American Fun (50 page)

In the early seventies,
Andy Shernoff, a mouthy adolescent from Queens, started a disorderly fanzine,
Teenage Wasteland Gazette,
while studying music at
SUNY New Paltz. Not given to the usual fanzine fawning, the
Gazette
took a cheeky
Mad
Magazine
stand on the sex, drugs, and general damage of the
rock ’n’ roll lifestyle—which is to say, it reveled in it. It invented fake bands. It reviewed fake shows. So true was it to the dangerous fun of rock that it received the unprintable castoffs of major rock critics like, yes, Lester Bangs and the gleefully anarchistic
Richard Meltzer,
who reported in its pages on a blow-out party where furniture, records, and art were destroyed; where sex was had right out in the open; where Meltzer scrawled obscenities on the walls; and where the host, “
Handsome Dick Manitoba” (this was his parents’ house), met the cops at the door wearing “
a jock strap with red lipstick swastikas drawn all over [his] body.” Out of such orgies and the wasteland revelry of the
Gazette,
America’s first bona fide
punk band was born. Disgusted by the decadent softening of rock by noodlers like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; tickled by the New York Dolls’ rude camp theater; enthralled by the raw-boned, three-chord assaults of MC5 and the Stooges, as well as by the equipment-wrecking spectacles of the Who, Shernoff and Manitoba and some friends from Queens and the Bronx—the genuine teenage wasteland where hip-hop was born—formed the brash, hilarious, reckless, gross, and supremely adolescent
Dictators. Asked how they settled on that name, Shernoff said it was the “
funniest.”

They had been practicing for half a year in a farmhouse in the
Catskills when, thanks to Meltzer’s connections, some producers from
Epic Records took their DIY rock ’n’ roll parody seriously.
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!,
released in 1975, struck a sweet harmony between insult and irony. The album’s signature track,
“Master Race Rock,” reads like Manitoba’s lipstick swastikas—or
Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler”: if you didn’t catch the wisecrack from a song that precedes it (“
We knocked ’em dead in Dallas / They didn’t know we were Jews”), you might think they were Nazis, but that tension is the point, and the offense is the joke. Stepping on toes was the Dictators’ stock-in-trade; they devoured sensitive types like White Castle cheeseburgers. “
Hippies,” after all, as this song opines, “are squares with long hair, they don’t
wear no underwear.” The band’s comedy roars in their mock-macho choruses, ripples in
Ross Funicello’s lead guitar, and rides on vocalist Shernoff’s comic timing. Only a loser wouldn’t get the joke. Still, not to be underdone by losers, they giddily, idiotically, spell it out: “We tell jokes to make you laugh, we play sports so we don’t get fat.”

The most auspiciously punk gesture on
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!
may be its two cover tunes—blistering guitar tributes to Sonny and Cher’s number-one 1965 hit,
“I Got You Babe,” and the Riviera’s number-five 1964 hit, “California Sun.” These covers poke fun at the seventies’
American Graffiti
nostalgia and refine rock ’n’ roll’s essential nonchalance. In the tradition of Thomas Morton’s satires nailed to the
Maypole, or of Alfred Doten’s correspondence about Wild West bacchanalia in the pages of the
Plymouth Rock,
the Dictators’ Benzedrine-pitched pop-rock tributes revel in their unwelcome intimacy with an audience that they have every intention of offending. Such rankling punk parodies send an all-American message: We’re in this together, like it or not. All of us are tapping the same cultural keg, so we may as well enjoy our differences. The Dictators’ most obvious musical inspiration was the bubblegum surf-pop of the early 1960s. Like the
Z-Boys, however, they gleefully rubbed their feet on early surfing’s beach-blanket innocence. The album’s closing number,
“(I Live for) Cars and Girls,” rips off the Beach Boys’ trademark “
Ooooo-wheee-aaah-ooooo” and relocates the party to teenage wasteland. It opens, “I’m the type of guy / who likes to get high / on a Friday afternoon.” The lifestyle this song equally razzes and celebrates entails pretty much the same reckless
hedonism that nearly killed
Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, but the Dictators mock and embrace its anarchy: “Cars-girls-surfing-beer / Nothing else matters here!” It’s California fun by way of the outer boroughs, where kids were never promised anything, and its tongue-in-cheek patriotism looks ahead to the anti-neotraditionalism of Reagan-era hardcore: “It’s the hippest scene, it’s the American dream, and for that I’ll always fight!”

Kids were slow to catch on. The Dictators went right over their heads. Critics dismissed them as novelty rock, which of course they were, but four guys from Forest Hills, who attended their shows and imitated their streetwise dress (leather jackets, T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers),
understood their subversive force. Posing as a dysfunctional family called the Ramones, they turned surf-punk shtick into performance art, and by 1976 they were dominating the art-rock scene that had coalesced around a lower Manhattan bar called
CBGB-OMFUG. The Ramones tempered their humor with gormless cool and punched it out in one- to three-minute anthems: “Blitzkrieg Bop” (“Master Race Rock” redux), “Beat on the Brat” (drubbing rich kids), “Let’s Dance” (punk tribute), “Judy Is a Punk.” If the Dictators gave the lie to their chuckleheaded rock with smarting swipes at the oil industry, the Ramones, despite the aggressive idiocy of songs like
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” mocked their own political and historical educations with smartass polemics like “Havana Affair”: “
Now I’m a guide for the CIA / Hooray for the USA!”

Early New York punks—often suburban social dropouts who adapted the modern-primitive looks of their working-class (and largely unemployed) English brethren—embraced these bands’ overeducated stupidity as the antidote to so much bullshit: hippie earnestness, disco excess, government corruption, bourgeois materialism. In the tradition of 1960s
undergrounds and the
Teenage Wasteland Gazette,
with a contact buzz from the English
Sniffin’ Glue,
they published and distributed handwritten fanzines that flouted all taste, decorum, and polish. Transatlantic/transcontinental zines like
New York Rocker,
Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll,
Ripped and Torn,
and
Legs McNeil’s superlative
Punk
were aggressively childish and obscene publications. Interviewers insulted bands (and vice versa). Editors insulted readers. Badly written articles and badly drawn cartoons espoused nihilism, drinking, insolence, vandalism. But even as they promulgated the anarchic lifestyle that (ironically) brought punks closer together, zines also functioned like Sons of Liberty screeds in defining the punks’ civil society. As the historian Tricia Henry has shown, zines intervened as a sort of conduct manual between unruly bands and their audiences, whose most creative response to angry acts like the
Sex Pistols could be to spit or throw beer bottles. While the mainstream press liked to sensationalize punks’ garish public fury, making them a caricature of society’s decay, the zines, which knew better, showed readers “
that there was a line between good-natured, high-spirited fun and senseless, destructive violence.” The enemy wasn’t
the bands or other punks. The enemy was boredom. Even,
especially,
Johnny Rotten—the “I is anarchy”
porte parole
of violent 1970s punk—stressed the carefree pleasure of his profession: “
Rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be fun. You remember fun, don’tcha?”

And yet, in the late 1970s, while the
Dictators and the Ramones were remembering fun and
Sid Vicious, late of New York, broke any and all rules and laws, there remained a skittish disconnect between the surly, stylish fans and the bands and zines making all the noise. In England, it was popular for punks to “pogo,” a thuggish, jostling, hopping dance that matched the music’s 4/4 time. Stateside, however, at CBGB and elsewhere, arty crowds would stand by in toleration while a shrill, pounding, and screaming ensemble like Cleveland’s excoriating
Dead Boys—which
Nicholas Rombes calls “
one of the first punk bands to drive off the cliff”—showered them in abuse.
Lester Bangs’s “Program for Mass Liberation” had not yet come into its own.

But then sometime around 1980, rather appropriately in San Francisco and Los Angeles, American punks remembered their California education and the crowds themselves got in on the act. As a new breed of “hardcore” punk bands (the
Dead Kennedys,
Germs,
Circle Jerks,
Black Flag) hit the gas and sped the music up to 8/4, 8/8, and faster (and gnarlier), a furious synergy gushed up from the crowd and rose to meet the action onstage. With the birth of the
mosh pit—that sloshing mass of unchecked youth that chewed like a blender in front of the band—punk became a full-contact sport. Suddenly punk was American fun. This rude and sweaty new California fun lacked the skill of the B-boys’
cypher, lacked the soaring elegance of the
Z-Boys’ aerials, but what it shared with both of them—and with the 1850s
miners’ ball that J. D. Borthwick saw at
Angels Camp—was a raw, reckless, rebellious pleasure that pulled the outcast crowd together. What all of these revelers shared, throughout history, was respect for radical civility: a rough balance of individual and communal pleasures. Mosh-pit fun pushed civility to its limits. Lifesaving rules were honored in the pit (they would pick you up if you fell to the ground), but mostly (and this was the point) all bets were off. If you joined the mosh pit, you were in it for pushing, thrashing, kicking, head-butting—whatever.
Buddy Bolden invented early
jazz
by reading the crowd. Punk musicians dove right in—riding, surfing, often
fighting
the crowd.

Hardcore fulfilled the
Dictators’ promise of unsafe, unclean, politically tainted fun. From 1979 to 1982, hardcore metastasized throughout America’s urban centers, growing its most pernicious cells up the East Coast’s I-95 corridor—from the turf of D.C.’s
Minor Threat and
Bad Brains to Boston’s
Negative FX and
Gang Green. Self-sufficient “scenes” cropped up around hardcore, much as they had around hippie “tribes.” Connected by word of mouth, DIY publications, and late-night shows on college radio stations, the hardcore explosion enthralled American youth with its virulent amateurism. Hardcore dropped all pretense of art. Anyone, it seemed, could throw together a band, write some deliberately terrible songs, and successfully enrage a crowd.

Punks hated money with all the fervor of the
Diggers and
Yippies. Crafting a barter-and-forage economy, they parasitized the system they scorned and lived bare lives of urban primitivism. They gathered their food, clothing, and furniture from curbs, dumpsters, and alleyways. If
hippies “dropped out” and inhabited crash pads, punks went them one further and “squatted”—overtaking abandoned buildings where
they “pirated” plumbing and electricity and burned indoor bonfires for heat. Often these “punk houses” assumed an identity—around a band, around a purifying belief system like veganism or “straight edge” (the refusal to drink or take drugs). Punk houses let the squatters form radically defined communities in the cracks of mainstream civil society. Punks were clannish like hippies had been, but their larger subculture wasn’t defined by
psychedelia and peace-and-love “being.” Restless, irreverent, and violently pissed off by the stark incongruities of Reagan’s America (union busting, runaway unemployment, material excess, “trickle-down” economics), punks, for all their competing identities, were defined by the rage and blistering ironies expressed in their anti-rock-star music.
To listen to their scorching diatribes, it is clear that hardcore punks, like their predecessors the
Dictators, held hippies and other rockers in contempt. But for this reason, they showed a sneaking kinship with the
Merry Pranksters,
Diggers, and
Yippies.
Jello Biafra, the
Dead Kennedys’ superlative frontman, recalls the band’s only
Bill Graham show, when they opened for the
Cramps and the
Clash. Graham was still playing the hand-wringing chaperone. Biafra: “
I did my usual swan dive in a crowd of about 3000 jocks, and when I emerged, the only clothes left on my body were my belt, shoes, and socks. I did the rest of the show
nude
while Bill Graham smoldered by the edge of the stage.”

An early 1980s mosh pit at Merlyn’s Club in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photograph © Hank Grebe.)

By the sociologist
Ryan Moore’s interpretation, punk culture was an “
exclamation point” on the sixties counterculture’s “decline into impotence.” Which is to say, the subcultures were syntactically linked—by rock, by rebellion, by DIY resistance. But like
Z-Boys’
surfing and skating in the debris of California’s failed leisure class, hardcore punks gloried in the rot of the hippies’ flower-waving optimism. They grinned bloody grins of pessimism.

A hardcore punk show was frightening to witness. To cops, to parents, to the uninitiated, the mutual destruction between the stage and the crowd signaled the failure of civilization. The punk show was a rehearsal of raw social violence that flaunted its bloodshed and broken bones. And as the historian Lauraine Leblanc shows, hardcore punk’s mosh pit—Jello Biafra’s “3000 jocks”—was intensely masculine. The gender-inclusive art-punk scene of the late 1970s had given way to a
physically aggressive arena where women were assaulted as freely as men (to this extent, the violence was democratic) but also, often, groped—a fact, however, that didn’t stop a rash of female hardcore bands from forming. The mosh pit wasn’t pretty. It was a consensual bloodsport for self-selecting thrashers. And yet, for this reason, it was the practice of anarchy, whose danger was as attractive to the leftist and pacifist as it was to the most divisive, racist skinhead. In the mosh pit these strangers could thrash like bosom enemies in spite of their ideological differences. To the uninitiated, the mosh pit looked mirthless,
merciless,
the polar opposite of fun, but for the willing and exhilarated participants—who dove back in, night after night, with the stamina of ring dancers on
Congo Square—thrashing was the sheerest, funnest expression of all the outrage that made punk punk. Thrashing was the hardest-core way to show that you got (and could take) the big cosmic joke.