PUNK Magazine #2
After PUNK Magazine was so successful, we thought the next issue would be easy! Nope.
NOTE: I have to say this: The content in this newsletter (not the free one I also distribute) is for paid subscribers only, so please do not repost it and give away the contents, OK? This is meant to be exclusive content for my supporters: People who are willing to support me financially. If you want to forward it to a friend or two, to encourage them to get a paid subscription? That will be most appreciated. But…
Whenever someone posts this stuff on another platform, it reduces the chances I might get subscriptions from doing this thing. If you want to kill the profit motive and force me to end this newsletter? (Which is something I have to think about if I cannot attract more paid subscribers). Then go ahead and post this newsletter on other platforms. Before long I won’t be bothering to create this newsletter anymore. So, back to the story at hand: The early history of PUNK Magazine:
Everything went right for PUNK #1, but everything went wrong when I tried to put together the second issue. And my two “co-founders” made everything worse. At the time, we were all making crazy mistakes. Here’s a small look at the problems I was facing.
With 20/20 hindsight, maybe the choice to put Patti Smith on the cover wasn’t the best. Yeah, she was the most mainstream CBGB musician at the time, and I absolutely loved her D.I.Y. first single “Piss Factory.” Her debut album Horses was OK, but nowhere near as good. But maybe putting Patti on the cover was too easy. So was adding Television and the Talking Heads as our other two main features. These were the three bands everyone was telling us that we had to cover, and we didn’t have the time nor the resources to go after an alternative. I was hanging out at CBG. and checking out other bands back then, but never found another band that could represent punk rock in any way. But maybe another band would have been a better choice. The bottom line was that Publisher Ged Dunn Jr. insisted on putting Patti Smith on the cover of the second issue, so I went along with his decision.
This decision cemented PUNK Magazine as a CBGB fanzine instead of a mainstream rock magazine. Putting Aerosmith or even KISS on the cover would have been a more commercial move, and might have sold more copies, but would have alienated the hardcore CBGB fans.
On the other hand, our biggest problem was that there weren’t any other punk rock bands at CBGB besides the Ramones to write about back in early 1976. Johnny Thunders’ The Heartbreakers would have been a possibility when you hear their music from back then, but they were pro-heroin. Most of their lyrics promoted the use of opiates (which was a deal-breaker for me since I had lost friends to heroin use). Also, the New York Dolls at the time represented the failure of New York rock to become mainstream. The Dolls and the Velvet Underground unfairly represented New York City rock music as uncommercial and useless to the music industry back then, so putting Johnny Thunders, as cool as he was, on the cover of PUNK Magazine would have been stupid.
Looking back at the New York rock scene with 20/20 hindsight, I can’t think of who we might have been able to write about other than Patti Smith. Bruce Springsteen, as popular as he was at the time, wasn’t punk rock at all, and he was so popular that his record company would never would have given PUNK Magazine, a ratty little zine, the time of day. There was also a lot of backlash because he had appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week in November 1975. So that would have been a big mistake.
I wish we could have chosen another lesser-known CBGB band, but the options were:
Tuff Darts: They would have been a good choice, but when I saw them perform at CBGB back then I was very disappointed. There were five guys in the band who all looked like they belonged in a different band. The singer (Robert Gordon, very talented) looked like a 1950s rockabilly guy. The musicians behind him dressed like hippies, with long hair and bell-bottom jeans, or 1960s garage rock guys. And their music wasn’t cutting edge. I do wish we had covered them at one point, but the biggest problem I had back then was getting music writers to contribute to PUNK Magazine! (The Tuff Dart appeared in PUNK #6: The Legend of Nick Detroit).
The Planets: Binky Philips formed the band in 1972. They opened for the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center and the Ramones at CBGB. They had a decent following and a lot of people involved in the scene thought they had “a lot of commercial potential.” But that was a big part of the problem: They were following the mid-1970s formula, and were more prog-rock than punk. But there’s a happy ending to this: The Planets released their first album five years ago. So you can listen to their music and see why they weren’t a good fit for PUNK Magazine.
IMAGE:
The Miamis: These guys were probably the most popular band at CBGB back in the day: They were nice, professional people and they made music that everyone liked. Great rock ’n’ roll! Maybe we should have given them more coverage: What do you think? What would the world be like of we put The Miamis on the cover of PUNK instead of Patti Smith?
Milk ’N’ Cookies: Of all the CBGB bands that PUNK maybe should have covered? Yeah, Milk ’N’ Cookies were very close to what the Ramones were attempting to create: Heavy Metal Bubblegum! The band opened for the Ramones more than once and had great energy during their performances. But they were too bubblegum and pop and lacked the hard edge I was looking for. On a side note, “Linda Cummings Ramone,” Johnny’s widow, was dating the lead singer of Milk ’N’ Cookies, Justin Strauss. He once told me that the Ramones song “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was absolutely spot on about how the romance involving him, Joey and Johnny went down.
The Mumps: Lance Loud was famous from being involved in the first-ever “reality TV show” on PBS, An American Family. Yes, Lance’s band (which also featured Kristian Hoffman) played CBGB. But they were glam-rock or new wave and had nothing to do with the punk rock attitude. Sorry I can’t find a performance video from back in the day. (By the way, the two “female bodyguards” who appear in the video are Elizabeth and Ruth Seidman, who were two of the Marymount High School contingent who were a big part of the CBGB scene back in the day.) Covering The Mumps would probably have given us a lot of media attention but it would have been at the expense of our credibility.
The Fast: This was the band that CBGB/Max’s scenesters pressure us the most to cover in PUNK. They had a large following at Max’s Kansas City, which attracted glam rock fans much more than punk rockers. Punk was an alien concept in early 1976. Glam rock was dead, and I was trying to promote a new music movement that moved on from the polyester clothing, platform boots and glitter that dominated that music scene. This was a tough transition. By the way, this video was possibly filmed for the Punk Rock porn film that played on 42nd Street for a week before it disappeared due to lack of interest. You can find the film on DVD but it’s not currently available on-line.
The Fast were a really good band that was ahead of their time. But… They were not exactly punk. Still, Pam Brown wrote an article about The Fast for PUNK Magazine #8 (mostly to shut up their multitude of fans!).
We covered a lot of other CBGB/Max’s bands in the next few issues: The Marbles (like Milk ’N’ Cookies, they mined that bubblegum sound, and were a favorite of Liz Kurtzman, our Fashion Editor, so they appeared in PUNK #2), Blondie (Debbie Harry appeared in a photo with The Marbles in PUNK #2, I was eager to cover them but they were on a break in early 1976), The Heartbreakers (we tried to write about them in PUNK #3 but for whatever reason they were hostile towards us).
Maybe we should have taken a few weeks off after publishing PUNK #1 to figure out our next move, and decided on a quarterly publishing schedule instead of insanely trying to put out a monthly magazine. Maybe we should have put a movie star on the cover, or a TV star (like Fonzie).
But we did what we did.