You Say You Want a Revolution? Quiz

Answer: The Stooges

The Stooges were a subversive and, mostly, confrontational rock act. Sure, there had been similar bands prior to them but none of them managed to take their performance "over the top" in the manner that the Stooges did. Led by the lava licks of Ron Asheton's guitar and fronted by Iggy Pop's caged animal personality the band's performances were raw to the point of being primal. Their stage acts generated so much energy that their self-titled debut album was looked forward to with such anticipation. Produced by the classically trained J.J. Cale, the album, rather than marking the band's territory, fell flat.

Enter Don Gallucci, former keyboard player for the Kingsmen (of "Louie, Louie" (1963) fame), and a new approach. They stripped the studio as much as possible to get the room to resemble the band's concert set-up and ended up producing a sound that was a quantum leap ahead of the first album. It came with the punch of a bulldozer, a sense of immediacy and bursting with energy. There was also a new found confidence in Iggy Pop's delivery and a much stronger set of songs to work with, typified by the anarchy that bleeds from the album's closing track "L.A. Blues". This album showcases the Stooges as a band reaching their peak.

Some would argue that the band's next album "Raw Power" (1973) is a better album (I won't argue with that) and that it was more influential (I could argue that). However, it was with "Funhouse" that the Stooges discovered their mojo and laid the foundations on which their success would build.

Answer: New York Dolls

The New York Dolls were the band that the major labels shied away from. In 1971 they (the labels) struggled to come to grips with the band's vulgarity, their shambolic live shows and those androgynous wardrobes of theirs. It was Mercury Records that took the punt on the band and they hailed them, after their 1973 self-titled debut, as the hardest rocking band since the Rolling Stones. Certainly, they held the swagger of the Stones but, into the cocktail, they drew upon the glam stylings of David Bowie and the "in your face" attitude of Iggy Pop and his Stooges. Their album, which dealt with alienation and heartbreak and produced gritty little gems such as "Personality Crisis" and "Looking for a Kiss", paved the way for acts such as the Ramones, KISS, the Replacements and Guns 'n' Roses.

The band's second album "Too Much too Soon" was released a year later but by now tensions were rife within the band. Yes there were artistic differences but the main culprit was the habitual drug use by the band's vocalist and guitarist Johnny Thunders, their drummer Jerry Nolan and bass player Arthur Kane.

Answer: Patti Smith

Patti Smith wears so many punk rock labels; "The Godmother of Punk", "The Queen of New York Punk", "The Poetess of Punk"... that it's sometimes difficult to see the avant-garde visionary hiding behind the shambolic hairstyle and piercing eyes. Her debut album "Horses" has been hailed as the stone that laid the foundation for the New York punk scene but there are a number of elements within this recording that are so un-punk. These include the jazz influenced "Birdland" and the rambling take on Van Morrison's "Gloria", and the short sharp songs... well they're missing from here. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. fame cited this album as one of his major influences indicating that it was a "very real recording", "it was visceral" and "very no-bull(expletive)".

The band's follow-up album "Radio Ethiopia" (1976) was far less accessible for audiences. Smith would suffer a fall in 1977 that saw her break several vertebrae in her neck. The enforced period of recuperation saw her re-assess her future and this is reflected by a subtle change in direction in the band's next two albums; "Easter" (1978) and "Wave" (1979). The former would become her most commercially successful album and would include the hit "Because the Night".

Answer: Ramones

It would have been quite easy to have installed any one of the Ramones' first four albums into this list because each of them is a strong representative of the punk rock DNA. However, the choice of their debut album is rather appropriate because, in the eyes of many critics, this is the album that truly launched the punk rock movement.

"The Ramones" was made on a shoe-string budget of $6,400 and was completed in a mere four days. Its 29 minutes of playing time produced a blur of 14 songs filled with single-minded fury and unadulterated adrenaline. Using the motto "Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance", the album bashed out a series of 1950s style rock and roll ditties that appeared to be laced with steroids and speed.

Their sound, then, did not sound revolutionary, it was written off as being rather ordinary. But here's the thing... no one else was doing this. The world, at the time, was being served up spoonful after spoonful of Moody Blues' style mysticism, chasms of Cat Steven's like introspection, drawn out solos by Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and a disco landscape that would soon be encouraging everyone to "Do the Hustle" and put on their "Boogie Shoes". The Ramones were the antithesis of all this... and so started the revolution.

Answer: Television

Television arose from a band called the Neon Boys, which was a group that Tom Miller formed with his high school buddy Richard Meyer. The pair shared a love for poetry and linked their stage names with poets that influenced them. Miller admired Paul Verlaine's work and became Tom Verlaine while Meyer was moved by Arthur Rimbaud's 1873 work "A Season in Hell" and changed his name to Richard Hell. The pair would fall out and go their separate ways. Verlaine continued as Television while Hell would form the Heartbreakers and then the Voidoids.

With its mixture of street-wise poetry and relentless energy, "Marquee Moon" is seen as a landmark recording in the hallways of punk rock and a key element into the progression toward new wave. However, some would argue that with its strong free jazz and psychedelic influences it should not be viewed as punk at all. The argument against that is that its impact was punk in nature. The best example of that argument was delivered by Butch Vig, the legendary producer of Nirvana's groundbreaking 1991 album "Nevermind", who is quoted in an interview with Classic Rock magazine in 2015 "It's as if you stuck your finger in a wall socket and you got a jolt from this jarring, fractured, punky guitar playing. It's just so unusual and interesting sounding".

The band would release the much softer "Adventure" LP in 1978, however, by this time their artistic differences were starting to surface and when vocalist Richard Lloyd's drug abuse came to a head the band soon dissolved.

Answer: The Damned

The Stooges were an early influence on The Damned and they pay homage to them with a blistering cover of their "I Feel Alright" track (from The Stooges' "Funhouse" - 1970 album), using it to close out their debut album. However, where The Stooges lacked that early precision, The Damned were the exact opposite and produced an album that is as sharp as any surgeon's knife. As if to emphasize this point, their opening track is the bombastic "Neat, Neat, Neat".

Whilst "Damned, Damned, Damned" has all the hallmarks of a classic punk album and described by one critic as both a "powerhouse" and a "punch in the guts", the band failed to consolidate their reputation. Their "take-no-prisoners" approach and their on-stage antics endeared them to their audience. They left the bile spitting to the Sex Pistols and the political posturing to the Clash and focused on their own sound. Their musicianship was hailed by critics and Rat Scabies (as a drummer) was already being compared to the legendary Keith Moon.

So, what went wrong? Part of the answer may lie with their debut single, "New Rose", which is seen as the first UK punk rock single. Built in a furnace of rock and roll fire, this song is held out as a punk rock classic but it also set the bar, for the band, way too high and, as good as their subsequent releases were, they could never match the standard of that track.

Answer: The Saints

We can thank our lucky stars that The Saints were visionaries. We were also blessed that they were fiercely independent and determined. For, without these qualities, they would never have gotten off the ground. Forming in mid-1973, and playing a brazen brand of garage rock, they were not well liked in their native Brisbane. In the words of their guitarist-songwriter, Ed Kuepper, "the response was negative... if you don't like the band, beat the (expletive) out of the singer." Virtually outcasts, in 1976, they raised their own funds, recorded their first single, "(I'm) Stranded", a fierce song about (appropriately) alienation that has become a punk standard, on their own label and released it independently. The English went crazy for it and when the EMI executives in London ordered their Sydney counterparts to sign up the band they were greeted with the incredulous response "Who?"

Their debut album was released the following year. It was a fuzzed disc with a raw energy that delivered songs at breakneck speeds. It achieved, what was then a rare milestone for an Australian recording, international acclaim and is rated as one of the high points of the early punk rock movement. It also fired up their hometown of Brisbane which quickly became a mecca for punk in Australia. As a measure of their influence, in an on-line blog entitled "Tales From the Pig City" (September, 2007), Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens wrote "punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia for two reasons: we had Joh-Bjelke Petersen (the State's Premier), 'the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservative that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against', and we had the Saints, the 'musical revolutionaries in the city's evil heart' that gave a city that usually chased music history its own place in it. Brisbane has a way of honouring its favoured sons and daughters in rock and roll; they named a bridge after the Go-Betweens and a street after the Bee Gees (Bee Gees Way on the Redcliffe Peninsula), a similar recognition may also be due the Saints.

Answer: The Clash

It was the 3rd of April, 1976 that Joe Strummer and his band, the 101ers, were preparing for their gig at the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington when he stopped to listen to their support act. The band was the Sex Pistols and it was there that Strummer declared "the future was right in front of me". Some months later he bumped into Mick Jones on a London street. Jones said to him words to the effect of "your band is not good, but you are. We'd like you to join us". So began one of the foremost song writing partnerships in the history of rock and roll.

Jump forward several months and Joe Strummer and his new band, The Clash, have launched their debut, self-titled album. Full of relentless rhythms and primitive rockers the album seemed rushed. One reviewer proclaimed it "sounded like a riot being born". There was a disparity between the singers, Strummer barking his lyrics whilst Jones provided a touch of sensitivity. Strummer chopping at his guitar whilst Jones was the more melodic... but it gelled. Where the Sex Pistols were sneering and nihilistic, The Clash were streetwise and articulate, they managed to capture the mood of their generation perfectly and bring punk rock into the mainstream.

Answer: The Stranglers

Outriders is probably the best term that I could use to describe the Stranglers and their link to punk rock. They were aligned to the punk rock movement because their sound was forged in the unforgiving cauldron that was the pub-rock scene of the mid-1970s. Their gigs were littered with punch-ups and walkouts and their lines were strewn with lyrical anger and confrontation. That's as punk as you can get without needing to tear your jeans and sticking safety pins in your nose.

However, their backgrounds were so non-punk they defied their entrance into this arena. Drummer Jet Black was knocking on the door of forty when the band was recording their debut album and, prior to that, he'd made a living manufacturing ice-cream. Jean-Jacques Burnel, the band's bass player, was a classically trained musician, lead singer Hugh Cornwall had previously enjoyed life as a bio-chemist and keyboardist Dave Greenfield came from a prog-rock background. Their sound was intellectual with pounds of arrogance, brashness and boorishness thrown in. They could produce scorching punk tracks, sophisticated ballads, noise, jazz, prog-rock and some beautifully crafted pop songs.

Despite this swirling ragout and their "take no prisoners" approach their craft lifted them above this allure and provided a bridge from the violence that was inherent in the Sex Pistols' sound to the new wave that was beginning to generate within this ocean of protest. Hugh Cornwall screeching about smacking his girlfriend's face and installing that as a line in the opening track ("Sometimes") to their debut album ("Rattus Norvegicus") is hardly going to win you friends in the mainstream or influence punters in a positive manner. Yet, despite this and the misogynistic lyrics of "London Lady" and "Hanging Around" the album, like the band, managed to rise, producing classic singles such as "Peaches" and "(Get a) Grip (on Yourself)". A line in the closing out track on the album is probably a solid reflection of the band; "We'll be called the survivors. Do you know why? (No!) Because we're gonna survive".

Answer: Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Oh, what could have been for Richard Hell. He arrived in New York City (from Kentucky) in 1966 with the view of being a poet. Highly intelligent, articulate and very good looking. He was many things; a poet and a nihilist, a perfectionist and a visionary, he seemed to have it all at his fingertips and, it seemed that all he had to do was to reach out and grab it. Before he unleashed his band, the Voidoids, upon the planet he'd formed the band Television with Tom Verlaine but, whilst the pair shared a love for poetry, they couldn't agree on their musical direction. Hell left without recording with the band. He then formed the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunder from the New York Dolls but left before recording with them. To set up the Voidoids he recruited the Velvet Underground influenced guitarist Robert Quine. It was a perfect match as Quine's jaggedly aggressive guitar sound sat beautifully with Hell's anti-love songs, in particular "Love Comes in Spurts" and "Betrayal Takes Two".

Their sound was a long way distant from that of Television's but it would provide a bridge between the garage band sound of the early proto-punks and the dawn of new wave artists that were lining up at the end of the 1970s. Hell had a strong poetic voice and sense of musical intelligence that should have seen ranked in the same echelons as Patti Smith but, after the release of "Blank Generation" he virtually disappeared from the music scene. He released a second album with the Voidoids a year later and then retired to being a novelist and revisiting his poetry. There were some minor collaborations again in the 1990s but nothing of serious note.