HiImThomasPynchon

Who wins?

edit: No More Half-Measures! Forks win!

Feature Song: Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies (1983/Frontier Records/Venice, CA)

Skateboarding evolved out of surfing in the late 50s and early 60s, as something for surfers to do when the waves just weren't there. The skateboard itself began as the crate scooter, a plank of wood with some wheels and a crate on top to serve as ersatz handlebars. Eventually the planks were replaced by something more akin to a board and the crate was removed to make it more like a surfboard. Early skaters (or 'street surfers') would often make their own boards, which they would ride barefoot to emulate the feel of surfing. Accordingly, all of their moves were based on surfing moves. The first manufactured skateboards came to us by way of Bill Richard's Val Surf in 1962. Originally Val Surf sold only the parts to build your own skateboard, but by 1965, Bill had assembled a team to begin assembling ready-made skateboards. Meanwhile, Larry Stevenson, publisher of Surf Guide magazine, began publishing articles about this new pastime hoping to hook more surfers on the hobby. Eventually Larry started Makaha Skateboards, a company still in existence today. A competitive skateboarding scene started to pop up in Southern California, and many of them got sponsorships. In 1965, the city of Tuscon, Arizona constructed Surf City, the world’s first purpose-built skate park, with more to follow. The following year, the Van Doren Rubber Company would begin selling shoes designed for skateboarding, and The American Skateboarding Championships in Anaheim were broadcast nationally on ABC’s Wild World Of Sports. With the national exposure, people around the nation took up skateboarding only to discover an unfortunate truth about these early boards: It was really easy to get hurt on them.

Skateboarding is always going to come with the potential of injury, but there was a far greater number of far more serious injuries with these old boards. The design of a skateboard was still evolving, with boards only gaining a tail at the end of the 60s. Wheels were made of clay, steel, or even wood, all of which had a tendency to skid and break. That all changed in 1972, when Frank Nasworthy produced the polyurethane skateboard wheel, which offered greater traction and better performance at high speeds. Fewer wipeouts meant fewer injuries, and less time spent recuperating meant more time to practice. Downhill and freestyle skateboarding started to grow in popularity. Then, in 1976, a terrible drought hit Southern California, meaning lots of pools were kept dry in the summer. These empty pools became bowls for the new crowd of skateboarders. It was this second wave of skaters who embraced punk.

So what did skaters listen to before punk? Well, since the surfers were the original skaters, there was a lot of surf rock in the beginning. When skateboarding became its own thing, the music tastes of skaters began to drift away from their surf roots. Hard Rock and early Heavy Metal became popular with the skateboarding crowd, along with Southern Rock. But when Punk Rock took off in 1976, it seemed to fit perfectly with skateboarding culture. Skating is about going fast, unwinding, and working through confusion and aggression. Skaters also had an antipathy towards authority, as police often hassled those who practiced on the street. Punk was about all those things, too, and the relationship between Punk Rock and Skateboard culture only deepened when SoCal punks invented Hardcore.

Oxnard, California, about an hour West Northwest of Los Angeles, opened their first skate park, Endless Wave, in 1977. This place was a magnet for local youngsters, many of whom were falling in with the burgeoning Hardcore scene in the LA suburbs. Among the earliest Punk acts from the area were an outfit from Moorpark called the Rotters, who pretty much just aped the Sex Pistols, even going so far as to pretend they were from London. They played to mostly teenage audiences, most of them skaters. Among them were Mark Hickey and Henry Knowles, who seemed to understand the style immediately. In 1979, they got together with SIMS skateboarding teammate “Big Bob” Clark to become Agression. Through late ‘79 through early ‘81, Agression would replace the Rotters as the hottest punk band in Oxnard, followed by the likes of Dr. Know and Ill Repute. Mark and Henry would get the Oxnard Hardcore (or Nardcore) scene noticed late ‘81 when they became some of the earliest members of the Better Youth Organization, a collective founded by Shawn and Mark Stern of Youth Brigade. While BYO released much of the early work, things really got going when Mystic Records founder Doug Moody discovered the Oxnard Hardcore scene, bringing further bands like Stalag 13, False Confession, and Rich Kids on LSD, most of whom knew each other through skating. Recording for Mystic Records meant going to Los Angeles, so they would come to mingle with newer LA Hardcore acts like Suicidal Tendencies, Minutemen, and Bad Religion. Along with a couple outsiders like Gang Green (from Braintree, MA), Big Boys (from Austin, TX), and Jodie Foster’s Army (from Phoenix, AZ) these acts would later go on to lay the foundation for Skate Punk, a subgenre of Punk centring specifically on skateboarding.

Except it wasn’t called Skate Punk, yet. Most of the time it was called Skate Thrash, as a nod to Thrasher magazine, which began publishing in 1981. Through Thrasher, skaters found out about the scenes sprouting up in various locales across America, which often led them to discover new bands. It was also a shout-out to the then-emerging Thrash Metal scene in Los Angeles. Thrash Metal is what happened when Americans got their hands on The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. While bands like Motorhead and Iron Maiden were spurred on by having to share venues with Punks bands, Metallica and Slayer were playing in venues that also hosted Hardcore acts. As such, they also inherited the ‘louder, harder, and faster’ mentality that drove the LA punks. For a little bit, Thrash and Hardcore were sort of the same thing to a lot of people, separated only by the technical proficiency of Thrash. Sometimes, however, a Thrash Metal band would strip out the intricacies, or a Hardcore Punk band would introduce something more intricate, giving us Crossover Thrash.

The connection between Punk and Skateboarding reached the mainstream imagination thanks to the video for Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies. The song was likely the first true Hardcore music video to get significant airplay on MTV, and featured singer Mike Muir walking through a makeshift skate park at the beginning of the video. This was a nod Muir’s affiliation with the Venice, CA skate crowd. Not only did Mike skate but his older brother Jim was on the original incarnation of the Zephyr Competiton Team (or Z-Boys), the team that pioneered vertical and aerial boarding in the late 70's.

Skate Punk would come into its own as a discrete genre thanks to Bad Religion’s 1988 comeback album Suffer. Their 1985 album Into The Unknown saw the band embark on a progressive rock-influenced flight of fancy that didn’t go over well with their fans. Guitarist and producer “Mr. Brett” Gurewitz joked that they sent out 10,000 copies and had 11,000 sent back. The reaction to the album was so poor that Bad Religion disbanded, and Gurewitz closed the doors on Epitaph Records. Two years later, Gurewitz and singer Greg Graffin would reunite Bad Religion and reopen the label. Suffer would be a return to the hardcore format but with added attempts at melodies and occasional vocal harmonies. Suffer became arguably Bad Religion’s greatest success, re-invigorating the the SoCal Punk scene and laying a lot of the groundwork for what punk would become in the 90’s. But those stories are still to come.

Next time: Things are about to smell far, far worse.

Well, here we are. The 80's, finally. Ronald Reagan is in the White House, Margaret Thatcher is in No 10, and a lot of people are angry. Punk Rock as we knew it splintered into New Wave, Ska, Post-Punk, and Goth. Those who stuck to the core Punk Rock ethos became known as Hardcore Punks, after the D.O.A. album Hardcore '81. Thanks to works like Penelope Spheeris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Hardcore bands like Black Flag and Germs would become the faces of the movement. Punks as presented in movies and television would almost always dress and act like Hardcore bands rather than the likes of the Ramones or The Dictators. While CBGB had once been a home for weirdos making weird music, it was almost all Hardcore acts through the 80s. Evolution still happens, but at a far slower pace than previously, and in a way that's easier to track scene-by-scene. To that end, I'm starting the Hardcore Havens sub-series, in which I'll talk about the various Hardcore scenes and what they added to Punk Rock.

To begin: Washington, DC.

Punk came to the US capital the same way it came to everyone else: the Ramones came to town. In their wake, all the weirdos in D.C. decided to stop waiting for weird music to come to them. This resulted in the first wave of D.C. Punk bands, like The Slickee Boys and The Penetrators. These bands mostly released music through local Maryland indie label Limp Records, who released the foundational :30 Over DC compilation in 1978. But most of these bands still had a bit too much of that precursor DNA, sounding a bit folky and a bit garage rock, and mostly settling into place in the "New Wave" niche.

...And then, Hardcore happened.

One of the things about Washington, D.C. is that a lot of the people there are tuned-in politically and a lot of the young people were very angry about America's ongoing decline. To paraphrase Henry Rollins of State of Alert (and later Black Flag), there wasn't really a kind of music for people who were both very angry and very energetic. While the Ramones opened their eyes to the wonders of pounding rhythms and buzzsaw guitars, it was the likes of Black Flag, Germs, and (unfortunately) FEAR that showed that you could push it even further. Remember how I said L.A. Punks threw melody to the wind? Yeah, D.C. did that even more, with bands like S.O.A, Youth Brigade, and The Teen Idles just barely suggesting a melody in their songs.

In amongst all these up-and-coming Hardcore bands was a little Jazz Fusion act called Mind Power. From 77-78, the group had a dual awakening, as future vocalist Sid McCray introduced them to punk rock and Bob Marley introduced them to the Rastafari movement. Punk and the Rastafari movement spoke to their beliefs, and seemed to compliment each other. To that end, they changed their name to Bad Brains and became a Punk band. Their sound was much like that of their contemporaries in the D.C. Hardcore scene, except for the occasional dip into Reggae. This mixture of sounds made them incredibly popular with the DC Hardcore crowd, who would slam dance particularly vigorously when the band was on. Bad Brains encouraged this kind of dancing, which they called 'Mashing.' However, due to singer/guitarist H.R. and his Jamaican accent, the word came out as "Moshing." Club owners in D.C. were not very happy about moshing, as it was dangerous to other patrons and had the potential to cause a lot of property damage. As such, Bad Brains got banned from basically anywhere they could play in their hometown. In 1980, the band relocated to New York City, where they would become a staple at CBGB.

Ian McKaye was the bassist in The Teen Idles. He'd originally formed the band as The Slinkees in 1979, and formed Dischord Records with drummer Jeff Nelson to release the Minor Disturbance EP in 1980. And then The Teen Idles broke up. But Ian and Jeff persisted, enlisting Lyle Preslar on Guitar and Brian Baker on bass to form Minor Threat. Their debut release, a self-titled EP in 1981, contains the song Straight Edge, in which Ian explains why he doesn't get intoxicated. Except that song is only 49 seconds long, so he has to cut out quite a lot of the story. The truth is there was something of a temperance movement growing within Punk scenes, even before Minor Threat had formed.

What we know today as Punk began as a way to take rock 'n' roll back for the masses, and drugs and alcohol are part and parcel of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Being associated with Punk meant you were marginally more likely to encounter some stuff that was particularly hard and particularly cheap or even get introduced to impromptu highs like airplane glue. A lot of punks had become addicted to drugs and alcohol and were dying young because of it. The highly publicized death of Sid Vicious in 1979, followed by the suicide of Darby Crash in 1980 had started to put things into perspective. This was a big deal to one Ian McKaye, who had seen firsthand the way drugs and alcohol impacted the people in his life. He had sworn off drugs and alcohol in his teens and wanted to encourage others to do so as well. But Punk comes from counterculture, and attempts to take them away from their intoxicants aren't going to go over well. In Straight Edge, Ian made the case that one can live fast without taking drugs, drinking booze, or smoking cigarettes. Sure, Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers had sung the virtues of sobriety, and The Vibrators disavowed the hard stuff. Minor Threat made it about rebellion through self control, and while they never really tried to push it on people, they wound up becoming reluctant figureheads of the movement.

A thing I've been sorta glossing over is just how young some of these new Hardcore acts were. A lot of Hardcore bands consisted of people who were under 21, which made it difficult to book gigs at Punk-friendly clubs. Ian MacKaye experienced this firsthand when Teen Idles went to California, where a club owner turned them away at the door because nobody was of legal drinking age. The band was able to reach a compromise with the management by which they would all wear a big black X on the back of their hand in permanent marker, so staff would know not to serve them alcohol. When Teen Idles returned to DC, they spread the idea to local club managers, who liked the idea. With the X, teenagers could get into the shows, see Minor Threat play, and get introduced to the ideas of straight edge. When those kids finally came of age to drink, they kept the X as a way to self-identify with the new movement. This sorta continues into modern times, as xXUsernamesLikeThisXx originated as a way to denote that a user is straight edge.

As the movement spread, people began to wonder "Why stop at cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol?" After all, there were plenty more vices harming the Punk community around this time. STI's, and unplanned pregnancies were common among several scenes, and thus some began to eschew casual sex as part of their commitment to the lifestyle. Some Punks even became vegetarian or even wholly vegan, with bands like Earth Crisis incorporating animal rights and environmentalism into their interpretation of straight edge. There's also Queer Edge for those of you who abstain from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes but aren't straight.

So don't do drugs.

Or do.

It's your life.

Nice beeps.

Cool boops.

Kinda makes me wanna play Earthbound.

"Yeah...we're REALLY jamming now."

Remember, YOU owe it to the long-suffering Bennedetto Family to not work today!

Feature Song: We Want The Airwaves by the Ramones (July, 1981/Sire Records/New York, NY)

Despite exploding onto the scene around the same time, TV and Rock Music have always had a tenuous relationship. Around 1950, TV networks were interested in satisfying the broadest needs of the ~5 million households that owned a television. Rock 'n' Roll was too loud, rebellious, and (to put it more plainly), black for wholesome television. When Rock 'n' Roll broke in 1952, there were ~25 million TV sets in homes across the nation, and a great many of those watching TV belonged to a brand new demographic, the "Teen-Ager." These new Teen-Agers, or "Teeny-Boppers" were gaining a sort of financial independence, which made them ripe for advertisers. However, Teens liked Rock 'n' Roll, and that meant Rock 'n' Roll would have to go on TV eventually. By 1956, white people had finally put together competent Rock 'n' Roll acts that could appear on television, but even then, it had to be sanitized. Elvis Presley's first TV appearances had him shot from the waist up for fear that his pelvic gyrations would be too much for the TV-watching public. But the real damage had been done, as Rock 'n' Roll was sonically exotic, visually exciting, and most importantly, accessible. In 1957, Bandstand went national, becoming American Bandstand, while Ozzie Nelson's son Ricky began performing Rock 'n' Roll numbers on the nationally syndicated Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet Show. These shows, along with The Ed Sullivan Show, did a lot to sanitize Rock 'n' Roll's image. However, they tended to feature only the most family-friendly acts.

On New Year's Day 1964, the BBC launched weekly pop chart programme Top of The Pops, counting down the top 20 singles of the week with performances by some of the featured artists. The first show featured The Rolling Stones performing I Wanna Be Your Man and a promotional video for that week's #1 single, I Want To Hold Your Hand by The Beatles. Just over a month later, The Beatles would perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show, revealing that Br!tish Rock 'n' Roll was far more TV-friendly than what Americans were doing. This not only kicked open the door for The Br!t!sh Invasion, but also pushed Americans to develop a more mature form of Rock 'n' Roll. This would lead to Folk Rock becoming the dominant form of homegrown Rock music in the country, while the Br*ts would pioneer Blues Rock and Progressive Rock. These sounds would be deemed too underground for TV in America or in the UK, leading them to appear on Beat-Club in West Germany. This would feed back into Top of The Pops, who would begin to feature stranger, more visually captivating artists like Arthur Brown and various Glam Rock acts in the Early 70s.

This is the world Punk Rock was born into in the late 60s-early 70s. While Link Wray and The Kingsmen had national TV appearances, and Los Saicos got their big break on Peruvian national TV, most proto-punks never really got to be on TV. For example, The Fugs were simply too radical to be featured on American airwaves, however they did appear on Swedish TV in 1968. Similarly, The Velvet Underground would have to make concessions to censorship if they wanted to be on TV, which they considered selling out. MC5 made a handful of appearances on local Detroit music show The Lively Spot in 1970, before issues with the US Government pushed them off the airwaves and over to Germany, where they performed on Beat-Club. Needless to say, Iggy and The Stooges were just too obscene for TV. This is the way things were when Punk was formalized in the mid-70s. While some acts, like Television, would have dismissed the opportunity to appear on TV, others like the Ramones, Blondie, and DEVO would have relished the opportunity. Unfortunately, earlier acts had made it unlikely for TV broadcasters to come asking for them.

Things were just a touch bit different in the UK, however, as Glam Rock had been a big ratings win for Top of The Pops and the weekly chart shows that followed. When The Saints hit it big with (I'm) Stranded in 1976, Punk was still unknown to the UK public, who saw it as a younger, snottier extension of Glam. When the Sex Pistols rose to notoriety, the first show to have them on was Tony Wilson's So It Goes.. Shortly thereafter, it was over to Today with Bill Grundy, when the Pistols gave us the most controversial 2 minutes in Br*tish television. The resulting media circus made it so the only acceptable place for Punk on Br*tish TV was lambasting on the nightly news. But then, on January 25th of 1977, the news rang out that Punk had died. In its wake came New Wave, which was cleaner, less boisterous, and overall more presentable. When The Jam's debut single In The City made it into the charts in May, they were invited to perform on Top of The Pops, and it wasn't long before more acts in the punk sphere got the invite. This posed a conundrum to the punk crowd:

On one hand, Top of The Pops was a product of the BBC. The Man. Appearing on the BBC was like consorting with The Enemy. However, if you did go on Top of The Pops, you were making Punk accessible to young people across the nation in a way it never would have been otherwise. Helping matters was the fact that nobody actually played on most of these shows. Performances on Top of The Pops and other weekly shows featuring live bands were almost universally 'mimed' over a backing track. This was due to TV studios being ill-designed for live music and a perceived lack of technical skill among Rock and Pop acts. However, the fact that it was all mimed meant that you could subvert it. Examples include Hugh Cornwall's no-hands guitar solo on No More Heroes and Bob Geldof playing the candelabra in the intro to Rat Trap. However, the all-time kings of screwing with TOTP wouldn't arrive until 1994, when Manic Street Preachers went on in IRA regalia. Still, the overall idea among UK Punks was that being invited to play on TOTP was an admission from the BBC that they had "made it."

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, Punks eventually settled on an acceptable way to appear on TV: Public Access. Counterculture writer Coca Crystal launched weekly call-in show If I Can't Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution in 1977, and it finally ended production in 1995. Coca Crystal described her show as "an hour of talk, telephone, and technical failure." She opened every episode by lighting a joint before talking about news items relating to her staunch Leftist politics. Guests on If I Can't Dance... included the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Cesar Chavez, along with Debbie Harry of Blondie and Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs. After appearing on the show in 1978, Glenn O'Brien was inspired to create his own public access call-in show, TV Party. The Coca Crystal Show and TV Party would go onto inspire a slew of other lo-fi public access talk shows, including one of my all-time favorites: The Chris Gethard Show.

And then...

Saturday, August 1st, 1981, 12:01 AM.

An apt choice, all told. Artists had been making promotional videos for their music since there were talkies, but nobody had ever thought of broadcasting just that, 24 hours a day. And so it came to pass that Music TeleVision was born. Despite the sheer volume of video the fledgling channel had access to, they almost immediately found themselves starved for relevant content. To put this into perspective: for the first few years of their existence, the artist with the most videos in circulation on MTV was Rod Stewart. Music videos didn't need to be good, they just needed to exist. That's where the punks excel. Bands like the Ramones, Blondie, DEVO, and Black Flag put together simple videos on shoestring budgets and got Punk music into regular rotation on what was functionally a national radio station. Kids from Maine to California were watching the same videos and taking in the same music, and that meant they might be taking in Punk. However, the easy times couldn't last forever. 1983 saw the much-ballyhooed debut of the video for Thriller. Produced for a whopping $500 000 under director John Landis, that music video is more like a short film. Thriller entered heavy rotation and the race was on for other bands to keep up. Punks couldn't keep up with that kind of money, but still managed to wind up on MTV, either by being visually striking, refusing to play the game, or just by being too weird to look away.. Punk (and its children) would return to MTV in a more formalized way with the creation of the 120 Minutes block in 1986, but for a brief while at the start of the channel, punks got pretty close to running the show.

Movie is He Died With A Felafel in His Hand (Richard Lowenstein/2001/Melbourne, AU)

Awh yeah 2000 AD Drokkposting is back bay-beee!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/261026

Featured song: Rumble by Link Wray and The Ray Men (March 31st, 1958/Cadence Records/New York, NY)

I find myself commenting about punk history a lot in this place. Seems a lot of you have questions and misunderstandings about the genre. Thought I'd throw my hat into the "Post something every day" ring, but with an informative twist. Of the things I'm encyclopedic about, punk history might be the one thing I'll never run out of stuff to say about.

To begin, I'd like to answer the most hotly debated question in punk rock: Who was first? There are a number of oft-cited answers but this one's mine.

It's winter, early 1958, in Virginia. While trying to lay down a guitar-centric version of The Stroll by The Diamonds, Link Wray's amp makes a noise it's not supposed to. Might have been some faulty electrics, might have been some bizarre environmental variables. All we know is that nobody had ever heard distorted guitar like this before, and that the world just wasn't the same afterward. The resulting instrumental, originally called 'Oddball' becomes a crowd favorite, with audiences requesting it multiple times a night. It also becomes one of Link's favorites, because he gets to make that noise again.

But it's never quite the same as that first time. Whatever the circumstances led to this early distorted guitar, they were too arcane for 1958 to fathom. Legend has it that Link destroyed a number of speaker cones trying to replicate the sound. Including the studio speaker he used to demonstrate the original sound to producer Archie Bleyer. Bleyer didn't like the song, didn't see the appeal. However, his stepdaughter was enamoured with it and convinced him that it should be released on Cadence Records.

When you listen to the song, are you picturing a bunch of 50s teenagers squaring off for a fight in an alleyway? If not, why not? Also, what would you call those kids with the greasy hair and leather jackets rolling around in gangs? Would you call them punks, per chance?

Phil Everly of The Everly Brothers noticed this too, and suggested the title Rumble because it sounded like a street fight. In fact, this imagery was so powerful that, to this day, Rumble remains the only instrumental to ever get banned from US airwaves. Despite being banned, it reached #11 on the R&B charts.

Rumble is my pick for first punk rock track because it was the first to mix ideas about punks and ideas about rock. When The Ramones got together 16 years later, they based their look and feel on the street toughs that came to mind when people heard the song in '58.

Further reasoning:

1. "Punk is about being ugly." - Jehangir Tabari

Sure, Michael Muhammad Knight isn't the guy to tell the story of punk and Islam, but he made a good point there. The whole point of Rumble is that an electric guitar wasn't supposed to sound like that. But Link went ahead with it anyway, because despite being "ugly" it was cool and slightly menacing. What's more punk than that?

2. They banned an instrumental!

It's the hysteria surrounding rock music and juvenile delinquency in its barest form. Rumble was so in-your-face for the time that it got banned for indecency despite having no lyrics. It pissed off parents across the nation and what's more punk than that?

Recommended Reading: None (homework is for squares, anyway)

Recommended Viewing: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (2017)

Tomorrow, Punk Goes West

Can't wait to see Ravnica get compleated.

"WATCH OUT GUILDLESS! THE PHYREXIANS ARE RIGHT BEHIND YOU! oh no they all have airpods in they cant hear us oh shit oh fuck"

Edit: Wait I just realized this means Krenko is at risk :kitty-cri-screm: