Post #181225 by thejab on Mon, Aug 22, 2005 4:52 PM

Good points Vern (and great book recommendation), but one can name similar direct links between mid-60s garage/punk and 70s punk.

Lenny Kaye (of the Patti Smith Group) compiled the Nuggets compilation of 60s garage in 1972, and he wrote the liner notes, in which he labels some of the bands "punk rock".

Another example of a direct link was the great late Greg Shaw of Bomp magazine (which starting in the early 70s covered bands like the Troggs along with the New York Dolls), UA records (he produced their Legendary Masters series that included reissues of the Troggs and Pretty Things among others), and Sire records (who signed many punk bands thanks to Greg Shaw's influence).

Here's more on his late 70s activities as written by Anastasia Roderick for the Bomp web site:

His new enthusiasm was the garage music of the '60s. People told him he had coined the term "punk rock" back in Creem while writing about this music, predicting it would make a comeback someday. Something like this seemed to be happening in the early days of New York's punk scene, but when the spike-haired English punks took over the word, Greg decided the nomenclature was getting confusing, and began referring to the '60s stuff as "garage". Now that there was nothing else cool going on, he launched into promoting greater awareness of the glories of garage.

One of the projects that has passed through Sire during his tenure there had been Lenny Kaye's "Nuggets" album, which had been deleted on Elektra when Sire reissued it in 1976, just in time for it to became a huge influence on all the new punk bands. Lenny and Greg wanted to do a second volume, and work went ahead on it until it became clear that some of the best tracks could not be obtained, because the original labels were obscure and nobody knew where to find the masters. A couple years later, Greg took his notes for the project and put together the album he saw as the sequel "Nuggets" deserved. Because it wasn't "Nuggets", he called it "Pebbles". Where master tapes couldn't be found, he mastered from records, and hoped nobody would mind.

One can't name a single city like Detroit and say that's where it started, when every town had dozens of garage bands in 1965-1967 that varied from Beatles pop to Brydsy folk-rock to Who influenced feedback punk to psychedelic, and in may of those towns (Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Boston, etc.) the music slowly evolved into what became 70s punk.