Punk: Attitude Page #2

and we knew it was a little bit wicked...

and we're kind of breaking a taboo,

gosh they said a bad word...

but what the hell, you know, this is

rock 'n' roll and it's all in good fun...

but when they rushed

the album out...

the programmers heard

the motherf***er and...

they lost it, they lost it...

and it effectively broke the back of

the whole, the MC5's entire campaign.

It's hard to think of today...

when you almost have

to say motherf***er.

I mean, you're talking about people,

a rock 'n' roll band, you know.

We're on acid, you know.

We're smoking 50 joints a day...

you know, around, biting along

with the bands for hundreds of miles...

with James Brown playing on ten,

in the car, you know.

We had some friends

up in Ann Arbour...

that shared some principles

with the MC5...

sonically especially, and they called

their band the Stooges.

Gimme danger

Little stranger

And I'll feel you bleed

Gimme danger

Little stranger

And I'll heal your disease

I remember the first time

I saw Iggy Pop...

he was covered with oil

and glitter...

and everyone was kinda staring at him,

going what the hell is this, you know?

It was kinda strange,

different kinda attitude...

and he was kinda jumping around

like a spastic, you know.

Now if you will be my lover

I will shiver and sing

Primal beats, you know,

slabs of sound...

brutally,

psychologically honest.

Lyrics, you know...

in a metaphoric, I mean, "I wanna be

your dog", those kinds of things...

things that he grabbed

from the blues.

Now I wanna be your dog

Now I wanna be your dog

I think the transformative experience

that happened to Ig...

was, and I was at the show too,

he saw The Doors.

Seeing the Doors

changed them.

They were mesmerised...

what they saw in that performance

gave them a whole new lease on life.

I'm worth a million in prizes

Yeah, I'm through with sleeping

On the sidewalk

No more beating my brains

Beating my brains

With liquor and drugs

With liquor and drugs

You know these were bands that weren't

selling records, you know.

Iggy claimed as far as he knew he didn't

sell any records until he came to NY...

and met this other, this newer generation

of like The Ramones and stuff who were...

completely informed by The Stooges,

which was shocking for him.

It seemed like a lot of the people

who started the early...

both the punk and the new

wave bands in America...

were the only Stooges

fan in their town...

the only

Velvet Underground fan...

and then we all moved to bigger

towns and met each other...

and started bands.

Yeah, yeah, yeah

No, no, no

Baby, no, no, no

You know rock 'n' roll

had become this just be...

denimed kind

of drum solo...

kind of thing, and what we wanted to do

was to bring it down to 3 minutes and...

put that Little Richard

drag on top of it and...

that's what rock 'n' roll was to us.

You know...

we were just trying

to make rock 'n' roll.

Punk rock wasn't even a thought

at that time I don't think...

but the seeds for punk were certainly

being sown by The Dolls...

and by all the bands that had

come previous to that...

such as The Velvets and

The Stooges and the MC5.

And your a prima ballerina

On a spring afternoon

Change on into the wolfman

Howlin at the moon

In England there was this thing,

this controversy...

because this guy said...

what did he say, mock rock...

which, you know I mean,

I couldn't care less at the time...

but I could see how it...

kinda like galvanised kids who

thought, like, this is the real deal...

so what do you know,

you old fart.

Festival music from an American

group like the Stones...

like the Monkees were

to the Beatles.

A pale and amusing derivative.

These are the

New York Dolls.

Who so fly up in the sky

Faster than any boy

could ever describe

When I saw them and the way

they didn't care about nothing...

and that just really struck me straight

away, you know what I mean.

It was something completely different

to anything else that was going on then.

Every punk band that I knew

in London, and I know all of them...

they all had both of

the New York Dolls albums.

No one had told us that

we had all this impact.

We didn't know

anything about it.

Yeah, we would have moved

to England and stayed here.

When I say I'm a luv you'd

best believe I'm a luv, L.U. V.

I know that there's this thing, Malcolm

McClaren managed The Dolls but...

he hung around with this us for the last

2 weeks of our existence. We were like...

we were going

down in flames.

Malcolm thought like what's the

most shocking thing in America?

They're really afraid of

communism in America...

so let's make all these red clothes

and have a red party.

And then for shock value...

he put a big flag with a hammer

and sickle in the back.

They didn't sing about

being communists...

it was just there to irritate

people and it sure did.

It's so funny to

think now that...

you know, that communism

in the States was like...

was like child molesting,

you know.

So this was it, I mean, in America which

we were such a hard pill to swallow.

You know everyone

was booing them.

You know, "Faggots get off the stage",

and you know and a lot of that stuff.

We were number one man and

we were way ahead of the pack...

and then that's when we fell

and broke our leg...

and bam and everyone

else just whoosh.

The red and black leather show and

that look was kind of the final blow.

It's sort of interesting

as that sort of marks...

the point where glam rock died

and punk rock started.

As The Dolls sort of began to wind

down and then eventually broke up...

there were other

bands coming in...

that had been in kind of

in the circle of The Dolls...

and had been inspired by The Dolls

and they started forming bands.

In New York pre-75...

the punk rock scene was probably

just starting to bubble...

but nobody knew it was going

to be the punk rock scene...

we were just taking notes from the MC5

and taking notes from The Stooges...

and the cauldron was

starting to bubble.

You know everybody was so fed up with

what was going on with rock 'n' roll...

which was Deep Purple.

These big bloated concerts where they

did these organ solos for 20 minutes...

or these guitar

solos for 20 minutes.

The Bowery was still The Bowery.

It wasn't cleaned up yet.

It was still fun and

a little dangerous...

and edgy and it was, you know,

a different cultural social world back then.

Also everybody was sick

of the Vietnam war...

which started in 1965

and went to 1975...

so it was kinda like, you know,

we don't wanna be political any more...

you know, we want to kinda be about

don't step on my blue suede shoes...

which is probably the most political

thing you could say...

because that's about

personal freedom.

The Dictators are a kind

of an unknown band...

and they were

actually the first.

They came out in 74 with an album

called "Dictators Go Girl Crazy".

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes