A Cultural Dictionary of Punk

1974-1982

Nicholas Rombes

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781441105059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Neither a dry-as-dust reference volume recycling the same dull facts nor a gushy, gossipy puff piece, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 is a bold book that examines punk as a movement that is best understood by placing it in its cultural field. It contains myriad critical-listening descriptions of the sounds of the time, but also places those sounds in the context of history. Drawing on hundreds of fanzines, magazines, and newspapers, the book is-in the spirit of punk-an obsessive, exhaustively researched, and sometimes deeply personal portrait of the many ways in which punk was an artistic, cultural, and political expression of defiance. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is organized around scores of distinct entries, on everything from Lester Bangs to The Slits, from Jimmy Carter to Minimalism, from 'Dot Dash' to Bad Brains. Both highly informative and thrillingly idiosyncratic, the book takes a fresh look at how the malaise of the 1970s offered fertile ground for punk-as well as the new wave, post-punk, and hardcore-to emerge as a rejection of the easy platitudes of the dying counter-culture. The organization is accessible and entertaining: short bursts of meaning, in tune with the beat of punk itself.
Rombes upends notions that the story of punk can be told in a chronological, linear fashion. Meant to be read straight through or opened up and experienced at random, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk covers not only many of the well-known, now-legendary punk bands, but the obscure, forgotten ones as well. Along the way, punk's secret codes are unraveled and a critical time in history is framed and exclaimed. Visit the Cultural Dictionaryof Punk blog here.

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Saints

The first album by Australia’s the Saints is almost too good to be punk. Released in 1977, (I’m) Stranded is, at its core, a fifties-style album disguised as punk. Formed in Brisbane in 1974, the Saints’ early lineup included Chris Bailey, Ed Kuepper, Kym Bradshaw, and Ivor Hay. Early footage of the band from Australian television shows why they never really fit in with the emerging punk scene in the United States and the United Kingdom, as the band tears through “(I’m) Stranded” with barely any physical movement at all, as Bailey—laconic, bored looking, with cigarette in hand—comes off as a thinner version of David Thomas from Pere Ubu. But there is a radicalness in the anti-performance of it all, as if to underscore the fact that the music is fierce enough: Why create a spectacle on stage when the music is spectacle enough?

By the time the Saints arrived in the United Kingdom in June 1977, where they opened for the Ramones and Talking Heads at the Roundhouse, the punk scene was already hardening into its own strict categories of sound and style. In the summer of 1977, they were interviewed in Gun Rubber , a Sheffield fanzine:

Me: What do you think of the tour so far? And of the New Wave scene?

Ed: The reception so far has been 50/50, some really great audiences and some not so good like tonight. I think the New Wave thing has lost a lot, it’s got too involved in fashion, which is superfluous.

Me: You’re not fashion conscious at all?

Ed: No, we don’t care about all that, we play this music because it’s what we’ve always played and we don’t care who likes us, just because we’ve been named as a “punk” band doesn’t mean that we’re going to start dressing the part.

They had received early positive reviews of their first single. In Sniffin’ Glue , Mark P. wrote that “this single is a brilliant effort. The Saints recorded and released it themselves. They’re what rock ’n’ roll’s all about. They move—fast, loud, very like the Ramones, but they’re no take-off.” According to Ed Kuepper, the single was made in June 1976, when it was recorded and mixed in about five hours. As with the Ramones, the Saints did not see themselves as breaking with the past musically so much as recuperating its lost energy. “It wasn’t recognized at the time,” Kuepper has said, “but I think in a strange sort of way, my main influences was stuff I thought, was the absolute epitome of rock and roll … mostly done in the Fifties with the likes of Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry and people like that. That sort of music, I thought, had never been really surpassed.”

In truth, the Saints—especially on their first, and best, album—assault the fifties as much as love it. “Like a snake calling on the phone / I’ve got no time to be alone” begins “(I’m) Stranded,” and the song never lets up. You feel as if machines, not humans, are playing the instruments, and all your theories about the “meaning” of punk disappear. “Nights in Venice” is even stranger; it reminds you in its end-of-time destruction of “30 Seconds over Tokyo” and how the best punk songs are not necessarily the shortest ones. The song builds to annihilation, and what is clear now, in retrospect, is that the rock industry had no place for a song like that whose doom-struck sound could not be recuperated by the marketplace. The Saints’ first album was a theory of something darker and fiercer than punk, in its adolescent violence, could ever imagine.

[Ed Kuepper interviewed in Gun Rubber , August 1977, p. 11; Ed Kuepper interviewed by Joe Matera, Australian Guitar , 2004; Mark P., “Stranded with the Saints,” October 1976, in Mary Perry, Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory . London: Sanctuary, 2000.]

Screamers

A punk band (Synth-punk? Punk-ELO? Techno-punk?) out of Los Angeles, consisting of Tomata du Plenty, Tommy Gear, K. K. Barrett, and Paul Roessler. Active from 1977 (there was an earlier incarnation called the Tupperwares) until the early 1980s. A band without guitars. A band that never released a record. Their interviews were an expression of theory. They answered questions in deceptively simple aphorisms.

From a 1977 interview with Slash :

Tomata: I would just say we make sounds.

Slash : What will happen to Johnny Rotten?

Tomata: When he makes some money he’ll probably get his teeth fixed!

Slash : Are you a “musical” band?

Gear: I personally don’t like music per se.

From a 1979 interview with New York Rocker :

NYR: Or go video-disc.

TG: I don’t know. It would be real exciting to release video before audio recordings. That may be the standard in the future.

From a 1979 article by Jon Savage:

Tomata: I think advertising is more exciting than the product most of the time.

In stage presence, they are likely to remind you of Devo or Talking Heads. In sound, they are likely to remind you of nothing, except maybe Pere Ubu. In truth, they seem to have sprung from some strange, undiscovered garden. Pioneers of video before music and video were linked together for mass audiences, it is only recently, in the YouTube era, that their work has the potential to reach unsuspecting viewers. As documented by Target Video in the late seventies, in both live and studio performances, the Screamers performed not so much for the camera as at it. “Early September [1978] saw them up north in San Francisco, Oakland to be precise, spending a week at Target Video doing promotional videos,” Jon Savage wrote in 1979.

The most remarkable of these are two videos filmed at Target Video Studios in 1978, “122 Hours of Fear,” which recalls, distantly, Rocket from the Tombs’ “30 Seconds over Tokyo,” is a soundtrack to the B-horror movie that your life could be if you strayed too far. “Wow! What a show! One-hundred-and-twenty-two hours of fear!” Tomata screams. Most of the video is one long take with no cuts or edits; there is none of the fast cutting that would come to characterize MTV and its distracted audience. More frightening yet is “Eva Braun,” a video stretching over nine minutes. The band is surrounded by television sets showing themselves. Tomata stands perfectly still, like a mannequin, for the first few minutes. About six minutes into the song the band calmly walks off the set, the music droning on without them. The stage is now empty. At around the 8:00 mark, the band returns, the song resumes, and then it ends.

There is an idea behind this all, but what is it? Is it pop music? Performance art? What are its intentions? The most exhilarating and menacing thing about the Screamers is that they remained undefined, unclassifiable. The very existence of a band as strange as the Screamers poses a question that, thankfully, has yet to be answered.

[Steve Ellman, “Screamers: Past Their Primal?” New York Rocker , August 1979, p. 34; “Interview with the Screamers,” Slash #2, June 1977; Jon Savage, “The Screamers,” Melody Maker , January 6, 1979.]

SCUM Manifesto

Valerie Solanas’s screed–insane, but with just enough truth to make you wonder—was published in 1968 and was part of Malcom McLaren’s and Vivienne West-wood’s remodeled shop, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. As McClaren noted in 2004, “I ripped out the dance floor and used the wood to make parallel bars. I covered the walls with sponge and sprayed slogans from pamphlets I’d picked up in NYC—the SCUM (Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, adding the words, ‘Does passion end in fashion, or does fashion end in passion?’”

Punk’s disaffection with the hippies—sometimes violently expressed, sometimes humorously, most often both—was nothing compared to Solanas’s. In a section of the Manifesto entitled “Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community,” Solanas writes:

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids … The “hippy” babbles on about individuality, but has no more conception of it than any other man. He desires to get back to Nature, back to the wilderness, back to the home of furry animals that he’s one of, away from the city, where there is at least a trace, a bare beginning of civilization, to live at the species level, his time taken up with simple, non-intellectual activities—farming, fucking, bead-stringing … The “hippy” is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussy—the main commodity to be shared …

Punk, too, was about negation and rejection. As Johnny Rotten told Carolyn Coon in 1976:

I haven’t seen a hippie in two weeks. That’s something! They were so complacent. They let it all—the drug culture—flop around them. They were all dosed out of their heads the whole time … Yeah man, peace and love. Don’t let anything affect you. Let it walk all over you but don’t stop it … We say b—! If it offends you, stop it. You’ve got to or you just become apathetic and complacent yourself … You end up with a mortgage watching TV with 2.4 kids out in suburbia—and that’s just disgusting. All those hippies are becoming like that.

[Johnny Rotten quoted in Caroline Coon, “Sex Pistols: Rotten to the Core,” Melody Maker , November 27, 1976; Malcom McClaren, “Dirty Pretty Things,” The Guardian , May 28, 2004, http://arts.guardiann.co.uk.]

Second Extermination Nite

Ad for 2nd Extermination Nite, from Cleveland Scene , January 1975

The Second Extermination Nite at the Viking Saloon in Cleveland, on January 19, 1975, was, as Paul Marotta notes, “the fourth gig of the [Electric] Eels’ five-gig career.” The songs they played come across like all the trees in a forest falling at precisely the same time. The sound is from every direction. There is scattered applause. “Mustard” builds to fury in just over a minute. “When you’re using / lots of hotdogs / in the peat moss / you can feel it,” go the lyrics, by John Morton. An ad for the show in Cleveland’s Scene is small; the names of the bands are not even listed. Approximately 450 miles to the east, at CBGB on that same night, Television and Blondie performed. It was near the midpoint of the decade. There was no telling how things might turn out. Approximately three months later, the Ramones would release their first album. The sounds began to coalesce around some unified whole. Strangely, although punk is often memorialized in terms of disorder and anarchy, it was order that defined it. The Extermination Nites at the Viking was the furthest expansion of that disorder. Soon patterns developed. Personalities emerged. Bands had identities and promoted those identities. The sound crept its way from bedroom to bedroom on vinyl, from basement to basement. The music just before punk was a rumor. Punk confirmed that rumor, and in confirming it, obliterated it.

“See No Evil”

A song by Tom Verlaine, appearing most famously as the opening track on Television’s Marquee Moon , released in 1977. There it is: a nervous, concocted thing, full of jumpy glory, with Richard Lloyd’s guitar solos predicting a version of punk—jazzy and swinging—that would never happen. In fact, Verlaine has denied that there even was such a thing as punk: “I didn’t think there was any punk and, in fact, I still don’t. I think punk is slightly more aggressive bubblegum music.” In fact, the early music of Television, like that of Patti Smith, was really poetry adorned with music, folk music for the distracted age:

I get ideas

I get a notion

I want a nice little boat

Made out of ocean

“See No Evil” is, more reasonably, a folk song without the specifics of locale or place. And in truth, the best version of the song is obscure and seldom heard. It was recorded by Peter Laughner in his bedroom at his parents’ house shortly before he died, in June 1977. “Well, it’s real late at night” he says, his voice dry and raspy, “and everybody’s gone to sleep. But I got a six-pack of Genesee, and some Lucky Strikes. So I’m gonna do some songs.” It would be easy to say that Laughner’s version is stripped down, but it’s not. It’s extravagant, and you can imagine him there, in his twenties, in his old bedroom, with nothing to lose, as his friends Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell were making splashes in New York, and his ex-compatriots from Rocket from the Tombs, such as David Thomas, were actively recording and performing in bands like Pere Ubu.

In Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street , the rock star Bucky Wunderlick remembers the “mountain tapes” that he had recorded years earlier, which were the absolute opposite of the overproduced, massive rock star persona that he is trying to escape. The description might as well be of Laughner’s late-at-night-the-night-before-his-death recordings in his parents’ house:

On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me (without accompaniment) on and old acoustic guitar, the first I’d ever owned … I had just come off a world tour and my voice was weary and scorched, no sound nearer to my mind than the twang of baby murders in patriarchal hamlets … These songs conveyed a special desolation, a kind of abnormal naturalness … Every reel was full of repetitions, mistakes and slurred words.

Peter Laughner, singing alone in the night. In your own dark nights, it is his voice that you remember.

[Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street , 1973; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994, pp. 147–48; Tom Verlaine quoted in Scott Mervis, “Music Preview: Television’s Tom Verlaine Turns in on Again,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , June 8, 2006, www.post-gazette.com.]

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Table of contents

• Cover page
• Acknowledgments
• Title page
• Opening Shot
• Quotation
• 400 Blows, The
• Letter A
• Letter B
• Letter C
• Letter D
• Letter E
• Letter F
• Letter G
• Letter H
• Letter I
• Letter J
• Letter K
• Letter L
• Letter M
• Letter N
• Letter O
• Letter P
• Letter Q
• Letter R
• Letter S
• Letter T
• Letter U
• Letter V
• Letter W
• Letter X
• Letter Z
• Postscript
• Postscript Redux
• Copyright