March 12, 2022 • 52 mins
Punk rock really needs about 10 episodes to do it justice, but we'll try and tackle anyway. Learn all about this movement right now in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, it's your old pal Josh. For this
week's s Y s K Selects. I've chosen our two
thousand nineteen episode a brief overview of punk rock. And
it's just that. And I'd say we did a pretty
good job for a couple of squares, a couple of
uptight weirdos, you know what I mean. So I hope
(00:20):
you enjoy this brief overview of punk rock because we
did Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:42):
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Thrash Core back. I'm already
regretting this. There's Chuck Bryan over there, Charles W. Chuck Bryan,
There's Jerry drewome Roland and uh, like I said, I'm Josh.
This is stuff you should know. Hey, ho, let's go exactly.
(01:03):
I want to issue a c A off the top
here too. Fans of punk music, get ready to be
mad at us. Yeah, please don't beat this up though. Yeah,
here's the thing. Punk It's sort of like the hip
Hop episode. It's not just music, it's a culture. It's
a movement, and it is so there are so many tentacles,
(01:26):
alternative tentacles, so many subgenres, so many like the more
I started getting into it, I was like, why are
we even doing this in a single episode? I had
the same feeling because it can only disappoint. But we're
doing anything. There's a lot of people out there who
don't know squad about punk. We're gonna be like, cool,
I'm punk now, I get it, and the people who
(01:47):
are punked now we're gonna love us for it. Well,
I mean, you know, there are certainly podcast I'm sure
that are dedicated to the history of punk right now,
I know. And the thing is is with a big
distinction here between the hip hop episode in this episode
is that the hip hop episode doesn't beat you up
if you show up to which there shows and you're
(02:09):
not wearing the right thing. That's true. Punk's kind of
protective of punk, which makes sense because that's pretty punk,
right like you kinda you can't allow for commercialization of
punk or else it stops being punk. So by definition
it has to be vigilantly defended and protected. But the
(02:30):
irony of the whole thing is when you do that,
you actually strangle it from becoming anything ever, and you
kind of killed punk, strangling in the cradle the End. Yeah,
And I listened to a lot of music while researching this,
and there's just so many things that could possibly fall
under the banner of punk, and probably so many real
(02:51):
punk fans that will fight you on any of them
if you say, like, you know, the Talking Heads were punk,
Television was punk, not really, but were a new wave
I don't know. Yeah, the New York Dolls, I was
listening to them proto punk. When you listen to them, though,
they sound like sort of like dressed up rock and roll,
(03:13):
like rocky horror picture show style, right, But make no
bones about it, the New York Dolls were a direct
predecessor of punk. Yeah. But then I started listening to
things I never listened to growing up at all. Like
I wasn't a punk kid, but I saw all the
Jackets with Minor Threat and Circle Jerks and Dead Kennedy's
on them, and I started listening to that stuff today
(03:34):
and I liked a lot of it. Oh, it's good music,
and some of it I didn't quite love, Okay, which
one I think? You know? My deal is I like
vocals and vocalists, and punk is not known for that.
But stuff like that had a really unique bent and
it wasn't just screaming. I liked a lot more so
you like the Misfits a lot. I like the Misfits,
I like the dann I like the Circle Jerks. Did
(03:56):
not like the Germs. I was never into the Germans.
What about the Cramps? Uh, didn't listen to the Cramps yet.
They're like rockabilly punk. I'll probably like it. But stuff
that had a little more melody, a little more vocal styling,
I liked much more than the Germs, which you know,
Darby Crash, just it's just screaming things that you can
hardly understand. Didn't love Black Flag, What Little Life to
(04:18):
listen to? Like the Henry Rawlins black Flag. I listened
to a little bit of both. But it's all very
interesting to me, and I dig the music for sure. Yeah,
it's hard not to in some way, shape or form
like punk when you hear it, like it's it's it's
just too it just gets under your skin just too easily,
(04:39):
really quickly, and you might not even realize, like you're
like your head's like kind of nodding in your knees,
like shaking or whatever. But like no matter who you are,
punk and get to you like that. Now, whether you're
like I'm gonna start buying punk records and like get
a mohawk or something like that, that's that's maybe a
couple of steps down the road. Most people probably we wouldn't,
(05:00):
but I think everybody can appreciate punk on some level.
Especially to me. The greatest punk band of all time,
and what I would argue would be the first punk
band is the Remotes. If you like melody and you
like singing, but you also like punk, they've got everything
you need. Yeah, And if you like songs that are
seconds long, sure, well that was a big thing. Like
(05:21):
punk grew out of this idea that led Zeppelin had
like eleven minutes songs you're playing on the radio, and
guys like the Ramones were like shut up. So they
purposefully and deliberately went the opposite way and they started
making songs or sometimes less than a minute, like one
of the greatest punk songs of all time in my opinion,
Circle Jerk's Wasted is like fifty fifty two seconds long,
(05:45):
getting get out. It's all you need. He gets the
point across. He talks about all the drugs he's on
she talks about all the stuff he does when he's
on drugs. Unless a minute. Yeah, but I think you
bring up an important point is punk was a reaction.
It was a reaction to the bloated money and the
bloated song links and the arena rock, Cucumber in the pants,
(06:08):
hard rock mckeismo getting the ladies. Like this great quote
from one of the Ramons, These were kids on the
outside and he said, uh, Johnny Ramon in V six
and Rolling Stones said, you know, they got together because
none of them could get girls, so they all found
solace in each other. And he said girls always wanted
(06:29):
to go with guys who had corvettes, so we had
nothing to do but climb on rooftops and sniff glue.
The Rams in the nutshell. But if you look at
nineteen seventy seven, like the albums that came out in
nineteen seventy seven, Um, you know you've got the sex
Pistols and the Ramons and stuff like that, but you've
got Eric Clapton, Slowhand, Fleetwood, Max Rumors, Point of No
(06:51):
Return from Kansas, Uh, The Stranger from Billy Joel, which
one was that it was one of the great ones,
but they all work right right, uh Asia from Uh
Steely Dan and like these are like the big chart toppers.
And so punk came along and was just like, no,
(07:12):
screw all that to heck with you guys. Yeah, that's
what it says. So it was an ethos and a
spirit even as much as it was music. Yeah, And
I think, um, one of the other things that commonly
ran across and researching this was that, um, it was
not just kind of like rock sucks because it's getting
so you know, eleven minutes long per song and there's
(07:34):
lots of guitar solos and stuff like that, but also
that it was hopelessly commercialized. And so punk was like,
there's nothing inherently wrong with rock, it's just gone on
this path that it's been on for so long that
it's it's just become I think, like you said, bloated, Um,
let's take rock back and scrape away all the all
(07:54):
the blow and just get back to like the core
and the point of it originally, which was rebellion, which
is that was what punk was built on in the
in the late seventies and the Ramans again, I will
go to my grave saying they were officially the first
punk band that ever existed, but there were there was
music that's that led up to that, immediately before it,
(08:18):
and even a decade or so before it that really
laid the foundation in the groundwork for for bands like
the Ramon and this the punk that that um, the
punk music that took off right afterwards. Yeah, and uh,
you also got to remember that coming into the early
seventies where some of these proto punk bands started, this
was coming off of the late sixties and the hippie
(08:39):
movement and Nixon and Vietnam, which so all that had
proved a failure. Yeah, and and flower power and the
peace and love and all that stuff. Uh. There there's
still Crisy Stills and Nash and stuff hanging around, but
there's also a younger generation that thumb their nose or
more specifically their middle finger at that whole generation, right,
(09:00):
and that's what sort of birth the punk movement, in
the proto punk movement at least, so I saw the
earliest proto punk band I could find, um that you
could trace a direct line too, is actually from Peru. Okay.
They were around in nineteen starting in Los Sakos, s A. I. C. O.
S and if you go listen to a Los Sakos song,
(09:23):
you will it's quite clear that this was proto punk.
Did it have the speed a little bit? Because I
think that's a bit of the distinction, Like there was
that whole uh Nuggets era garage rock of the sixties.
You can hear a little bit of that, but it
still didn't have that chugga chugga chugg a speed that
punk rock would be known for. You know it did. Yeah, no, um,
(09:46):
like another proto punk band that's more garage rock, but
kind of some of the sentiments they came up with.
The Chocolate Watch band had this anthem called like I'm
not like everybody else and it's like real kind of um,
it's groovy, but if you listen to the words, it's
like those guy's talking about being a punk but it's
(10:06):
long before punk. But they're musically they were not punk
at all. Losakos was punk like their's Their sound is
definitely punk and they were around the same time. Yeah,
and the and the specifics of what you're doing musically
on a guitar with punk is important, is the down stroke.
So you know, it's hard to talk about it without
(10:27):
showing you. But if you're playing like a an Eric
Clapton rhythm part, it's like, you know, you're stroking down
and up ching ching, ching ching. If you're playing punk,
you're just going down that ching ching ching ching ching
ching ching. Uh. And that's a really, really great impression.
And the Ramans made a career out of two or
three chords played fast, playing that same rhythm and down
(10:50):
stroke over and over and over and over. Like I'm
convinced you just did two seconds snippet of a misfit song.
I could hear it like playing his day. It's great. Though,
I was listening to the stuff that I was like, man,
I really like a lot of this and I missed out.
So I see myself diving into it again, or diving
in for the first time rather. I mean, I know
about the Clash and the Ramones and stuff like that
(11:12):
for sure, but oh there's like I mean, as you know,
a whole world, the whole world. And then the thing
about punk is the more like you find, oh I
like this band, and then oh that it turns out
this guy was used to be in this other band
there from the same scene as this other band. It
just keeps going and going and going, because one of
the through lines of punk is that anybody could be
(11:34):
in a punk band. It was super democratized, and the
d I Y ethos um was was basically the foundation
of punk music. All right, well, let's take a break.
We'll go back in time a little bit and talk
about New York and London, and then we'll get to that.
What I think is kind of the coolest part of
this whole thing is that d I Y aesthetic. Okay,
(12:08):
all right, so I mentioned London in New York. H
I sourced this from a bunch of articles. I can't
remember if this was the Pitchfork one or not, but
the headline of this part is the Tale of two Cities,
New York and l A. I'm sorry New York in London,
but l A would come along a bit later with
its own scene. And also London gets mentioned here at
the expense of Manchester, which I would say is like,
(12:30):
that's ground zero next to New York. Right. Also ground zero,
which doesn't get nearly enough press is Australia. Oh yeah,
these things were going on in parallel all over the world.
That's really interesting to think, like this stuff is happening
like almost independently and it was because it's not like
someone in Australia heard someone on the internet in nine.
(12:53):
But there are a couple of bands, one called Cheap
Nasties on the Western I think in Perth, and then
The Saints, probably the biggest punk band to come out
of Australia. This is at the same time that CBGB's
uh and the Stooges were like getting big. It's crazy. Yeah,
So the Stooges would technically qualify as proto punk too,
but they came from Michigan along with m C five
(13:14):
and Death Death is an even earlier proto punk band
than the Stages. That documentary is great. I actually I
haven't seen that one. Yeah, there's one on death it's
just called like a band called death right. Yeah. Yeah,
it's very like they're amazing and they were, um I
think three three African American brothers from Detroit just killing it.
Who in like a punk band? Yeah yeah, and this
(13:36):
is before the Studges. I think this is before MC five,
before Bad Brains for sure for sure. Um, So all
of these bands are starting to kind of lay the
groundwork and then it's almost like it just kind of ignites,
like we're saying in different parts of the world virtually
at the same time, which I just find endlessly fascinating. Yeah,
and I think that's what really lends a lot of
(13:57):
credence to the fact that it was a movement. It
was a feeling people were rebelling against more than anything
which can happen parallel in different parts of the country
in world. You know, if there's anything that can bring
the whole world together, it's disdained for hippies, you know,
I think really bring that out. And everybody, did you
see the Tarantino movie Yet Once upon a Time, And yes,
(14:19):
there's a lot of the anti hippies stuffing. It was
pretty funny. Yeah, a little some of them are beaten
to death literally. Well, I just mean all the DiCaprio
stuff was really funny. He did the hippies. But but
Tarantino really like pointed out, like you know, the mans
and family has been celebrated in romanticized at least in
(14:39):
some weird ways. Um, and they should not be. And
this is why I think he did a really good
job of doing that. Uh So sorry, we're talking about
the Stooges in MC five in Michigan. Uh in New
York Cities where things really crystallized with the club CBGB,
owned by Hilly Crystal. Crystal Crystal, is it crystal? I
(15:00):
think so, like Billy Crystal right by Hilly Uh. And
originally you know that stands for a country, blue, blue
grass and blues, and that was what it was supposed
to be when it opened in nineteen seventy. Yeah. But
then in about two years the Ramones started playing their
talking Heads started playing their in nineteen seventy five, Blondie,
Um Television, I think television. I'm okay with them, Like
(15:24):
I don't love them, they don't, I don't hate them,
but um, they were they were essential to that scene
happening um and a lot of people kind of overlook them.
I think is like one of the the foundation bands
for punk. Yeah, which is interesting, like I mentioned earlier,
like it's such different kinds of music, Like I love
(15:44):
talking Heads and television and Blondie and the Go Goes
and they were all on that early scene. But I
don't think it's that's anything like the Misfits or the
Damned or the Ramons. No, but the Misfits uh and
the Ramones both started their careers at cbgby so it
was like the place where punk began in the United States. Yeah,
(16:04):
but also at Max's Kanzie, Kansas City and New York
Legendary Club. This is where like Patti Smith is hanging out,
the Velbot Underground is hanging out. Again, they're not punk
at all, but they were in that scene, right. And
one thing that we're kind of not really mentioning that
is a common thread to all these bands, not necessarily music,
but heroin was a huge thread. They shared their deep,
(16:27):
deep deep love of heroin um in common and that
definitely bound them together at CBGB for sure. And that
was a huge factor on the early punk scene was heroin,
which I mean this is you know, if you remember
back just a few years ago, for oxy Cotton turned
everybody into junkies in the world. Um, heroin was not
(16:50):
a big drug at all, and back then especially it
was like you were a total burnout if you were
doing heroin, like it was not done. So the fact
that these people were like shooting heroin like in the clubs,
that was a that was a another kind of badge
that they took on. Um that separated them from everybody else. Yeah,
(17:13):
you know, even their preference of drugs was super hardcore, Yeah,
for sure. Another interesting thing happened early on in ninety
seven when these two scenes sort of exported one of
their um early UM big bands to play in the
other city. Uh. In venty seven, the Damned played in
(17:34):
the United States, and less than a year before that,
the Ramons had gone to the UK to play shows
in London. And that was a big deal because all
of a sudden you had these two different scenes swapping bands.
Of course, it wasn't anything they planned, but they got
a taste of New York City in London with the
Ramons in a big, big way, and the same can
be said in New York City with the Damned very British.
(17:56):
And then a month before the Ramons played in London,
in Manchester on June, the sex Pistols had their first show.
And a lot of people point to this is this
is when UK punk happened. It was this one show
at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, which is like a
(18:17):
hall might as well be a VFW basically, and that's
where the sex Pistols are there first show. But some
of the people who were there were so influential, including
a seventeen year old Morrissey who went to cover the
thing for New Music Express um that that it just
spread out like a germ, Like it was the single
point that that UK punk spread out from. And this
(18:40):
was uh June of ninety and within six months, the
major record labels were lining up to sign any and
every punk act they could get their hands on. Six
months Like That's so not only did it spread and
grow in parallel around the world at the same time
(19:00):
when it hit the scene, It's hard to overstate how
quickly it just blew up, like just from nothing to
it in six months. Yeah. I mean, if there's one
thing I mean, I don't I don't know about the
music industry today, but previous to you know, digital content,
the music industry was always there waiting to commodify the
(19:23):
next big thing. Yeah, and they did it to punk
big time. Yeah. So let's talk about this d I
Y thing for a little bit. It was really cool
this article about these um, these d I Y origins
in punk music. What happened was when punk started coming
around in the mid nineties seventies. This coincided with a
big shift in UH equipment and recording gear and modernizing
(19:47):
recording gear among the big labels. Yeah sure, um, and
so all of a sudden there was all of this,
these rooms and this gear that you could either rent
cheap or buy cheap. Yeah, they're old stuff that they
didn't need anymore. Yeah, and so punks came along and
uh started using it, and the very first punk labels
were self started. Miles Copeland started Step Forward, Bob Last
(20:09):
started Fast Product, and of course, very famously, Tony Wilson
started Factory Records. Yes, dude, which, by the way, see
twenty four Party of People. If you never have everybody.
It's amazing to see that again. I saw it once
when it came out. Yeah, it's a good movie. Um.
But it follows this progression of punk into new wave,
uh into the eighties. Um. It just does it in
(20:33):
a spectacularly great way because it's Steve Coogan who's created
so good. But people trace the um punk on record
or on recorded tape rather to the very first single
they claim very first punk single November seventy six, The
Damns New Rows, which I thought that was weird because
(20:55):
the Ramones released their album before them, but maybe because
they're among were on the label when they released their album.
They're saying like this is the first d I Y
Maybe when was the Ramons first? Off? I think like
the full year before. I'm pretty sure, if not at
least seventy six then, but I'm pretty sure seventy five. Well,
the Buzz Cox put out an EP and I listened
(21:16):
to a lot of that today. I enjoyed that. UM
Spiral Scratch was this EP was apparently the first British
homemade record and that was a really big deal. Uh,
this is a seven. They sold out a thousand copies
that they printed, then they went on to sell another
sixteen thousand and UM. The influence on Spiral Scratch really
(21:37):
spread out and told everyone because they printed it was
very cool. They printed on the little record jacket like
how much it cost, how they produced it, and what
the money was all about for a hundred and fifty
three pounds, basically saying go do this right, like and
here's how to do it. Yeah. Um they all all
like that kind of set the tone for other records,
(21:58):
like other punk bands released their own record. Words also
included instructions on the sleeve that the record came in
UM and the whole d I Y record released thing
that the Buzz Cocks kicked off UM. Other people started
to find other ways to to kind of make it
so punk could exist outside of the influence of the
(22:21):
record companies. Like people would release records in zip block baggies,
Like that was the record sleeve that your record came in,
and people loved it, Like you didn't. You didn't need
like this expensive sleeve for the thing to come in,
Like you could just pop it in for in a
zip block bag and sell it. It's super punk. And
then also, um, if you can form a band that
(22:45):
it was put like this, like the sex Pistols showed
that anybody could be in a punk band. You didn't
even need be very talented, right, you didn't even need
to know how to play an instrument, um, and you
could be in a punk band. And the buzz Cocks
came along and showed that anybody could us our record.
But there's still one very essential ingredient missing, and that
was distribution. And like you said, mail order made up
(23:08):
for a lot of the Buzzcocks ep UM sales, but
they they realized that there were more people out there
who wanted this stuff but didn't have a way to
get to it. So a what was called the Cartel
was formed, which was a group of independent record stores
around the UK that would basically serve as a distribution
(23:28):
network for these d I Y punk records. So cool um.
Not only that, but zines were very important early on
in the punk and really kind of a lot of
music genres. Zines were really big. Which are these, you know,
fan made magazines. Yeah, maybe with like photocopy, not even photocopy,
like mimiograph stuff. Ye, And you would just pronount your
(23:50):
zine and some of these zanes got to be pretty
big and they would attach distribution to the zines sometimes
and sneak forty not sneaking, but a pack of forty
five in the zine. And that's how you could release
your stuff. And it was just this uh. Again, it
sounds so trite to say, very punk rock attitude, but
that's exactly what it was. The way they were doing
things was all under the radar, all on their own, uh.
(24:13):
And that changed pretty quickly. It did is because the
big the big players came in. They smelled money, they
smelled something new, the next big thing, and they started
signing everybody they could left and right. And these punks
were going like nah, bollocks. I don't want your money.
They're like, what if we pay you in heroin? He's
like okay, yeah, I like you put it that way.
(24:35):
You could buy drugs with money, right, So um again.
Within six months of what most people point to as
the source of UK punk, that one specific show by
the sex Pistols, The sex Pistons were so new. Sid
Vicious wasn't even in the band. He was still Susie
and the Banshee's drummer. He so this is how young
(24:58):
this stuff was. Within six months, they were signed on
to a major record label. The Clash was signed on
to a major record label. The Fall, the Jam, the Stranglers,
everybody got signed in this feeding frenzy where everyone who
had a punk band could get a record deal with
a major label. Six months after, the sex Epistols had
their first show, Yeah, Generation X with a young Billy idol, Uh,
(25:22):
which I did ever do? That? Dancing with Myself was
originally a Generation X song. They released it, then he
re released it as a solo artist like a year
later and it became a much bigger hit. Sure, they
were like thanks a lot, but yeah, sex Pistols went
with E M I. Um, the Stranglers at you A,
The Clash signed to CBS, the Jam went to Polydor
(25:42):
Generation X, and Stiff Little Fingers went to Chrysalis and
even the Buzz Cox. They were very quick to hop
on that train too, with United Artists, which actually that's
not too bad. You could have signed with worse because
United Artists was started by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, um,
Charlie Chaplin, indeed W Griffith so that artists could have
(26:03):
more control and ownership over their work. Yeah, I mean
it was a movie company, and I guess they dabbled
in records. So one of three things happened basically to
the little d I Y small label movement. Um you
either got Pilford, they'd use one example in Belfast the
Good Vibrations label. Four of its first six bands were
(26:24):
stolen away or signed away. I guess. So either got
Pilford and then just shut down and gave up um
or you grew and got bigger to where you were,
you know, like Rough Trade and Factory Records. Those all
became like bigger independent labels. Yeah, Rough Trade still around.
Sure they have state of the art, cutting edge bands.
It's great. Um Or they stayed small and just kept
(26:49):
going right. They went punk and went back underground. Yeah, Like,
so they didn't all go away. They didn't all say,
you know, we're all getting Pilford, so we're just gonna
shut down. They would just find more underground bands and
go deeper and deeper and deeper. But then, um, something
happened in nineteen seventy nine, In February of nineteen seventy
nine that a lot of people point to. Just as
they point to that first Sex Pistols show as the
(27:11):
beginning of punk in the UK, they point to the
death of Sid Vicious as the end of punk, at
least the first wave of punk. His death from a
heroin overdose um is widely pointed to as as the
death of punk, which is a really dumb thing to say,
because punk very clearly went on. But what I think
(27:32):
people are saying, sorry, I guess it's not entirely dumb
now that I say it out loud, But what people
are saying is is that punk transformed into something else,
and that punk really as as it originally existed, was
only around for about two three years, maybe four or five.
Some people at a bar right now that are just
saying that over and over again. Punk only the last
(27:54):
said three years. Okay, well, I agree with you, drunk
person in this sense, but it's not like punk went away.
It transformed and became something else. And so what it
transitioned into is commonly called hardcore hardcore punk, where stuff
just got faster, louder, a little angrier. Yeah. Um, and
(28:16):
it just went in in a different direction, predominantly in
the United States. Yeah, and there were there were a
couple of scenes. Um, the l A scene had already
sort of been born by the late seventies. Uh, if
you haven't seen it, The great documentary from Penelope spheris
The Decline of Western Civilization releasing eighty one, but filmed
(28:38):
over I think maybe covered the l A scene. And
that's the germs and uh like I think Blondie and
the Go Goes and stuff like that, all right, and
Jerks York the best sets ever in the Decline of
Western Civilization. Yes, it's very good. And the germs too,
That's where I was. I was watching some of that
(28:58):
today and that's when I knew I didn't like the germs, right.
But Pat Smir of course, the food Fighters, he was
in the germs. You know he likes money. And also
if you're like, who's Penelope Spies? You may be familiar
with their work if you've seen the movie Wayne's World,
that's right, or the movie Black Sheet, the Chris Farley
David Spade movie, or The Decline of Western Civilization. I
(29:18):
think she'd ended up doing like three or four of those, right,
at least three, because I know she didn't want to metal.
The second one was metal, which is good too. Yeah,
that's the only two I saw. Did you ever see
that documentary about um heavy Metal Parking Lot? Yes, yeah,
where everybody's smoking PCP at did Judas Priest concert. Ye,
it's pretty great. Did you know early eighties metal head
smoked PCP? No, I didn't until a documentary because it
(29:41):
was quite a surprise. I was scared of all those people. Well,
they're kind of scary because they were all on PCP,
especially when you're like eight or ten. Scary. So American. Uh,
we were talking about the you know, punk bands releasing
their own albums. This started happening on the West coast. Um.
They started forming their own labels even to release their
(30:04):
albums and sign other like bands like SST very famous
punk label was started from the guy, the original guy
from Black Flag, right, yes, uh, what's his name? Greg
g I N n either again or Jin I'm sorry punkers,
I know you're mad at me right now that I
don't know this. Yeah, I think he was like the
(30:24):
founder of Black Flag Okay, Jello Biafro of course, um
Dead Kennedy's they formed or he formed Alternative Tentacles. Yeah,
in nine nine and seventy nine was a big year
because that's the same year that a band called Bad
Brains came out and Washington d C. Which I didn't love.
(30:49):
Did you see the Dave Gold documentary series? So I
can't remember what it was called, but he did this
like ten part documentary series where he would do the
music of a different city and it was really really good,
except for the last like fifteen minutes of it. He
would get the food Fighters together in a studio and
they would play like some of those songs, and if
you're really into the Food Fighters, I imagine you loved
(31:11):
it all. Not into the Food Fighters, so I would
just stop it there. But he does Seattle. But what
got me on this was one of the most interesting
episodes was the Washington DC episode because I didn't know
it was such a hardcore scene. Like that's where when
people talk about hardcore, yeah, they're like, well d C
is kind of the cradle of it and Bad Brains,
(31:32):
which my friend Jason Jenkins in college introduced me to,
and that's when it was like really fast, had a
little metal edge, but Bad Brains was also started out
as like jazz fusion and had reggae roots, also African
American guys. Yeah, and um, really really good stuff. Yeah.
So you've got at the same time, l A and
(31:55):
d C as the new like seats of punk music
in the USA, punk slash, hardcore, and it's going it's
going like way more hardcore, way more masculine, way more
macho than the UK went. The UK went a different route.
They went way more political, way more like class struggle. Um,
and there's there's definitely lots of political threads that um,
(32:18):
American punk music went through, but I think the UK
went to it earlier. Like Crass is a great great
punk band from the UK. Um, they're kind of like, uh,
they're just great, check them out. Um, but they were
doing like anarchy stuff in the seventies. Yeah, the clash
certainly is notable for their political statement, very political um.
(32:39):
And then you've got like the Six Sex Pistols talking
about anarchy in the UK. They didn't really mean it,
they were just saying something right, um. But there were
a lot of like politically motivated bands in the UK
in the early seventies that didn't pick up till later
in the eighties in the US because certainly were not political.
They were not political. But the other thing, the other
differentiation I saw between UK and US punk was that
(33:03):
UK punk didn't take itself quite as seriously as the
US started to in the late seventies early eighties, and
that this guy I read I think a Guardian article
trace that back to a love of glam rock. That
glam rock really led to punk, especially in the UK,
and if you're into glam rock, you just can't quite
take anything fully seriously, including punk music and the the US,
(33:27):
even though punk came out of the New York Dolls
in part um, which was definitely glam rock, um, it
just didn't have that that through thread. So it did
get taken way more seriously and that was a big
part of hardcore and what differentiated it from the earlier
punk taking things really really seriously and it being a
(33:48):
little more political than ever before and um angsty against
things like the boredom of suburban life. Yeah, I mean,
I think punk is just as important for things that
it uh inspired that happened afterward as it was the
actual movement itself, because you can point to stuff in
Minneapolis like Whosker Do or bands like the Minutemen, who
(34:09):
I loved and they had a very punk sound to them,
and maybe you're even considered punk, probably post punk post
I think Mini Men are considered punk, but Whosker Do
would definitely be post post punk, and stuff like Sonic Youth,
which I would call them post punk to post punk,
straddling into the early grunge though too. Well. Yeah, I
(34:31):
mean it's like it's hard to it's easy sometimes to
trace that through line, and sometimes it's really difficult. But
we want to we want to be able to say, like,
you know, it went from um from Bad Brains to
Hoosker Do to Sonic Youth to Nirvana, you know, four
Degrees of Nirvana three days and they're going, what about us,
right exactly? Um, but you just you can't. But at
(34:54):
the same time, you also can't discount the effects that
these later bands um got from the earth listening to
the earlier bands that came before him. There's undoubtedly an influence.
It's just not quite as crisp and clean as as
we like to make it. Yeah, And it's even argued
in one of these articles that the the birth of
(35:15):
hardcore came about because, like you kind of teased earlier on,
because punk, you know, flouts the rules and norms of
rock and roll. Then they formed their own rules and norms,
and we're really pretty serious about it, and so hardcore
came along because they didn't quite fit in with that,
the true punk aesthetic. They took punk even further because
(35:39):
punk was being commodified and commercialized otherwise, that's right, which
would make it kind of easier to break from, especially
if you just go slightly angrier and faster and louder. Right,
But you also can look at the stuff like you
talk about tracing the through line, UM, if you want
to think about early Manchester and stuff like Joy Division
(35:59):
that goes to New Order that goes to Orchestral Maneuvers
in the Dark and Simple Minds and all of a sudden,
it's a John Hughes soundtrack and it's hard. It's then
it's like, what is punk about anything? And that like
sort of softer new wave. But at the same time
you can also say, well, New Order was just straight
up new wave, but then new wave caught on and
(36:19):
got commercialized and commodified, and then you end up having
a John Hughes soundtrack because the record labels got ahold
of the new wave band. Right. So that's kind of
like the story with music is somebody comes up with
something raw and organic and rebellious, everybody loves it, The
big guys come along, get their hands on it, co opted,
(36:41):
commodify it, commercialize it, ruin it, and then some thread
kind of jumps off of that and it starts something else,
and the whole thing always it just continues on and
continues on, except until the mid two thousands when music
died forever and ever and ever. Alright, well, let's take
another break here and we'll talk a little bit about
(37:01):
the end of punk, and before that, maybe we'll hit
on the fashion of punk. Oh boy, okay, chuck um,
(37:22):
we're talking fashion of punk. Yeah, so, every every genre
has its own look, well, I cannot remember what it
had to have been. The safety pin short stuff, where
we talked about Richard Hell being considered the guy who
started the safety pin as a fashion statement. Pretty shut,
(37:44):
but it was Richard Hell. He was the guitarist for
television and he was like the first guy with the mohawk,
like the Elmer's glue kind of mohawk and safety pins
holding his shirt together, which is I mean, that's quintessential punk.
But at the same time, dressing like a Ramon as
in essential punk too, with like the jeans with the
knees in it, black jeans Doc Martin's, or Converse low
(38:07):
tops or Converse high tops. Uh, black biker jacket. Yeah.
The New York Dolls were very famous for wearing the
jean jackets super super small. That jokes in this article
that they could barely fit in them, right. They also
wore super tight lycra shiny pants and stuff too, Yeah,
but they were glam but that it was really those
(38:29):
black ripped jeans, and this was a time where that
wasn't like the cool thing to wear if you you
didn't walk around with holes. And you know, now it's
become a recurring thing in fashion to have holes in
your jeans being cool. At the time, it was not cool.
To admit that you were poor exactly. Man. This was
like somebody in this article I think from Pitchfork said,
(38:50):
you know, Dee de Ramon had uh um holes in
the knees of his jeans, not because it was cool,
but because he didn't have any money for some new
genes and those his jeans ha had holes in them.
So that's what he wore. Now you pay like a
hundred or two hundred bucks for genes that have pre
ripped holes that are just right. Yeah, that's a perfect
(39:12):
example of the commodity commoditization of punk. Yeah, for sure.
Uh other you know, in l A, they have their
own fashion scene going on because it's l A and
they don't have harsh winters and cold, rainy weather, so
they went to the thrift stores and bought things and
cut them up. And that's where you you never saw
a shirt on a punk in the l A scene
(39:34):
that didn't have like the net cut out or the
sleeves cut off, or in the case of the Go
Goes in their earlier punk days, wearing like literal trash
bags as fashion, very funny and blondie too. They all
had a very like specific aesthetic. In Los Angeles. It's
interesting that the Go Go started out on the punk
(39:55):
scene and when they were I think to the casual
music fan, known very much for just sort of a
bubblegum sing along pop hits, that they had just lovable
as all get out as all get out great songs.
And Bolen and Carlisle too, like her solo stuff is yeah,
just kiss everybody. You couldn't see that, but that's what
(40:16):
I gave. But it's that whole pop punk thing, which
is kind of where it started to go bad. You
could make the case that starting in the beginning of seven,
when all those first record labels came in, it started
to go bad then. But hardcore here's this is where
(40:37):
I This is my reading of this, okay, And I'm
not a punk or even music historian by any stretch
of the imagination, but from what I gathered from this
research is that early punk got co opted and commodified
by the record labels immediately hardcore grew out of that.
Hardcore is way harder to co modify because it's much
(40:59):
more raw than it's much less melodic. It's much more
in your face and angry than the original punk was.
And it's also jealously guarded and defended by the fans,
where at the beginning of the show we're saying, please
don't beat us up, Like if you go to a
hardcore show and they think your opposer, like, you may
(41:19):
get beaten up. If this is the eighties or the nineties,
I don't know if they still do it today. I
remember feeling that threat. Oh yeah, it was, but the
punks at the school, like you didn't want to cross him.
It was part of being a punk, was like you
beat somebody up to basically defend punk them to keep
it from getting commodified, Like like seeing kids like wear
(41:41):
Thrasher T shirts today and they have no idea what
Thrasher is. Like it's like if you did that with
punk in the eighties and nineties, you would get beaten up,
maybe even at school, definitely at a punk show. And
so in doing so, they were able to defend hardcore
from commoditization because they kept it their own violently. But
at the same time they also it's kind of like
(42:03):
how a language evolves the more people speak it and
the more free and easy the rules on it are.
By by putting these very tight restrictions on what's punk
and what's not punking? Who's allowed to come to a
punk show, which is super ironic for punks to do.
To come up with all these rules and regulations, they
kept it from evolving, and they definitely kept it underground.
(42:26):
And it's still around today, but it's the same thing
over and over again because it wasn't allowed to grow
and evolved because the fans have kept it, at least
in America, have kept it underground, uh, purposefully, deliberately, invioluently.
So punk's killed punk kind of, they would argue, No
punks still around. I go see punk shows all the
time and don't come to it because your opposer and
(42:47):
will beat you up. So they're still punk. But as
far as like you and I walking around are concerned,
punk is dead as a doornail for now. For now, well,
I mean, I remember when we did our UK tour.
I remember we're seeing a group of punks in Manchester
that looked like they stepped right out of nine with
the full spiked mohawks and the leather studded leather collars.
(43:10):
And I was scared of him then a little bit.
You're like, those are bad kids, are going to try
to get me in town to do a podcast. Right, Well,
what's funny is is that fashion that you're talking about,
that quintessential punk fashion that was a commodification immediately to
the sex Pistols. Manager used to be the manager of
the New York Dolls, Malcolm McLaren, and he owned a
(43:33):
shop Gonna b d S m Um fashion shop with
Vivian Westwood in London, and he basically used the sex
Pistols to promote the fashion he was selling at his shop,
to make it fashionable so we could sell more clothes.
This is the manager of the first UK punk band
ever well, and he had put them together, right. It's
not like essentially the sex Pistols all got together because
(43:54):
they were mates. Like they were formed by a manager. Yes,
by this guy Malcolm. They were the monkeys kind of
were the monkeys of the punk They were the punkies.
So many people are mad at us right now, for sure,
but it's true. I mean, go look up your history.
If your punks are gonna beat us up next time
we go ontoor. Some some thirteen year old just looked
down at the Sherwin. That's what the sex Pistols are.
I had no idea. Well, it's funny though you talk
(44:16):
about the the pins and the it was all homemade stuff,
Like I remember it being a very I mean, I
was certainly way too square, but I remember seeing the
punks in my school doing stuff to their clothes during
class and at lunch and thinking it was the coolest thing.
Whether it was black magic, black sharpie doing the Dead
(44:38):
Kennedy's or the anarchy symbol. Well, the Dead Kennedys did
have the coolest symbol, right, it was pretty cool. Or
just fraying their fraying their jackets or adding safety pins.
It was all It was all created out of that
homemade aesthetic sort of like the music and it and
it appealed to me, but I was afraid of it.
And now that's why I'm just now starting to listen
(45:00):
to some of this music. Are you going to turn
all punk now? Maybe? Okay, that would be one of
the bigger surprises you've ever laid on me, man. But
pop punk we should talk a little bit about. Um
they call it bitter sweet in this article. Um sweet
in the sense that you could get tons of money
and be super famous, but bitter because you know, it's
(45:21):
spawned a genre that I think a lot of true
punks really loathe like I think true punks like a
square more than they like blink On indubitably, you know, uh,
and that you know, that whole scene, the Van's Warped
Tour and Ransid and Offspring and Green Day and all
these groups was a part of a big second wave
of these kids who grew up definitely listening to that
(45:44):
stuff and I guess feeling like they were a part
of it. I mean, I'm sure green Day really feels
like they're a punk band and part of a punk movement,
Whereas I remember the first time I heard Green Day
thinking these are guys pretending to be a punk band,
which is a really creuddy thing to say, but I
mean it is. It's like, it's totally understandable how you
would think that, but they they are. It is punk
(46:08):
in some way, shape or form. It's punk. The stuff
they're talking about is pretty punk. Um, but punk bands
don't release acoustic songs. Definitely not the first The first
album Dookie, right, is what we're talking about. I guess
was that the first one? I think so. I just
remember hearing it and going like, why is that guy
trying to sound British? Well, that's pretty punk. It's very punk, yeah,
(46:31):
for sure, an American kid trying to sound British so um,
but yeah, I don't. I would guess you're right though
there on Broadway punks for God's sake. Well, yeah, there
was a brief shining moment where you could have conceivably
called them a punk band. Here's the thing though, man,
people like money. Yeah, but that's been a through not
(46:51):
just in the punk scene, but but it's just a
music in general. Although hats off to the punk culture
for keeping it at bay better than anybody ever has
any other genre I would like to hear. I'm sure
there are people listening that Noah, punk bands that did
stick their middle finger up to the money and say nope,
I can tell you one. Fugazi H Well, I love
(47:13):
Fugazi DC or I guess hardcore. Um, and they I
think they formed Discord Records. If not, they're a big
act on Discord Records. And they have done this whole
d I Y thing, like from the get go. They've
they've issued the major labels as far as I know
their whole career, and they were extremely successful despite that. Yeah,
(47:36):
I saw them in Athens once. Oh yeah, what do
you think that was great? This is you know, I
think they got together in the like seven ish and
this was more like Okay, well, they were still huge
and probably bigger. That was when they were at their height,
I would guess. I mean, technically they had a I
don't know about how it performed on the literal charts,
(47:57):
but they had that one song that had a big
MTV hit, Waiting Room. Yeah, it's a good song. It's
a really good song. Um. So I just want to
give some shouts out to anybody who's like, this is
really interesting. I want to know more. Go listen to
the Cramps. I would recommend the Cramps, listen to Crass,
(48:17):
Go watch the Decline of Western Civilization. Definitely check out
the Circle Jerks, Um who else, Chuck, I'm gonna say
that for my picks, Bad Brains, and the Damned. Okay,
I'm gonna toss g g Allen out there, although he
kind of transcends everything. Just punk and you. We were
sending me some um. I didn't catch any of the names,
(48:39):
but she said there's a big punk scene in Japan still.
And that was another thing too, is somebody said Punk's
not dying, It's just coming up in other places like
um in Islamic countries, there's a big punk movement. I
saw Mexico has got a big one right now. Apparently
Japan has it. And then there's a whole riot girl
feminist punk that is. Man. If that's not punk out
(49:00):
like Eastern block punk riot girls, I love it. So
punk is still alive. Punk not dead. Punk no dead,
Punk's not dead. Okay, if you want to know more
about punk music, go listen to that stuff we just
told you to go listen to. And since I said
that's time for listener, man, if you want to learn
(49:20):
more about punk music, you can probably go to literally
any other place other than this episode and learn more
about punk music. If you want to know more about
punk music, go to your local library and read up.
It's fundamental. Al Right, guys, I'm gonna call this poop. Nope,
no poop. On that short stuff about the guy who
didn't eat for a year. Uh, we talked about the
(49:40):
fact that he didn't poop that much, and she said
this is the norm for people with a colostomy or iliostomy.
I had a temporary iliostomy and ostomy connected to the
ilium instead of the colon. Due to crone's complications. My
colon was completely severed from the rest of my digestive
system during this time and basically sat dormant while food
(50:02):
exited into an ostomy pouch. No food means no poop,
but the body still produces the normal gut stuff like
mucus and cells and needs to evacuate on occasion, which
I think that's what we talked about. For people with
years about issues such as pain and running to the
bathroom every thirty minutes. This can be a literal lifesaver. Anyway,
my colon is currently now reattached to the rest of
(50:25):
my intestine and my crones is in remission. I had
no idea. So this person had a colostomy and had
it was reversed. Yes, that's I had no idea they
could do that. Yeah, we should do something on crones
and just tie all the stuff together. I just wanted
to give you a little perspective on the topic. Um. Actually,
ostomy's would be an interesting topic for you to tackle.
(50:47):
Thanks for doing the best podcast around. According to my
podcast app, I've listened to over four hundred episodes. Yikes, Well,
Sonia in Canada, you have another what seven fifty, eight hundred?
What are we up to? Now? What a number of episodes?
Eight fifty we're up to? Like, well, she's listening to
four hundred. Okay, so just do a little math. Oh okay,
(51:10):
hold on, I can do so another like eight hundred
or so. Yeah, I would say something, all right, Well,
you're a third of the way there, keep at it. Yeah, roughly, yeah,
you got a third. And you guys should have just
seen Chuck like look up in the air from the
side of his eye. She said, we'd love to see
you to the come out to the Prairie provinces. So
I know in Canada we do Toronto and Vancouver, but
(51:31):
there's a lot of country in the middle there that
we should probably go to at some point. In the US,
we'd call them flyover states. In Canada they call it
prairie country. Right. Well, if you want to get in
touch with this, like did Sonia, thanks again, sonja Um,
you can go on to stuff you Should Know dot
com and check out our social links, and you can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
(51:54):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
M Hey everybody, it's your old pal Josh. For this
week's s Y s K Selects. I've chosen our two
thousand nineteen episode a brief overview of punk rock. And
it's just that. And I'd say we did a pretty
good job for a couple of squares, a couple of
uptight weirdos, you know what I mean. So I hope
(00:20):
you enjoy this brief overview of punk rock because we
did Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:42):
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Thrash Core back. I'm already
regretting this. There's Chuck Bryan over there, Charles W. Chuck Bryan,
There's Jerry drewome Roland and uh, like I said, I'm Josh.
This is stuff you should know. Hey, ho, let's go exactly.
(01:03):
I want to issue a c A off the top
here too. Fans of punk music, get ready to be
mad at us. Yeah, please don't beat this up though. Yeah,
here's the thing. Punk It's sort of like the hip
Hop episode. It's not just music, it's a culture. It's
a movement, and it is so there are so many tentacles,
(01:26):
alternative tentacles, so many subgenres, so many like the more
I started getting into it, I was like, why are
we even doing this in a single episode? I had
the same feeling because it can only disappoint. But we're
doing anything. There's a lot of people out there who
don't know squad about punk. We're gonna be like, cool,
I'm punk now, I get it, and the people who
(01:47):
are punked now we're gonna love us for it. Well,
I mean, you know, there are certainly podcast I'm sure
that are dedicated to the history of punk right now,
I know. And the thing is is with a big
distinction here between the hip hop episode in this episode
is that the hip hop episode doesn't beat you up
if you show up to which there shows and you're
(02:09):
not wearing the right thing. That's true. Punk's kind of
protective of punk, which makes sense because that's pretty punk,
right like you kinda you can't allow for commercialization of
punk or else it stops being punk. So by definition
it has to be vigilantly defended and protected. But the
(02:30):
irony of the whole thing is when you do that,
you actually strangle it from becoming anything ever, and you
kind of killed punk, strangling in the cradle the End. Yeah,
And I listened to a lot of music while researching this,
and there's just so many things that could possibly fall
under the banner of punk, and probably so many real
(02:51):
punk fans that will fight you on any of them
if you say, like, you know, the Talking Heads were punk,
Television was punk, not really, but were a new wave
I don't know. Yeah, the New York Dolls, I was
listening to them proto punk. When you listen to them, though,
they sound like sort of like dressed up rock and roll,
(03:13):
like rocky horror picture show style, right, But make no
bones about it, the New York Dolls were a direct
predecessor of punk. Yeah. But then I started listening to
things I never listened to growing up at all. Like
I wasn't a punk kid, but I saw all the
Jackets with Minor Threat and Circle Jerks and Dead Kennedy's
on them, and I started listening to that stuff today
(03:34):
and I liked a lot of it. Oh, it's good music,
and some of it I didn't quite love, Okay, which
one I think? You know? My deal is I like
vocals and vocalists, and punk is not known for that.
But stuff like that had a really unique bent and
it wasn't just screaming. I liked a lot more so
you like the Misfits a lot. I like the Misfits,
I like the dann I like the Circle Jerks. Did
(03:56):
not like the Germs. I was never into the Germans.
What about the Cramps? Uh, didn't listen to the Cramps yet.
They're like rockabilly punk. I'll probably like it. But stuff
that had a little more melody, a little more vocal styling,
I liked much more than the Germs, which you know,
Darby Crash, just it's just screaming things that you can
hardly understand. Didn't love Black Flag, What Little Life to
(04:18):
listen to? Like the Henry Rawlins black Flag. I listened
to a little bit of both. But it's all very
interesting to me, and I dig the music for sure. Yeah,
it's hard not to in some way, shape or form
like punk when you hear it, like it's it's it's
just too it just gets under your skin just too easily,
(04:39):
really quickly, and you might not even realize, like you're
like your head's like kind of nodding in your knees,
like shaking or whatever. But like no matter who you are,
punk and get to you like that. Now, whether you're
like I'm gonna start buying punk records and like get
a mohawk or something like that, that's that's maybe a
couple of steps down the road. Most people probably we wouldn't,
(05:00):
but I think everybody can appreciate punk on some level.
Especially to me. The greatest punk band of all time,
and what I would argue would be the first punk
band is the Remotes. If you like melody and you
like singing, but you also like punk, they've got everything
you need. Yeah, And if you like songs that are
seconds long, sure, well that was a big thing. Like
(05:21):
punk grew out of this idea that led Zeppelin had
like eleven minutes songs you're playing on the radio, and
guys like the Ramones were like shut up. So they
purposefully and deliberately went the opposite way and they started
making songs or sometimes less than a minute, like one
of the greatest punk songs of all time in my opinion,
Circle Jerk's Wasted is like fifty fifty two seconds long,
(05:45):
getting get out. It's all you need. He gets the
point across. He talks about all the drugs he's on
she talks about all the stuff he does when he's
on drugs. Unless a minute. Yeah, but I think you
bring up an important point is punk was a reaction.
It was a reaction to the bloated money and the
bloated song links and the arena rock, Cucumber in the pants,
(06:08):
hard rock mckeismo getting the ladies. Like this great quote
from one of the Ramons, These were kids on the
outside and he said, uh, Johnny Ramon in V six
and Rolling Stones said, you know, they got together because
none of them could get girls, so they all found
solace in each other. And he said girls always wanted
(06:29):
to go with guys who had corvettes, so we had
nothing to do but climb on rooftops and sniff glue.
The Rams in the nutshell. But if you look at
nineteen seventy seven, like the albums that came out in
nineteen seventy seven, Um, you know you've got the sex
Pistols and the Ramons and stuff like that, but you've
got Eric Clapton, Slowhand, Fleetwood, Max Rumors, Point of No
(06:51):
Return from Kansas, Uh, The Stranger from Billy Joel, which
one was that it was one of the great ones,
but they all work right right, uh Asia from Uh
Steely Dan and like these are like the big chart toppers.
And so punk came along and was just like, no,
(07:12):
screw all that to heck with you guys. Yeah, that's
what it says. So it was an ethos and a
spirit even as much as it was music. Yeah, And
I think, um, one of the other things that commonly
ran across and researching this was that, um, it was
not just kind of like rock sucks because it's getting
so you know, eleven minutes long per song and there's
(07:34):
lots of guitar solos and stuff like that, but also
that it was hopelessly commercialized. And so punk was like,
there's nothing inherently wrong with rock, it's just gone on
this path that it's been on for so long that
it's it's just become I think, like you said, bloated, Um,
let's take rock back and scrape away all the all
(07:54):
the blow and just get back to like the core
and the point of it originally, which was rebellion, which
is that was what punk was built on in the
in the late seventies and the Ramans again, I will
go to my grave saying they were officially the first
punk band that ever existed, but there were there was
music that's that led up to that, immediately before it,
(08:18):
and even a decade or so before it that really
laid the foundation in the groundwork for for bands like
the Ramon and this the punk that that um, the
punk music that took off right afterwards. Yeah, and uh,
you also got to remember that coming into the early
seventies where some of these proto punk bands started, this
was coming off of the late sixties and the hippie
(08:39):
movement and Nixon and Vietnam, which so all that had
proved a failure. Yeah, and and flower power and the
peace and love and all that stuff. Uh. There there's
still Crisy Stills and Nash and stuff hanging around, but
there's also a younger generation that thumb their nose or
more specifically their middle finger at that whole generation, right,
(09:00):
and that's what sort of birth the punk movement, in
the proto punk movement at least, so I saw the
earliest proto punk band I could find, um that you
could trace a direct line too, is actually from Peru. Okay.
They were around in nineteen starting in Los Sakos, s A. I. C. O.
S and if you go listen to a Los Sakos song,
(09:23):
you will it's quite clear that this was proto punk.
Did it have the speed a little bit? Because I
think that's a bit of the distinction, Like there was
that whole uh Nuggets era garage rock of the sixties.
You can hear a little bit of that, but it
still didn't have that chugga chugga chugg a speed that
punk rock would be known for. You know it did. Yeah, no, um,
(09:46):
like another proto punk band that's more garage rock, but
kind of some of the sentiments they came up with.
The Chocolate Watch band had this anthem called like I'm
not like everybody else and it's like real kind of um,
it's groovy, but if you listen to the words, it's
like those guy's talking about being a punk but it's
(10:06):
long before punk. But they're musically they were not punk
at all. Losakos was punk like their's Their sound is
definitely punk and they were around the same time. Yeah,
and the and the specifics of what you're doing musically
on a guitar with punk is important, is the down stroke.
So you know, it's hard to talk about it without
(10:27):
showing you. But if you're playing like a an Eric
Clapton rhythm part, it's like, you know, you're stroking down
and up ching ching, ching ching. If you're playing punk,
you're just going down that ching ching ching ching ching
ching ching. Uh. And that's a really, really great impression.
And the Ramans made a career out of two or
three chords played fast, playing that same rhythm and down
(10:50):
stroke over and over and over and over. Like I'm
convinced you just did two seconds snippet of a misfit song.
I could hear it like playing his day. It's great. Though,
I was listening to the stuff that I was like, man,
I really like a lot of this and I missed out.
So I see myself diving into it again, or diving
in for the first time rather. I mean, I know
about the Clash and the Ramones and stuff like that
(11:12):
for sure, but oh there's like I mean, as you know,
a whole world, the whole world. And then the thing
about punk is the more like you find, oh I
like this band, and then oh that it turns out
this guy was used to be in this other band
there from the same scene as this other band. It
just keeps going and going and going, because one of
the through lines of punk is that anybody could be
(11:34):
in a punk band. It was super democratized, and the
d I Y ethos um was was basically the foundation
of punk music. All right, well, let's take a break.
We'll go back in time a little bit and talk
about New York and London, and then we'll get to that.
What I think is kind of the coolest part of
this whole thing is that d I Y aesthetic. Okay,
(12:08):
all right, so I mentioned London in New York. H
I sourced this from a bunch of articles. I can't
remember if this was the Pitchfork one or not, but
the headline of this part is the Tale of two Cities,
New York and l A. I'm sorry New York in London,
but l A would come along a bit later with
its own scene. And also London gets mentioned here at
the expense of Manchester, which I would say is like,
(12:30):
that's ground zero next to New York. Right. Also ground zero,
which doesn't get nearly enough press is Australia. Oh yeah,
these things were going on in parallel all over the world.
That's really interesting to think, like this stuff is happening
like almost independently and it was because it's not like
someone in Australia heard someone on the internet in nine.
(12:53):
But there are a couple of bands, one called Cheap
Nasties on the Western I think in Perth, and then
The Saints, probably the biggest punk band to come out
of Australia. This is at the same time that CBGB's
uh and the Stooges were like getting big. It's crazy. Yeah,
So the Stooges would technically qualify as proto punk too,
but they came from Michigan along with m C five
(13:14):
and Death Death is an even earlier proto punk band
than the Stages. That documentary is great. I actually I
haven't seen that one. Yeah, there's one on death it's
just called like a band called death right. Yeah. Yeah,
it's very like they're amazing and they were, um I
think three three African American brothers from Detroit just killing it.
Who in like a punk band? Yeah yeah, and this
(13:36):
is before the Studges. I think this is before MC five,
before Bad Brains for sure for sure. Um, So all
of these bands are starting to kind of lay the
groundwork and then it's almost like it just kind of ignites,
like we're saying in different parts of the world virtually
at the same time, which I just find endlessly fascinating. Yeah,
and I think that's what really lends a lot of
(13:57):
credence to the fact that it was a movement. It
was a feeling people were rebelling against more than anything
which can happen parallel in different parts of the country
in world. You know, if there's anything that can bring
the whole world together, it's disdained for hippies, you know,
I think really bring that out. And everybody, did you
see the Tarantino movie Yet Once upon a Time, And yes,
(14:19):
there's a lot of the anti hippies stuffing. It was
pretty funny. Yeah, a little some of them are beaten
to death literally. Well, I just mean all the DiCaprio
stuff was really funny. He did the hippies. But but
Tarantino really like pointed out, like you know, the mans
and family has been celebrated in romanticized at least in
(14:39):
some weird ways. Um, and they should not be. And
this is why I think he did a really good
job of doing that. Uh So sorry, we're talking about
the Stooges in MC five in Michigan. Uh in New
York Cities where things really crystallized with the club CBGB,
owned by Hilly Crystal. Crystal Crystal, is it crystal? I
(15:00):
think so, like Billy Crystal right by Hilly Uh. And
originally you know that stands for a country, blue, blue
grass and blues, and that was what it was supposed
to be when it opened in nineteen seventy. Yeah. But
then in about two years the Ramones started playing their
talking Heads started playing their in nineteen seventy five, Blondie,
Um Television, I think television. I'm okay with them, Like
(15:24):
I don't love them, they don't, I don't hate them,
but um, they were they were essential to that scene
happening um and a lot of people kind of overlook them.
I think is like one of the the foundation bands
for punk. Yeah, which is interesting, like I mentioned earlier,
like it's such different kinds of music, Like I love
(15:44):
talking Heads and television and Blondie and the Go Goes
and they were all on that early scene. But I
don't think it's that's anything like the Misfits or the
Damned or the Ramons. No, but the Misfits uh and
the Ramones both started their careers at cbgby so it
was like the place where punk began in the United States. Yeah,
(16:04):
but also at Max's Kanzie, Kansas City and New York
Legendary Club. This is where like Patti Smith is hanging out,
the Velbot Underground is hanging out. Again, they're not punk
at all, but they were in that scene, right. And
one thing that we're kind of not really mentioning that
is a common thread to all these bands, not necessarily music,
but heroin was a huge thread. They shared their deep,
(16:27):
deep deep love of heroin um in common and that
definitely bound them together at CBGB for sure. And that
was a huge factor on the early punk scene was heroin,
which I mean this is you know, if you remember
back just a few years ago, for oxy Cotton turned
everybody into junkies in the world. Um, heroin was not
(16:50):
a big drug at all, and back then especially it
was like you were a total burnout if you were
doing heroin, like it was not done. So the fact
that these people were like shooting heroin like in the clubs,
that was a that was a another kind of badge
that they took on. Um that separated them from everybody else. Yeah,
(17:13):
you know, even their preference of drugs was super hardcore, Yeah,
for sure. Another interesting thing happened early on in ninety
seven when these two scenes sort of exported one of
their um early UM big bands to play in the
other city. Uh. In venty seven, the Damned played in
(17:34):
the United States, and less than a year before that,
the Ramons had gone to the UK to play shows
in London. And that was a big deal because all
of a sudden you had these two different scenes swapping bands.
Of course, it wasn't anything they planned, but they got
a taste of New York City in London with the
Ramons in a big, big way, and the same can
be said in New York City with the Damned very British.
(17:56):
And then a month before the Ramons played in London,
in Manchester on June, the sex Pistols had their first show.
And a lot of people point to this is this
is when UK punk happened. It was this one show
at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, which is like a
(18:17):
hall might as well be a VFW basically, and that's
where the sex Pistols are there first show. But some
of the people who were there were so influential, including
a seventeen year old Morrissey who went to cover the
thing for New Music Express um that that it just
spread out like a germ, Like it was the single
point that that UK punk spread out from. And this
(18:40):
was uh June of ninety and within six months, the
major record labels were lining up to sign any and
every punk act they could get their hands on. Six
months Like That's so not only did it spread and
grow in parallel around the world at the same time
(19:00):
when it hit the scene, It's hard to overstate how
quickly it just blew up, like just from nothing to
it in six months. Yeah. I mean, if there's one
thing I mean, I don't I don't know about the
music industry today, but previous to you know, digital content,
the music industry was always there waiting to commodify the
(19:23):
next big thing. Yeah, and they did it to punk
big time. Yeah. So let's talk about this d I
Y thing for a little bit. It was really cool
this article about these um, these d I Y origins
in punk music. What happened was when punk started coming
around in the mid nineties seventies. This coincided with a
big shift in UH equipment and recording gear and modernizing
(19:47):
recording gear among the big labels. Yeah sure, um, and
so all of a sudden there was all of this,
these rooms and this gear that you could either rent
cheap or buy cheap. Yeah, they're old stuff that they
didn't need anymore. Yeah, and so punks came along and
uh started using it, and the very first punk labels
were self started. Miles Copeland started Step Forward, Bob Last
(20:09):
started Fast Product, and of course, very famously, Tony Wilson
started Factory Records. Yes, dude, which, by the way, see
twenty four Party of People. If you never have everybody.
It's amazing to see that again. I saw it once
when it came out. Yeah, it's a good movie. Um.
But it follows this progression of punk into new wave,
uh into the eighties. Um. It just does it in
(20:33):
a spectacularly great way because it's Steve Coogan who's created
so good. But people trace the um punk on record
or on recorded tape rather to the very first single
they claim very first punk single November seventy six, The
Damns New Rows, which I thought that was weird because
(20:55):
the Ramones released their album before them, but maybe because
they're among were on the label when they released their album.
They're saying like this is the first d I Y
Maybe when was the Ramons first? Off? I think like
the full year before. I'm pretty sure, if not at
least seventy six then, but I'm pretty sure seventy five. Well,
the Buzz Cox put out an EP and I listened
(21:16):
to a lot of that today. I enjoyed that. UM
Spiral Scratch was this EP was apparently the first British
homemade record and that was a really big deal. Uh,
this is a seven. They sold out a thousand copies
that they printed, then they went on to sell another
sixteen thousand and UM. The influence on Spiral Scratch really
(21:37):
spread out and told everyone because they printed it was
very cool. They printed on the little record jacket like
how much it cost, how they produced it, and what
the money was all about for a hundred and fifty
three pounds, basically saying go do this right, like and
here's how to do it. Yeah. Um they all all
like that kind of set the tone for other records,
(21:58):
like other punk bands released their own record. Words also
included instructions on the sleeve that the record came in
UM and the whole d I Y record released thing
that the Buzz Cocks kicked off UM. Other people started
to find other ways to to kind of make it
so punk could exist outside of the influence of the
(22:21):
record companies. Like people would release records in zip block baggies,
Like that was the record sleeve that your record came in,
and people loved it, Like you didn't. You didn't need
like this expensive sleeve for the thing to come in,
Like you could just pop it in for in a
zip block bag and sell it. It's super punk. And
then also, um, if you can form a band that
(22:45):
it was put like this, like the sex Pistols showed
that anybody could be in a punk band. You didn't
even need be very talented, right, you didn't even need
to know how to play an instrument, um, and you
could be in a punk band. And the buzz Cocks
came along and showed that anybody could us our record.
But there's still one very essential ingredient missing, and that
was distribution. And like you said, mail order made up
(23:08):
for a lot of the Buzzcocks ep UM sales, but
they they realized that there were more people out there
who wanted this stuff but didn't have a way to
get to it. So a what was called the Cartel
was formed, which was a group of independent record stores
around the UK that would basically serve as a distribution
(23:28):
network for these d I Y punk records. So cool um.
Not only that, but zines were very important early on
in the punk and really kind of a lot of
music genres. Zines were really big. Which are these, you know,
fan made magazines. Yeah, maybe with like photocopy, not even photocopy,
like mimiograph stuff. Ye, And you would just pronount your
(23:50):
zine and some of these zanes got to be pretty
big and they would attach distribution to the zines sometimes
and sneak forty not sneaking, but a pack of forty
five in the zine. And that's how you could release
your stuff. And it was just this uh. Again, it
sounds so trite to say, very punk rock attitude, but
that's exactly what it was. The way they were doing
things was all under the radar, all on their own, uh.
(24:13):
And that changed pretty quickly. It did is because the
big the big players came in. They smelled money, they
smelled something new, the next big thing, and they started
signing everybody they could left and right. And these punks
were going like nah, bollocks. I don't want your money.
They're like, what if we pay you in heroin? He's
like okay, yeah, I like you put it that way.
(24:35):
You could buy drugs with money, right, So um again.
Within six months of what most people point to as
the source of UK punk, that one specific show by
the sex Pistols, The sex Pistons were so new. Sid
Vicious wasn't even in the band. He was still Susie
and the Banshee's drummer. He so this is how young
(24:58):
this stuff was. Within six months, they were signed on
to a major record label. The Clash was signed on
to a major record label. The Fall, the Jam, the Stranglers,
everybody got signed in this feeding frenzy where everyone who
had a punk band could get a record deal with
a major label. Six months after, the sex Epistols had
their first show, Yeah, Generation X with a young Billy idol, Uh,
(25:22):
which I did ever do? That? Dancing with Myself was
originally a Generation X song. They released it, then he
re released it as a solo artist like a year
later and it became a much bigger hit. Sure, they
were like thanks a lot, but yeah, sex Pistols went
with E M I. Um, the Stranglers at you A,
The Clash signed to CBS, the Jam went to Polydor
(25:42):
Generation X, and Stiff Little Fingers went to Chrysalis and
even the Buzz Cox. They were very quick to hop
on that train too, with United Artists, which actually that's
not too bad. You could have signed with worse because
United Artists was started by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, um,
Charlie Chaplin, indeed W Griffith so that artists could have
(26:03):
more control and ownership over their work. Yeah, I mean
it was a movie company, and I guess they dabbled
in records. So one of three things happened basically to
the little d I Y small label movement. Um you
either got Pilford, they'd use one example in Belfast the
Good Vibrations label. Four of its first six bands were
(26:24):
stolen away or signed away. I guess. So either got
Pilford and then just shut down and gave up um
or you grew and got bigger to where you were,
you know, like Rough Trade and Factory Records. Those all
became like bigger independent labels. Yeah, Rough Trade still around.
Sure they have state of the art, cutting edge bands.
It's great. Um Or they stayed small and just kept
(26:49):
going right. They went punk and went back underground. Yeah, Like,
so they didn't all go away. They didn't all say,
you know, we're all getting Pilford, so we're just gonna
shut down. They would just find more underground bands and
go deeper and deeper and deeper. But then, um, something
happened in nineteen seventy nine, In February of nineteen seventy
nine that a lot of people point to. Just as
they point to that first Sex Pistols show as the
(27:11):
beginning of punk in the UK, they point to the
death of Sid Vicious as the end of punk, at
least the first wave of punk. His death from a
heroin overdose um is widely pointed to as as the
death of punk, which is a really dumb thing to say,
because punk very clearly went on. But what I think
(27:32):
people are saying, sorry, I guess it's not entirely dumb
now that I say it out loud, But what people
are saying is is that punk transformed into something else,
and that punk really as as it originally existed, was
only around for about two three years, maybe four or five.
Some people at a bar right now that are just
saying that over and over again. Punk only the last
(27:54):
said three years. Okay, well, I agree with you, drunk
person in this sense, but it's not like punk went away.
It transformed and became something else. And so what it
transitioned into is commonly called hardcore hardcore punk, where stuff
just got faster, louder, a little angrier. Yeah. Um, and
(28:16):
it just went in in a different direction, predominantly in
the United States. Yeah, and there were there were a
couple of scenes. Um, the l A scene had already
sort of been born by the late seventies. Uh, if
you haven't seen it, The great documentary from Penelope spheris
The Decline of Western Civilization releasing eighty one, but filmed
(28:38):
over I think maybe covered the l A scene. And
that's the germs and uh like I think Blondie and
the Go Goes and stuff like that, all right, and
Jerks York the best sets ever in the Decline of
Western Civilization. Yes, it's very good. And the germs too,
That's where I was. I was watching some of that
(28:58):
today and that's when I knew I didn't like the germs, right.
But Pat Smir of course, the food Fighters, he was
in the germs. You know he likes money. And also
if you're like, who's Penelope Spies? You may be familiar
with their work if you've seen the movie Wayne's World,
that's right, or the movie Black Sheet, the Chris Farley
David Spade movie, or The Decline of Western Civilization. I
(29:18):
think she'd ended up doing like three or four of those, right,
at least three, because I know she didn't want to metal.
The second one was metal, which is good too. Yeah,
that's the only two I saw. Did you ever see
that documentary about um heavy Metal Parking Lot? Yes, yeah,
where everybody's smoking PCP at did Judas Priest concert. Ye,
it's pretty great. Did you know early eighties metal head
smoked PCP? No, I didn't until a documentary because it
(29:41):
was quite a surprise. I was scared of all those people. Well,
they're kind of scary because they were all on PCP,
especially when you're like eight or ten. Scary. So American. Uh,
we were talking about the you know, punk bands releasing
their own albums. This started happening on the West coast. Um.
They started forming their own labels even to release their
(30:04):
albums and sign other like bands like SST very famous
punk label was started from the guy, the original guy
from Black Flag, right, yes, uh, what's his name? Greg
g I N n either again or Jin I'm sorry punkers,
I know you're mad at me right now that I
don't know this. Yeah, I think he was like the
(30:24):
founder of Black Flag Okay, Jello Biafro of course, um
Dead Kennedy's they formed or he formed Alternative Tentacles. Yeah,
in nine nine and seventy nine was a big year
because that's the same year that a band called Bad
Brains came out and Washington d C. Which I didn't love.
(30:49):
Did you see the Dave Gold documentary series? So I
can't remember what it was called, but he did this
like ten part documentary series where he would do the
music of a different city and it was really really good,
except for the last like fifteen minutes of it. He
would get the food Fighters together in a studio and
they would play like some of those songs, and if
you're really into the Food Fighters, I imagine you loved
(31:11):
it all. Not into the Food Fighters, so I would
just stop it there. But he does Seattle. But what
got me on this was one of the most interesting
episodes was the Washington DC episode because I didn't know
it was such a hardcore scene. Like that's where when
people talk about hardcore, yeah, they're like, well d C
is kind of the cradle of it and Bad Brains,
(31:32):
which my friend Jason Jenkins in college introduced me to,
and that's when it was like really fast, had a
little metal edge, but Bad Brains was also started out
as like jazz fusion and had reggae roots, also African
American guys. Yeah, and um, really really good stuff. Yeah.
So you've got at the same time, l A and
(31:55):
d C as the new like seats of punk music
in the USA, punk slash, hardcore, and it's going it's
going like way more hardcore, way more masculine, way more
macho than the UK went. The UK went a different route.
They went way more political, way more like class struggle. Um,
and there's there's definitely lots of political threads that um,
(32:18):
American punk music went through, but I think the UK
went to it earlier. Like Crass is a great great
punk band from the UK. Um, they're kind of like, uh,
they're just great, check them out. Um, but they were
doing like anarchy stuff in the seventies. Yeah, the clash
certainly is notable for their political statement, very political um.
(32:39):
And then you've got like the Six Sex Pistols talking
about anarchy in the UK. They didn't really mean it,
they were just saying something right, um. But there were
a lot of like politically motivated bands in the UK
in the early seventies that didn't pick up till later
in the eighties in the US because certainly were not political.
They were not political. But the other thing, the other
differentiation I saw between UK and US punk was that
(33:03):
UK punk didn't take itself quite as seriously as the
US started to in the late seventies early eighties, and
that this guy I read I think a Guardian article
trace that back to a love of glam rock. That
glam rock really led to punk, especially in the UK,
and if you're into glam rock, you just can't quite
take anything fully seriously, including punk music and the the US,
(33:27):
even though punk came out of the New York Dolls
in part um, which was definitely glam rock, um, it
just didn't have that that through thread. So it did
get taken way more seriously and that was a big
part of hardcore and what differentiated it from the earlier
punk taking things really really seriously and it being a
(33:48):
little more political than ever before and um angsty against
things like the boredom of suburban life. Yeah, I mean,
I think punk is just as important for things that
it uh inspired that happened afterward as it was the
actual movement itself, because you can point to stuff in
Minneapolis like Whosker Do or bands like the Minutemen, who
(34:09):
I loved and they had a very punk sound to them,
and maybe you're even considered punk, probably post punk post
I think Mini Men are considered punk, but Whosker Do
would definitely be post post punk, and stuff like Sonic Youth,
which I would call them post punk to post punk,
straddling into the early grunge though too. Well. Yeah, I
(34:31):
mean it's like it's hard to it's easy sometimes to
trace that through line, and sometimes it's really difficult. But
we want to we want to be able to say, like,
you know, it went from um from Bad Brains to
Hoosker Do to Sonic Youth to Nirvana, you know, four
Degrees of Nirvana three days and they're going, what about us,
right exactly? Um, but you just you can't. But at
(34:54):
the same time, you also can't discount the effects that
these later bands um got from the earth listening to
the earlier bands that came before him. There's undoubtedly an influence.
It's just not quite as crisp and clean as as
we like to make it. Yeah, And it's even argued
in one of these articles that the the birth of
(35:15):
hardcore came about because, like you kind of teased earlier on,
because punk, you know, flouts the rules and norms of
rock and roll. Then they formed their own rules and norms,
and we're really pretty serious about it, and so hardcore
came along because they didn't quite fit in with that,
the true punk aesthetic. They took punk even further because
(35:39):
punk was being commodified and commercialized otherwise, that's right, which
would make it kind of easier to break from, especially
if you just go slightly angrier and faster and louder. Right,
But you also can look at the stuff like you
talk about tracing the through line, UM, if you want
to think about early Manchester and stuff like Joy Division
(35:59):
that goes to New Order that goes to Orchestral Maneuvers
in the Dark and Simple Minds and all of a sudden,
it's a John Hughes soundtrack and it's hard. It's then
it's like, what is punk about anything? And that like
sort of softer new wave. But at the same time
you can also say, well, New Order was just straight
up new wave, but then new wave caught on and
(36:19):
got commercialized and commodified, and then you end up having
a John Hughes soundtrack because the record labels got ahold
of the new wave band. Right. So that's kind of
like the story with music is somebody comes up with
something raw and organic and rebellious, everybody loves it, The
big guys come along, get their hands on it, co opted,
(36:41):
commodify it, commercialize it, ruin it, and then some thread
kind of jumps off of that and it starts something else,
and the whole thing always it just continues on and
continues on, except until the mid two thousands when music
died forever and ever and ever. Alright, well, let's take
another break here and we'll talk a little bit about
(37:01):
the end of punk, and before that, maybe we'll hit
on the fashion of punk. Oh boy, okay, chuck um,
(37:22):
we're talking fashion of punk. Yeah, so, every every genre
has its own look, well, I cannot remember what it
had to have been. The safety pin short stuff, where
we talked about Richard Hell being considered the guy who
started the safety pin as a fashion statement. Pretty shut,
(37:44):
but it was Richard Hell. He was the guitarist for
television and he was like the first guy with the mohawk,
like the Elmer's glue kind of mohawk and safety pins
holding his shirt together, which is I mean, that's quintessential punk.
But at the same time, dressing like a Ramon as
in essential punk too, with like the jeans with the
knees in it, black jeans Doc Martin's, or Converse low
(38:07):
tops or Converse high tops. Uh, black biker jacket. Yeah.
The New York Dolls were very famous for wearing the
jean jackets super super small. That jokes in this article
that they could barely fit in them, right. They also
wore super tight lycra shiny pants and stuff too, Yeah,
but they were glam but that it was really those
(38:29):
black ripped jeans, and this was a time where that
wasn't like the cool thing to wear if you you
didn't walk around with holes. And you know, now it's
become a recurring thing in fashion to have holes in
your jeans being cool. At the time, it was not cool.
To admit that you were poor exactly. Man. This was
like somebody in this article I think from Pitchfork said,
(38:50):
you know, Dee de Ramon had uh um holes in
the knees of his jeans, not because it was cool,
but because he didn't have any money for some new
genes and those his jeans ha had holes in them.
So that's what he wore. Now you pay like a
hundred or two hundred bucks for genes that have pre
ripped holes that are just right. Yeah, that's a perfect
(39:12):
example of the commodity commoditization of punk. Yeah, for sure.
Uh other you know, in l A, they have their
own fashion scene going on because it's l A and
they don't have harsh winters and cold, rainy weather, so
they went to the thrift stores and bought things and
cut them up. And that's where you you never saw
a shirt on a punk in the l A scene
(39:34):
that didn't have like the net cut out or the
sleeves cut off, or in the case of the Go
Goes in their earlier punk days, wearing like literal trash
bags as fashion, very funny and blondie too. They all
had a very like specific aesthetic. In Los Angeles. It's
interesting that the Go Go started out on the punk
(39:55):
scene and when they were I think to the casual
music fan, known very much for just sort of a
bubblegum sing along pop hits, that they had just lovable
as all get out as all get out great songs.
And Bolen and Carlisle too, like her solo stuff is yeah,
just kiss everybody. You couldn't see that, but that's what
(40:16):
I gave. But it's that whole pop punk thing, which
is kind of where it started to go bad. You
could make the case that starting in the beginning of seven,
when all those first record labels came in, it started
to go bad then. But hardcore here's this is where
(40:37):
I This is my reading of this, okay, And I'm
not a punk or even music historian by any stretch
of the imagination, but from what I gathered from this
research is that early punk got co opted and commodified
by the record labels immediately hardcore grew out of that.
Hardcore is way harder to co modify because it's much
(40:59):
more raw than it's much less melodic. It's much more
in your face and angry than the original punk was.
And it's also jealously guarded and defended by the fans,
where at the beginning of the show we're saying, please
don't beat us up, Like if you go to a
hardcore show and they think your opposer, like, you may
(41:19):
get beaten up. If this is the eighties or the nineties,
I don't know if they still do it today. I
remember feeling that threat. Oh yeah, it was, but the
punks at the school, like you didn't want to cross him.
It was part of being a punk, was like you
beat somebody up to basically defend punk them to keep
it from getting commodified, Like like seeing kids like wear
(41:41):
Thrasher T shirts today and they have no idea what
Thrasher is. Like it's like if you did that with
punk in the eighties and nineties, you would get beaten up,
maybe even at school, definitely at a punk show. And
so in doing so, they were able to defend hardcore
from commoditization because they kept it their own violently. But
at the same time they also it's kind of like
(42:03):
how a language evolves the more people speak it and
the more free and easy the rules on it are.
By by putting these very tight restrictions on what's punk
and what's not punking? Who's allowed to come to a
punk show, which is super ironic for punks to do.
To come up with all these rules and regulations, they
kept it from evolving, and they definitely kept it underground.
(42:26):
And it's still around today, but it's the same thing
over and over again because it wasn't allowed to grow
and evolved because the fans have kept it, at least
in America, have kept it underground, uh, purposefully, deliberately, invioluently.
So punk's killed punk kind of, they would argue, No
punks still around. I go see punk shows all the
time and don't come to it because your opposer and
(42:47):
will beat you up. So they're still punk. But as
far as like you and I walking around are concerned,
punk is dead as a doornail for now. For now, well,
I mean, I remember when we did our UK tour.
I remember we're seeing a group of punks in Manchester
that looked like they stepped right out of nine with
the full spiked mohawks and the leather studded leather collars.
(43:10):
And I was scared of him then a little bit.
You're like, those are bad kids, are going to try
to get me in town to do a podcast. Right, Well,
what's funny is is that fashion that you're talking about,
that quintessential punk fashion that was a commodification immediately to
the sex Pistols. Manager used to be the manager of
the New York Dolls, Malcolm McLaren, and he owned a
(43:33):
shop Gonna b d S m Um fashion shop with
Vivian Westwood in London, and he basically used the sex
Pistols to promote the fashion he was selling at his shop,
to make it fashionable so we could sell more clothes.
This is the manager of the first UK punk band
ever well, and he had put them together, right. It's
not like essentially the sex Pistols all got together because
(43:54):
they were mates. Like they were formed by a manager. Yes,
by this guy Malcolm. They were the monkeys kind of
were the monkeys of the punk They were the punkies.
So many people are mad at us right now, for sure,
but it's true. I mean, go look up your history.
If your punks are gonna beat us up next time
we go ontoor. Some some thirteen year old just looked
down at the Sherwin. That's what the sex Pistols are.
I had no idea. Well, it's funny though you talk
(44:16):
about the the pins and the it was all homemade stuff,
Like I remember it being a very I mean, I
was certainly way too square, but I remember seeing the
punks in my school doing stuff to their clothes during
class and at lunch and thinking it was the coolest thing.
Whether it was black magic, black sharpie doing the Dead
(44:38):
Kennedy's or the anarchy symbol. Well, the Dead Kennedys did
have the coolest symbol, right, it was pretty cool. Or
just fraying their fraying their jackets or adding safety pins.
It was all It was all created out of that
homemade aesthetic sort of like the music and it and
it appealed to me, but I was afraid of it.
And now that's why I'm just now starting to listen
(45:00):
to some of this music. Are you going to turn
all punk now? Maybe? Okay, that would be one of
the bigger surprises you've ever laid on me, man. But
pop punk we should talk a little bit about. Um
they call it bitter sweet in this article. Um sweet
in the sense that you could get tons of money
and be super famous, but bitter because you know, it's
(45:21):
spawned a genre that I think a lot of true
punks really loathe like I think true punks like a
square more than they like blink On indubitably, you know, uh,
and that you know, that whole scene, the Van's Warped
Tour and Ransid and Offspring and Green Day and all
these groups was a part of a big second wave
of these kids who grew up definitely listening to that
(45:44):
stuff and I guess feeling like they were a part
of it. I mean, I'm sure green Day really feels
like they're a punk band and part of a punk movement,
Whereas I remember the first time I heard Green Day
thinking these are guys pretending to be a punk band,
which is a really creuddy thing to say, but I
mean it is. It's like, it's totally understandable how you
would think that, but they they are. It is punk
(46:08):
in some way, shape or form. It's punk. The stuff
they're talking about is pretty punk. Um, but punk bands
don't release acoustic songs. Definitely not the first The first
album Dookie, right, is what we're talking about. I guess
was that the first one? I think so. I just
remember hearing it and going like, why is that guy
trying to sound British? Well, that's pretty punk. It's very punk, yeah,
(46:31):
for sure, an American kid trying to sound British so um,
but yeah, I don't. I would guess you're right though
there on Broadway punks for God's sake. Well, yeah, there
was a brief shining moment where you could have conceivably
called them a punk band. Here's the thing though, man,
people like money. Yeah, but that's been a through not
(46:51):
just in the punk scene, but but it's just a
music in general. Although hats off to the punk culture
for keeping it at bay better than anybody ever has
any other genre I would like to hear. I'm sure
there are people listening that Noah, punk bands that did
stick their middle finger up to the money and say nope,
I can tell you one. Fugazi H Well, I love
(47:13):
Fugazi DC or I guess hardcore. Um, and they I
think they formed Discord Records. If not, they're a big
act on Discord Records. And they have done this whole
d I Y thing, like from the get go. They've
they've issued the major labels as far as I know
their whole career, and they were extremely successful despite that. Yeah,
(47:36):
I saw them in Athens once. Oh yeah, what do
you think that was great? This is you know, I
think they got together in the like seven ish and
this was more like Okay, well, they were still huge
and probably bigger. That was when they were at their height,
I would guess. I mean, technically they had a I
don't know about how it performed on the literal charts,
(47:57):
but they had that one song that had a big
MTV hit, Waiting Room. Yeah, it's a good song. It's
a really good song. Um. So I just want to
give some shouts out to anybody who's like, this is
really interesting. I want to know more. Go listen to
the Cramps. I would recommend the Cramps, listen to Crass,
(48:17):
Go watch the Decline of Western Civilization. Definitely check out
the Circle Jerks, Um who else, Chuck, I'm gonna say
that for my picks, Bad Brains, and the Damned. Okay,
I'm gonna toss g g Allen out there, although he
kind of transcends everything. Just punk and you. We were
sending me some um. I didn't catch any of the names,
(48:39):
but she said there's a big punk scene in Japan still.
And that was another thing too, is somebody said Punk's
not dying, It's just coming up in other places like
um in Islamic countries, there's a big punk movement. I
saw Mexico has got a big one right now. Apparently
Japan has it. And then there's a whole riot girl
feminist punk that is. Man. If that's not punk out
(49:00):
like Eastern block punk riot girls, I love it. So
punk is still alive. Punk not dead. Punk no dead,
Punk's not dead. Okay, if you want to know more
about punk music, go listen to that stuff we just
told you to go listen to. And since I said
that's time for listener, man, if you want to learn
(49:20):
more about punk music, you can probably go to literally
any other place other than this episode and learn more
about punk music. If you want to know more about
punk music, go to your local library and read up.
It's fundamental. Al Right, guys, I'm gonna call this poop. Nope,
no poop. On that short stuff about the guy who
didn't eat for a year. Uh, we talked about the
(49:40):
fact that he didn't poop that much, and she said
this is the norm for people with a colostomy or iliostomy.
I had a temporary iliostomy and ostomy connected to the
ilium instead of the colon. Due to crone's complications. My
colon was completely severed from the rest of my digestive
system during this time and basically sat dormant while food
(50:02):
exited into an ostomy pouch. No food means no poop,
but the body still produces the normal gut stuff like
mucus and cells and needs to evacuate on occasion, which
I think that's what we talked about. For people with
years about issues such as pain and running to the
bathroom every thirty minutes. This can be a literal lifesaver. Anyway,
my colon is currently now reattached to the rest of
(50:25):
my intestine and my crones is in remission. I had
no idea. So this person had a colostomy and had
it was reversed. Yes, that's I had no idea they
could do that. Yeah, we should do something on crones
and just tie all the stuff together. I just wanted
to give you a little perspective on the topic. Um. Actually,
ostomy's would be an interesting topic for you to tackle.
(50:47):
Thanks for doing the best podcast around. According to my
podcast app, I've listened to over four hundred episodes. Yikes, Well,
Sonia in Canada, you have another what seven fifty, eight hundred?
What are we up to? Now? What a number of episodes?
Eight fifty we're up to? Like, well, she's listening to
four hundred. Okay, so just do a little math. Oh okay,
(51:10):
hold on, I can do so another like eight hundred
or so. Yeah, I would say something, all right, Well,
you're a third of the way there, keep at it. Yeah, roughly, yeah,
you got a third. And you guys should have just
seen Chuck like look up in the air from the
side of his eye. She said, we'd love to see
you to the come out to the Prairie provinces. So
I know in Canada we do Toronto and Vancouver, but
(51:31):
there's a lot of country in the middle there that
we should probably go to at some point. In the US,
we'd call them flyover states. In Canada they call it
prairie country. Right. Well, if you want to get in
touch with this, like did Sonia, thanks again, sonja Um,
you can go on to stuff you Should Know dot
com and check out our social links, and you can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
(51:54):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
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