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Archives
Looking back |
"In 1977 From the Clash's "1977" written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones This week, the thirtieth anniversary of the "Summer of Love" will commence. The thirtieth anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival will also be marked this summer. We're gonna get buried in the nostalgia and the hype. It's not that '67 wasn't a watershed year, it was. It was the second rock and roll revolution. But like many of you, not only wasn't I there, I wasn't even off somewhere else feeling like I was missing something. As Sid Vicious once so eloquently put it, "I was too busy playing with my Action Man." In the summer of 1967 I had just turned seven years old. Maybe I was born too late. Certainly that's what I believed a decade later, when as a high school senior I felt that I was indeed born out of my proper time, that I should have done my rights of passage in the '60s, been at Monterey and Woodstock. I was pissed off that I had no draft to dodge. What I didn't know then was that just as ten years earlier I'd missed my proper time/place by a decade, I'd managed to fuck up again. I missed the third rock and roll revolution, this time missing the mark by 4000 miles, or if I'm really generous with myself, maybe only 1500. I began my eighteenth year truly believing that I'd missed all the action, and oblivious to the fact that I was missing it again. 1977 was the summer of Punk, and I was in neither New York or London. Nobody's retelling the tales of that revolution. Maybe a decade from now, when my peers are running the media corps, someone will think it matters. I sure don't remember this kind of hype around the 20th anniversary of the "Summer of Love." In many ways '77 was a lot like '67. It's not like something unprecedented happened in '67. The seed was planted in '65, by Dylan, by the Beatles, in San Francisco, the power was in full flower by '66 and by '67, all the Bay Area bands had been signed, so all the Greenwich Village folkies went to L.A, plugged in and met the demand. 1967 was the year it went from being a news story to a business interest. 1967 was just the year that the culture escaped from the lab and made it's way from fringe to mass media. In that way, Punk was pretty similar to Hippie. The Stooges had defined '70s punk by the release of "Raw Power" in '73. The New York scene, presaged by the New York Dolls, was a healthy underground mess by '76. And very few sea-changes in rock music are so clearly defined as the birth of British punk. The Ramones went to England, Malcom McClaren saw them, and had an epiphany that equals Sam Philips' prescience of 1954. The Sex Pistols were born and everything punk out of England for the rest of the decade was a direct result. 1977 wasn't the year punk was born, it was the year it was picked up on corporate radar. Again, the year it went from being a news story to a business interest. Punk, like Hippie before it, wasn't born at major record labels. It was born where creative, revolutionary-minded young people scrapped to get by, to find their voice and their audience, and to be heard. Indie-rock didn't exist in the way it does now. There were people making records in their basements, and there were major labels. There wasn't a middle ground. The trick was to get your basement record, or perhaps just a demo tape played on BBC radio (and hopefully banned, an unparalleled publicity coup), and get signed by one of the majors. Hell, the Clash's first single, "White Riot," was released on CBS (now Sony). Do you think CBS was developing this new music? They were just panning for gold. Now "alternative music" is big business. The higher up the label food chain you go, the higher the expectations. No punk-derived band's ever going to get the time of day at a major in '97 until they've been developed by some Indie A&R guy. Thousands of contracts at hundreds of Indies mean that all kinds of artists can get a foot in the door. No longer is it about picking the fruit from the top of the tree. Pioneering labels like Stiff records in England made the success of American labels like SST, TwinTone and SubPop possible. Still, back in '77 the majors did a pretty decent job of bringing great music from New York and London to the heart of America. Television, Talking Heads, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam... It was a tidal wave that swept up, and brought me (eventually) music that wasn't even punk. Without the punk revolution of '77 I might not have ever heard Joe Jackson, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, XTC, or Rockpile. All that you know as "alternative music" stems from it. The moment was significant enough to Talking Heads that they named their debut album Talking Heads '77. So, will there ever be a fourth revolution? I don't recall any revolution of '87, and I'm pretty damn sure that no building, dam-burst of creativity is set to take over in in '97, though we desperately need one. I'm tired of "alternative music." If all the good alternative records haven't already been made, then it's still certain that enough great ones have, that I couldn't fully appreciate them all if I spent the rest of my life trying. I don't need any more low-fi, bad attitude, shoe gazer bands or their records. It's been great fun, but it's played out. It's time for something new. Something fresh, affirming and well, fun...something pleasant. Something that's not the sonic equivalent of getting one's most tender parts pierced. I don't need to prove how bleeding edge I am, how raw I can take it, or insusceptible to outrage I've become. Soothe me. Thrill me. Perhaps rock spent the '50s, '60's and '70s inventing itself, and the '80s and '90s just freshening it's makeup. That's a depressing thought. Gimme the next revolution, please.
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