Feature Track: Judy Is A Punk by Ramones ((April 23, 1976/Sire Records/New York, NY)
In the summer of 1975, John Holmstrom, Roderick "Eddie" McNeil, and Ged Dunn put together a Three Stooges-style comedy film on a 16mm camera. They enjoyed the project so much that they decided to continue working together, but they struggled to figure out what their next move should be. At the end of the summer while driving around one day Holmstrom suggested to Dunn and McNeil that the three of them should start a magazine. When pressed to explain his reasoning Holmstrom said "If we had a magazine people would think we're cool and stuff and want to hang out with us." Dunn and McNeil still didn't get it, but got on board when Holmstrom suggested that being proprietors of a magazine would also help them get free drinks. The trio planned for their magazine to be about everything they were into, which McNeil broke down as "TV reruns, drinking beer, getting laid, cheeseburgers, comics, b-movies, and this new sort of rock and roll that nobody but us seemed to be into. Like The Velvets and The Stooges and The New York Dolls ."
Originally, the trio intended to name their magazine Teenage News Gazette after an unreleased New York Dolls song . However, that summer was also when The Dictators released their debut album "Go Girl Crazy,” and the boys absolutely loved that album. “We’d just get drunk every night and lip sync to it,” McNeil admitted later. On the inside gate of this album was a picture of the band hanging out in a White Castle wearing leather jackets. The three boys with a magazine felt a real kinship with that photo. “The picture seemed to describe us perfectly,” Eddie said. “So I thought the magazine should be for other fuck-ups like us...Kids that had parties when their parents were away and destroyed the house. You know, kids that stole cars and had fun. So I said ‘Why don’t we call it ‘Punk’?”
The word Punk had just experienced a major rebirth as part of the 50’s Nostalgia wave that had popped up at the beginning of the decade. The Fonz from Happy Days was described as a punk, along with most perpetrators in TV police procedurals. Magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone had used the word ‘Punk’ to describe the perceived lack of quality and musicianship by the likes of The Stooges and MC5. However, that was just a descriptor, it wasn’t the name of the genre of underground music that was beginning to pop up across the nation. In 1975, it still didn’t really have a name. The New York Dolls called their sound ‘Glitter Rock’ but nobody was really in the same league as them. “Street Rock’ was a term that got thrown around but it never really caught on. But when Punk magazine started printing in 1976, the ideas about this music started to coalesce. The word Punk summed up everything these groups were about: being drunk, obnoxious, smart (but not pretentious), and darkly funny. Punk Magazine would become a breeding ground for new authors to write about new bands and discuss the ideology (or lack thereof) that came with his emerging sound. After a while, any band that was discussed in the pages of Punk Magazine became known as a Punk Band, and so it came to pass that their music became known as Punk Rock.
While John Holmstrom was the editor/cartoonist for the magazine, and Ged Dunn handled the business side, Eddie McNeil didn’t really have a skill he could contribute. Before he became a regular writer, Holmstrom declared Eddie “Resident Punk” and began using him as the basis for the magazine’s mascot. The character was called Legs after his long and spindly appendages, but when people saw that Legs was just an exaggerated version of Eddie, people started referring to him as Legs.
30 years later, he would team up with Gillian McCain to write a history of the genre, which I am shamelessly ripping off here.
Thanks, Legs.
(Meanwhile)
Across the pond in England, a 14 year old punk rocker Gideon Sams was studying Shakespeare in school, specifically Romeo & Juliet. His teacher gave the class an assignment to write about a doomed romance. Gideon went home and churned out a short story about an unlikely relationship between a young punk boy David "Adolf" Shpitz and a girl called Thelma, who is part of the Mod revival scene. It's a very silly little novella (only 62 pages) that feels just like the outpourings of angst and anger in the music of the time. It also reads very much like it was written by somebody who wasn't old enough to get into the places where these bands played.
Scrawled in red pen on an exercise book, Gideon's teacher gave him his grade, after which he threw it in the trash. However, his mother discovered the paper later on and saw the spark of something much bigger in it. If her son could finish the story and get it published, it could be the first step to legitimizing punk in the eyes of the Br*tish public. Gideon cleaned up and eventually finished The Punk, which received a limited printing of about 500 copies from Polytantric Press. After the original 500 copies by Polytantric Press, the book stayed alive through illegitimate printings, mostly spiral bound (or at least every copy I’ve encountered was), until Corgi Press acquired the text in the mid 90s. Gideon left England for America in 1978. After that time, he pretty much falls off the map until his death at 27.
There’s just one problem: It all seems kinda...perfect, doesn’t it? A lower class teenager turns up out of nowhere to write “The First Punk Novel” and then just disappears before joining the 27 club? Also I've read three different dates for his death, two different places for the place of his death (on opposite sides of the country), and two different descriptions of his head stone. I'm not convinced Gideon Sams existed, in spite of the photo on the inside cover and accounts from people who claim they knew him. Actually, even those who say they knew him acknowledge they didn't really know him that well, and that he was probably too young to have ever gotten into a show.
Recommended Reading: The Punk by Gideon Sams and whatever zines are local to you.
Next time: Where Were You When The Ramones Came To Town?