Premise: Four Iowa punk friends in their early 20s agree to see 100 shows that year, while also dealing with the ins and outs of their own personal lives and the wild world of 1984.
Sorry, no story so far. Working on research. But I'll post writing exercises, research, outlines, and whatnot. You can read my long treatment at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kCeqaT1Ug3zuEgjTeTTCby-1IJcreATvtH5tyAklFVM/edit?usp=sharing. Feel free to comment or make any suggestions.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. *At that time if you saw someone who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.
70s Detroit band, Flirt (Courtesy of Rockee Berlin)
Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): That scene had girls, but they all died. It’s weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.
Hillary Waddles (scenester): There were girls, but we were all people’s girlfriends. It just wasn’t the time for that yet—girls didn’t get in bands; you didn’t get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.
Gloria Branzei (scenester): It was a little dick fest, and they didn’t like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.
Hillary Waddles: Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn’t like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.
Gloria Branzei: It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone’s ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.
Tesco Vee: Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.
Sherrie Feight: Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.
Jon Howard (scenester): There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn’t get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam’s Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of ’81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Rea-sons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Dave Rice: The upstarts were coming into the old guard’s headquarters. I use the image of the old guard being kind of crowded into the back half of the bar during a hardcore show looking like somebody farted, you know like “What is this horrible . . . oh my God.” Where the bald kids with bandanas on their legs were right up front. The hardcore thing was just deliberately nihilistic. And homophobic as fuck. Which, I mean—rightfully so—rubbed people the wrong way. But there were hilarious aspects, you know, I mean just the old punk scene was taking place largely at Bookie’s, which was an old gay club, so there was a lot of cross-over there. A lot of those people would come from that kind of Rocky Horror mind set, where even if you weren’t gay, you acted it.
Tex Newman (RUR, Shock Therapy, Country Bob and the Bloodfarmers, guitarist): There had always been a rivalry between the Elvis Costello people and us. And the big rock bands were also the enemy, and then the bands that wore their tiger-print pants. Bookie’s was punk rock, and the Freezer was for the hardcore shit.
The Women's City Club in a 1962 Photo. Women City Club Will sill Building.
John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): You want to talk about punk rock, I’m gonna go Stooges, MC5, real Detroit rock. Alice Cooper. The only thing that really carried that on after that was Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Destroy All Monsters, which were all my heroes from the other bands. Anything else that claimed it was punk rock in Detroit was just a joke. So I lived through that whole ’79 to ’81 thing where new wave took over. So you got all these old Bookie’s bands, you’re all coked out, you’re wearing suits and skinny ties, doing Animals covers or some obscure Brit-sixties shit, and you think you’re fuckin’ punk rock. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.
Larissa [Strickland] and I were living in the City Club, the old women’s club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for New Jack City. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody’s like, “We’re taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck it, we’re squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You’re cool, white boy, but you’re going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn’t go over in the ’hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn’t have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.
Chris Moore, AKA Opie (Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist): This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.
John Brannon: I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.
Cass Corridor
Chris Moore: Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.
John Brannon: Me and Pete Zelewski would go to whatever punk gig, and we’re always like, “Who’s this chick?” Larissa stood out. Then we started going to see L-Seven shows. We had Negative Approach together, but they were doing all these big gigs. They opened for Bauhaus at Bookie’s. We met them at some big outdoor gig, and we got along. Then my mother kicked me out of the house. Fifty cents, I take the Jefferson bus, come downtown, walk about three miles over to the Clubhouse from Jefferson, knocked on her door, and was like, “’Sup?” And I’d only met her twice. I’m like, “Um, I need a place to stay.” She says, “Come on in.” I had nowhere to go. I lived with her for about a year first, but we were best friends at that time. Then we actually became a couple.
Sherrie Feight (Strange Fruit, Spastic Rhythm Tarts, vocalist): You’d go to Detroit for a show, you never knew what to wear. So you’d kind of wear what the guys were wearing. The first time I saw Larissa, I was like, “Oh my God.” She was in a slip and combat boots, her hair bleached out, with this milky white skin and those eyes. I wanted to be like her, but there was no way. I was this rich kid and she was from down on Cass; we were from different worlds.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Andy Wendler (Necros, McDonalds, guitarist): We went to see the Clash at the Motor City Roller Rink, and Joe Strummer kicked his roadie. He was pulling the typical rock-star nonsense—kicking his roadie in the chest because his guitar was messed up. We said, “Okay, this is cool. We love it.” When we saw hardcore, it was right away the idea that this is our thing. We were seven years younger than the guys from the Clash, and the first punk wave and stuff. We played little shows, like basement shows and party shows, then actually started playing real shows with the Fix in Lansing at Club DooBee before the Freezer happened. As record collectors, we had all the 27 and Coldcock singles, the Bookie’s bands and all that stuff. We liked it, but it wasn’t us. The one thing that set us apart was that we wanted to do our own thing, and that was always very clear to us. We weren’t gonna try to get in on the end of the Bookie’s thing; we were just gonna do our own thing. We were also too young. There were many times playing Bookie’s and other places with the Misfits, where we’d meet with the manager and he’d say, “Alright, just come in right before you play, or whatever, in the back door or something.” It was always that hassle.
Chris Panackia: Hardcore kids were cool because they didn’t bathe and they had no hair on their head. A lot of them squatted. The hardcore kids played the Freezer, the Clubhouse, Cobb’s Corner. They played places that were just inferior in every respect possible. Even a bathroom was a luxury. The bands wanted beer and to sell a few T-shirts, and that was good enough. They didn’t have any high hopes. One more thing about that whole hardcore thing is, who would have thought John Brannon would be revered by every punk rock, hardcore kid in the world as like the greatest punk rock lead singer ever? I was the only sound guy that helped those punk rock guys out. They would always say, “Yeah, Cool Chris always treated us good, man. You were always really good to us.” I didn’t want to be that rock sound guy—I was one of them.
Negative Approach playing The Freezer Theater
Corey Rusk (Touch and Go Records, owner; Necros, bassist): I was younger than the other guys in the Necros, so from the time they had driver’s licenses, we were going to Detroit, going to Ann Arbor to get records, or going to Detroit to try and sneak into a show, because we were underage. I quickly realized that my fake ID didn’t work all that often. Once I had a driver’s license, I could go on my own. It really wasn’t ever like I wanted to be a promoter. It seemed like if I put on a show at some rental hall, then it’s all ages and I get to see the band that I really wanna see. So I started renting out halls in the Detroit area when I was seventeen to put on shows of bands that I wanted to see.
John Brannon: It was all promoted on the phone. You call up one dude. He’d call up six dudes. We’d pass out flyers at the gigs. All this shit was word of mouth. No Internet. No MTV. No radio play. Everything was done with cassette tapes and letters, so you’re talking about creating something out of nothing. It started with fifteen people. We know the first five bands that began it all: the Fix, the Necros, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, L-Seven. You got another scene out of that scene when a bunch of those kids following those bands started magazines and bands and that shit became national. “Okay, we’re bored, we live in Detroit, we’re going to create nothing out of nothing.”
Tesco Vee: The Freezer is where a lot of the next part of Detroit music started. It was about fifty feet by twenty feet wide—just a shit hole. A beautiful shit hole. It was like a frat boy fraternity for hardcore. There were a few girls, but for the most part it was guys.
John Brannon: We never expected anything out of it except to write those songs and play the shows. The fact that Negative Approach were able to make records through Touch and Go Records and get the exposure through Touch and Go magazine was just great. We didn’t know it was going to turn out to be this whole thing.
Tesco Vee: Dave Stimson and I started a label, Touch and Go, named after the magazine we had. We had friends that were in the Necros and the Fix, and these bands were so fucking good and nobody’s going to put their records out, so I have to put them out. I felt like it had to be done. *We were part of something that was great, and we weren’t deluded into thinking our own little thing was great; it really was great. We had some really good bands, and the world needed to hear them. The Necros and the Fix were the two big bands, and then Negative Approach.
Andy Wendler: In the fall of ’80 we ran into Tim Story, who is now a Grammy award–winning producer and composer. But at the time he had a four-track in his basement, and that’s where three songs on the Necros’ first single came from. He just came over and brought his bike and his four-track over and a little mixer, and we just laid it down, and then that was it.
Tesco Vee: Those first records by the Fix and the Necros records sat in various shops. We’d drive them down to Ann Arbor and we’d run and look and, yep there’s still five. Still five Necros. Oh, we sold one Fix for $2. Now those records go for a couple of mortgage payments.
Corey Rusk: The first two Touch and Go releases, the Fix and Necros, were so limited, two hundred of the Fix and one hundred of the Necros. And that seemed like so many: we have five friends. You know, “We don’t know anybody beyond our five friends who would want this.”
Marc Barie: Corey took it from those two releases, the Fix and Necros, and Touch and Go became one of the biggest indie labels in the world. That doesn’t happen accidentally.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Vince Bannon: In 1981 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s. Bookie’s was, I don’t know, getting done. I was in business with another guy, and he took good care of everything, from what our security would look like and so on. But again, we were under the radar. We would have grown exponentially if the media in Detroit would have been supporting what we were doing. In cities like LA you had like KROQ, so you talked to the promoters. It wouldn’t be economic reasons; it would be media reasons. But we couldn’t influence radio. When we moved away from Bookie’s was the same time radio became really corporate. The stations were owned by corporations; Lee Abrams and those guys came in and said, “If you want to grow your radio station in Detroit, play much more Rush and much more Bob Seger and much more Journey.”
Mark Norton: We went through what I think is called the Middle Child Syndrome. As the middle child, we were fucked anyway. No one was interested in what we were doing. Everyone looked everywhere, but not in their own city or state for the latest trend. “Punk rock sucks.” It especially sucked coming from Detroit. I know where the Ramrods stand: we were and are the lost children between generations. We didn’t exist then, and we don’t really exist now—never did in the first place. We were a chimera, beat-down motherfuckers who knew right from the start in mid-’77, that knew every card in the house was stacked against us, and we liked it. The Ramrods set the stage for those who would know how to navigate the entire mess—hardcore. The hardcore guys came along and ripped the torch out of someone’s hands—it certainly wasn’t ours. We never had the torch in the first place. Bless you guys.
Skid Marx (Flirt, bassist): There were newer bands coming along, and there was a little bit of friction going on between the hardcore, younger punks and the Bookie’s crowd. There were new metal bands, too, that weren’t really Detroit bands or playing Detroit music.
Paul Zimmerman (White Noise, editor): One of the first hardcore bands I saw was Black Flag at Clutch Cargo’s. My wife-to-be and I had gone to a wedding, and we were dressed super-normal. We went in there, and their audience were all in uniforms, and we were like, “Uh oh.” They were all in black, and I’ve always liked black. I wore black to weddings, but that night I didn’t. So that night we were getting some funny looks, and finally she went to the bathroom and I heard this ruckus. These two girls in the bathroom go, “Look at Barbie. Come on, Barbie, huh, Barbie,” and she finally kicked one of the bathroom stalls open and went, “You want to fuck with Barbie? Come on, fuck with Barbie!”
Bob Mulrooney (Ramrods, Coldcock, Bootsey X and the Lovemasters, drummer, vocalist): There were a few hardcore shows at Bookie’s, and people were just going around grinding their heels into my shoes and just wanting to cause trouble. And they were all guys, and I don’t go out for that. I go out to look at girls, and there was no girls there. Hardcore was too negative. I like the look of the Gothic scene—not so much the records, but the Gothic chicks.
Gary Reichel: You’d hear that we were the old people and that we were resisting the new breed. But they never tried to be cool with us.
Dave Rice (L-Seven, guitarist, producer): Black Flag played Bookie’s in summer ’81 with Dez singing. The front was full of new kids. The back was where the older people stood wondering what was going on.
Brian Mullan (sound man, promoter): Bookie’s introduced me to what led me to hardcore. Actually it went backwards. A high school teacher of mine was sitting around with me and my twin brother after school doing an extra credit project. We went to school in a pretty shitty area, Benedict at Outer Drive and Southfield, so we were not having a whole lot of fun. The Catholic schools back then were about as good or bad as public school—no real difference. We grew up at 6 Mile and Greenfield. After the great white flight the house across the street was empty and a moving van pulled up one day and we were all happy: wow someone is moving into that house. The next day we woke up, and all the bricks were gone from the house, so we had to stare at a tar-paper shack for the next year. We all had paper routes for the News and Free Press. The News route was an afternoon route, and it was brutal because on Friday, they all knew you were out collecting. So some Fridays you’d get robbed and others you wouldn’t. Then we got smart and would collect Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so when they caught up to you Friday, their take wouldn’t be so great. So this teacher presented the question to us that day: “You guys aren’t having much fun are you?” “No, not really.” My brother and I had each other, but that was about it. He goes, “You didn’t hear this from me, but I think you guys need to go to this place, place called Bookie’s. It’s on 6 Mile before you get to Woodward.” My brother went before me, and he came back all jacked up and excited. “Man, I went to that place he told us about. It was crazy, man. The guitar player was wearing a wedding dress.” It turns out that it was the Damned. I went a couple weeks later, ’cause I lived on 6 Mile, took the 6 Mile bus. This guy Rob was working the door, and I’m thinking that I looked like I was twelve and there’s no way I’m gonna get in. But the guy just says, “Hey, man. How’s it going?” and he opens the door for me. There weren’t too many people around, and I didn’t know a soul. I was real nervous about going to this new place, and I looked up and there’s Gloria Love, who I didn’t know at the time, had never seen her. She was clad head to toe in leather, and she looked up at me, and she’s like, “Darling, we’ve been waiting for you.” She runs over and grabs my head and buries it in her breasts. I was still a virgin at the time. That’s very much a night that changed my life. That’s why I started going to Bookie’s, which pretty soon introduced me to hardcore when they booked Black Flag.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Mike Skill (The Romantics, guitarist, bassist): The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don’s dad was the principal.
Don Was: Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.
Chris Panackia: The Romantics eventually would play three nights at Bookie’s and sell out every night. They played the Silverbird on a Monday night and didn’t announce the show until just before doors. This was right when “Tell It to Carrie” was starting to hit and people were just waiting for them to explode. When they announced it on the radio, 6 Mile and Telegraph became a parking lot. There were probably a thousand people there that couldn’t get in outside.
Bill Kozy (Speedball, guitarist): I was real young, and my pals from Warren Avenue took me and to the Silverbird when the Romantics did a surprise show. Beers were 25 cents. It was this rowdy rock crowd, but things were different than that. The Romantics’ fans looked like late-seventies rock people.
Mike Murphy: People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened. Then the bands imploded or were erratic, and it was kind of strange that nothing ever happened out of that whole time, the first wave of punk rock. Bands were going to New York and playing shows and showcases.
Katy Hait (Sillies, vocalist, photographer): These bands from other cities would come in—Teenage Head from Toronto, Skafish from Chicago—and we were just as good as those bands. We joked about it because Detroit was such an underdog. Bands from LA and New York would become famous even though they weren’t that great.
Rock Band The Romantics Performing on Stage (Photo by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Kay Young (photographer): The music was really good, but no one hit like the Ramones or the Cramps did because Detroit was not New York. There were no record label scouts here.
Jerry Vile (The Boners, vocalist, artist, editor, White Noise, Orbit): The whole Detroit punk thing—nobody made it, and there are a lot of reasons. The record covers always looked like shit.
Vince Bannon (Bookie’s, City Club promoter; Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist): The Romantics were the only ones to pull out of Detroit in that era with any kind of substantial deal. You know it’s interesting: Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads told me that all these bands rolled into New York City because there were so many clubs besides CBGB that they would play. They could actually afford to live in the East Village and build a buzz. So you’re an A&R guy in New York, and this band is playing various buildings, and there’s a big buzz. Same thing in LA. The thing you have to remember is, what big bands came out of LA? The first punk rock bands were all signed to independents. It was out of New York where at that time the record capital was, and if you were to make it, you had to go and live in New York and do it. Also, anybody who really made it—from the biggest pop star to the rock-and-roll guy you think is totally underground—their ambition is through the roof. A lot of these guys that were from Detroit, they lived at their parents’ house, they go and play a gig, they come home, and Mom would make them breakfast in the morning.
David Keeps (Destroy All Monsters, manager): Bands from Bookie’s didn’t break out. The bands that did do something had heavy management, people who were willing to invest money in them to get them out of Detroit, like the Romantics. Also in Detroit you didn’t have these bands with money or commitment. You had to have both, and many didn’t. I don’t think anyone was poor; I think that they were mostly suburban kids living in their parents’ houses and didn’t have jobs. They weren’t like dole kids. It wasn’t as if you went to Bookie’s and all these people were from the projects or got ADC. There were kids who wanted to move out of their parents’ and lived in shitty neighborhoods.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich
Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.
Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’
Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.
Tesco Vee (Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor, Touch and Go magazine): We’d go to see everyone at Bookie’s, like the Revillos, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Gang of Four, the Effigies, and the Misfits many times. You know it’s funny—all the Detroit bands would warm up all those national acts—the Mutants, the Algebra Mothers, Flirt, the Cubes, the Sillies. We talked about them a lot in Touch and Go. It was like new wavy stuff, but still it was new music, and we covered new music, and it was probably just to fill up the pages. That’s not very nice is it?
Bookie's in Detroit
Steve McGuire (Traitors, bassist): When we hooked up with Don and they had this whole floor of an old Westinghouse factor at I-94 and Trumbull, with all this old equipment from United Sound and Sound Suite. It was our rehearsal place. I had quit high school and started living there and experimenting. When I first met Don I thought this was our ticket; we’re going to make it. I was so naive. There were blurbs of the Sex Pistols, and I thought the Traitors and the Sex Pistols were in a race, and whoever won would be kings.
Gary Reichel (Cinecyde, vocalist): They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we’ll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We’ll use the same equipment. You don’t have to worry about time between bands.” That’s how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.
Mike Murphy (The Denizens, the Rushlw-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics): No band got famous out of that whole era except the Romantics, and that’s freaky. It’s not that the Romantics weren’t Detroit, but they were not representative of that scene at all. But maybe that’s why they did get signed. When they were first working they were getting on all the good bills and paid for a rehearsal space and they were on salary, which sure isn’t like the rest of the bands. We were poor. I was working at a 7-Eleven.
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.”
Occasionally, with a familiar sense of irony, “punk” became a positive description. In 1929, a critic for the Asheville Citizen-Times described a song called ‘That Empty Pantaloon’ as “so punk, it is refreshing.” Ten years later, the Pittsburgh Press went further: “Americans wouldn’t be likely to know whether a singer was good or bad and would prefer him fairly punk, because sour notes are the sound of native music that Americans like, such as jazz and swing.” When the story was reprinted elsewhere, some used the heading “We Like It Punk.”...
(Ernest) Nelson was then twenty-one, and had formed the band (Oregon Loggers) a couple of years before, in 1930, with five other part-time lumberjacks.... Nelson called himself “Whistle Punk,” a logging term for the young, often teenaged, worker responsible for signalling other members of the gang. Sometimes Nelson cut it short, to “Punk.” He was probably the first musician to call himself a punk.
The Oregon Loggers, 1932. Ernest Nelson is bottom left, with his harmonica (Source: The News-Review, Roseburg)
This was not a punk in the Shakespearean sense, nor the poor quality punk of Otto Wise. Through the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, punk had become a term for a young person, often a delinquent, sometimes a young gay man. Inevitably, the word was applied to musicians; writing in his 1939 autobiography, Benny Goodman remembered being called a “little punk” when he was twelve, in about 1920. In Really The Blues, clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, “punk” was included in the glossary of jazz slang; Mezzrow said it meant a “young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship.” “Punks and skunks,” he wrote, could also mean “there’s nothing very exciting to report.”
The “poor quality” sense of the word still lingered. A feature in Ballyhoo magazine in the early thirties asked readers to decide if Bing Crosby and other musical stars were “‘punk,’ ‘lousy’ or ‘marvellous.’”...
By the fifties, the “delinquent” sense of the word became ubiquitous. Newspapers across the country worried about “grisly whodunits, horror films and cinema and airwave glorification of punks.” According to the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, Elvis Presley was cast as “a hot-headed punk” in Jailhouse Rock. “This punk can’t smile,” a correspondent to the Pittsburgh Press wrote, “he has a nasty curled lip, a mean eye and those sideburns remind me of a hoss-rustler who was hanged a long time ago.” Presley himself used the word; in 1957, he threatened a young Marine with a prop pistol, and called him a “punk.”
Presley as a punk, 1957 (Source: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal)
Presley also inspired what was likely the first television reference to “punk” music. It came in 1956, on The Steve Allen Show, the week after Presley made his famous first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In a dig at both Presley and his main television rival, the announcer said there was a “peculiar trend” in music, where “some of the new singing groups look like four fellas you’d hate to meet in a dark alley.” That night, the announcer said, they had “the ultimate in the new trend,” a group called “The Four Punks.” Allen came onstage wearing leathers, with a low slung guitar, swinging his hips, joking about petty crime, before the group performed a song he called ‘Misery Motel.’
By the 1960s, punk was so closely associated with young music fans that, when a seventeen year old “psychedelic painter” was beaten and robbed in Arizona, while hitchhiking from Los Angeles, his assailants cut off his hair and carved “punk” into his back with an empty beer can. Even high-school students in Delaware, campaigning to raise money to renovate the school roof, were called punks: resisting the name, one told his local newspaper that “punk-ness is in the eye of the beholder.”
“The professional punk”, 1968 (Source: Chicago Tribune)
Through the sixties “punk” became a journalistic failsafe. Musicians were often dismissed as punks, with The Beatles at the forefront. “They know they’re punks. They admit it,” the Austin American-Statesman argued in 1964. They were “immature punks” in the Uniontown Evening Standard, and “just punks with long hair” in the Fresno Bee. The San Bernardino County Sun complained that “these four little punks’ fad-fed bank accounts have gone to their heads.” Even in the countercultural Berkeley Barb in 1968, they were “punk millionaires.”
“Punks’ Haircuts”, 1964 (Source: The Salina Journal)
Other musicians had the same treatment. In 1965, one news agency ran a story from the Whisky-A-Go-Go, Los Angeles, criticising “punks who can burp into a microphone and produce a hit record.” In 1967, a journalist who had recently returned from Vietnam complained that “we’ve got kids out there dying without a sound and we’ve got punks here who dress up like girls and make millions of dollars doing it.” The same year, Mel Torme called The Rolling Stones “dope-ridden punks.” In 1968, Mike Butterfield told Hit Parader about walking into his first session with Bob Dylan “like a dumb punk with my guitar over my back, no case.”
“Young punk” in Dick Tracy, 1965 (Source: Great Bend Tribune)
The word was also used by specialist music journalists, on both sides of the Atlantic. At first, it appeared in reported speech: in 1967, according to Derek Taylor in Disc and Music Echo, “a young artist” in Los Angeles, painting a sign for the Monterey Pop Festival, was told to “get a haircut, punk” by a passing driver. In 1968, in The New Yorker, Ellen Willis reported that staff at the Newport Festival mistook the Village Voice critic for “just another of those young punks.” In Melody Maker, in February 1969, Chris Welch imagined executives at Motown calling him a “Limey punk.”
The old “poor quality” meaning was still occasionally used about music. In 1966, the New York Daily News recalled “there was a middling popular and middling punk song some decades ago called ‘I Surrender, Dear.’” In 1967, the Indiana Gazette discussed “a number of the big names who are by any standards of real musical judgement pretty punk performers. Yet these fairly punk performers sell hundreds of thousands of records.” In July 1969, the Indiana underground magazine The Spectator argued that the 5th Dimension’s ‘Don’tcha Hear Me Callin’ To Ya’ was “so hilariously punk” that it could be a pastiche.
Gradually at first, punk became part of a wider, critical argument, with“punk” musicians in opposition to high art or the mainstream music business. In 1967, in the Indianapolis News, Misha Dichter, a pianist with the Boston Symphony, was said to look “like a cross between a punk and a poet.” In 1968, the Los Angeles Free Press suggested Frank Zappa’s work was an angry response to his a time as a “teenage punk” listening to the bands of the late fifties and early sixties. Writing in New York in December 1968, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lillian Roxon described “Dylan’s switch to rock” as “the beginning of a new golden era when the punks and the scruffies and the weirdos would take over Tin Pan Alley.” A month later, the St Louis Post-Dispatch said Dylan was “half-punk, half-guru, probably America’s best young songwriter, possibly its best young poet.”
The word also crossed over to the music itself. In 1967, Simon & Garfunkel released ‘Punky’s Dilemma,’ about a Californian draft dodger. The same year, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band used the word on ‘Big Shot.’ In 1968, The Mothers of Invention included ‘Flower Punk’ on We’re Only In It For The Money: “hey punk,” Zappa sang, to the tune of ‘Hey Joe,’ “where you going with that flower in your hand? Well, I’m going up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band.”
Probably the most widely read reference to “punk” and music in the sixties came in March 1969, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Rickey Ivie, a seventeen year old from Fremont, California, was interviewed about a “series of boycotts” that had been organised at his high school. As co-chairman of the Fremont Black Students Union, he railed against the “ghetto educational system” and its “racist training.” “In the world of music,” he said, “we want to hear about black composers, about the Supremes, Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye,” not Bach, “that old, dead punk.”...
William Buckley’s Los Angeles Times column, as it appeared in The Billings Gazette, Montana, 31st March 1969
Three weeks after the Rickey Ivie story, and the week after Buckley’s column, Lester Bangs’ byline appeared for the first time in a national publication, for his review of The MC5’s debut album in Rolling Stone. He panned the record, saying the band looked like “a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip.”
As Otto Wise exhaled, one night in the final few months of the nineteenth century, the smoke from his cigar curled towards the ceiling of B’nai B’rith Hall, San Francisco. Wise, a twenty-seven year old attorney, was “director” for that nights’ “smoker” at the fraternal lodge, encouraging attendees to do a turn for the entertainment of the two hundred other guests...
Wise turned next to Eugene Levy, a fellow attorney. Levy, who was thirty nine, sang as requested....
Whatever the song, it was bad. Before Levy could sit down, Wise mocked it. Wise was a consciously cultured man — he gave public lectures on Jewish literature and “the social life of the ghetto” — and this song, he thought, was so bad that it needed a new word, a word that probably hadn’t been used about music before, at least not in print, a noteworthy word, more noteworthy than the song itself. It was, he said that night in October 1899, “the most punk song ever heard in a hall.”
“The most punk song ever heard in a hall,” 1899 (Source: San Francisco Call)
Many punk historians have tried to capture the complexities of the word “punk.” “Ask forty punk rockers how they define punk and you’ll get forty different answers, and they’ll all be right,” Bob Stanley suggested in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. It is a “notoriously slippery term,” Nicholas Rombes wrote, in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, “unstable, ambiguous, loaded with so many suggestions.” According to Richard Cabut, in an introduction to Jon Savage’s ‘Punk Etymology,’ in Cabut and Gallix’s Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, “at the beginning — and at the end — is the word.”
If the story of punk’s etymology is told at all, it is normally told this way: at the very end of the sixties, and the very start of the seventies, the word bubbled up in rock criticism, most notably when Lester Bangs referred to The MC5 and Iggy Pop as “punks.” In 1971, they say, Creem editor Dave Marsh coined the term “punk rock,” in a review of ? And The Mysterians. The next year, the future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye used the phrase to describe Nuggets, his compilation of mid-sixties garage. By 1976, it was used for the bands who played at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, via a New York magazine called Punk. The term re-crossed the Atlantic, and was used to describe London bands....
Those that mention any older history might suggest that Bangs got the word from William Burroughs — who is sometimes quoted to suggest punk meant “someone who took it up the ass” — or that Shakespeare used the word to mean “prostitute.” Any older musical history of “punk” is lost, with only faint smoke trails lingering, through forgotten journalists in regional newspapers, underappreciated female critics and rock crit faves, back to Otto Wise and his cigars, and further still, through centuries.
Lester Bangs and Lillian Roxon (Source: Robert Milliken, Lillian Roxon: The Mother of Rock)
Punk was already mean and ironic by the time Shakespeare used it. His punks were flashy and transgressive even at the end of the sixteenth century. “This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers,” he wrote, in The Merry Wives of Windsor around 1597. “She may be a punk;” Lucio says in Measure for Measure, “for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown mentions a “taffeta punk” for whom the “French clown” would be “fit.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, punk was first printed in 1575, the year Shakespeare became a teenager. It appeared in a song, a ballad called ‘Simon The Old Kinge,’ or sometimes ‘Old Simon The King.’ The song’s narrator suggests that being drunk is “a sin, as it is to keep a punk.” It seems to be a joke, a drinking song disguised as a morality tale, or vice versa. The song was popular, and was reprinted often, becoming a standard for hundreds of years. According to one writer in 1776, it was played drunkenly in taverns, with “half a dozen fiddlers” playing “till themselves and their audience were tired.” Despite its “harsh and discordant tones,” “people thought it fine music.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a new meaning for punk grew, a meaning that had never been used in Britain: punk as rotting wood, used for tinder, and eventually other things that smoulder, like fuses and incense...
Eventually, the word became a standalone adjective, meaning poor quality, and was applied to the arts: there were “punk shows” in theatres in San Francisco by 1889. Newspapers speculated about the word’s origins... Some said it had come from “hoboes,” “passed along thousands of miles of railroad,” or from “our colored brethren,” or noted it was used by young people, complaining about “punk” plays with no “hot stuff in dem.” This seems to be the sense in which Otto Wise used the word in the B’nai B’rith Hall, earning cheap laughs in a well-to-do setting with a youthful, working class word.
Although it was used across America, it seems small-town Kansas was a particular hotbed for early references to “punk” music: there was a “punk orchestra” in Emporia in 1898; a “punky band” paraded down the street in Waverly in 1899, most likely a theatrical group in blackface; Iola had a “punk concert” in 1901, and Hutchinson had a “punk band” in 1902.
By 1901, according to the St Louis Republic, punk was “everyday twentieth century slang.” In 1907, the Los Angeles Times mentioned a campaign for “punk music by union men,” on its front page. In 1908, there was a “punk opera” in Nebraska. “Punk music” was played in New York, by “a man violinist and his wife accompanist,” and in Utah, by a “cross-eyed accordion player.” In 1913, according to the New York Evening Telegram, a woman “an inch deep in make-up and all swathed in violet chiffon veils and chinchilla” sailed across the Atlantic, “strumming on a guitar in the moonlight and humming French songs. Her voice was punk.” At least one vaudeville performer fought a critic over the word’s use. The first cinematic punk appeared in 1916, in Pedro The Punk Poet.
Advertisement for Pedro The Punk Poet, 1916 (Source: Hot Springs New Era)
The word was used so often, it began to sound like a genre in its own right. “It is little wonder that the managers send us punk music shows,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grumbled in 1914. “These draw audiences of great size, while the sane and intelligent exercise of stage art goes unattended.” According to the Tampa Times in 1917, “the latest war song, ‘Send Me Away With A Smile,’ is very punk and therefore very popular.” “The popularity of a song depends upon its punkness,” the article suggested. “The demand of the day is ‘punk songs for punk people.’”
