Hippies vs. Punks: Negative Trend

Negative Trend, a precursor band of Flipper, was on the bill of the famous January 14, 1978 Winterland show that spelled the end of first wave Punk and the Sex Pistols. Negative Trend was supposed to appear after the Sex Pistols, but they never made it on stage. The plan hatched by Malcolm McLaren was for Negative Trend to go on, perform using the Sex Pistols' equipment and then destroy everything -- the stage, guitars, amps, drums -- in a blaze of crowd-pleasing, media-tantalizing glory. The band was blocked from the stage by bikers employed by Bill Graham. The story is recounted by guitarist Craig Gray in a KALX interview from 2009:

Negative Trend had three different lead vocalists in the late 1970s -- Rozz Rezabek, Mikal Waters and Rik L. Rik. The Posh Boy Music November 1978 recording that I downloaded from Amazon and have been listening to all week features F-Word co-founder Rik L. Rik. He is the end of the line. While Rik is excellent, Mikal Waters, who appears on the Negative Trend EP (1978), I prefer; he has more of a Lee Ving vibe. The original singer, Rozz Rezabek, has a solo record titled Rozz and Negative Trend: The Pop Sessions (1978) which is quite good but apparently not accurate in its co-crediting of Negative Trend:

I think the name "Negative Trend" is the perfect name for a first wave Punk band. It says it all without irony and ostentation. 

This is what Punks represented after the Hippies vacated the cultural vanguard and the Age of Aquarius evaporated -- a negative trend. 

The Zeitgeist has grown progressively more negative ever since, to the point where we are at now, The End: culturally, suffocated by technology; politically, smothered by an extremely powerful plutocracy; ecologically, headed for -- if not already suffering from -- a planetary crisis.

The music of Negative Trend is an aural bridge between first wave UK Punk and what would become the dominant form of American Punk -- California Hardcore of the early and middle 1980s. One can also hear a proto-Goth sound in a song like "Black and Red":

It's good stuff. I particularly like "Mercenaries":

It takes me back to the late '70s when colonial Africa was collapsing and images of black national liberation wars were shown on the nightly network news through a white supremacist lens. The U.S. had just "cut and run" in Vietnam and here we were right back in a proxy war, this time in Angola. But the Hippies were no longer on the scene with their Magical Mystery Tour (1967). No, the Punks of 1977-1978 were about as far away from "All You Need is Love" as one can imagine.

To see the new face of the avant-garde and its celebration of drunken adolescent cynicism take a look at these videos from a Mabuhay Gardens show in early 1978, a couple of months after Negative Trend failed to make it to the stage of the Winterland Ballroom. The lead singer is Rozz Rezabek. The bass player is Will Shatter, who will go on to form Flipper with the second Negative Trend drummer, Steve DePace:

After three decades Negative Trend reformed  in 2009, performing also in 2010 when they disbanded. This is the group (the only original member is Craig Gray) doing "Meathouse" at a San Francisco show in February of 2009: