Hippy Punks, no Punky Hips
It always seems silly the pitched battle twix hippies and punks. Pre-punk (in the current understanding of punk) musical radicals - often long hairs - cast off and dissed as dirty hippies not hip to the new Now sound. Now the divide between the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground is seen as vast (which it really sort of was) but in '69 or '70 it really was seen as the same piece of pie. The Doors and The Stooges occupying the same side of the spectrum of "hip" music.
Maybe teds and mods fought it out on the Beachs in mid 60's and Hardcore thugs beat down on longhairs and wierdo's in rough-and-tumble early '80's OC, but is that something to aspire too?
Ah, but here's the rub, when you look closely the distinction between righteous late 70's hippies and righteous late 70's punks is gray at best. Mark Perry, punk fan boy who printed one of the most prominent early punk zines Sniffin' Glue (I've heard - I've never read it) got in the mix and formed his own band Alternative TV. There recorded a couple classic punk gems and did all the UK punk things buuuuttttt they also covered Frank Zappa songs and Perry was an unrepentant fan of wierd 60's music like Beefheart, Zappa, etc.
Between their first and second albums they released a live record that was a split with the Here & Now. Who were the Here & Now? Some other righteous forward thinking punk band? Of course not, they were a hippy jam band who played the free concert circuit and played with the likes of David Allen (of Gong, of Soft Machine). Maybe they were just thumbing there noses at the already prevailing punk dogma of '78, but maybe they were also pointing out the obvious. As Far as People Doing Righteous Things With Music in a DIY Manner - PUNK WAS NOT THE FIRST KID ON THE BLOCK. There was a history, at least in the UK and on the continent, of 60's hippy bands trying to live and play with the 60's progressive politics. They were established musical anarchists years before Johnny Rotten birthed Anarchy in the UK.
Even furthermore Punk bands like Zounds and the Mob even opened and shared members with the Here and Now. If anything Anarcho-Punk is the child of two parents: the Anarchists unfufilled spiels of the Sex Pistols and Clash with the actually living Anarchy of the Free Music radicals of post-Hippy UK Scene.
Not surprisingly the closes ties between Punk Scenes and Hippy Scenes are were the edges of Punk and Hippiness that highlighted the politics of the process of making music. DIY, anarcho-punks, post-punks all had closer ties to anarcho hippies and burn-outs than the leather and stud crowd or the the beads and peace/love crowd.
All that is to say two things: it really is not all that surprising that Tim Yohannon owned a copy of the Grateful Dead's first album and two it is foolish to dismiss all non-punky pre-punk stuff out-of-hand, esp. because punk's founding fathers definitely weren't. Punk wasn't musical ground zero.
Maybe teds and mods fought it out on the Beachs in mid 60's and Hardcore thugs beat down on longhairs and wierdo's in rough-and-tumble early '80's OC, but is that something to aspire too?
Ah, but here's the rub, when you look closely the distinction between righteous late 70's hippies and righteous late 70's punks is gray at best. Mark Perry, punk fan boy who printed one of the most prominent early punk zines Sniffin' Glue (I've heard - I've never read it) got in the mix and formed his own band Alternative TV. There recorded a couple classic punk gems and did all the UK punk things buuuuttttt they also covered Frank Zappa songs and Perry was an unrepentant fan of wierd 60's music like Beefheart, Zappa, etc.
Between their first and second albums they released a live record that was a split with the Here & Now. Who were the Here & Now? Some other righteous forward thinking punk band? Of course not, they were a hippy jam band who played the free concert circuit and played with the likes of David Allen (of Gong, of Soft Machine). Maybe they were just thumbing there noses at the already prevailing punk dogma of '78, but maybe they were also pointing out the obvious. As Far as People Doing Righteous Things With Music in a DIY Manner - PUNK WAS NOT THE FIRST KID ON THE BLOCK. There was a history, at least in the UK and on the continent, of 60's hippy bands trying to live and play with the 60's progressive politics. They were established musical anarchists years before Johnny Rotten birthed Anarchy in the UK.
Even furthermore Punk bands like Zounds and the Mob even opened and shared members with the Here and Now. If anything Anarcho-Punk is the child of two parents: the Anarchists unfufilled spiels of the Sex Pistols and Clash with the actually living Anarchy of the Free Music radicals of post-Hippy UK Scene.
Not surprisingly the closes ties between Punk Scenes and Hippy Scenes are were the edges of Punk and Hippiness that highlighted the politics of the process of making music. DIY, anarcho-punks, post-punks all had closer ties to anarcho hippies and burn-outs than the leather and stud crowd or the the beads and peace/love crowd.
All that is to say two things: it really is not all that surprising that Tim Yohannon owned a copy of the Grateful Dead's first album and two it is foolish to dismiss all non-punky pre-punk stuff out-of-hand, esp. because punk's founding fathers definitely weren't. Punk wasn't musical ground zero.
posted by furtanic at 1:32 AM
2 Comments:
anarcho-punk, the child of two parents; you couldn't be more right. CRASS, being the natural place to begin such an examination, directly exemplifies the truth of your statements. formed originally as a two piece by steve ignorant/williams, a teenager who wanted nothing more than to be the next johnny rotten, and jeremy ratter, nee penny rimbaud, a 35 year old hippy living in a commune with a bunch of other hippies. Crass, poision girls, all hippies. if you read the (massively long and often deadly boring) insert that comes with christ the album, which for some reason i devoted a week of my life to, they talk a lot about the hippies they trafficked with (both internally and externally), in no uncertain terms. and we can all look to the mysterious and bewildering gurus of Guerilla Incendiary Sabotoge Mutineer when they said, "Punks Is Hippies." what they may have thought they were talking about, i couldn't say, since the rest of their ethos includes mostly calls for "anarchy violence" etc. etc., but it is true. punks is hippies. or at least were. and some of us still like to tread that line.
My interpretation of God In the Schizoid Mind's assertion of "Punks is Hippies" is that they were letting the people know of their imminent defection to metal from punk because punkdom shares too much with hippiedom, and hippie entails too much... pussyfooting.
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