Best Punk Rock Albums of the Seventies Part 1

When I go out of this world, my thoughts will be three:

1.) I feel very bad about what was done to the Black people.

2.) Punk rock is, as Kurt Cobain observed, the "total escape from pain." However, it is also the music of survivors.

3.) The most amazing group of people to ever walk the earth are, IMHO, the Jews. Time and again the world has come against them, and yet they always survive—and even thrive. One of their most well-known traditional songs is "Hava Nagila," which literally translates as "Come, let's be happy," which in itself gives us the character, the true soul of a people so vastly persecuted. Antisemites hate to acknowledge that there is a kind of exceptionalism about them—or maybe they do see it, just in a reverse sense. At any rate, their history is incredible and still waiting to be fulfilled.

But this article isn't about the Jews. It's about punk rock.

I've been listening to punk rock all my life, and for years and years as a young man went to punk rock shows, dressed like a punk, and did punk stuff—much of which I'm not physically even capable of at age 49. Regardless, punk rock is still my first love, even though I listen to a little of everything.

I'm a marginal person; I've always been an outcast everywhere. I don't socialize, and I have no close family or friends. My pathway was laid out for me long ago in a bourgeois world that I've never really been a part of. So be it. Hell, we all die in the end, as Dead Kennedys intones in the song "Dead End" on their album Plastic Surgery Disasters.

I realized recently there were a handful of vastly influential and favorite punk rock albums from the 1970s, the decade that saw my birth into this damned ugly world. I hate writing about music because it's hard to find superlatives and descriptors for something so emotive and abstract. Plus, I'm not sure about "fair use" and quoting a line or two of lyrics. I guess I'll get away with it.

These are the great albums of '77-style punk rock, from the years it came raging from the Bowery and into your bedroom. Love and napalm, kiddies.

1. Iggy and The Stooges - Raw Power

Not punk in the traditional sense of a lot of down strummed guitars, Iggy's Raw Power lays bare the bones upon which the flesh of future punk rockers would solidify like the gristle on the back of Edison's Frankenstein Monster as he floated in the iron vat. Screamers like "Search and Destroy", the anthem or plaintive call of a "streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm," gave vent to the sense of post-atomic nihilism cum Eisenhower-era rock 'n' roll irony, replacing the old-fashioned sock hop doowop of a generation before and grinding it through the postmodern automation provided by songs that seem as if they are taking fun, danceable rock by the throat and strangling it. "Gimmie Danger," a forlorn, post-modern ballad about the wretchedness of emotional scar tissue, joins such song as "Death Trip," and "Shake Appeal," redefining rhythm and rock and sending Buddy and Jilly into the mean streets of the Motor City in search of musical absolution.

Or something like that. Iggy's snot-infused vocalizations drip white boy blues menace and are so distinctive it's easy to see why he's considered The Godfather.

I've heard Raw Power thousands of times in my life. Or well, a lot of times at least. It never loses its sense of energy, its taut, compact, emotional functionality, taking fun and setting it aside, winding it around in songs that go in heavy, bluesy circles, as if you're dancing in place, on your DEATH TRIP.

Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power (1973) (Full Album)

2. The Dead Boys - Young, Loud, and Snotty

Born on the Bowery: CBGB's OMFUG.

Truly.

I first discovered this tape at a music store (they had those then) in a mall in Baltimore. I knew immediately I wanted it--it had punk rock dog whistles, and a cover with Stiv and the sleazy mess of Dead Boys like, in an alley.

I'll never forget going out to the car, and my dad and stepmom popping the audiocassette into the player. They sat there stock still as the opening palm muted notes of "Sonic Reducer" blasted forth from the speakers. They didn't get it, of course. They didn't understand it, and they most certainly didn't like it.

"I don't need anyone, don't need no mom and dad, don't need no good advice, don't need no human face..."

That's when I knew this album was glorious.

Oh it's misogynistic and leans into its "badboy" image. But alot of that is irony, I think, if you look at Stiv Bators, who looked as if a strong wind could knock him over. (On the other hand, someone said that the reason Stiv may have avoided medical help after getting hit by that car--an accident that led to his untimely death--was because his violent performances, much like Iggy's, had made him "inured to pain.") Whatever the case, Stiv's NYC phlegm-choaked rasp holds forth on songs "Ain't Nothin' to Do" and "Down in Flames," his guttural intonations vomiting up lyrics about homelessness, junkies, whores, boredom, and taking rock into a place beyond irony and masculine posturing into a raw, visceral world where "I'll be ten feet tall, and you'll be nothing at all."

This is hard charging, stripped-down functional, fast rock, with plenty of solos and a lot of balls. Dead or otherwise.

Dead Boys - Young Loud and Snotty (Full Album)

3. Ramones - Self-Titled

The kids are losing their minds...

Someone once said of The Ramones that, if they didn't exist, someone whould have had to invent them.

Actually, I don't know if anyone ever said that about the boys from Forest Hills, the leather-jacketed anti-Beatles who, really, still kind of liked The Beatles anyway.

And Doo Wop. And Bubblegum Pop. And "Surfin' Bird."

But if no one ever did, they really should have. Because these boys transcended the limitations of their musical ability and their seeming individual destinies as filling-station attendants and, in the case of tall, gangling singer Joey Ramone, a probable real-life "teenage lobotomy," and became iconic images of tough, NYC punk rock pioneers, inventing a sound and style that would span an entire genre of imitators that rose to success doing what they did and doing it with far more a lucrative outcome.

Their eponymous debut is a classic slab of 1976 vinyl with steadily paced jackbooted punk drumming (not thrashy) over a minimalist guitar fuzz, down stroked so that their music blitzspeared by at record speed in a manner suggestive of a tight, constricted sing-along of short, buzzsaw odes to the radio hits they grew up with and missed.

Lyrics are self-consciously dumb. Joey Ramone, very Jewish, croons in his unmistakable nasal gurgle and pop about being a "Nazi Shotzi." Which horrified the equally Jewish record producer. Other lyrics cover Texas Chainsaw Massacre, glue-sniffing, dancing, male prostitution, and how "they're going through a tight-wind." Lyrics are often one or two liners, repeated phrases, almost like slogans. Maximum tongue-in-cheek FUN.

"Blitzkrieg Bop," "Beat on the Brat," "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World," "53rd and third" are songs so familiar they are now seemingly radio-friendly and their opening chords are instantly recognizable. The raw edge of their music exploded first here, their iconic image standing in front of an alley wall made poignant now when one sees an image of the same wall with their images digitally removed.

Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy are all gone now, with Tommy being the last to go in 2014. People talk about the "Curse of the Ramones," that all of the original members died within 13 years of each other. Of course, Marky, CJ, and Richie Ramone are still around (As far as I know) but they weren't the guys standing in front of that brick wall in one of the most famous rock 'n' roll images of all time.

Like Johnny Cash, those guys represent, to this author, an America that no longer exists. I'll leave it at that.

Ramones - Ramones (1976) (Full Album)

4. The Clash - Self-Titled

"I'm so bored with the You Ess Eh, but what can I do?" "

The Clash were so abominably good, so thunderously, uproariously just reeking of brilliance, it's hard to credit the fact that, when I first heard this album, I didn't like it. I bought it in a Kmart cut-out bin, along with Alice Cooper's "Raise Your Fist and Yell," Iggy Pop's "Instinct," and "Mistress of Taboo" by The Plasmatics.

Back in those days of bygone youthful naivety, I was sold on the fact that punk rock should always be what Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols once described as "three minutes of thrashing stuff." That it should all sound like The Exploited or G.B.H.; i.e. fast, primitive, uptempo street punk with minimal musicianship and shouted vocals. No melodies.

Not here. These boys were consummate rock musicians, through and through. This wasn't hardcore, which was still a couple of years off. This was a potpourri of rock and reggae influences, and influences all over the damned place, and melodies that were counterpoised against the toothless cockney vocal ministrations of Joe Strummer. The songs are heavy guitar against up-tempo drumming, songs to get the crowd pogoing, with fuzz-tinged instruments not overpowering the rest of the compositions. And unlike most other punks of the period, The Clash were not afraid to combine white boy rock with blues, and reggae on songs like "Police and Thieves," "White Man in Hammersmith-Palais," and then turning back to proto-thrashing scorchers like "White Riot," and the staggering caterwaul of "London's Burning."

I won't pretend I understand the British political environment of the era that spawned The Clash and their undeniable social messages of oppression and, dare I say, revolution? It was an economic downtime for the U.K., and an influx of immigration rose tensions to the boiling point. (Has anything changed? Of course not.) Youth gangs, er, "movements," saw the rise of skinheads, mods, rockers, soul boys, rude boys, Teds, hippies, and, of course, PUNKS.

Disaffected underclass and working-class youth gravitated to The Clash, as demonstrated by the travails of a typical Clash fan as depicted in the pseudo-documentary movie Rude Boy.

The Clash were not just a punk rock band. They were an international phenomenon, a musical milestone that, as author Jim Goad once observed, in concert were "out to destroy you."

All that and a cover of "I Fought the Law, too."

London's burning still.

The Clash - The Clash (US Version) (1979) [Full Album]

5. The Sex Pistols - Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

"When there's no future, how can there be sin?"

No article like this could leave out The Sex Pistols, and their shambling atom bomb of a debut, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, a thing that twists, clatters, roars, and grooves, and stomps, and a hundred other things past the listener, for anthemic protest songs against generally accepted human and societal values.

But that is perhaps overstating things.

Their tough-as-nails rock and roll high energy assaults, leave the listener grasped by the lapel (perhaps like the old slam pit move, "the Grapple"), and shaken, setting up the verses with Johnny Rotten Lydon's distinctive sneering, Irish cockney bastard of a vocal style underpinning the sarcasm of the lyrics of such songs as "God Save the Queen," who is "not a human being," turning young British ladies and lads into "potential H-Bombs." The choruses often jar the listener with their sudden dips, almost as if each song pulls the rug out from under the listener, leaving him or her freefalling or cartwheeling into the next brutal pogoing slam.

These anthems of rebellion are infectious, and Steve Jones's guitar solos scream into the hard-driving rhythms of Paul Cook's steady (but not "thrashy") intense drumming.

Of course, the band, created as an instrument by Impresario Malcolm McLaren as a cash-in on the punk movement, was slated to self-destruct. By instructing them they must "let it all hang out" to become British tabloid sensations, he set his young proteges up for a bloody, violent downfall. In particular, one John Simon Ritchie, a.k.a. "Sid Vicious," a man with mental and drug issues and fetal alcohol syndrome, with seemingly little in the way of any musical talent, or any talent of any remark, except for having the right "look" (he wore the fashions of McLaren's fashion designer lover, Vivienne Westwood) and being a total nihilistic fuck-up. His girlfriend, American Nancy Spungen, accompanied him after the group disbanded (Vicious was the "replacement" for Glenn Matlock, an actual competent musician) to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where, on or about October 12th 1978, she was found dead of a stab wound to the abdomen in the bathroom of a hotel room she had been sharing with Vicious, while both of them tried kicking heroin with methadone. Vicious was arrested for the murder (she was stabbed with a knife belonging to him), but died himself of a drug overdose in February, after attending a birthday party for Doyle, the guitarist from The Misfits.

Rockets Redglare, a stand-up comic and part time actor who appeared in bit parts in such films as Big and television shows such as "Tales from the Darkside," reportedly confessed to friends that he murdered Spungen. He apparently was a drug dealer and a hanger-on for rock bands and musicians who also frequented the hotel room where Spungen and Vicious were staying.

Rockets is also dead.

The "filth and the fury" ended in blood.

Murder.

But, hey, that's rock 'n' roll, baby.

The Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks 1977

PART TWO COMING SOON.

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