Gripe Of The Moment: Robert Plant Is Wrong About Punk Rock’s Origins

Here’s the thing, everyone who cares has an opinion on who, when, or where punk started. So, unless you agree with me, my telling you what band started punk music is about as pointless as me telling you that Megadeth is better than Metallica. But you know what, I’m going to tell you anyway.

But first…

I see this video title on YouTube, “Artists on Nirvana and Grunge Rock (Pt.3),” and I’m intrigued enough to click on it to listen to while I work. It’s a VH1 production and it’s pretty damn interesting, but the gripe I have is with what Led Zepplin’s Robert Plant says:

Punk came out, you know in England, that was the last time anything really important happened in England, or came from England, to affect anybody. You know what happened is that punk said, ‘We’re fed up with Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zepplin, the sorta skeleton of The Beatles, let’s have some music from the street.’ And what’s happening in America in 1991, ‘90, is that you finally got your own punk.

That is all complete bullshit. First of all, the bands that he lists were all alive and well when punk was unleashed in the ‘70s. Second, and this is my gripe, this is what really pisses me off, punk did not come out of England — it came out of New York City. More specifically, it came from the New York Dolls.

Yes, there’s a certain group who will say that The Who was the first sorta punk band. Fact is they were just the hardest rock band within the British Invasion. There’s another group of people who will say that the Sex Pistols were the first punk band, which is a little closer to the truth, but still not accurate.

Here’s the facts if you consider the Sex Pistols the first: the New York Dolls had a manager, Malcolm McLaren, and when he ditched the Dolls to go manage the Sex Pistols in England, he handed them some riffs that the Dolls had been working on. Those riffs ended up on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols even took a stab at the Dolls on that album with the song “New York.”

In the following calendar year, after the Dolls broke up, guitarist Johnny Thunders responded to “New York” on his solo album, So Alone, with the track “London Boys.”

Anyway, Plant pissed me off with his statement about punk coming out of England, when it so clearly started in NYC. So, Mr. Plant circa 1996, we had our own punk long before the Seattle grunge scene, which isn’t even punk, technically.

Rock Hard \m/