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What was punk?


Otto Masson

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I think it's completely ridiculous how Sid Vicious is the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of Punk. He was so bad at playing bass that the other members of the Sex Pistols (Johnny, Steve, and Paul) kept him out of the studio (at least while he wasn't sick). On the Sex Pistol's landmark album Never Mind The Bollocks, it's not Vicious playing bass, but Steve Jones. The man (or rather child) was far less talented than original bassist (and main songwriter) Glen Matlock.

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I think it's completely ridiculous how Sid Vicious is the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of Punk. He was so bad at playing bass that the other members of the Sex Pistols (Johnny, Steve, and Paul) kept him out of the studio (at least while he wasn't sick). On the Sex Pistol's landmark album Never Mind The Bollocks, it's not Vicious playing bass, but Steve Jones. The man (or rather child) was far less talented than original bassist (and main songwriter) Glen Matlock.

how true.

Sid Vicious aka John Ritchie, could hardly play a note and got the job because he looked the part. To add further to this, i've heard rumours that even Jones and Cook weren't playing on the Never Mind the Bollocks album, but that producer Chris Thomas brought in studio hacks leaving only Johnny Rotten the only Pistol on the record. I don't know if it's true, but you never know.

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how true.

Sid Vicious aka John Ritchie, could hardly play a note and got the job because he looked the part. To add further to this, i've heard rumours that even Jones and Cook weren't playing on the Never Mind the Bollocks album, but that producer Chris Thomas brought in studio hacks leaving only Johnny Rotten the only Pistol on the record. I don't know if it's true, but you never know.

I'm pretty sure Cook and Jones are on Bollocks. I think it's a shame that Glen couldn't have stayed in the group because he actually could play bass instead of having Vicious who did nothing.

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I hadn't heard rumors about Cook not playing on the record, but I have heard the rumor that Chris Spedding was brought in to do Jones' parts, which is entirely bogus.

Yeah, it is a shame that Glen didn't play on Never Mind The Bollocks. Although the "bootleg" Spunk (the reason it's in quotes is because it is quite possible that their manager Malcolm McLaren himself leaked the recordings), which is some demo recordings the Sex Pistols made while Glen was still in the band. The recordings really show how much of a presence the Sex Pistols lost when he walked out.

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I hadn't heard rumors about Cook not playing on the record, but I have heard the rumor that Chris Spedding was brought in to do Jones' parts, which is entirely bogus.

Yeah, it is a shame that Glen didn't play on Never Mind The Bollocks. Although the "bootleg" Spunk (the reason it's in quotes is because it is quite possible that their manager Malcolm McLaren himself leaked the recordings), which is some demo recordings the Sex Pistols made while Glen was still in the band. The recordings really show how much of a presence the Sex Pistols lost when he walked out.

Yep, like i said, it was rumoured. I believe it would be hard for a studio pro to get that raw energy thing going. Some things you just have to live in order to reproduce, if that makes sense. But it adds to the lore, just like Jimmy Page playing the guitar solo on "You Really Got Me" or whether Ringo Starr played all of the Beatles drum tracks on Sgt Pepper.

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I'll dispel a few myths.

Steve Jones and Paul Cook played ALL the guitar and drum parts on "Nevermind The Bollocks". Chris Spedding never played a note on the album. It's Sid Vicious who barely plays a note on the album as he was in the hospital with hepatitis when recording of the album started. Sid became well & was let out of the hospital, laid down some bass tracks, & Chris Thomas & the band were not happy with the results so Steve Jones overdubbed bass on some of the songs while they also "re-hired" Glen Matlock to play bass on the rest of the songs as a session musician.

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I hadn't heard rumors about Cook not playing on the record, but I have heard the rumor that Chris Spedding was brought in to do Jones' parts, which is entirely bogus.

Yeah, it is a shame that Glen didn't play on Never Mind The Bollocks. Although the "bootleg" Spunk (the reason it's in quotes is because it is quite possible that their manager Malcolm McLaren himself leaked the recordings), which is some demo recordings the Sex Pistols made while Glen was still in the band. The recordings really show how much of a presence the Sex Pistols lost when he walked out.

How true. I've still got to buy that one. I've heard the version of Submission on Spunk though. It sounds much more raw than Bollocks does. :)

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"Spunk" is good but I like "Bollocks" much better. The Pistols wanted the album to sound commercial, not like a DIY demo. Then again I like the first warts & all sounding Clash album better than their second highly produced album "Give Em Enough Rope".

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"Spunk" is good but I like "Bollocks" much better. The Pistols wanted the album to sound commercial, not like a DIY demo. Then again I like the first warts & all sounding Clash album better than their second highly produced album "Give Em Enough Rope".

Ha Ha :D Go figure. I like London Calling the best. Granted I haven't heard Give Em Enough Rope or Sandinista though.

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Ha Ha :D Go figure. I like London Calling the best. Granted I haven't heard Give Em Enough Rope or Sandinista though.

"London Calling" & the first album, preferrably the UK version, are a tie as my favorite Clash album. They're both very diverse & sort of sloppy, it really depends on my mood to which I like better( right now it's the debut). "Give 'Em Enough Rope" is a good album but the slick production doesn't work for all of the songs. "Safe European Home" & "Tommy Gun" sound great with the polish added to them, "English Civil War" & "All The Young Punks" could have been looser sounding. "Sandinista"s a tough listen. It's a triple album. It would have been a perfect single album, a great double album, but as a triple it's bizarre. A lot of remixes & dubs on the album that were originally intended as singles & B-sides but their label wouldn't let them release it that way so the single album became a triple. Still a great album but I recommend burning your own version of the album because it is all over the place. I have the "songs" on one disc & the "dubs & remixes" on another.

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Thanks for all the responses. Maybe I should add that my purpose in starting the thread was certainly not to dismiss all the actual music that came out of the punk wave. I listened a lot to The Clash myself back in the day, still love London Calling and Sandinista, and I'm also a longtime fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, just to give a couple of examples. What I was disputing was more how the whole thing has been seen, what the actual significance of it was in the history of popular music and rock more specifically.

The theory that it was a much needed revolt against a stagnant, overblown scene just seems ridiculous to me, because if you just look at the albums released in the years immediately prior to the real punk explosion in 1976-77, it was an incredibly fertile scene. Take 1974-1975: it's when you get albums like Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, Elton John's Captain Fantastic, Genesis's Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, David Bowie's Low, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Jethro Tull's War Child and Minstrel in the Gallery, 10 cc's How Dare You? and so on, almost forever. Where is the fucking stagnation punk was supposedly revolting against? Overblown? Bullshit - these are simply great albums. There's a lot of professionalism by that time, certainly, but why would that be a problem for music lovers?

Punk as I see it was more of a simplifying turn, and as some of you have mentioned, that can be linked to the fact that a new generation was coming to the fore, trying to obtain space for itself to develop. Which it did: I think the real achievements of that new generation came in the 1980's, and by that time it wasn't necessarily punk anymore. Siouxsie is a case in point - but so is the experimentalism of an album like PiL's Flowers of Romance (another album I loved - it came in 1981, the year of the punk explosion on the Icelandic scene). To summarize, what I mean is that I don't believe that simple music is better - it's just relatively simple when you compare it with something else. Both things can be done done well or badly.

Disco was a part of what the typical punk rhetoric was always attacking, and in this country disco killed live music almost completely. I felt a lot of sympathy with that - also for personal reasons - but, people were also dismissing so-called dinosaurs and what not, calling them passé, etc. In itself that can be seen as just a passing thing, as a new generation tries to find its own voice and all that, but I find that incredibly many take that ideology at face value, when it just doesn't make a lot of sense. A certain subjectivity in taste will of course affect how you judge all this, but to actually believe that punk was a revolt against a stagnating scene to me smacks more of either narrow-mindedness, pure ignorance or perhaps just that people haven't really thought it through.

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^^^

My tendency Otto is to think that people just haven't thought it through. It was the explaination given at the time and it has taken root in pop culture ever since. I think music lovers were looking for more music as opposed to change and Punk provided it . It was and still is just another choice for music lovers...no more, no less

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^^^

My tendency Otto is to think that people just haven't thought it through. It was the explaination given at the time and it has taken root in pop culture ever since. I think music lovers were looking for more music as opposed to change and Punk provided it . It was and still is just another choice for music lovers...no more, no less

Hi Ally, you are so right mate. :notworthy:

"The more things change the more they stay the same" or so i have been told. ;)

Kind Regards, Danny

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Hi Ally, you are so right mate. notworthy.gif

"The more things change the more they stay the same" or so i have been told. wink.gif

Kind Regards, Danny

Hiya Danny wave.gif

Certainly in terms of North America at least. In those day's, we were alway's a little behind with music trends.

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Hiya Danny wave.gif

Certainly in terms of North America at least. In those day's, we were alway's a little behind with music trends.

Hi Ally,

Don't sell you're self short mate, England and North America both bounced off each other, for without one both could not borrow from each other. Without American Rock and Roll and the Blues there would be no English Rock, and that's for sure, and without English Gospel, Folk and Country there would never have been the Blues in the first place. We are a good double act in reality and i hope we always will be, c-rap excepted. :lol:

Kind Regards, Danny

PS, that goes for the rest of the UK as well, i dont want you to feel left out, Alex, Phil, Rory et all. :beer:

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Punk didn't start out as a rebellion against other music, it was young AMERICAN kids who started what became known as punk & who weren't virtuos's but wanted to be in bands & play music anyway, & for whatever reason it was the ENGLISH punks, who co-opted the American punk scene, that started ranting about "dinosaur" bands & throwing out the old order. I think the Brits are just kind of like that in general as a culture, no offense intended because I do find that somewhat healthy. The Ramones loved The Beatles & Zeppelin as much as they loved the Stooges & New York Dolls so there wasn't a movement of overthrowing anything, & that went for all the other CBGB's bands as well. Without the Ramones, there's no Sex Pistols & no Clash, & I like both bands better than The Ramones but they started what became the sound that's most associated with punk. Besides these English punks were like 17, 18 years old. They were bound to be obnoxious & want their own scene. That was what the American rock & roll audience of the 50's were like to. There's nothing wrong with Frank Sinatra, a brilliant talented singer but the kids wanted Elvis, something that was their own & not from the generation before. There's only a 10 year difference between Sinatra & Elvis when they each started, & if you go back to the English punk scene that's pretty much the same amount of time between the Stones & the Pistols, & of course the Pistols, with the exception of Rotten, loved the Stones but they wanted something to call their own. It wasn't so much a musical rebellion but a generational rebellion, at least with the English punks. The American & English punks get lumped in with eachother but it really was two different scenes & mentality's going on.

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^^^

My tendency Otto is to think that people just haven't thought it through. It was the explaination given at the time and it has taken root in pop culture ever since. I think music lovers were looking for more music as opposed to change and Punk provided it . It was and still is just another choice for music lovers...no more, no less

Well, I agree with you entirely on all that, Ally. :yesnod:

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Punk didn't start out as a rebellion against other music, it was young AMERICAN kids who started what became known as punk & who weren't virtuos's but wanted to be in bands & play music anyway, & for whatever reason it was the ENGLISH punks, who co-opted the American punk scene, that started ranting about "dinosaur" bands & throwing out the old order. I think the Brits are just kind of like that in general as a culture, no offense intended because I do find that somewhat healthy. The Ramones loved The Beatles & Zeppelin as much as they loved the Stooges & New York Dolls so there wasn't a movement of overthrowing anything, & that went for all the other CBGB's bands as well. Without the Ramones, there's no Sex Pistols & no Clash, & I like both bands better than The Ramones but they started what became the sound that's most associated with punk. Besides these English punks were like 17, 18 years old. They were bound to be obnoxious & want their own scene. That was what the American rock & roll audience of the 50's were like to. There's nothing wrong with Frank Sinatra, a brilliant talented singer but the kids wanted Elvis, something that was their own & not from the generation before. There's only a 10 year difference between Sinatra & Elvis when they each started, & if you go back to the English punk scene that's pretty much the same amount of time between the Stones & the Pistols, & of course the Pistols, with the exception of Rotten, loved the Stones but they wanted something to call their own. It wasn't so much a musical rebellion but a generational rebellion, at least with the English punks. The American & English punks get lumped in with eachother but it really was two different scenes & mentality's going on.

Good post! I think you're almost certainly right to point out that punk signified somewhat different things in the US and the UK, and that there was less of an emphasis on any musical "rupture" in the US. I tend to go from the UK scene very much, for one thing because it became very influential here, and the punk ideology here was very similar, and for another because, as you are saying, the English punk scene became very definitive for how we understand punk today. The English punks were influenced by Iggy and the Stooges and other earlier American bands, but many of them were actually also listening to Bowie, Roxy Music, T. Rex, etc. interestingly enough.

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Good post! I think you're almost certainly right to point out that punk signified somewhat different things in the US and the UK, and that there was less of an emphasis on any musical "rupture" in the US. I tend to go from the UK scene very much, for one thing because it became very influential here, and the punk ideology here was very similar, and for another because, as you are saying, the English punk scene became very definitive for how we understand punk today. The English punks were influenced by Iggy and the Stooges and other earlier American bands, but many of them were actually also listening to Bowie, Roxy Music, T. Rex, etc. interestingly enough.

Thank you Otto. I'm from NYC but I too preferred the first wave of English punk bands to the first wave NYC bands, even though I love a lot of the NYC bands too. But there's a big chasm even amongst the American punk scenes. With the exception of Black Flag, X, & Dead Kennedy's, I hate, absolutly loathe, the California punk scene. I can't stand it. They have their own complete different take on punk than the NYC scene & the Brit scene. I can relate much more to a Brit punker ranting about being on the dole because I know what it's like to be broke but how can I relate to some mohawked guy hanging at the beach going on about skate boarding or whatever. It's like the Beach Boy's surfing songs or the Eagles watching Tequila soaked sunrises, I just don't get it because I don't have that point of reference. Then there was the Washington DC hardcore scene, which I did/do like even though it's different from the NYC scene but maybe I can relate to it because it was still an East Coast scene. Lol, the East/West coast feud goes back way before Tupac & Biggie it seems!

Even among my friends we have very differing opinions about what is considered punk. I love The Buzzcocks who are pretty poppy & have a homosexual singer. My Agnostic Front loving friends don't think that they're punk & think that the Buzzcocks are fags, while I just think Agnostic Front are a bunch of macho poseurs, an angrier version of The Offspring who I can't stand either as I consider them a boy band with tattoos. Yet I concede that all three bands I just mentioned are punk whether I like them or not. I love The Dead Boys but I could never understand my friends who loved Patti Smith & considered her punk. She's just a Jack Kerourac spouting beatnick hippie to me, yet I love X & they are beatnick hippies too but with a rockabilly twist. So it's strange. After all what did The Beatles & The Stones really have in common themselves when they started out? The Beatles loved American rockabilly & black American pop while The Stones loved Chicago blues and the raunchier side of black R&B, yet both bands are almost forever going to be linked despite these differences.

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Hi Ally,

Don't sell you're self short mate, England and North America both bounced off each other, for without one both could not borrow from each other. Without American Rock and Roll and the Blues there would be no English Rock, and that's for sure, and without English Gospel, Folk and Country there would never have been the Blues in the first place. We are a good double act in reality and i hope we always will be, c-rap excepted. laugh.gif

Kind Regards, Danny

PS, that goes for the rest of the UK as well, i dont want you to feel left out, Alex, Phil, Rory et all. beer.gif

Everything you've said is true Danny and long may it continue. In this particular case though I was referring more to the era in question. Britain had already experienced many a punk band before punk was even considered a form of music in large parts of North America. If you lived west of the Mississippi punk was still Dirty Harry's best line biggrin.gif

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Great post MSG!

Thanks Swede!

Punk didn't start out as a rebellion against other music, it was young AMERICAN kids who started what became known as punk & who weren't virtuos's but wanted to be in bands & play music anyway, & for whatever reason it was the ENGLISH punks, who co-opted the American punk scene, that started ranting about "dinosaur" bands & throwing out the old order. I think the Brits are just kind of like that in general as a culture, no offense intended because I do find that somewhat healthy. The Ramones loved The Beatles & Zeppelin as much as they loved the Stooges & New York Dolls so there wasn't a movement of overthrowing anything, & that went for all the other CBGB's bands as well. Without the Ramones, there's no Sex Pistols & no Clash, & I like both bands better than The Ramones but they started what became the sound that's most associated with punk. Besides these English punks were like 17, 18 years old. They were bound to be obnoxious & want their own scene. That was what the American rock & roll audience of the 50's were like to. There's nothing wrong with Frank Sinatra, a brilliant talented singer but the kids wanted Elvis, something that was their own & not from the generation before. There's only a 10 year difference between Sinatra & Elvis when they each started, & if you go back to the English punk scene that's pretty much the same amount of time between the Stones & the Pistols, & of course the Pistols, with the exception of Rotten, loved the Stones but they wanted something to call their own. It wasn't so much a musical rebellion but a generational rebellion, at least with the English punks. The American & English punks get lumped in with eachother but it really was two different scenes & mentality's going on.

I'm on a quick flyby right now but I'll talk with you later about your excellent posts, Kaiser. It took a bit of time to unearth this classic article but, if you haven't read it, I think you and Swede might enjoy this: Jerry Nolan's 1991 first person account of his years as a drummer for the Dolls and other bands, written a year before he died. (I hope the link works):

Jerry Nolan - My Life as a Doll

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Everything you've said is true Danny and long may it continue. In this particular case though I was referring more to the era in question. Britain had already experienced many a punk band before punk was even considered a form of music in large parts of North America. If you lived west of the Mississippi punk was still Dirty Harry's best line biggrin.gif

Nice one Ally, and still is my friend. :lol:

Don't get me wrong, just because i don't like something doesn't mean i don't give it credence because i do. Not all Punk was bad, neither is Rap or Disco or anything else, but i would prefer to listen to whale song or Gregorian chant rather than have to listen to them, its just my honest account of what a bigoted fool I've become mate. ;)

Kind Regards, Danny

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