Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and was a leading influence in rock music criticism. The music critic Jim DeRogatis called him "America's greatest rock critic".
New wave is a music genre that encompasses pop-oriented styles from the 1970s through the 1980s. It is considered a lighter and more melodic "broadening of punk culture". It was originally used as a catch-all for the various styles of music that emerged after punk rock. Later, following its usage as a marketing term to cover musical styles as disparate as synth-pop, alternative dance and post-punk, critical thought discredited "new wave" as a definable genre, regarding it as a "virtually meaningless" umbrella term. The main new wave movement coincided with late 1970s punk and continued into the early 1980s.
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene which emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Punk rock is a music genre that emerged in the mid-1970s. Rooted in 1950s rock and roll and 1960s garage rock, punk bands rejected the corporate nature of mainstream 1970s rock music. They typically produced short, fast-paced songs with hard-edged melodies and singing styles with stripped-down instrumentation. Lyricism in punk typically revolves around anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian themes. Punk embraces a DIY ethic; many bands self-produce recordings and distribute them through independent labels.
Blank Generation is the debut studio album by American punk rock band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. It was produced by Richard Gottehrer and released in September 1977 on Sire Records.
CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in the East Village in Manhattan, New York City. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters CBGB were for Country, Bluegrass, Blues, Kristal's original vision for the club. But CBGB soon emerged as a famed and iconic venue for punk rock and new wave bands, including the Ramones, Dead Boys, Television, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, Madonna and Talking Heads.
A punk zine is a zine related to the punk subculture and hardcore punk music genre. Often primitively or casually produced, they feature punk literature, such as social commentary, punk poetry, news, gossip, music reviews and articles about punk rock bands or regional punk scenes.
Creem is an American rock music magazine and entertainment company, founded in Detroit, whose initial print run lasted from 1969 to 1989. It was first published in March 1969 by Barry Kramer and founding editor Tony Reay. Influential critic Lester Bangs served as the magazine's editor from 1971 to 1976. It suspended production in 1989 but attained a short-lived renaissance in the early 1990s as a tabloid. In June 2022, Creem was relaunched as a digital archive, website, weekly newsletter, and quarterly print edition.
Thomas Erdelyi, known professionally as Tommy Ramone, was a Hungarian-American musician. He was the drummer for the influential punk rock band the Ramones from its debut in 1974 to 1978, later serving as its producer, and was the longest-surviving original member of the Ramones.
Roderick Edward "Legs" McNeil is an American music journalist. He is one of the three original founders of the seminal Punk magazine that gave the movement its name; as well as being a former editor at Spin and editor-in-chief of Nerve Magazine.
Flipside, known as Los Angeles Flipside Fanzine, was a punk zine published in Whittier and Pasadena, California, from 1977 to 2002. The magazine was associated with its own record label, Flipside Records, releasing vinyl records and compact discs beginning in 1978.
John Holmstrom is an American underground cartoonist and writer. He is best known for illustrating the covers of the Ramones albums Rocket to Russia and Road to Ruin, as well as his characters Bosko and Joe.
The history of the punk subculture involves the history of punk rock, the history of various punk ideologies, punk fashion, punk visual art, punk literature, dance, and punk film. Since emerging in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in the mid-1970s, the punk subculture has spread around the globe and evolved into a number of different forms. The history of punk plays an important part in the history of subcultures in the 20th century.
Post-punk is a broad genre of music that emerged in 1977 in the wake of punk rock. Post-punk musicians departed from punk's traditional elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a broader, more experimental approach that encompassed a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and non-rock influences. Inspired by punk's energy and do it yourself ethic but determined to break from rock cliches, artists experimented with styles like funk, electronic music, jazz, and dance music; the production techniques of dub and disco; and ideas from art and politics, including critical theory, modernist art, cinema and literature. These communities produced independent record labels, visual art, multimedia performances and fanzines.
Sabel Hay Shields, better known as Sable Starr, was an American groupie, often described as the "queen of the groupie scene" in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. She stated during an interview published in the June 1973 edition of Star magazine that she had met Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Elton John, and Marc Bolan.
Dave U. Hall is an American musician whose musical voice is articulated by the tones of his Electric Bass guitar. He was a member of the band Birdland with Lester Bangs and The Rattlers. He has also played with other bands including, but not limited too, Zymosis, The Makers, Luigi & the Wiseguys, Danny Russo Blues Band, Remod, Jeff Salen, Tiger Beats, Tina Peel, Alan Merrill author of the song "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", Joey Ramone, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. By the end of the punk era, Hall had a reputation for being a session and performance player for many bands.
CBGB is a 2013 American biographical drama film about the former New York music venue CBGB. It follows the story of Hilly Kristal's New York club from its concept as a venue for Country, Bluegrass and Blues (CBGB) to what it ultimately became: the birthplace of underground rock 'n' roll and punk. The film uses devices such as a comic book-style panels, as well as onscreen text to identify important figures in the punk movement.
Eric Mitchell is a French born writer, director and actor who moved to downtown New York City in the early 1970s. He has acted in many No Wave films such as Permanent Vacation (1980) by Jim Jarmusch, but is best known for his own films that are usually written and directed by him: Kidnapped, Red Italy, Underground U.S.A. and The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues, starring Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Mark Boone Junior and Rockets Redglare. Mitchell worked out of New York City's sordid East Village area in conjunction with Colab and other performance artists and noise musicians. There he created a series of scruffy, deeply personal, short Super 8mm and 16mm films in which he combined darkly sinister images to explore the manner in which the individual is constrained by society.
William Terry Ork was an American band manager and record producer for the new wave/punk music scene in New York City in the mid 1970s. Ork is associated with the success of the club CBGB as manager for punk band Television and musician Richard Hell. Ork arrived in New York City in the late 1960s and worked briefly for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. While working as the manager of a film bookstore called Cinemabilia, Ork met Billy Ficca, Tom Verlaine and Hell of the Neon Boys and introduced them to Richard Lloyd. Ork began managing the new band when they reformed as Television. In 1975, he founded Ork Records, which released Television's Little Johnny Jewel (1975), Richard Hell's Blank Generation, The Marbles' Red Light (1979), Mick Farren's Lost Johnny, and the double A-side single Girl and Everytime I Close My Eyes by Prix, among other recordings. Farren said, "Terry Ork was an idealist, as true to the punk ethic as you could be, which means that when it all started getting slick, and the bands were getting deals, Terry was left behind." He died in San Diego on October 20, 2004.
Roberta Bayley is a photographer, best known for her photographs of the New York punk scene of the 70s.
