Early history

New York City
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The origins of New York's punk rock scene can be traced back to such sources as late 1960s trash culture and an early 1970s underground rock movement centered around the Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village, where the New York Dolls performed.[75] In early 1974, a new scene began to develop around the CBGB club, also in lower Manhattan. At its core was Television, described by critic John Walker as "the ultimate garage band with pretensions".[76] Their influences ranged from garage psych pioneer Roky Erickson to jazz innovator John Coltrane. The band's bassist/singer, Richard Hell, created a look with cropped, ragged hair, ripped T-shirts, and black leather jackets credited as the basis for punk rock visual style.[77] In April 1974, Patti Smith, a member of the Mercer Arts Center crowd and a friend of Hell's, came to CBGB for the first time to see the band perform.[78] A veteran of independent theater and performance poetry, Smith was developing an intellectual, feminist take on rock 'n' roll. On June 5, she recorded the single "Hey Joe"/"Piss Factory", featuring Television guitarist Tom Verlaine; released on her own Mer Records label, it heralded the scene's do it yourself (DIY) ethic and has often been cited as the first punk rock record.[79] By August, Smith and Television were gigging together at another downtown New York club, Max's Kansas City.[77]
Out in Forest Hills, Queens, several miles from lower Manhattan, the members of a newly formed band adopted a common surname. Drawing on sources ranging from the Stooges to The Beatles and The Beach Boys to Herman's Hermits and 1960s girl groups, the Ramones condensed rock 'n' roll to its primal level: "'1-2-3-4!' bass-player Dee Dee Ramone shouted at the start of every song, as if the group could barely master the rudiments of rhythm."[80] The band played its first gig at CBGB on August 16, 1974. Another new act, Blondie, also debuted at the club that month. By the end of the year, the Ramones had performed seventy-four shows, each about seventeen minutes long.[81] "When I first saw the Ramones", critic Mary Harron later remembered, "I couldn't believe people were doing this. The dumb brattiness."[82] The Dictators, with a similar "playing dumb" concept, were recording their debut album. The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! came out in March 1975, mixing absurdist originals such as "Master Race Rock" and loud, straight-faced covers of cheese pop like Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe".[83]
That spring, Smith and Television shared a two-month-long weekend residency at CBGB that brought major attention to the club.[84] The Television sets included Richard Hell's "Blank Generation", which became the scene's emblematic anthem.[85] Soon after, Hell left Television and founded a band featuring a more stripped-down sound, The Heartbreakers, with former New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. The pairing of Hell and Thunders, in one critical assessment, "inject[ed] a poetic intelligence into mindless self-destruction".[30] In August, Television—with Fred Smith, former Blondie bassist, replacing Hell—recorded a single, "Little Johnny Jewel", for the tiny Ork label. In the words of John Walker, the record was "a turning point for the whole New York scene" if not quite for the punk rock sound itself—Hell's departure had left the band "significantly reduced in fringe aggression".[76]
Other bands were becoming regulars at CBGB, such as Mink DeVille and Talking Heads, which moved down from Rhode Island. More closely associated with Max's Kansas City were Suicide and the band led by drag queen Wayne County, another Mercer Arts Center alumna. The first album to come out of this downtown scene was released in November 1975: Smith's debut, Horses, produced by John Cale for the major Arista label.[86] The inaugural issue of Punk appeared in December.[87] The new magazine tied together earlier artists such as Velvet Underground lead singer Lou Reed, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls with the editors' favorite band, The Dictators, and the array of new acts centered around CBGB and Max's.[88] That winter, Pere Ubu came in from Cleveland and played at both spots.[89]
Early in 1976, Hell left The Heartbreakers; he soon formed a new group that would become known as The Voidoids, "one of the most harshly uncompromising bands" on the scene.[90] That April, the Ramones' debut album was released by Sire Records; the first single was "Blitzkrieg Bop", opening with the rally cry "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" According to a later description, "Like all cultural watersheds, Ramones was embraced by a discerning few and slagged off as a bad joke by the uncomprehending majority."[91] At the instigation of Ramones lead singer Joey Ramone, the members of Cleveland's Frankenstein moved east to join the New York scene. Reconstituted as the Dead Boys, they played their first CBGB gig in late July.[92] In August, Ork put out an EP recorded by Hell with his new band that included the first released version of "Blank Generation".[93]
The term punk initially referred to the scene in general, more than the sound itself—the early New York punk bands represented a broad variety of influences. Among them, the Ramones, The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, and the Dead Boys were establishing a distinct musical style; even where they diverged most clearly, in lyrical approach—the Ramones' apparent guilelessness at one extreme, Hell's conscious craft at the other—there was an abrasive attitude in common. Their shared attributes of minimalism and speed, however, had not yet come to define punk rock.[94]
Australia
At the same time, a similar music-based subculture was beginning to take shape in various parts of Australia. A scene was developing around Radio Birdman and its main performance venue, the Oxford Tavern (later the Oxford Funhouse), located in Sydney's Darlinghurst suburb. In December 1975, the group won the RAM (Rock Australia Magazine)/Levi's Punk Band Thriller competition.[95] By 1976, The Saints were hiring Brisbane local halls to use as venues, or playing in "Club 76", their shared house in the inner suburb of Petrie Terrace. The band soon discovered that musicians were exploring similar paths in other parts of the world. Ed Kuepper, coleader of The Saints, later recalled:
One thing I remember having had a really depressing effect on me was the first Ramones album. When I heard it [in 1976], I mean it was a great record ... but I hated it because I knew we’d been doing this sort of stuff for years. There was even a chord progression on that album that we used ... and I thought, "Fuck. We’re going to be labeled as influenced by the Ramones", when nothing could have been further from the truth.[96]
On the other side of Australia, in Perth, germinal punk rock act the Cheap Nasties, featuring singer-guitarist Kim Salmon, formed in August.[97] In September, The Saints became the first punk rock band outside the U.S. to release a recording, the single "(I'm) Stranded". As with Patti Smith's debut, the band self-financed, packaged, and distributed the single.[98] "(I'm) Stranded" had limited impact at home, but the British music press recognized it as a groundbreaking record.[99] At the insistence of their superiors in the UK, EMI Australia signed The Saints. Meanwhile, Radio Birdman came out with a self-financed EP, Burn My Eye, in October.[100] Trouser Press critic Ian McCaleb later described the record as the "archetype for the musical explosion that was about to occur".[101]
United Kingdom
After a brief period unofficially managing the New York Dolls, Englishman Malcolm McLaren returned to London in May 1975, inspired by the new scene he had witnessed at CBGB. He opened Sex, a clothing store specializing in outrageous "anti-fashion".[102] Among those who frequented the shop were members of a band called The Swankers. In August, the group was seeking a new lead singer. Another Sex habitué, Johnny Rotten, auditioned for and won the job; McLaren became the band's manager. Adopting a new name, the group played its first gig as the Sex Pistols on November 5, 1975, at St. Martin's School of Art[103] and soon attracted a small but ardent following.[104] In February 1976, the band received its first significant press coverage; guitarist Steve Jones declared that the Pistols were not so much into music as they were "chaos".[105] The band often provoked its crowds into near-riots. Rotten announced to one audience, "Bet you don't hate us as much as we hate you!"[106] McLaren envisioned the Pistols as central players in a new youth movement, "hard and tough".[107] As described by critic Jon Savage, the band members "embodied an attitude into which McLaren fed a new set of references: late-sixties radical politics, sexual fetish material, pop history, ... youth sociology".[108]
Bernard Rhodes, a sometime associate of McLaren's and friend of the Pistols', was similarly trying to make stars of the band London SS. Early in 1976, the group broke up, spinning off two new bands: The Damned and The Clash, which was joined by Joe Strummer, The 101'ers former lead singer.[109] On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in what came to be regarded as one of the most influential rock shows ever. Among the approximately forty audience members were the three locals who had organized the gig—they soon began performing as the Buzzcocks. Others in the small crowd went on to form Joy Division, The Fall, and—in the 1980s—The Smiths.[110]
In July, the Ramones crossed the Atlantic for two London shows that helped spark the nascent UK punk scene, an impact that was later exaggerated by the band's members.[111] On July 4, they played with the Flamin' Groovies and The Stranglers before a crowd of 2,000 at the Roundhouse.[112] That same night, The Clash debuted, opening for the Sex Pistols in Sheffield. On July 5, members of both bands attended a Ramones club gig.[113] The following night, The Damned played their first show, as a Pistols opening act in London. In critic Kurt Loder's description, the Pistols purveyed a "calculated, arty nihilism, [while] the Clash were unabashed idealists, proponents of a radical left-wing social critique of a sort that reached back at least to ... Woody Guthrie in the 1940s".[114] The Damned built a reputation as "punk's party boys".[115] This London scene's first fanzine appeared a week later. Its title, Sniffin' Glue, derived from a Ramones song. Its subtitle affirmed the connection with what was happening in New York: "+ Other Rock 'n' Roll Habits for Punks!"[116]
Another Sex Pistols gig in Manchester on July 20, with the Buzzcocks debuting in support, gave further impetus to the scene there.[117] In August, the self-described "First European Punk Rock Festival" was held in Mont de Marsan in the southwest of France. Eddie and the Hot Rods, a London pub rock group, headlined, while the Sex Pistols were excluded for "going too far" and The Clash backed out in solidarity. The only band from the new punk movement to appear was The Damned.[118]
Over the next several months, many new punk rock bands formed, often directly inspired by the Pistols.[119] In London, women were at the center of the scene—among the initial wave of bands were the female-fronted Siouxsie & the Banshees and X-Ray Spex and the all-female The Slits. The Adverts had a female bassist. Other groups included Subway Sect, Eater, The Subversives, the aptly named London, and Chelsea, which soon spun off Generation X. Farther afield, Sham 69 began practicing in the southeastern town of Hersham. In Durham, there was Penetration, with lead singer Pauline Murray. On September 20–21, the 100 Club Punk Festival in London featured the four primary British groups (London's big three and the Buzzcocks), as well as Paris's female-fronted Stinky Toys, arguably the first punk rock band from a non-Anglophone country. Siouxsie & the Banshees and Subway Sect debuted on the festival's first night; that same evening, Eater debuted in Manchester.[120]
Some new bands, such as London's Alternative TV and Edinburgh's Rezillos, identified with the scene even as they pursued more experimental music. Others of a comparatively traditional rock 'n' roll bent were also swept up by the movement: The Vibrators, formed as a pub rock–style act in February 1976, soon adopted a punk look and sound.[121] A few even longer-active bands including Surrey neo-mods The Jam and pub rockers The Stranglers and Cock Sparrer also became associated with the punk rock scene. Alongside the musical roots shared with their American counterparts and the calculated confrontationalism of the early Who, journalist Clinton Heylin describes how the British punks also reflected the influence of the "glam bands who gave noise back to teenagers in the early Seventies—T.Rex, Slade and Roxy Music".[122] One of the groups openly acknowledging that influence were The Undertones, from Derry in Northern Ireland.[123] Another punk band formed to the south, Dublin's The Radiators From Space.
The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." poster—a ripped and safety-pinned Union Flag
In October, The Damned became the first UK punk rock band to release a single, the romance-themed "New Rose". The Sex Pistols followed the next month with "Anarchy in the U.K."—with its debut single the band succeeded in its goal of becoming a "national scandal".[126] Jamie Reid's "anarchy flag" poster and his other design work for the Pistols helped establish a distinctive punk visual aesthetic. On December 1, an incident took place that sealed punk rock's notorious reputation: On Thames Today, an early evening London TV show, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones was goaded into a verbal altercation by the host, Bill Grundy. Jones called Grundy a "dirty fucker" on live television, triggering a media controversy. Two days later, the Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and The Heartbreakers set out on the Anarchy Tour, a series of gigs throughout the UK. Many of the shows were cancelled by venue owners in response to the media outrage following the Grundy confrontation.
Other U.S. cities
In 1975, Suicide Commandos formed in Minneapolis—one of the first U.S. bands outside of New York to play in the Ramones-style harder-louder-faster mode that would define punk rock As the punk movement expanded rapidly in the United Kingdom in 1976, a few bands with similar tastes and attitude appeared around the United States. The first West Coast punk scenes emerged in San Francisco, with the bands Crime and The Nuns, and Seattle, where the Telepaths, Meyce, and The Tupperwares played a groundbreaking show on May 1. Rock critic Richard Meltzer cofounded VOM (short for "vomit") in Los Angeles. In Washington, D.C., raucous roots-rockers The Razz helped along a nascent punk scene featuring Overkill, the Slickee Boys, and The Look. Around the turn of the year, White Boy began giving notoriously crazed performances. In Boston, the scene at the Rathskeller—affectionately known as the Rat—was also turning toward punk, though the defining sound retained a distinct garage rock orientation. Among the city's first new acts to be identified with punk rock was DMZ. In Bloomington, Indiana, The Gizmos played in a jokey, raunchy, Dictators-inspired style later referred to as "frat punk".[135]
Like their garage rock predecessors, these local scenes were facilitated by enthusiastic impresarios who operated nightclubs or organized concerts in venues such as schools, garages, or warehouses, advertised via inexpensively printed flyers and fanzines. In some cases, punk's do it yourself ethic reflected an aversion to commercial success, as well as a desire to maintain creative and financial autonomy. As Joe Harvard, a participant in the Boston scene, describes, it was often a simple necessity—the absence of a local recording industry and well-distributed music magazines left little recourse but DIY.