieved major sales in the
first decade of the 2000s. In 2004, Green Day's
American Idiot went to number one on
both the U.S. and UK charts. Jimmy Eat World, which had taken emo
in a radio-ready pop punk direction, had top-ten albums in 2004 and
2007; in a similar style, Fall Out Boy hit number one with 2007's
Infinity on High. The
revival was broad-based:
AFI, with roots
in hardcore and skate punk, had great success with 2003's
Sing the Sorrow and topped
the U.S. chart with
Decemberunderground in 2006.
Alkaline Trio had three successive
top-thirty albums, peaking at number 13 with 2008's
Agony & Irony. Ska punk groups
such as
Reel Big Fish and
Less Than Jake continued to attract new fans.
Celtic punk, with U.S. bands such as
Flogging Molly and
Dropkick Murphys merging the sound of Oi!
and The Pogues, reached wide audiences. The Australian punk rock
tradition was carried on by groups such as
Frenzal Rhomb,
The
Living End, and
Bodyjar.
With punk rock's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the
punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream.
They argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV,
punk bands like Green Day were buying into a system that punk was
created to challenge. Such controversies have been part of the punk
culture since 1977, when The Clash was widely accused of "selling
out" for signing with
CBS Records.
The effect of commercialization on the music itself was an even
more contentious issue. As observed by scholar Ross Haenfler, many
punk fans "'despise corporate punk rock', typified by bands such as
Sum 41 and Blink 182". By the 1990s, punk rock was so
sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were
often used to market highly commercial bands as "rebels". Marketers
capitalized on the style and hipness of punk rock to such an extent
that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the
Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was
"like punk rock".
See also
Footnotes
- Erlewine, Stephen Thomas, "The Ramones: Biography", Allmusic.
Retrieved on October 11, 2007.
- Robb (2006), foreword by Michael Bracewell.
- Ramone, Tommy, "Fight Club", Uncut, January
2007.
- McLaren, Malcolm, "Punk Celebrates 30 Years of Subversion", BBC News,
August 18, 2006. Retrieved on January 17, 2006.
- Christgau, Robert, "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of
Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain" (review), New
York Times Book Review, 1996. Retrieved on January 17,
2007.
- See, e.g., Rodel (2004), p. 237; Bennett (2001), pp.
49–50.
- Savage (1992), pp. 280–281, including reproduction of the
original image. Several sources incorrectly ascribe the
illustration to the leading fanzine of the London punk scene,
Sniffin'
Glue (e.g., Wells [2004], p. 5; Sabin [1999], p. 111).
Robb (2006) ascribes it to The Stranglers' in-house fanzine,
Strangled (p. 311). In fact, Strangled, which
only began appearing in 1977, evolved out of Sideburns
(see, e.g., )
- Blush (2001), pp. 173, 175. See also The Stimulators—Loud Fast Rules 7″ Killed By
Death Records (September 21, 2006).
- Harris (2004), p. 202.
- Reynolds (2005), p. 4.
- Jeffries, Stuart. "A Right Royal Knees-Up". The
Guardian. July 20, 2007.
- Washburne, Christopher, and Maiken Derno. Bad Music.
Routledge, 2004. Page 247.
- Kosmo Vinyl, The Last Testament: The Making of London
Calling (Sony Music, 2004).
- Traber, Daniel S., "L.A.'s 'White Minority': Punk and the
Contradictions of Self-Marginalization", Cultural Critique
48 (spring 2001), pp. 30–64.
- Murphy, Peter, "Shine On, The Lights Of The Bowery: The Blank
Generation Revisited", Hot Press, July 12, 2002;
Hoskyns,
Barney, "Richard Hell: King Punk Remembers the [ ] Generation",
Rock's
Backpages, March 2002.
- Blush, Steven, "Move Over My Chemical Romance: The Dynamic
Beginnings of US Punk", Uncut, January 2007.
- Wells (2004), p. 41; Reed (2005), p. 47.
- Shuker (2002), p. 159.
- Laing (1985), p. 58; Reynolds (2005), p. ix.
- Chong, Kevin, "The Thrill Is Gone", Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, August 2006. Retrieved on December 17, 2006.
- Quoted in Laing (1985), p. 62.
- Palmer (1992), p. 37.
- Laing (1985), p. 62.
- Laing (1985), pp. 61–63.
- Laing (1985), pp. 118–119.
- Laing (1985), p. 53.
- Sabin (1999), pp. 4, 226; Dalton, Stephen, "Revolution Rock",
Vox, June 1993. See also Laing (1985), pp. 27–32, for a
statistical comparison of lyrical themes.
- Laing (1985), p. 31.
- Laing (1985), pp. 81, 125.
- Quoted in Savage (1991), p. 440. See also Laing (1985), pp.
27–32.
- Bessman (1993), pp. 48, 50; Miles, Scott, and Morgan (2005), p.
136.
- Strongman (2008), pp. 58, 63, 64; Colegrave and Sullivan
(2005), p. 78.
- Strohm (2004), p. 188.
- See, e.g., Laing (1985), "Picture Section", p. 18.
- Daniel Wojcik. The End of the World as We Know It: Faith,
Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York
University Press, 1997. Page 122.
- Wojcik (1995), pp. 16–19; Laing (1985), p. 109.
- Laing (1985), pp. 89, 97–98, 125.
- Laing (1985), p. 92, 88.
- Laing (1985), p. 89, 92–93.
- Laing (1985), pp. 34, 61, 63, 89–91.
- Laing (1985), p. 90; Robb (2006), pp. 159–160.
- Laing (1985), p. 34.
- Laing (1985), p. 82.
- Laing (1985), pp. 84–85.
- Laing (1985), p. 14.
- Sabin (1999), p. 157.
- Harrington (2002), p. 165.
- Reed (2005), p. 49.
- Fletcher (2000), p. 497.
- MC5: Kick Out the Jams review by
Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, April 5, 1969. Retrieved
on January 16, 2007.
- Marcus (1979), p. 294.
- Taylor (2003), p. 49.
- Harrington (2002), p. 538.
- Bessman (1993), pp. 9–10.
- Andersen and Jenkins (2001), p. 12.
- Klimek, Jamie, "Mirrors", Jilmar Music; Jäger, Rolf,
"Styrenes—A Brief History", Rent a
Dog. Both retrieved on November 27, 2007.
- Unterberger (1998), pp. 86–91.
- Laing (1985), pp. 24–26.
- Robb (2006), p. 51.
- Anderson (2002), p. 588.
- Unterberger (2000), p. 18.
- Leblanc (1999), p. 35.
- Quoted in Leblanc (1999), p. 35.
- Shapiro (2006), p. 492.
- Bangs, Lester, "Of Pop and Pies and Fun", Creem,
December 1970. Retrieved on November 29, 2007.
- Nobahkt (2004), p. 38.
- Shapiro (2006), p. 492. Note that Taylor (2003) misidentifies
the year of publication as 1970 (p. 16) as does Scott Woods in the
introduction to his interview with Marsh: "A Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy Interview with Dave
Marsh". rockcritics.com. Retrieved on December 26, 2006.
- Taylor (2003), p. 16.
- Houghton, Mick, "White Punks on Coke", Let It Rock.
December 1975.
- Savage (1991), p. 131.
- Atkinson, Terry, "Hits and Misses", Los Angeles Times,
February 17, 1973, p. B6.
- Laing (1985), p. 13; "Punk Magazine Listening Party # 7", Punk
Magazine, July 20, 2001. Retrieved on March 4, 2008.
- Hilburn, Robert, "Touch of Stones in Dolls' Album", Los
Angeles Times, May 7, 1974, p. C12.
- Harvard, Joe, "Real
Kids", Boston Rock Storybook. Retrieved on November
27, 2007.
- Savage (1991), pp. 130–131.
- Taylor (2003), pp. 16–17.
- Savage (1991), pp. 86–90, 59–60.
- Walker (1991), p. 662.
- Strongman (2008), pp. 53, 54, 56.
- Savage (1992), p. 89.
- Bockris and Bayley (1999), p. 102.
- Strongman (2008), p. 57; Savage (1991), p. 91; Pareles and
Romanowski (1983), p. 511; Bockris and Bayley (1999), p. 106.
- Savage (1991), pp. 90–91.
- Bessman (1993), p. 27.
- Savage (1991), pp. 132–133.
- Bockris and Bayley (1999), p. 119.
- Savage (1992) claims that "Blank Generation" was written around
this time (p. 90). However, the Richard Hell anthology album
Spurts includes a live Television recording of the song
that he dates "spring 1974."
- Strongman (2008), p. 96; Savage (1992), p. 130.
- Walsh (2006), p. 27.
- Savage (1991), p. 132.
- Walsh (2006), pp. 15, 24; for Punk, Wayne County, and
punk homosexuality, see McNeil and McCain (2006), pp. 272–275;
Savage (1992), p. 139; for CBGB's closing in 2006, see, e.g.,
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External links