24
I Missed Punk, but I Got the Message
I was on the road in America with AC/DC in 1976 when punk pierced the surface of British cultural life. It had been rumbling for a bit; record magazines were full of articles about this new movement, but nothing much had changed in the musical lives of my friends.
Music had built my youth: bands, whether comprised of friends or idols, and whether seeing them in concert or playing in them. I hung out with a group of musical people, most of whom were older than me and lived in a village near my hometown in a converted Victorian mansion called the Holme. Flat 4—essentially a rehearsal space—was the epicenter of the building, as well as the music that emerged around the town. Nobody in the other flats seemed to mind the constant noise in the unit because most of them were in or connected to the bands that played and practiced there.
My friends’ musical influences were broad, but American music, particularly from the West Coast, had worked its magic on us. A local musician and friend of ours had gained some success and moved to California to pursue his career. Occasionally, he would return to our area, sometimes in the company of his American friends, so part of the musical stew that evolved around us included his brand of UK-based blues and California harmony. The Beatles loomed large for some of us, as did soul music. Bob Marley was big, as were the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
While I was crisscrossing the US with AC/DC, Britain was a cauldron of political frustration and social tension. There were strikes and protest marches. Unemployment was high. London stunk to high heaven because of a months-long trash strike. And troubles in Ireland had spilled over into the UK mainland. Most of this was lost on me as I journeyed around America, focused only on getting to the next gig on time after yet another four- or five-hundred-mile overnight drive.
Life as a roadie is nothing if not obsessive. All that matters is what your band is doing. You don’t become one of the biggest bands in the world if you are distracted or unfocused. Every day you know what is going to happen and, more importantly, why it needs to happen. Of course, there are perks to this relentlessness, but it’s a small, self-contained world.
This was also the era of pre-digital technology. We didn’t have cell phones, and we had barely any contact with home except for the occasional pay-phone call or postcard. My time in the US was supposed to last for a few weeks, but it turned into months because the band started to break big. So, we kept going. We kept making tour plans that were scrapped almost overnight as things moved faster. One weekend, we went from Omaha, Nebraska, to the Netherlands for a TV appearance, and then to Miami, Florida. It was fantastic. Tiring, sure, but fantastic.
Eventually, we all needed a break and I got to go home for the first time in ages. What awaited me was mind-blowing. When I had left, most of my friends were in a late-1970s hippie phase. Long hair, jeans, nothing particularly forward-looking, fashion-wise. But when I returned, I was greeted by a bunch of punks. Everything had changed: the dress, the music, and the attitude. Suddenly, the center of the musical universe had shifted from the US, which had always held the top spot among my friends. We may have had the British invasion, but all those bands—the Beatles, the Stones—they started out playing American music. But punk was something else.
Punk was perhaps the most significant thing ever to happen in youth culture at the time. It formed in our era’s crucible of disappointment and frustration. It was music that raged against the machine, using urgency and creative dissent as its weapons. Punk was a confrontation with orthodoxy, a moral cleansing movement. Its musicians were heretics who dared to believe you could pick up instruments you could barely play, make some noise, and be a band. Punk was a critique of the bloated, self-satisfied, indulgent music business, and a rallying cry for those disaffected by the unfulfilled promises of the modern world. The late 1970s, specifically 1977, signaled the end of the future and the modern world. Punk was a sign of a generation’s loss of faith. “No future!” it sang.
Punk’s subcultural status meant it could explore sexuality without much attention. David Bowie was already working at that coalface, offering up a new vision of what it meant to be a man in the post-countercultural world of the 1970s. But punk rock was the first genre in which women were given equal ground. The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and X-Ray Spex were every bit an integral part of the punk scene as the Sex Pistols or the Clash. Nobody cared about your gender or who you had sex with. For many punks, sex was employed as a shock tactic against the conventions that held sway. Punk was anti-hippie and anti–free love, ideas that still hovered around youth culture in the wake of the late 1960s.
Inspired by the Situationists (precursors to the postmodern philosophers), punk practiced subversive tactics, particularly in its wardrobe. T-shirts with slogans, ripped and torn clothing, safety pins—it was all political commentary, a reaction against commodified youth culture. The streets are full of trash, so wear a trash bag. Society confines you to the margins and gives you little hope of access to its version of a good life, so create your own and live by a different set of rules. Homemade became the hallmark of punk. It was the first genre of rock music to produce its own magazines en masse. Gig posters, clothing, recordings—all of it was DIY, lo-fi, and against the market stream.
At the height of punk, I helped a friend do stage work on a short tour of Britain with X-Ray Spex. Like the Sex Pistols, the band released only one album, Germfree Adolescents, but it is central to the story of punk.
X-Ray Spex had a different lineup than the traditional bass, drum, and guitars of most punk bands. To that familiar setup, the band added a saxophone player. She was fifteen years old at the time, still at school and learning to play the instrument, but musical ability was secondary to the whole ethos of punk. So Lora Logic, as she came to be known, wailed away on her sax and became part of the band’s distinctive—terrible—sound.
They were not good musicians and they had very little stage presence, except for frontwoman Poly Styrene, who was a force of nature. But none of that mattered to their hordes of fans. Bands and fans relate to each other differently in punk music—or they did in the beginning. Punk bands were totems around which the fans gathered. Most of the time they played in small venues, pubs, clubs, and dive bars, where fans would pack in tight against the stage. Being close to each other, collapsing the boundary between fans and band, was the dynamic of punk. The musicians were not there to be rock gods; they were there to tear those idols down and put a stake in the heart of slick, consumerist rock music.
There are a couple things to note about rock music. The first is the beat. Rock is a music of beats and grooves. That’s where most of it begins. Whether it is the backbeat of the Beatles, the disco hi-hat, the heavy-metal four-on-the-floor, the hip-hop drum machine, or the dance grooves of pop, it is all about the beat. The other notable element of rock is its gestural art form. Just like the visual art counterpart, in which paint is applied in broad, sweeping gestures, rock is all about emphatic gesture. The sneer of Johnny Rotten, the raised middle finger of Johnny Cash glaring at the camera, Robert Plant’s primal scream, David Bowie’s androgynous Ziggy Stardust—rock music is as much about the gesture as anything else. Each band of each musical subculture has its ritual signs and symbols. They are liturgical actions that signal and invite the faithful into the community.
All too often those gestures are misunderstood or viewed through an already biased and distorted lens. A few years back, I was invited to a church where the minister apparently knew a lot about rock music. I sat in the audience listening to him describe the satanic prayers AC/DC prayed before its shows, and he informed us that the band’s name meant “Anti-Christ/ Devil’s Children.” That, as we say in England, is a load of old codswallop.
As far as I know, the band’s name came from a vacuum cleaner, complete with the lightning bolt in the middle, alerting Australian users to make sure they plugged the appliance into an alternate current rather than a direct current socket. As for the satanic rituals. . . . If changing guitar strings, going over set lists, and worrying about sound quality constitutes a satanic rite, then we were all were deep in the grips of Satan. But if not, I think they were just a band playing music.
Lots of satanic accusations are made against rock music, and I’m sure there are people in the world of rock who actually do yield themselves over to dark stuff. But I never met a practicing satanist when I was on the road. Of course, that is not the sort of information one might easily volunteer, and the death metal genre is often more likely to openly profess atheist and satanic tendencies. Like most things, there is a lot of sensationalism at work in the link between the occult and rock music. It is rooted as much in rock’s antiestablishment posture as it is in a desire for the dark side.
Take, for example, the raised “horn hand” of metal bands and their fans. The symbol is utilized by virtually every hard-rock band in existence and determined by some to be a sign of the devil. Nobody seems to know how it became such a pervasive symbol in the heavy-metal music scene, but it is ubiquitous. Some trace it back to an artist named Ronnie James Dio, who said it came via his Italian grandmother, who used it as a sign to ward off the evil eye. Whatever its origins, it now means simply, “I want to rock out and have a good time”—hardly a demonic desire.
I suppose I should address the lyrics and the potential demonic content of the lyrics of the band I worked for. I mean, they did have songs called “Highway to Hell” and “Hells Bells.” Rock music is not a discursive language. Words in music don’t function the way they do in real life. If we all went around singing to each other rather than conversing, the world would seem a very strange place and I doubt we would get much done.
Lyrics in popular music function as only part, not the total sum, of a song’s meaning. Meaning also lies in the song’s emotional arc, formed from all the pieces involved in its creation: bass, drums, guitar, vocals. That’s why our reactions to and interactions with music are so subjective. Half the time it is hard to guess what the song even means if we break it down word by word. Or the meaning is so vapid that you wonder why you yourself can’t write a millions-selling pop song and live richly off the royalties. Songs take you on a journey. They create a world, as Brian Eno says, and invite you in.
Listen to a singer such as Otis Redding, who can stretch a one-syllable word to its breaking point. His vocals arc and loop and bleed against the instruments as he pours out his heart. His words are reduced to an almost guttural cry—but you get it, because you feel that way too. That’s the thing with popular music; it’s about capturing an emotion. Music captures a range of human characteristics and wraps them in instrumentation, offering them back to you like a talisman. Certain songs are important and sacred to us because they are more than the sum of their parts. Bruce Springsteen recently said, “You can change a life in three minutes with the right song.”
I approach my theological work from a musical perspective. I look for the melody, rhythm, and beat of Scripture and I try to grasp the emotional arc of what I find. There is little in the way of tangible information about lots of things in the Scripture. Many consider the Bible to be a manual for living, though it’s a strange one because things aren’t always clear. But the emotions are laid bare on the surface of the book. Trace Jesus’s words through the Gospel of Mark and you will find that his anger, frustration, alienation, and loneliness are palpable. If you read it like a song—looking for rhythm, groove, and melody—you can actually begin to feel it.
On the wall of my home is a piece of homemade art comprised of a Sex Pistols flag and a few other bits of personal stuff. Around the frame I wrote a quote from Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash: “Punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.” Punk may have been angry—and rightly so—but at its heart was concern for the misbegotten, the forgotten, and the marginalized. It gave a renewed sense of hope to people locked in suburban lives with limited future. “Here’s a way out. You are not alone,” it said. It was solidarity in frustration.
