Unvarnished, Detailed, West Coast
by John Doe
Punk rock songs are not:
all screaming & yelling
3 chords (most Ramones songs are not)
2 minutes long
stupid lyrics w/ no leads
fast, loud & atonal
Punk rock songs are:
provocative
immediate
hook driven (title usually repeated many times)
specific
fast, slow & in between
Misconceptions about punk-rock songwriting are as wide & flat as the city of Los Angeles itself. Maybe it even begins w/ the definition of punk rock. What it was & what it became are two vastly different things. Even by 1982 that definition had changed from anything that wasn’t “old & in the way” to “faster/louder.” Provocative? Yes. Fast? Not necessarily. Simple? Yes. 3 chords? No. Not too serious? Definitely. Culturally significant? Always.
It’s a small wonder that the Los Angeles basin didn’t partially lift off the ground w/ all the songwriting going on between 1977 & ’82—or maybe it did. Just as in NYC & London, the differences between writers, bands & subjects were spread all over the map. Blondie & The Ramones came from the same minimalist pool, went to the beach, but you would never be confused who it was when listening to them. In Los Angeles the same went for Black Randy & the Metro Squad, The Germs, The Weirdos, The Alley Cats, Fear, The Dickies, The Go-Go’s, The Plugz, etc. Blondie had beauty, camp, melody & power. The Ramones had power, camp, speed & minimalism. Black Randy had camp, humor, funk & cynicism. The Alleym Cats had cynicism, technique & beauty. Black Flag had power, violence & message. X had poetry, power, ability & violence. All had similar traits but w/ different emphasis on each part of the overall sound. The binding element was that all were searching for something, something beyond that invisible line that had been drawn between “then” & “now.” You would never listen to Black Flag & mistake them for The Weirdos, The Dickies, X, or The Plugz. You may not even have known who it was, but you would damn well find out.
We told real stories, exaggerated the facts, or just plain made them up. We commented on a world that, to us, had become unbelievably crass & stupid, a world that was just recognizing the separation between rich & poor. We had been told that the neutron bomb could be the end of us all, so The Weirdos wrote a song about it, using all the power without the destruction. We wanted to cut loose & have fun. This was a lesson learned from The Ramones, The Damned & Blondie & perhaps why Television or Patti Smith weren’t as influential in LA. Devo knew how to poke fun & blaze a totally different trail. There was a fascination w/ mental illness because we all could identify w/ being abnormal. Maybe that’s where jerking around while playing started? These were teenagers or recently post-teens who still had no idea what they were “going to do w/ their lives.” Because we didn’t think any of us would be around, creatively or otherwise, in 2 or 3 years, we certainly didn’t take any of this shit seriously. But that didn’t keep everyone from meaning every bit of what we played, sang, or said. These were songs that were simple enough for any musicians to hear & think, “I could write something like that.” These were songs you could hear once, probably catch the title & possibly remember the next morning. These songs were meant to be played live, loud & sloppy. Having an actual record that someone could put on their turntable was still off in the distance for most of us.
I imagined early rock ‘n’ rollers with the same creative guts, cranking out the basics in sweaty clubs where underage drinking & carrying-on happened every night. The same probably went for early British Invasion, psychedelic, and garage bands as they figured out their individual sounds. They kept things uncomplicated but intuitive & real. Yes, there was the advance guard—MC5, The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Velvet Underground, The Sonics—and they were heroes we could grasp. But more important to our small circle were the originators—Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Wanda Jackson, Jerry Lee & every Sun record, Big Joe Turner, & Fats Domino. Others looked up to David Bowie, Roxy Music, New York Dolls & to most of us in Hollywood that’s why we accepted everyone’s sexuality & style, but that’s another chapter.
Punk-rock songwriting brought songs back to “the people” because Fleetwood Mac, The Moody Blues, The Eagles, The Beatles, etc. had gotten so full of themselves & full of pompous art that no amount of “Get Back” could encourage an average guy/girl to believe they could start a band & make songs that would communicate. Maybe it wasn’t those established groups’ fault, but after so many years, so much money, so many songs, so much insulation from reality, such ridiculously long jams & trying to write the most general subject matter so that the maximum stadium size audience could “relate” to what you were “laying down, man,” it was just too much bullshit to still call it rock ‘n’ roll.
I wanted to tell stories about this city that filled my eyes w/ decay & anonymity. A place where random violence breathed in & out like the ocean. I didn’t want to tell stories like Bob Dylan but like Bukowski (w/out the lurid sex but a suggestion of it)—minimal, unvarnished, detailed West Coast, filled w/ the kind of darkness The Doors and Love had promised. We dug for images & sounds opposite to what everyone in America thought of Los Angeles at the time. Our melodies were simple & chord changes oftentimes went one half step off of what was expected. We were contrary & always reached for something just left of center. But at least we always had two verses & a chorus you could identify over the shitty sound system and the audience jumping all over each other. These were the first songs I’d written that were actually any good. Exene was a partner, coconspirator & if not the lyricist, then the catalyst. She would write a line like “Johnny Hit & Run Pauline,” tape it to the door & a few months later that story would come to me. Even though she’d never written a song, Exene could write lyrics on a page, top to bottom, as if the music was already there. All I had to do was match some music I’d been working on to the cadence of the words. Other pages were more impressionistic, scattered poems w/ whole pieces of songs waiting to be excavated & expanded on. Some of those scattershot poems became songs anyway. We didn’t care about rhyming. We loved to set a scene that didn’t follow a linear story & if we could poke fun at pop culture, even better. I still marvel at the trust she put in me to allow me that artistic freedom.
Billy, however, demanded that the music kept to his definition of rock ‘n’ roll. He kept us from getting too strung out on “arty shit” as he would call it. He loved The Ramones’ “dumb lyrics” & wished we would write more like that. But as long as he could lay rockabilly riffs over my unconventional chord changes, he was happy. Our general contrary attitude, that rules were meant to be broken, and Billy’s dogged refusal to include anything more than the basics & purity in his definition of what was & wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll made X songs what they became.
As ’79, ’80, ’81 rolled around, the cynicism got deeper, songs got faster & the music became more of a soundtrack for the audience to whirl around the dance floor. Those unfamiliar w/ punk rock will use this period to judge all punk-rock songs as crap. But dozens of new bands & their songs created their own version of what would overtake the first wave of LA punk & define what most people think of as punk rock.
Everyone had witnessed the new wave groups like The Knack and even the punk-rock party band The Dickies get signed to major labels. It was clear that safer-sounding groups like The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, The Go-Go’s, and Blondie could score airplay & hits w/ something the existing music business could wrap their corporate heads around. Punk rock need not apply.
Independent labels began to mirror the fierce spirit of the newer hardcore bands. SST and Alternative Tentacles provided diversity w/ even more contrary attitude but a lot less humor. The songs became more linear, more stream of consciousness, fewer hooks & more overall chaos & distortion. The sound of The Germs and Fear were templates for so many like The Stains (from East LA), T.S.O.L. (from the beach), or China White (from OC). But more eccentric groups like The Minutemen, The Crowd & Middle Class kept the crazy up front & still seemed to have a great time doing it. Black Flag went through several incarnations, became the flag bearer & w/ Henry Rollins began developing a nationwide underground network that allowed indie bands in the ’80s to reap the rewards. Black Flag’s original singer, Keith Morris, would form the Circle Jerks to continue his brand of fast, loud, hooky punk rock. And The Minutemen would distinguish themselves by releasing an epic double LP, Double Nickels on the Dime, displaying their mastery of jazz, beatnik & punk rock from San Pedro. In their own way they would all prove that hardcore bands encouraged their own kind of diversity & originality.
The song landscape was still vast like the S. California basin. Although it was on its way to becoming more codified & uniform, its branches were growing all over the United States & the world. Many are still discovering what came before & just how diverse it was & can be.