Weller didn’t perform on the show—Snyder showed only a 20-second Jam clip and a bit more of the Runaways (decked out in glam-era leather, doing “School Days”). The panel confessed they hadn’t heard many punk bands. There was barely a mention of what the music sounded like, even though there were an astonishing number of life-changing (admittedly unpurchased) records released in ’ 77 (see page 67), many on major labels. There was a brief aside that similar groups were cropping up in America (though it was a July ’ 76 Ramones show in London that directly inspired the Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned, and Generation X). What mattered more was that the nation’s youth were presumably spewing all over the music that was the soundtrack of ’60s social change. Baby boomers had given the world the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Hendrix—real artists who made a difference. Of course, now it was all about limos, drum solos, and concept albums. But who did these ungrateful, nihilistic clowns think they were?

Ironically, one of the savvier ’ 77 punk assessments came from New York Times political columnist/etymologist (and former Richard Nixon speechwriter) William Safire, who wrote: “The success of punk in music and fashion springs from a rebellion against the material success of rebel leaders…. They identify with unsuccessful slobs rather than with millionaire musicians who exploit unsuccessful slobs.” That’s why the Clash sang, “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones” in their song “1977.” They felt betrayed by rock’s bloated heroes. Of course, Safire had his own reasons for hating the hippie-liberal landed gentry, but when you’re right, you’re right.

Punk magazine, founded in New York in 1975 by John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil, and Ged Dunn Jr., was a raw in-joke celebration and mockery of the local music scene. The Pistols’ situationist skipper Malcolm McLaren took that stripped-down, snot-nosed-teen ethos (which had originated with Creem magazine’s Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh), gave it a political spin, amped up the fashion, and “punk” reemerged in ’ 77 as a petulant, visionary toddler, spouting slogans and defiantly peeing his/her bondage pants. Said brat was analyzed, marketed, misrepresented, and dismissed before he/she ever played a note. Some veterans of seminal New York dives Max’s Kansas City and CBGB felt the artistic nuance of groundbreakers Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television, and Richard Hell had been perverted into a gross cartoon. Maybe, but punk was also the most thrillingly subversive cartoon ever in pop culture. It was the hilarious, scary, seething fuck-you that so many of us had been waiting for. The arch posing and furious contempt. The

In late 1977, teenagers Sid McCray and Darryl Jenifer lived across the street from each other in southeast Washington, D.C. They were the rare black kids into what they called “ ‘doomsday music’—Black Sabbath, Kiss, Budgie, and Led Zeppelin,” as Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins reported in their ²⁰⁰³ book Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital. Then McCray saw a TV segment on British punk, went out and bought the Sex Pistols’ and Damned’s first albums and, when he got home, “went into a violent rage and tore my room up.” Proselytizing to Jenifer and his mates in a jazz-fusion group called Mind Power, he eventually converted them, and the greatest hardcore punk band of all time—Bad Brains—was born (sans McCray).

“We dug the militancy happening in punk rock,” Jenifer testified in Dance of Days. “It said, ‘If you have something to say, say it.’ A lot of the things we saw our people falling for made us mad at the kind of illusions society was trying to create.”

Bands from New York and London, and even some West Coast iconoclasts, still scrap over the title of the first and truest punks (see our three roundtables, beginning on page 72). But a deeper story is the diverse array of provocative (and widely ignored) malcontents, all over the U.S., the U.K., and the world, who also formed bands, xeroxed fanzines, made art, shot films, and put on shows. In a taunting echo of the 1968 student protests that broke out in the U.S., France, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, the ’ 77 generation of les enrages realized they had the right to refuse.

New York City’s sister scene was, oddly, in Ohio. There were the ferocious Cleveland aesthetes Pere Ubu and drooling delinquents the Dead Boys (who eventually moved to Manhattan); Velvet Underground obsessives the Mirrors (later the Styrenes); the audience-abusing, post-glam sociopaths electric eels; and screed-heads the Pagans. In Akron, the Bizarros and Rubber City Rebels revved up a hooky buzz, and Devo’s multimedia synth-punk spoofed and condemned society as a mutant production line; Kent’s male-female trio Human Switchboard conjured organ-drenched drama. Also in the Midwest, MX- 80 Sound’s arty metal-

tasteless pranks and withering critiques. The insistence on doing things that would never earn you a penny. The totally baffled adults. Lucky for us, the music even surpassed the caricature.

ROBER TA BAYLE Y/RE TNA; BE T TMAN/CORBIS; ©JENNY LENS PUNK ARCHIVE

FROM LEF T: WILLIAM BARRY/IS TOCKPHOTO; G. HANEKROO T/SUNSHINE/RE TNA; COUR TES Y SMOG VEIL RECORDS;

MAY 9
In their most
prestigious gig to date,
the Clash headline
the 3,000-capacity
Rainbow in London.
Bob Marley attends at
the group’s invitation.

MAY 1
White Riot ’ 77, a punk pack-
age tour of the U.K., starring
the Clash, Jam, Buzzcocks,
Slits, and Subway Sect, hits
the road.…The first issue of
Slash, which introduced such
writers and artists as Claude
Bessy and Gary Panter, and
later spawns a record label, is
published in L.A.

JUNE 8
After the Pistols’ promotional
“Queen’s Jubilee” boat party
on the Thames River, police
arrest 11, including manager
Malcolm McLaren and his
partner, clothing designer
Vivienne Westwood.

JUNE 9
Joe Strummer is
arrested in London for
spray-painting the
Clash name on a wall.

JUNE 18
Talking Heads drummer
Chris Frantz marries
the band’s bassist, Tina
Weymouth. Five days later,
after their brief honeymoon,
the group open for Bryan
Ferry at New York’s Bottom
Line….Johnny Rotten is
attacked and slashed on the
face and arms by skinheads
outside a London pub. A few
days later, Pistols drummer
Paul Cook is stabbed and hit
on the head with an iron bar.