The Very Black History of Punk

Youtube ^ | 3/4/19 | Gavin McInnes

[OddLane]

Al Jazeera is a propaganda machine created by a guy who's literally called Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Hamad bin Abdullah bin Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani.

They dupe low IQ underachievers into churning out left-wing propaganda that makes everyone but Muslims look racist and evil and bad. It’s amazing how eager the alt-left is to take their checks. We are so easy to manipulate...

[Don W]

That Sad Saeed is pathetic. Shows ONE band that had a black dude in it and tries to expand that into “Punk was Black”.

Nice try, girl, but not playing. I didn’t see ANY blacks involved in my area. Not one. Even among visiting or touring bands. None nil nada rien.

[DoodleBob]

I didn't sit through the entire appx. 30 mins of back and forth, but I get the point.

But I do take issue with Mr McInnes' brushing off of Death. To be sure, they were not influential due (in my opinion) to their not getting a record deal (they refused to change their name). But after hearing their recordings from the mid-1970s, I'm convinced if they'd come in the scene, they would have been mega-influential. Check out Politicians In My Eyes and, I hope, you'll see my point.

[OddLane]

Oh yeah, I listened to their album and was really impressed.

I'm not a huge punk fan myself-aside from Bad Religion-but I loved their music, and the documentary about their lives was fascinating.

[TexasM1A]

The only black dudes that i remember in my punk days were HR and the dudes in Bad Brains, but then again, that stuff didnt matter.

[ZirconEncrustedTweezers]

This is the first I’ve heard of this Death - my first thought was the death metal band of the same name founded by Chuck Schuldiner (RIP).

[the OlLine Rebel]

Given how garbage that noise is, it wouldn’t surprise me, if rap is any clue.

Then again, I think it’s actually that culture has degraded so much, that white and black both devolved from music to horrid noise, just different versions.

[Hugin]

Gavin is wrong when he says punk was originally British. The Ramones and the whole CBGB scene predated British punk and influenced the early Brit band’s to start.

[a fool in paradise]

It’s myopic revisionist history.

And it isn’t “researched” it’s cut and pasted from other peoples’ distorted reports.

As the critical host of the video says, Death didn’t have “influence” on punk (at least in the original era). Their record was rediscovered decades later. They were nominally present in their local market “back in the day”.

And something lost in the discussion of “black people weren’t supposed to play or listen to punk and hard rock”. That is the black community looking down on them and giving them odd looks, not white people.

[central_va]

low IQ underachievers = perfect punk rock band name.

[a fool in paradise]

I like Death and saw the documentary a few years ago. “Politicians in my eyes” even came out covered on a tour single by The Dirtbombs (another band that is omitted, neglected, marginalized). Black singer playing rock and roll, better than the White Stripes, also from Detroit. Most people have only heard one of their (lesser) songs on an Autozone commercial.

The Dirtbombs: Politicians in My Eyes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkrZeloIwrE

the Dirtbombs live video Amoeba (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V0ZNOnieRM

40 minute dutch documentary about the Detroit garage punk scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbHQph6rCZk

Mick Collins was also (concurently) singer of Blacktop

Blacktop - I’ve Got A Baaad Feeling About This (Full Album)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_hNszSKcW8

And Mick Collins was in the Gories going back to 1988. LONG before Jack White “exploded”
The Gories - At “Garageland” in New Boston - Ann Arbor 1989 (BandIn Sessions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRGwq_nIEQc

And for the record, the Ramones didn’t “invent” punk. It existed in the 60s and was “called” garage punk in Lenny Kaye’s liner notes for Nuggets (a 2LP compilation).

At 4:30 mark in that 1988 Gories concert, they are covering an obscuro L.A. garage punk band named the Sloths who opened for the Rolling Stones in the 60s.

Sloths - Makin’ Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZyosYyOkvk

And the Sloths are back and making new songs too.
The Sloths “One Way Out” - OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLtjRxVYZLU

Big Star were also a marginalized band. White guys on a subsidiary of Motown (recording in the South).

Big Star had more impact over the years but still are largely unknown (even with That 70s Show using one of their songs as it’s opening theme).

Without Big Star, no REM or other such bands of the 80s and 90s college indie radio.

Big Star documentary trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFAGUbJPXOI

Dead Moon/Fred Cole is another story of a band/performer who existed 50 years without mainstream notice.
Trailer- Unknown Passage: The Dead Moon Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNt7kDP0kPw

One of Fred Cole’s 70s band with his wife
The Rats - “Can’t stand Back”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5366JsvrF0
Oh, and look at that Fred Cole was on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets album with his 1968 track
The Lollipop Shoppe - You Must Be a Witch 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HfAsJ8AUmA

[a fool in paradise]

and every “history of black punk” neglects to mention the black drummer of Dead Kennedys (DKs are also not included in most histories of hardcore)

Dead Kennedys - California Über Alles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIqESwzCGg4

[a fool in paradise]

Also, the JackAzzera revisionist histories cite Margaret Thatcher as a cause of punk in England. Nope. She wasn’t PM until 1979. They are already post-punk by then.

But Leftist loons hate Margaret Thatcher (and Reagan) and push crap to kids at very turn.

And the political left was late to the game in punk (as they were to rock and roll). Commmies hated it. The Marxist Left didn’t appreciate the MC5’s “white panthers” thing and called them out as sexist pigs. Read Leggs’ McNeil’s account (from oral histories) in Please Kill Me.

[a fool in paradise]

Has BET shown the Death documentary?
Aired any Bad Brains concerts?

Well it leaves them more time to celebrating living blues artists in their 80s, right?

Wait, BET doesn’t show these things?
BET doesn’t like punk people??
We shall overcome.

[OddLane]

They have the same name, but the band referred to in the story is a hard rock band from the ‘70s.

[DoodleBob]

Thank you...I forgot Ted was black.

I was at a concert put on by kids from a bunch of School of Rock franchises (one of the little DoodleBobs was in the school at the time). When one school started the intro to "Holiday in Cambodia," I ran to the front of the stage and almost started moshing. All the other parents were sedate...I was astounded that nobody was impressed by what these kids were doing.

And yes...the vocalist sang ALL the lyrics.

[a fool in paradise]

David Thomas (Pere Ubu/Rocket From The Tombs):

Either everything I’ve done is punk or nothing is.

“Punk” doesn’t mean anything. It’s one of these words that everybody has their own definition for.

To me, “punk” was cliché pablum designed to sell merchandise to gullible rubes in confused and decaying cultures. That’s what punk is to me.

Pere Ubu and Rocket: we were rock bands working in the mainstream.

I don’t mean that every band that’s considered punk I don’t respect. Johnny Lydon has all the respect in the world he can get from me. Yeah, the Sex Pistols were a decent rock band! The Clash ... eh, they were a decent rock band. I’m not a big Clash guy.

My point is that all of the early quote-unquote punk bands in America, like Television or Blondie or Talking Heads, they were all gonna happen anyway. They all had roots before punk happened, and nothing changed for them, y’know?

And this is hard for people to understand, but if you remember back to the Sex Pistols tour of America, there was all this kerfuffle about how they had these joke bands opening for them, these sort of goofball, Tubes sort of bands. And all the English are going, “Ahh, they don’t understand,” but no, that’s how we perceived punk at the time: that it was a goofball, Tubes sort of band, or “Weird Al” Yankovic sort of thing.

And the thing that English people don’t understand is that all this stuff we’d seen before in that garage band thing of the ‘60s: ? and the Mysterians, Music Machine, all that stuff. If you’re gonna call something punk, that stuff was punk, certainly as easily as the ‘70s punk UK thing. We’d seen all that! So oh, big deal...”

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_from_the_Tombs
Rocket from the Tombs (or RFTT) is an American rock band originally active from mid-1974 to mid-1975 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. The band was reconstituted several times with various line-ups starting in 2003.

Heralded as an important protopunk group, they were little known during the band’s original lifetime, though various members later achieved renown in Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Billy Bob Hargus wrote, however, that “The sound of the Rockets is much more ferocious than Ubu or the Dead Boys.”

...There was some fluctuation of the group’s personnel, but what’s come to be known as the “classic” lineup included Peter Laughner, David Thomas (then known as “Crocus Behemoth”[2]), Craig Willis Bell (a.k.a. Darwin Layne), Gene O’Connor (a.k.a. Cheetah Chrome), and Johnny Madansky (a.k.a. “Johnny Blitz”).

When RFTT disbanded, the personnel split and formed two different musical groups:

* O’Connor and Madansky joined with singer Stiv Bators (who made a guest appearance on-stage at the last RFTT show) to form Frankenstein, which later morphed into the Dead Boys, a more straightforward punk rock group.
* Laughner and Thomas went on to form the more experimental Pere Ubu with bassist Tim Wright (RFTT’s soundman). Laughner died in 1977, of acute pancreatitis brought on by years of drinking and drug use.[3]

Both groups used songs first written or performed by Rocket From The Tombs as parts of their repertoires: the Dead Boys were known for “Ain’t It Fun,” “What Love Is,” “Down in Flames,” “Caught With the Meat in Your Mouth” (done by RFTT as “I’m Never Gonna Kill Myself Again”) and “Sonic Reducer”; Pere Ubu went on to reinterpret “Final Solution,” “Life Stinks” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo.”