Crash Course, No. 17: 70s (Is It?) Punk, ft. Runaways, Rezillos, and Undertones

Yes, and....but also, yes. I'm working on it...

[Ed. - For my sanity and yours, this will be the first post of two. The other one will be up by Sunday.]

I’ve decided to start with something I said I wouldn’t do at all: define “punk.” Ducking the question makes sense for countless reasons – losing “punk rock” as a genre shorthand chief among them - but members of a couple bands I looked into articulated the idea eloquently enough to make skipping it feel like a disservice. Here are some favorites:

“Punk rock is more of an attitude than a sort of music. The punk rock ethos is a do-it-yourself thing, and creativity comes first.”

- Fay Fife of the Rezillos

“I still hate that arrogant, swaggering rock star attitude. It annoys me when I see so-called-punk bands behaving like that. You’re the same as the audience, not some daft rock gods or whatever.”

- Captain Sensible of The Damned

“The problem was Malcolm McLaren's principle, which was to sign to a major label and then to rip them off. Everyone did that, but the major always ripped you off in one way or the other. You couldn't beat the system, so they all went in and within a few years they were all making very slick albums. The original 7" Do It Yourself ethos disappeared.”

- Robyn Hitchcock of The Soft Boys

The two main ideas I get out of that – the urgency of creating/making a statement as a greater good than musical proficiency and the outsider/(semi-pretentious) unpretentious sensibility – get closer to how I’ve always understood “punk” than any musical choice. For instance, I’d call this song as “punk” as anything Green Day ever did (not to pick on Green Day; examples abound). Going to the other way, this song feels punk in spirit, but so clearly from another genre that calling it punk (or anything else) feels like giving someone bad directions, maybe even out of spite. None of that changes the reality that an overwhelming majority of people will instantly flash to a very specific musical sound in their heads when they hear “punk rock” (e.g., fast, simple, sloppy, and with someone shouting off-key vocals over it). That’s useful when someone wants to quickly way to explain a band that sounds like that to someone else - and giving it up willy-nilly feels…unwise – but it also elevates one specific, time-based manifestation of the larger punk ethos over everything else and leaves…just a shit-ton of music homeless, and for bad reasons.

One Hit No More, No. 24: The American Breed, Who Did Bend, and Shape

Fuckers would tangle up if you so much as looked at 'em...

The Hit
During high school, and before developing an operating record store M.O., I picked up the odd impulse-buy cassette tape at local gas stations. If I recognized enough of the artists and had about $5 left after buying gas (and probably junk food), I'd get about a month's worth of "fresh-to-me" music out of the good ones (the Dutch imports, though; jesus christ). The education as to what’s what came from classic rock radio and, at some damn point, the Freedom Rock compilation they sold on late-night TV.

I stumbled into The American Breed’s “Bend Me, Shape Me” on a gas station cassettes, apparently. It’s a good late 60s pop tune (1968), nice (literally) galloping rhythm, nice layering of horns over guitars, etc. – and I swear I’ve heard recordings where they really juiced the rhythm parts (or my speakers just sucked and/or accidentally improved on the original). The American Breed neither wrote the song nor recorded it first: the writing team of Scott English and Larry Weiss wrote it, while a guy named Bill Traut (who has another cameo later) graced it with those horns. An all-female band called The Shape got first crack it at (can't find that, so here are The Models doing it), but it was another act – The Outsiders (of “Time Won’t Let Me” fame) – who had the best shot at knicking it out from under The American Breed.

The Rest of the Story

The kindest and rudest thing I can say about The American Breed is that key members got sidetracked making commercial jingles (and quite a few of them, and in The Bigs – e.g, writing/singing for Coca Cola and American Airlines) during the band’s hey-day. That these guys knew their way around a song well enough to turn that into a day job is the kind side; the rude side comes with a sneer at the commercialism of the overall project (yeah, I like the “artistes”) and they fact they didn’t write their biggest hits. (Don’t worry, the bona fides come later.)

One Hit No More, No. 23: Keith, and the Normal Human Temperature

Different Keith...

The Hit
A little tune titled, “Ninety-Eight Point Six,” which sounds like something you’d hear in some coming-of-age B-movie from the late 1960s (and which, if you type it as "98.6" fucks up the link, so...). It topped out at No. 7, but hung in the charts for just over a quarter of a year. It was written by a team - Tony Powers (lyrics), George Fischoff (music), John Renzetti (arrangement) - and handed to Keith, who was pried out of a band by a producer who saw star qualities in him and sent out into the world as a solo artist. Keith’s reaction to it all bears noting:

“And When I hooked up with Jerry [Ross] he put me more into that pop commercial vein, and after hearing the song I remember calling my wife at the time and saying you wouldn’t believe what they have me singing, and I sang it to her over the phone. No, I had no idea.”

That last comment was on whether he knew it’d be a hit when he recorded it…

The Rest of the Story
Keith was born James Barry Keefer, and grew up in Philadelphia and with the “fame” bug. He started a number of bands, nearly all of them a play on his name – e.g., Keefer and the Shadows, Keif and the Bel-Airs (then there was The Admirations) – but he realized he had to drop most variations of “keif” when he learned it was “a Moroccan drug.” Keefer did enough to catch the attention of a DJ named Kal Rudman, who steered him to Ross, who in turn rechristened him “Keith” and sent him out into the world.

The “pop commercial vein” worked well for Keefer, and Ross fed him a couple other tunes – e.g., “Ain’t Gonna Lie” - which became his first (minor) hit. With those two hits under his belt, Keith made a big enough name to open for The Beach Boys on a national tour. Touring, as it happens, was very eventful for him. First, he was kicked off that tour for this:

“But a skit that had him squeezing or eating fruits with suggestive offstage audio comments and sound effects caused problems. Keith left the tour after the mayor of a large southern city objected to the humor. The politician's daughter had been in the audience!”

One Hit No More, No. 22: The Casinos, Farewells, and Hard Work Pays Off Briefly

The pleasure is just as fleeting...

The Hit
A 1967 number titled “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” that did a little drop pass to doo-wop. (If it goes less than 10 years back, can it rate as a “throw-back”?) It’s cute, in all honesty, and built around this conceit:

“Kiss me each morning for a million years/
Hold me each evening by your side/
Tell me you’ll love me for a million years/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then if it don’t work out/
Then you can tell me goodbye”

It’s still doo-wop, which is fine, but it’s “echo doo-wop,” a revival of a freshly deceased genre. (Don & Juan had charted with “What’s Your Name” just five years prior.) With all the free-floating ambition in the rock world that same year (e.g., The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, The Beatles, Sgt. Peppers), you wonder whether some kind of sleeper demographic (e.g., older adults pining for their youth) didn’t carry “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye” to that lofty No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100 all on its own.

The Rest of the Story
“Wrong song, yes, but possibly worse–the Casinos didn’t look the part. With nary a short hair out of place and no jeans and peace signs, Gene and his Casinos were deviates. The look was of a Sunday morn choir, a gathering of Young Republicans.”

That quote comes from a site called One Hit Wonders: A Musical Revue (link below; how is this the first time I've seen that site researching this project?), and it points to just one of the ways The Casinos were a bad bet to every get a second hit. For one thing, doo-wop had to be at least four genres passe by 1967, a relic of a square past the youth revolution rejected. Add the fact(s) that, 1) they started performing in 1958 and failed to break through when doo-wop was big, and 2) they chased fame from Cincinnati, Ohio, it would have been a miracle if they hit No. 60 with a song like “Then You Call Tell Me Goodbye.” And yet they did, by paying their dues one dollar at a time.

One Hit No More, No. 21: ? and the Mysterians, "I Need Somebody" Ain't Chopped Liver (Dammit)

A Mysterian. Oh, hell yeah.

The Hit

If you’ve ever wondered how far back “69” goes as a dirty word, I can confirm 1966 at a minimum. ? and The Mysterians toyed with calling their hit “69 Tears” but, even at 15, lead guitarist Bobby Balderrama knew wouldn’t touch a name like that. Fortunately, the same guy who came up with it (Robert Martinez, OG Mysterian and drummer) had the bright, marketable idea of flipping the numbers in the same conversation, thus “96 Tears.”

If you’ve listened to enough oldies radio, you know this one; if you’re a fan of garage, or even punk, you know it: if nothing else, you know that keyboard riff because it’s probably been in 20 commercials by now. It barely has lyrics – “Too Many Teardrops,” which repeats like a broken man’s mantra, was its working title – so it’s mostly that loping (almost Motown?) rhythm staggering between a couple different musical passages and with that famous keyboard snippet tying it together. Add Question Mark’s (tonally) pitch-perfect delivery and you’ve got a hit.

The Rest of the Story

“Question Mark was an eccentric figure, publicly stating that his soul had originated from Mars and that he once walked on Earth with the dinosaurs.”

It’s hard to choose what’s more out there about ? and the Mysterians: Question Mark’s personality, or the fact that every Mysetrian who ever played in the band was the son of Mexican migrant workers (the auto factories, mostly), and in Bay City and/or Saginaw, Michigan. Those reading closely might have caught another notable detail – e.g., Balderrama was young when he started in the band. Frankie Rodriguez, the guy playing that famous keyboard hook, joined at the insanely young age of 13. They weren’t much older when they hit it big and toured…

Back to the beginning, the band started nameless and as a three-piece – one without a keyboardist. Robert Martinez, Larry Borjas (guitar), and wee Bobby Balderrama was the original line-up and they started covering surf music (e.g., The Ventures, Duane Eddy). As a bunch of Mexican-American kids in an area where they didn't come in bunches, they struggled to find venues that would let them play. As the band bumbled for a sound and an identity, they lifted "Mysterians" from a 1957 Japanese sci-fi movie. The first big step toward breaking out came when Question Mark, the band’s singer/talisman, came on board; Rudy Martinez (aka, Question Mark, aka, Robert’s younger brother) already had a reputation as a dancer, but it turned out he could sing – and with a surfeit of style. The rest of the band thought he sounded enough like Mick Jagger (huh) that they threw over the surf rock and started playing closer to the The Rolling Stones and the Beatles.