What was the first Punk Rock-type song? "Louie, Louie"? "96 Tears"? "Talk Talk"?

In early 20th century prison slang, a "punk" was a weak, passive guy who served as the proprietary sexual outlet for a bad-*** inmate (same for "gunsel", according to D. Hammett). Sometime in the 50's "punk" came to mean a tough rebel-type male with no respect for the law and/or decency.

Does anyone know the history of the transition?

Jim K.

 

Well, if Charlie Feathers' "One Hand Loose," from '56, isn't 'punk' in its purest form, then nothing is.

 

Before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was in a band (I can't recall the name) that recorded a song called "You're Driving Me Insane".

 

I agree with Jack White ; anyone who was listening to garage bands in the '60s want to chime in on when they 1st heard the term "punk" to refer to this music (Sonics, etc)? I read somewhere that Nick Tosches used it in the early '70s...

It's a similar argument to the "when was the 1st Rock & Roll record?" debate. Just because something, with hindsight, seems like a natural precursor, doesn't necessarily make it so. Also confused by the fact that in England in the late '70s we never used the term "punk rock"...it was always just "punk".

I stand by my earlier post that all the "punk" influences, however incredible, sound more like other music (e.g. r'n'b-type chord changes, etc) than the post-CBGBs/Pistols sound.

& FWIW, I probably listen more to Link Wray/Sonics/Stooges etc than the post-'75 "punk rock" I grew up on...& I also don't consider Nirvana to be punk (rock)!

John

 

Or how about "I Can Only Give You Everything" - Them or MC5 version.

There are many good nominees, but when snarling mutant-Jagger vocals and the BIG BEAT are used as criteria, I'll have to agree that The Sonics were first.

 

I'll vote for "Life's Too Short" by the LaFayettes; it has all the elements of "Talk Talk" and all of those, but about two years sooner.

 

and also "Why Don't You Smile Now" covered in great punky fashion by The Downliners Sect.

 

I nominate Love's "My Little Red Book" if only to be able to claim that Burt Bacharach wrote the first punk song!

-BZync

 

The thing is that most mid-late 70s (pre-hardcore) punk was trying to get straight back to that 50s/60s primitive/garage rock sound that had been lost somewhere in the later part of the 60s as everything drifted towards psychedelia, long songs with drawn out soloing or jam sessions. In my eyes much of that music is interchangeable, played with the growing intensity, volume levels and differing degrees of musicianship of progressive generations the sound is colored to fit certain applicable genre classifications. The Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones and their contemporaries all covered volumes of 50s and 60s rock and roll and turned many of their younger fans back onto this music.

 

I agree with that totally. In fact, didn't The Ramones say something like they wanted to write songs that sounded like the '50's and '60's girl groups?

 

And I argue that there was a continuum - not a break. The Ramones and Pistols did take it to a rawer and louder level, but their notoriety (especially Pistols at the time) causes people to think that punk rock / new punk started in 1976.

Some "punky" bands between the garage guys and the Ramones/Pistols/Damned etc.:

MC5
Stooges
Flamin Groovies
Deviants
Pink Fairies
Hawkwind
Motorhead
New York Dolls
Dictators
Imperial Dogs

and that's just a handful of the most obvious off the top of my head.

 

So, you're saying that the drug-ridden, hyper-sexuality, gritty anti-'summer of love' hipness and cool, standoffish arrogance does not qualify as Punk? I think we have to disagree. IMO, The Velvet Underground in their sound, appearance and subject matter were the very essence of Punk. Without them, I don't think there would have been a Stooges or New York Dolls.

 

Agreed, at least with your 1st & 3rd sentences, but in the process (imho of course), they took these ideas & made something, if not completely, but quite different, in the same way that Elvis sounds kinda like Dean Martin, The Inkspots & Jackie Brenston, but at the same time, nothing like them.

John.

 

Question was;
"... First Punk Rock-Type Song".
So you don't have too worry about when the term Punk Rock became relevant. Nor, if it was done by a 'official' Punk Rock band. Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Beatles DID look Punked Out in Hamburg. The Who were Mod's. However, they did Punk Rock. Glad too see The Sonics getting dap! My personal "first" is Elvis's Little Sister. However, I'll defer too those that can predate that.
The prison term for "Punk", is correct. I believe it found it's way into general society to address the youth that did not toe the line. As in general society, we don't commonly have men forcing sexual act's on other men. So it went from the guy who would give it up, without much of a fight, too the kid on the corner who showed no respect for the status quo.
If you really want to be a Punk Band, you have to present yourself, to the point that other bands dis you. Nobody like The Stooges, when they first hit the scene. The idea was to go to the show and hate on Iggy. Nirvana, were not the industry's darling too start. And quite a few people were disgusted by Elvis. Think anybody was jumping up and down to sign or have The Ramones open for them? I love DC5 Glad All Over, however it's a love song. And Punk, ain't no love song (paraphrasing Johnny Lydon). If it's not despised by general society and even the biz, it ain't PUNK!

 

You know, it would be a really good idea to actually READ a post you're responding to before setting fingers to the keyboard.

Nowhere in my post (which you quoted in full) did I say that 60s punk rock was referred to by that name at the time it was actually being recorded -- or "in their own time," if you prefer.

What I said was that the term was applied to this music BEFORE it was applied to the music of The Ramones, Sex Pistols, etc.

In fact, I cited a possible source for the first use of the term: BOMP! magazine, or possibly The Rock Marketplace -- both of which were early 70s publications. (I know I was reading The Rock Marketplace in 1973, for example).

Before posting I checked the liner notes of the original Nuggets LP to see if Lenny Kaye might have used it there, but it appears he did not.

Nevertheless, my original point stands: what we now more commonly refer to as "garage rock" was referred to as "punk rock" in the early 1970s -- before The Ramones and others ever came along.

No. See above. Nuggets was first issued on LP by Elektra in 1972. As I said, "punk rock" does not appear to be in Lenny Kaye's original liner notes, though I didn't read them word for word last night.

"Punk rock" was used to refer to 60s garage bands before 70s punk ever existed. Period. I was there; were you?

As The Ramones might say, "Pleased ta meetchoo." To repeat, I never once said "contemporaneously." As far as commonly, at the time no one other than the fanzines were referring to this musical style *at all.* But those who did refer to it called it "punk rock."

This is irrelevant. Calling a person a "punk" is entirely different from applying the term to a genre of music. That's kind of like citing all the old blues songs that have "rock and roll" used as a verb. The fact still remains that Alan Freed, while he didn't coin the term itself, was the first to apply it to a genre of music.

Once again, it was used "in the literature" of the only people who cared about this music as a genre at the time -- the fanzines of the early 70s.

All terms that come into "public consciousness" have to originate somewhere. The likely scenario is exactly the reverse of the one you postulated. Rather than "punk rock" being first applied to The Ramones, et al, and then being applied retroactively to 60s bands, what happened was that the people who wrote for fanzines such as TRM!, BOMP!, Creem!, etc., heard The Ramones and said, "Gee, these guys sound a lot like the 60s bands we've been going on about for the past few years...we can call them 'punk' too."

Finally, there's nothing "vague" about it. One more time: punk rock was a term applied to The Seeds, The Standells, The Chocolate Watchband, et al, in the earlier half of the 70s, before anyone knew who The Ramones were.

Yes you could.

Happy to be of service.

 

I don't disagree with your last statement at all.

It all comes down to how strict you want your definitions to be. I generally -- for reasons I guess I've never bothered to think about -- tend to draw the lines narrowly...though this in no way precludes my enjoyment of a broad spectrum of music.

When I think of 60s punk, I think of a bunch of acne-ridden high school kids from the hinterlands somewhere playing cheap guitars through tiny amps they begged their dads to buy for them. I don't think of a classically trained musician with a viola or a band financed by a renowned pop art icon.

It's all semantics, really. I absolutely LOVE The Velvets, agree totally on how influential they were to future generations of punks, and how punkish much of their music sounds. I guess I just don't call them a punk rock band...sorta like how I can't call The Kinks one either, even though I love the early stuff to distraction ("All Day and All of the Night" is absolutely in my top five all-time favorite songs).

 

The early Guess Who had some very good garage/punk songs in 1965, '66 such as "Clock On The Wall", "It's My Pride". Butch Cummings' singing was not far off of vocalists of the day such as Eric Burdon.

Has anyone mentioned early Stones? "Satisfaction", "Get Off Of My Cloud" to name a couple. I remember seeing an interview about 17, 18 years ago w/ Julian Cope. Cope said "World Shut Your Mouth" was his nod to the Stones "Get Off Of My Cloud".

Somewhere in my book collection I have the first large edition of the NME (New Musical Express) Book Of Rock, c. 1975. The definiton of punk rock in that encyclopedia mentions the 1960s one-hit garage bands such as The Troggs and many of the U.S. bands featured on the Nuggest collections. This edition came out just as The Sex Pistols, Dammed, Ramones, etc. were coming onto the music scene.

 

"Clock on the Wall" is a GREAT song. I was travelling in Canada in the summer of 1966 and heard it played a lot on the radio.

But there were plenty of American rock bands mining the same territory in 1966, and earlier.

 

Oh no, I agree totally. I did not mean to imply that there were any breaks. Most people consider the majority of the bands you listed to be proto-punk if not punk themselves and some of their songs (especially The Stooges, The MC5 and The Dolls) are the ones routinely sighted as "the first" punk songs even though they are pre-dated by The Sonics and some of the other acts mentioned upthread.

 

Oh absolutely.

Some dark lyrics in "Clock On The Wall". I think Randy Bachman wrote the song.


Verse
"Th clock on the wall says 12 noon
I gotta get up soon
Meet my friend Clive
Start drinkin' by 5
Then I wish I weren't alive

The clock the wall says quarter to 9
I gotta meet my girl on time
She puts me down and then
By twenty to 10
I'm out drinkin' again

Chorus
The clock on the wall keeps a pushin' me
That's not the way I want my life to be
If you take any pushin' from that clock on the wall
You won't be happy at all

The clock on the wall strikes the midnight hour
I'm feelin' dirty and sour..."

 

Find any good punkers?

I remember getting a promo of the original "Nuggets" album on Elektra during my college radio days in 1972. Needless to say, I gave it a lot of airplay and wondered how Lenny Kaye had overlooked all of the 60s garage bands that I grew up with like the Hangmen, the British Walkers and the Fallen Angels. Fanzines like Greg Shaw's "Who Put the Bomp" soon appeared and brought the many local 60s regional scenes into focus through their coverage of locally released garage band records throughout the USA and beyond. Hipster fanzine types and 60s record collectors routinely referred to 60s garage band music as "punk" in 1973-1975 before the accepted mainstream definition of "punk rock" was applied to the NY and UK acts that are now said to define the term. The use of "punk" during this brief transitional period referred to aggressive, crudely-recorded 1964-1968 rock & roll al la the Sonics, early Seeds, Music Machine, 13th Floor Elevators etc. Not surprisingly, most people followed Lenny Kaye's paradigm and did not separate garage and psychedelic music as much as the hardcore fanatics in both camps do today (perhaps due to the fact that you could still find rare garage band records AND really good LSD at bargain prices in 1974). "Punk" was also used as an adjective back then to describe snotty, aggressive rock music with attitude, for example:
"That MC5 'High Time' record might be too punk for your sister" or "Gene Vincent really sounds punk on 'Cat Man'." My local record dealer in 1975 would always ask me if I "found any good punkers" when I'd return from a flea market safari because he was servicing an overseas collector market for Mouse & the Traps 45s even back then. As far as the first punk rock record, who knows? The Kingsmen's hit version of "Louie Louie" was probably the first one that made any money. Frank Zappa and the Mothers were making fun of teenage psychedelic garage bands as far back as 1968 with "Flower Punk" on "We're Only In It For The Money". Heck, I'll cast my vote for the B-side of the Rumblers 1963 "Boss" 45. I can't remember the title offhand, but it was a vocal and was pretty damn "punk" for the time.
Hey Steve, why did you leave if off the DCC Rumblers disc? Woulda made a nice bonus cut...

 

While I certainly would never give it the honor of being the first punk (sounding) song, The Rezillos covered Glad All Over and they didn't deviate too far from the original and yet their version is very much a punk song. I have a hard time ever taking anything John Lydon says too seriously. The Ramones had plenty of sappy love songs, The Clash had 1-2-Crush on You, The Damned had Love Song and that's without getting into the darker side of love that punk songs routinely explore.

 

Ok but in objective reality the disgust and outcast factor in most cases is the reaction to the music not the catalyst. From the original 50s ravers to the 60s psychpunks to the 70s back to the basics punkers the motivations for picking up a guitar and making an elemental racket were basically the same-flashing ego,making money,getting laid,acting rebellious,scoring a record deal and last but not least the love of raw unadorned musicmaking. Everything gets segmented and retrofitted and pidgeonholed after the fact but hey as the Wailers said "Out Of Our Tree" but come to our concerts and buy our records!

 

Burton was known as Butch? I'd love to see him in a photo with a flattop.

 

Thank you...my point exactly!