The Ramones

A few years ago, I was working with a young producer, cutting a show for HGTV. We were taking a break and I was flipping through the LA Weekly and came across an ad promoting the full reunion of X, including the usually reticent Billy Zoom, who agreed to close his guitar amp repair shop in Orange County and drive back to the city at the edge of the apocalypse for a couple of gigs with his old band mates. Knowing Matt was a huge X fan, I called him up and told him about the show. Two steps ahead, he already had tickets and was salivating at the prospect of seeing his heroes live again. When I got off the phone, my producer asked, “Who’s X?”

She was, I should point out, in her early twenties at the time, which meant she was born around 1980. Discouraged at her lack of knowledge, I patiently explained that X was the seminal LA punk band during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“Oh,” she replied. And then, after a moment’s consideration, “What’s punk?”

What’s punk? What the fuck? From a musicological/cultural/historical point of view, the question may be valid. Is it sloppy three-chord garage guitar rock? Is it subject matter? Is it attitude? Politics? Are there still punk bands or is it strictly music that was made during that brief window in the late ‘70s? This was not, however, what she was asking. She had apparently never even heard the words “punk” and “rock” next to each other in a sentence. That’s the problem with kids these days, no sense of the destruction of history.

Once more, slowly, for those of you that have been asleep for the past 30 years.

In the mid-1970s, American popular music had grown bloated and stagnant. Art rock had taken over and the sales charts were clogged with bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer or Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd that used the modest foundations of rock ‘n’ roll to build huge elaborate ornate structures on top. Wanky soloing was at the peak of popularity and it wasn’t uncommon to find tracks stretching out for an entire side of an album, while each band member took their time in the spotlight. The music was so overproduced and baroque that it had lost all of the visceral charms that made rock music such an engaging – and dangerous – pleasure. Those short little three-minute bursts of anarchy and lust that so scandalized the older generation while firing up the younger had turned into bloated symphonic epics that wouldn’t be out of place in an opera house. Yawn. For the disaffected youth, things were bad.

Things were especially bad in NYC, where, because of the convoluted cabaret laws, the only bands that could play in almost any club either had to already have a record out or be a cover band. There wasn’t any place for a couple of local kids to get their chops together in front of a modest audience. Except for a little dive in the Bowery called CBGB’s. Opened by Hilly Kristal, CBGB (actually, CBGB (OMFUG)) stood for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues, (and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers) and was envisioned as being a place where folk musicians could woodshed. But folk music had largely disappeared so when a couple of beat-up Queens kids in ripped jeans asked if they could play a gig there, Hilly shrugged his shoulders and said sure, why not.

Those Queens kids were tired of the bloated pomp that came leaking out of their radios and longed for the days when rock ‘n’ roll was fun and fast and stupid. They didn’t care that you were supposed to be a virtuoso or play in 7/4, they just wanted to bash out some quick and dirty music, so they plugged their amps in, learned three or four chords, and slammed through songs about sniffing glue and banging heads that barely lasted two minutes. Taking their name from an old Paul McCartney stage name, they dubbed themselves The Ramones.

Thousands of people crammed into CBGB’s for their legendary first gig and, when it was over, the revolution had begun and converts went streaming out into the streets, waving the punk flag and bringing the stodgy music industry to its knees.

Well, not exactly.

Their first gig was played for little more than the bartender and his dog, but they kept coming back and slowly, word of mouth got around the Village and other people started showing up to play in their garage bands. The loose community that formed had less to do with stylistic similarities as it did with just being a local phenomenon. After all, you’d be hard pressed to say that there was a common musical or attitudinal thread connecting The Ramones and Blondie and Talking Heads and Television – all early CBGB fixtures – they just all happened to be in the same place at the same time. What they did have in common was a disregard for doing things the way they were “supposed” to be done, and for following their muse and doing everything themselves, from writing the songs to making the flyers and t-shirts and promoting the shows. This Do It Yourself ethos became the rallying cry of punks the world around, and gave them the strength to follow their convictions. The name punk came from a small ‘zine that was published and distributed around the area at that time and perfectly summed up the snotty yet smart attitude of many of the musicians, so the name just stuck (see Legs McNeil’s brilliant and entertaining oral history of the whole phenomenon, Please Kill Me).

British enterpreneur/opportunist Malcolm McLaren came to visit and went to a few shows and was immediately smitten with the scene and, especially, with Richard Hell’s torn t-shirt and matted hair. Hell’s shockingly antisocial attitude (this during the disco years, when preening to go out was taken to new heights) was deliciously anachronistic and rude, and McLaren seized on it, took it back to London, and codified it. He gathered some disaffected British youth together, gave them bad haircuts, bondage gear from his Sex fashion shop, and a racy name, and set The Sex Pistols loose on the world. When the wave that had started in NYC came back from England, it took the media (if not the country) by storm, and the punk phenomenon blew across the culture.

To reiterate, punk was not born in England. It may have reached its apex there and been more of a vital force (British punk is, in general, more political than its American forefathers and, as England was in the depths of a crushing recession at the time, more British youth took its message to heart). And you can argue convincingly that the roots of punk stretch down past the New York Dolls dirty take on glam and past Velvet Underground’s bleak street noise and Iggy Popp’s nihilistic fun house into a thousand grungy garages in the sixties, but, for all intents and purposes, the real punk explosion owes more to The Ramones than anybody else. Their balls-to-the-wall sets of louder faster songs, their unwillingness to be groomed, their need to do things (like Frank Sinatra) their way are what really lit the fires that burned in a thousand bands and helped shatter the monolithic hold of the music industry into hundreds of tiny but viable labels and a scene of full of passionate beleivers.

Because, ultimately, punk isn’t about a sound or a style. It’s about taking the means of music making into your own hands. It’s about valuing passion over precision. It’s about DIY. And that’s why it keeps coming back around again. Every time music gets a little too sterile and over-produced, the spirit of punk comes bursting out of the garage again. Grunge was merely punk in flannel, a reaction to the sterility of new wave. And now that the electronica moment seems to have passed, bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes are shocking everybody again with their exciting sloppy pop. Punk gives people power over their lives and their art. Punk is a rallying cry. Punk is a rage against the machine, an unwillingness to be spoon-fed the same pabulum as everybody else. Punk proves that you matter, no matter how weird or depressed or confused you are. That’s what punk is. You stupid bitch.