How did punk rock develop?

Answer 1

Punk rock began in the mid-to-late sixties with the Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and the MC5. It progressed into the seventies in New York City, with bands like the New York Dolls, the Dead Boys, the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Talking Heads, Blondie, etc., who mainly played two East Village clubs, CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. At the time, rock music had become very stale; it was all about long solos and using 12 different guitars. It was extravagant and pretentious. And the culture surrounding it -- the hippie ideals like peace and love and everybody being nice to everybody else -- seemed trite, unrealistic, namby-pamby, and doomed to failure. Punk rock was a rebellion against all that. It was a return to simple 3-minute pop tunes, like the songs Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddly, etc. did in the '50s, but really loud and hard and fast.

In the early seventies, Malcolm McLaren, the eventual manager and mastermind behind the Sex Pistols, came to New York and started spending a lot of time watching these bands at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. He started managing the New York Dolls, and did such a bad job that the band ended up breaking up. He tried to inject politics into the music, by giving the Dolls a communist twist, and dressing them up all in red. This didn't work because New York punk never had anything to do with politics: with him in charge, the band lost their identity.

So McLaren returned to England and put together the Sex Pistols. Since there was already a punk scene there, brought on by bands like the New York Dolls and the Ramones touring England in the last few years, they were met with pretty much instant success. English punk bands like the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash, the Cockney Rejects, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc., were -- generally speaking -- much more political; English punk had a strong element of class warfare to it, along with an inherent desire to be shocking and offensive. However sincere the Sex Pistols themselves were, many felt that Malcolm McLaren was just deliberately creating a lot of hype and publicity for himself, and that the whole thing was just a con on his part.

On New Year's Day, 1978, the Sex Pistols began their American tour, touching down in Atlanta, Georgia, and making their way across the country. The tour only lasted 14 days, but there was no shortage of media coverage, and the public eagerly and incessantly waited for the next shocking news bulletin about the Pistols. Kids all across America were dressing themselves up in ripped T-shirts and dog collars, with spiked, brightly-colored hair and safety pins through their ears and noses: punk had suddenly gone from an underground music scene to a full-blown mass movement.

The band, however, progressively deteriorated as the tour went on. Sid Vicious was an out-of-control drug addict and Johnny Rotten was becoming increasingly disillusioned about McLaren and about the band in general. The Sex Pistols broke up after their San Francisco concert at the Winterland, on January 14, 1978. Before walking offstage at the end, Johnny Rotten famously said to the audience, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" presumably referring to how he felt manipulated and cheated by McLaren.

The end of the Sex Pistols marked the beginning of the decline of the punk rock era, and by the early eighties, punk was on its last legs. As the 1980s progressed, punk rock mutated into two very different kinds of music, hardcore punk like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, and New Wave bands like Depeche Mode and the Cure.

There is an excellent, excellent book on the subject, called Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The entire book consists of nothing but direct quotations from the people who were actually there, so it's as accurate as is humanly possible.