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.

Hippies vs. Punks: Sex Pistols at Winterland, January 14, 1978

Post-Punk starts, in the usual telling of the tale, when Johnny Rotten walks off the stage of the Winterland Ballroom on January 14, 1978. The Sex Pistols had just performed The Stooges "No Fun." Rotten, right before tossing his mic, asks the audience, "Ever feel like you've been cheated?"

The entire Winterland show can be heard here:

The next day the Dallas Cowboys demolished the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII. And, yes, I did feel as if I had been cheated. My mother and I watched the game on a tiny portable Sony television that we had set on top of the kitchen table.

I had jumped ship at the end of the summer of 1977, leaving my father in California while exchanging places with my sister in Southern Oregon. My dad had not required that I attend school. So I just stopped going. My 7th-grade year was spent riding motorcycles -- a 70cc Honda trail bike and a Kawasaki 100cc street bike -- in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But by the beginning of the next school year I had seen the handwriting on the wall. My father's behavior was growing more erratic -- drinking, carrying on a romance with a much younger woman -- and I knew I couldn't blow off another year of junior high. I made the move north to Ashland, Oregon, where my mother had relocated earlier that spring. I started the 8th grade right on schedule, the day after Labor Day, with all the other kids.

We lived in a cockroach-infested, moldy two-bedroom rental house located on a dirt road on the outskirts of a tract housing development called Quiet Village. Across the dirt road from our house were acres of pasture dotted with blackberry brambles and a horse or two. My mother supported us by working as a psychic, doing astrological and tarot readings. She had long, flowing golden hair, and she wore knee-high leather moccasins. She looked like she stepped out of a John Everett Millais painting

My mother had gone to high school with Craig Morton; he was her brother's good friend. The Super Bowl was something really special for that reason; it's not often that a starting quarterback in the paramount secular ritual of the United States is kith to kin.

Monday was the Gala Benefit for the spring 2013 exhibition, "PUNK: Chaos to Couture," organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The exhibition, on view from May 9 through August 14, 2013, will examine punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the 1970s through its continuing influence today." The elite walked the red carpet in a display as far removed from that weekend in January over 35 years ago as one could possibly imagine. Only torrents of money and complete amnesia (which is a pretty good description of our current rush to doomsday) can label the raw power of a Punk manifesto like "Problems" -- no doubt one of the greatest, most pure examples of rock 'n' roll -- "high fashion":

A couple months back I read The New Yorker piece, "Anarchy Unleashed," written by Calvin Tompkins, about Andrew Bolton, the Met curator who put the Punk show together. One interesting thing that Bolton says, quoting Mick Jones of the Clash, is that Punk in its pure form lasted only a hundred days. Mick Jones is probably referring to a string of months in 1976. But think about it this way: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols -- the timeless, living, breathing monument of Punk Rock -- is released at the end of October 1977 (the month of the Baader-Meinhof Group's German Autumn -- the flame-out, along with Red Brigades' kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro five months later, of Western Leftist armed guerrilla resistance). The band breaks up the middle of January 1978. That's about three months. And then we're supposed to be speaking about a world that's "Post-Punk." This is confusing. It's a problem. Punk is over before it ever really happens.