Those who came before - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Many, many moons ago, I read a book called Please Kill Me. Written by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, it told the story of the early days of punk music in the United States - mostly New York City. I repressed my anger about its title - damn, now what am I going to call my autobiography? - and resigned myself to the fact that it was an amazing book about a fascinating time.

 

Many books about music are a real gateway into music you never knew you wanted to listen to. Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City is a good example of this. When I read it, in the days of CDs, I went broke buying this Mötley Crüe album or finding that Van Halen song. So, back to Please Kill Me, I had just begun listening to the Ramones and I wanted to learn more about the early punk rock scene in New York City. I was going to Manhattan for the first time and I wanted to know more about that time in the city. (I did, thankfully, make the pilgrimage to CBGB on my last day there - the “Save CBGB” campaign followed and it would close permanently in 2006.)

 

I began reading the book and I couldn’t have been more excited to learn about the Ramones. And then... it didn’t happen. Not only that, but I was reading about bands I’d never even heard of, except for The Velvet Underground. 

 

The Velvet Underground really set the scene for the book. So goes a quote from the great Brian Eno that, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” So, perhaps it was fitting that the book began there. 

 

Recently, I was listening to a podcast about music from the 1990s and a guest spoke about his introduction to music that was considered cool in that decade, specifically Sonic Youth. He went to his local Blockbuster, rolled up to the “Special Interest” section, which he identified as being for “everything else”, like documentaries, concert films, etc. Boy did that bring me back to my Rogers Video days. 

 

Anyway, he rented a documentary about the “punk” music of the day with a promise of seeing more about Nirvana - the biggest band in the world at the time - but was first served a healthy dose of Sonic Youth, a band that inspired the very scene in which Nirvana was thriving and many of its musicians as well. 

 

That reminded me of Please Kill Me. On the hunt for Ramones lore, I was reading about the MC5, Iggy Pop (alright, I had heard of Iggy), Richard Hell, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television and a bit of Talking Heads. Then, and only then, would we arrive at the Ramones and their stories. 

 

And, much to my surprise and enjoyment, I really loved learning about the people who inspired the scene and paved the way for the Ramones, who would be among the most successful and influential bands to emerge from that scene. (The book, which is an oral history, told by those who were there, opines that The Clash, the famed British punk band, basically lifted the Ramones’ style and musical tendencies. While many will lift The Clash up as the superior band, I admit to subscribing to the book’s theory after listening for myself to the bands’ debut albums - 1976 for the Ramones and 1977 for The Clash. Another fun fact about the Ramones is that they always tried to finish their set faster than the set from the night before. So, if you went to a Ramones show and they played something like 18 songs in 32 minutes, they would have been pretty pleased with themselves about that.)

 

Long story short, I suppose, to bastardize a Winston Churchill quote, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to suck.