No-Chord Wonders: Five Punk Rock Records That Attack Any And All Standards of Received Musical Form And Good Taste
“A return to rock’n’roll roots,” “back to basics,” “raw, primal rhythms and guitars” – such were the terms in which the punk movement was cast by its late-‘70s pioneers and their supporters in the rock press. The mainstream rock scene of the time, so the story went, was characterized by multi-sectioned, “classically-influenced” epics delivered, via towering swords-‘n’-sorcery stage sets looking like Harry Potter’s malt-liquor-and-crack-induced nightmare, to the semi-conscious oohing and aahing of teenaged hordes of recreational-household-inhalant aficionados. Then, with one safety-pin-pierced hand, PUNK swept away this vast, bloated miasma in a single violently strummed chord of gloriously discordant simplicity and purity.
This was true as far as it went. However, as that cagiest of ‘60s survivors Neil Young put it around that time, there was more to the picture than met the eye. The supposed “primal” 50s progenitors to which punk was said to hark back were actually supremely accomplished musicians, capable of guitar playing that combined accurate yet quicksilver fretwork with fluid lyricism – think Scotty Moore’s work with Elvis, or James Burton’s with Ricky Nelson, let alone Chuck Berry. Even prominent punk musicians themselves, like the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, were virtuosos within the strictly demarcated musical area they staked out, delivering the goods with verve and pin-point precision. Just check out any live recording of Johnny Thunders; even opiated to the point that they had to prop him up against the mike stand, the guy didn’t miss a note. So, given the tendency toward extremist one-upmanship inherent in any radical current, it was inevitable that somebody would take the screw-the-rules, chaos-is-the-future credo of punk not as a vague normative ideal but rather as a concrete blueprint for action. Here are a few who did.
- The Slits, “A Boring Life.” “Are you ready?” “ . . . .Ready?” Silence, and the sound of some object being moved. Then a groaned, “Ohhhh no . . . .” followed by a shuddering, grinding roar of guitar. The drums catch up after a measure or two, or three. Meanwhile a young woman is hollering about her dire lot in life, the rhythm of her voice seeming to follow the logic of her thoughts as much as or more than what the rest of the band is doing at the moment. You can tell they’ve hit the chorus because the pitch of the distorto-guitar spew modulates a couple of notes up and the other girls join in shouting, “What a boring life!” until the rhythm collapses in on itself in a momentary spasm before lurching toward the next verse. For better or worse, the band’s secret weapon was drummer Palmolive; she evolved rapidly from the wild amateur heard here into a total powerhouse, in the process dragging the rest of the band kicking and screaming into at least the run-down outskirts of “normal” rock and roll. Throughout it all, though, the Slits remained gloriously untamed at heart, U. K. punk’s truest believers (as well as some of its earliest). The version of “A Boring Life” described above is on the rare-to-the-point-of-invisibility Once Upon A Time In A Living Room LP; an almost-as-good version can be heard, along with other very early stuff, on the In The Beginnin CD.
- The Germs, “Germicide.” The Germs travelled faster and farther musically in their three-year existence than most bands do in many times that span. By the 1979’s (GI) they’d honed a precise, lightning-quick wrecking-ball attack that set the scene for hardcore. To say that one wouldn’t have expected that, based on the 1977 live recording issue as Germicide (first on cassette, later on CD), is putting mildly indeed. In their defense, they’d only been playing their instruments for a few months – not that this seemed to have struck anybody as a potential problem. The drummer actually does sort of keep time; she just doesn’t seem to be particularly aware of what the other band members are doing. The guitar and bass trundle haphazardly along in a dazed smog while Darby Crash (then Bobby Pyn) sings some of the time, when he’s not shouting down hecklers (“Oh wow, big pussy!”) or assaulting onlookers with peanut butter. The songs are actually pretty great, several never to be recorded again, and the version of the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” is definitive.
- The Rotters, “Amputee”/”Sit On My Face Stevie Nicks.” In biology, geographical isolation has been responsible for the emergence of many strange and interesting organisms. Some cognate phenomenon was at work in the case of the Rotters. Late ‘70s L. A. was one of the world’s preeminent early punk scenes, but the pleasantly sleepy coastal college town of Santa Barbara, three hours’ drive to the north, was still the archetypal mellow post-hippie haven. The Rotters stuck out like a sickly-green dog turd on a beach full of horrified frisbee-flicking frolickers. Influenced by the Sex Pistols, and only the Sex Pistols, the band clanged aimlessly along behind vocalist “Nigel Nitro”’s ludicrously fake-Brit-accented Rottenisms. Better yet were guitarist “Phester Swollen”’s demented solos; usually lagging noticeably behind the beat, and considerably louder than the rest of the band, they are the musical equivalent of a clumsily grafted limb twitching madly with little discernible relationship to the body to which it has been attached. The recordings were made for course credit by Steely Dan-loving UCSB audio-engineering students who hated the band’s guts and gave them a disorienting, cavern-like sound that adds to the glorious ill-fittedness of the entire enterprise.
Fun fact: When Mick Fleetwood heard “Sit On My Face Stevie Nicks,” he reportedly threatened to beat all of the Rotters silly if he ever ran into them; he and Stevie were having an affair at the time. (My favorite Mick Fleetwood anecdote is when he said that if you laid every line of cocaine he ever did end to end, it would stretch from L. A. to Las Vegas. What a guy!). Both songs were initially issued as the Rotters’ debut single in 1979; they can be found, along with much other fine earl work, on their Pull It And Yell Cd.
- Mikey Wild And The Mess, “Die Die Die”/”I Hate New York.” Mikey Wild was a) developmentally disabled and b) by his own account Philadelphia’s first punk rocker. The above may or may not be relevant to the utter singularity and indifference to/defiance of the outside world exhibited on these songs, which comprised a 1988 single but may have been recorded earlier. The band grinds along in an erratically pummeling stomp, like a conveyor belt with something jammed into the gears, while Mr. Wild’s mush-mouthed caterwauling weaves in and out of the beat: “Aahuuh, I uh . . . I hate fuckin’ . . FUCK YOU NEW YORK!! I hate the Jets, the Mets, the Yanks, AND the Rockettes!” A flawless performance. These tracks, and other classics like “Chicks with Dicks” and “Vincent Price (Wasn’t Very Nice),” are included on the I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk CD, credited to Mikey Wild and the Magic Lanterns. Not included, sadly, is Wild’s tribute to Uncle Eddie, the lovable Philadelphia eccentric who paid kids in video game cartridges and pizza to shit on him while he lay nude in his bathtub (the kids supposedly picketed in protest against his imprisonment). It’s this kind of municipal spirit that has made Wild’s legend live on, even after his death, as the poet laureate/maudit of the cheesesteak capitol.
- The Thrown-Ups, Seven Years Golden. There’s a sudden avalanche of crashing and banging, like someone throwing a Marshall stack fully outfitted with plugged-in guitars down a steep staircase. The sound fades down to a feedback hum, then a crazed, nasal voice hollers, “Your band SUCKS!” The musicians lurch into a churning, off-kilter pattern of atonal, brain-dead Sabbath-sludge, while the nasal-voice guy emits a sputtering spume of seemingly Tourette’s-inspired verbiage up top. Welcome to the wacky world of the Thrown-Ups. These guys are actually a bit of a ringer in terms of the rest of this here list; they were already accomplished musicians, Mark Arm and Steve Turner having started the “Seattle sound” as the half of Green River that went on to become Mudhoney instead of Pearl Jam (and I gotta say, the fact that this group is a mere degree or so of separation away from Eddie Vedder and Co. really gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside). But if the example of the Thrown-Ups demonstrates anything, it’s that truly inspired musicians can forget everything they’ve so painstakingly acquired, if need be. They posit a world in which the Shaggs and the Godz are of equal pertinence to the “Seattle sound” as, say, the Stooges, Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad, etc. But that distinctively Northwestern 70s-cock-rock-meets-postpunk gestalt is indeed present here too, making this a sort of terrifying fun-house-mirror-distorted premonition/parody of the “grunge” music that would take over American rock during the 1990s. In fact, if groups like the Stone Temple Pilots and Alice In Chains essayed a model of rock sexuality in which Robert Plant and Robert Smith melded into a broodingly-tormented-yet-threateningly-virile studmuffin/thundergod, the Thrown-Ups’ version was more like a toothless hobo up on a fire escape wacking off while checking out passing women below, then tripping over the pants slumped at his feet and tumbling headfirst down into an open dumpster. The Seven Years Golden CD collects nearly all of their stuff, one tragic exception being perhaps their finest work, “Traffic Accident Sex.” The latter appears on the multi-artist Dope, Guns And Fucking In The Streets Vol. 1-3 compilation, available in various formats.