All right, this is earlier than expected but here's another TOTW, this time about, um, proto-punk. Again. But this is the last one, I promise! And there should be an actual discussion thread up by next week, too, instead of just another list. But anyway...

70s Proto-Punk:

There are a lot of people credited with the emergence of punk rock in the seventies: Danny Fields, Lester Bangs, hundreds of musicians and journalists who each claimed to be the only true founder of the movement. But there’s one person whose contributions to the field remain relatively unknown, someone who nevertheless stands in retrospect as one of the most important architects of the punk movement…
I speak, of course, of former US president Richard Nixon.
After all, Nixon was the one who drove the final nail through the coffin of sixties idealism and hope, who showed an entire generation that the ‘Establishment’ was too rotten to ever be fixed and that only a fool would even try. So it wasn’t a surprise to see an exponential increase in the numbers of surly, disaffected, borderline nihilistic youth across the nation… This new generation avoided any kind of movements and eyed all aspects of society with baleful mistrust. For all their well-publicised rebellion, the hippies of the sixties merely wanted to change the government: the ‘blank generation’ of the seventies only wanted to get away from it. So in the classic manner of pissed-off teens everywhere, they cultivated a wilfully abrasive stance towards everything and everyone, getting their rocks off not through harmony, folk-rock and social activism but through the more direct pleasures of heroin, Stooges records and being as deliberately obnoxious as possible. They started bands not because of any idealistic passion, but just because they were bored. But somehow, this motley collection of junkies, thugs, artists, transexuals, morons, poets, psychopaths and, well, punks... somehow they managed to produce records that defined an era, that ripped up the musical rulebook and started over, that caused a revolution that changed the face of rock & roll forever. Some of them are famous, some obscure, but all are worth listening to.

NOTE: As before, I’ll be using hash marks (###) to denote bands that are particularly good or interesting. So if you don’t want to go through them all, the hash-marked bands are the ones who were particularly good and who you should definitely try to check out. Anyway:

Neon Boys:
‘Proto-punk’ in the most literal sense, the Neon Boys were a short-lived band from the early seventies formed by Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine… You can catch tantalising glimpses of their later career paths on songs like ‘That’s All I Know Right Now’ and especially ‘Love Comes In Spurts’, which is radically different from the version on Richard Hell’s album Blank Generation and contains some great guitarwork from Verlaine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkV18jBDnHE . It’s also interesting to hear on that track how heavily influenced they were by the sixties garage bands…

###New York Dolls:###
The Dolls took the sound and style of the Rolling Stones, dragged it into a backstreet alley and vigorously kicked the living shit out of it, injecting a much-needed cocktail of danger and fun straight into it’s bloated arteries before dressing it up like a downtown drag queen and flinging it headfirst into the horrified faces of the music world. They may have divided the critics (Creem magazine labeled them both best and worst band of 1973) and alienated the glamophobic American audiences, but their template of energetic fifties rock shot through with urban grit proved a major influence on punk.And besides, they were awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2-iwHbnXXo , and also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2cQPln0Fr8.
The Old Grey Whistle Test performance is also interesting because presenter Whispering Bob Harris had beforehand sneered at the Dolls for being derivative ‘mock rock’, prompting thousands of little proto-punks at home to exclaim ‘fuck off!’ at their TV sets and sowing the first seeds for the massive generation gap to come...

Zolar X:
A deeply strange glam band from LA (or maybe Plutonia, depending on who you ask), Zolar X were chiefly famous for dressing like space aliens 24/7 and for speaking their own made-up language at all times… In any case, their rough space-glitter-rock music (described as 'Silver Sabbath') and Ygarr Ygarrist’s wonderfully amateurish vocals made them a huge influence on future punks like Steve Jones and Jello Biafra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpUTw4sfWMI#

###Destroy All Monsters:###
A great “anti-rock” art-noise band from Michigan, they started out playing stuff like vacuum cleaners, tape loops, modified children’s toys and broken electronics… They soon recruited Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton (who only joined because he wanted to fuck the singer) and MC5 bassist Micheal Davis, and soon had a sound that was more noticeably punk while still retaining the weird avant-garde type of fuckery that made them so great in the first place… Here’s a Myspace page a fan made for them, listen to ‘Life Is Very Difficult’ and ‘Boots’: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=121150194

Devo:
Formed in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings of 1970, Devo always had a misanthropic, cynical view of human nature that made them fit right in with other proto-punk bands. Musically, however, they were a whole other proposition: twitchy, vertebrae-snapping rhythms, strained, jerking vocals and spastic plastic keyboards made them one of the most original and interesting acts in years… Just check out their cover of ‘Satisfaction’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvcuaJy9OwI ) or this live version of ‘Mongoloid’ from 1978 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWmf7r_37eA ).

Lou Reed:
Four reasons he’s on here:
- Berlin, an incredibly dark and disturbing album with lyrics about junkies, prostitution, and domestic violence. Listen to ‘The Kids’ here, an ode to a ‘miserable rotten slut’ of a prostitute and her many clients: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpL9jCNI0Jc&feature=related . I can only assume ol' Lou left in the screaming children as backround noise because he felt the song wasn't depressing enough as it is.
- Metal Machine Music. ‘Nuff said.
- The song ‘Kill Your Sons’ off his overlooked Sally Can’t Dance album… Harsh, metallic guitars and great, raw lyrics about having his brain fried through electroshock that was meant by his parents to ‘cure’ his homosexual impulses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jKaPuWTwE
- He’s Lou fucking Reed.

Jayne/Wayne County:
A transvestite whose musical tastes inclined more to hard rock than the usual Ronettes/Supremes covers, Jayne was well known for her bizarre, deliberately offensive stage antics (which included shitting on a crucifix… at a gig played in a bible college). Her crowning achievement was probably ‘Fuck Off’, a wonderfully blunt song that contains lyrics like ‘If you don’t wanna fuck me baby, then baby, fuck off’ and the immortal line ‘You think that you’re/ Hot shit, I heard/ Yew ain’t nothin’ but a/ Cold turd’. Seriously, that alone makes it pretty much mandatory listening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0c4lgvpb4

The Modern Lovers:
To be honest, I really never got into the Modern Lovers… Maybe because I’ve always found Jonathan Richman to be a deeply irritating little fuck, and whenever I hear him drawl ‘Woadwunnah, woadwunnah’ like the smug asshole that he is I become consumed with Hulk-like rage and have to fight the urge to break stuff. But anyway, they were heavily influenced by the Velvets and actually did have some good songs, chiefly ‘She Cracked’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H4p3lmTLyE (here in alternate demo form)

Rocket From The Tombs:
Another Cleveland band, the shortlived Rocket From The Tombs has passed into proto-punk legend as one of the greatest bands that never was… A sort of weird super group containing future members of Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Luckily, they did manage to produce some demos before breaking up, and alongside the obligatory Stooges/Stones covers ae gems like ‘Ain’t It Fun’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVAVU96CXfE# ) and especially an early live version of ‘Final Solution’, in which one of the greatest songs ever somehow becomes even greater. I'll see if I can upload that one later...

###Electric Eels:###
Yet another Cleveland band, and this one is the best of them all… The legendary Electric Eels, quite possibly the single greatest punk rock band of all time. Smart without being pretentious, deliberately as crude, obnoxious, and confrontational as possible, mixing great garage-punk classics like ‘Jaguar Ride’ and ‘Anxiety’ with experimental noise and snarling free-jazz weirdness like ‘IQ 301-Man!” and ‘Bunnies’… In fact, fuck it, the best description of them has already been written in online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever:
“The Electric Eels were the most anti-social badass motherfuckers to ever avoid killing someone. They formed a band whose legacy has been well documented in this day and age, but who still don't get the credit they deserve as the complete epitome of anti-everything noise, true punk music because it dispelled with politics or messages and only concerned itself with dadaistic aggression. An article in CLE magazine compared three of the original Cleveland underground bands (the Electric Eels, Pere Ubu, and the Mirrors) to the Three Stooges, and said that the Eels were like Moe, the really violent one. Illogical, dangerous, but above all, completely genius.” (http://www.furious.com/perfect/electriceels.html )
You can find more information about the band on their hilariously nasty, vaguely pornographic website http://www.electricfuckingeels.com/ , and, you lucky bastards, it just so happens that you can download three of their songs for free there: http://www.electricfuckingeels.com/eels_files/eels.htm . So download the songs and then go out and buy ‘The Eyeball Of Hell’, because if you don’t I swear to god I will devote all my time and resources for the rest of my life to destroying you and everything you stand for. So there.

Suicide:
One of the single most original and influential bands ever, Suicide made some of the dirtiest, nastiest music of all time, pretty much invented electronica, synthpunk, and the whole No Wave scene, and took the prerequisite audience-confrontation thing to the next level by whipping eight-foot-long motorcycle chains across the stage randomly, making the nastiest noises they could, and generally scaring the shit out of whatever poor bastards were unlucky enough to attend their concerts. Soundwise, imagine a psychopathic cyborg Elvis from a postapocalyptic future world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WqOMPakGCg .

###Simply Saucer:###
Canadian psych-punk band that’ve been name checked by everyone from Julian Cope to Thurston Moore, Simply Saucer sound uncannily like the Stooges tackling early Pink Floyd… Mixing hard, driving punk with actual tunes to create in Cyborgs Revisited one of the most consistently excellent albums of the seventies. A good example is ‘Here Come The Cyborgs’… Just listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIuBtqjRSJQ&feature=related .

The Dictators:
Even more so than the Ramones, the Dictators can lay claim to the title of being the first real ‘punk’ band. Mixing brief, powerchord-laden songs with smartass humour and gleefully un-PC tendancies (the fact that this Jewish band had a song called ‘Master Race Rock’ says it all), the Dictators never met with any real critical or commercial success, but the influence they had on the New York punk scene was immeasurable. Check out this fantastic live version of ‘The Next Big Thing’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oM0jzUwEw&feature=related# ) and the classic ‘Faster And Louder’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuM8EqL7g98&feature=related# ) to see why.

Mirrors:
Yet another Cleveland band, because for some strange reason that city was second only to New York in the proto-punk stakes. Anyway, Mirrors weren’t as good as the Eels, but they did the whole noisy Velvets garage-punk thing very well with great tracks like ‘Hands In My Pockets’, so, yeah, check them out: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=278008735

Patti Smith:
The term ‘Godmother of Punk’ has never been so appropriate… Patti Smith melded pure, raw garage rock with stream-of-conscious poetry to create in Horses one of the single greatest albums of all time, and one which pretty much defines the more intellectual side of NY punk. I really don’t know how to describe it to anyone who hasn’t heard it yet, so I’ll just let the music do the talking and link to some early performances of ‘Gloria’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Le_oJAyAnQ# ) and ‘Free Money’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPVMYDrbrCo&feature=related ).

###Television:###
Almost more post-punk than proto-punk (proto-post-punk?), Television’s Marquee Moon album is one of those ones that are virtually impossible to describe… If you’ve heard it, then you know how incredibly fucking great it is without me having to tell you, and if you haven’t then there’s no way I can convince you of how awesome it is without actually forcing you to listen to it. So, listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL1lfnlxZkA&feature=related , and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6IAalgT4vU&feature=related . The single most important template for all good guitar music that was to follow, and had a profound influence on pretty much everyone from Sonic Youth and Wire to even U2.

###Richard Hell:###
The least well-known of the Holy Art-Punk Trilogy, Richard Hell is nonetheless one of the most interesting people of the entire scene… Sure, his look was copied wholesale by the Sex Pistols, but his sound was truly unique: A bizarre but thrilling mix of glam, punk, country, and the sort of deformed plastic funk that James Chance would later make his own. Lyrically, he was one of the best songwriters of the whole group, fusing nihilistic poetry with pitch-black humour and a taste for the absurd as songs like ‘Blank Generation’ (“The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first/ The doctor grabbed me by the throat and yelled, God’s consolation prize!”) and ‘Love Comes In Spurts’ (“’Cause love comes in spurts/ In dangerous flirts/ And it murders your heart/ They didn’t tell you that part”) prove. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1-fveh6oc8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKm3tCIyCQM .

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers:
Johnny Thunders was, by all accounts, a vicious lowlife junkie asshole… But boy, did he make some great music. After leaving the Dolls, he formed the Heartbreakers, and they created a slew of punk classics like ‘Born To Lose’, the Dee Dee Ramone-written ‘Chinese Rocks’, and of course the classic ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory’… You can see the last song in all it’s stupid, corny, improbably touching brilliance here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAhIs_DV0KA .

The Dead Boys:
The Dead Boys emerged from the wreckage of Rocket From The Tombs and went to New York, where they quickly took up residence at CBGBs. An interesting thing that set them apart from the other punk bands there was that while the others were acting like ignorant, violent morons to get a reaction, the Dead Boys really were ignorant, violent morons. So in a way, they acted as a kind of precursor to the dumber aspects of the UK punk movement… Still, they were vaguely loveable in their own retarded way and ‘Sonic Reducer’ is one of the best punk songs ever, so that’s all right. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8dC9M6OCkE.

###The Ramones:###
The band who came to define, more than any of their peers, the look and sound of what swiftly became known as ‘punk rock’. The genius of the Ramones was that they were so simple… They made stripped rock & roll down to it’s most basic elements, and in doing so achieved a power and a ferocity that was virtually unparalleled. It's also interesting to note that they incorporated aspects from all the proto-punks before them: The melody and energy of the original fifties rockers, the enthusiastic amateurism and raw pop instincts of the sixties garage bands, the gritty realism of the Velvets, the raw power of the Stooges. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLWGSRQrbQs&feature=related , and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWHAL_q1ne8 .

So that's it for proto-punk. If you're interested in finding out more about the bands and events that formed the 70s US punk scene, I'd recommend the Legs McNeil/Gillian McCain book 'Please Kill Me', which shows just how depraved and weird those early punks were (and the bit where Iggy Pop gets attacked by Elton John in a bear suit is too bizarre to miss). So, yeah.

fuck yeah television!!!

This topic looks great, I'm sure there's probably quite a few gems to be found here.

Rocket from the Tombs rules bup on that.

also I wish I could like the Modern Lovers because my old roommate was obsessed with him, but it wasn't that impressive to me!

hey man how did you GET LIKE THIS anyways. I think you're still in college from a post I read about "keeping me from exams" but you clearly know your history of this stuff unlike most people (and if you're younger than me, more than I did for sure since only recently have I known enough to keep up with shit like this).

like I know a small amount about anarchopunk but only because I read that book, uh, The Day the Country Died by Ian Glasper, but most of the bands I've known I've learned by pretty much hanging out with older music nerds. is that what you did or do you just read 33 1/3 books constantly or did you just decide FFFF CAN'T GET ENOUGH PROTOPUNK.

edit: also for ANYONE doing these TOTW things, please include ALBUM recommendations as well. it helps when looking for them.

hey man how did you GET LIKE THIS anyways. I think you're still in college from a post I read about "keeping me from exams" but you clearly know your history of this stuff unlike most people (and if you're younger than me, more than I did for sure since only recently have I known enough to keep up with shit like this).

like I know a small amount about anarchopunk but only because I read that book, uh, The Day the Country Died by Ian Glasper, but most of the bands I've known I've learned by pretty much hanging out with older music nerds. is that what you did or do you just read 33 1/3 books constantly or did you just decide FFFF CAN'T GET ENOUGH PROTOPUNK.

edit: also for ANYONE doing these TOTW things, please include ALBUM recommendations as well. it helps when looking for them.

Well, there was an unfortunate accident involving a radioactive Ramones album... No, I just read a lot of music magazines, and a lot of this shit just sinks in through osmosis or whatever. Also, I like looking at the way music evolves... Everyone always thinks that stuff like punk and grunge come out of nowhere, and it's fun to look at all the little bands and scenes that would eventually mutate into them.
I'll post some album recommendations later, anyway.

EDIT: Here they are:
New York Dolls - New York Dolls
Destroy All Monsters: 1974-1976 - Destroy All Monsters
Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo - Devo
The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From the Tombs - Rocket From The Tombs
The Eyeball Of Hell - Electric Eels
Cyborgs Revisited - Simply Saucer
Suicide - Suicide
Marquee Moon - Television
Blank Generation - Richard Hell
Ramones - Ramones

I know there's a lot there, but the albums by Television, Richard Hell and Simply Saucer are the ones to pick up if you're on a budget.

sweet I got most of that stuff already.

also what magazines do you read? basically I'd like to expand my music knowledge a little more but most magazines are shit!

Mostly Uncut magazine... It's mainly about americana and stuff like that but mentions quite a bit of weird and obscure music, and it's gotten me into a lot of new bands (and also into punk/postpunk in general, since up till then I'd been listening to Jethro Tull or whatever).
Also Mojo occasionally has some good stuff too. Not sure if either or those are availible in America, though...

I checked out Television and man did The Strokes steal their style OR WHAT!

Yeah, the Strokes pretty much lifted everything wholesale from other bands... It's pretty funny since their albums are pretty shit but they give off enough of a 'hip New York garage' feel that no-one really cares.

I dunno, I kinda consider The Ramones pop-punk. :\

Wonderful topic though. Devo is the tits.

Mostly Uncut magazine... It's mainly about americana and stuff like that but mentions quite a bit of weird and obscure music, and it's gotten me into a lot of new bands (and also into punk/postpunk in general, since up till then I'd been listening to Jethro Tull or whatever).
Also Mojo occasionally has some good stuff too. Not sure if either or those are availible in America, though...

yeah I was really starting to wonder myself how you know so much fucking stuff about specific genres of music...

like I consider myself to be more widely listened than most (especially considering all the world music and jazz that I listen to which is like a no go for most people my age period) and I am like fucking blown away by the sheer amount of knowledge you have about individual genres/styles. partly I think because I never get too into one thing before I discover something entirely new but yeah I dont think I have that indepth of an understanding of any one thing at all