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| 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.
Moreover, that idea Hitchcock mentions about the “branding” of punk, it comes up a lot – especially when the old originals look back at the beginning. The same bittersweet story appeared in multiple reminiscences in X’s oral history of LA punk, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. For anyone who found this post and wants to read a really strong conversation on that, Fife and Eugene Reynolds of The Rezillos (and the Revillos) fleshed it out nicely (and studied it from multiple angles) in a 2015 Louder than War interview (link below). If nothing else, it’ll explain why you won’t hear a succession Sex Pistols knockoffs on the playlist that goes up with this (and that I’ll link to throughout below).
Finally, I decided to keep the entries short, and not just because I (fucking stupidly) decided to cover six bands. I’m not here to write a book, and you’d be reading one if you wanted to, so think of all this as introductions. Starting with the most “big picture” punk band of the bunch.
The Runaways: A Brilliant and Terrible Idea
Against all the above about not pigeonholing punk rock, I resist calling The Runaways a punk band for the simple reason that “hard rock” fits them so nicely. I mean…just listen to the riffs, the attitude…it’s hard rock, dammit. Even the roots of their break up has my back:
“Joan Jett wanted the band to take a musical change, shifting towards punk rock/glam rock while Lita Ford and Sandy West wanted to continue playing hard rock/heavy metal music.”
Fun story: Joan Jett, one of The Runaways founding members, makes a cameo in Under the Big Black Sun. One of the interviewees (can’t remember who; also don’t own the book) remembers when Jett landed like an alien at her high school, how larger than life she seemed. She was a natural, in other words, something a producer named Kim Fowley saw too. He’d met a Sandy West around the same time and, when he passed one woman’s phone number to the other, The Runaways started. Fowley scoured LA for other young women to round out the line-up and the classic line-up ended as a five-piece with Lita Ford on lead guitar, Cherie Currie on vocals, and Jackie Fox (born Fuchs) on bass; Jett picked up rhythm guitar when Ford showed up and West played drums. In other words, while they weren’t created in a lab or anything (like, say, The Monkees), they didn’t start on their own and their creation was deliberate.
Major punk bands of the day did embrace them (or, as Wikipedia puts it, “the band formed alliances”), including The Ramones, The Dead Boys, The Damned, and, yes, even The Sex Pistols; The Runaways “got lumped into” the punk rock movement, so…fair game, I guess.
They had a smash-and-grab career, releasing four studio albums from 1976-78 and getting weirdly massive in Japan. There were drugs and darkness, and Fowley turned out to be quite the motherfucker. He not only burned the band in terms of finance and support, he drugged and raped Fuchs in a disturbingly full room (to her credit, Currie said she tried to stop it). Nearly all of them recovered, happily: Jett tops the list, obviously (after 23 labels passed on her, she founded her own and became…well, massive), but Currie kept going, Lita Ford had solo success in the 80s, and Fuchs got her law degree from (fucking) Harvard and a four-game run as Jeopardy! champ. The Runaways were a band that kept on giving: Micki Steele, who briefly played bass with them for a minute before Fuchs went on to play bass for The Bangles.
Featured Songs: I got all my songs from their Mercury label anthology (I’ll do live albums…some day), sive over there (apparently). At any rate, I included “You Drive Me Wild,” “Queens of Noise,” “California Paradise,” and, personal favorite, “Thunder” on the playlist, so that’s two from the eponymous debut and two from the follow up, Queens of Noise. For what it’s worth, the only album I avoided was And Now…The Runaways, for reasons of the cover…
Source(s)
That’s that. Now…where to go from there? Why not Scotland?. And this is also where where I admit I put more time into all the bands besides The Runaways…
The Rezillos: (One of) Edinburgh’s Finest
And my roll continues: The Rezillos didn’t identify as “punk” (but there Fay Fife is above, arguing about it), instead offering “a new wave beat group” to explain themselves. A 2015 Vice interview wins the label battle for me with “hyperkinetic garage-pop.” Like a lot, maybe nearly all punk bands, The Rezillos borrowed some older sounds – 50s rock, mid-60s garage, etc. - and just put their spin on it. They rev the rhythm and, rare (winning) exceptions aside (e.g., “Someone’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight”), they like bright, if jagged, instrumentation; they sound like people having fun and the camp sensibility helps more than a little (e.g., “Flying Saucer Attack” and “(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures.” The Rezillos took on stage names, some more aggressive than others – e.g., Alan Forbes (vocals) became Eugene Reynolds (a bit low risk), Jo Callis (guitar) went with Luke Warm (better), while Sheilagh Hynd went with Fay Fife – after her hometown, incidentally. (Disclosure: there are many more members in the original line-up and future iterations; Wikipedia went pretty big on The Rezillos).
After a fairly common “we met at university” origin story, their career comes closer to epic than most. The came together in Edinburgh and, after nailing down a line-up, it looks like they’d play everywhere that left them (Callis put it at more than every other day in ’77). They had enough songs for a set-list from the get-go, so they had plenty to record when people came calling – and they did. And that’s where the implosion kicks in: after they released a single (“Can’t Stand My Baby” b/w “I Wanna Be Your Man”), that drew interest from Sire Records; Sire would release their next singles, but then sent them to New York City to record at the Power Station, a place where Sire liked to ship their punk and new wave acts, where they recorded their debut album Can’t Stand the Rezillos…and then Sire parked the record, waiting for a distribution deal with Phonogram Records to die, so Warner Bros. Records could take over, but the momentum had died by then. They’d started shedding members even before their second (and biggest) singles came out (that’s “Flying Saucer” and “Good Sculptures”), they lost more (no, not William Mysterious, aka, Alastair Donaldson) waiting on Sire to get their shit together, etc.
Can’t Stand the Rezillos came out in July 1978; the band was broken up by November, just four months later. They didn't even have time for one of those slick albums Hitchcock talked about.
Factions might have killed the band – another early member, Dave Smythe (bass; “Dr. D. K. Smythe”), saw the romantically paired Reynolds and Fife on one side, and Callis on the other – but the band also saw members leave to keep day jobs, and even out of redundancy (Gail Jamieson, aka, Gayle Warning). The whole thing ended with an ultimatum from the label and Reynolds and Fife refusing to accept it. They did play a farewell show, even inviting back past members for a proper send-off. A good number of them kept going – Fife and Reynolds with the Revillos (one letter got them out of the contract) – but it was Callis who landed the biggest second act when he stumbled into The Human League during their peak years. I think I read somewhere that Reynolds figured Callis was ready for the change, but don’t quote me on that.
Featured Songs: I laced a few into their history above (the second single stuff), but their biggest hit, “Top of the Pops,” made the cut too; it’s just too damn fun to get sick of. The Rezillos got back together to release new original music in 2015 (Zero), but I stuck with Can’t Stand the Rezillos for this one, where I found the tres new wave, “Getting Me Down,” the sleazier, slasher “Bad Guy Reaction,” and the souped-up- 50s-pop gem “Destination Venus.”
Source(s)
Louder than War interview, Fife and Reynolds (2015, has the convo on punk)
Vice interview, Fife and Reynolds (2015; source for the “punk” quote)
And, because it was them The Revillos played with on their final, fatal tour…
The Undertones: Derry’s Finest
“The story goes that Peel cried the first time he heard it. On his scale of one to five stars, this 2:26 tune scored 28.”
The famous John Peel had a lot to do with making The Undertones famous. He paid to have their famous single, “Teenage Kicks,” produced and used his platform to promote it relentlessly; he still called it his favorite song on the way to his grave, so the proselytization probably didn’t hurt him. They took a route similar to finding John Peel that The Rezillos took to finding fame – playing the right sound at the right time, and often as they could. The Undertones worked a venue called The Casbah; the quest to extend a paid residency inspired them to keep writing songs, “Teenage Kicks” among them. That happened to be the one they shopped, though, and the one that hit Peel’s sweet spot.
The most remarkable thing about The Undertones could be where they come from: Derry, Northern Ireland, and probably during the worst of Ireland’s infamous “Troubles;” that’s being from where other people aren’t twice over. Even though punk and politics are hardly strangers – e.g., and close enough to them, Stiff Little Fingers’ “Suspect Device” – The Undertones took a pass on the pain and stuck with your normal pop music fixations, “adolescence, teenage angst and heartbreak.” They have a hell of a knack for it too, or at least they did over their first two albums. While they come far closer than the two bands above to playing something people would immediately call punk – and they drew immediate inspiration from London punks and The Ramones – something about their chosen themes render them so differently tonally. Even musically, it feels like the difference between revving up and “lo-fi-ing” The Beatles (a la The Undertones) instead of doing the same to, say, late 50s rock, surf tunes, or mid-60s garage. As much as anything else, The Undertones just play pop rock that sounds a certain way. That’s not a knock at all; I like it.
On the downside, they don’t generate much for stories and/or surprising/exotic futures or pasts. They formed a band, wrote some songs, got noticed, got big enough for a magazine (Sounds) to call them “possibly the best pop group in the English speaking world,” wrote some more songs with a different sound, and then they broke up. Their greatest drama involved original – also, signature – vocalist, Feargal Sharkey (that quaver) leave over artistic differences and rising tensions with rhythm guitarist, John O’Neill. Outside that, the only other member to leave was Vincent O’Neill, but he left before they launched and his younger brother, Damian, took over lead guitar. The other original members – Michael “Mickey” Bradley (bass, keys) and Bill Doherty (drums) – started with the band, and they’ve been with it since it came back in 1999; that’s when Paul McLoone joined and took over vocals – when Sharkey opted against.
Featured Songs: “Teenage Kicks,” for one, but I also pulled “Get Over You” from The Undertones first album, if only to show how a particular strong chorus can make a song, but also “Family Entertainment” as another serving of what they did best the first time around. The band’s follow-up to the almost obligatory eponymous debut, 1980’s Hypnotised, sees them either lightening up or broadening, take your pick. “Nine Times Out of Ten” lets its guitars snarl a little, but the melodic counterpoints point toward the even lighter, trending new wave with “More Songs About Chocolate and Girls,” the pure pining pop of “Wednesday Week,” and their impressively smooth rendering of The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk.” Just to note it, The Undertones kept evolving (or just going commercial) over their remaining studio albums, which included Positive Touch in 1981, and The Sin of Price (Sharkey’s favorite) in 1983. They dropped a couple more during the aughts (Get What You Need, 2003, and Dig Yourself Deep, 2007), but I’ve only heard the first two. I’ll get to them.
Source(s)
Spectrum Culture retrospective (2018; source for the quote/info up top)
I haven’t mentioned this yet, and mostly because I just decided to do it. I’ve decided to split this post into two parts, something that will spare both you and me*. I expect that to go up over the weekend. After it does, I’ll link to it here.
* It’s one thing to research these first time around, but something else to organize the material into something coherent, especially when you’re trying to keep six bands straight. I see a future of smaller chunks…
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