Review: No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion (Rhino)

[DudeAsInCool]

Various Artists

No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion

[Rhino; 2004]

Rating: 10.0

"At its best new wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides."

     --Lester Bangs, NME, Dec. 1977

"It was obvious at Winterland-- everyone knew how to behave, everyone knew how to spit, how to dress-- everyone knew how to pack the place. But it was just sensationalism, a spectacle."

     --Danny Furious of The Avengers, on opening for the Sex Pistols at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, Jan. 14, 1978

It was the best of punk, it was the worst of punk; it was December 1977, the winter of nearly everyone's discontent, but it had been a banner year for angry young men on a handful of continents. All you disenfranchised modern malcontents, you grew up too damn late. Even Lester Bangs, the most vociferously jerky of all knee-jerk misanthropes, was predicting great things; he'd just published a three-part treatise on egalitarianism, the new democracy of music, and the frailties of human nature in NME, and was only a few weeks away from accompanying The Clash on tour. The Ramones were finally bringing the Bowery to Britain, and the few, nascent battle-cries of the MC5, The Stooges, and the New York Dolls from a few years back were now being echoed by thousands of new voices. None, of course, screamed louder than the Sex Pistols, though; with some careful management, in just over a year, the Pistols had enjoyed more controversy and notoriety than most other punk acts combined. For better or worse, they were the public face of punk, a voice for all the restless rejects shouting down all comers, and they were on a collision course with the southern United States.

By December 30th, 1977, the Sex Pistols didn't even have visas; less than three weeks later, after a brutal reception throughout America's heartland, John Lydon sat dejected on the stage of the Winterland Ballroom and famously asked, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" With his last words as Johnny Rotten, he cast off the fetid mantle of punk's figurehead, and the most notorious punk band of the era had hung it up; with Goliath slain, so died the "big story" of punk. Most of the press dried up, casual, rubbernecked gawkers looked for another car wreck, and inside of five years, the punk journalists had burnt out, the punk heroes had blown up, and punk footnotes like The Avengers had simply faded away. Punk rock, bang-to-bust, a flicker of revolutionary greatness smothered by de rigeur rebellion, and all neatly summed up in a tumultuous microcosmic two-month tumble. Conventional wisdom is often simplistic like that.

Fortunately, Rhino's overwhelmingly comprehensive four-disc love letter to the heart and soul of punk music isn't particularly conventional. While punk remained a mostly well-kept (and easily documented) secret prior to the Sex Pistols' spectacular collapse, the aftermath of the punk explosion was a shambles. That the Pistols are conspicuously absent on No Thanks! might be the doing of a petulant Lydon (presumably irked that Rhino pulled a stateside release of a Sex Pistols box a few years back), but fitting nonetheless. Fine. Fuck 'em. Of all the admirable successes of No Thanks!, the finest is surely the deliberateness with which it unearths so many of the also-rans long-since buried in the Pistols' wake. With barely a track to spare for The Clash, The Ramones, or The Fall, they're barely an afterthought here. No Thanks! isn't "essential"; it's "scope," pure magnitude. Deadbeats and dilettantes, glammed progenitors and goth poseurs, the revered and the reviled. This isn't just "punk," this is everything that was boiling beneath the surface, the whole of the late-70s underground brought to light.

The Motors will never, ever be spoken of in the same regard as Richard Hell. Or The Damned. Or even Generation X (Billy Idol was the Diamond Dave of punk rock, after all). Ditto for the Glen Matlock's Rich Kids, 999, The Vibrators, Subway Sect, and half of the other bands that grace this stage, and that's the collection's charm; every Englishman or Yankee to ever hold a guitar, let alone learn to play one (how else can you explain The Adverts?) gets at least an act, maybe two. The diversity contained here is staggering, but the disparity of sound is nullified by the unity of motivations; whether out of sincerity or fashionability, everyone's got a grudge to bear. No matter what form it takes, the underlying theme is simple dissatisfaction; no one was playing because he or she was happy (except maybe Devo-- who knows what they wanted?). Something,anything, needed to change, but all any of these people were empowered to do was play music. Punk was fundamentally unfocused rage, a loaded gun aimed at any institution-- politics, clothing, loneliness, provinciality, music itself-- too societally entrenched to get out of the way. The tactics aren't always smart, and rarely pretty, but the execution is brilliant, and Rhino has released the ultimate document.

Large-scale entropy demands order, though, if only to maintain the physical form of the discs themselves. To that end, Rhino offers two minimal criteria: Every track included must come from label-distributed singles released during the 70s. The 70s was a singles-driven decade, for certain; some pulse-stopping LPs emerged from bands that went on to dominate the canon, but many of the other bands had the half-life of a mayfly-- they were lucky to even make it through a 45 before splintering. With a fraction of the media saturation we have today, bands fought for recognition on the radio waves, or Top of the Pops, or with the pocketbooks of the working poor-- three minutes were all they had to make a name for themselves. And surely, chronology must factor in, so, sure, why not draw the line at the close of the 70s?

[beware: the pointless whining of a perfectionist follows, but only out of my all-consuming love.]

Here's why. Arbitrary guidelines made out of necessity are for sissies; reap your bastard rewards: No Crass-- ridiculously, sincerely radical, no one epitomized agit-punk better. No Anti-Nowhere League-- they drove around in a van spray-painted with "We're the Anti-Nowhere League and you're not"; a completely laughable bunch of buffoons, but for sheer, mindless disposability, "We Are the League" isn't so far removed from The Vibrators' "Baby Baby". Plus, Elvis Costello liked them. No Angelic Upstarts-- see Crass; skinheads against racism. No Misfits-- for the 28 minutes of Static Age, The Misfits were as perfectly hopeless as the best the West Coast had to offer, schlock horror and all. No Birthday Party-- same reason, but Nick the Stripper & Co. are Aussies. No Rocket From the Tombs-- sure, why include the first voice of Cleveland punk, the group that spawned both The Dead Boys and Pere Ubu (who are naturally present)? No MC5!-- "Rock & roll, drugs, and fucking in the streets" was printed on their freakin' business cards. No Lou Reed-- I heard he shot anti-freeze and lived, dudes. There's more. And yet we're left with Devo. That doesn't even touch on multiple questionable song choices; "Final Solution" is a poor man's alternative to "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (and that was a single!), but I'm about to get carried away. Let common sense dictate some choices, guys; this compilation is so close.

But even if not absolutely perfect (and could any compilation really be?), compilations don't come more essential than this; it is required listening for anyone new to punk, and unquestionably the best primer on this music in existence. Rhino does away with any pretense of chronology to great effect; vital, fiery sermons spar with tense, calculated cool, and with one-hits back-to-back with the classics, virtually every track commands attention. Middleman-ing between Richard Hell's perversely jubilant "Love Comes in Spurts" and the primally willful, snot-nosed ignorance of The Dead Boys' classic "Sonic Reducer", even the (still living) Boys' "First Time" sounds like a hit. Each disc is an untouchable mix, varied enough that five consecutive hours of listening isn't out of reach, but Rhino have outdone themselves even here, in case you can't afford that time commitment. Subtle as it is, disc one flirts precariously with becoming a full-fledged classics compilation, between opening with "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "White Riot", followed in short order by The Damned's blistering "Neat Neat Neat", The Jam, Pere Ubu, and Jonathan Richman's hypnotic ode to midnight radio at a thousand miles an hour, "Roadrunner".

The proud, preening showcase taken by disc one is welcome as a one-shot primer, but in the end, nothing but old news, and just as compelling as the less-well-traveled discs two and three. Disc four, however, is the true masterpiece; coming close to exposing the splintered force of punk near the end of the decade, frail and faltering against the ropes before succumbing fully to new wave and post-punk, it takes an angle not often seen. With early idealism and bravado stripped aside, bands were slowly falling out of step. Talking Heads and Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio" carefully tread the path to commercial success that Blondie recklessly followed before them; "Boys Don't Cry" famously hints at The Cure's forthcoming, beautiful pop romanticism. Gang of Four ride Andy Gill's shattered guitar lines all the way to name-drop superstardom; "Adult Books" is X's impression of Talking Heads before they leave the limitations of West Coast punk behind for the Dead Kennedys to flog. These are the epilogues to a story stretched out over the three prior discs, and provides easily the most memorable individual moments of this compilation.

The last notes heard as No Thanks! closes out the decade are Joy Division's, with an air of obvious finality, but the Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" is more poignant. Thunders' life mirrors the larger story of punk as presented here in a way the Sex Pistols never can. From his untouchable beginnings with the New York Dolls, he was a catalyst of the breaking New York scene, but he was helpless, naïve and vain-- he fractured the Dolls because he wanted the spotlight. Although he went on to headline with The Heartbreakers, he toiled only to mixed success in a sea of bands he helped inspire. A growing heroin habit eventually dissolved any vestige of stability, and The Heartbreakers, too, buckled under the pressure. For his remaining years, Johnny solo was a joke; not falling off the stage marked a successful performance. Shooting up in his hands and feet because other veins had collapsed, playing for cash in hand to get smack after the show-- he tried to clean up, but like so many tragic figures, it seems, he was too late. Johnny Thunders died in 1991, long after the punk rock he fostered had disappeared, but he wrote "Memory" in 1978; like him, its greatness had passed, but it would be a long time fading away. "It doesn't pay to try/ All the smart boys know why," and when he sings it with his innocent, put-upon inflection, one thing is certain: He was too dumb not to give it his best shot, and smart enough to realize it. We're better off that he-- and the rest of them-- did try, at least; I can't think of a more appropriate conclusion.

-Eric Carr, February 11th, 2004

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-revie...no-thanks.shtml

[slum_goddess]

i looked for a separate punk forum here, totally forgetting that it isn't a viable genre these days (another reason i dig being on this side of the atlantic, punk is alive and well and thriving especially in the brixton part of london). a fave band is 6 Days Till Sunday, all under 21 and who truly rock out.