They Didn't Invent Punk...

I am going to do a bad thing.... I know how you all hate registering to read articles online.

So...I am going to cut n paste something here from the NY Times.... its pretty self-explanatory and endorses my choice of photo on my last post... the one I put up before I lived through four days of rock n roll, punk revival, girl group bliss and an amazing double bill of garage rock and oh yeah... the national heat wave of 100 degree temps....

Music Review
They Didn’t Invent Punk, Though They Could Have
By JON PARELES

The standard story goes that punk rock was invented in New York by the Ramones. They distilled the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, plus one-shot mid-1960’s singles and the Detroit ferocity of the MC5 and the Stooges, into the formula that came to define punk: short, fast, catchy, unstoppable.

But in some alternate realm, punk might have traced its genesis to Rocket From the Tombs, which headlined the Dot Dash Festival of punk rock at Southpaw in Brooklyn on Saturday night. The initial Rocket From the Tombs was a Cleveland band that lasted less than a year (1974-5) and never made a studio album. One of its songs, “Sonic Reducer” — with lyrics like “don’t need no human race” — was as straightforward a punk song as anything the Ramones were devising in 1974.

Rocket From the Tombs split into the bands that would become the Dead Boys, playing straightforward punk rock, and Pere Ubu, playing noisy, arty songs it described as “avant-garage.” Peter Laughner, a guitarist in Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu, died of pancreatitis in 1977.

In 2003 three surviving band members — the singer David Thomas from Pere Ubu, the guitarist Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys and the bassist Craig Bell — reconvened Rocket From the Tombs with Steve Mehlman from the current Pere Ubu on drums and Richard Lloyd, from the New York punk-era band Television, on guitar. They did a brief reunion tour and made the first full-fledged studio album of Rocket From the Tombs’ songs, “Rocket Redux” (Smog Veil). Now they have reunited again.

Hindsight inevitably colors reunions, and Rocket From the Tombs started and ended its set on the fast and punky side. But Mr. Thomas has said he doesn’t consider Rocket From the Tombs a punk band. In the mid-1970’s Rocket From the Tombs drew on 1960’s styles — the Stooges, early psychedelia and garage-rock — and sang about adolescent frustrations and destructive urges with a mixture of bluntness and savage irony that was very punk.

The current band sounds hardly less volatile than the group on the rehearsal tapes and live bootlegs that are all the original Rocket From the Tombs left behind. The stinging, quivering phrases of Mr. Lloyd’s guitar solos change the overall sound but leave it just as barbed; Mr. Lloyd wrote and sang a new song, a garage-rocker named “Amnesia.” Mr. Thomas’s high, reedy, cracked croon is more familiar now after 30 years of Pere Ubu, but it’s still one of rock’s most willful vocal styles, both loopy and insolent.

Rocket From the Tombs carried “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” a song about a bombing mission, from ominous psychedelic vamp to punk detonation; “Final Solution” flared up fiercely between each doleful complaint. While Rocket From the Tombs could bash away at punk speed, it could also do unpunk things: particularly ballads like “Ain’t It Fun,” a song about junkie life that, sung by Cheetah Chrome, now sounds as much like a memorial as a report. On Saturday night, as in 1974, Rocket From the Tombs fit into no genre and sounded just right.

Comments

Popular Posts