The Sixties – The History Of Punk
Ahh the sixties! As rock’n’ roll collided with the blues, bands like Them, The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds absorbed blues and rock’n’roll riffs (Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry for instance), dirtied and speeded them up and appropriated the gruff mannerisms of black blues singers to produce songs like Gloria and Satisfaction.
In a curious twist Jagger sang like a Yank who in turn was exaggeratedly copied by US bands to produce those lovely thuggish sneering acid vocals that The Standells and others used while mixing it up with rockabilly, the surf music of Dicky Dale and Link Wray. Elvis, blues and rockabilly influenced The Beatles then the Stones and Yardbirds who in turn on visiting the USA became the catalyst for an explosion of US bands who sprouted up like psychedelic mushrooms.
These bands popped up everywhere in a 60’s garage scene that took the dirtiest elements, fuzzed them up and spiked them with psychedelia. The music had a look and a sound. This really was a golden period. Bands formed overnight and hundreds of singles were released in an explosion of creativity.
Let’s face it the Yanks thrashed us here in the 60’s. We started them off with the Stones and they gave us a whole magical trip while we ended up with the shite like Traffic, The Move and the bloody Beatles spewing their pap. Yep the USA gave us Count 5 performing songs like Psychotic Reaction as covered by The Cramps and Radiators from Space (and the Sex Pistols in their early days), The Trashmen gave us Surfin Bird as covered by The Ramones. The 13th Floor Elevators led by Roky Erikson, who escaped a sentence for drugs with electric therapy and was made a virtual vegetable, gave us the classic You’re Gonna Miss Me. Or The Seeds, featuring Sky Sunlight Saxon, doing Pushing Too Hard.
This period is just filled with numerous gems some of which were collected by Lenny Kaye on the famous Nuggets album and which should be in every persons collection. Other great bands to watch out for include The Standells, Love, Chocolate Watch Band, The Sonics and Electric Prunes.
There’s a lot of similarities with punk 77 style… explosion of bands, small labels, a counter culture of look, sound and teenage rebellion. These bands would heavily influence later American punk bands.
Having influenced the Yanks we gave them some more to chew on. This time it was fashion-based culture and angry young men with the destructive power and feedback of those sharp Shepherds Bush hipsters The Who, the distorted two chord fury of The Kinks and the glorious Small Faces. The Sex Pistols used to include Faces and Who songs in their set and early rehearsals featured covers from both bands.
