Ramones

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Praise for the series:

Passionate, obsessive, and smartNylon

Religious tracts for the rocknroll faithfulBoldtype

Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take ona beloved long-player ... the books that have resulted are likethe albums themselvesfilled with moments of shimmeringbeauty, forgivable flaws, and stubborn eccentricityTracksMagazine

At their best, these books make rich, thought-provokingarguments for the song collections at handThe PhiladelphiaInquirer

Reading about rock isnt quite the same as listening to it, butthis series comes pretty damn closeNeon NYC

The sort of great idea you cant believe hasnt been donebeforeBoston Phoenix

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visitour website at www.continuumbooks.com

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Nicholas Rombes

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Ramones

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2011

Continuum International Publishing Group80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York NY 10038The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright 2005 by Nicholas Rombes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without thewritten permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRombes, Nicholas.Ramones / Nicholas Rombes.p. cm.(33 1/3)Includes bibliographical references.eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8327-91. Ramones (Musical Group). Ramones. I. Title. II. Series.ML 421.R32R65 2005782.421660922dc222004024081

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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Acknowledgments

Ramones in Their Time

Ramones

Notes

Select Bibliography

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Contents

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Dusty in Memphis, by Warren ZanesForever Changes, by Andrew HultkransHarvest, by Sam InglisThe Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society,by Andy MillerMeat Is Murder, by Joe PerniceThe Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by John CavanaghAbba Gold, by Elisabeth VincentelliElectric Lady land, by John PerryUnknown Pleasures, by Chris OttSign O the Times, by Michaelangelo MatosThe Velvet Underground and Nico, by Joe HarvardLet It Be, by Steve MatteoLive at the Apollo, by Douglas WolkAqualung, by Allan MooreOK Computer, by Dai GriffithsLet It Be, by Colin MeloyLed Zeppelin IV, by Erik DavisArmed Forces, by Franklin BrunoExile on Main Street, by Bill JanovitzGrace, by Daphne BrooksLoveless, by Mike McGonigalMurmur, by J. NiimiPet Sounds, by Jim Fusilli

Forthcoming in this series:

Born in the USA, by Geoff HimesEndtroducing..., by Eliot WilderIn the Aeroplane over the Sea, by Kim CooperLondon Calling, by David UlinLow, by Hugo Wilcken

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Kick out the Jams, by Don McLeeseThe Notorious Byrd Brothers, by Ric Menck

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Also available in this series:

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I would like to thank the staff of both the University ofMichigans Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library and the MusicLibrary for help in tracking down materials from themid-1970s. In many ways, punk remains outside the officialhistory often archived in libraries, so I am especially thankfulto the many private collectors who shared their material withme.

Many thanks to Craig Leon for taking the time out of hisschedule to answer my questions about the albumsproduction, and to Fredric Shore, Maggie Carson, and JuliuszKossakowski, whose film Punking Out provides invaluablefootage of key bands, including the Ramones, at CBGB as thepunk scene was emerging.

I am thankful to my teachers over the years who have taughtme that no cultural text can be studied without tuning in to itsmaterial history, especially JamesBerta and Carla Mulford. I have also enjoyed conversationsabout punk with Stephen Manning over the years.

Thanks to David Barker at Continuum for his support andgoodwill.

My love and thanks to my mother and father, Nicholas andDiane, for a wonderful childhood and home, a place where Iwas encouraged to create. This book took me back to 1975,and to memories of my sister, Kori.

Finally, my deepest love to Niko and Maddy, who tolerateddads musical obsessions during the writing of this book. And

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to my wife Lisa, my endless love, gratitude, and respect. Thisbook is for you, for everything.

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Acknowledgments

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You even shatter the sensations of time and space into splitseconds and instant replays.

Max, in Network

After hearing [Ramones], everything else sounded impossiblyslow.

Jon Savage, Englands Dreaming1

The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos.

Colin Wilson, The Outsider2

No subculture has sought with more grim determination thanpunks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape ofnormalized forms, nor to bring down upon itself suchvehement disapproval.

Dick Hebdige, Subculture:The Meaning of Style

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Ramones is either the last great modern record, or the firstgreat postmodern one. Fully aware of its status as pop culture,it nonetheless has unironic aspirations toward art. TheRamones themselvesmaintaining an unchanging image fornearly thirty years in a culture that values nothing so much aschangewere too serious and enduring to be dismissed ascartoonish, yet too fun to be embraced as serious.

As other bands self-destructed, seduced by their own madnessor by the trappings of fame, the Ramones remainedtroubadours of punk, and, for the better part of their career asa group, generated an unchanging sound in the face of rapidlyevolving trends. They weredeeply aware of the Dark Side of longevitythe Beatles, theRolling Stones, and The Who all provided templates of thepath not to be taken, as the early reckless power of their workgradually gave way to self-perpetuating indulgence andexcess, signaled by long, dramatic concept songs and albumswhose virtuosity practically demanded worship.

The quality that insured the Ramones first album wouldbecome one of the most important records in modern rockwas the same quality that guaranteed they would never havemainstream success in their time: a unified vision, the force ofa single idea. There is a purity to Ramones that is almostoverwhelming and frightening. Basically, the Ramones arethe only punk group from the 1970s to have maintained theirvision for so long, without compromisea vision fully andcompletely expressed on their very first album. In America,there is a skepticism and wariness about any artistic orcultural form that doesnt evolve, that doesnt grow. There isno more damning critique than the charge of repeating

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yourself. And yet punk was precisely about repetition; its artlay in the rejection of elaboration. And nowhere is this moreevident than on the Ramones first album, whose unforgivingand fearful symmetry announced the arrival of a sound sopure it did not require change.

Its one of those interesting twists of history that Ramoneswas released in 1976, Americas bicentennialyear, the year of remembering Declarations of Independence.While punkespecially in its 1980s and 90s incarnationsisoften associated with anarchist dissent and alienation from themainstream, there is also a very homespun, nostalgicdimension to the original punk movement, especially itsAmerican version. After all, the do-it-yourself philosophy ispart of the American tradition, stretching from theRevolutionary War era to Ralph Waldo Emersons call forself-reliance. Of course, you dont need to know or even careabout these things to like the music, and in a way it goesagainst the whole spirit of punk to read too much into itssources and traditions. But part of the appeal of punk asembodied by the Ramones arose from how it managed to tapinto this American tradition of independence and resistancethat pits the little fellow against the forces of the big, while atthe same time rejecting tradition.

Details of the albums production have passed into legend: itwas recorded in seventeen days in February 1976 for roughly$6,400. At first, the process sounds like the ultimatedo-it-yourself, amateur, reckless ethic that is associated withpunk. In truth, however, the Ramones approached therecording process with a high degree of preparedness andprofessionalism. They had already been playing together forroughly two yearsincluding at least seventy live

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showsand had fully developed their defining sound. Theyhad produced theirown demo, had written enough material for several albums,and had given much consideration to the sound they wantedto achieve on the first album.

Before considering the details of the albums production, itssongs, and its eventual reception and influence, it is importantto reconsider the context from which the Ramones, and punkitself, arose. For the term punk today carries a muchdifferent meaning than it did in the early to mid-1970s. Iftoday the term has passed into a recognizable and perfectlyacceptable commodity form, thirty years ago punk waswildly unstable; attached to it were all sorts of meanings andsigns expressed in the magazines, newspapers, fanzines, anddocumentaries that covered what was then coming to beknown as punk rock.

Punk was a stance that embodied rejection. Whereprogressive rock, as a withered stepchild of the 1960s, wasstill deep down about affirmation and saying yes, punkoffered negation and a resounding no. In Punking Out (1977),probably the best documentary of the 1970s CBGB scene(and among the few to use live sound as opposed topost-synch), a fan was asked: Whats a blank generation? towhich she replied: Im blank. Theres nothing coming in.Theres nothing going out. The Ramones imbued thisnothingness and rejection with a fierce humor that transportednihilism into the realm of pop culture. The emergence of punkand its uneasymix of nihilism and humor, especially as embodied by theRamones, cannot be separated from writing about punk inmagazines, newspapers, and fanzines in America and the UK,

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including Crawdaddy, Soho Weekly News, New York Rocker,Trouser Press, Village Voice, Melody Maker, Creem, HitParader, Sounds, Zigzag, Punk, and others. Indeed, punkemerged at precisely the moment when music writing andediting was at its most intelligent andexperimentalespecially in the hands of John Holmstrom,Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent, Alan Betrock,James Wolcott, Robert Christgau, Nick Tosches, MaryHarron, Greil Marcus, and othersa fact that is crucial to anunderstanding of punks creation and subsequent mythicalstatus. The Ramones, whose unified image and sound werecentral to the early articulation of punk aesthetics, were oftensingled out, especially in coverage of CBGBs 1975 summerfestival of unsigned bands. In Down and Out at the Bowery,Melody Makers Steve Lake provided this early impression ofthe Ramones:

The Ramones, meanwhile, are being heavily touted by therock columns of the local press as potentially the greatestsingles band since the Velvet Underground, and theyrecently made rock history with a phenomenally tight set atCBGB that crammed six songs into a 13-minute performance.Their image is pre-flower power Seeds with Sky Saxon/EarlyByrdspudding bowl haircuts and biker outfits of leather and denim.Determined punks all.4

Indeed, the CBGB festival in 1975 provided an opportunityfor writers to offer some sort of coherent vision of punk; thefestival and the publicity it generated constituted both anopening up and a closing down of the disparate channels ofwhat was beginning to be called punk in the press. James

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Wolcott, writing in August 1975 about the CBGB festival,said that there is original vision there, and what the placeitself is doing is quite extraordinary: putting on bands as if thestage were a cable television station. Public access rock.5 The festival also attracted the attention of national,larger-circulation magazines such as Rolling Stone, which, asClinton Heylin notes, had heretofore largely ignored theemerging scene. In October 1975, Ed McCormack of RollingStone offered this assessment of the festival and the Ramones:

Right now the Ramones are where the New York Dolls wereback in the early seventies, when they were playing at theMercer Arts Center for practically nothing and using taxicabsas equipment vans. While a recording contract has thus fareluded the Ramones, their machine-gun paced, hot singlessound and their cutesy-poo Beaver-Badass image have madethem cult favorites of groupies. They come on in patchedjeans and Popeye T-shirts, plant themselves in place andplay nonstop. And while their cult followers liken them to ahip new version of the Osmonds, one cannot help butwonder if they are bragging or complaining.6

In the months surrounding their signing with Sire records inJanuary 1976, although the Ramones were treated asharbingers of the new music scene that was developing inNew York, they were more likely to be called undergroundthan punk. In July 1975, The Village Voice noted that unlikemost of New Yorks underground groups, theyre notneo-Velvets, so theyre not coolly insulated from the fire theycreate and that their songs were played with a choppingfreneticism.

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7 And in the SoHo Weekly News in 1975, Alan Betrock(founder of New York Rocker) wrote that on stage the bandemits a 1975 sound not unlike a streamlined, yet stillvehemently compact, mixture of early Velvet Underground,Shadows of the Knight, and the Stooges. Its rock & roll theway it was meant to be played, not with boogie or pretense,but just straight freshness and intense energy. Sort of out ofthe garages and onto the stages again.8 Around the same time, in a blurb about CBGB buried in hiscolumn The Pop Life, John Rockwell in the New YorkTimes in September 1975 noted that the efflorescence of theNew York underground rock scene at the C.B.G.B. club willlive on past the present moment. A group of SoHo videoartists who call themselves Metropolis Video have been documenting the bands everyweekend. The shows can be seen Saturday nights at midnighton Manhattan Cables Channel D.9 The preferred term to describe the emerging scene in 1974and 1975, in both the mainstream and underground press, wasindeed underground rather than punk.

While its true that debates about the origins of the termpunk to describe the scene can quickly devolve intotriviality, the confusion surrounding the term is central topunks anarchic spirit, a confusion that is important tomaintain, rather than resolve. Originally, punck was used todescribe a prostitute or harlot; in 1596the first knownappearance of the word in printthe writer Thomas Lodgeused the word like this: He hath a Punck (as the pleasantSinger cals her).10 Over the centuries, the meaning of the word has evolved,variously used to describe something worthless or foolish,

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empty talk, nonsense, a homosexual, or a person of noaccount.

More recently, in the decades prior to the emergence of thepunk music scene, the word punk can be found scatteredthroughout novels and stories by the likes of ErnestHemingway, William S. Burroughs, and others. InHemingways story The Mother of a Queen from hiscollection Winner Take Nothing (1933), the narrator saysthis fellow was just a punk, you understand, a nobody hedever seen before... 11 Dashiell Hammettsnovel The Maltese Falcon (1930) features a scene where SamSpade tells Gutman weve absolutely got to give them avictim. Theres no way out of it. Lets give them the punk.12 In Burroughss first novel Junky (1953), the narratorobserves as two young punks got off a train carrying a lushbetween them.13 And Thomas Pynchon uses the term in V. (1963) like this:There was nothing so special about the gang, punks arepunks.14

The word punk in relation to music is both trickier and easierto trace; while pretty much everyone now knows punk whenthey hear it, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term hadnot yet taken on the coded weight of meaning that it carriestoday. In his first nationally published workfor RollingStone in 1969Lester Bangs reviewed the MC5s albumKick out the Jams, and wrote, never mind that they came onlike a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip.15 In May 1971 Dave Marsh, writing in Creem, used thephrase punk rock, and the following month in the same

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magazine in his essay Psychotic Reactions and CarburetorDung, Bangs, writing about the influence of the Yardbirds,said that then punk bands started cropping up who werewriting their own songs but taking the Yardbirds sound andreducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter.16 Punk, as associated with rock and roll, gradually gainedcurrency, so that by 1974, the word could even be found inthe rarefiedpages of none other than The New Yorker. Reviewing a NewYork Dolls concert at the Bottom Line in May 1974, EllenWillis wrote, in reference to opening act Suzi Quatro, I wasgetting a naive kick out of watching a woman playrock-and-roll punk.17 And writing in the Village Voice in November 1975, just alittle over a month after the Ramones had signed with Sire,Greil Marcus, in reviewing Patti Smiths debut album Horses,wrote that the concepts that lie behind behind Smithsperformanceher version of rock and roll fave raves, theNew York avant-garde, surrealist imagery and aestheticstrategy, the beatnik hipster pose, the dark side of the streetpunk soulemerge more clearly with each playing, until theyturn into schtick.18

Yet even this coupling of punk and rock didnt yetcapture the meanings we associate with punk rock today. Itwasnt until 1976, and the founding of the magazine Punk byJohn Holmstrom and Legs McNeil, that the term adapted onceagain to capture and give name to the emerging scene. AsLegs McNeil tells it, Holmstrom wanted the magazine to bea combination of everything we were intotelevision reruns,drinking beer, getting laid, cheeseburgers, comics, grade-Bmovies, and this weird rock & roll that nobody but us seemed

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to like: the Velvets, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, andnow the Dictators.19 In fact, the group The Dictators and their 1975 album TheDictators Go Girl Crazy!were a direct inspiration for the magazines title. Not only didthey use the word punk in the song Weekend (oh weekend/ Bobby is a local punk / cutting school and getting drunk /eating at McDonalds for lunch), but an inside sleeve pictureof them dressed in black leather jackets eating at White Castleled McNeil to suggest Punk as the title: The word punkseemed to sum up the thread that connected everything welikeddrunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd,funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.20

One of the best discussions of the punk ethos appeared in thevery first issue of Punk in January 1976 in the essay MarlonBrando: The Original Punk. Suggesting that punk is aboveall a sensibility, a way of carrying yourself in the world, thepiece suggests that Brandos films Streetcar Named Desire(1951), The Wild One (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954)provided media recognition for an inarticulate, rebelliouscharacter type, til then ignored by the popular media. ...Brando was cool without oppressing the audience with toomuch sharpness. He was powerful without having to beinvulnerable. ... Vulnerability in a leather jacket. Brandoprowled, not as a predator, but as a formidable victim.21 The Ramones, especially, embodied this cool style thatreversed the governing codes of 1970s macho rock embodiedby the figure of the swaggering leadsinger. Joey Ramone was the punk underdog, the impossiblyskinny guy who hid beneath his hair and behind hissunglasses. In that same issue of Punk, in her two-page spread

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on the Ramones, Mary Harron was hesitant to use the wordpunk to describe the band (preferring instead punk-type),and when she did use it, she did so to describe a visual styleand attitude, not a sound: OK, Harron asked, why do youaffect leather jackets and kind of a punk-type attitude onstage? Tommy replied: It keeps us warm, yknow? And theblack leather absorbs more heat.

In fact, groups like Alice Cooper, Kiss, and even AC/DCwere written about as part of the mix of the punk and newwave scene. If today not many people would consider AC/DCan element of the new wave that included art bands likeTalking Heads, in the early-to-mid 1970s the categories ofpunk, new wave, hard rock, heavy metal, and pop were stillblurred. As well see later, this was due in part to the fact thatrecord companies, promoters, and radio stations, whichdepended upon the fairly strict maintenance of genericclassifications, had not yet absorbed the new wave into acommodity form. Writing about AC/DC in New York Rocker,which was devoted almost exclusively to covering the punkand new wave scene, Howie Klein noted that AC/DCdoesnt use safety pins, never went to art school, and theysure dont limit themselves to 2 or 3 chords, butif new wave is a reaffirmation of rock n rolls traditionalvalues, this band is an important part of it.22 The Ramones themselves, although cautious of labels likepunk, were variously touted as punk, new wave, hard rock,pop, pop-punk, and others. In a full-page 1977 ad in NewYork Rocker from their record company Sire, the Ramoneswere described as the worlds foremost exponents of purepunk-rock and New Yorks pioneer New Wave band.

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The Ramones, as was true of most bands of that moment,preferred to demonstrate the premise of their music ratherthan talk about it. When asked in 1977 about their feelingsregarding the punk label, Johnny responded: Whaddyagonna do? We dont care if they wanna call us dat. It doesntmatter one way or the other.23 But very often the bands and their fans either rejected orsimply ignored the label punk. In the documentary PunkingOut, one fan at CBGB in 1977 answers, when asked aboutpunk, [if] you want to talk about punk and underground itsbullshit. You call em punk because you got nothing else tosay about em, no other way to link em. But its like theheartbeat that links em. In an interview with Mary Harronin Punk, when asked if he had a name to describe the music,Johnny Rotten said that punk rocks a silly thing to call itand it means, likeAmerican sixties rip-off bands.24 And asked about whether he and the Ramones thought ofthe album that they were recording in 1976 as punk, CraigLeon, who produced Ramones, responded that if my memoryserves me well, we never used this term at all. Seymour Steinnicked the term New Wave from the 50s French film guysto describe the music but no one used punk other than thetitle of John Holmstrom and Legs McNeils magazine oflower NY at that time.25

One of the dimensions of punk that was nearly eclipsed as themore hardcore punk bands of the 80s and 90s gainedascendancy was the humor and the sense of sheer absurdityand fun that characterized the emerging scene. Punk magazinewas very close to Mad in this regard, its pages filled withself-deprecating spoofs, such as Lester Bangs versusHandsome Dick Manitoba, a spread from issue #4 that

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pictures Bangs and Manitoba (of The Dictators) fightingwhile spoutingin cartoon-like bubbleshighly theoreticalsentiments such as The fall of a culture puts us in the samearchetypal cesspool and Violence is directly associated withthreats to identity as occur in periods of rapid transition! TheRamones, who were regularly featured in Punk, were centralto punks early identity as more fun than dangerous. In TheRise of Punk Rock from the Village Voice in 1976 JamesWolcott wrote:

Punk humor, a healthy parody of rock machismo, can befound in the music of the Dictators (who sing:The best part of growing up/Is when Im sick and throwingup/Its the dues you got to pay/For eating burgers every day....) and the leather-jacketed Ramones, in the Daffy Duckery ofPatti Smith, in magazines like Punk and Creem, and intelevision heroes like Fonzie and Eddie Haskell. Its a style ofhumor which reverses banality, thrives upon it, and enjoysjuxtaposing it with high culture references in order to create acomically surreal effect.26

The rise and fall of the Sex Pistols in England and the DeadBoys in the US in some ways put an end to punks first, naivephase. It may seem strange to call early punk innocentand areading of Please Kill Me suggests just the oppositeyetdespite the hedonism that is typical of any rock movement,the Ramones and other related groups offered a vision thatrejected the excesses of the hippie counterculture and insteaddrew, often ironically, on the supposed innocence of the1950s. While Tom Carson may have been exaggerating whenhe wrote in the New York Rocker that the Ramones thirdalbum Rocket to Russia demonstrated what some of us have

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suspected for a long timethat these guys are really straightold-fashioned pop moralists under the skin,27 there is an element of truth in his claim. If the Ramoneswere innocent, this innocence lay in their elevation oflimitation to the level of art, and in their hop-scotchingbackward over the hippies directly to the promise of the earlyBeatles, kiln-fired down to a hardcore soundat which previous bands could only hint. For in punksrejection and nihilism there was a larger violence that for theRamones remained a path not taken, at least for their firstseveral albums. The violence, outrage, and shockwhatClinton Heylin called the more brutal aspects of the punksound28that groups like Dead Boys and Laughing Dogs broughtto the scene were latent in punk from the beginning, and insome ways represent the logical conclusion of the punkmovement. The Ramones remained ambivalent about thisstrain of punk. In a 2001 interview, Johnny noted, whenpunk started getting this bad reputation here, we startedgetting lumped in with the stuff and being excluded.29

After the Sex Pistols said the F-word on British television,punk became even more associated with a level of violenceand rebellion that, as the Ramones have suggested, workedagainst any possibility of widespread radio play in the US. AsKeith Negus has noted, [t]he formatted radio systemdecisively demarcates and defines the market for popularmusic in the United States.30 The associations that were beginning to be attached to theword punk are evident in a press release by EMI inDecember 1976, two months after the Sex Pistols had signedwith them and shortly after their notorious TV spot. Entitled

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Comment on Content of Records, by Sir John Read,Chairman of EMI, the press release read, in part:

Sex Pistols is a pop group devoted to a new form of musicknown as punk rock.

It was contracted for recording purposes by EMI RecordsLimited in October 1976an unknown group offering somepromise, in the view of our recording executives, like manyother pop groups of different kinds that we have signed. Inthis context, it must be remembered that the recordingindustry has signed many pop groups, initially controversial,who have in the fulness of time become wholly acceptableand contributed greatly to the development of modern music....

Sex Pistols is the only punk rock group that EMI Recordscurrently has under direct recording contract and whetherEMI does in fact release any more of their records will haveto be very carefully considered. I need hardly add that weshall do everything we can to restrain their public behaviour,although this is a matter over which we have no real control.31

The hope that the Sex Pistols would eventually becomeacceptable of course proved futile, as they were dropped byEMI early the following year. The strangeness of thelanguage here, as Sir John Read carefully hopes that punkmight soon become domesticated, shows how punk as acommodity simply could not happen, at least not in 1976. Inthis sense, punks image created the very climate thatintroduced it to the mainstream and that simultaneouslyassured it would be frozen out of the mainstream. As Danny

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Fields has suggested, the whole thing [punk] just got out ofcontrol and whatever chancethe Ramones had to get on the radio based on the merit of themusic was then wiped out by the Sex Pistols because itbecame too hot to handle. American radio, then as now,doesnt like to participate in anything that is dangerous orrevolutionary or radical.32

To be sure, there was an unmistakable violence, at leastrhetorically, in the Sex Pistols, but there was also a deepsense of humor and recognition of the fundamental absurdityof life. In America, this punk humor was directly rooted in therejection of what was perceived as hippie sincerity. Anyattempt to account for the rise and appeal of punk must takeinto account its rejection of the progressive rockestablishment and its unironic embrace of feelings andrelationships and pseudo-macho posturing. By themid-1970s the country was in recession, the promises of theGreat Society were an increasingly unrealizable dream, thecreative possibilities suggested by the counter-culturemovement had withered into self-absorption and a sideshowof perpetual new age self-help movements, and theonce-radical alternative lifestyle promises had transformedinto cardboard sitcom scenarios (remember, The Love Boathad its debut in 1976). The tremendous idealism and promiseof harmony of the 1960s had been steadily eroded byassassinations, burning cities, white flight, busing violence, adisgraced president, and a lost war.

If disco was in some ways a grotesque magnification of thelatent hedonism of the 1960s, then punk, with its minimalismand its implicit violence, was an about-face on the 1960s that

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constituted a symbolic rejection. In describing the emergenceof punk, Mary Harron has noted that punk, like Warhol,embraced everything that cultured people, and hippies,detested: plastic, junk-food, B-movies, advertising, makingmoneyalthough no one ever did. You got so sick of peoplebeing so nice, mouthing an enforced attitude of goodness andhealth.33 In America, Punk magazine was instrumental inarticulating a sensibility that mocked the grandiose socialcommentary that characterized flower-power music. Issue #1included a Do It Yourself Sixties Protest Song that replacedserious lines with ones like watching Adam 12 andmunch my Wheaties and other references to everyday life.In issue #3 from April 1976, Dee Dee Ramone talked abouthow, when in school in the late 1960s, they used to havethose peace demonstrations and stuff. I used to heckle thedemonstrators. And in that same year, Lou Reed said,Nixon was beautiful. If he had bombed Montana and gottenaway with it, I wouldve loved him.34

Often, there is a savage kind of beauty in disintegration and inthe articulation of that disintegration through art. Andcertainly mid-70s America presenteda moment of exhausted optimism and a great lowering ofexpectations. The Watergate fiasco began in 1972 with theapprehension of men breaking into and attempting to wiretapDemocratic party offices. By 1973 televised congressionalhearings dominated the airwaves, and in August 1974 Nixonresigned in disgrace (his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, hadresigned the previous year in a non-Watergate related taxscandal). In October 1973 OPEC declared its oil embargo,driving high fuel prices ever higher. In a gesture symbolic of

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what Jimmy Carter would later call the nations malaise,the national Christmas tree was not lit in December 1973.Americas involvement in the Vietnam War officially endedin barely-controlled chaos atop the American embassy inSaigon in April 1975 with the last helicopter leaving as theNorth Vietnamese took the city.

At the center of this crisis of confidence, both literally andsymbolically, was New York City, which was headed intobankruptcy in 1975. Against the backdrop of the looming1976 presidential election, President Ford was making hayof the New York crisis as a symbol of the bankruptcy ofliberalism and of the Democratic Party.35 The citys $1.5 billion deficit was brought under controlthrough a series of measures that severely impacted the workforce, as roughly 60,000 workers were laid off over athree-year period. This was the era of plannedshrinkage, an idea famously articulated by Roger Starr (NewYork City Administrator of Housing and Urban Developmentfrom 197476) in a 1976 New York Times essay in which hedeclared planned shrinkage is the recognition that the goldendoor to full participation in American life and the Americaneconomy is no longer to be found in New York. Plannedshrinkage called for the systematic withdrawal of basicservicesincluding police, fire, health, sanitation, andtransportationfrom poor neighborhoods to make themunlivable and thus drive the poor out of the city.36 During 1975, headlines in New York daily announced thecitys crumbling economy. [Mayor] Beame Submits NewCuts Requiring added Layoffs Running into Thousands, rana frontpage headline in the New York Times in October 1975,followed by Mayor is Bitter. The article is typical of thesort of news New Yorkers were reading every day: The

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exact layoff total will be decided in the next week, andunofficial estimates circulating among city administratorswho coursed fretfully through City Hall was that thedismissals might total up to 8,000 beyond the 21,000 workerslaid off thus far in the fiscal crisis. Police officials said up to900 policemen would be laid off, and school officialspredicted several thousand teachers and school workerswould have to be let go.37

Despite the downbeat scene in America in the mid-1970s,American punk from that era did not resonatewith the same aggressive political edge that characterizedBritish punk. England was in the throes of a deep recession,with unemployment reaching 6.4 percent in June 1976, thehighest since 1940.38 To make matters worse, the summer of 1976a periodwhen the emerging punk movement was beginning to attractpress in publications such as New Musical ExpressinEngland was characterized by a sweltering heat wave. ByAugust a drought was declared (a Minister of Drought wasappointed), and the Notting Hill Carnival, which in past yearshad been a peaceful celebration of Caribbean culture, wasmarred by violence and rioting that sent over 100 policemento the hospital.39 This isnt to suggest that the punk movement was simply aresponse to mid-1970s malaise, but that, rather, it embodiedthe very anxieties that characterized the era. As Hebdige hassuggested, the punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisiswhich had filled the airwaves and the editorials throughoutthe period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms.40

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The fundamental difference between British and Americanpunk was in the Americans basic optimism. While its truethat both British and American punk traded in nihilism anddestruction, in American punk this tendency was fracturedand less pronounced than in the British version. As LegsMcNeil recounts, punk was about real freedom, personalfreedom. ... I remembermy favorite nights were just getting drunk and walkingaround the East Village kicking over garbage cans. Just thenight. Just the night. Just that it would be the night again. Andyou could go out, you know? It just seemed glorious. Andyoud be humming these great songs and anything couldhappen, and it was usually pretty good.41 Punk musics great strengthespecially the music of theRamoneswas its ability to convey this sense of explosivejoy while at the same time hinting at some larger idea that youcould never really be sure was there.

If details and stories like this are important to remember, it isbecause punk responded with its own stories and its ownstance, the stance of the underdog. On March 30, 1974, theRamones played their debut gig (as a trio) at the PerformanceStudio in Manhattan. That same night, New York CitysWPIX-TV played the 1958 American International Picturescult horror film How to Make a Monster as part of theirChiller Theatre series. To those who might perchance haveseen both the performance and the movie, it would have beena natural double feature. A little over two years later, in thespring of the bicentennial year, the Ramones first albumdebuted, without even one song approaching the three-minutemark.

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How do you define a band without a tradition? Rejecting theblues-oriented inflection that had for twenty-fiveyears characterized both American and British rock, theRamones didnt plug into any recognizable past. Of coursethere were influences, which many rock historians and writersover the years have noted, including the Detroit pre-punkscene of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges, the glam-rockscene of T. Rex, David Bowie, and the New York Dolls, theglam-metal scene of Alice Cooper, and of course the earlyBeatles and The Who. But these exist only as fragments in theRamones, only as sonic glimpses, barely even enough to becounted as influences. Now is probably a good a time as anyto directly address the question: Who was the first punk band?Or, more narrowly: Were the Ramones the first punk band?The problem with this question is that it assumes a total breakwith the past and with influence that no bandno matter howoriginalcan achieve. Also, in the end it comes down toindividual taste and interpretation: if you hear punk in theStooges, then you hear punk in the Stooges. If you dont, youdont. On the other hand, if such questions prompt a deeperappreciation of important bands that might otherwise beneglected, then its not such a bad idea to ask them. Whilemany people have written about punks prehistory, the mostsustained discussion is found in Clinton Heylins book Fromthe Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for aPost-Punk World. At the risk ofsimplifying his argument, he divides American punk into thefollowing categories:

Precursors:

The Velvet Underground

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The Stooges

MC5

Alice Cooper

The Modern Lovers

The New York Dolls

The First Wave:

Television

Patti Smith

Blondie

The Ramones

The Second Wave:

Talking Heads

The Dead Boys

The Heartbreakers

Richard Hell and the Voidoids

The Dictators

Suicide

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The Cleveland Bands:

Cinderella Backstreet

Mirrors

The Electric Eels

Rocket from the Tombs

The Styrenes

Pere Ubu

Peter Laughner

Devo42

Now, right away you can see how a taxonomy like this mightprovoke argument (and perhaps even the throwing of a beerbottle or other object). Why, for instance, is Suicideconsidered second wave when, as Heylin himself notes, theywere performing as early as 1970 at a venuecalled the Punk Best? But despite objections to Heylins punkcanon, his meticulous book remains the most complex andnuanced history of the roots and emergence of punk music inthe US, in the same way that Jon Savages book EnglandsDreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyondremains the best book on the emergence of UK punk.

Once you start tracing influences, where do you stop? Otherwriters have proposed other influences. Jim Bess-man notes

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that punk encompassed everyone from Elvis Presley to theBeatles,43 while Joe Harrington writes that punk includesgarage-Rock pioneers like the Stan-dells and ChocolateWatch Band to protometalloids like Dust and Black Sabbath.44 Others have cited Phil Spector-produced groups such as theCrystals and the Ronettes, as well as groups ranging fromHermans Hermits to ? and the Mysterians. I have a friend inNew York City who is says that true punk didnt reallybegin until the California hardcore bands like Black Flag andthe Dead Kennedys emerged in the late 1970s.

Though disputes about firsts always end up devolving intojustifying our personal tastes, their value lies in their ability toprod us into a more historical appreciation of the music wetake for granted. My own sense is that punk was the productof a specific and unique set of artistic, cultural, and economicforces at work in the US in general and New York City inparticular in theearly to mid-1970s, and that no matter how far back we reachto look for punk antecedents, it is only in the 1970s that themovement became fully articulated in music, comics, and theundergroundand eventually mainstreampress. It is tothose who wrote about punkand to punk writersthat weshould now turn.

There was a moment in the 1970s, who knows preciselywhen, when rock criticism aspired to greatness, adopting acombative, skeptical stance that embodied the music itcovered. This was an era when some of the musiciansthemselves, like Patti Smith or Richard Hell, wrote aboutmusic. Or perhaps its more accurate to say that in the 1970s,writing about music and culture in underground and

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mainstream newspapers and magazines perfected a style andtone worthy of the music being created at the time. Academiaresponded with cultural studies in an attempt to treatpopular culture seriously, but for the most part, academiccultural studies approaches were dead on arrival, written in apallid prose style that defanged and fossilized the raw energyof culture itself.

There is no doubt its easy to hate rock critics, if for nothingelse than because when it comes to music that we genuinelylove, we like to think that its only us and maybe a smallclique of others who really get it. Rock critics neverappreciate our bands or music scenes enough. Their writingdoesnt capture whatever it isabout the music that we love. We dont like to see our deepexperience with the music reduced to a 500-words-or-lessreview that pretends a greater familiarity with the music thanwe suspect the reviewer actually has. Besides, who needs toread about music when it is right there for the listening?

But while these charges and others can be leveled against the1970s rock-crit writers, what they brought to their reviewsand essays was something unheard of in writing about popmusic up to that time: a sense of theory, of distance, ofdanger, of critiquea broader sense of the place of popularmusic in culture. And most importantly, the writing style wasat times unexpected and unpredictable; it went beyond thetypical here is a description of the music or the fan clubapproach that asked you to worship every crumb that fellfrom the mouth of said Rock Star. Writing of this sort hadbeen percolating for some time: it can be found in the prose offilm critic Pauline Kael, who was among the first to praisetrash films and to rebel against the safe, art-house

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sensibility of many of the major publications of the 1960s.Its also there in Hunter S. Thompson, whose brand of gonzojournalism challenged with furious humor the lie that newsreporting could ever be objective. In fact, this sort ofwriting haunts American culture in the 1950s and 60s: it isthere in ThomasWolfe, in William S. Burroughs, in Charles Bukowski, inSusan Sontag.

By the 1970s, rock criticism was at the height of its influenceand had not yet taken the turn toward the less reflective,star-gushing territory that it would in the 1980s. Despite thefact that there were and are deep and often bitter disputes anddivisions, not worth chronicling here, among writers likeRobert Christgau, Nick Kent, Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs,Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, and others, what united themwas a sense that rockand punk specificallywas worthwriting about in ways that actively challenged readers. Forsome, such as Meltzer (author of the 1970 classic TheAesthetics of Rock), this took the form of a slangy, almoststream-of-consciousness style that was a form of art in itsown right. Describing punk, Meltzer has written: Forblazing, incandescent moments it oozed and spurtedsomething antithetical to rock: it was honest. About its ownpain, its own hunger, without candy coating, without vanity,without an iota of formulaic dissimulation.45

For others, like Bangs, the street-level approach to rock wasinflected with big ruminations about culture and society andpolitics. After leaving Creem and Detroit in 1976 and movingto New York City, in 1979 Bangs wrote a tough essay, TheWhite Noise Supremacists,

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that alienated him from many in the punk scene, but thatdrove him to an uncomfortable truth about punk and fascismand racism. This scene and the punk stance in general, hewrote, are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive,and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human racemostly amounts to a pile of shit, youve got the perfectbreeding ground for fascism.46 Leaving aside the question of whether he was right orwrong (and anyway cant he be both?) what matters is thatthis was just the kind of disruptive question that could beasked in the 1970sand by somebody who loved punk. Thepoint is that the very contradictions of punk itselfwas itfunny or scary? absurd or nihilistic? art or trash?anti-mainstream or pop? stoopid or smart? ironic orsincere?were the same contradictions that riddled the bestrock-crit writing about punk.

Although today we remember those writers such as Bangs,Meltzer, and Marcus, whose work has been preserved andanthologized, there were others whose writing was alive andalarming, but who for various reasons are not preserved in thecurrent rock-crit canon. One of the joys of revisiting oldcopies of the New York Rocker, Soho Weekly News, TrouserPress, and other newspapers and fanzines is discovering thevoices that introduced bands like the Ramones to readers. Inthe second issue of the New York Rocker (1976) for instance,StephenAnderson kicked off his article on the Ramones, whose firstalbum had not yet been released, like this:

Revising a structural reality from the harsh poetics of rock isan arduous, remarkable task that the Ramones haveaccomplished. Thats not bad for a solid thesis sentence or

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just a plain old opening remark, and its as unnecessary asrock criticism is unnecessary. Los Ramones have lockedthemselves within a black leather embryo that neither sticksnor stones nor intricate musical pretensions may transcend.47

Now, any article that uses the words structural reality in thevery first sentenceand that isnt about something like aThomas Pynchon novelis risky, to say the least. And aswell see later, this self-referential tendency so much rock-critwriting of the era possessed constitutes a larger tendencywithin punk itself, not unlike lines like second verse same asthe first from the Ramones first album. When Anderson,later in the essay, says he wants to defend the Ramones froma detractor by quoting lines from T. S. Eliot, or maybe thecinematic philosophy or Godard. Or Artauds theatre ofcruelty, does he risk alienating an audience that picked upNew York Rocker to read about their favorite bands ratherthan Godard and Artaud? Probably, and it is this defiantgesture, this unexpected detour into something other than theRamones in an article thats supposed to be about theRamones, that constitutes thepunk sensibility, and why the emergence of punk music andwriting about punk music cannot be separated. In fact, therock-crit establishment was powerful, ironic, and self-awareenough that in the January 26, 1976, issue of the VillageVoice, critic Robert Christgau could write an essay calledYes, There is a Rock-Crit Establishment (But Is that Bad forRock)? that basically mythologized and deconstructed,simultaneously, the rock-crit establishment, which forChristgau included himself, Dave Marsh, Jon Landau, JohnRockwell, and others.

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While Rolling Stone did provide some coverage of theemerging punk scene, it did so from much more of a WestCoast perspective, one that was still, in many ways, inflectedwith a 1960s nostalgia that was fast becoming associated witha bloated, rock-as-big-concept mentality. Having said this, itis important to bear in mind that while Rolling Stone mighthave neglected the emerging New York underground musicscene, it did in fact help to give shape and voice to rockcriticism in general, and to promote the spread of gonzojournalism (Hunter S. Thompson, who began writing for themagazine in the early 1970s, undoubtedly brought a punksensibility to the pages of Rolling Stone, even though he didnot write directly about punk). Much closer to the punk scenewere SoHo Weekly News, New York Rocker, Village Voice,and, from Detroit, Creem. While the VillageVoice did not offer extensive coverage of the emerging punkscene, in its pages could be found some of the mostconsistently engaged and thorny discussions of punk, whichoften framed it in the larger context of New Yorksavant-garde traditions, the surrealists, and the French NewWave. Writing in the Village Voice in 1976, James Wolcottnoted that the [Talking] Heads look like a still from aGodard movie (La Chinoise, maybe) and Tom Verlainelooks like Artaud from Dreyers The Passion of Joan ofArc.48 This almost surreal mix of high and low culture is typicalof much punk-oriented writing from the 1970s. Later in theessay, Wolcott says, the Velvets and their progeny are allchildren of Dr. Caligaripale-skinned adventurers ofshadowy city streets.49

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Its not that these writers were experts on punk, or evendie-hard fans, which was precisely the point, for at their best(especially Bangs and Meltzer) they rejected the worshipfulstance of hard-core groupies and, like punk itself, assaultedthe audience with a sort of bright-light honesty that couldnthelp but alienate them from any number of readers. As JonSavage has noted, America had inaugurated both Rockjournalismwith the work of Paul Williams in Crawdaddyand Robert Christgau in the Village Voiceand the newjournalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. If newjournalism took you there, and there was pop for a while,then Rock journalism took pop phenomena seriously, teasingout their meaning and importance in language that was no lesshigh-flown.50 And they brought to their writing a sense of adventure anda willingness to make connections between punk and art andpolitics in ways that always risked being dismissed as toointellectual, too obscure, too uninterested in the mechanics ofthe music. On the one hand, these critics risked alienating thedie-hard fans, who viewed their writing as the sorry musingsof wanna-be musicians-turned-writers who were always astep or two behind the evolving music scene; and on the otherhand, the readers for whom punk, and pop/rock music ingeneral, was the bubblegum province of teenagers, and whowould laugh off the suggestion that Talking Heads hadanything in common with a high-art Godard film.

What distinguishes rock-crit punk writing from the mid-1970sfrom most subsequent rock criticism is that a good deal of itwas written by the musicians themselves, including PattiSmith, Richard Hell, Andy (Adny) Shernoff, Peter Laughner,and others. If there is any such thing as a punk canon thatincludes not only bands but also other writers and artists, then

45

its initial formulation can be traced to the underground pressand fanzines of the era, where the contours of the punksensibility were articulated not only by professional rockcritics, but by the musicians themselves. In a 1976 essay forTrouser Press, for instance, Dictators guitarist Scott TopTenKempner paid homage to critic Richard Meltzer, providing asort of bibliographic account of his writings:

A few years later, a second book appeared, entitled Gulcher[1972] (gulcher ... gulture ... culture, get it?). Like the firstbook, one can start at any point and read, in any direction.Gulcher is subtitled, Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism inAmerica (16491980) and is the official document of theunder-the-counter culture. Recognizing that rock itself is nolonger the true focal point of the culture, Meltzer coverseverything from wrestling and booze to television andbottlecaps.51

Like Kempner and so many others, Richard Hell not onlywrote about punk, but did so in such a way that performedpunks anarchy on the page. In a 1976 article about theRamones in Hit Parader, Hell wrote that the music theRamones create from these feelings [of frustration] isincredibly exciting. It gives you the same sort of feeling youmight derive from savagely kicking in your smoothly runningtv set and then finding real thousand dollar bills inside.52 If Hermann Goering popularized the line whenever I hearthe word culture, I reach for my pistol, then punkpopularized the gesture of reaching for a guitar or a pen in theface of culture, not to destroy it, but to transform it.

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And yet, many of the rock-crit writers did help to make safe asort of narcissistic confessionalism thatmarks much of the criticism of our era. The first-personreportage of writers like Bangs and Marcus and Meltzer, inthe Jack Keruoac tradition, opened the door in rock criticismfor the wholesale elevation of the personal to the public, adiary-entry journalism, which is great if you happen to be agood writer, but nothing short of horrible if you dont. Wheneverything is permitted, its hard not to be seduced by yourown reflection in the mirror, and for these writers the mirrorthat punk held up was hard to look away from. Today, almostall rock criticism takes the form of personal anecdote andmemoir; as in the movie High Fidelity, we want to see thestory and the story about the story. We want writers to showtheir faces, to confess a secret, to show us that they are nobetter than us. Writers like Meltzer and Bangs and Toscheswere blogging before there were blogs, and made it safe totalk about rock by talking about yourself.

Although it helped to create the confessionalist critic, punkitself was resistant to such openness. If anything, punkdepersonalized itself, rejecting the needy, confessionalintrospection of progressive rock. The Ramones were perhapsthe purest and most brilliant of depersonalized punk bands,appearing in an unchanging uniform, sharing the same lastname, and making music that rearticulated over and overagain a single idea. Even their I Wanna and I DontWanna first-personsongs were less about people than characters, concepts, ideas,ways of behaving. In fact, it is this unchanging purity thataccounts, more than anything else, for the failure of theRamones to fully enter the mainstream of American popularmusic. For rock is built on the myth of change, a fact that

47

serves record companies well, as they promote the evolutionof bands to keep pace with the changing tastes of themarketplace. Early Beatles, late Beatles. Early Stones, lateStones. Early R. E. M, late R. E. M. Early Elvis, late Elvis,Vegas Elvis.

But punk stood against evolution and technical growthbecause this implied a growing expertise and mastery ofmusic that ran counter to punks studied amateurism, andbecause it suggested a future that, especially in punks Britishstrain, should not exist. Besides, why change a good thing? Ifyouve found your music, your sound, your stance, why pushit into something else? This is why for so many punk and newwave bands, the marker of selling out was not signing to amajor label, but rather adapting your sound to suit markettastes. So many punk bandsranging from the Sex Pistols tothe Dead Boysself-destructed rather than buy into the mythof evolution, of change, of progress. The Ramonesuniformity can be seen on a recording of a remarkable earlytelevision studio performance, among the first visualrecordings of the band, preceding Amos Poes 1976documentary on CBGB, Blank Generation,and the 1977 documentary Punking Out. There is noaudience, just the band in a white television studio with ahome-made Ramones banner draped on the wall behindthem. Without any ceremony they break into Loudmouthand continue for twenty minutes, pausing only long enoughmid-way through for Johnny and Dee Dee to take off theirleather jackets.

Documenting the influence of the Ramones, and punk ingeneral, on post-1970s music is perilous. In retrospect, theRamones soundfast, loud, simpleserved as a blueprint

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for scores of bands and movements in the 1980s, 90s, andtoday. As much as the Ramones looked backward forinspirationto early Beatles, surf rock, Iggy Popat the timethey offered an alienated future rock, concocting a sound that,while echoing the past, was really disconnected fromtradition. The very fact that we can look back to the Ramoneswith nostalgia attests to their triumph in mass culture: Heyho, lets go is played as a rallying cry not only during NewYork Yankees games, but in many other baseball parks acrossthe country, right along with classic rock snippets frombands ranging from Queen to Van Halen.

This is where distinctions between 1970s-era punk and itsincarnations in the 1980s and 1990s become clear, as wellsee later on. Even a slight familiarity with bands such asBlack Flag or the Minutemen, or withpunk magazines like Punk Planet, reveals a level ofprogressive politics and seriousness that distinguishes it fromits 1970s roots. If there was a political dimension to theRamones, the Dead Boys, the Sex Pistols, the Adverts, andother bands, it was ambiguous and contradictory, a mix ofanarchist sentiments, fascist symbols (such as the Swastika),and anti-liberal humanist sentiments. Indeed, early issues ofPunk are a testament to the self-deprecating humor thatinformed Ramones-era punk, and if anythingpunksespecially in the United Statesmocked the politicalseriousness and message music of the hippies.

Looked at from one angle, punk provided the corrective towhat, by the 1970s, had become the absorption of uncriticalliberalism into mass cultural forms. If Johnny Ramone waspunks most famous conservative (his line at the Rock andRoll Hall of Fame induction ceremonyGod bless President

49

Bush, and God bless Americawas widely reported in hisobituaries in September 2004), he was certainly not its onlyone. If the free and easy sixties were, on one level, a reactionto the uptight fifties, then punk was a return to order premisedon disorder, rendered all the more contradictory whenconsidered in light of the excesses of the scene as depicted inbooks like Please Kill Me. In this context, its not surprisingthat one of the outgrowthsof punk was the Straight Edge scene in the early 1980s, wheresobriety itself became a form of rebellion in the context ofpunk excess.

Sure the Ramones were associated with New York City, butwere they city kids? It seems a sort of dumb question, but ithad resonance in 1975 and 1976 and went to the heart ofperceptions about punks authenticity. The Ramones had allmet in Forest Hills, New York, described by Monte Melnickas a middle-class, mostly Jewish suburb in the borough ofQueens.53 Part of the energy of the CBGB sceneand theunderground scene in generalwas this ambiguity about thesocial class and status of its performers. Were the Ramonessuburban kids? What about the preppy-looking TalkingHeads? While Clinton Heylin might be right that theRamones ... were no teenage delinquents,54 you wouldnt know that from reading Dee Dees bookLobotomy or stories about them in Please Kill Me. In an earlyissue of New York Rocker, Suzanne Schwedoch devoted anentire column to musing on the relationship between suburbankids and the emerging underground New York City scene.This report from the lowest echelons of rock by anun-authority on the local scene is a desperate plea for NYrockers to try their stuff out in suburbia where aimlessness

50

just may be converted into new fans and generate some sparxof enthusiasm from the hoards of boreds who listen to dyingd.j.s on the FM dials.55

David Thomas, who along with Peter Laughner foundedClevelands Rocket from the Tombs, puts the allurepoetically:

We were into this Urban Pioneer thing, which was a bunch ofkids born in the suburbs to middle-class families, movingback into the city, because they thought the city should live.The city I loved everybody else hated: it was totally deserted,people fled when the sun went down. It was run down, but wethought it was beautiful at the time of youth when youreprone to romanticism.

I wondered at what point a civilization hits its peak and thenbegins to decline. All those deserted cities, the jungleovergrows them: at what point does the city die? At whatpoint do the people who live there no longer understand thevision of the builders?56

As noted earlier, the deserted city, whether by plannersdesign, economic blight, or racial tension, gives rise in thiscase to inspiration. An inspiration not to those left in it, but tothose raised outside it: suburban kids who saw it as abeautiful, romantic thing.

Crisis and disintegration often lead to rejuvenated culturalforms, and this is certainly true of early and mid-1970spopular culture. The punk movementand the Ramones in

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particulardrew upon and made their own an eccentric mixof pop culture references ranging from Mad magazine toRoger Corman. Indeed, Punkmagazine editor John Holstrom had studied with HarveyKurtzman, founder of Mad. Legs McNeil, who was alsoinvolved in the publication and who in fact gave it its name,became the resident punk: So it was decided I would be aliving cartoon character, like Alfred E. Neuman was to Madmagazine.57

Unlike the serious prog-rock and concept albums of the erathat distanced themselves from the mundane triviality ofpopular culture, Ramones is laced with references to movies,news events, history, and the ordinary happenings ofeveryday life. As Donna Gaines has noted, the Ramonessongwriting reflects their obsession with popular culture andAmericana. Johnny and Dee Dee were war-movie fiends, andthe whole band loved television, surf culture, comic books,and cartoons.58 The filmic world evoked on Ramones is one of B-movies,cult movies, and horror films. The Texas Chainsaw Massacrewas released in 1974, the year many of the albums songswere written. Film scholar Robin Wood has written thatcentral to the filmand centered on its monstrousfamilyis the sense of grotesque comedy, which in no waydiminishes but rather intensifies its nightmare horror. ... Thefilms sense of fundamental horror is closely allied to a senseof the fundamentally absurd.59 This sense of comic-horror infuses the albums fifth track,Chainsaw, a sort of homage to the film. This was also theera of the vigilante film, most forcefully

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expressed in Straw Dogs (1971) and Death Wish (1974), inwhich Charles Bronson plays a tolerant New York Cityarchitect who turns to vigilantism after his wife is murdered.Mixed with the albums humor is a deeper menace and senseof pervasive violence running through songs like Beat on theBrat and Loudmouth (Im gonna beat you up) that isreminiscent of films like Death Wish and that in factconstitutes a wholesale rejection of the feel good,peace-love-and-understanding ethos that informed therhetoric of the counterculture. For if in 1969 audiences wereexpected to see the violence of Easy Rider as tragedy visitedupon well-meaning (if not innocent) drifters, by 1974 filmslike Death Wish pretty much had audiences rooting for thosecommitting the violence.

Like the emerging punk scene itself, films in the mid-1970swere a heady mix of high and low, art and trash, domestic andforeign. Ads from an August 1975 issue of the Village Voice(during a time when the Ramones were playing at CBGB)offer a glimpse of the variety of films playing in New YorkCity. At the Bleeker Street Cinema, you could see BergmansThe Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, Fellinis Roma,Hitchcocks The 39 Steps, and Satyajit Rays Two Daughters.The Eiger Sanction was playing (for only $1.00) at St. MarksCinema, while a theater on Broadway at 49th showed TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre. The Elgin, meanwhile,offered Mickjagger in Performance, Jonathan DemmesCaged Heat, as well as Dont Look Now, El Topo, and TheHarder They Come. Or you could catch Russ MeyersSuperVixens, rated X (in the mid-1970s, X-rated movies wereadvertised alongside family movies in both undergroundand mainstream newspapers in New York City, including the

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New York Times). The blurb for SuperVixens might just aswell have come out of the punk imagination:

an all out assault on todays sexual mores, and more, a frontalattack against womens lib ... blasting through the malemachismo syndrome, kicking the hell out of convention,hang-ups, convictions, obsessions! The whole bag. . . cops,robbers, sexually aggressive females, rednecks, sickmen-of-war, unfaithful wives, impotence, athletic prowess,the 32-second satisfaction, cuckolding, breast fixation vs. hatjobs, egotism and other fun n games, racing cars, self-abuse... and even death and reincarnation!

And of course PG-rated Jaws (8th Record Week!) wasplaying just about everywhere, with its own image of a hugeshark about to munch a practically nude female swimmer.

The most punk moment in any movie from that era hasnothing at all to do with punk rock or punk style. Aboutmidway through Martin Scorseses Taxi Driverwhichopened in 1976, just months before Ramones wasreleased, and which was shot in the summer of 1975TravisBickle (Robert DeNiro) sits in his New York apartmentwatching American Bandstand on his crappy TV. Scorsesecuts between kids slow dancing to Jackson Brownes Latefor the Sky and Travis watching in a kind of resignednumbness (sitting here with nuthin to do) as if thenormal world being depicted on TV were utterly andforever out of reach for him. He has a gun in his hand, whichhe occasionally aims and the screen. Later, in a startling shot,we see a transformed Travis standing outside at the edge of acrowd listening to a hackneyed speech by a politician. Travishas changed: he is sporting a Mohawk (punk?) haircut that

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signals his radical rejection of the normal world depicted onAmerican Bandstand. While the film escalates into increasingand frenzied violence at this point, I think it is the few quietmoments where we see Travis watching the TV with a sort ofdeep and menacing sadness that best capture the spirit ofloneliness that punk emerges from and addresses.

In Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman wrote that seen strictly asa youth movement, punk was a kind of perverse, high-speedreplay of the counterculturecomplete with its own music,press, entrepreneurs, fellow travelers (including more than afew ex-hippies), and, ultimately, movies.60 Punk films from this era include John Waterss PinkFlamingos (1973) and FemaleTrouble (1975), Derek Jarman jubilee(1977), and AmosPoes Blank Generation (1976) and The Foreigner (1977).However, while these and other films are no doubt central tothe articulation of a punk sensibility, it is another film, DavidLynchs Eraserhead (1977), which, like Taxi Driver, capturesthe sense of outsiderness that informs punk. In Eraserhead,Henry (Jack Nance) is the ultimate outsider, existing in aworld so degraded that its simply beautiful. He is practicallyinarticulate, defining himself though his actions, not hiswords. And that electroshock hair is as alarming as anythingworn by Richard Hell or Sid Vicious. Above all, Eraserheadoffers the illusion of a complete and separate world; likepunk, its influences can (and have been) traced anddemystified in dry studies of influence, and yet there issomething about Eraserhead, and about punk, that managesto escape the most determined efforts to explain away itsmystery.

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And although it is beyond the scope of this book, it is alsoworth noting that from the very beginning, do-it-yourselfpunk cinema was an important part of the emerging punkmusic scene. Filmmakers like Amos Poe, who was also awriter for the New York Rocker, helped define the punkaesthetic in film and often wrote for or were featured in themusic newspapers and fanzines that emerged in New YorkCity in the mid-1970s. Ina 1976 profile on Poe in New York Rocker, Matthew Fleury,in his discussion of Poes films Night Lunch (1975) and BlankGeneration (1976), called Poes work presence filmmakingand noted that Poe considered the Zapruder film of theKennedy assassination the greatest single footage ever shotbecause it captured, unintentionally, history.

Earlier I wrote that Ramones was either the last great modernrecord or the first great postmodern one. The more you listento it, the more you realize: of course its the first greatpostmodern one, and thats largely because it tunes in on thesound and the hum of our era. It gives shape and form to thelow, almost imperceptible oceanic sound that Don DeLillowrites about in his novel White Noise (1985). The messagethe album conveys is, finally, noise. If the album can be saidto be about anything, then it is about noise. Thats whystandard rock-crit discussions of the lyrics or the personalitiesof the band members are ultimately dead ends. Of course itwould seem that all rock albums are about noise, but manyare not, not in the least because they regard noise as a given.But, like a Jean-Luc Godard film from the 1960s, Ramonesincessantly interrogates the formulation of its own sound.When Simon Frith wrote that punk queried the naturalnessof musical language,

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611 think this is what he was getting at: punk is as much atheory of music as it is music.

It has become commonplace to suggest that punk music wasauthentic and pure and somehow directly opposed to thetainted sellout status that widespread acceptance brings. In hisexcellent book Subculture, Dick Hebdige, writing about punk,notes, as soon as the original innovations which signifysubculture are translated into commodities and madegenerally available, they become frozen. Once removedfrom their private contexts by the small entrepreneurs and bigfashion interests who produce them on a mass scale, theybecome codified, made comprehensible, rendered at oncepublic property and profitable merchandise.62 More recently, Stacy Thompson has suggested that one ofpunks fundamental desires is the desire to resist thecommercial realm, and especially commercial music.63 Yet what does it really mean to claim this about punk,especially in its mid-1970s incarnation? The Ramones werenot rebelling against popular music, but rather against howpopular music had come to be defined and experienced. Iftoday we tend to think in terms of selling out versus notselling out, we need to be careful not to project these concernsbackwards to the 1970s. For there was less worry aboutselling out to the mainstream than there was desire toreplace mainstream music with something better, somethingmore alive, something unexpected. The Ramones, inparticular, desired a hit; after all, they believed in and werepassionate abouttheir music, and they wanted to share it with others beyondthe cramped space of CBGB. As Seymour Stein, theco-founder of Sire records who signed Ramones to Sire in1975, has said, their melodies were very catchy and stayed

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with me, dancing around in my head, and it was absolutelyclear that for better or worse, underneath it all was a pop-bandmentality.64 Others, such as Craig Leon, who produced Ramones, sharethis view: Quite honestly, we thought we were creating a hitpop record. The Bay City Rollers, Hermans Hermits, and theBeatles were our competition in our minds. But do bear inmind we were laughing all the way through it.65

Casting the Ramones and other bands as anti-corporate andanti-mainstream means that you have to ignore thetremendous amount of care and energy that went intopromoting themselves. The Ramones, in particular, were verymuch aware of the press and publicity they were generating,and were active participants in shaping their image andgenerating further press interest, as this 1977 interview fromthe New York Rocker suggests:

What was the turning point?Dee Dee: That festival [the 1975 summer Rock Festivalat CBGB].Tommy: The turning point was ... when Lisa Robinson camedown... actually we got some nice writeups from some peopleand we sent them out to the people in the trades, with a littlepicture of us.

Johnny: I think we had a list of 100 people and we hiteverybody.Did you lick the envelopes yourselves?Tommy: Yeah, addressed them and everything.66

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This form of do-it-yourself publicity, while much different inscale than the massive promotional engines that sustainedsupergroups like Led Zeppelin and the Eagles, wasnonetheless driven by a desire to reach a broad audience.Rather than look at their success as something to be ashamedof, or as some sort of sellout, the Ramones remained keenlyaware that, as one of the earliest punk bands to sign to a label,they were in many ways responsible for the potential successand viability of the emerging punk scene. We were the firstCBGB-punk-type group to get signed, Tommy noted, andthat was important because I think we opened up the doors.67 While punk in the 80s and 90s very much cast itself inopposition to mainstream, corporate interests, and whilerecent writing on punk (often by academics) casts punk as asort of Marxist music for the people and by the people, itsinstructive to remember that in its early days, many punkbands desired and actively courted mainstream success.

And yet, despite the melodic, pop-oriented sensibility thatcharacterized early punk and the Ramones first album inparticular, there is somethingother than the obviously rawsoundthat assured punks marginality.Please, dear reader, dont cast down this book when I remindyou of the ironic dimension to the Ramones. Irony is anotoriously slippery word, often used as shorthand forinsincerity, or intellectual aloofness, or postmodern cynicism.Rest assured, I use it in none of these senses. Instead, Imusing irony in a broader sense to suggest that one of thedefining features of punk was its awareness of itself as punk.This does not mean it was insincere, any more than I wouldsuggest you were insincere for dressing a little nicer thanusual to meet someone you liked. Now, the Ramones havebeen called ironic before, but often in a dismissive way, as

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when Greil Marcus writes that much has been made ofpunks antecedents in ... the arty, ironic New York scene thatemerged in 1974especially as exemplified by the Ramones.Beat on the brat / with a baseball batwhat could be morepunk than that?68

I think Marcus gives the band too much credit, and notenough. Certainly the Ramones did emerge from the NewYork scene that included Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, PattiSmith, and others whose work could be characterized ashighly self-conscious. As Craig Leon notes, the Ramoneswere much more part of the NY underground art scene ofThe Velvets and Warhol & co. They had much more incommon with bands like Television and Patti Smiths groupthan the Sex Pistols and other so-called punk bands.69 And yet the immediacyand rawness in their performance and recorded musicdiscredits the claim that they were more self-consciouslyartistic. Watching an early video of the band tearing, withdetermined fury, through a twenty-minute set in a televisionstudio with no audience, its hard to see the irony anywhere.And yet... can punkand its glam-rock predecessorsbecompletely separated from the sort of camp sensibility thatSusan Sontag described as camp. Camp is the consistentlyaesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory ofstyle over content, aesthetics over morality, of ironyover tragedy.70 Camp combats the threat of boredom. The relationbetween boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated.Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies,in societies or circles capable of experiencing thepsychopathology of affluence.

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71 In a discussion with Sontag in 1978, Richard Hell told her,the generation I belong to has more in common among itsmembers than any other generation that ever existed becauseof television and public school systems.72 An album like Ramones is both an acknowledgment and afierce rejection of this sentiment: saturated in pop culture, thealbum nonetheless rejects again and again easy connections toits influences and sources, which remain locked tightly in itsself-contained songs.

Questions about whether or not punk was ironic are notmerely academic questions put to punk thirty years later, butin fact constituted the tension and contradictions typical of thescene. Early accounts of the Ramones and other undergroundor punk bands raised the same questions. A 1976 issue of NewYork Rocker noted that the Ramones hit hard, but when allthe smoke and fury have subsided, one may recognize thatdespite the overwhelming amplification, the group isoperating through the most basic devices of irony andunderstatement.73 In that same issue, in the essay The Clothes Nose:Sniffing Out NY Rock Dress Sense, Robert Swift says thisof the Ramones: Pretty calculated, but theyll probably saythey have no money. Rounded haircutsBeatles / Standells /kids cereal commercials, and a singer with a kink in neck.Clothes are worn out levis, tee shirts, scuffed shoes orsneakers, sneers, and shades. A sort of Mommas boy punk.All in all done to perfection, and ultimately it looksunforced.74 If not ironic, this hyper-awareness of style, as bothlegitimate and as camp, is one of the major differencesbetween punk and progressive rock, for whom style was, evenat its most theatrically excessive, unreflective. In this sense,

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punks indebtedness to glam rock is crucial, for while theRamones are remembered as being almost anti-style in theirunchanging uniform, they were heavilyinfluenced by glam rock. According to Dee Dee Ramone:

Joey had a band called Sniper [prior to the Ramones]. He wastrying to break into the New York glam circuit that washappening around then. ...

The glitter took a lot of upkeep and the gear was expensive.We would get custom-made snakeskin boots sent fromEngland via Granny Takes a Trip in New York. JohnnyThunders and Tommy Ramone both went to London to getthe right stuff to be the top flashmen about town. JohnnyRamone had an exact replica of the James Williamson outfitwith the leopard collar that James wore in the Stooges RawPower stage. John also had silver lame pants from GrannyTakes a Trip that he wore for the first few Ramones gigs.75

If the Ramones rejected the continual reinvention of style intheir own formulation of style (just as their music rejectedupdating and modification), then this was not out of anignorance or rejection of style, but rather out of anunderstanding that minimalism (no make-up, no costumechanges, no glitter, etc.) could quite possibly form the basis ofa new style.

The album does make you wonder, though, how seriously youshould be taking this. The punk generation grew up not onlywith TV, but with cable, and with all the repetition (reruns),irony, and camp that the medium engendered. As Robert Rayhas noted, the new

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self-consciousness also flourished on television, whereRowan and Martins Laugh-In (196873), The CarolBurnett Show (19671978), and NBCs Saturday NightLive (1975- ) all featured irreverent media parodies,particularly of movies and TV news. Other regular seriescould not be taken straight: All in the Family (197179),The Rockford Files (19741979), Happy Days(19741984), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976), andSoap (19771981) all traded on obviously ironic uses ofstandard television formulas.76 The beautifully complicating thing here is not thatRamones offered itself as an ironic rock album, but that itmight be received that way by an audience raised in a TVculture that always questioned the codes of sincerity. Or,looked at another way, punk irony was gradually evolvinginto the new norm, replacing the macho sincerity andyou-better-take-this-concept-album-seriously of progressiverock, which would help explain punks delayed acceptanceinto the mainstream and its late-blossoming stature: it came atthe very beginning of a decades-long process of incorporatingirony into the mainstream, in which a show like Late Nightwith David Letterman was key. In 1976, Ramones soundedboth very wrong and very right. Today it just sounds veryright, not because the music on the album has changed butbecause the conditions into which that music enters have.Listeners coming to Ramones for thefirst time today are conditioned to accept it because they haveheard it beforeperhaps without knowing itin the verymusic that the Ramones helped to create. In this sense, theRamones career is about creating the conditions under whichtheir music would be retrospectively accepted. As Jon Savagehas suggested in his study of British punk: In the mid-1960s,pop had been modernistic: reveling in an everlasting present,

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without reflection or theory. In the late 1960s, pop becameprogressive, an idea implying some forward, unitary motion.Early seventies stars like David Bowie and Roxy Music brokeup this linear motion with a plethora of references taken fromhigh art, literature and Hollywood kitsch. As the newgeneration, the Sex Pistols were a finely tuned mixture of theauthentic and the constructed.77

Besides, isnt all performance, whether writing, acting,singing, dancing, or whatever, self-conscious by its verynature? Perhaps, but punk was predicated on a deliberateassault on the elaborate, over-produced, self-serious music ofthe era, and it is this reactionary nature that imbued punk witha complicated ironic stance. In short, unlike the music of itsday, which sought to extend a tradition (i.e., Led Zeppelin orEric Clapton extending the blues), punk sought to rejecttradition. For even though its true the music of the Ramonespoints back to an earlier time, as Craig Leon and others havenoted, this earlier music is referenced not so much for itssound or style, but rather for its energy. While its pretty easyto hear the blues in Zeppelins Dazed and Confused, its notso easy to hear Hermans Hermits in Loudmouth. Itsharder to think of another rock album that, upon is initialappearance, sounded so little like anything that had comebefore it.

Is it surprising that a movement like punkwith its rejectionof the musical indulgence and decadence of progressiverockwould embrace the iconography of fascism, which alsorejected decadence? I suppose now is as good a time as anyto say that I think people who have written about punk haveby and large tended to go to great lengths to dismiss,

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underplay, minimize, and even ignore the fascist iconographyin the punk scene.78 Dick Hebdige has argued that the use of the swastika, forinstance, cannot be read as a political sign, and that, indeed,most punks were not generally sympathetic to the parties ofthe extreme right. He goes on to say, the swastika was wornbecause it was guaranteed to shock.79 Stacy Thompson, meanwhile, argues Nazi codes, as usedby punks, drew attention to unequal economic relations underthe capitalist system.80

Mary Harron comes closest to best explaining the use offascist imagery in punk and by the Ramones in particular.Joey Ramone was a nice guy, he was no savageright-winger, she has said. The Ramones wereproblematic. It was hard to work out what their politics were.It had this difficult edge, but the most important thing wasneedling the older generation.81 If liberal humanist rock critics and scholars today are waryof dwelling on the conservative, sometimes reactionarypolitical dimensions of punk (Johnny Ramone was a longtimeconservative), while at the same time devoting page afterpage to delineating the socially-engaged political subtleties ofBob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Ani DeFranco, then its atthe risk of minimizing one of the many complexities of punk.Joe Harrington has suggested that these flirtations with fascistsentiments and iconography were the result of the politics ofboredom, noting that wed reached the stage where youngpeople who could afford the luxury of playing Rock n Rollstrictly for the amusement of it had grown so blase that theyliterally wanted to see the world disintegrate for their ownamusement. Far from being anti-war like the hippies, the new

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kids welcomed carnage of any kind as a kind of liberationfrom their dull shopping mall surroundings. 82

Dear reader, please permit me one anecdote here. The firstRamones song I remember hearing was The KKK Took MyBaby Away, from 1981s Pleasant Dreams. I had found thealbum in my girlfriends record collection (was she mygirlfriend or was I just hanging around with her one summer?)and I thought it was afunny and scary song at the same time, and of all thepost-1977 Ramones music, thats the song that still remindsme the most of their earlier records. I borrowed the album,played it a lot, and wondered: How could they get away withusing the KKK like that in a song? Why wasnt there acontroversy or something? It wasnt that the lyrics of the songwere racist; in fact, the narrator was obviously dating anAfrican American girl, and I assumed he was white, andtherefore not racist. But it wasnt that, it was those letters:KKK. Not that I was Mr. Sensitive, or anything, but thoseletterslike the symbol of the swastikathey just werentthings you casually used in pop songs.

The sense of disequilibrium and unease thats generated bymoments like this is perhaps something that we ought topreserve, rather than justify or explain away, which is whyarguments that punk (or the Ramones) used Nazi imagery orreferences for mere shock value, or to draw attention to theiroutsider status, seem lame. On their first album, the Nazireferences (and other references to violence) might be ironic,or they might not be. Their power resides in precisely thisambiguity. In this regard, the Ramones were part of a largermovement in the United States that was producing what film

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critic Robin Wood refers to as incoherent texts. Wooddoesnt use the word incoherent to indicate a disparagement,but rather to refer to movies, primarily fromthe 1970s, that reflect the social, moral, and politicalinstability of the era. As Woods says: I am concerned withfilms that dont wish to be ... incoherent but are sononetheless, works in which the drive toward the ordering ofexperience has been visibly defeated.83 For Wood, films like Taxi Driver and Looking for Mr.Good-bar cannot provide easy endings or clear-cut heroes andanti-heroes, not because they are bad or poorly made films,but rather because they are products and commentators on thecrisis of confidence that characterized mid-1970s America.The unresolved contradictions that make the Ramones firstalbum so dizzyingare the songs sincere or ironic? are thefascist references political or nave expressions of defiance? ifthe Ramones hate hippies, why do they look like hippies withtheir long hair?speak to a moment in American historywhen such ambiguity was part of the larger fabric of culturallife.

I dont believe that one should devote ones life to morbidself-attention. I believe that someone should be a person likeother people.

Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

The plane rose and the camera went on. The girlfriend and Italked. The drinks arrived. I had poetry, and a fine woman.Life was picking up. But the traps, Chinaski, watch the traps.You fought a long fight to put the word down the way youwanted. Dont let a little adulation and a movie camera pullyou out of position. Remember what Jeffers saideven the

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strongest men can be trapped, like God when he once walkedon earth.

Charles Bukowski, South of No North84

Society appeared to be in a state of advanced disintegration,yet there was no serious possibility of the emergence of acoherent and comprehensive alternative.

Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan85

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Ramones in Their Time

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Details of the trajectory that led the Ramones from theunderground scene to a record contract have been welldocumented; Ill briefly touch on them here. In early 1975,Lisa Robinson, who edited Hit Parader and Rock Scenemagazines, saw them at CBGB and began championing themin her magazines. As Joey Ramone recalls: Lisa came downto see us, she was blown away by us. She said that wechanged her life. She started writing about us in Rock Scene,and then Lenny Kaye would write about us and we startedgetting more press like the Village Voice, word was gettingout, and people started coming down.86 Robinson also convinced Danny Fields, who had managedthe Stooges and wasan influential person on the New York music scene, to see theband; he would eventually end up managing them beginningin November 1975. According to Fields the Ramones hadeverything I ever liked. The songs were short. You knew whatwas happening within five seconds. You didnt have toanalyze and/or determine what it was you were hearing orseeing. It was all there.87

The Ramones received further exposure, this time on a morenational scope, after the CBGB 1975 summer festival ofunsigned bands. As Tommy has noted the turning point waswhen Hilly decided to publicize the place [CBGB] by havingthe Summer of Rock Festival in 75. It got a lot of publicityand after that the place was alway