Hippies vs. Punks: The Vibrators' Pure Mania 1977

I gave away my copy of Pure Mania by The Vibrators, one of the seminal Punk recordings from 1977. Nineteen-seventy-seven was the year that Punk broke into popular consciousness and knocked the Hippie off his avant-garde pedestal.

My girlfriend Stacey expressed surprise that I owned Pure Mania. At that point, early 1988, copies were somewhat rare. One afternoon I had been browsing for used records in Rasputin's with my buddy and musical mentor Oliver when he came across the LP in one of the bins. Being a prodigious collector, he already owned a copy; but he suggested that I get it for myself, which I did, since I always deferred to Oliver's judgment on music.

I listened to Pure Mania quite a bit. You could say I made a study of it. I like its energy, its propulsion.

But I didn't bond with it; it didn't work for me. So when Stacey showed an interest in it, I was happy to give it to her.

Shortly before I met Stacey she had been in a garage band. All I remember about it was the name, Tons of Bugs, which I thought was a good one, and a song of hers (she drummed and shared vocals) that she included on a mix tape. She sang something like "Baby, I love you/Because you've got a tattoo/You wear my heart on your sleeve." Pretty horrible. But we both loved music.

Stacey had a nice apartment on the Oakland-Berkeley border near Alcatel Bottle Shop. It was a second-story walk-up, a railroad apartment. Her bedroom, which was the locomotive, was spacious. The windows opened to trees. The sun filtering through created a green light. I remember one Sunday we spent the afternoon in bed listening to Sonic Youth's Sister (1987), their last album with SST.

Stacey and I listened to a lot of music together in that apartment. For us, the Spirit of '77 was a reconstruction. The first wave English Punk bands burned rock 'n' roll back to its roots, incinerating the outer layers of Hippie pomposity. I never listened to a lot of the Ramones; their garage rock was never my cup of tea. But I don't think you can understand the UK Punk bands of 1977 without "Blitzkreig Bop."

This week at work, YouTube streaming Damned Damned Damned (1977), Pure Mania and The Clash (1977) (one of the two great monuments to Punk from 1977, the other being Never Mind the Bollocks), listening on my ear buds as I organized old grievance files, I realized that this is music not easily ingested. It demands a certain level of commitment from the listener. And the Hippies, no longer "forever young," were, for the most part, unwilling to provide this commitment.

I appreciate Pure Mania much more today than I did in 1988.