Punk Spreads
The Spread of Punk in the UK: 1978-80
In the UK, the Sex Pistols were the Punk brand leader. When they split up in mid-January 1978, that was the cue for many musicians and fans energized by 1976 and 1977 Punk to try something different, to develop the language of guitar-driven pop music. Among the leaders of this experimental tendency were Wire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Subway Sect and John Lydon’s own Public Image Limited, who released their first single in October 1978 and were the first to successfully marry guitar music and dub reggae, thanks to bassist Jah Wobble.
UK Punk had a very constricted template, mainly taken from the Ramones. 1978 saw a huge opening up, with new groups like the Pop Group influenced by funk and dub. Other musicians took from Punk’s energy and the new synthetic disco epitomized by summer 1977’s huge hit, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to create a new electronica: in particular Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, the Flying Lizards and the Normal, with their single “Warm Leatherette” inspired by leading British Science Fiction writer J.G.Ballard.
An important result of the Do-It-Yourself imperative established by fanzines and independent groups like the Desperate Bicycles was the emergence of the labels around the country that helped to establish the new sound. These included Fast Product (Edinburgh: Gang of Four) and Factory (Manchester: Joy Division). The Crass label set new standards in design and political commitment - in their case to deep anarchism. During the next few years hundreds of independent 45s would be released: a vast and still untapped resource of a genuine people’s music.
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Joy Division
Joy Division began in spring 1977 as Warsaw, a run-of-the-mill punk band, although their first, self-released EP, “An Ideal for Living” showed signs of originality. In 1978 however they changed their name and hooked up with manager Rob Gretton, record label owner Tony Wilson and producer Martin Hannett. Regular dates at Manchester’s Factory club allowed them to develop in isolation: The late 1978 “Factory Sample” EP reveals them as a futuristic, troubled group with a good handle on the brand new digital technology.
During the first few months of 1979, Joy Division became a fearsome live act, with a punishing, heavy sound and totally committed performances by singer Ian Curtis. “Unknown Pleasures” was released in May 1979, and showed the group’s concert attack transmuted within digital delays and ambient sound. The stand-alone single, “Transmission” (October 1979) moved towards outright commerciality, while the limited “Licht und Blindheit” single (March 1980) contained the achingly beautiful “Atmosphere” and the downright terrifying “Dead Souls”.
As Joy Division became more successful, the pressure told on Ian Curtis. His lyrics became more personal - artistic alarm bells that failed to alert those close to him - most notably on the classic “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. After his death in May 1980, that single became a British top ten hit, as did the group’s second album, “Closer” - a mixture of uplifting dance rhythm and emotional exhaustion. In the intervening years, a carefully curated legacy - including three feature films - have made the group as famous as they deserved to be in their brief time.
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Flyer for a pre-Joy Division performance as Warsaw. Manchester, 1977. REX055_207
San Francisco section – items on one wall
San Francisco, California
When the Sex Pistols played the last show of their short career at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on January 14, 1978, Johnny Rotten sneered, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Rotten’s boredom and disgust, however, only exhilarated a crowd intent on making punk their own. The rock critic Greil Marcus wrote 500 pages trying to explain his experience at that show through an entire history of art, theology, politics, and violence. But the evening’s two opening bands, The Avengers and the Nuns, had already made San Francisco punk: the Avengers’ Penelope Houston shouted out a new anthem in the biting lyrics to “The American In Me,” where she fused the city’s longstanding left wing politics with punk’s rejection of 60s idealism: “Ask not what you can do for your country. What’s your country been doing to you?” No one embodied this political punk more than the weirdly sophisticated satire of Jello Biafra and his band Dead Kennedys. In “California Über Alles” Biafra called then (and future) governor Jerry Brown a “zen fascist”; he channeled Jonathan Swift and Charles Baudelaire to mock the Carter administration’s neutron bomb in “Kill the Poor”; and he took on right wing skinheads in “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Then he ran against Dianne Feinstein for mayor.
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SF Punk in the 80s
Much of Jello Biafra’s hijinks played out onstage at the Mabuhay Gardens (the Mab), a Filipino restaurant and nightclub in the former Beat Generation stronghold of North Beach where promoter Dirk Dirksen ironically mocked audiences and local bands like Flipper, Negative Trend, and Crime. Local scenes depend on touring bands for new sounds and new ideas, and as these flyers testify, a punk fan in the Bay Area could see hardcore bands from anywhere in the country in the ’80s: Articles of Faith and Negative Approach from the Midwest; Bad Brains, Cause for Alarm, Gang Green, and Marginal Man from the East Coast; Corrosion of Conformity from the South; DOA and Poison Idea from the Northwest; and, not surprisingly, a host of bands from LA, including Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, Social Distortion, Fear, Youth Brigade, and T.S.O.L., as well as Reno’s Seven Seconds. Some, like Texas legends the Dicks, DRI, and MDC, came on tour and stayed. So did Ohio’s Toxic Reasons. The Butthole Surfers claimed that San Francisco’s soup kitchens served better food than they could buy at home.
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Gilman Street
By the mid-80s the Mab and other SF clubs had closed their doors, and the vital energy of the scene had moved across the Bay. In late 1986, Berkeley punks teamed up with the staff of the MaximumRocknRoll fanzine to open a new all-ages club on Berkeley’s Gilman Street. The Gilman Street Project would become a mecca for punks across the country and the breeding ground for Lookout Records, whose bands included the ska-punk of Operation Ivy, crust punk like Neurosis, Filth and Blatz, and, most famously, the melodic punk of bands like Crimpshrine, the Mr. T Experience, and Green Day. Gilman fused working class and intellectual activism with queer culture, hippie anarchism, and third world politics to create an eclectic sound and style felt in later bands like AFI, Pansy Division, Screw 32, Spitboy, the Swingin’ Utters, Tilt, and Tribe 8.
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OOPS, MOST OF THE GILMAN ST. STUFF WAS THROWN IN LAST-MINUTE AND WASN’T SCANNED. GUESS WE’LL NEED TO DO THAT.
Green Day. Tour Rider. Ca. 1990. _041
Before Green Day became a household name with their 1994 major label premier, Dookie, the band was a mainstay at Gilman. As the rider from their first tour shows, they had started out conscious about not making rock star demands. _042, _012a_1, _012b_1
Lookout Records Release Party Flyer. Gilman Street, 1990. _040
This 1990 Lookout Records release party at Gilman shows the growing popularity of Berkeley-style punk, as well as its variety, with brutal and lighthearted bands sharing the same bill. This was part of a long, local tradition. Earlier in the 80s, the Eastern Front outdoor festivals featured legendary bands like Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, and Fang; Gilman picked up and extended this tradition.
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Cometbus Archive – Items in one case
Cometbus. 1981 –
Of the thousands of fanzines associated with the history of Punk, Cometbus is remarkable for its artistry, range, and endurance. The zine began in 1981, documenting the local punk bands in the East Bay, where editor Aaron Cometbus came of age. Later, he turned the same fan-like focus onto other kinds of groups: used booksellers, members of collective restaurants, occupants of L.A. bathrooms, kids of hippie back-to-the-landers. Cometbus is a key primary document in the history of the underground press and a counterweight to mainstream accounts of life in the United States.
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The Aaron Cometbus Archive
Almost as remarkable as the Cometbus zine is Cometbus’s archive, which now resides at Cornell. The materials in this case, as well as those elsewhere in the exhibit, are part of a treasure trove of flyers, fanzines, set lists, and other material culture documenting the history of Punk and the small or underground press. The archive, as Cometbus states, helps focus on “the behind-the-scenes folks who did the work,” because, without them, “any history lacks its fiber, its moral weight, and its heart.”
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Los Angeles – items in one case and one wall, and Screamers items in upright case
Los Angeles Punk
As historian Dewar McLeod tells it, the mythical founding of LA punk spawned from an April 16, 1977 visit by The Damned—the first English punk band to appear on vinyl—to the Bomp record store on Laurel Canyon. By the end of that event a show had been planned at the Orpheum theater with Cal Arts students the Weirdos, Mexican-American band the Zeros, and the soon-to-be infamous Germs. By the time Germs’ lead singer Bobby Pyn (the future Darby Crash) was wrapped in licorice, smeared in peanut butter, and kicked offstage, punk had its spectacular start in LA. Bomp Records, the KROQ radio show “Rodney on the ROQ," Hollywood clubs like the Masque or the already famous Whiskey-a-Go-Go, and fanzines like Slash quickly established the rag tag infrastructure to filter and fuel the energy of the city’s diverse punk scene with bands like X, the Dickies, and, in their early years, even the Go-Go's.
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John Denney (lead singer of the Weirdos), Darby Crash (lead singer of the Germs) and Tomata DuPlenty (lead singer of the Screamers). Photograph by Diane Grove. _054
While early Hollywood punk looked a lot like the art and anarchy of the New York and London scenes—although with a much stronger representation of Latino bands like the Zeros, the Plugz, the Bags, and others—punk also flourished in the suburbs of the LA valleys or the southern coastal areas of San Pedro and Huntington Beach. There, an even faster, louder, and more aggressive sound called “hardcore” arose, first with the Middle Class, and most influentially, with Black Flag. Eventually fronted by the hulking D.C. transplant Henry Rollins, the embodiment and mouthpiece of the driving power generated by guitarist and founder Greg Ginn, Black Flag, and their iconic four bar icon by now renowned artist Raymond Pettibon, spread hardcore throughout the country in a relentless life on the road chronicled in Rollins’s memoir, Get In The Van. Bad Religion (fronted by Cornell PhD and professor Greg Graffin), TSOL, Descendants, the Minutemen, Social Distortion and others helped produce a diverse sound in LA, and with independent record labels like SST and Epitaph these scenes laid the groundwork for punk’s massive popularity with mainstream audiences in the ’90s.
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Slash Magazine. Los Angeles, 1977-1980.
Founded by Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen in 1977, Slash was central to the first wave Los Angeles punk scene of the late ‘70s. The magazine featured interviews and reviews, concert photographs, and coverage of local LA bands such as the Screamers, the Germs, the Bags, and X.
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The Screamers
Darlings of the Los Angeles Punk Scene, the Screamers were entirely original when they emerged in April 1977: two punk styled former performance artists delivering a shock attack with pounding live drums (thanks to transplanted Nebraskan K.K.Barrett) and a twin synthesiser barrage. Spiky hair and damaged looks, but no guitars and no easy certainties. Hyper media aware, the Screamers were obsessed with image, video and tabloid headlines: it’s no accident that their logo, designed by Gary Panter, is one of the most reproduced and reproducible punk images.
Despite their ambiguous relationship with Punk, the Screamers’ fortunes were tied to the small LA scene which, although vigorous, was shut of the media and ignored by record companies. Although they had an opportunity to release records on local labels, the Screamers’ held out for the big deal that never came. They were both too futuristic and too alarming: key song “122 Hours of Fear” was sung from the point of view of a plane hijacker, while “Peer Pressure” was one of the few songs of the period to mention the existence of gay people.
The Screamers however, were masters of the video form. Two clips shot by Joe Rees’ Target Video in autumn 1978 illustrate the poppy “Vertigo” and the alarming “122 Hours of Fear”, in which front-man Tomata Du Plenty contrives to remain still for the first minute or so, in am absolute mastery of tension and performance. While the group disbanded in the early 80’s without releasing anything, this clip has nearly 400,000 hits on youtube. With a documentary on Tomata Du Plenty in the works, it looks as though the 21st century is the Screamers’ time.
Screamers artwork appropriated for a Spanish performance by Oi Punks The Exploited, 1997. _189
X
The revivalist tendencies of early punk were perfected by the Los Angeles band X, formed in 1977 by guitar virtuoso Billy Zoom and two aspiring poets, John Doe and Exene Cervenka, both of whom were natives of the eastern U.S. but drawn westward by their love of the Doors. X fused 1950s rockabilly solos with Ramones-inspired riffs, bare and dissonant vocal harmonies that recall Appalachian folk music, and dark lyrical visions of Jim Morrison. After seeing X perform at the Whisky a Go Go, the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek signed on to produce X’s first four albums. Their first two albums, Los Angeles (1980) and Wild Gift (1981) were released on the independent label Slash Records, which had evolved from the L.A. punk zine of the same name; the next two albums, Under a Big Black Sun (1982) and More Fun in the New World (1983) were released on Elektra Records--home of the Doors, the MC5, and Iggy Pop, as well as the quintessential So Cal country rockers, the Eagles. Later side projects and collaborations of Doe and Cervenka drifted towards more traditional country and folk sounds, helping to define the “Alt Country” genre—country and singer-songwriter ballads with a musical and lyrical edge of urban punk and indie rock.
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Exene Cervenka on the cover of Slash magazine, v.1 n.6, December 1977. _182
Washington DC – items in one case and one wall
Washington D.C.
Ian MacKaye remains one of the most important figures in U.S. Punk history. The co-founder of Washington D.C.’s Dischord Records, MacKaye’s band Minor Threat learned from the light speed performances of D.C. friends Bad Brains, and helped define the sound of hardcore across the country in the early 1980s. After coining the term “straight edge”— and thus accidentally writing the guidelines for an anti-drug subculture — and writing the requiem for the early D.C. scene in “Salad Days,” MacKaye disbanded Minor Threat. By 1985, his short-lived band Embrace joined D.C.-area bands like Beefeater and Rites of Spring in a newly emotional form of Punk associated with what was later dubbed Revolution Summer. A few years later, MacKaye united with Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty of Rites of Spring, as well as bassist Joe Lally, to form the post-hardcore band Fugazi. Borrowing from reggae, Jimi Hendrix, and D.C.’s funk influenced Go-go music, combined with Punk and hardcore, Fugazi transformed the possibilities of Punk’s sound, while retaining its agitated politics in the form of anti-corporate anthems (“Merchandise”), declarations of women’s rights (“Suggestion”), and anti-colonial critiques (“Smallpox Champion”).
Ian MacKaye performing with Minor Threat, 1982. Photograph by Glen E. Friedman. _087
H.R. and Dr. Know performing with Bad Brains, 1981. Photograph by Glen E. Friedman. _244
Glen E. Friedman defined and documented the early look of Los Angeles skate culture, hardcore Punk, and New York Hip Hop. His photographs of Run-DMC, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Tony Alva, Jay Adams and others have become iconic images of the ’80s subcultures that became some of the most important cultural movements in the United States.
Chicago
Los Crudos
Formed in the early 1990s, Chicago’s Los Crudos, and their singer Martin Sorrondeguy, were one of the most extraordinary hardcore bands in the United States to fuse punk’s broader political protest to central questions of Latino life in the U.S.: immigration, racist violence, and linguistic difference. Latino punk bands such as the Plugz, the Zeroes, and the Bags, were integral to the L.A. punk scene in the late 1970s, and hardcore bands in Latin America like Alerta Roja (Argentina), Narcosis (Peru), Masacre 68 (Mexico), as well as U.S.-based hardcorelike Dogma Mundista and others paved the way, but Los Crudos helped broaden the audience for punk sung in Spanish and, in songs like “Hardcoregoismo” (Hardcoregoism) or “Somos los mojados” (We’re the Wetbacks), criticized the xenophobic and anglocentric members of any punk scene. Through their record label Lengua Armada they forcefully cleared a space for Latino punk and Latino identity in the heartland of the U.S as they sang songs in Spanish (often introduced with English translations), played Latino community centers as well as traditional punk clubs, and supported Latin American hardcore bands during their own tours in Mexico, and South and Central America. Los Crudos joined the local and global politics of race and ethnicity in songs like “Levántate” (Rise Up) and “Asesinos” (Murderers), with the latter’s indictment: “Bush (murderer), Pinochet (murderer), Hitler (murderer), Baby Doc (murderer), murderers!” In 1998 Martin Sorrondeguy and other members of Los Crudos formed the queercore band Limp Wrist, marking another significant challenge to hardcore’s unwritten dogma of machismo, as well as homophobic stereotypes of gay men as essentially effeminate. With Los Crudos and Limp Wrist, Sorrondeguy renovated punk rock at the turn of the millennium by amplifying its queer and Latino roots.
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Austin, Texas
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Gretchen Phillips in a red dress and playing a red bass. Houston, TX, ca. 1983.
This photograph and the accompanying two flyers document Austin’s thriving early 1980s punk scene. They are on loan from Gretchen Phillips, founder of the seminal Austin punk band Meat Joy, which combined punk’s raw musical energy with humor and sexual politics. Phillips would later found two additional groups, the all-girl bands Girls in the Nose and Two Nice Girls.
Meat Joy. Flyer for their show at the Continental Club, February 7 1985.
Gretchen recalls: “Meat Joy was extremely excited to get to play with The Meat Puppets because they were 1/3 of the inspiration for our band name.” The other 2/3rds were Joy Division, and Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 performance piece “Meat Joy.”
GUESS WHAT? DIDN’T GET THE GRETCHEN PHILLIPS/MEAT JOY STUFF SCANNED EITHER.
Punk and Activism
Punk and Activism
With resistance and refusal as its founding principles, punk culture has always blurred the line between art and activism. In “God Save the Queen,” the Sex Pistols attacked the empty commodified symbols of the fading British Empire, while “Anarchy in the U.K.” issued a call to think and act outside existing institutions.
Punk and punk-inspired DIY zines soon became a vehicle for reporting on key social and political issues, especially with the tide of conservatism that swept the U.S. and the U.K. in the 1980s and early 1990s. The rise of white nationalist organizations in Britain gave rise to the Rock Against Racism campaign that united punk, ska, and reggae performers; in the U.S. the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment by the deadline of 1982 led to punk-inspired third-wave feminist zines and a decade later riot grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney; increased poverty from diminished social welfare programs inspired demonstrations on behalf of the homeless in People’s Park (Berkeley, CA), as well as benefit concerts at 924 Gilman Street; the slow reaction of governments to the AIDS epidemic decimating the gay community, and the demonizing of that community, was challenged by the zine and record label Outpunk in the early 1990s, and queercore bands such as Tribe 8, Pansy Division, and Limp Wrist; institutional investments in apartheid in South Africa were confronted by global demonstrations and multi-racial Afropunk bands such as National Wake. Food Not Bombs, AK Press, and hundreds of other national and local grassroots and DIY organizations sprang up from punk communities to actively support poor and underserved populations and produce an alternative to mainstream capitalism.
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Peace Punk
Picking up on the anarchist principles of U.K. bands like Crass, Discharge, and Zoundz, and drawing on the Bay Area’s own long tradition of anarchist protest, “peace punk” bands like Crucifix, Trial, Christ on Parade, and Atrocity described the brutal consequences of capitalism, religious dogma, and the quest for power in the age of Reagan. Like the hippies before them, peace punks promoted animal liberation and vegetarianism, but their message was filtered through darkly distorted guitars, frenetic drums, and an apocalyptic lyrical and visual vocabulary that encouraged peace by holding up a mirror reflecting the worst horrors of the world. As Crucifix sang, “it’s a shame to give birth in a world that is dirt.”
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Punk and Popular Imagination
Although punk rockers mocked and rejected the entertainment industry and the consumer culture it fed, that industry found the striking visual style, the sneering insolent performers, and the sensationalistic threat of youth violence irresistible.
At first a contained regional curiosity in New York and London, punk in the popular imagination would be forever marked on December 1, 1976 by the appearance of the Sex Pistols on the London Today show, when Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones, surrounded by an entourage of fans (including Siouxsie Sioux), decked out in spiky hair, Vivienne Westwood t-shirts and Malcolm McLaren’s fetish wear, were provoked by the host Bill Grundy into a cascade of swearing insults. The moment immediately turned punk rock into a caricature of itself.
U.S. comics, from the satirical Mad magazine June 1978 issue, to the serial detective strip of Dick Tracy in August 1979 through January 1980, seized on the cartoonish nature of punk style and attitude, portraying punks as boorish and ridiculous. European glossy magazines, however, turned lead singers into standard rock star pin-ups and objects of tabloid gossip columns.
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Absolut Vodka Campaign. Sex Pistols, 2000.
In 2000, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols became part of an ad campaign series by Absolut Vodka that reproduced or slightly modified the jacket art of eight classic albums, including Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Judas Priest’s British Steel, and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane.
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