When I was a teenager I lived in England. At about that time, punk came along and captured the front pages of the tabloids: `The Filth and the Fury'. The Sex Pistols brought out `God Save the Queen' during the Queen's Jubilee year (a celebration of Elizabeth II for sitting on the throne for 25 years without falling off), just when the rest of England was lining up to kiss the royal posterior. The Pistols' ode to her majesty started:
`god save the queen
the facist regime
they made you a moron
potential h-bomb
god save the queen
she ain't no human being
there is no future
in england's dreaming
don't be told what you want
don't be told what you need
there's no future no future
no future for you
god save the queen
we mean it man.'
That summed up for me the spirit of punk. Johnny Rotten was obviously being sarcastic (he didn't "mean" `God save the Queen' as in "Lord watch over our ruler"), but in fact the Pistols proved to be far more than the marionettes McLaren wanted them to be, and they really did stand for something punk: chaos, rebellion, and a gob in the face of traditional values.
American punks seemed to be second-rate imitators who never embodied the whole spirit of the movement the way the Pistols and the Clash did. Later I got to know the Ramones, who were as real as any of them and just happened to do it first. But to an 18 year old raised on rugby and aggro, US punk was just kids from the suburbs playing dress-up.
In 1984 I went to see X at the Orpheum in Boston. When I got there the support had finished and X were already onstage. There was no way I was getting anywhere near the front. I knew how punk audiences were. But I tried anyway, and within 5 minutes I was standing a few feet from Exene. These so-called "punks" melted like butter - they wouldn't even stand their own ground. US punks had no spunk.
I know there are good US punk bands, but I hardly know them. I never got into hardcore, which is in some ways truer to the spirit of punk than what came before it. I do think Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 were living the punk life years before anyone in England thought of it, but can you call their music punk, or is it just raw, primitive rock? I know some great New York bands that hung around CBGBs when the Ramones played there, and were informed by their spirit, but they all got poppy or arty pretty fast (Blondie, Television, Talking Heads).
Tomorrow morning I'll do an overall Best Punk Band Diary (with a poll and a quiz), but could you educate me a little in the meanwhile, in the comments below? What US band really showed you the meaning of punk?