Dead Head & I Hate Led Zeppelin

If Webster’s had an illustration to accompany the definition for punk, it would depict a guy with a Mohawk, a spiked collar, and ripped clothing just barely held together by a few safety pins. This punk is probably giving you the finger—and quite possibly the two-fingered Fuck You favored by the Brits.

In its earliest days, however, punk was an artistic free-for-all, with acts as disparate as Patti Smith and The Ramones arising out of New York while Black Flag and the Go-Gos surfaced in L.A. In Chicago, the punk scene was home not just to musicians but to art school kids and drag queens.

The history of punk has been documented in several places, and more and more memoirs seem to be on the way. But you can patch together an entertaining portrait of the early years by listening to some of Marc Maron’s recent and excellent interviews on his WTF podcast. John Doe, Mike Watt, and David Byrne were all quick to point out the diversity of those early days.

John Doe: “The original punk rock scene in LA was eclectic. It was the Weird-Os and the Screamers and the Germs and Fear and the Controllers and the Alley Cats and the Go-Gos… it was all arty and then rock and roll. "

Mike Watt: “For us, punk was never a style of music… it was anything… it was a state of mind.” When Maron mentions, “No one sounds like you guys,” Watt is quick to shoot back: “We thought that was the point though! We thought that was part of the movement!” He then charmingly reminisces about discovering a John Coltrane record and assuming it was an older guy playing punk.

David Bryne: (recalling the scene at CBGBs) “There was a kid, Steve Forbert, a folk singer from Mississippi who came in and he became part of the thing… not punky at all. There was another, like, progressive jazz group, I forget what they were called, where they’d gone to Berkeley or whatever and these kids could really, really play and sing and all that kind of stuff. Our jaws just dropped and it was like, what is that doing here? But all that was kind of accepted, which was kind of great. It wasn’t until later that things got competitive…”

So how did it go from a free-for-all to the singular, angry image that one tends to conjure when hearing the word punk? Artistic movements often seem to have a life and momentum of their own, and it can be simplistic to pin a larger phenomenon down to a single novel, painting, or song… though in this case an obvious answer does offer itself up. As John Doe said on WTF, “The Ramones and all of us—we wanted to be famous. We wanted to be popular. And then the Sex Pistols came in and fucked it all up for everybody.”

If punk’s not your thing, then the Sex Pistols are probably the band you most immediately associate with it. I’m certain it would be the #1 response on Family Feud. Considering that they remain the most iconic band in an iconoclastic genre, it’s worth noting how they actually came together. It’s not the story of four scrappy friends with a dream. They were deliberately assembled by a manager, Malcolm McLaren, who wanted to create and promote a punk band. They were in search of a lead singer when they spotted John Lyndon walking up the street, wearing an I HATE Pink Floyd t-shirt. “I personalized it myself,” he later boasted.

Of course, no one just decides to be popular. The public has to go along with it. Since other bands were just as willing, why, then, did the Sex Pistols take hold? I suspect it’s because they gave everyone what they wanted. If you were at an age when you wanted to believe the grown-ups were idiots and the world was fucked, well, the Sex Pistols were basically providing the soundtrack to your angst. And if you were outside of this new and bizarre scene and you wanted to hate it but couldn’t quite put your finger on why, well, the Sex Pistols did that work for you. Hate us! They seemed to be screaming.

Even if the Sex Pistols never existed, I very much doubt punk would’ve remained a free-for-all forever. One way or another, it would’ve codified into a more singular sound, and a good deal of snotty, irreverent angst would likely have been at the forefront of it all.

This brings me back to that t-shirt John Lyndon was wearing that day when the band first laid eyes on him. I Hate Pink Floyd. I doubt the Teen Idles or Screeching Weasel had John Lyndon’s t-shirt in mind when they wrote “Dead Head” and “I Hate Led Zeppelin” (respectively but not respectfully), but these songs send the same message: You know that thing the previous generation loved? We hate it. We are drawing a line between it and us. We are not you.

In my profile I make some claims about placing great works of art side by side. This post is different. I don't think these songs are great. But they’re fun and they’re funny and they perfectly express the playful irreverence that we now associate with punk. And while these aren't songs that win a spot on your regular rotation, it can be fun to play them for your friends—particularly to burst their nostalgic bubble.

Sympathy for the Devil & Bring Tha Noise

Everything about 9/11 was alarming, disturbing, disorienting, but there's this one minor aspect of that day I think gets overlooked: It all happened so damned early.

Especially so if, like me, you were living on the west coast. And even more so if, like me, you were unemployed, depressed, and sleeping past noon every day. At 6:30 a.m. I got a call from my mom who assured me that my father was safe. "Um, okay...?" He was in New York in business, she explained (this was news to me). There's been a terrorist attack, she explained (also news to me).

Amid the considerations of lives lost, of who the perpetrators were, of what would happen next, there came a minor but bewildering realization: this is easily going to be one of the most significant days of my life and it’s not even 7am yet. So many hours to fill. What to do?

Everyone, of course, has a vivid memory of that day, as if a recording device in your mind gets turned on. “Flashbulb memories” is the term for this, and I realize everyone has their 9/11 story, or their JFK assassination story, or perhaps their Paris attack story… or a dozen other stories. Days like that seem to be piling up, and it’s starting to feel less a matter of “this happened” and more a matter of “how bad was it this time?”

I don’t think my 9/11 story is particularly special, but I’m writing about it here because that evening, for me, featured a song pairing that has stuck with me. I can see no reason why this should mean anything to anyone except myself (unless you also happened to be drinking at Beulahland in Portland, Oregon that night), but I’m not too worried about alienating my readership as I'm pretty sure I do not have one.

I'm confident about my memories of that day, but I also have backup. Back then, I wrote everything down. By hand. Typically on yellow legal pads. The very idea of this now seems exhausting. Here’s a bit from that evening at Beulahland:

 A few things about this. First off, the jukebox at Beulahland in 2001 was no bullshit.

Moreover, there was something about seeing the silent images of that day and people picking out songs to play over it that felt apt. It wasn’t crass or ironic. It was more like: What else can there possibly be to say about this?

There’s a line in a Beastie Boys song that goes: I've been through many times in which I thought I might lose it. The only thing that saved me has always been music. On an average day, that sentiment seems simplistic if not downright corny. But on a non-average day, on a horrendous day, on a day that’ll spark a flashbulb memory… you tend not to give a shit if something is corny. I remember feeling grateful, that night, to have been in that bar, among strangers, and to have heard these songs, which from here on out are conjoined in my memory.

I Wanna Be Your Dog & Disorder

Here are some M&Ms. There are 10 of them.

I’m not a math person, so it was late in life when I first tried to wrap my head around the concept of “base 10.” That is, we worked our way into a counting system that groups things into bunches of 10, but it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. We probably arrived at it from counting on our fingers. Other civilizations apparently gave base 20 and base 8 a try. If I understand base 8 correctly, it means we’d count up that row of M&Ms and say there are 12. As in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12. The actual amount remains unchanged; M&Ms could give a fuck how we describe them.

Base 10 seems to be one of those fundamental concepts that pervades everything and yet you can get by just fine without ever once thinking about it. (See also: Why is the alphabet in the order it’s in? Ka-boom. Mind blown.)

And this, naturally, brings me to Iggy Pop.

Have you ever watched any old Iggy Pop interviews on YouTube? Do it. They are wonderful. In one, he explains to Tom Snyder, very coherently and intelligently, the difference between Apollonian and Bacchanalian art. In an interview on Dutch TV he offers out a humble and insightful definition of punk. But it was a remark he made on Dinah! that got me lining up M&Ms.

Dinah: Do you think you’ve influenced anybody?

Iggy: I think I helped wipe out the 60s.

We bunch the years together into decades and, the further we get away from them, the more certain we are that there was a coherence to that bracket of time—however arbitrary that bracket might be (not to mention the arbitrariness of the starting point: year zero). 

But I get what Iggy means. Whatever whiff of love and optimism may have been in the late 60s air, it was bound to fizzle out, leaving in its wake a tinge of disillusionment and a thriving drug culture. (Though it’s worth noting that “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was released just a few weeks before “Give Peace a Chance”.)

"I Wanna Be Your Dog" came out in 1969, and, at Iggy’s prompting, it’s reasonable to think of this song as bringing down the curtain on the 1960s.

The decade that followed, musically, was a lot of things. Prog. Disco. Punk. It's difficult to be reductive about it, but as the decade wrapped up, the 1979 Joy Division song, “Disorder,” (in my humble and partially informed opinion), once again brought down the curtain. Part of what I hear when I listen to this song is: It’s not the 1970s any more.

Cat Man and Lou Lou

Hide your daughters. Hide your sons.

Rockabilly seems to be one of those genres, like funk or ska, that is so specific and easily identifiable that you’re not really allowed to get too creative with it. This stuff can be fun—especially when seen live—but within one’s record collection it tends to be something of a novelty, a lighthearted interlude from the stuff you take a bit more seriously. (Conversely, if any of those genres are your main thing, then there's a decent chance you've got a wardrobe to match.)

What always struck me about rockabilly is the rawness. Much of it feels so much more threatening than what followed after. If stodgy parents bit their nails during the Beatles’ performance on the Sullivan show as the bowl-cut Brits yearned to hold their daughter’s hand, how would they have handled Gene Vincent’s “Cat Man” which came out eight years prior?

I’m personally not an aficionado of this stuff, which I believe excuses my one-stop-shopping approach: I bought myself a box set. God bless Rhino—this is very much in their wheelhouse. (They don't actually include a tin of pomade with the box set, which seems like a missed opportunity.)

To call it “punk,” as the compilers of this collection did, is obviously an anachronism (and obviously they knew that), but, in the spirit of things, it feels accurate. These songs are youthful, abrasive, and very much aware of their own newness. Like much of punk rock, it hopes to appear a bit threatening while also announcing: Look, I’m just being myself.

This particular collection has some excellent stuff, but, given the specificity of the genre, some of it starts to sound the same. And, lyrically, a few of the songs prove true that old creative writing 101 mantra: Show don’t tell. As singers declare: I’m a rebel… I’m a juvenile delinquent… You shrug and think: Well, if you say so.

This, for me, makes “Cat Man” and “Lou Lou” stand-outs.

“Cat Man,” we learn, is an acrostic: C is for the crazy hairdo that he wears around… et cetera. This corny device probably should tank the song, but its balanced out by the unbridled whelps and wails belted out between verses. As he warns, better hide your sister. This dude’s not fucking around.

“Lou Lou” makes a perfect contrast. Lou Lou knows what guys to date. Lou Lou knows what steps to take. Lou Lou knows whose heart to break. Lou Lou’s taking this town... Nice to see the tables turned on the 1950s fellas: Lou Lou is very much in charge.