Music

Punk Nostalgia: The Original Punks Would Have HATED It

With a new movie on CBGB due later this year, we’re seeing an upswing in nostalgia for the original days of punk.  What has become of what punk was?  Vanity Fair has some opinions.

Punk put the “tense” into present tense, nailing itself into the now, never intending to be anybody’s nostalgia cruise. Rude, fast, scratchy, and frontal-attacking, its philosophy was “Out with the old, in with the spew.” To see Patti Smith spitting on the stage of the Bowery club CBGB in 1975, like an infielder releasing a gob of chaw, was to witness a new chapter opening in rock, androgyny, and deportment, a rough draft in action.

Other bodily fluids would soon volley forth, more than any lone mop could handle, but there was also a clatter of bone rattling from punk’s hunger artists, who appeared to major in emaciation, as eloquently skeletal and skulled as Falconetti and Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Self-invention and self-annihilation yoked into the yin-yang of punk.

One two-man squad was known as Suicide, their high-volume dissonance as armored and unyielding as an assault vehicle. A band with a racier following was the Dead Boys, whose lead singer, Stiv Bators, would wrap the mike cord around his neck like a noose and loop it over a ceiling fixture, dangling himself in effigy. A lot of lives cashed out early. Three of the original four Ramones—Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny—died relatively young.

Rigor mortis came early for the phenomenal New York Dolls/Heartbreakers guitarist Johnny Thunders, who died under sketchy circumstances after decades of addiction. Bombastic writer and provocateur Lester Bangs, who briefly fronted his own band, never woke up from a nap, dead at the age of 33. That pale wraith of heroin and unliving matter, iconic proto-punk Lou Reed, a member of the Velvet Underground before venturing solo, was the presiding Boris Karloff spirit of below 14th Street.

The premiere issue of Punk magazine presented him on the cover with Frankenstein’s monster neck bolts and head stitches. Yet Lou not only survived but has survived long enough to become a grumpy landmark, like Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, while punk itself has taken on the romance of a broken-down Brigadoon.

Continue reading.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 40283 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.