Dister, Alain. “Punk Special: Clash, Damned, Saints, Jam, Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Ramones, Dictators.” Rock & Folk (French), no. 126, July 1977, pp. 1–8.
Punk Special
— Punk dossier by Alain Dister, examining the rise of the Clash, Sex Pistols, Damned, Saints, Jam, Ramones, Dictators and Stranglers.
— Focus on the Clash: politicised, working-class roots, influenced by New York Dolls and Pete Townshend, described as folk-punk and heirs to Woody Guthrie.
— Discography section lists French pressings of The Clash, Damned, Saints, Jam, Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Dictators.
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Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77 | Cover
N°126 July 77, 6 F monthly
Rock&Folk
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Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77 | Page 1 & Page 2
The big companies sign, sign, sign (who knows?), punk albums are flourishing. The time has come to take a first assessment, to judge the croak after the plumage.
To realize that beyond the image there are human beings and that not all punks look alike.
Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77 | Page 3 & Page 4
OK. I'm 35 years old. It's not an age for a punk. But that won’t stop me from continuing to claim the right to play the fool whenever I feel like it. And the opportunities to behave like an idiot are becoming rare these days. With all those stories of space music and hippies, I had even ended up no longer believing in it. Boredom. Nothing else, but really cultivated. Or the tearful nostalgia over my piles of great classics. But in the end, the reality of the Yardbirds no longer really fits the time. And I’m not talking about that of the Dead. Real dead.
And then two years ago, the upheaval started again. Like in a Masse drawing, a building in madness swept away on waves of cobblestones. And old men yelling inside, when the wind doesn’t carry them away towards a grayish infinity. The wind started blowing stronger and stronger. The earth trembles, the hordes are at our doors. There had been that little breeze, that gust of wind foreshadowing the storm, in 73, with the New York Dolls; but nobody believed in it, right? The idiots sneered swearing that it would pass and that we would soon return to the (funeral) pumps of accepted pop culture. Nobody dared imagine what would rush in behind those little brats.
1977. The crisis, the quagmire—finally, a little rain before the hail. Systems and programs have strictly nothing to offer. The situation is clearly summed up on the vinyl t-shirt of a London punk girl (?): "No future." In the time of the Beatles, the alternative was: rock and roll or the factory. Today, it has become: rock and roll or unemployment. It's not that you make fortunes strumming a guitar (The Clash, though well-known, admit to earning only 800 francs a month), but it keeps you busy. And the folklore of the 70s is no longer high school romances or flowers in your hair.
It’s the filthy street, pollution, the stupidity of the media. The scenery is not new. We've already used it elsewhere. It's the way we look at it that has changed. The environment is no longer to be endured with groans or transformed by some political gesture; it just is. Period. Poor theater where matter is lived in the present moment. Instantaneity sometimes expressed by a brutal shock, power of men against power of things. English punk is thus situated in a pictorial avant-garde perspective—and not a musical one.
Are the two activities themselves closely linked? On the one hand minimal rock, whambam whambarn bambam, support of an aggression that is undoubtedly more visual, joining the happenings of the glorious sixties. On the other, a painter’s approach—or rather action on objects. You’re going to talk to me about Andy Warhol and pop art. Yes, yes, and even the Velvet Underground. Warhol, I agree. But the Velvet, no. The pop
art of The Clash, of the Pistols or of the Damned, is situated before the meeting of Andy and Lou. It's that of the Campbell’s soup can, itself a direct heir of the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Instant-art. Instinct-art.
The Clash
Their approach is even singularly (because they are the only ones to claim it) prior to Warhol. Their references: Jasper Johns and above all Jackson Pollock, whose name is associated with the New York school known as "action painting." Homage to Pollock: the shirts of The Clash are smeared, whipped with splashes of paint. To the limit. The Clash should not be playing rock and roll (straitjacket of three chords) but action music—the free jazz was, in its great period, much closer to the spirit of Jackson Pollock. The search for an artistic creative process based on non-thought, on direct expression of gesture, nerve, the living cell—is it diverted into the simplism of rock and roll? I forgot to ask them the question when I met them. In any case, their approach seems closer to Artaud and to a certain theatricalization of the miasmas of their time.
"The troubled moods of the plague victim are like the solidified and material face of a disorder which, on other levels, equates with the conflicts, struggles, cataclysms and collapses that events bring us." (1).
Conversation in a brasserie.
Place de la République. Neon lights. Mirrors and half-shandies. The Clash: "We all come from London. From the West. All from the working class, except me." (Joe Strummer).
(Note: punks, these working class heroes, are generally guided by people who have studied, learned a bit of philosophy and art history, and who know how to create an image. Strummer in The Clash, McLaren for the Pistols, etc... They’ll accuse me again of disdain for the working masses. But I can’t help it: all revolutions were invented by little bourgeois. If you don’t believe me, go ask Karl Marx’s wife.)
"A few years ago, we listened to the New York Dolls. A great influence on us. We play punk rock. It’s nothing but a label, but for us it means an effective music. We play like this because we are really living in a shitty time. Our attitude, our style is the result of mass production. Reference to Jasper Johns (who painted American flags) and Jackson Pollock. We seek an impact. And we don’t intend to starve. We want to become kings, No. 1. We are not sexists. We like to look at girls. The Damned are sexists. And the
Stranglers are even worse. Their songs are disgusting. We can’t stand the Stranglers. In this scene, anyway, everybody hates each other. We tolerate the drummer and the bassist of The Damned; but that’s all. The competition is very tough. We are all jealous of each other."
It’s the opposite of the sixties, the portrait of a generation in negative (and not in absence—blank). When The Who declared that they couldn’t stand each other, nobody dared believe them. The Who? Did you say the Ouh? Yes, why? Because all that—the punks, the chopped-up rock on primitive tempos, pop art, instant fashion—it’s all one era. That of the Mods, precisely. I don’t know what has replaced pep pills (probably other pep pills), but the feeling is there. Difference, but a big one: it’s the good old hippies, love and all that, who have taken on the role of fossilized rockers.
And the titles of The Clash’s songs look as if they come straight out of Pete Townshend interviews. Little things like "Hate & War," "Career Opportunities," "48 Hours"... I stress this, because it’s important: from interviews, and not from songs. Townshend kept his social (or sociologizing) reflections for himself and the journalists. It’s in these reflections that The Clash draw their inspiration and find their truth. Politicized punks (to muddy the waters, claims Méchamment Rock in a weekly whose name escapes me). To the limit, comrades, at the level of the structuring of language, of the approach to the realities of class struggle. The Clash is a folk group. Strummer, a Woody Guthrie of the Depression in England.
Townshend, in his interviews, also spoke of the condition of the mod, evoked a social, economic and political universe that he very rarely put on stage in his songs. Joe Strummer and his partner Mick Jones (graduate in sociology) want to express this universe directly. Double approach: in the words and in the attitude. The distance between the artist and his subject is here reduced to the maximum (or to the minimum, depending on the angle adopted by the observer). It’s exactly the kind of approach that The Damned reject.
The Damned
Everyone will hasten to tell you that the soul of The Damned is that vampiric and vaguely necrophilic singer, Dave Vanian. And that his appearance is not without evoking... wait, let me dig through my archives, hmm... Lou Reed, will that do? Vanian son of Lou Reed and the bride of Frankenstein. All of this is quite suspect. Far too obvious. The devil is hiding somewhere else.
Even Brian James is a little too... present. Brian James is the author and composer of most of the songs. Those little pearls of delirious misogyny and inevitable plastic nightmare: "Born To Kill," "Feel The Pain," "So Messed Up"... Ooooh, scare me; here, take this poem from Mr. James: "She is so disfigured, she can’t even fuck anymore... I think I’d rather fuck her mother... Her face is so wrecked that the best thing she could do is die" ("So Messed Up").
Transposed to cinema, that gives us the great moments of Japanese horror films, torrents of blood, abominable leprosy, rotting corpses... The prop store of The Damned has long been in the service of the Grand Guignol. And the devil is not a clown. Could it be Captain Sensible? We’re getting closer: the man is elusive, passing from one costume to another, from one sex to another. If you touch him, he’s sure to change color or slip into a parallel dimension, an anti-world.
But a demon is still a little bit smarter. The demon of The Damned has taken refuge in the skin of the seemingly most harmless character (...), the drummer Rat Scabies (the mangy rat). "I’m nineteen. I play drums because I like hitting things. I started four years ago. My biggest influence is Me. I owe My success to Me." Rat is the personality of the group, if not the group itself.
Sour spirits will not fail to point out the return of the rat in popular imagery—and sometimes in reality. Rat on a woman’s breast on the cover of "Zoom," Rat Scabies, Rattus Norvegicus—first album of The Stranglers... The rat, that’s fascism. There. The word is spoken, written, and let’s not return to it. Because that word, used in every sauce, become a simple synonym for something we don’t like, means absolutely nothing anymore. Punk, fuck music? As if a music could be fucked. And these allusions to rats. Good little Frenchmen, you will never understand anything about understatement, that Anglo-Saxon national sport. The rat is not yet the plague. It announces it, points to it.
And the plague of this punk rat would rather suggest the one evoked by Antonin Artaud: "A social disaster so complete, such an organic disorder, this overflowing of vices, this sort of total exorcism that presses the soul and pushes it to the limit, indicate the presence of a state which is on the other hand an extreme force and where all the powers of nature are found raw at the moment when it is going to accomplish something essential."
The convulsive music of The Damned reaches this kind of state of emergency, this cruelty at times, so necessary to tear us from torpor.
Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77 | Page 5 & Page 6
The Saints
It is with cheerful obviousness that we pass from The Damned to The Saints. Ah! Rock and roll, microcosm of our dualist turpitudes. The Saints come from Australia. You complain because you live in an impossible hole 300 km from the capital. But what would you say if you lived at the other end of the world? Australians who still have some taste generally escape to England (during the sixties, we saw landings there, barely faded: Daevid Allen, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson (OZ) and Jack Brabham). Today, here are The Saints. Chris Bailey, Ed Kuepper and Ivor Hay met at the end of 73. Later, they met their first drummer, who abandoned them in the middle of their first concert. Afterwards, it was a to-and-fro
of drummers and bassists, until they found some who managed to handle their music. Yet the music of The Saints is not complicated: heavy like the sun on a Queensland plateau, carved into rock like the shelter of an aborigine, punch in the mouth like those that rain down every night in the bars of Adelaide and elsewhere. If the sound of MC5 is Detroit, if The Clash are London, The Saints breathe Australia, its dust and its impossible heat.
"We played the most obscure and craziest stuff we could find," recounts Kuepper. "Today, it’s still the same. We do pretty things because, after all, there is a certain beauty in the world, but at the base of it all, we let the feeling speak and that’s the best way to go about it. Rock and roll is made to be revolutionary, and aggression is always present... We are not a punk group, and we do not glorify violence; but you have to be realistic, right."
The Jam
Back to London. Flashback to 64. The Jam strangely resemble those groups from the end of the Mod period, short hair, dark grey mohair suits, look at any photo from that time—I don’t know, the Beatles in 65, or the Yardbirds with Clapton, or the Small Faces. So for them, no question of safety pins or paint-smeared shirts and even less of torn t-shirts. The Jam, it’s The Who.
More Who than the real thing, and not from just any era: strictly 65. Guitarist Paul Weller affirms: "We are the black sheep of the New Wave." Image—contrast, play of antitheses, of anti-everything. And when they start talking politics, these neat iconoclasts attack you at your weak point: "This whole thing of wanting to change the world is a bit too fashionable. Next time, we’ll vote Conservative."
At the origin of The Jam: a far suburb (Woking), a good hour by train to the center of London. Morose boredom among the rhododendrons. And yet, the first musical reference, like the Rolling Stones, like The Who—those other suburbanites—is rhythm and blues, and more particularly Otis Redding. We won’t go so far as to look for that influence in the music. Besides, you surely didn’t find that of James Brown in Pete Townshend. The existence of The Jam rests on an ambiguity: on the one hand, each member of the group claims an individuality, an uncompromising originality.
And on the other, they dress exactly the same, tie, shirt and suit—and even down to the two-tone shoes. And by that very admission a dismaying conformism, to a certain point, the same as him: broke, semi-delinquent. They quit school because, according to Rotten, "Teachers are an insult to public decency. What they do to us is downright criminal. All I remember of my youth is this: my hatred of teachers. You sit down, you look at them and you just want to rip their eyes out, because you realize they don’t give a damn about you."
Without McLaren, no Pistols: he encouraged them to exploit their violence, their aggressiveness, their anti-social side. A method which, perfected by Andrew Oldham, made the fortune of the Stones. And what happened afterwards went beyond the Pistols. This story of violence took on, under the pens of journalists, alarming proportions. They wanted to make of these good lads, a bit agro, scarecrows on which would crystallize all the latent violence and fear in this period of economic insecurity. The pound collapses, the Sex Pistols must have something to do with it.
Their audience even more or less went along with the scheme, and wanted to make them the incarnation of a deep disturbance, the ideal projection of feelings they found hard to accept. "Hate is not constructive. You have to be realistic to really understand the situation in which you find yourself and use it to your advantage," says Rotten. The accuracy and objective harshness of his remarks are surprising when one thinks back to the image of the Pistols imposed on us by the media (or their press officer). The guy went through hell and knows exactly what he can expect from his contemporaries: not much.
The view he takes of his world is political, but in another dimension than that of The Clash. "We are more anti-social than political," says bassist Glen Matlock. In more posed and academic terms, one would call it a social phenomenon: the Pistols don’t write songs about anarchy. They are anarchy (says Caroline Coon, from Melody Maker). Instead of placing himself outside, the attacker stands at the center, already victorious against what once caused his defeat. He is no longer the victim. He is no longer directed. He IS action.
The Stranglers
I will not talk to you about The Stranglers, who are to punks what Scott McKenzie was to hippies. See what I mean? So, back to the real thing.
The Ramones
Or punk American-style. Which is only justice after all: it was they who rehabilitated the word (thanks L. Bangs, L. Kaye and F. Zappa). When English punks talk about revolt and anarchy, American punks bring out their old clichés—energy, fun fun fun and all that kind of thing. The "No Future" of The Ramones is interpreted in another sense than that of the Pistols: that of immediacy, of enjoyment here and now. We want the world and we want it... NOW!
For Tommy Ramone, the drummer, there is no doubt: "We were the first punks, the first to do this kind of rock and roll." And his small cruel eyes, hidden behind his dark glasses, pierce yours. "They’ve always wanted to make us out to be idiots. We’re not idiots! Rock and roll is not a stupid music. We’re not intellectuals, fine, and so what... We just want to have a lotta fun!" Hedonist?
Not even: he barely touches the succulent dishes his buddies devour. He is there, just in front of me, to give me a performance, without affectation, because maybe he really is like that: aggressive, mean, vengeful to the last degree. When The Ramones dragged their heels and were thrown off every stage where, by mistake, they had been allowed to set up, it was he who managed them, he who took the arguments and the blows. His misogyny is proverbial. From time to time he hits a girl, because he has overheard a comment about his ugliness.
In a corner, squinting and listening intently, their current manager, Danny Fields, misses nothing of his group’s words. An old hand at show biz, he has been through countless misfortunes, passed through every experience, from the underground to sugary pop. With him, The Ramones are in good hands, whatever that means (puppets at the service of Tommy Ramone’s paranoia?). Besides, the latter has few illusions about the motivations of his pals: "When we were starving and really doing shit, we were a kind of avant-garde.
Afterwards, we got better. It’s more commercial. I started playing drums (before, he sang and it was Joey who hit the skins). When I saw that dollars could fall, I changed the sound of the group, to make it what it is today—hard rock."
On that point, I allow myself to disagree. The rock and roll of The Ramones is a new school and draws all its strength from the limited tonal space within which it evolves. A word immediately comes to mind to define it: minimalism. Minimal-rock. This sound choice is also found in all the attitudes displayed by The Ramones. Minimal clothing—jeans and jacket, minimal words and thoughts (not minimum), a whole style which is the exact reflection of the society in which it is born: mass production of objects reduced to their simplest function. And the
function of The Ramones is obvious. Blitzkrieg. On three chords (if they even know how to count to three, which would already imply a diversification of language—not their concern). So The Ramones are stuck. Forced to stick to their minimalism, to reduce their music more and more to an essential that constantly seems to escape them.
It is at the moment when they think they have reached it that it disappears before their eyes. And their monolithic wall of sound tends towards the negation of all melody, of all variation in amplitude. In a few years, they might settle for a scream over an apocalyptic drone. From there, they could start all over again. But where will rock be? The Ramones may one day be number one (Tommy: "It is not our goal to remain in second position"). But they will be alone in their specialty.
The Dictators
They bring us the only dimension that (tragically) punk rock lacks: humor. You’re going to tell me that all this takes us back again to The Who, to the antics of Keith Moon, to the more or less fake fights of Daltrey and Townshend. But with The Dictators there’s a more exasperated, more New York side, and a deliberate will to smash everything, to joyfully trample on the myths, starting with the one they themselves inhabit.
Witness this aggression by Manitoba against poor Wayne County. Handsome Dick looks pretty tough, but the transvestite from Max’s hides under his skirts an athletic build. The score: a draw, with a slight advantage to Wayne County, and The Dictators banned from Max’s, forever.
Devastation, the great sarcastic laugh of The Dictators seems to come straight from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, revisited by the New York Dolls. But what a musical foundation! Producers Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman applied to them the same recipe as for Blue Öyster Cult: efficiency, highlighting the voices, therefore the lyrics.
Indispensable to fully understand why The Dictators live only for cars and girls ("Cars And Girls") and deem it necessary to proclaim such truths over surf music, Beach Boys 65 (or how to compress into a three-minute track a complete illustrated anthology of American youth culture. For senile culture, remove the girls).
The pursuit of this efficiency may perhaps be the Tarpeian Rock from which groups like The Dictators, after The Ramones and a few others, will be thrown. Already, their second album (on Asylum! What do the Eagles think of that?)...
...Image of the typical English group, immortalized by Rave and the rag dealers of Carnaby Street. What does this mean? Is this heavy wink toward the sixties a tribute paid to the great ancestors or the mad desire to start all over again, on the same instruments (Rickenbacker, bass and lead, like the ones Peter Townshend smashed)? Yet Paul Weller is not tender towards the one who supposedly triggered his vocation and shaped his image. "The songs of Townshend are full of self-satisfaction. He pisses us off with his martyr stories (!). He’s not going to rest on his laurels until the end of his days.
If only he used his money to build studios or start a company, to help young musicians. And Keith Moon spends his time wrecking cars. And McCartney takes his cats for walks in airplanes. All that drives me mad. Lennon is the only guy who hasn’t let go, the only one I still trust." As good Mods, The Jam also think that musicians who are too rich should open clothing shops a little more personalized than the ones seen everywhere. A piece of advice that Malcolm McLaren, the manager—and creator?—of the Sex Pistols, didn’t wait to follow.
Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77 | Page 7 & Page 8
Sex Pistols
"Long live the Queen, she’s the best diplomat we’ve ever had, she works harder than you and me for the good of the country, she’s an example to follow, and blah blah blah..." declare The Jam.
"Is she really a human being?" reply the Pistols. Whether they’ll end up each at a different end of the same rifle is another story. These two antitheses of the Anglo-Saxon new wave hardly agree on more than one point: overthrowing the old idols erected by previous generations. "They scared the old musicians, and that’s a good thing," say The Jam about the Pistols. And the latter add: "Rock was dragging its ass.
It was as interesting as the shit sold in the shops on King’s Road. Do people really listen to that kind of music? No! It just gives them background noise while they buy their jeans—flared jeans. Is that a state for rock?"
Besides, rock—Johnny Rotten doesn’t give a damn. The only thing that ever interested him was pissing people off. For example by spitting on the dandies parading down King’s Road. The place is important in the story of the Pistols. King’s Road, once the chicest street in London, today a sad lineup of jeans shops. And down at the bend, miraculously preserved, outside of time or racing far ahead, the boutique of Malcolm McLaren.
It changes name and décor every year, proclaims total independence of spirit in relation to the prevailing fashion, and self-destructs as soon as the style it has just invented spills over its walls. Five years ago, when satin and velvet were obligatory for the trendies, McLaren offered old leathers and pointed shoes to snub the platforms. The Pistols liked the shop, because they could calmly steal scraps of fabric there. "His shop was great. The clothes always different. It was anti-fashion and anti-organization. One day he asked me why I always looked bored and why I pissed everyone off, he wanted me to sing with the Pistols."
Johnny Rotten didn’t need to be asked twice. The other Pistols were more or less going in that direction, neglecting all the slapstick fun of the beginning. Besides, the references were changing. The tracks on "Go Girl Crazy" were deliciously anti-California, mocking good old Sonny Bono and the beach boys. Those on "Manifest Destiny" glance towards Detroit, the Stooges, and, to be clear, furiously evoke Blue Öyster Cult. When the subject becomes social, the laughter fades. And when they play a piece of Iggy—"Search And Destroy"—it’s in the utmost seriousness. While in fact there’s fantastic material there, an inexhaustible source of laughter. If The Dictators start respecting ghosts, there will soon be no one left daring to make faces at Mr. Pop.
Many groups would still deserve the honors of these few pages. That would mean completely revisiting the concept of punkness, taking into account more diversified elements than those we have concerned ourselves with until now. In fact, the label could not better apply than to those who translate the sounds of the street, the noises of life. And a group is not necessarily punk in all its compositions. The Jam are with "In The City." And the Pistols with "Anarchy In The UK." And The Clash with "Garageland." And The Damned with "Neat Neat Neat." But all can be tempted by evanescence, leaving the pavement to climb into the clouds. One is punk in flashes, and punkness is a permanent state that is not perceived in a permanent way.
- Alain Dister.
Discography in French pressings:
Clash • (Mick Jones, g. Joe Strummer, g. voc. Paul Simonon, bs. Tory Crimes, dms). The Clash. CBS. 82000-
Damned • (Dave Vanian, voc. Brian James, g. voc. Captain Sensible, bs. voc. Rat Scabies, dms. voc.). The Damned. Stiff 2C066 98867. Distribution Pathé Marconi.
Saints • (Chris Bailey, voc. Ed Kuepper, g. Kym Bradshaw, bs. Ivor Hay, dms). (I’m) Stranded. Pathé Marconi 2 C 066 83 359.
Jam • (Paul Weller, g. Bruce Foxton, bs. Rick Buckler, dms). In The City. Polydor 2383447.
Sex Pistols • (Johnny Rotten, voc. Glen Matlock, bs. Paul Cook, dms. Sid Vicious, g. Steve Jones, g). God Save The Queen. 45 T. Sex Pistols Records. Distribution Barclay.
Ramones • (Joey, Tommy, Johnny and Dee-Dee Ramone). Leave Home. Philips 9286 743.
Dictators • (Handsome Dick Manitoba, voc. Adny Shernoff, bs. Ross Funichello, g. Top Ten, g. Stu Boy King, dms). Manifest Destiny. Asylum 53 061. Distribution WEA.
Rock&Folk | N°126 July 77
Rock&Folk | N°126 juillet 77