children of the counter-revolution

Buried somewhere in my attic archives is a copy of the January (February?) 1978 issue of Creem, which features a cover story on the Sex Pistols' disastrous American tour and subsequent break-up (wedged in at the end of the piece as a "breaking news item"). The issue also features a list of recommended punk records, with a mention of The Clash's debut LP being considered "too rough-sounding" for an American release by CBS and a review for The Jam's The Modern World.

The punky buzz was in the air at the time, with nuggets of punk news and rumors liberally sprinkled amidst the premature optimism for the Frampton/Bee Gees Sgt. Pepper movie's prospects and record labels playing both sides of the street with full page ads for The Vibrators' Pure Mania ("You've been conned! This is real rock and roll!") run back-to-back with ones for the various corporate rock gods punk was supposed to displace.

All in all, it offers an amazing glimpse at the rock'n'roll zeitgeist at a watershed time, the crossroads of millennarian rhetoric and sobering realizations. Which is why it pains me that I can't locate the damn thing after four years of searching through my boxes from the move to our house on the hillside. I suspect that I packed it, along with my Psychotronic film and video guides (which doubled as scrapbooks for the better part of a decade), into a "special" box for easy retrieval, providing yet another example of my being tripped up by my own clever thinking.

Oh, well, I guess we'll just have to settle for this unexpected find from the August 1978 issue of Pizzazz:

That's right, Mighty Marvel's mag for swingin' teens paid a visit to a Bowery dive bar in order to rake the cooling embers of the New York punk scene.

It starts off with some speculative junk food for thought...

...or will the "punk" tag be so freely and nonsensically applied that it becomes reduced to meaningless marketing jargon?

The writer then spends a while discussing club's overall ambience (i.e. dive bar chic) while unsurprisingly omitting any and all references to dirty needles and hepatitis infections. (Remember, kids: A 2% bleach solution is your friend.) As for CBGB's clientele...

Oh, so it's a downmarket version of Studio 54, then? Anyone care to wager if the dog collar and leather jacket kids mentioned in the article ever attended the venue before the media buzz began? Here's the accompanying photo of the tragically hip crowd...

One of these people is not a music critic for the Village Voice! Can you tell which one?
Tell me, Mr. Pizzazz Staff writer, how loud was it?

Loud enough to evoke a baffling Peanuts reference, apparently. Here's something I never understood about outsiders' descriptions of punk music -- music played in club venues is always too goddamn loud, unless the artist is playing an acoustic set. That's not something limited to just punk acts. If the music requires any sort of amplification, it's a given that the person in charge of the PA system will crank the volume up to "head inside a jet turbine" levels.

No vintage mass media depiction of punk rock would be complete without a taste of some representatively "punky" lyrics, and the article does not disappoint:

The members of Flip City were apparently alumni of the University of New Hampshire.
There is no entry for either Flip City in the International Discography of American New Wave. (Shrapnel, the other band cited in the article, has an entry in the listing of New Jersey acts.) By the time the article was written, most of the founding members of the Bowery scene had moved onto bigger venues, broken up, or slid into the "no wave" or "mutant disco" scenes, leaving an assortment of wannabes and bandwagon jumpers to occupy the field.

I'm kind of curious about Flip City, though, with its pair of female vocalists and the somewhat new wavey description of the band. Shrapnel, whose act centered around dressing up like Vietnam vets and engaging in mock firefights, sounds like yet another example of the novelty shock punk buffoonery that has glommed onto the scene since its inception and rarely lives up to its over-the-top promise. It's a lot easier to be loud and obnoxious than it is to be loud, obnoxious, and clever...

...which brings us to this mindboggling inset featuring one of the "really big American punk groups" of the era:

What the fuck, Pizzazz?
There's no Flip City, no Shrapnel, and definitely no goddamn Kiss in today's musical selections, just a swell pair of cuts from the golden era of the NYC punk -- off-kilter rock romanticism by Television and Suicide's sweetly sinister brand of synthpunk. I'm quite fond of a lot of the music that came out of the 1970's NYC punk scene, but I'm less charitable regarding the scene itself, which spent decades trying to distance itself from "punk" before rushing back to assert its primacy once the label had come back in vogue.

Television - See No Evil (from Marquee Moon, 1977)

Suicide - Cheree (from Suicide, 1977)