“It wasn’t the first time”: Was punk rock truly original?
We’re all familiar with the saying by now: punk rock changed the world. It was the first time angry young people picked up guitars and screamed about how rough they had it. It was the working class striking back against the privately educated rock establishment—bands in capes playing 25-minute synth solos. Punk stripped music away from larger-than-life icons and gave it back to the people, using simple chords played at ear-bleeding volume—something that had never been seen or heard before.
Or was it really that novel a phenomenon? It’s a neat little story with a ring of truth to it. At least in the mainstream, the rock scene of the late 1970s was in some pretty dire, self-indulgent straits. It was time for a shake-up, and punk was the result. People put more cultural cache in punk than a mere changing of the guard, though. So, what gives? Was punk really that important, or was it just a rehash of everything that came before?
In the mid-1960s, there was a strain of rock music inspired by the loud, heavy immediacy of rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll. However, it also replaced the sheer virtuosity of the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard with the awkward, untrained enthusiasm of a bunch of suburban kids in their garage. The likes of The Sonics, the MC5 and especially The Stooges laid down a blueprint with garage rock that the punks followed so closely that the only inaccurate thing about calling those bands ‘proto-punk’ is that there may not be much ‘proto’ to them.
Garage rock was a particularly American phenomenon, but punk rock—at least the leather-jacketed, safety pin-through-the-nose kind—was as English as steak and kidney pie. Sure, some English scenesters were listening to Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, but not enough to single-handedly fuel the punk movement, right? You’re not wrong, but there was an English version of the same phenomenon that gave the world garage rock too.
The pub rock scene of the early 1970s was essentially punk without the socio-political conscience—loud, fast and slightly shambolic takes on vintage rock ‘n’ roll tunes played in a tight-knit London-based gig circuit. The difference was that the best of the garage rock set was able to effectively carry their appeal onto records, making classics like Raw Power (The Stooges), (Turn On) The Music Machine (The Machine), and the deathless compilation album Nuggets (Eri Esittajia). Pub rock was a resolutely live phenomenon, with its leading lights, Joe Strummer and Ian Dury, needing it to evolve into punk before making records that reflected their genius.
So, had punk rock all been done before? Certainly, if you asked the establishment of the time. When asked what he thought of punk when it broke through in a 1995 interview, David Gilmour sniffed, “I thought it was quite lively. I don’t think it’s had a particularly lasting significance…it wasn’t the first time it happened, either. I mean, people being incredibly rude and playing music incredibly badly and being incredibly obnoxious has always been a teenage sort of thing.” He’s not entirely wrong about that last part, but to say that it had no lasting significance is, to use the parlance of our times, cope.
Of course, he wouldn’t get it. You’re asking Pink Floyd’s guitarist and singer about punk rock. You might as well ask a dinosaur about the beauty of comets. Sure, there had been music movements broadly similar to punk, at least in its most basic summer of ’77 form. It’s the music that inspired popular music as we know it today, which is what makes it matter. It was the spark that lit the fuse for decades of rock development.
This makes punk more than just a bunch of teenagers stumbling through a double-speed 12-bar blues with a sneer. In fact, it’s what makes it one of the most important forms of popular music ever invented.
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