by Ian Wise

Created on: February 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 01, 2007

Punk rock is an evolutionary subculture. What was originally just kids with guitars has turned into a world-wide phenomenon, and it begs the question, asked over and over again, is punk dead? In the words of the legendary New York punk pioneers Kraut, you gotta' look backwards to go onwards, so let's start.

The original wave of "punk" came from the West Coast garage sounds of a little band called the Sonics. Their first LP "Here Are the Sonics" set the precedent for hundreds of kids across the US who heard rock n roll for the first time and said "we can do that!" The formula was simple. Melody like the Beatles, driving beats like Chuck Berry, and all the anger of 16 year old adolescent boys. In the mid 1960s, the record industry noticed a boom in records being self-releases, or put out on independent labels. A full 10 years before the Ramones ever played CBGB or the Sex Pistols walked into the TV studio, these kids were already practicing the DIY ethics that would become the moniker for punk rockers world wide by the mid 1980s. Not only is this absolutely crazy to think about, but the scene produced some amazing bands and songs, nowadays immortalized in CD collections like the "Back From The Grave" and "Quagmire" series.

The 1960s scene was recognized en masse after it's peak with the release of the "Nuggets" double LP (later reissued and expanded by Rhino Records), which was described in several articles as music that "any young punk could play". By that time, bands like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges were coming out and expanding on the basics to make explosive, energetic, and original music, what most people point to as the birth of the American punk scene, but their roots were in the conceptual arts and pretentious theories on big city existentialism, and they lacked the youthful recklessness of the earlier bands.

It wasn't until a few years later in New York City that a small group actually made the connection between the two dichotomies of bands like the Stooges and bands like the Sonics and put it together to create something accessible, yet challenging. When the New York Doll's started playing their classic rock n roll, but coupled with the carefree androgyny of transsexual prostitutes (not a joke!) that something came close to setting the tone for a real punk rock aesthetic. What the Dolls really did was inspire four kids to start a band that represented how they felt about everything, and make no compromises about it. The band was the Ramones,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>