(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
While heralded as an insurrectionary musical reset at the time, punk’s ‘Year Zero’ was only ever a rhetorical commitment surrounding rock’s winding traverse, a fact not lost on Joey Ramone.
You’ve heard it all before, but punk is nigh impossible to discuss without taking stock of the identity crisis rock found itself in by the mid-1970s. While glam had whetted the kids’ appetites with its glittery pop escapism, much of the lauded rock canon had bloated to tediously self-indulgent prog theatrics or snoozing yacht harmonies beloved by The Old Grey Whistle Test, but not setting any pulses racing.
Even former heroes like The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin had lapsed into a faint parody, living lives of remote excess increasingly alienating to a new generation eager to reignite music’s urgent attack.
In came the Ramones, or so music lore tells us. Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon baulks at the idea that punk was burnished in New York, but it’s hard to argue against the timeframe. When the future ‘God Save the Queen’ seditionaries first plugged in their guitars late 1975, four Schott-jacketed garage kids from Queens had already taken to the stage for the then-fledgling CBGBs some 15 months previously, conjuring a turbo-charged speed of rock fury spiked with infectious pop hook that threw a much-needed antidote to Yes or the Eagles to a bewildered yet fascinated crowd.
While UK punk struck the country from London and Manchester’s ground zeroes with a fiercer cataclysmic fervour, punk’s entry to the US story was a more organic and linear one. Just as Joey was firing off “Hey ho! Let’s go!” for the first time, the city witnessed the likes of The Dictators’ juvenile and stripped-down garage assault, New York Dolls’ smeared lipstick dress-up, and the eerie electronics of art provocateurs Suicide. Only a few years earlier, the likes of Detroit’s Stooges, MC5, and early Alice Cooper all paved the path toward punk’s primal ephemerality.
But punk wasn’t solely about the belligerence. Just as the Sex Pistols’ first-ever show included a number made famous by The Monkees, the Ramones held an unabashed love of 1960s bubblegum pop, known to spin songs like 1910 Fruitgum Company’s ‘Indian Giver’ or The Music Explosion’s ‘Little Bit O’ Soul’ in their sets. The Ramones, at least, presented punk as less a hard genre and more an unmistakable sensibility, largely owing to their frontman’s definition as born entirely from attitude.
“To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying ‘This is who I am’,” Joey once said. “To me, John Lennon and Elvis Presley were punks because they made music that evoked those emotions in people. And as long as people are making music that does that, punk rock is alive and well”.
Lennon’s punk pedigree is easier to discern, counting a storied history of politically radical, if at times incoherent, solo intersection of organising and incendiary chart toppers, as well as lacing The Beatles’ songbook with his potent, lyrical snark. Presley’s mantle as a punk pioneer may have felt like ancient history in the mid-1970s. The King was well and truly lost in his Las Vegas kitsch, but the arousing flame first lit by rock and roll’s explosive debut stirred the same visceral senses that punk would only build on years later.
It’s an encouraging lens to view contemporary music with. Rather than a tedious mohawk and tartan trousers checklist exercise, punk’s eternal clash against orthodoxy and expression of unfiltered self means that no amount of corporate co-opt or conservative hijack will ever be able to snuff out the enduring examples set by The Beatles or the Ramones in rejecting the naysaying bullshit and marking your own, weird, imprint on the musical landscape.
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