“What do you do when your kid can only count to four? Buy him a drum kit and call him gifted!”*…
It may be that familiarity breeds contempt, and if that’s so, we should all be very glad of the wealth of excellent documentaries correcting the monolithic commercial story of punk, which goes something like this: The Sex Pistols and The Clash explode into the world in 1977 purveying anarchy and revolution and designer BDSM gear, and the status quo freaks out, then discovers many savvy marketing opportunities and here we are at our local punk boutique before the punk arena show at Corporation Stadium.
That’s a boring story, mostly because all the most interesting parts, and weirdest, most violent, gross-out, angry, experimental, queer, black, radical, feminist, etc. parts get left out, along with nearly all the best bands. Even if we date punk from the early seventies in New York with Patti Smith and the Ramones, we’re missing key progenitors from the 60s, from Detroit, Germany, Tacoma, Washington…
From the “liner notes” to a extraordinary Spotify playlist, “The Evolution of Punk in Chronological Order.” More background (on Open Culture), along with a link to download the Spotify app lest one need to, at: “The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016.”
[TotH to Brad DeGraf]
* Frank Edwin Wright III (Tré Cool, Green Day)
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As we make three chords work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that The KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival opened on Mt. Tam in Marin County, California, featuring Canned Heat, Dionne Warwick, Every Mother’s Son, P. F. Sloan, The Seeds, Blues Magoos, Country Joe and the Fish, Captain Beefheart, The Byrds (with Hugh Masekela on trumpet), Tim Hardin, The Grass Roots, The 5th Dimension, Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors (in their first major appearance, contemporaneous with the rise of their first hit, “Light My Fire”), among many others. At least 36,000 people attended the two-day concert and fair– the first of a series of San Francisco area cultural events known as “the Summer of Love.” Admission to the festival was $2.00 and all proceeds were donated to the nearby Hunters Point Child Care Center in San Francisco.
While the (much more completely documented) Monterey International Pop Festival is widely remembered as the seminal event of that epochal summer, the KFRC Festival took place one week before Monterey and is considered to have been America’s – if not the world’s – first rock festival.
