Fans love to debate the first punk band. Kinks or Kingsmen? Or did they have too much proto in their punk and it really didn’t start until the Dolls or the Damned came along a decade later?
Doesn’t matter. As with any artistic movement, punk formed over time, with plenty of influences and antecedents. You’d think “first” would be somewhat less subjective than “best” or “most influential,” but it isn’t. There’s still too much subjectivity for meaningful consensus.
That’s a lot of syllables for a little article on punk rock, so I’ll stop. For my money, the first true punk rock band was the Monks, the best was the Clash, and the most influential was the Sex Pistols, but feel free to disagree. I only mention it because I want you to understand my own personal tastes before I tell you about an album you need to own if you are a fan of punk rock.
The many flavors of punk rock began showing up in the mid 1960s
“Prior to the British Invasion, America’s early '60s rock n’ roll scene was largely composed of pimply Italian crooners, slick-suited lounge bands, tanned California surfers, and singing groups of every configuration. Invariably, they wanted to be All Around Entertainers.”
That’s how Harold Bronson opens his marvelous liner notes for Nuggets Volume Two: PUNK. Bronson founded the legendary indie label Rhino Records, and he began releasing a series of seminal rock tracks from the 1960s modelled on Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets release.
The history of Nuggets is a little confusing so we’ll leave it at this: Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitar player, initially compiled a double-LP’s worth of early garage rock and released it under the Nuggets title in 1972. That first album is an essential part of any rock fan’s collection.
In 1984, Bronson and Rounder revived the concept, eventually releasing a 12-album collection that went much deeper than Kaye’s original. Bronson divided the new albums into loosely defined genres. Three of them – volumes two, six, and twelve – were designated as “Punk.”
What moves a song from “garage” into “punk?” Why do I have the Monks first in line ahead of the Kingsmen, for instance? For me, the answer comes in Bronson’s short second sentence above:
“Invariably they wanted to be All Around Entertainers.”
Most early garage bands – at least the ones who were able to get a song on the radio – may not have perfected their craft or even been very good, but they all harbored dreams of hitting the big time. They may not have had the chops or the tenacity to make such dreams realistic, but nonetheless, the dreams persisted.
To be punk, at least in the early days, you didn’t care about entertaining a lot of people. You cared about entertaining yourself and your friends. And chances are you didn’t have all that many friends to begin with.
From its earliest days, punk rock bands seemed to go out of their way to alienate mainstream listeners. They were loud, they were abrasive. They sang – or rather, screamed – about unpleasant topics. To be punk was to be confrontational.
There’s a reason why the Sex Pistols wrote crude lyrics about the Queen and why Paul Westerberg routinely turned his amp louder when asked to turn it down. Punks had to be contrarians. They figured they were probably going to get beaten up and hassled anyway, so why not have some fun?
I don’t mean to suggest that punk rock was solely defined by attitude. There was the music too. Blues-based, with distortion and other odd instrumentation. A pounding bass/drum rhythm section that was headache-inducing to most, but intensely liberating to the genre’s mostly young fans.
The musicianship often was primitive, which wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker. But it could also be quite good. And when it was – when the attitude of confrontation was paired with musicians who had the virtuosity to get that sound out of their heads and into your ears - that could be truly special.
And that is exactly what Bronson and his colleagues created on Nuggets Volume 2: PUNK.
The original vinyl had 14 tracks from 11 bands. Three bands – the Shadows of Knight, the Music Machine, and the Standells – got a second track.
The album kicks off with the outstanding Arthur Lee and his band Love, punking up a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, “My Little Red Book.” The chugging stomp of the bass turns a pop song into an early punk classic.
Chicago’s Shadows of Knight are up next with a gloriously snotty cover of Them’s “Gloria.” Later on the album, they veer into an even louder, more abrasive sound with “I’m Gonna Make You Mine,” one of the hardest rockers recorded in 1966.
The Seeds psychedelic “I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” isn’t nearly as loud or aggressive as their biggest hit “Pushin’ Too Hard,” (which appears on Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets), but still earns its punk stripes based on the over-the-top oozing lethargy of lead singer Sky Saxon.
LA’s Music Machine were best known for their hit “Talk Talk,” but here we get a couple deeper tracks. First comes the propulsive “Double Yellow Line,” a great guitar/organ track form the mid-‘60s. Later, the epic grandeur of “The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly” repeats the formula in soaring fashion.
The Chocolate Watchband veered into late ‘60s psychedelia more than most other punks. They were also among the most experimental. While never abandoning their Stones’ influences, they tossed in any manor of instrument to shake up their sound. “Are You Gonna Be There (at the Love In)?” was their first single, showing off David Aguilar’s Americanized Jagger vocals and Mark Loomis’ perfect little guitar runs.
The Del-Vetts were a local Chicago band who dipped their toe into flaming hot punk with “Last Time Around,” an original built on Jim Lauer’s outstanding guitar and a typically desperate rhythm section. The Del-Vetts couldn’t sustain success with that type of music in 1967,
Side one of the album closes with the Vagrants, a bluesy band from New York performing the Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin hit “Respect.” It was built on Jeremy Storch towering organ and vocalist Peter Sabatino’s vocals, which surely don’t match Aretha, but have their own level of desperation. The Vagrants’ most famous member, guitarist Leslie West, takes a subordinate role here.
Side 2 kicks off with the Standells, a SoCal band best known for recording the classic ode to Boston, “Dirty Water.” They had never actually set foot in Boston, but their attitude captured the city. On “Try It,” that attitude is on full display. The song was a hit in LA, but as Bronson points out, the ambiguous “try it” exhortation was deemed too sexually explicit for 1967, and the song was soon banned.
Bronson chose a second Standells’ tune, “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White,” to close the album. The organ-fueled song, which grows out of the “Gloria” rhythm, is, according to Bronson, “perhaps the most definitive punk record ever made.”
Sandwiched between those two Standells’ songs, we get a second Shadows of Knight song – the rollicking, messy powerhouse “I’m Gonna Make You Mine.”
The Leaves' “Too Many People” takes San Fran psychedelia and scruffs it up just enough to become a punk song. Later they would do a fabulous punkish version of “Hey Joe,” a few years before Jimi Hendrix got hold of it.
Toward the end, we get arguably the most influential of all the bands on the album. The Sonics would exert enormous influence in their home base in and around Seattle. They were a link between the Kingsmen and the Melvins, all of which helped prepare for Nirvana and the grunge explosion of the late-‘80s/early-‘90s. Gary Roslie’s raucous praise of “Strychnine” begins with a horror movie motif and gets wilder from there.
Just before the final Standells’ track, Bronson throws in “Spazz” from the Elastik Band, admitting in his liner notes that “not much is known about” them. The song begins with anguished groans, then turns Middle Eastern for a brief spell before the machine gun guitar and vocals serve up a song that would sound modern in any era.
We now know a bit more than Bronson did at the time – that the band was comprised of a bunch of teenagers from San Francisco and that its frontman, David Cortopassi, had no clue what kind of impact his song would have, for better and for worse. It was a hit, offering a radically different sound from standard mid-‘60s fare, but it also created pushback based on the popular interpretation that the song was a cruel putdown of the disabled.
The song disappeared for a time, only to be rescued by Nuggets. That is mostly true of all the tracks. And if you like classic punk, hardcore, or post-hardcore, pop punk from the ‘90s, or really any music genre that aligns itself with the punk label, you are sure to enjoy Nuggets Volume 2: PUNK, where much of that music got its start.