Who invented punk rock?

Give this a listen, "Birthday Special" from Nadir's Big Chance.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rc6WbPLwsZQ

 

Yeah I heard about this...but why wouldn't they exist?
They just borrowed from the song like they did with many others.

I think the song that had the biggest influence on the RAMONES was I Wanna Be Your Dog.
It's arguably the STOOGES most Punk lyric (which the RAMONES borrowed heavily with the "I Wanna...") but more importantly I think it inspired the RAMONES trademark down-stokes.


Also...listen to this.

 

Link doesn't work but I'll get my hands on it
Edit~OK I heard it and I think I will buy the album...thanks guys.

 

Neil Sedaka

 

Yeah...it saddens me they were turned into a Pop band early on.

 

If they hadn't, we wouldn't have had the Stones, The Who, Ramones, Pistols, etc.

 

Can you explain?
Yes, they were a big inspiration on Modern music but I can't help think what would have been if Lennon had his way and they remained a Rock n Roll band early on.
And why wouldn't we have the STONES?

 

I can't believe you need to ask.

Without the Beatles, modern history - as we know it - would be unrecognizable. Man would never have traveled to the moon, computers would never have gone beyond the pocket calculator stage, we'd have been listening to endless rewrites of "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" for the past 60-years!!!

 

Malcolm Mclaren

 

Consider that it was George Harrison who suggested to the guy who turned down the Beatles that the Stones be signed to Decca Records, the label that rejected the Fabs, that one of the Stones earliest singles, I Wanna Be Your Man was written by Lennon & McCartney for the Stones before the Beatles recorded it themselves with Ringo singing lead, and that the Stones first manager Andrew Loog Oldham originally worked as an assistant to the Beatles manager Brian Epstein before taking on the Stones and used his experience working with Epstein in shaping the Stones career, just twisting things a bit so that image-wise the Stones would appear to be the polar opposite of the Beatles. Also keep in mind that early on the Stones mirrored a lot of what the Beatles did on their records before returning to their Blues roots during the second phase of their careers.

And the Beatles were always a Rock & Roll band who delved into Pop just as other bands like the Stones did at the time and afterwards. All you got to do is listen to Helter Skelter, that's as raw and raunchy as anything the Stones or Who did. Early Elvis Costello, the Ramones and the Clash are considered Punk, but they also dipped into Pop as well.

 

Sounds pretty Pop to me.

 

This one sounds like Pop too, always liked this one.

 

And then there's,....

 

And, lest we forget,...

 

Also nice to know that the Pistols could be pretty decent blokes when they wanted to be.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/how_the_sex_pistols_saved_christmas

 

???
I wasn't arguing with you I just thought the part that the BEATLES invented almost everything was an odd reply to my lamenting on what the BEATLES might have been if Brian & Co didn't turn them into a vocal Pop group early on.
I want more Twist And Shout and less Love Me Do.

However, saying none of these other bands would have existed without them is ridiculous.
It's like saying the BEATLES wouldn't have existed without Buddy Holly.
The BEATLES were a great band that had more influence on Pop Culture over any other band but they didn't invent Rock N Roll.

 

I'd vote for Punk Floyd ;-)

 

Never said they did, but they certainly helped to make it popular again and brought back attention to the major pioneers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Arthur Alexander and Buddy Holly who were almost all forgotten till the Beatles brought their songs back to a wider audience.

 

I didn't see Al Gore on the list...

 

I've always thought with songs like Under my Thumb, Paint it Black, etc., the Stones were the first to exhibit the attitude that came to be known as punk. Of course I'm more a 60's guy, so what do I know?

 

Warning: long and long-winded post, some of it revised from posts on earlier threads:

As I’ve said in other threads on this and related topics, I don’t think that it makes much sense to seek examples outside of the historical moment of the mid-late '70's to pinpoint the “origin” of Punk. The term as we know and use it refers to that moment’s disruption of the musical culture's own business-as-usual, and it did so by emphasizing and exaggerating a strain in the music that was always there, but not always dominant, elements connected with the music's own original rebellious force, physical impact, and simplicity. This--at least I would argue--is why it seems to make so much sense to so many of us (although ultimately I'm not sure it DOES make sense) to offer suggestions from the '60's and even the '50's. It was the attitude of many of these older records that so many performers in the "punk" moment of the late '70's were trying to revive (and they did so in many different ways, emphasizing and really ultimately exaggerating different elements).

There are continuities that can be drawn between all of these sources and the mid to late '70's moment that brought us the Ramones in NY, the Electric Eels, Rocket from the Tombs/Dead Boys/Pere Ubu in Cleveland, the Saints in Brisbane, etc., and etc., and then very quickly the Sex Pistols in the UK and everything else on both sides of the pond. The Velvet Underground were a key connector because they were themselves reviving and exaggerating certain basic raw elements of the music, while also connecting it with literary and avant-garde elements, leaving a blueprint, as has been noted, for an important strain in what would happen a few years later. Similar things can be said about the Stooges, and some other bands. But I also don’t think it’s right to identify the VU or any of the others as originators of what we later came to call “punk.”

That’s because “punk” as we know it arose out of the artistic needs and energies of a particular moment that not only gave the elements it grabbed hold of a new set of meanings, but also turned them into something with some considerable cultural force and identity (again, old things bent to new purposes and presented in new ways).

So it’s not just stylistic elements or attitudes you need to think about, it’s also the whole cultural package and impact and meaning. I think probably the key moment, the lightening rod that attracted and conducted the energy to make punk into, as we’d say now-a-days, “a thing,” was the release of the first Ramone’s album in the spring of ’76 and the parallel mutant mayfly moment of the Sex Pistols in the UK, which happened because McLaren plugged a bunch of similarly disaffected young people into the energies of the same mid-seventies NYC moment. The other parallel scenes and moments in places like Cleveland, etc. and etc. took comparable shapes and grew out of similar forces (they weren’t unique to NY), but they would have remained odd and local had it not been for the cultural energies that were focused and unleashed by the Ramones and the Pistols. People in each of these scenes were asking similar versions of the same set of questions and coming up with similar-sounding answers, but it was the NY and London versions that got heard in a way that created more than just local scenes, and that of course inspired more and more local variations (that process is still going on).

Once the door jams were kicked out and punk exploded as a large-scale cultural phenomenon, the changes it wrought in the music industry (especially the introduction of a radical DIY ethic that governed not only the music, but the way it was recorded, distributed, and sold) brought some of the older musics (now seen as “proto-punk”) to wider attention (in some cases for the first time) along with all the music from those odd local scenes, which would never have found a reasonably wide audience otherwise. This resulted in the odd fact that we often refer to music that preceded the punk explosion (like those early Pere Ubu singles) "post"-punk.

If you think about "punk" as a label for an attitude or for a musical vocabulary that was an essential part of rock and roll from the start, and then you start searching for a "first punk record," you're answer is going to be the same as your pick for the first rock record itself (this is how we end up with Elvis, etc. showing up in these discussions). No point in repeating that exercise unless you want to find a new way to ask the question you’re really asking, which has more to do with what the essence of Rock is than with its material history.

I think it’s more useful to look really carefully at all of the various things that were going on in the music--especially in those various underground scenes (NYC especially, but also Detroit, Brisbane, Cleveland, and various urban areas of the UK, etc., and etc.) from the very late '60's until that moment sometime in the late '76 when something happened to cause elements of these scenes and their musics to coalesce into something bigger and to begin to gain the wide audience and press attention that led to lots of people who were seeking an answer to the dissatisfactions of that time seeing new possibilities for themselves as artists and listeners.

That’s the process, and the catalyzing moment that the release of the first Ramones album and those early Pistols singles created (along with the barrage of similar things that suddenly became audible in their wake) is just one part of it. I'm much more interested in the process than I am in trying to identify a key turning point. Such cultural changes seldom really pivot on one point anyway.

L.

 

There's a great Julian Temple film of that - Never Mind the Baubles.

 

Status Quo invented The Ramones

 

Gets at a bunch of basics. Thoughtful post. The OP framed this as “invented”, which is surely not the greatest way to get at this genesis, which is more believably a facet of a cyclical socio-cultural renewal that is as old as the species. Even more reason to hem in the discussion to a particular time.