The artist Pete Townshend said helped him invent punk: “In complete accord”
Any archaeologist will tell you that pinpointing the exact origin of a certain species, civilisation, or time period is a far more complicated task than it might seem, and that is certainly true when looking at the origins of punk rock.
It might have infected the mainstream during the mid-1970s, but that sneering attitude and abrasive sound stretches back much further, to the sounds of the swinging sixties and songwriters like Pete Townshend.
On the face of it, The Who aren’t the most obvious candidates for being punk’s ground zero. After all, the mod rock outfit quickly summited the dizzying heights of the pop charts with their first single releases back in 1965, and they have presided over the British rock scene like royalty for upwards of half a century, at this point, hardly in keeping with the grassroots, DIY ethos of the punk age.
When you look at era-defining anthems like ‘My Generation’, though, it is easy to connect the dots between Townshend and the later explosion of punk rock. Particularly during the early years of The Who, the band were devoted to those short, sharp, and endearingly abrasive anthems which seemed to speak directly to the disenfranchised youth of post-war Britain, in a similar fashion to how groups like The Clash or the Sex Pistols spoke directly to the disenfranchised youth of the 1970s a decade later.
Indeed, many of those groups who populated the stage of The Roxy Club – London’s punk centrepoint – back in the 1970s, a lot of them cited The Who as being a major influence, despite punk’s willingness to burn down the rock and roll mainstream and start again. The Clash, for instance, had multiple songs directly inspired by the riffs and chord progressions of Townshend’s early work, and the likes of Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols went as far as to perform cover versions of certain Who tracks.
Even if The Who did come from the origin of the species, though, Townshend did not act in isolation. Across the Atlantic Ocean, there were many more proto-punk outfits bubbling under the surface, ready to burst onto the mainstream in a flash of rock and roll anarchy. Namely, Iggy Pop and The Stooges paved the way for America to abandon the spaced-out ‘peace and love’ rock of the hippie age and pursue something much more confrontational and amphetamine-fueled.
“Iggy and I are in complete accord. I did the talk; he did the walk,” Townshend said of his brother-in-punk during a 2007 chat with Dean Goodman. “OK, I did some walking too. It was impossible to be in a band in Shepherd’s Bush or Flint, Michigan, and not to prefigure punk. It was in our genes,” he shared, equating the rather grey and depressing surroundings of both songwriters, which spurred them on to create their own worlds.
Still, Townshend was keen to note that The Who and The Stooges hardly adopted the same kind of sound. “What is strange is how the Who, the MC5 and the Stooges saw the future,” he shared. “We responded to what we saw in different ways. I saw a spiritual or artistic solution. The MC5 saw street fighting. The Stooges saw frenetic shamanism and outback, frontier-style free living on the frontline. All of these things have come true,” the guitarist concluded. “In fact, impossibly, they have all come to be in parallel.”
Regardless of those three groups’ Nostradamus qualities, the inherent sounds of each band soon found their way into the repertoires of the punk generation. Even if, by the time that 1976 rolled around, The Stooges were long gone, The MC5 had disbanded for a second time, and The Who were gradually winding down their rock and roll rebellion, the energy and punk spirit of their early recordings certainly lived on.
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