In a Travel Channel segment, when maverick cook and writer Anthony Bourdain asks iconic drummer Marky Ramone to name a “desert island disc”, that silly but now ubiquitous catchphrase in pop culture, after a brief lull in their chat, Marky settles on Phil Spector’s Greatest Hits (Warner, 1977). Not because Spector produced The Ramones album End of the Century (Sire, 1979), which split their fan base down the middle due to its sometimes hammy wall-of-sound arrangements, but because the album captures a milieu of tough girls belting out taut songs with memorable melodies.
To me, that is also the essence of the Ramones, minus the coiffured hair and snappy downtown dresses. Yet, such punk antecedents go missing in the newly re-released Punk: Attitude (Shout! Factory, 2011). Luckily, books like I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2009) fill in the dire gaps in punk history, making readers aware that the such bands could never have really unleashed their white riot without the raw power of black music in their creative DNA.
This may unsettle some folks, but often punk rock is a black, Jewish, southern thang, to be sure. That’s not to blithely point out that Bernie Rhodes, the Clash’s barnstorming manager, was a pushy Jewish kid with street smarts and a head full of Marx that was enticed by the Paris revolts of 1968. Guitarist Mick Jones was half-Jewish too, and he lived with a Jewish grandparent when mustering up London SS, his pre-Clash band. Joey Ramone (Jeff Hyman) of The Ramones was Jewish, as was first drummer Tommy Ramone, though the band has become as whitewashed as Jerry Seinfeld.
Author: Mickey Leigh and Legs McNeil
Publisher: Touchstone
Publication date: 2010-11
Format: Paperback
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/i/isleptwithjoeyramone-cover.jpg
To be sure, hiccupy rockabilly, swamp blues, and androgynous southern rock ’n’ roll ala swaggering Little Richard, also gave punk rock some much-needed meat and soul in the ’70s, when excessive, masturbatory stadium rock held sway over the FM airwaves. Plus, the South produced a bevy of bands like Corrosion of Conformity and DRI that bastardized hardcore punk into crossover speed-metal, forever changing the punk landscape.
Punk was never purely bred from Anglo anguish. In the recently released thesis “A Blacker and Browner Shade of Pale: Reconstructing Punk Rock History”, (Technische Universitat Dresden, 2010), German historian Franziska Pietschmann “probes how the music press, aided and abetted by academic texts, constructs punk as a white music mono-culture that such discourse historicizes, analyzes, and maintains” while largely ignoring or underrepresenting “the presence of people of color, especially black (American) as well as Latina/o participants, in punk rock culture.” This means writers have often downgraded or dismissed punk participants of color but also undervalued punk as an outgrowth of a hybrid American music culture fostered in disparate locales, in which punk maintains “a fluid social and musical convergence culture that continuously crosses unstable boundaries of genres, races, and genders.”
Punk unleashed a lot of pent-up disgust and vitriol, concur most historians, folklorists, and fans. Punk: Attitude partly errs, though, and somewhat revises history in the process, by suggesting that a lone loose-knit triangle occurred between London, Los Angeles, and New York City. These divergent points became a perfect trifecta of punk hostility, intelligence, creativity, and fusion. All the other efforts, from gritty Seattle to cowpoke gone crazy Austin, even Chicago’s barbaric midwest yawps, go unnoticed.
The talking heads in the film, culled from the ranks of favored bands like the Damned, Black Flag, X-Ray Spex, Agnostic Front, and the New York Dolls, paint the birth of hardcore and punk in broad terms. London was awash in unrest, dubbed the Winter of Discontent, which meant long dole queues, strikes by garbage men, race riots and, unmentioned in the film, a relentless heat wave as well. Culturally, the implosion of pub rock, unmentioned in the film too, and glam rock, vis-a-vis Bowie (who in the late-’70s aimed for austere German art rock and white funk) and Mark Bolan, meant that a hole existed in the youth scene, which punk quickly filled with savvy rancor.
That youth scene, by no means, was stuck in dirty, glamorous downtown London or lower Manhattan. Even former frontier Ohio gave rise to Pere Ubu, the Pagans, and Dead Boys, just to mention a few utterly seminal bands of the era. As Mike Hudson, singer for the Pagans, conveys in his biography Diary of a Punk (Tuscarora Books, 2008), meeting Chuck Berry at a Route 99 inn was one of the biggest thrills of his life. Punk might have declared itself the vanguard of the blank generation, the beginning of a new, blistering era, but it was deeply fond of black culture icons like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, despite posing otherwise.
That’s not to say that black filmmaker Don Letts doesn’t know his material. He was the house DJ at the Roxy, which was ground zero for punk rock – literally its fertile field or battle zone – for 100 eventful days in 1977 — just like the Masque in Los Angeles became a West Coast vortex of angst festering under the sun. Not only did Letts escort members of the Clash to sound system parties, share his bluebeat and reggae records with them, he also spun such tunes at the Roxy, since punk records were few and far between. He ran Acme Attractions too, an outlet for all things hip, like proper punk clothes, which not only drew in folks like Patti Smith and Bob Marley but competed with SEX, the shop operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols.
Director: Don Letts
Distributor: Shout! Factory
Release date: 2011-01-11
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/e/ensminger-punkattitude-cvr.jpg
Letts is the actual figure standing in the middle of the riotous scene captured on the cover art of the Clash’s compilation Black Market Clash (Epic, 1980), former manager of the art-punk girl band the Slits, and an early chronicler of punk, whose film The Punk Rock Movie (Sun Video, 1978) set the benchmark for future independent lenses. While that film captures some of the earliest, and most potent moments, of first comers like Generation X and Slaughter and the Dogs, a criminally under-rated Manchester band (with whom Morrissey briefly sang), neither appear in Punk: Attitude, which also lacks any input from the Adverts and the Jam. Though interviews with the likes of Howard Devoto (Buzzcocks, Magazine) and Glenn Branca (Theoretical Girls) are revealing and give voice to artistic diversity, the aforementioned gaps yawn rather wide.
Many Clash enthusiasts know Letts’ footage of the Clash playing Bonds in New York City, which became the core material behind videos like “This is Radio Clash” and Clash on Broadway DVD. In Punk: Attitude, Letts pays homage to this time in the Clash’s career, when they were able bridge the hip hop style of urban graffiteros with the ‘three chords and the truth’ urgency and worldview of punk, which had set out to knock down barriers, both culturally and socially.
This synthesis – a kind of disco punk, or punkified rap – was sharpened by the band to an apex on “Lightning Strikes Twice” and “Magnificent Seven”, replete with long surreal chains of lyrics and insistent grooves. Yet, as longtime Clash biographer Marcus Gray avidly paints in Route 19 Revisited his new depthy examination of the Clash’s London Calling double LP (Soft Skull Press, 2010), the Clash’s debt to black music arose much earlier. Joe Strummer’s squat days testify to this, for he honed a heady Woody Guthrie-cum-Bob Dylan persona. Leading the raucous band 101ers, he wholeheartedly mixed Chucky Berry riffage with British Invasion chops and grassroots, even zydeco, rhythm.
Since the formative days of the Clash, black music was a stimulus and a mile-marker. Honesty was necessary, though. They didn’t simply dole out white contraband of black music, or bare-bone white anguish and rebellion translated via black musical songs, stories, and spirit. They did emulate black musical practices, such as relentless touring and DIY forcefulness, but they also worked with an important gestalt and basic knowledge: rock ’n’ roll itself was a motley hybrid. They knew, instinctively, that rock ’n’ roll was a meeting ground, or bridge, in which youth of diverse stripes and origins, together forever, could render potent meanings from their lives.
If black America had given Western culture a heavy, indelible dose of “Sorrow Songs,” according to black philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois, replete with blood, sweat, and labor, then Western music culture, especially in the veins of blues, folk, and even rock ’n’ roll, stirred that sorrow, mingling it with fresh narratives and divergent musical directions. Punk was just an outgrowth of that seed. It might have been a mutation to some, a self-defeating gesture of noise and fury. To bands like the Clash, punk meant a chance to meet black culture in a merging of horizons. In songs like “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” they made punk reggae, not photocopied dreadlock rock.
The Clash’s fondness for black music was anything but one-dimensional. Sure, as Paul Simonon, who grew up surrounded by West Indian families, tells in Punk: Attitude, he learned to play bass by thumbing along to reggae records hour after hour. It offered exercise and skill sets, concentration and nimbleness, but instead of delivering his parts in rote boredom, like a kid studying a lesson on paper, he clung to it because it was vivid, alive, and pregnant with culture.
On the other hand, drummer Topper Headon was already a limber and learned player when he took over as drummer. His spaghetti arms could play an infinite variety of styles, even the very un-punk percussion of Weather Report, whose calculated modern jazz also drove the technique of the Bad Brains as well. By the late-’70s, the Clash were restless and soaked up sounds of their transatlantic travels (like cruising across America with Bo Diddley) and the poignant news of the street.
They pushed punk boundaries just as the second wave of British punk, like Oi boys Angelic Upstarts and Sham 69, provocative political pioneers Crass, and proto-hardcore contingents like the UK Subs began their full-frontal assault on the punk legacy. None of these bands even merit an interview in Letts’ film, which quickly shifts focus to nascent US hardcore bands like Dead Kennedys and Agnostic Front.
This Ain’t Pure-bred Anglo Anguish
Gray’s book successfully counterpoints these trends by examining how “London Calling” is a wide-ranging record that offers examinations of movie stars like Montgomery Clift (“The Right Profile”), long cool ’50s cars (“Brand New Cadillac”), factory town racism toward Jews (“Clampdown”), poets like Garcia Lorca (“Spanish Bombs”), and the coming Cold War apocalypse (“London Calling”). But behind all that lyrical brouhaha and musical charm and finesse remains a core of studied black music: Toots and Maytals (“Pressure Drop”), Desmond Dekker (“Israelites”), Althea and Donna’s (“Up Town Top Ranking”), Sonny Okosun (“Fire in Soweto”), Matumbi (“The Man in Me”), and Danny Ray (“Revolution Rock”), just to name a handful.
Some of those tracks found daylight on albums like London Calling and Black Market Clash, others remained buried in rehearsals and sound checks, brought to light by Gray’s book only, or a rare bootleg, which fill in the gaps of history. Without such text or documentation, the Clash’s legacy remains rather cliché, even anemic. Once one understands the band’s full commitment to rich musical antecedents, the Clash’s output seems more seasoned and fecund.
I Slept with Joey Ramone by Joey’s brother Mickey Leigh, who co-administers his estate as well, adeptly examines the real roots of the Ramones’ punk outpouring. For too long, people have routinely suggested that mid-’70s punk cut its umbilical chord to black music, which was promulgated from everyone from Bomp label, fanzine, and record store founder Greg Shaw to Maximum Rock’n’Roll columnist Mykel Board, and academics as well, like David James (“Poetry/Punk/Productions: Some Recent Writing in LA,” Postmodernism and Its Discontents, 1988). These voices effectively conjure up punk as white music, whose roots were closer to The Sonics and other Nuggets-era bands than to cotton fields, leaning back porches in the South, or Chitlin’ Circuit juke joints.
Luckily, Punk: Attitude does trace punk to Chuck Berry’s duck walk and Little Richard’s wild drag style, acknowledged in the film by none other than gender-bender David Johansen of the New York Dolls. That legendary proto-punk band readily indulged in covers of black music from the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson and Bo Diddley to the Coasters. But Leigh’s book cuts to the core, describing how Jewish kids from swampy Queens were riveted to Stax and Motown, even Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind LP. Buying his first drum set with his Bar Mitvah gelt, Jeff Hyman (aka Joey Ramone) lit a path, translating his love of such music into his own special starry-eyed stab at the Jewish-American dream. Along the way, I imagine, he tried to capture the original joy of seeing Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Temptations at the Brooklyn Fox Theater, his first concert.
Writer: Brian Walsby
Publisher: Bifocal
UK Release date: 2011-01-25
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/e/ensminger-manchild5-cvr.jpgThe razory pop of the Ramones first record is no simpleminded aberration, no one-dimensional kink in the musical machine of the bloated ’70s record industry. It’s an incisive link, for me, between the shouted fervor of “Lucille” and the howls of bored youth seeking kicks in the haze of post-Velvet Underground New York. It coincides with the Cramps debuting their jungle beat punkabilly, which they aptly termed “psychobilly”, and the wayward sexual revolt of cross-dressing Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, not to mention the White Castle inspired musings of the Dictators, whom Letts documents as well. The Dictators were like the MC5, shorn of politics. They embodied an ethos of dope and fucking in the streets, but evoked no White Panther party tumult.
The Ramones stand out from this bunch, not simply because they were gawky gang-like hoodlums with primitive songs about other misfits, like pinheads and mental patients, but because they wore their roots on their sleeves with panache and fire in their belly. To hear Joey sing is to flash back, again, to those tough girl groups from the ’60s. Like it or not, he had a big pop heart, which even cult filmmaker Roger Corman knew. The Ramones are perfect for Rock ’n’ Roll High School (reissued by Shout Factory, 2010), not because they were rebels without a cause but because they were transcendent high schoolers themselves, forever producing hit underground singles. They were the mutant Chuck Berry of punk. “Rockaway Beach”, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”, and innumerable other songs spoke to a world of surf, turf, problems, and freedom, all wrapped in the dented domain of pop.
Sure, Joey’s career was jumpstarted by other more frenetic tunes as well, like “Martian Bop” and “Surfin’ Bird”, and he never veered too far from those stylings, but he also melded and balanced those jarring tunes with truly melodic fare and vocal inflections that feel far more indebted to Marvin Gaye than the clunky frat rock of the Troggs. The book obviously explores Joey’s life in far more complete terms, such as his ongoing battle with an obsessive compulsive disorder, but the gaps it serves to fill in the musical history of the Ramones is essential and profound too.
Author: Marcus Gray
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: 2010-10
Length: 532 pages
Format: Softcover
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/a/ashsmith-route19-cvr.jpgIn its own way, Brain Walsby’s Manchild, his most recent installation in the Manchild graphic novel series, is equally adept at making sure the voids of history, this time North Carolina in the ’80s, are examined at length, with trenchant wit and insight. These are the territories that fall off the map of documentaries like Punk: Attitude. In essence, Walsby not only delivers an oral history and fanzine compendium of what small town America produced in the heyday of punk and hardcore, he also delivers keen comics as well, which he has produced for three decades.
Known for graphics that ended up on endless gig flyers and the records of 7 Seconds, and as a finely-honed drummer for Scared Straight, Polvo, and more recently Double Negative, his previous collections offered bucket loads of sly and sardonic antics and an insistent leveling of all icons and “punk stars,” including his graphic artist nemesis Pushead. In segments, he has poked at lame Emo, created fictitious girl superheroes like Jailbait Girl for bald men harboring adolescent fantasies, and detailed the origins of his early bands, such as garage rockers Zombie Clergy and posicore pioneers Scared Straight.
He has imagined faux punk “reunions” too – Minor Threat babbling about Saabs and SUVs — and explored titans from Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to Jessica Simpson and Bono. No people or elements within the scene escape his eye, from never-ending punk house parties with cookie cutter bands or politics that stymie dissent as “uncool” and pump up “uniform thought” – lame codes that make punk seem extra enclosed and hermetic. For those of us raised on punk fanzine gossip, in-fighting, and territorialism, not to mention the comic work of Jaime Hernandez and Shawn Kerri, Walsby’s confessionalism, wit, and down-to-earth raps are engrossing.
This newest collection extends work previously published in Left of the Dial, my own magazine, years ago. As an oral history project, it traces the lineage of a peculiar Southern hardcore-meets-speed metal style, mastered by bands like Corrosion of Conformity. Other bands had certainly leaned in the metallic direction, including Suicidal Tendencies, the Accused, and Agnostic Front, but it was southern bands like Void, DRI (who resettled to San Francisco), Offenders, and Corrosion of Conformity that really fused the heavy riffage, acumen, and churn of metal music with the speed and harshness of hardcore. In fact, given the direction of Slayer, Metallica, and Anthrax, these bands were ahead of the curve and reached Middle America, trailer park and all, much more than punk purists like Crucifix.
While the book does offer revealing anecdotes about punk’s links to skateboard culture, tensions and ties to Washington D.C.’s scene, and the development of the crossover sound, it doesn’t quite explore the politics of Corrosion of Conformity. Their lyrics, peaking during the release of the genre-defining Technocracy (Metal Blade, 1987) album, grapple with pertinent issues relating to science, war, and industry while others punk bands of the era, from Black Flag and “new” TSOL, retreated to staid rock clichés.
Other anecdotes about the Bad Brains address lurking sexism in the scene, while interviews/oral histories with Honor Role, Stillborn Christians, Subculture, and No Labels reveal how Southern cities coped with isolation, nurtured visits by far flung bands, and made an impression nationally by releasing fanzines and records, like countless other youth hubs in the pre-Internet era.
For a folklorist, each of these works represents one important notion – punk is a history still in the making, with margins that await documentation. Stories continue to unfold, such as the impact of black culture upon the formation, formula, and function of punk rock.
The graphic novel may provide a synthesis between oral history and graphic action, a way of seeing what theorist Scott McCloud terms “a dance of the visible and invisible” that amplifies meaning and fascinates viewers because they can identify with universal features of the drawings (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 1994).
Biographies like I Slept with Joey Ramone indulge readers not only with anecdotes but also offer a likeable, breezy, personal slice that cuts a personal and deep path, tempered by an affection for details that reveal Joey’s layered personality rather than bolstering an already redundant legend.
Lastly, films like Punk: Attitude spin their tales in a biased fashion, focusing on impressions of a select few with cultural currency, but at least the extras the DVD offers, like the short documentary L.A. Punk by Dick Rude, and clips assembled to discuss the roles of women and fanzines, not only circulate knowledge about gender roles and the material/visual culture of punk, they offer much-needed context. Punk is no vacuum, no airtight, sealed white music form. It is a repository of culture — magnetized, manifold, and chock-full of merit – that was, and is, impacted by Jewish, black, and Southern experiences.