Essay: A View of Modern Punk Rock

 Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2023
Updated from Jersey Beat, 2005
Images from the Internet unless indicated

A View of Modern Punk Rock

This was first published in another form from my column in Jersey Beat fanzine (digital version) in 2005, which is no longer available. I have updated it and added new text.

Ramones (pic by Robert Barry Francos)

As a gross generalization, there are two ways to look at music: forward and backward. In the modern punk’s vision, bands and fans imagine themselves doing the former more than the latter. They often deride the First Wave pre-1975 (or so) music as hippie and too structured. Well, as someone pointed out to me, more time has passed since the Sex Pistols broke up (1978) than from the beginning of rock’n’roll (for argument’s sake, let us say 1955) until that point. We all use what we grew up with as a point of reference for what we see in the future. It is easy to look back and say anything pre-Ramones, or even pre-hardcore, is worthless. Okay, but if you were there when the Ramones started in ’74, you had rock’n’roll – not punk – to use as your starting point.

Eddie and the Hot Rods (photo by Robert Barry Francos)

The Ramones used surf and pop as their foundation and gave that a twist, giving the British punks something newer to build upon (Malcolm McLaren learned it here from the likes of Richard Hell and disastrously managing the New York Dolls, and then returned to England to help create the Sex Pistols), and then the hardcore scene combined the First Wave New York and Second Wave London scenes to create the Third Wave. One of the first US hardcore fanzines by the late Paul Decolator was even named Third Wave. Each Wave brought something different into the mix.

As I discussed with a former fanzine editor, some of us who are old enough to remember pre-Ramones seem to find it somewhat easier to see other kinds of music as possibilities. Many of those early ‘70s punks came from the harder sounds of glam and metal (e.g., John Lydon singing along to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” as his audition for the Pistols), and I came from listening to folk, both traditional and modern. My punk sensibilities are a bit different than most I know, for that reason.

Dead Boys (photo by Robert Barry Francos)

I have often posited that folk music (e.g., Dylan, Ochs) of the ‘60s is the same in spirit of those of the punk era: protest music that just became more electrified, simplified, faster, and louder. But the themes are often the same (tell me “Positively 4th Street” is not punk). That is why so many members of punk groups started doing solo singer-songwriter styles as they aged and their bands dissipated.

Husker Du (photo by Robert  Barry Francos)

The up-and-coming punks have bands like the Ramones, the Pistols, Black Flag, and arguably Nirvana to use as their history, but we did not. There was no punk. There were bands like the Velvet Underground, the MC5, and the Stooges, but in a time when FM radio was basically album rock (such as Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yes and CSNY), the odds of even finding out about VU and the like was slim. Unless you knew someone who was hip enough to turn you on to that stuff (in my case, it was Bernie Kugel, the first record collector I had met and a fine musician in his own right).

Richard Hell (photo by Robert  Barry Francos)

But mostly we who were rebelling had very few alternatives. I mean, if you wanted to be really radical, you could listen to Bowie (of whom I was never a fan), or the Count V (who did “Psychotic Reaction” in the mid-‘60s, before just about anyone knew about maniacal fuzz). Hell, even the Rolling Stones were looked on as scary. Once the ‘70s started, I almost stopped listening to broadcast music because there was such a dearth of anything out of the mainstream. I was fortunate enough to see Slade during the early ‘70s though, who showed me what was possible, but even they were arena rock, just as loud and hard as can be (the opening band, that I found tedious, was Aerosmith).

Johnny Thunders/Heartbreakers (photo by Robert Barry Francos)

To sum up: from the opening of CBGB as an alternative music venue in 1974 to now is nearly 50 years. If one was to flip that from the time before CBGB, which would be the Roaring Twenties, when Jazz and Swing were considered radical. When punk started, there was only a 20-year history of rock’n’roll to build on, as opposed to the 50-years of the present punk sound. You can poo-poo early rock’n’roll as being too standard (aka boring), but considering the shift of what the Ramones (and the like) listened to with what they ended up bringing, was far more radical than just about anything going on today. How much of what you are listening to now is fundamentally different than the bands of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Or even the Blink-182s of the ‘90s? You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone…