So Elton Billy Preston-John, Freddie Mercury, Disco Cowboy, and the World's Ugliest Ace Frehley fan are all punk rockers? Huh. It must be true, because it appeared in Dazzler #3 (May 1981).
(Although I am absolutely certain there's some would-be rock critic out there wasting megabytes of hard drive space expounding how "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," "Bohemian Rhapsody," and "Nothing from Nothing" are seminal punk classics. In the space of twenty years, we've gone from a situation where the mainstream media wouldn't touch the genre with a ten foot pole to one where folks are falling all over themselves in a rush to tag anything and everything with the punk label.)
When I first came across this panel (via Essential Dazzler Vol. 1), I had a brief moment of punk rock indignation over its absurd inaccuracy. Then I remembered this, the "punk rawk" CHiPs episode (which has been tragically yanked from YouTube), and the various American Sex Pistols fans shown in Lech Kowalski's 1980 documentary D.O.A. and realized that the fellows in the comic knew exactly what they were doing.
Television Personalities - Part Time Punks (from the Where's Bill Grundy Now? EP, 1978; collected on Yes, Darling, But Is It Art? 1995) - How did my not-quite-friend Tim once put it? "A poseur is a punk that isn't you or anyone in your circle of friends." All of us may be sinners, but some are more damned than others.
SNFU - Real Men Don't Watch Quincy (from a 1990 bootleg 7" of 1982 compilation tracks/demos) - I'm amazed at the extremely low ratio of crap to quality among late 70's/early 80's Canadian punk material, especially since our neighbors to the north seem so, well, polite (compared to their surly cousins in the States, at least).
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
la-la la la-la-lah
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3 comments:
At the end of an SNFU show I attended about a decade ago, Ken Chinn handed out the remainder of his bottled water to patrons who looked like they needed it. Polite indeed.
Well, surely we've progressed. It's not as if a recent issue of say, The Spirit tried to portray punk rock and...
Oh. Whoops. Nevermind.
(Disclaimer to my cheap joke: I loves Darwyn Cookie's Spirit to pieces and my statement is not meant as anything other than a cheap joke.)
I can cut Cooke some slack because a large part of his charm is how he keeps his feet firmly planted in the Eisenhower Era.
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