Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Brightest in the firmament were the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, with the MC5 slightly in their shadow. Yet they hardly shared the same aesthetic. While the Stooges, under the leadership of Iggy Pop, had reduced rock to a blunt confrontational instrument, the Velvets, with Lou Reed in command, were graduates of the New York avant-garde art scene, fronted by a man whose desire was to transfer the techniques and narrative range of literature into rock ’n’ roll. To this end, he employed three-chord rock, musique concrète, and balladry so sensitive that it made James Taylor and Joni Mitchell sound like clumsy alcoholics. Almost single-handedly, Reed had forced mid-1960s rock to stretch even further than Bob Dylan had imagined possible, to the point where it could chronicle homosexuality, sadomasochism and drug addiction in graphic detail. But his lyrical genius was less influential than his passion for garage-band rock ’n’ roll; he was prone to boasting that a simple chord change from E major to A major was more profound than Nobel Prize-winning poetry.

  So there was a contradiction at the heart of the new aesthetic. Iggy Pop and his ‘retard bop12’ (Nick Kent) represented a deliberate dumbing-down of rock’s capabilities: ‘stupid’ began to be used as a compliment. But the same journalists who abhorred the idea of rock becoming pretentious or overambitious adopted as their icon a songwriter whose efforts were steeped in pretension. Pretending to be ‘dumb’ was authentic and honest; wanting to use rock as a vehicle for artistic expression was ‘bloated’, unless you could mask your ambitions beneath naked aggression.

  Pete Townshend, as astute a rock critic in the mid-1970s as he was a songwriter, hit upon the essence of rock ’n’ roll when he praised the glam-rock band (and former bubblegum act) Sweet: ‘I think their music does contain13 a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a 15-or 16-year-old.’ And that was the holy grail, it seemed: music that would seize the rampant hormones of adolescent boys, and simultaneously renew that fire in the hearts of men who had long since waved their teens goodbye.

  Could this be the New Wave14? … punky, Stones-influenced rock and roll.

  Ed McCormack reviewing the New York Dolls, 1972

  All this talk about getting15 back to the streets – yeah, the streets are fine, but you won’t find anything there that you don’t already know.

  Todd Rundgren, 1974

  British underground theorist and Deviants singer/lyricist Mick Farren was in his early 30s when he wrote a series of self-questioning essays about the future relevance of rock ’n’ roll. In 1974 he imagined the mainstream being ‘challenged by a lot of wild boys16 from the edge whose motivation is music rather than profit … A lack of cash could force the music to become cheap, gaudy, vital and energetic.’ Two years later, he proclaimed that ‘If rock becomes safe17, it’s all over … The best, most healthy kind of rock and roll is produced by and for the same generation … It may be a question of taking rock back to street level and starting all over again.’

  There was no handbook explaining how to achieve this cultural reversal. Among the suggestions were ‘dictatorship rock18 … a neo-Nazi-type band, made up of very young Jewish boys’, by American club-owner Rodney Bingenheimer; schoolgirls in fetishist underwear, envisioned by US producer Kim Fowley and personified by the Runaways; and a group that could enact the 1970 manifesto of London film-maker Malcolm McLaren: ‘Be childish. Be irresponsible19. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates.’ Yet the purest approach of the era was provided by a New York quartet who offered ‘a cartoon vision of rock and roll20’, said Charles Shaar Murray, and who were ‘pocket punks, a perfect razor-edged bubblegum band’.

  When the Ramones’ debut album was launched in early 1976, they seemed to encapsulate the fantasy of rock as minimalist, abrupt and above all dumb. Few of their songs extended beyond two minutes and three chords; or veered far from melodies and riffs so basic that most budding musicians would have shied away in embarrassment. They played fast and relentless, while singer Joey Ramone chanted lyrics of conscious banality about teenage life. Chris Stein of Blondie, who emerged from the same milieu, dismissed the idea that the Ramones had emerged organically in this quintessentially lowbrow state: the band was ‘a preconceived idea21 – they worked at it a long time before they came out’. The Ramones’ collective decision to adopt the same surname reinforced the notion that this was not a spontaneous flowering of basic rock ’n’ roll but an exercise in performance art: Gilbert & George for teenagers, perhaps. Their producer, Craig Leon, admitted that their debut LP was ‘quite layered and structured22 and took full advantage of the studio’. But the artifice was applied with such skill that all anyone could distinguish was the absence of art – exactly the streetwise sonic assault for which a generation of critics had been begging.

  The Ramones’ New York contemporaries shared their blend of rock power and artistic integrity, though not their forced stupidity. Blondie celebrated and satirised the pure American pop of the era immediately before the Beatles, although press attention focused on their archetypally glamorous lead singer, Deborah Harry. Patti Smith mixed ecstatic beat poetry with the rock spirit of 1965; her friends Television injected fresh energy and oblique lyricism into the duelling-guitar format of psychedelic bands such as Quicksilver Messenger Service; while Talking Heads oozed art-school formalism from every skeletal pore. The musician who provided a collective ethos for their efforts, and for its surreal reflection in London, was Richard Hell, the only member of this diffuse artistic movement not to become a genuine pop star. He did, however, write its anthem: ‘(I Belong to the) Blank Generation’, which identified a cultural void and then belied it with the verbal precision of his writing. Yet Hell’s title was deliberately ambiguous. Did ‘Blank’ denote a nihilist refusal to adopt a pose, an admission of emptiness and despair? Or was he declaring independence from the past, and allowing his generation the freedom to rewrite the history of rock from the beginning?

  Ironically, the term which would ultimately define this era, in America and Britain, was rooted in the past. ‘Punk rock’ had been applied to America’s mid-1960s garage-rock tradition since the early 1970s – a statement of pride, and also of opprobrium, as a letter to Rolling Stone magazine in 1973 illustrated, in its criticism of ‘the punk ethic, anti-intelligence23, anti-heart tide currently fashionable’. This ethic was located, the correspondent believed, in the New York Dolls, whose blend of Rolling Stones swagger and androgynous fashion sense won them critical acclaim but minimal commercial success.

  The Dolls were in disarray a year later, when they first met Malcolm McLaren, ex-art student, then tailor for London’s Teddy boys, and now the proprietor (with designer Vivienne Westwood) of Sex, a shop specialising in fetish wear and confrontational fashion. McLaren offered to manage the New York band for a few chaotic months, imagining that he could mould them into an act which would embody his naïve vision of cultural anarchy. He soon realised it would be easier to force his vision upon more impressionable subjects: a bunch of musical novices in their early 20s whose ambitions didn’t stretch beyond imitating Rod Stewart and the Faces. It was McLaren who made the fateful decision to combine them with John Lydon, a teenage nihilist of no apparent talent, who would soon become one of the most charismatic and nonconformist figures of the rock era.

  Their manager told punk chronicler Jon Savage that he imagined the Sex Pistols (his choice of name) ‘could be the Bay City Rollers24 … dour and tough and the real thing. A genuine teenage group. For me, that was anarchy in the record business.’ His rhetoric would almost inevitably filter into the Pistols’ songs, as they worked their way through deconstructions of 1960s pop classics towards an original repertoire. But although manager and artists shared a language, their definitions were starkly at odds. For Lydon, anarchy denoted a sullen disgust with what was on offer to him and his peers: cultural repression, unemployment, stunted prospects, harsh realities. For McLaren, it was a theoretical concept rather than a reflection of daily life: after all, as a boutique-owner he had bee
n master of his own destiny for years. He wanted to confront the structure of society and undermine its ethical foundations. So did Lydon, but only with individual acts of dissent, rather than a philosophy of revolution. Meanwhile, his fellow Pistols wanted to be rock ’n’ roll stars, yobs and party animals, and weren’t fussy how they got there. This ‘quartet of spiky teenage misfits25 from the wrong end of various London roads’, as they were described in an early review, were destined for one of the briefest and most tumultuous careers in the history of popular music: a cultural explosion misinterpreted at the time, and distorted ever since.

  It is very likely there will26 be violence at some of the gigs, because it is violent music. We don’t necessarily think violence is a bad thing, because you have to destroy to create.

  Malcolm McLaren, 1976

  Punk rock people27 don’t want to be pretty. They reckon they are appealing only if they seem appalling … They do their own horrific thing.

  Daily Mirror, 1976

  As their name suggested, violence was intrinsic to the Sex Pistols’ manifesto, although sexuality was never on the agenda: ‘Sex’ was an advertisement for Malcolm McLaren’s shop, rather than anything more carnal. As Jon Savage recounted, ‘the Sex Pistols were programmed28 for confrontation. McLaren was ambitious for this group: as his instrument, they would act out his fantasies of conflict and revenge on a dying culture.’ These fantasies did not involve reforming the music business, or providing a sonic template for generations of future bands to follow. It was serendipitous, rather than calculating, that McLaren’s championing of a chaotic, untutored band should so perfectly answer the call of fans and critics who (like the Pistols themselves) were bored with the elitism of the rock aristocracy.

  London’s pub-rock movement had arisen out of the desire to return rock ’n’ roll to its spiritual home in bars and basements. It encouraged a number of entrepreneurs – managers, promoters, record-stall owners – to provide an outlet for this defiantly out-of-time music by forming their own independent labels. Soon there was a recognised circuit of rock pubs and clubs, and labels such as Chiswick and Stiff to promote its luminaries, from the Count Bishops to Nick Lowe. But none of these artists could match the disturbance caused by the Sex Pistols in 1976, especially once McLaren and Westwood had incited fights in the audience at the Nashville Club that April, in front of reviewers from the pop press. McLaren’s friend and rival Bernie Rhodes began to shape another band, the Clash, in a similar mould, and the music papers recognised not just an anarchistic publicity stunt but a ‘new wave’ of frenetic, combustible music ripe for marketing. As Mark Perry, publisher of an early punk fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, insisted that summer, ‘This “new wave” has got to take in29 everything, including posters, record covers, stage presentation, the lot!’ Under McLaren’s guidance, the Sex Pistols were handled like a multimedia art project, providing audience and press alike with the frenzy and outrage they desired.

  Aware that he required national exposure to play his spirit-of-1968 games with Britain’s mainstream media, McLaren ensured that his protégés should ignore the backwaters of independent distribution, and strike at the heart of the corporate beast. The Sex Pistols were signed to EMI, and so began a sequence of disruptions and scandals which surpassed McLaren’s wildest imaginings – swearing on national TV, censorship by media organisations and local councils, attacks on the Pistols and their entourage, and ultimately the implosion of the band, followed by the tawdry decline and inevitable death of bassist Sid Vicious. Even at its mid-1950s height, rock ’n’ roll had never polarised opinion so starkly, or sparked such anger and disgust. No sooner had Britain’s national press noticed punk’s existence than they were chronicling events that still beggar belief – a 47-year-old lorry driver kicking in his television to prevent his child witnessing the Pistols, appalled rock stars in their 30s bombarding their record labels with protests when they signed these unruly punks, and claims of rowdiness and worse in company offices, airports, even on the street outside Buckingham Palace. Never had it been so simple to shock parents and other responsible adults: the punk uniform (based in part on Sex designs) turned everyone who wore it into an instant rebel. With the ripped clothes, safety pins and spiked hair came the etiquette – face twisted into a snarl, spit collected in the throat until it was almost solid, and then expelled at random targets, tribal aggression. Every antisocial act that popular music had ever been accused of encouraging was now visible on British streets; or so it seemed once the press had begun the process of demonisation.

  The music itself was every bit as shocking. Amidst the pallid pop of late 1976, the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ exploded like a hand grenade in an elevator. Beyond the multi-overdubbed guitars and iron-foundry drumming, what endured was Lydon’s voice, as menacing as a mugger’s knife. There followed a year of such sonic assaults: the Clash’s football terrace vocals on ‘White Riot’, where only the title was audible amidst the chaos; the Jam reprising the power-chord theatrics of the Who c.1965; above all others, the Sex Pistols sabotaging the much-anticipated royal jubilee with ‘God Save the Queen’. Its (literal) lese-majesty was regarded by the establishment as tantamount to blasphemy, but the taint that lingered was the repeated chorus of ‘No future’, a generation’s curse on its own inheritance.

  Punk was now, regardless of Malcolm McLaren’s intentions, the soundtrack of political dissent: a blaring siren call of betrayal and dissatisfaction. Veteran journalist Barry Miles cited the Clash’s ability to capture ‘the dormant energy30 of all the hours of crushing boredom of being an unemployed school-leaver, living with your parents in a council flat’.fn1 Like ragtime and jazz, punk began to be used as an all-purpose adjective: the Daily Mirror headlined an editorial about youth unemployment ‘Punk futures32’. The Church Times suggested that ‘There is evidence33 that today’s “punk rock” phenomenon, with its violent language and mannerisms, has arisen directly because of unemployment among the young.’ What began as a solitary gesture of opposition was cohering into a suitably anarchic political force, albeit one operating in a black-and-grey moral universe. By summer 1977, fanzine writer Danny Baker was complaining that ‘Punks are the same as the government34 … If you don’t believe me, try getting on stage at a punk gig and talking against the agreed pose for the night.’

  Some observers saw punk’s culture of uniformity – one sound, one style, one attitude – as a straitjacket. As early as February 1977, Mark Perry was writing: ‘This scene, if there is35 a “scene” anymore, is about movement. It’s about constant change, creative changes, not fashion changes.’ A month later he pleaded: ‘Chuck away the fucking stupid36 safety pins, think about people’s ideas instead of their clothes.’ By now, record companies were betraying the confusion with which they’d greeted each new form of popular music over the last sixty years: unable to distinguish quality from banality, they signed acts indiscriminately. ‘All the new groups37 sound like drones’, said Clash guitarist Mick Jones in spring 1977. Concerns were voiced that artists were being profiled in the music papers before they had been given time to develop a unique identity. This pattern would become the norm over the decades ahead, to the point that bands would have exhausted their novelty value before they had even made a record.

  By the end of 1977, it was possible to rent a punk for £4 an hour, to enliven a London cocktail party. Young men made a living from posing for tourists’ photos on the King’s Road, and ‘punk’ became as hackneyed an image as ‘hippie’ in San Francisco a decade earlier. As Jon Savage wrote, ‘English punk was now open38 to every charlatan, poseur and genius attracted by the prospects of media attention and a record contract.’ ‘Punk rock39’, said Kim Fowley that October, ‘is finished’; his compatriot Greg Shaw talked about its ‘built-in obsolescence40’. In the aftermath of an explosion, with energy converted into destruction, all that remained were fragments. But the fragments proved to have an unexpected afterlife.

  What I picked up most41 from mixing with the
punks was a new way of approaching things – that whole punk DIY ethic … The DIY ethos was a blueprint for the working class to create their own shit despite the class system and the closed doors of the old-boy network.

  Film-maker Don Letts

  There are so many new bands42 in England and they’re all copying the Sex Pistols. It’s such a joke. They might as well be copying Smokie.

  Nick Lowe, 1978

  Punk? New-wave? New-wave punk? For decades, ‘punk’ the noun had signified a hoodlum, a working-class outlaw, a biker, a rebel; ‘punk’ the adjective a more generalised insult (folk traditionalist Ewan MacColl described Bob Dylan’s songwriting as ‘punk’ in 1965, for example). ‘New wave’ denoted a fresh approach to the business of film-making, exemplified by the nouvelle vague, and hence a description for any remaking of an art form, such as science-fiction writing in the 1960s or the so-called ‘bedsitter’ dramas of English theatre. In 1963, former Shadows drummer Tony Meehan had heralded a ‘new wave’ of British beat bands, such as the Rolling Stones, who were tapping into the same spirit as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker.

  ‘Punk’ and ‘new wave’ were used interchangeably to describe the anarchy of 1976; ‘new-wave punks’ distinguished the Pistols and the Clash from the ‘original’ punks in New York; or indeed from the 1960s garage-rock bands. Gradually, however, ‘punk’ and ‘new wave’ diverged: punk denoting explosive energy, new wave the more mannered or nostalgic forms of pop which emerged alongside it. By the end of the decade, ‘new wave’ was a form of denigration: a synonym for inauthenticity or shallowness. Anyone who wanted to retain the punk ethic but explore wider musical horizons was dubbed (with stunning logic) ‘post-punk’ – like ‘new wave’, so broad a category that it was effectively meaningless.