Proto-punk

Proto-punk
Stylistic origins	Garage rock pub rock
Derivative forms	Punk rock garage punk
Fusion genres
Glam punk
Other topics
History of the punk subculture acid rock hard rock punk blues rock and roll post-punk

Proto-punk (or protopunk) is rock music from the 1960s to mid-1970s that foreshadowed the punk rock movement. A retrospective label, the musicians involved were generally not originally associated with each other and came from a variety of backgrounds and styles; together, they anticipated many of punk's musical and thematic attributes. The tendency towards aggressive, simplistic rock songs is a trend critics such as Lester Bangs have traced to as far back as Ritchie Valens' 1958 version of the Mexican folk song "La Bamba", which set in motion a wave of influential garage rock bands including the Kingsmen, the Kinks, the 13th Floor Elevators and the Sonics. By the late 1960s, Detroit bands the Stooges and MC5 had used the influence of these groups to form a distinct prototypical punk sound. In the following years, this sound spread both domestically and internationally, leading to the formation of the New York Dolls and Electric Eels in the United States, Dr. Feelgood in England, and the Saints in Australia.

Definition

The AllMusic guide defined it as "never a cohesive movement" but as "a certain provocative sensibility that didn't fit the prevailing counterculture of the time", most of the time combined with a sound which was "primitive and stripped-down, even when it wasn't aggressive, and its production was usually just as unpolished". In contrast, in the book Screaming for Change (2010), it is defined as a specific sound which included simplistic instrumental work and amateurish compositions. The book cites this style as being pioneered in Detroit by the Stooges and MC5, who were influenced by the Velvet Underground and the earlier garage rock genre, with the sound then spreading to the United Kingdom, New York and Cleveland, Ohio.

History

Influences

One of the earliest influences on both punk rock music and the punk subculture as a whole is folk musician Woody Guthrie. Beginning in the 1930s and becoming popular in the 1940s, Guthrie is often known as one of the first punks.

In the United Kingdom, the emergence of skiffle in the 1950s as a popular music movement is comparable to punk, in that skiffle similarly "stripped music to its core", with its simplistic instrumental setup that "[sending] out a clear anyone-can-do-it signal, and as the skiffle explosion proved, anyone could and did", according to PopMatters writer Ian Ellis. According to Aidan Smith in The Scotsman, popular skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan embodied a "dangerous and daring and do-it-yourself" aesthetic that was later adopted by punk; Smith also commented that one of Donegan's combos "attracted a wild following: men so epicly drunk they'd wet themselves and – very proto-punk, this – their duffel-coats were accessorised with alarm clocks hung round necks." His 1957 British chart-topper "Cumberland Gap" has been referred to as "the first punk No. 1"; Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger writes: "Lurching speed-freak skiffle played on Christ knows what which sounds nothing remotely like any previous chart-topper: if punk is anything, it might as well be that." Ellis writes: "Forerunners of punk by 20 years, Donegan and the thousands of other skiffle acts that sprang up after 'Rock Island Line' wrested control from the establishment, democratizing the industry in the process."

1960s

The Kinks' 1964 song "You Really Got Me" was credited by Lester Bangs as one of the most influential songs on the development of punk

In his Book Protopunk: the Garage Bands, music journalist Lester Bangs traced the origins of punk to Ritchie Valens' 1958 version of the Mexican folk song "La Bamba", due to the song's simplistic three chord song structure and the aggressive vocals relative to the time. He places it first in a lineage of influential tracks, which over time developed punk: the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" (1963); the Kinks "You Really Got Me" (1964) and the Stooges' "No Fun" (1969). By the 1960s, garage rock a style of raw, loud and energetic rock music had developed significant scenes in both the United States and United Kingdom. The Kingsmen and the Kinks both came from the UK's garage rock scene, with the former's cover of "Louie Louie" being described by academic Aneta Panek as "punk rock's ur-text". Under the influence of "Louie Louie", the Kinks released "You Really Got Me" the following year, which was one of the earliest songs to make use of significant electric guitar distortion and was immediately influential for this reason. In the following years, this raw sound was being adopted by other British Invasion acts including the Who on their single "My Generation" (1965) and the Rolling Stones on their 1966 live album Got Live If You Want It!. In South America, the garage rock band Los Saicos formed in Lima, Peru in 1964, later being called "the world's first punk band" in Zona de Obras' book Spanish Dictionary of Punk and Hardcore.

One of the earliest written uses of the term "punk rock" was by critic Dave Marsh who used it in 1970 to describe the garage rock group Question Mark & the Mysterians in the United States, who had scored a major hit with their song "96 Tears" in 1966. While garage bands varied in style, the label of garage punk has been attributed by critic Michael Hann to the "toughest, angriest garage rockers" such as the 13th Floor Elevators and the Sonics. AllMusic states that bands like the Sonics and the Monks "anticipated" punk; the latter have likewise been cited as examples of proto-punk and the Sonics' 1965 debut album Here Are The Sonics as "an early template for punk rock". The raw sound and outsider attitude of psychedelic garage bands like the Seeds also presaged the style of bands that would become known as the archetypal figures of proto-punk, other examples are the Electric Prunes (who writer Gath Cartwright states were "embraced by the punks" due to covers by the Damned and Wayne County & the Electric Chairs), Red Crayola and Chocolate Watchband. The hit single "Psychotic Reaction" from 1966 by the garage band Count Five featured fuzztone guitars and blazed the trail for punk rock, influencing the development of a new musical style. Not only did the unconventional sound of proto-punk bands go against what was popular in the mainstream, but the visual styles of many bands were purposely contrasted with more popular, polished aesthetics found in more well known bands.

Musically distinct from most other punk predecessors, New York's the Velvet Underground were not aggressive, instead influencing punk through their avant-garde take on rock, which incorporated dissonance and taboo lyrical topics such as urban decay, drug addiction and sadomasochism. A 2014 article by the BBC stated that "The roots of underground and experimental music, indie and alternative, punk, post-punk and art-punk all snake back to the four Velvet Underground studio albums".

1970s

In Japan, the anti-establishment Zunō Keisatsu (頭脳警察, lit. 'Brain Police'), formed in 1969 and disbanded in 1975, mixed garage, psychedelic rock and folk; the band's first two albums were withdrawn from public sale after their lyrics were described in Mark Anderson's book The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture to violate industry regulations, with their "spirit... [being] taken up again by the punk movement."

In the early 1970s, the UK underground counter-cultural scene centred on Ladbroke Grove in West London spawned a number of bands that have been considered proto-punk, including the Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Edgar Broughton Band, Stack Waddy, and Third World War; contemporaries Crushed Butler have been called "Britain's first proto-punk band." According to Allmusic, glam rock also "inspired many future punks with its simple, crunchy guitar riffs, its outrageous sense of style, and its artists' willingness to sing with British accents (not to mention the idiosyncratic images of David Bowie and Roxy Music)". With his Ziggy Stardust persona, David Bowie made artifice and exaggeration central elements, ones that were later picked up by punk acts. The Doctors of Madness built on Bowie's presentation concepts, while moving conceptually in the direction that would The Guardian writer Simon Reynolds identified as "prophes[ying] punk".

Bands anticipating the forthcoming movement were appearing as far afield as Düsseldorf, West Germany, where "punk before punk" band NEU! formed in 1971, building on the krautrock tradition of groups such as Can. Simply Saucer formed in Hamilton, Canada in 1973 and have been called "Canada's first proto-punk band", blending garage rock, krautrock, psychedelia and other influences to produce a sound that was later described as having a "frequent punk snarl."

Origins

Detroit bands MC5 (top) and the Stooges (bottom) influenced the majority of early punk bands

Debut albums by two key US proto-punk bands were released in 1969, both from Metro Detroit in Michigan; Detroit's MC5 released Kick Out the Jams in January, and the Stooges, from Ann Arbor, premiered with their self-titled album in August. The sound of these albums influenced a wave of subsequent bands in Michigan, which notably included the Dogs, the Punks and Death, the latter a pioneering but commercially unsuccessful African-American proto-punk group. Formed in New York in 1971, the New York Dolls, merged Detroit's specific proto-punk sound with elements of glam rock, pioneering the glam punk genre. A 2022 article by Alternative Press stated were "the most important of all protopunk bands after the Stooges [sic]". Their style was adopted by a number of New York bands, including the Stilettos, the Brats and Ruby and the Rednecks, and subsequently was the catalyst for the city's early punk rock scene, which included Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The Detroit proto-punk sound also spread to Cleveland Ohio by the middle of the decade, where influential proto-punk bands including Pere Ubu and the Electric Eels formed.

The immediate predecessor to British punk was the early to mid–1970s pub rock scene, which was mostly based around London. Influenced by Detroit proto-punk, this style made use of stripped down, back to its basics, rock music similar to punk, and was fronted by groups including Dr. Feelgood, Tyla Gang, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Count Bishops. Many of the early British punk scene's musician began their careers in pub rock acts, including the 101ers (Joe Strummer, Richard Dudanski, Tymon Dogg), Kilburn and the High Roads (Ian Dury, Nick Cash) and Flip City (Elvis Costello). By 1976, pub rock had ultimately declined in popularity. At the same time as pub rock, the influence of the New York Dolls had spread to London, where a wave of glam punk bands, including Hollywood Brats and Jet, coalesced by the middle of the decade.

A new generation of Australian garage rock bands, inspired mainly by the Stooges and MC5, came even closer to the sound that would soon be called "punk": in Brisbane, the Saints (formed in 1973) recalled the raw live sound of the British Pretty Things, who had made a notorious tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1965, while in Sydney, Radio Birdman, co-founded by Detroit expatriate Deniz Tek in 1974, began playing gigs to a small but fanatical following. The Saints are regarded as a punk band and as being "to Australia what the Sex Pistols were to Britain and the Ramones to America," while Radio Birdman are regarded as co-founders of punk but have also been designated as proto-punk.

See also

• List of proto-punk bands

Bibliography

• Bovey, Seth (2019). Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-789-14065-1.
• Robb, John (2012). Punk Rock: An Oral History. PM Press. ISBN 978-1-60486-005-4.
• Sabin, Roger (2002). Punk Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-69905-6.
• Taylor, Steven (2003). False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6668-3.
• Lola, Edward (July 24, 2019). "Punk Before Punk". edwardlola.medium.com. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
• "The History Of Proto-Punk". giantdrag.org. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
• "Timeline of African American Music". carnegiehall.org. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
• "Detroit Punk History Archive". detroitpunkarchive.com. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
• "Goth So White? Black Representation in the Post-Punk Scene". post-punk.com. November 30, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2023.

Further reading

• Bessman, Jim (1993). Ramones: An American Band. New York: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-09369-1.
• Buckley, Peter, ed. (2003). The Rough Guide to Rock. London: Rough Guides. ISBN 1-85828-201-2.
• Heylin, Clinton (1993). From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14017-970-4.
• Marcus, Greil (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-53581-2.
• Marcus, Greil, ed. (1979). Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-73827-6.
• Taylor, Steve (2004). The A to X of Alternative Music. London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-8217-1.
• Unterberger, Richie (1999). Music USA: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides. ISBN 1-85828-421-X.
• Unterberger, Richie (2002). "British Punk". In Bogdanov, Vladimmir; Woodstra, Chris; Erlewine, Stephen Thomas (eds.). All Music Guide to Rock: The Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Backbeat. ISBN 0-87930-653-X.