History of the term "punk" as used with music, part 3 of 3 - 1970s

This is an edited version of the second part of an article on the history of the term "punk" as related to music. You can read the first part here.

The Rotten Etymology of Punk (Part 2 of 3)

by J.P. Robinson

Bangs’ description was undoubtedly important. For NME’s Nick Kent, “the whole concept of punk was his.” For Clinton Heylin, in From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, Bangs was “the godfather of punk journalism.” In 1975, Bangs wrote to a friend, admitting that he had “influenced a certain miniscule subculture of teenage misfits with rock’n’roll fanaticism and sometimes literary aspirations, who like to think of themselves as ‘punks.’”

However, in The MC5 review, Bangs didn’t use “punk” to call to mind a new spirit of rock’n’roll, but an old spirit of ill-informed journalistic excess... The Rolling Stone hype irritated him, and he paraphrased the earlier article, dismissing it with what would become his trademark sarcasm: “never mind that they came on like a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip — these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax!”

The word also seemed to conjure up Bangs’ own life. He was still then working on an autobiographical novel that he had begun in his teens, which he called Drug Punk... He discussed passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels, which had used the word “punk” frequently, with the San Diego Hells Angels chapter who lived next door. His friend Robert Houghton remembered that We’re Only In It For The Money, with ‘Flower Punk,’ was one of their favourite records of 1968....

After that MC5 review, through 1970, “punk” became popular. critics said Jim Morrison had a “street punk-choir boy voice,” or that The Rolling Stones had “a punk craftiness and sneering narcissism.” In the Fort Lauderdale News, there was the “lowest point in bad taste: the rock band of young punks at a remodelled nightclub which hung a placard on the bass drum with a phrase containing a four-letter word.” There are two types of kids: good kids and punks,” the Detroit Free Press suggested, though now “the good kids and the punk kids all have long hair.” In July 1970, in Fusion, Nick Tosches wrote a cover story called ‘The Punk Muse.’ For perhaps the first time, “punk” became more than a throwaway reference. It was now a recognisable, fashionable style.

“The Punk Muse”, 1970 (Source: Fusion/The Independent)

At the end of 1970, Bangs wrote a long essay called ‘ Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program For Mass Liberation In The Form Of A Stooges Review. Or, Who’s The Fool?,’ published in two parts in 2. Bangs called Iggy Pop “that Stooge punk.” As with The MC5 review, the description was both influential and called to mind earlier journalism; the previous year, in the Los Angeles Times, John Mendelsohn had described The Stooges’ first album as a collection of “whiny adolescently repulsive and barely distinguishable street-punk anthems.” Before that, in Fusion in October 1969, Iggy himself had described some of his audience as “punks.”

Bangs’ “Stooge punk” was a little different to the other “punks” of the time. This punk was “a pre-eminently American kid,” he wrote, vulnerable even, someone the “smug post-hippie audience” thought was “a fucked-up punk.” This was personal for Bangs: “his lifestyle was nigh-identical to ours,” he wrote later. In the issue of Creem that carried the second half of his Stooges essay, Bangs signed another review “Punko Bangs.” A few months later, he wrote that he felt “like some self-important punk’s notion of God sitting up here arbitrating the efforts of bands.” The same year, he called himself a “pompous punk,” someone with “pube punk fantasies.” For the first time in a couple of generations, someone had taken on the word willingly.

By the end of 1970, in New York, Suicide were advertising their early gigs as “punk music,” apparently inspired by Bangs. “I got the word from Lester’s piece,” Alan Vega remembered, “never imagining that punk would become a style of music.”

Punk was fashionable again.

Advertisement for Suicide in the Village Voice, October 1970 (Source: From The Archives)

“If punk America is dying behind the curdled MSG-free dregs of Hip and all the corny Experiments in New Designs for Living,” Bangs wrote in 1971, “then THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS.” Punk seemed to suggest a wider malaise that could be delineated by rock music. This “punk America” caused him to turn to nostalgic rock’n’roll: “you can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges,” he said, but they couldn’t compare to the “sneering punk snarl” of The Troggs.

This nostalgic usage was already common, particularly about fifties rock’n’roll. Ellen Willis had called Elvis a punk in 1969, and The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran would all be punks over the next few years. They were seen as forefathers: in a 1970 article on violence in rock, Rob Partridge in Record Mirror drew the links between the “romantic” punks of the 1950s and The MC5.

However, as Bangs had hinted at, it was the punks of the 1960s who first coalesced into a genre. In March 1971, in Creem, Greg Shaw wrote about The Shadows of Knight’s “hard-edge punk sound.” In April, in Rolling Stone, he praised The Guess Who’s “good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll.” The next month, Dave Marsh wrote his famous review of ? & The Mysterians, calling them a “a landmark exposition of punk rock.”

Both Marsh and Shaw felt they had originated the phrase “punk rock.” At the end of 1971, Shaw wrote about “what I have chosen to call ‘punk rock’ bands — white teenage hard rock of ’64–66,” and, according to the New York Daily News in 1976, he was “willing to take the credit for it even though he says he can’t remember the first time he used it.” Marsh remembered that, “culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better construed as a compliment.” He was, he said, “happier every year” to receive the credit for “punk rock.”

However, despite their influence, neither Shaw nor Marsh was the first to use the phrase. A year before either of them, in March 1970 in the Chicago Tribune, Ed Sanders, formerly of The Fugs, described his first solo album as “punk rock — redneck sentimentality — my own past updated to present day reality.” (While working on the album in December 1969, he also recorded a song called ‘I’m Just a Tired, Lonesome Street Punk,’ or simply ‘Street Punk,’ which was only released in 2008.) “No one sent me a check for coming up with the term,” Sanders recalled.

Wherever it originated, this “quaint fanzine term,” as Shaw thought of it, was growing in importance. Bangs’ ‘Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times’ was published in Creem the month after Marsh’s Mysterians review, again praising mid-sixties punk rock, particularly The Count Five... He planned to use the article’s title for what the Detroit Free Press anticipated would “probably be the definitive book on punk rock,” though it was never published...

Both the word and the music spread further still when Lenny Kaye used the phrase in the liner notes to his 1972 Nuggets compilation of sixties garage rock . “The New Nostalgia is here,” proclaimed a Chicago Tribune review, “with an emphasis on a single genre: punk-rock.”... Bangs wrote that Nuggets “proves that psychedelia and punk zap are just as much a real cool time now as they were when we might have invested some emotional space-born significance in them.”... By the new year, some fans of Nuggets were calling themselves “punks.”

Before long, punk was used to describe contemporary music. “Punk-rock has become the favoured term of endearment,” Ellen Willis wrote in December 1972, for “the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll.” Willis particularly liked what she called the “neo-punk sensibility” of Five Dollar Shoes, who she saw at the Mercer Arts Center in 1972, in one of the earliest references to underground New York rock as punk. (Lynn Van Matre had called Moogy And The Rhythm Kings “New York punk rock” in the Chicago Tribune that summer. Lillian Roxon also frequently praised a band called Street Punk, regulars at Max’s Kansas City.)

Although it was often used for artists that are now thought of as punk’s forebears — Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies —the word refused to be pinned down in the first half of the seventies, such was its ubiquity. Punk was used for a kind of “back to basics” blues rock.., heavy metal..., progressive rock..., and dozens of pop and rock acts with little else in common... The Monkees were “what punk rock is all about.” “Dion was the original punk,” according to Greg Shaw in Rolling Stone. For the Philadelphia Daily News, Connie Francis’ ‘Lipstick on My Collar’ “epitomized the adolescent worst of punk rock.”

“What Punk Rock Is All About”, 1973 (Source: Hartford Courant)

Soon, bands began to adopt the term. The Who included ‘The Punk and The Godfather’ on Quadrophenia in 1972. As well as Street Punk in New York, a band called The Punks formed in 1973 in Detroit. “Patrician rock is going down now,” Don McLean said that year, trying to shake off the success of ‘American Pie,’ “I like punk rock.” Brownsville Station released School Punks in 1974 and told journalists that they were “punk rock.” In 1975, Lowell George of Little Feat, once of The Standells and The Mothers of Invention, claimed that his current group, five albums in, were “just another punk band from L.A.” That year, The Tubes released ‘White Punks on Dope,’ reportedly about Jefferson Starship.

For much of the seventies, punk was often interchangeable with glam rock. For the New York Daily News, “punk rock” was a “subdivision” of “glitter rock” or “drag-rock.” Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade, and The Sweet were all called punk, and Roxy Music were “punk rock in space.” According to the Los Angeles Times in 1975, hitmakers Chinn and Chapman were “the masters of the English punk-rock sound,” but were “tired of the punk-rock wave that they rode to success in England.” In the British music weeklies, as Simon Reynolds observed in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, groups such as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Heavy Metal Kids were “punk before punk.” One headline about Harvey suggested “Thou Shalt Have No Other Punk Before Me.”

Indeed, the word was used frequently in the British press. As early as 1972, Charles Shaar Murray had described The MC5 as “punks,” after quoting Lester Bangs’ Rolling Stone review. Mick Farren often used the word for 1950s rock’n’roll, or those influenced by it. By 1973, NME was writing about “rock ’n’ roll’s punk-junk revolution.” In 1974, Melody Maker discussed “these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock,” and NME reported that record companies were actively searching for “punk.”

More than anyone else, Alice Cooper was the most high profile punk of the early seventies. He was “archetypal punk rock” for Grace Lichtenstein in The New York Times, and “mainstream punk raunch” in Rolling Stone. Punk was “a style that began and should have ended with Alice Cooper,” the Tampa Times argued. In Creem, Cooper won the new “Punk of the Year” category in the 1972 Readers’ Poll, with Lester Bangs placed in sixth. The next year, Billion Dollar Babies was “the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom.” After seeing a disappointing Alice Cooper show, a critic in Ontario wrote, probably for the first time, “punk rock is dead!”

Despite its popularity, punk still often betrayed the attitudes of those who used it, riddled with the problems of its etymology. In 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote to members of the Black Panthers, in a letter widely republished in the underground press, urging them to see the “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements as allies, and that “the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” Even where the word had come to mean a delinquent, it still sometimes echoed with homophobia or misogyny; liner notes to a 1973 compilation of The Sonics suggested that “it’s like if delta blues oughta be played by old black men, and if fag rock oughta be played by real queers, then it stands to reason that punk-rock oughta be played by punks!” For Ellen Willis, in 1974, “nouveau punkism… became an excuse for blatant male chauvinism and nihilistic trashing of every value and aspiration beyond (male) orgams and (male) violence.” In 1975, Let It Rock noted that “the term punk is bandied about an awful lot these days, it seems to describe any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off stage.”

Lester Bangs became sceptical about the term. In 1975, he wrote that “I try to completely dissociate myself” from people who think of themselves as “punks,” “because I don’t want to be the king of the punks or the king of the rock critics or any other such thing.” “This is punk?” he asked, when his friend Billy Altman took him to CBGBs for the first time, to see Talking Heads and Television. “This is just San Francisco all over again.”

“When there are no more punks,” Sid Vicious said, in January 1978, on the day of The Sex Pistols’ final concert, “that is when things are going to be okay.” The word had dogged the band, through tabloid controversy and critical admiration.

In America, the word had been attached to something recognisable as modern punk since at least Trixie A. Balm’s June 1975 review of The Dictators’ debut album in Creem, in which she praised their “punk aplomb” and “vinylized punk menace.” At first, calling The Sex Pistols “punk” was not to suggest they were new, but to compare them them to prevailing rock critical trends; in their first major review, in NME in February 1976, Neil Spencer said they played “60’s styled white punk rock as unselfconsciously as it’s possible to play it these days i.e. self-consciously. Punks? Springsteen Bruce and the rest of ’em would get shredded if they went up against these boys.” In May that year, Time Out described their set as “a mixture of Anglo-American teen/punk classics.” For Paul Morley, in his Out There fanzine, it was “controlled chaotic punk muzak.” Even for Greg Shaw, reviewing a gig at the 100 Club, “their sound is a straight blast of tortured punk rock.”

Read the complete article here.