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Saints
The first album by Australiaâs the Saints is almost too good to be punk. Released in 1977, (Iâm) Stranded is, at its core, a fifties-style album disguised as punk. Formed in Brisbane in 1974, the Saintsâ 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 â(Iâm) Strandedâ with barely any physical movement at all, as Baileyâlaconic, bored looking, with cigarette in handâcomes 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, itâs got too involved in fashion, which is superfluous.
Me: Youâre not fashion conscious at all?
Ed: No, we donât care about all that, we play this music because itâs what weâve always played and we donât care who likes us, just because weâve been named as a âpunkâ band doesnât mean that weâre going to start dressing the part.
They had received early positive reviews of their first single. In Sniffinâ Glue , Mark P. wrote that âthis single is a brilliant effort. The Saints recorded and released it themselves. Theyâre what rock ânâ rollâs all about. They moveâfast, loud, very like the Ramones, but theyâre no take-off.â 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. âIt wasnât recognized at the time,â Kuepper has said, âbut 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.â
In truth, the Saintsâespecially on their first, and best, albumâassault the fifties as much as love it. âLike a snake calling on the phone / Iâve got no time to be aloneâ begins â(Iâm) Stranded,â and the song never lets up. You feel as if machines, not humans, are playing the instruments, and all your theories about the âmeaningâ of punk disappear. âNights in Veniceâ is even stranger; it reminds you in its end-of-time destruction of â30 Seconds over Tokyoâ 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 Saintsâ 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., âStranded with the Saints,â October 1976, in Mary Perry, Sniffinâ 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 heâll probably get his teeth fixed!
Slash : Are you a âmusicalâ band?
Gear: I personally donât like music per se.
From a 1979 interview with New York Rocker :
NYR: Or go video-disc.
TG: I donât 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. âEarly September [1978] saw them up north in San Francisco, Oakland to be precise, spending a week at Target Video doing promotional videos,â Jon Savage wrote in 1979.
The most remarkable of these are two videos filmed at Target Video Studios in 1978, â122 Hours of Fear,â which recalls, distantly, Rocket from the Tombsâ â30 Seconds over Tokyo,â is a soundtrack to the B-horror movie that your life could be if you strayed too far. âWow! What a show! One-hundred-and-twenty-two hours of fear!â 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 âEva Braun,â 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, âScreamers: Past Their Primal?â New York Rocker , August 1979, p. 34; âInterview with the Screamers,â Slash #2, June 1977; Jon Savage, âThe Screamers,â Melody Maker , January 6, 1979.]
SCUM Manifesto
Valerie Solanasâs screedâinsane, but with just enough truth to make you wonderâwas published in 1968 and was part of Malcom McLarenâs and Vivienne West-woodâs remodeled shop, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. As McClaren noted in 2004, âI ripped out the dance floor and used the wood to make parallel bars. I covered the walls with sponge and sprayed slogans from pamphlets Iâd picked up in NYCâthe SCUM (Valerie Solanasâs Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, adding the words, âDoes passion end in fashion, or does fashion end in passion?ââ
Punkâs disaffection with the hippiesâsometimes violently expressed, sometimes humorously, most often bothâwas nothing compared to Solanasâs. In a section of the Manifesto entitled âIsolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community,â 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 âhippyâ 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 heâs 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 activitiesâfarming, fucking, bead-stringing ⌠The âhippyâ is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussyâthe main commodity to be shared âŚ
Punk, too, was about negation and rejection. As Johnny Rotten told Carolyn Coon in 1976:
I havenât seen a hippie in two weeks. Thatâs something! They were so complacent. They let it allâthe drug cultureâflop around them. They were all dosed out of their heads the whole time ⌠Yeah man, peace and love. Donât let anything affect you. Let it walk all over you but donât stop it ⌠We say bâ! If it offends you, stop it. Youâve got to or you just become apathetic and complacent yourself ⌠You end up with a mortgage watching TV with 2.4 kids out in suburbiaâand thatâs just disgusting. All those hippies are becoming like that.
[Johnny Rotten quoted in Caroline Coon, âSex Pistols: Rotten to the Core,â Melody Maker , November 27, 1976; Malcom McClaren, âDirty Pretty Things,â 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, âthe fourth gig of the [Electric] Eelsâ five-gig career.â 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. âMustardâ builds to fury in just over a minute. âWhen youâre using / lots of hotdogs / in the peat moss / you can feel it,â go the lyrics, by John Morton. An ad for the show in Clevelandâs 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.
âSee No Evilâ
A song by Tom Verlaine, appearing most famously as the opening track on Televisionâs Marquee Moon , released in 1977. There it is: a nervous, concocted thing, full of jumpy glory, with Richard Lloydâs guitar solos predicting a version of punkâjazzy and swingingâthat would never happen. In fact, Verlaine has denied that there even was such a thing as punk: âI didnât think there was any punk and, in fact, I still donât. I think punk is slightly more aggressive bubblegum music.â 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
âSee No Evilâ 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 parentsâ house shortly before he died, in June 1977. âWell, itâs real late at nightâ he says, his voice dry and raspy, âand everybodyâs gone to sleep. But I got a six-pack of Genesee, and some Lucky Strikes. So Iâm gonna do some songs.â It would be easy to say that Laughnerâs version is stripped down, but itâs not. Itâs 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 DeLilloâs 1973 novel Great Jones Street , the rock star Bucky Wunderlick remembers the âmountain tapesâ 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 Laughnerâs late-at-night-the-night-before-his-death recordings in his parentsâ house:
On the tapes were twenty-three songs, all written and sung by me (without accompaniment) on and old acoustic guitar, the first Iâd 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. 147â48; Tom Verlaine quoted in Scott Mervis, âMusic Preview: Televisionâs Tom Verlaine Turns in on Again,â Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , June 8, 2006, www.post-gazette.com.]
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