Stereo Review, October 1978

From The Elvis Costello Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
... Bibliography ...
727677787980818283
848586878889909192
939495969798990001
020304050607080910
111213141516171819
202122232425 26 27 28


Stereo Review

US music magazines

-

Punk rock


Steve Simels

Steve Simels explains (but does not apologize for) punk rock

Dear Steve:
While attending a Hot Tuna concert in 1970, I ingested several Quaaludes and a bottle of Boone's Farm wine, fell down a flight of stairs, and smacked my head into the knee of a nearby usher. As a result, I was in a coma until just three months ago. Upon awakening, I found much had changed (apparently I missed the Revolution), so I had to catch up on my reading (fortunately I have a lifetime subscription to Stereo Review, and all my back issues were piled neatly by my respirator). I am readjusting to contemporary life fairly well, but one thing does have me confused. I keep coming across references to some kind of music called either punk rock or New Wave. What is it? Should I like it? And why don't they play it on the Ed Sullivan Show?

Power to the Opposite Field,
Trippy Van Winkle
Sleepy Hollow General Hospital
Tarrytown, N.Y.


Dear Trippy:

Glad to hear you're recovering. As to your last question, sorry to break it to you so brutally, but not only has the Sullivan Show been canceled, Ed himself is now hosting the Great Variety Show in the Sky (one assumes Elvis is a frequent guest, and that God is not as offended by his bump and grind as the CBS censors were in 1957).

Your other questions, however, require fuller explanation, and consequently I'm going to share my reply with Stereo Review's readers. I hope you don't mind. While I'm sure that many of them are indeed aware that a motley crew of musical Visigoths has been making noises at the gate of the Rock Establishment for the last few years, it's likely that at least a couple of them may think the term "New Wave" refers to French art films of the early Sixties or that a punk is something little kids smoke behind the barn. The following explanation of punk is in no way definitive since the horde of new bands still shows no sign of abating and the species has not yet defined itself. But if you want to get a handle on what all the yammer is about, I hope my comments will serve your purposes — or at least make a little light reading while you're still in the hospital.


The first thing you should understand is that punk, like rock itself, means many things to many people, and although for a short time it may have had circumscribed, definable limits, that's no longer true. In fact, the term "punk rock" is by now as nearly meaningless as, say, "Romanticism." It is useful only in that it allows for easy, inexact classification of numerous musicians of widely divergent attitudes and stylistic persuasions. However. punk did not spring full grown out of the air. Like Alex Haley, it too has roots. The difference is that his were in Africa, while punk's were in Hollywood.

"Spiritually," and especially as a visual style, punk began in the movies in the early Fifties with James Dean and Marlon Brando. It was introduced into rock-and-roll by Elvis Presley, whose demeanor in those days would most likely shock the sweet old ladies who frequent current Elvis-impersonator acts. Elvis got a lot from Dean and Brando, and it's easy to visualize him as either the misunderstood teenager of Dean's Rebel Without a Cause or as the motorcycle hood of Brando's The Wild One. Presley's resemblance to them was not lost on teenagers of the period. All of this is relevant to our discussion because the recent resurgence of interest in Fifties rockabilly, the music made by Elvis' label-mates at Sun Records, is largely owing to the fact that punk bands, especially in New York City, have rediscovered the stuff with a vengeance.

But there are other punk progenitors. As far as anybody can tell, the term "punk" was first applied to a particular school of pre-Beatles rock bands operating in the Northwest — outfits like the Sonics, the early Paul Revere, and most of all the Kingsmen, whose almost incredibly moronic three-chord hit "Louie Louie" is even now the true test of a rock fan, the easiest way to separate the men from the dilettantes. Loud, raucous, stupid, flouting all known canons of good taste, this school remained pretty much a regional phenomenon, but through the great success of the Kingsmen's quintessential garage record, it made an indelible impression, for good or ill, on anyone who came into contact with it at an impressionable age.

Later on, fledgling rock critics began using "punk" to describe the music made by a whole slew of groups who, in the wake of the British invasion, had formed their own garage ensembles, gone on to become local sensations, and released various one-shot hits emulating (poorly, in most cases) their British betters before returning to the just obscurity of history. The seminal punk band in that regard was Chicago's Shadows of Knight, who looked like the Stones and sounded like the Yardbirds with arthritis, but just about every high school of the period had an identical band, and if you rummage through your old 45 collection, you'll undoubtedly uncover a small-time hit waxed by some group whose members once sat in front of you in Driver Ed.

Critic Dave Marsh now claims that the very first use of the term in print came in a review he wrote of a performance by Question Mark and the Mysterians, famous for their all-time imbecilic smash "96 Tears," which had only two chords. This was a particularly influential work because of its cheapo organ sound, which reappeared later on Elvis Costello and Blondie records. At any rate, the Mysterians were clearly of the same school as the Shadows. Other notables of this genre included the Swinging Medallions (a drunken fraternity band from the Deep South), the Castaways (a Texas outfit who, if you want to listen, sound amazingly like Talking Heads), the Knickerbockers (four greasers from Bergenfield, New Jersey, whose "Lies" is still the best Beatles imitation of all time), and the Barbarians (the first kids in their area, somewhere in Connecticut, to grow their hair long and the only group whose major claim to fame was a drummer with a hook for a right hand). Most of these wonderful period relics can be found collected on Sire's excellent Nuggets collection (Sire 3716).

But punk as an idea really became institutionalized only after the emergence of one Iggy Pop (né Stooge), who is to the New Wave roughly what James Brown is to r-&-b: the Godfather. The music on Iggy's first two albums, unlike the prevailing Woodstock Nation efforts of the day (1969-1970), sounded like the death throes of an industrial society, all fuzztone and wah-wah, the lyrics equal parts terminal boredom and teenage frustration. The cover pictures showed us a scuzzy bunch of leather- (or vinyl-) jacketed geeks with bad teeth working very hard at looking sullen. Iggy was canonized early on by the Detroit press corps, who saw him as the last authentic rock madman, and he was scoffed at by the editors of Rolling Stone, who saw only a pretentious third-rate Jim Morrison clone. They were both right, but no one could deny that he was some kind of (for want of a better word) phenomenon, and, as a result of his pioneering, punk rock became a useful generic description, part of our common language if not of our shared listening habits.

Around this same time, however, there were waiting in the wings two other barbarian hordes, ready to set the stage for the New Wave that now confronts us: the pub contingent in London and the glitter crew in residence at New York City's Mercer Arts Center.


In New York a lot of the attitudes that have come to represent the New Wave — contempt for older bands, disregard for conventional instrumental virtuosity — were originally exemplified by the New York Dolls (and, indeed, Dolls singer David Johansen has gone on to become a sort of Grand Old Man of the current scene). Although the Dolls were identified at the time as decadent pansexuals in the tradition of such avatars as David Bowie and Lou Reed, underneath the make-up was clearly a punk band struggling to get out.

In London, things were a lot more professional. Bands like Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwarz, Dr. Feelgood, and others could not only play well, but were clearly part of an ongoing mainstream rock tradition. They too, however, shared a punk attitude of "let's get back to good basic music and to hell with laser beams." Their penchant for short hair and mod clothes (check out the cover of the Feelgoods' "Down by the Jetty" to see what I mean) was an important visual influence.

But the climate wasn't yet right, and neither contingent amounted to much. The pubs dried up, and Mercer Arts fell down (the roof caved in, actually). The Dolls stiffed in Middle America (probably because of far too many extravagant claims made for them by overzealous, chauvinistic New York critics), and by the end of 1974 it seemed that it was all over. But that was an illusion. Back on New York's Lower East Side, a hundred little moron bands who had arrived too late to cash in were working feverishly to reverse the tide. One of them, the embryonic Television, convinced the owner of a decaying Bowery saloon called CBGB (short for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues) to let them loose on his tiny stage. A year later New York was the rock-and-roll capital of the world, at least in terms of media attention and sheer numbers of unrecorded working bands (some new, some Mercer Arts veterans). Word went out across the country through a teenage underground linked by fanzines and an occasional farsighted radio station: anybody who can play three chords on a guitar can start a band. Needless to say, this kind of revolutionary populist concept appealed immensely to any kid who didn't have the thousands of dollars needed to get a mainstream rock outfit on the road or who couldn't relate to the wispy banality of the stuff being foisted on us as rock-and-roll via television and most FM stations.

The big record companies were predictably slow to catch on to what was happening. Patti Smith was grabbed up first, after a Village Voice cover photo of her with Bob Dylan convinced Arista she was... um... legitimate. Staid Atlantic eventually took over the independently made Live at CBGB two-record document, and Sire, a label heretofore best known for the progressive yodeling of Focus, brought the Ramones to the world. Still, although just about all the major New York acts got record deals soon after (the Shirts waited the longest, and their album is only just now coming out), there was a certain reluctance to sell the music for what it was. Or, as a highly placed executive at a company which has since signed the Jam put it to me succinctly, "You can go to the toilet trying to promote punk rock."

What finally brought punk out of the dumper was the fact that English kids got wind of what was happening, and for a variety of reasons — including a pop mania that has always far exceeded ours, as well as a particularly messed-up political and economic situation — turned it into something of their own. The Ramones, who are almost a cartoon of a punk band, visited England in 1976 and were totally misinterpreted. Instead of seeing them as satirists, as older veterans pretending to be pinhead hoodlums, the British took the Ramones' studied teenage cool at face value. English groups and fans latched onto the idea of punk not as entertainment or even Art, but as an alternative to the drabness of their own lives, as a way of addressing social issues and attracting attention to themselves and their problems. English punk, as it developed almost literally overnight, had an Angry Young Man undercurrent to it that was so palpably real that even some rock fans who thought the music itself fairly mediocre found themselves unaccountably responding to it. Hence, in a dizzying succession, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash, the Jam, the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, the Vibrators, and on and on.


This is not to say that much of the activity was anything other than the traditional rock-and-roll game of épater les bourgeois, or shock the old fogies enough and the kids will buy your records. Punks sticking safety pins through their cheeks (a startling though certainly unintentional metaphor), reports of violence at punk clubs, and the nasty Sex Pistols saying naughty words on British television, being dumped by two record companies and banned by the BBC — all of that made for great copy. The sensationalist British newspapers ate it up, and in less than a year they turned punk into a national obsession. The bands themselves claimed self-righteously that they were above such hoary hypes. But that too is an old gambit: rule number one at rock manager's school is that a front-page headline in an evening paper is worth all the rock-press coverage in the world — but don't admit it. And it is possible that one or two of these outfits, notably the Clash, may even have been — how you say — sincere.

Not that it matters. All this publicity, coupled with the fact that the Pistols' Johnny Rotten had bona fide star quality (which cannot be said of Joey Ramone) caused the London scene eventually to overshadow what had happened on New York's Bowery. As a result, many people now believe that the English invented punk in the first place. Indeed, Elvis Costello, one of the unclassifiable not-quite-punk types who has been lumped with the movement anyway, has announced with a straight face that "there's never been a decent American rock band," echoing the anti-Americanism that also runs through much of the British New Wave. The Clash, the most overtly "political" of the hard-core punk bands (guitarist Mick Jones has made pro-Red Brigade statements), do a song called "(I'm So) Bored with the USA," and virtually all punk singers favor the most determinedly proletarian English dialects they can muster as a rejection of their hippie elders' fascination with American culture (surfing, cars, even the blues).

After the official, rather sudden demise of the Sex Pistols (whose self-destruct act was viewed by many as the ultimate expression of artistic integrity in the face of corrupt record-business pressure), English punk ceased to be controversial and was officially interred by the press. And while new young bands continue to be signed on both sides of the Atlantic, things have obviously changed. On the fashion level, the safety pins that were punk's most visible trappings now look as quaint as love beads, and more and more bands are rejecting that kind of packaging as too limiting.


If we can believe advance reports, America's industrial heartland, the Akron/Cleveland area, is where the future of the New Wave lies. Stiff Records, the independent label whose alumni include the Damned and Elvis Costello, is now readying a push behind several groups from that area. Most of them are dada-ist art-rock groups who owe far more to such vaudevillians as Captain Beefheart and King Crimson than to Iggy or Johnny Rotten. What hasn't changed, though, is that the big commercial breakthrough has still failed to occur. Very few of the hard-core punks have cracked the charts. In America, only the Ramones and Patti Smith have made it. And in England, despite number ones for the Pistols and the Stranglers, the Clash, who have received a press more unashamedly supportive than that accorded any act in recent memory, sell just moderately well.

Sales figures, however, are beside the point. Sturgeon's Law, that 90 per cent of everything is crap, is just as true for punk as for any other new-laid music, but punk was and is something to cheer about nonetheless. A recent Forbes article on the record business pointed out that more people than ever are buying albums, but that they're all buying the same kind of music, and consequently there are no longer the specialized audiences necessary to support a small hit that is outside the mainstream. This is a depressing prospect, and punk has been the first concerted effort by people who are passionate about their music to break the stranglehold that the major labels and their bland, market-researched superstars have on our listening habits.

Certainly there's no question that punk has brought about a long-overdue re-evaluation of the relationship between rock performers and their audiences, and it has also alerted us once again to the dangers inherent in too much cozy rapport between musicians and the industry. In general it has given us all a tremendous, energetic kick in the butt. So if, as Lester Bangs suggests, rock-and-roll since Kiss and Peter Frampton has been about "the pacification of a generation which does not want to rebel against anything except the possibility of missing out on an upwardly mobile job opportunity," then punk/New Wave may well be what its most enthusiastic boosters think it is: the single most important musical development of the Seventies.

And, oh yes, Trippy — you can dance to it. Hope you're out of bed real soon.

Love,
Steve Simels

-
<< >>

Stereo Review, October 1978


Steve Simels explains punk rock.

Images

1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 94.jpg1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 95.jpg
Page scans.

1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 98.jpg


A highly selective basic library of punk


Steve Simels

1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 97.jpg

The United States

RAMONES
Rocket to Russia (Sire SRK 6042). The Ramones pretty much define the mainstream of American punk — loud, deliberately stupid, three-chord tunes made to order for lyrics about sniffing glue and beating on the brat. Clearly, to take this at all seriously is a risky business, but lots of folks I respect do. The Ramones are humorists, they insist, and beneath the racket is an old-style New York pop sensibility. That may be true, but if they're joking I don't think they're funny enough. In a year or two, when they've moved on to dispensing Sixties folk-rock covers (an unreleased studio version of the Searchers' "Needles and Pins" already exists), it will prove only that they have good record collections. Relevant quote from Peppi Marchello of the Good Rats: "The Ramones respect us because we can tune our guitars."

MINK DeVILLE
Return to Magenta (Capitol SW-I1780). Solid, occasionally incandescent, old-school Latin-tinged r-&-b. Before punk, we would have grouped them with the J. Geils Band. Reactionary stuff, granted, but honest, and they'll probably be around a while.

PATTI SMITH
Horses (Arista AL 4066). The most commercially successful American punk so far and one of the least typical, Patti may or may not be turning into the egomaniacal monster some have predicted, but basically, as she goes so goes the movement. Recent hits notwithstanding, this remains her best album.

TELEVISION
RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS
Adventure (Elektra GE-133). Blank Generation (Sire SRK 6037). Television, since Richard Hell's departure, has turned into a wonderfully imaginative studio band whose live shows are, to these ears, more uneven than the Grateful Dead's. Hell's incredibly pretentious street-poet act, on the other hand, will someday seem as hilarious as Jim Morrison's acid raps.

TUFF DARTS
ROBERT GORDON
Tuff Darts (Sire SRK 6048). Fresh Fish Special (PRIVATE STOCK PS 7008). Robert Gordon has yet to back himself out of the artistic corner of his Fifties fetish, but at least he's trying. His old band, Tuff Darts, is an obnoxious mainstream metal aggregate that peddles sexist lyrics and a stage act similar to what Sha Na Na now does on the tube. Avoid at all costs.

TALKING HEADS
More Songs About Buildings and Food (Sire SRK 6058). An eccentric mixture of Sixties funk and SoHo minimalism; admittedly for special tastes, but somehow it works. Plus Tina Weymouth, the cutest bass player in rock (sorry, guys, she's married).

BLONDIE
Plastic Letters (Chrysalis CHR 1166). Deborah Harry's sex-kitten routine strikes me as more cabaret than punk, and although the band plays an intriguing mishmash of Sixties pop styles with a certain verve, the end result hardly transcends the admittedly less-than-serious sources. Good mindless fun, though.

DEAD BOYS
Young, Loud and Snotty (Sire SRK 6038). Some say that this adequate bar band, which four years ago was probably doing Mott the Hoople covers, is the most exciting act to emerge from the whole scene. Not me.


England:

EDDIE AND THE HOTRODS
Life on the Line (Island 9509). An energetic, brash young blues-based band lurching toward pop to good effect.

ELVIS COSTELLO
This Year's Model (Columbia JC 35331). The most compelling rocker out of England since John Lennon, perhaps, or merely the most interesting singer/songwriter since Warren Zevon. Decide for yourself.

SEX PISTOLS
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Warner Bros. K-3147). I never saw these guys, and you probably didn't either, so none of us is qualified to say whether or not session cats played all this stuff. Never mind. Their rise and fall is the most amazing story in rock history. For all that, however, they are probably more important as an influence than for their music.

THE JAM
This Is the Modern World (Polydor 6129). Because of a couple of reasonable early Who imitations, these guys have conned a lot of people into taking them seriously as something more than a Sixties nostalgia band. Rubbish. Boring tunes, contrived social consciousness, and I pass.

THE STRANGLERS
No More Heroes (A&M 4659) Misogyny, watered-down Doors organ licks, and a big So What. They are nonetheless currently the hottest live act in England. To me, inexplicable on all levels.

SHAM 69
Tell Us the Truth. (Sire SRK 6060). Okay, guys, I will: don't give up your day jobs. Punk already reduced to a formula.

NICK LOWE
Pure Pop for Now People (Columbia 35329). Somewhere between the National Lampoon and Paul McCartney. Lowe is proof positive that there is rock after Thirty. Brilliant.

GENERATION X
Generation X (Chrysalis CHR 1169). Their hearts are in the right place, but that's about it. Punk pretty boys for hip prepubescents.

THE CLASH
The Clash (CBS import). Most critics who've attended their live shows come away seeing God, but on record at least they veer most confusingly between the slightly ragged and the excitingly anarchic. You'd do well to wait for the American version, which will include some recent (and very fine) singles.




Photo by Ebet Roberts.
1978-10-00 Stereo Review photo 01 er.jpg


Cover and contents page.
1978-10-00 Stereo Review cover.jpg 1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 03.jpg 1978-10-00 Stereo Review page 96.jpg

-



Back to top

External links