Get off your arse...!

Ah, yes...I remember it well. And just because my memories may differ from yours, doesn't make either your or my recollection any less valid. You know, kinda like this is my truth, tell me yours.

Bing Crosby, who begat Frank Sinatra, who in turn helped beget Elvis Presley, who begat virtually everything else, including the great, great Public Enemy, perhaps the greatest American punk band of all time (cue ignorant outrage from folks whose heroes do appear on stamps…!) said of Louis Armstrong that he was the greatest pop (as in popular music) vocalist and that without his revolutionary vernacular style of singing there’d have been no Bing Crosby, Sinatra, etc. In other words, without the immortal Satchmo, we’d all still be freaking out to Maria Lanza…or not.

I’ve recently had some, ahem, correspondence on here with a few American music Stackers on the general theme of ‘Punk’ and, more especially, its provenance. And, it’s fair to say, there’s a wide disparity and range of views, with everyone from the MC5 to Iggy in Detroit to Johnny and the boys in London cited as the true source of this most overused and vexatious of labels. And that’s before we even walk the mean streets of Lower Manhattan and find ourselves in the home of country, bluegrass, and the blues on the Bowery where four bothers from four mothers in Queens first 1-2-3-4-ed their way into the world and every art school dropout formed their own version of ‘alternative’.

New York, London, Paris, Munich…everybody talkin’ about pop music…well, OK, definitely not Paris, too gayee Paree, and Munich, too Bavarian and already too blitzkrieged out to bop anymore. So, New York and London, it is, then. But, I hear those who know about these things, what about those Queenslanders who made perhaps one of the defining anthems of the nascent era we call ‘Punk’. Now we really are stranded! And, given ‘Punk’ was, if nothing else, a manifesto for burning Babylon down to the ground, surely we must give a tanned wave to the American Dream/Nightmare that is Los Angeles, which is, in all honesty, a real weak point in both my experience and general knowledge of what that scene entailed, but I think I can say there are plenty of others here who can more than fill me in on that score.

So, it’s complicated and, let’s be honest, for those of us who were there back in the day, our memories of it are compromised by both subjectivity and, erm, age. A little like this, perhaps?

So, you see? It ain’t easy. And beyond going back to the very roots of our popular music in the Western canon, in which case we have to go back to pre-Middle Passage times and the cradle of humanity in Kenya’s Rift Valley. But we’re not doing that today, because I’m neither informed enough about that shared ancient history of ours, nor do I have the time to address it with sufficient respect.

So, I’m just going to say that Louis Armstrong is the root source of ‘Punk’. For without him, Johnny would never have had ‘I’m Eighteen’ to mime to (neither would Alice Cooper have had, for that matter, the source material to record that great song!), and safety-pinned Richard Hell would never have arrived at that point of sartorial genius that so confuses those of us in the futile and faintly ridiculous game of who came first…to which the answer is Ol’ Satchmo.

So, until the summer of 2027, when I celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the, erm, Silver Jubilee when “punk’ not only saved us all, but also helped save the so-called non-human being who helped make us all morons, I’ll leave this peace offering to our American cousins who love their ‘Punk’ just as much as we love ours…

Yeah…alright…I can’t leave it like that. I’m magnanimous; not stupid! This is how it begins and ends.