When I think back to growing up as a teenager in the 70’s in love with the guitar and rock and roll in Minneapolis, Minnesota and then becoming a young adult in the early 80’s and seeing the evolution of punk and indie rock through those years, I’m amazed at some of the shows we experienced and the movements we saw birthed. Whether it was the mind blowing speed and agility of the classic rock gods or the raw energy of the punk pioneers the guitar led the way. Punk rock taught my generation some important lessons about guitar and rock and roll and our attitude toward it.
I remember being enthralled with rock and roll in junior high mostly because of hearing the local band that played at our school dances. The power coming from those amplifiers and the power those instruments gave to those who wielded them produced an energy that made an audience feel as though they were part of it. Live music became very important. The first rock concert I went to was Eric Clapton on his comeback tour with an opening act called Santana. That concert was quite pivotal in my desire to play guitar. At the same time it made becoming a good enough guitarist to become a star look pretty hard if not almost impossible. Shortly after that first arena concert I got to see Paul McCartney and Wings, Led Zepplin and The Who. Even though these first concerts were exciting for a young kid I began to realize that a lot of these classic dinosaur acts had already seen their biggest heyday and there was a different kind of excitement that was bubbling up from the underground. The spirit of punk rock was brewing from the time I really started becoming a serious rock fan in 8th grade as a fourteen year old. The seeds of punk were ripe in the work of artists like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and The New York Dolls.
By 1975 I was fully addicted to rock journalism after being given some copies of Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Hit Parader and Guitar Player by my hip older cousin. I quickly realized that this was one of the best ways to discover new bands. One of the new artists I started reading about was Patti Smith, whose debut album Horses was getting rave reviews and drawing attention to the scene surrounding a small club in NYC called CBGBs. Soon Patti and her band made their way to Minneapolis and we saw her tear up The Guthrie Theatre. Rock concerts were banned at The Guthrie for many years after that concert.
In 1977 we bought tickets for a Lou Reed concert and ended up discovering openers Elvis Costello and The Attractions and Rockpile (featuring Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds). Later that same year we saw The Ramones and The Runaways. Many of these bands seemed easier to relate and the songs were easier to learn and play quickly. We started to realize that maybe our garage band could make it too.
After graduating from high school in 1978 I moved to California with my teenage rock band Melodic Speed. After drifting across the country spending time in Colorado and eventually L.A. we settled in San Francisco where we were schooled in punk rock by the new people we met. We were turned on to The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Dead Kennedy’s and experienced a new level of intensity that this music contained. House concerts, beach parties and clubs like Mubuhay Gardens were putting on punk shows that everyone was getting swept up by. Smart bands that started to show they had potential for growth like The Clash couldn’t be ignored. Even Bob Dylan was paying close attention and being influenced by this new surge of energy and creativity.
When the first wave of punk hit, the beauty of it was that it was the anti-thesis of what rock had become in the 70’s - pompous, arrogant and overwrought. Punk had something to say and do. And that was to say pull yourself up by your boot straps and do it yourself if the man at the top won’t let you, and that goes for just about anything, especially if it means playing in a band. Who cares if you couldn’t play an instrument? As long as you could make up a tune to sing and shout anyone could learn one or two guitar chords or pluck a couple notes on the bass. All you needed was someone to bang fast and furious on something and a place to practice and you had a band.
As thousands of copy-cat punk bands emerged it quickly became evident that the genre would have to allow itself to evolve and grow or become stagnant and die. Among the earliest and most influential to recognize this was the Clash as they eagerly and swiftly infused reggae, rockabilly, jazz and hip hop into their unique punk sound and ethos. The musically prophetic, crazy mash up of sounds and styles on the band’s 1980 triple album Sandinista stands as one of the all-time great rock albums as much or even more than London Calling in my mind.
I finally saw the Clash in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1982 after moving back to Minnesota where we would witness the birth of the second wave of punk. It came in on the drunken swagger of a blue collar Minneapolis band named The Replacements who, like the Velvet Underground, a generation before them, would never reach the mainstream success that many expected but became the band among bands and spawned hundreds if not thousands of bands since, including Nirvana.
Around this same time many more bands emerged from the cold Minneapolis basements like Husker Du, The Suburbs and The Suicide Commandos. At the same time scenes were emerging in California like The Minutemen, Black Flag and Fugazi. In Athens, Georgia you had REM and a whole scene coming up around them. The influence of punk would begin to become evident as more and more sub-genres emerged in various cities culminating in a thriving Seattle grunge rock scene that gave rise to the importance of the indie record label Sub Pop and the mega success of Nirvana and then Pearl Jam. Other important punk infused scenes that came up through the 80’s into the 90’s and beyond include the New York No Wave and bands like Glen Branca, Sonic Youth, Big Black and The Butthole Surfers. In the 80’s and 90’s all kinds of old punkers started to emerge as seasoned songwriters and alt/country rockers like the San Francisco punk band The Nuns guitarist Alejandro Escovedo and X’s John Doe.
The biggest thing that punk rock has brought to music and guitar over the years is that you don’t have to be a virtuoso in order to play music that has heart, passion, intelligence, aggression and energy. And the beautiful thing about the guitar is that it is pretty easy to pretty quickly learn to play something that sounds cool and besides that it’s cheap to get into and portable. The perfect punk rock tool.
Many of the great guitarists of punk rock entered the pantheon of guitar greats quite by accident and due to their unique styles courtesy of their minimalism (i.e. lack of knowledge and/or skill). Here’s my list of favorite punk guitar slingers and a blurb why. I’d love to see yours. Leave your list in the comments section. Thanks!
1. Joe Strummer - What can I say? Nobody slung that Tele like Joe. I miss him so. But this music lives for ever. He had the spirit that fueled Mick’s expertise. Joe was that relentless rhythm and beating heart. He’d strum that sucker until his wrists bled and he knew he was doing the most important thing he could possibly be doing at that given moment. Thanks Joe. Your the reason I won’t stop rockin‘ until THEY stop me.
2. Mick Jones - He was the man that had the finesse and skill on the guitar to knit it all together and make Joe and the rest of The Clash sound beautiful and pro so they could play in the big leagues and take on the world.
3. Lenny Kaye - I saw Patti Smith in 1975 and again in 96 and on video many times between and since and on all the albums and I always knew that Lenny Kaye was Patti’s secret weapon. He had her vision and always made the songs priority without sacrificing an iota of punk energy. He's still playing with her today.
4. Tom Verlaine - Verlaine was the guitarist in one of CBGB’s most famous bands Television and played one of the incredible guitar parts in the masterpiece Marquee Moon as well as a guest guitarist on Patti Smith's debut Horses and many other albums over the years. Today Verlaine records some of my favorite instrumental albums.
5. D. Boon - D. Boon was so cool. Just YouTube The Minutemen and you’ll see. These guys wrote the shortest, fastest songs you ever heard and they rocked! So cool. Packed so tight and with a punch. A wallop of cultural cleverness and killer riffs from Boon to fuel the mad avant-funk of bassist Mike Watt. If you haven’t heard them please do yourself a favor. Try Double Nickels On The Dime.
6. Slim Dunlap - Not generally looked on that favorably but I love him. He joined The Replacements after the band had to fire original guitarist Bob Stinson because he was too wasted to get the job done which is so ironic because they were all terribly messed up. The final years with Dunlap are not seen as the classic peek Replacements but they were actually the years they had the most commercial success and paved the way for Paul Westerbergs more singer/songwriterly solo career. Slim has kept a low profile since his years in the Mats but has released a couple cool albums including The Old New Me.
7. Steve Jones - Even though The Sex Pistols only recorded one full album and four singles they still had such a huge impact on Rock and Roll that how could I not put Steve Jones on my list. When you heard that album Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols come roaring out of the speakers you thought sure they were going to blow up and that the police might just show up! The guitar was all Steve Jones.
8. Thurston Moore - After forming in 1981 Sonic Youth are still recording the best music of their career as late as The Eternal in 2009. At once as primitive as The Ramones and as complex as John Coltrane these guys are amazing and nothing is out of bounds when it comes to looking for new sounds.
9. Lee Renaldo - Thurston’s foil in Sonic Youth Lee Renaldo is a sculptor of sound and a thrasher of noise while at the same time a crafter of songs and a poet putting it all together to make 21st century art and roll.
10. Neil Young - The Godfather of Grunge is what they like to call him and I have to agree. Neil seems to have been carrying and living the punk aesthetic long before it was called punk or grunge or anything else. Neil and Crazy Horse could eat most punk bands for a snack. Lack of precision or technical skill or support from the man at the top has never stopped Neil Young from doing exactly what he has wanted to do through his entire career. You really don't get more punk than Neil.