Rock critics popularize the concept of “punk,” Richard Hell originates the look, Hilly Kristal opens CBGB—and Lou Reed goes arena rock. Big Star’s melancholy jangle sets the template for indie, while Kraftwerk heralds the dawn of synth pop.
And they will ruin rock ’n’ roll, and strangle everything we love about it, right? You know, because they’re trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb. Now, you’re smart enough to know that. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day that it ceases to be real, right? And then it just becomes an industry of cool.
—LESTER BANGS (PLAYED BY PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN) IN ALMOST FAMOUS1
In 1968, twenty-two-year-old critic Nik Cohn thought rock was spent as a creative force, and banged out a book in seven weeks to summarize its rise and fall. “There was no more good fierce and straight-ahead rock ’n roll, no more honest trash,”2 he wrote in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. “Groups like Family and the Nice in England, or Iron Butterfly or the Doors in America, were crambos by their nature and that was fine—they could have knocked out three-chord rock and everyone would have been content. But, after the Beatles and Bob Dylan, they’ve turned towards culture and wallowed in third-form poetries, fifth-hand philosophies, ninth-rate perceptions.”3
The antidote arrived the following year in a group named after self-abusive comedians, singing deliberately cretinous songs like “No Fun” and “Real Cool Time.” Their antics transfixed Alan Vega of the New York musical duo Suicide. “Suddenly Iggy’s flying into the audience. Then he’s back onstage and cutting himself up with drumsticks and bleeding.”4
Vega was also struck by Lester Bangs’s review of the Stooges’ 1970 album Fun House. Bangs wrote how people loved to hate “that Stooge punk.… Someday, somebody’s gonna just bust that fucked-up punk right in the chops!”5
Vega decided to promote Suicide’s second gig at Manhattan’s OK Harris Gallery on November 20, 1970, as “Punk Music by Suicide.” Afterward, he began advertising gigs in The Village Voice as “A Punk Music Mass by Suicide.” Onstage the leather-jacketed Vega hit himself with his own motorcycle chain. “If the violence got really bad, what I’d do was smash a bottle and start cutting my face up. That seemed to have a calming effect on the crowd. I guess they reasoned that I was so fucking nuts that nothing they could do would bother me. I figured out a way of doing it so that I drew a lot of blood but I wouldn’t be scarred for life. I had it down to a fine art.”6
In 1971, Bangs moved with his fellow Creem writers into a communal house on a farm in Michigan, a living situation that did not last long. Dave Marsh took issue with the fact that Bangs’s dog relieved himself inside and put some dogshit on Bangs’s typewriter, which resulted in a brawl.7 But they were on the same page with the concept of “punk,” which they applied to mid-’60s garage bands. Bangs originally used the term in the title of an unpublished, William Burroughs–influenced novel he wrote in 1968, Drug Punk. Marsh raved about a May 1971 gig by? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”) as “a landmark exposition of punk rock.” The following month, Bangs extolled Count Five in “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” then used the term “punk” again in an article ostensibly about the Troggs, “James Taylor Marked for Death” which advocated stabbing the singer-songwriter with a broken bottle of Ripple. The latter article ran in the fanzine Who Put the Bomp, edited by Greg Shaw, which celebrated “punk rock bands as white teenage hard rock of 64–66.”8
Around then, Stooges handler Danny Fields contributed to an Esquire article about “movers and shakers” in the industry and included a friend named Lenny Kaye, who wrote for Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy (and would later serve as Patti Smith’s guitarist). Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman saw the article and asked Kaye to talent-scout for him.
“I used to visit Lenny at the Village record store at which he worked. I was fascinated by the garage bands of the early ’60s who would have a single that was memorable over a short lifespan and no meaningful albums to speak of.”9 Holzman enlisted Kaye to compile a double album of such tracks and write the liner notes, which became Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era.
On January 4, 1973, Greg Shaw reviewed the collection in Rolling Stone in an article entitled “Punk Rock: The Arrogant Underbelly of Sixties Pop.” It claimed “the real vitality of American rock” was the “ephemeral local band.” “Punk rock at its best is the closest we came in the Sixties to the original rockabilly spirit of rock and roll.”
Kaye acknowledged, “[Nuggets] was critically very well-received, [which] wouldn’t surprise me because it was the product of a kind of critical group-think that was in the air at the time. It was commercially received indifferently, and marketed fairly perfunctorily, all of which leads to your usual cult item. I would doubt—I mean, I don’t know how many copies it sold—I would doubt that there’s more than 10,000 in circulation. Saleswise, I can’t imagine that it topped 5,000.”10
Kaye later observed, “What punk came to be known as—which is a very Ramonesish-based chant, and quick songs and black leather jackets, you know, that very specific kind of punk—you can really draw an analogy from one to the other in the sense that, you know, here [in Nuggets] you had short, very catchy songs played with a kind of iconic sneer.”11
University of Buffalo student Billy Altman started the fanzine Punk, in May 1973, with the Seeds (“Pushin’ Too Hard”) on the cover. He invited Bangs to write for it (and later became executor of Bangs’s estate).12 This was a precursor to Punk Magazine, started in 1975 by Legs McNeil and John Holmstrom, which centered on the CBGB scene.
“Punk” was now the trendiest word in rock criticism, even applied to newer bands ranging from the New York Dolls to Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, and the Guess Who. Kiss played with a New York band called Street Punk at the Hotel Diplomat in August. Townshend shoehorned a song named “The Punk Meets the Godfather” into Quadrophenia. “The punk” of the title chastises “the godfather” (Townshend) for being arrogant and lost in self-pity while people in the real world starve. Apparently none of the cognoscenti knew that in prison culture “punk” meant someone forced to sexually submit. It meant prostitute back when Shakespeare used it in All’s Well That Ends Well.
That spring, a new band called the Neon Boys recorded a demo of six songs that combined Nuggets garage rock with ragged avant-garde guitar à la the Velvet Underground. Some of the songs were released years later in compilations, including “Love Comes in Spurts” and “That’s All I Know (Right Now).” Bassist Richard Hell (Richard Lester Meyers) and guitarist Tom Verlaine (Thomas Miller) had relocated from Kentucky and been inspired by the Dolls at Mercer. They renamed themselves after poet Arthur Rimbaud’s book A Season in Hell and Rimbaud’s compatriot Paul Verlaine and formed the group with drummer Billy Ficca.
In search of a second guitarist, they auditioned Doug Colvin (later Dee Dee Ramone) and Chris Stein (later of Blondie) before settling on Richard Lloyd and renaming themselves Television (after briefly considering the moniker the Libertines). Along with the demo songs, Hell worked on an early version of “The Blank Generation.” “It was based on this ‘Beat Generation’ single by Rod McKuen that Tom had. He collected obscure, kitschy singles.… No-one figured that out for 10 years.”13 The song became one of punk’s anthems, but Hell’s biggest contribution to the genre was fashion.
While Iggy Pop created the prototype for the self-injuring front man, and Johnny Thunders created the hairstyle adopted by ’80s glam metal rockers, Hell introduced the spiky haircut. Since all the musicians sported long hair, whether they were hippies or glam rockers, Hell chopped his locks short and uneven to rebel. And he took to wearing ripped T-shirts like Brando in the “Stella!” scene of A Streetcar Named Desire. Later he used safety pins to hold pieces of the shirts together and scrawled phrases like “Please Kill Me” on them.
Hell told Lester Bangs, “One thing I wanted to bring back to rock and roll was the knowledge that you invent yourself. That’s why I changed my name, why I did all the clothing style things, haircut, everything.”14
A few years later, boutique owner (and Dolls manager) Malcolm McLaren asked Hell if he could manage him. Hell politely declined, and McLaren went on to mastermind the Sex Pistols in London. Hell observed, “Everyone in the band had short, hacked-up hair and torn clothes and there were safety pins and shredded suit jackets and wacked-out T-shirts and contorted facial expressions. The lead singer had changed his name to something ugly. It gave me kind of a giddy feeling. It was flattering.”15 The style soon boomeranged back across the Atlantic. “I was amazed, walking by Macy’s in Herald Square, to see ripped-up T-shirts in the windows. That was just three years after I was in my first band, when I was the only person in the world wearing ripped T-shirts.”16
By that time the emerging punk scene had relocated from the Mercer Arts Center in the Broadway Central Hotel. The building was destabilized when a wall in the basement was removed. On August 3, air-conditioning engineer Seymour Kaback noted, “I heard the walls groaning. By 2:30 p.m. on Friday it was Panicsville in there.”17 At 5:10 p.m., just before performances were due to begin, the eight-story building imploded, killing at least three.
Around that time, a club owner named Hilly Kristal was forced to close his East Village niterie Hilly’s due to noise complaints. So he turned his attention to a dive bar he owned on skid row called Hilly’s on the Bowery. On December 10, he rechristened it CBGB & OMFUG, an acronym for “Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers” (gormandizers defined as “ravenous eaters”). He intended to focus on the genres listed in the name but relented when bands like Television and the newly formed Ramones asked him to let them play there in the spring of ’74. Since he was lucky to get twenty people a night, the stakes were not high.
Punk founding father Lou Reed, meanwhile, attempted to repackage his Velvet Underground catalog for mass consumption on December 21, when he recorded Rock and Roll Animal live at New York’s Academy of Music. “I heard Mitch Ryder‘s Detroit Wheels, produced by Bob ‘Wonderboy’ Ezrin, doing [the Velvets song] “Rock And Roll” and I said, ‘Aha, that’s fun.’ So Ezrin got Alice Cooper’s band for me. I can’t play that way, I don’t wanna play that way, but they were as good at ‘that way’ as anybody else around. So I said, ‘Okay, here’s the material.’ They didn’t know it from the Velvet Underground, they’d never heard it, so I just taught them the whole thing. Now we’ll try it again, see what happens five years later. Duh. Let’s see if they [the record-buying public] get it this time around. Change the presentation. I mean, it is not something that I would want to keep doing, but it was probably one of the greatest live records ever made.”18
Paul Nelson wrote in Rolling Stone that “when his new band came out and began to play spectacular, even majestic, rock & roll, management’s strategy for the evening became clear: Elevate the erratic and unstable punkiness of the centerpiece into punchy, swaggering grandeur by using the best arrangements, sound and musicians that money could buy.”19
After squandering his “Walk on the Wild Side” momentum with the alienating Berlin, Reed “played ball” and earned his first gold record. Still, had any parent actually listened, the polished “Heroin” was more terrifying than a hundred faux-satanist heavy metal songs.
Alex Chilton scored a No. 1 single at age sixteen with “The Letter,” his first shot out of the gate as lead singer for the Box Tops. After leaving that group, he turned down an offer to sing for Blood, Sweat & Tears, deeming them “too commercial,”20 and joined forces instead with fellow Memphis native Chris Bell. They named their new group after the Big Star grocery store near the studio they recorded at, Ardent. On their debut, #1 Record, they alternated lead vocals like Lennon and McCartney on Beatles albums, while carrying on the chiming guitar sound of the Byrds.
But Bell resented that Chilton was receiving more attention and struggled with depression and substance abuse issues. He attempted suicide, fought with bassist Andy Hummel, smashed Hummel’s instrument, attacked the studio owner’s car, and was briefly institutionalized.21 By early ’73 the band seemed dead in the water.
Ardent’s promo man John King revived the group when he staged the First Annual National Association of Rock Writers Convention on Memorial Day weekend in May. King flew in 140 critics (including Bangs, Lenny Kaye, Cameron Crowe, Nick Tosches, and future Rhino Records co-founder Harold Bronson) into Memphis to watch a slate of bands and convinced Chilton, Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens to reunite for the occasion. They played Big Star originals along with covers of the Kinks, T. Rex, and Loudon Wainwright. The positive response convinced Chilton to turn the solo album he was working on into the second Big Star album, Radio City.
The trio captured many of the tracks live in the studio and mastered the completed disc on December 3.22 Included was Big Star’s most beloved ballad, “September Gurls.” Popdose’s Dave Lifton summarized, “We often describe jangly melodic rock songs as ‘Beatle-esque,’ but the brilliance of ‘September Gurls’ is how Chilton, at his prime, showed he could be three members of The Beatles at once and yet sound entirely original. Its effortlessly catchy melody and sing-able chorus is straight out of Paul McCartney’s Big Bag O’Hooks; the bitterly introspective lyric, notably the couplet, ‘I loved you, well, never mind / I’ve been crying all the time’ would have made John Lennon take notice. And that bright and shiny guitar tone is straight out of George Harrison’s Sonic Blue Stratocaster on ‘Nowhere Man.’”23 In 2011, Time magazine listed the track among its All-Time 100 Songs.24
The band played Max’s Kansas City in late December, “mainly to music writers on the first night” per the club’s website. Billboard’s Sam Sutherland called their December 22 performance a “triumph,” with an “aura of fragility [that] shifted into electric overdrive with full force.” Unfortunately, he noted, “with virtually no publicity outside the industry itself, the second night crowd was lean.”25
The Village Voice’s Christgau gave the album an A when it was released in February. But the label Stax was embroiled in a fight with its distributor Columbia that led to its bankruptcy. With almost no promotion, Radio City sold approximately twenty thousand copies. Hummel returned to college. Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens recorded a third album, then shelved it and parted ways.
Singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock said in the documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, “To me, Big Star was like some letter that was posted in 1971 that arrived in 1985—like something that got lost in the mail.”26 That was around the time R.E.M. began trumpeting the band in interviews. Paisley Underground veterans the Bangles covered “September Gurls” on their 1986 album A Different Light, which hit No. 2. The following year, the Replacements released their anthem “Alex Chilton,” recorded in Ardent Studios. The Gin Blossoms pilgrimaged there to capture their 1992 breakthrough New Miserable Experience. Cheap Trick covered “In the Street” for the theme to That ’70s Show. Katy Perry spelled “California Gurls” in honor of the earlier classic.
Fellow power-pop progenitors the Raspberries offered the inverse to Big Star’s “oddness and darkness,” as The Guardian’s Michael Hann put it. “Unlike Big Star, the chord changes in their songs go to the places you expect—they always sound comfortable, as a result.”27
The Ohio band formed in 1970 when lead singer Eric Carmen joined forces with the Choir, the garage band behind the winsome 1966 nugget “It’s Cold Outside.” Carmen did a shameless McCartney imitation, earnest big-eyed peeking, twitchy head nods, and all.
Carmen remarked, “Progressive rock had taken over the pot-addled airwaves of FM radio, and to me, long, boring flute solos and endless jamming had replaced the great songs I grew up listening to. Instead of the Beatles, we got Jethro Tull and Traffic and the like. I hated prog rock; to me, it was the ultimate expression of a bloated sense of self-importance and mindless self-indulgence. I wanted to have a band that could rock as hard as the Who and sing like the Beatles and the Beach Boys; a band that could play concise, three-and-a-half minute songs with power and elegance. Apparently, there were a few other guys that had similar ideas. Alex Chilton comes to mind, although we went after things in different ways. It wasn’t until after Raspberries, Big Star and Badfinger came to exist that power pop became a genre. In each case, I suspect Pete Ham, Alex Chilton and I all felt the same void after the Beatles broke up, and somehow we were all trying to fill it.”28
Chilton: “I remember when I first heard the Raspberries. Big Star were in a van travelling around doing some dates and we heard ‘Go All the Way’ on the radio, and we said, ‘Wow, those guys are really doing it!’ I thought that was a great song.”29
While Chilton quoted Lou Reed’s desire to “nullify my life” in “Daisy Glaze,” the Raspberries released relentlessly up-tempo singles like “I Wanna Be with You” (peaking at No. 16 in January) and August’s “Tonight.” Springsteen was a vocal fan and later incorporated power pop into his own work. But for the moment, the jangle was both too old and too recent to be popular, caught out of time in the twenty-year nostalgia cycle. After another year swimming upstream, Carmen went solo with “All by Myself.”
In Germany, two men pioneered the use of synths and drum machines, the vanguard of a movement that would eventually remake pop as radically as Dylan’s lyrics and the Beatles’ sonic experimentation once had.
Classical music students Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider formed Kraftwerk (“Power Station”) in Düsseldorf in 1970, part of the “Krautrock” scene that included Tangerine Dream, Can, and Neu. They each played multiple instruments, but in their promotional films Schneider played the flute while Hütter took keyboards. Originally they enlisted conventional drummers to supplement their sound. But in early ’73 the band Kingdom Come (featuring Arthur Brown, famous for dancing with a headpiece of fire) built their album Journey around a drum machine, one of the first rock albums so constructed.30 (Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On used one intermittently.) So Kraftwerk used the rhythm box presets built into an electric organ for their October album Ralf und Florian. (Organs with proto-drum machines were popular with keyboardists, who could use them to play events like weddings by themselves without hiring a band.31)
Kraftwerk began running their voices through the synthesizer called the vocoder, which later pervaded funk, hip hop, and electronic dance music. Ralf und Florian still featured Farfisa electric pianos, guitar, and flute, but songs like “Tongebirge” (“Mountain of Sound”) sounded like jazzy computerized New Age ambient music and, in some places, the background music of early video games.
After the album they patented their own version of electronic drum pads and added percussionist Wolfgang Flür to their lineup to play the pads, without a bass drum, hi hat, or cymbals. The trio released their first single in December, named “Kohoutek Comet Melody” (“Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie”) after the comet that could be seen passing Earth for the first time in 150,000 years.32
Schneider already sported short hair parted in old-fashioned style. Now Hütter shaved his mustache, cut his hair, and began wearing suits as well, shedding the last of his hippie vestiges. Next year, they created the “robot pop” of “Autobahn,” ground zero for New Wave, house, techno, trance, and electro pop.