Ah, the history of punk, and specifically, of the word "punk," is always interesting. I need to get me a copy of Let it Blurt (Lester's biography), but in the meantime I'll just paste this here. You can read more at www.fastnbulbous.com/punk.htm
The word "punk" first made an appearance in music journalism in a 1970 essay, "The Punk Muse: The True Story of Protopathic Spiff Including the Lowdown on the Trouble-Making Five-Percent of America's Youth" by Nick Tosches in Fusion. He described a music that was a "visionary expiation, a cry into the abyss of one's own mordant bullshit," its "poetry is puked, not plotted." That same year, Lester Bangs wrote a novella titled Drug Punk, influenced by William Burroughs' book, Junky, in which there is a line, "Fucking punks think it's a joke. They won't think it's so funny when they're doing five twenty-nine on the island." Dave Marsh used the phrase "punk rock" in his Looney Tunes column in the May 1971 issue of Creem, the same issue that introduced the term "heavy metal" as a genre name. Marsh wrote, "Culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better construted as a compliment, especially given the alternative to such punkist behavior, which I figured was acting like a dignified asshole." Tosches, Bangs, Marsh, Richard Meltzer, Greg Shaw and Lenny Kaye used the term to define a canon of proto-punk bands, including the Velvets, Stooges, MC5, the Modern Lovers and the New York Dolls (DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 118-119).
TeenFink said:
dude i got my shit together. that era was first referred to as "punk" in 1972 (Lenny Kaye's liner notes in nuggets), which was four years before '76. i just don't think it's right to call '76-'80 "the first punk era," that's all. by doing so, you're displaying ignorance of real rock'n'roll in general and it's misleading to some who may come here and be totally unaware of '60s punk.
ratoonie said:
it wasnt cald Punk .........back then!!! get your shit together!!!!!
TeenFink said:the FIRST punk era was from '65-'67, not '76-'80.


