‘When we would rehearse, Dave was just a wildcard,’ remembers Christy. ‘He was the funniest guy you’d ever meet. He had so much energy and drive. But I was always that A-type personality, I wanted to lead the show and I’d be saying, “Okay, this is what we’re doing next” – but he’d be going a mile a minute, wanting to do this and that. He was the lead guitar player and I was rhythm, but he’d be jumping on the drums any chance he could get, like in between songs. He’d just start whaling on those frigging drums, and it was annoying as hell, because I wanted to practise. I’d be saying, “Cut the shit, dude, we’ve gotta practise and you’re not a fucking drummer.” If he’d listened to me he’d never have been a drummer. If he’d listened to me, he might not have got anywhere …’
But the journey had already begun.
This is a call
The whole night was like a scene from Lord of the Rings where there’s twelve people that have to fight their way through an army of orcs, and there’s just no way they can possibly win – that’s how it felt to be a punk rocker in the middle of five million rednecks in Washington DC on the 4th of July. I had just discovered punk rock, and it was so unbelievably moving. It was like our own personal Altamont, our Woodstock. And that’s when I said, ‘Fuck the world, I’m doing this …’
Dave Grohl
It was 3 July 1983, Independence Day weekend, and America was in the mood to party. The sun was shining in Washington DC and Irene Cara’s hit single Flashdance … What a Feeling, sitting pretty at the summit of the Billboard Hot 100 for a fifth consecutive week, blasted from every shopfront, souvenir stall and boombox in the nation’s capital. The stately tree-lined avenues around the National Mall were a bustle of colour, movement and noise, as tens of thousands of tourists and DC metropolitan area residents jockeyed for the best vantage points for that evening’s celebratory fireworks display.
Chatting and laughing, Dave Grohl and Larry Hinkle weaved their way through the crowds, heading towards the Lincoln Memorial, in whose shadow a free concert was being held. Timed to coincide with DC’s annual pro-marijuana legalisation Smoke-In event, the Rock Against Reagan concert had been organised by the Youth International Party, a leftist counter-cultural collective, and boasted a line-up featuring some of the finest American hardcore bands of the day, among them Reagan Youth, Crucifucks, Toxic Reasons, M.D.C. (aka Millions of Dead Cops) and headliners Dead Kennedys.
As they neared the concert site, Grohl and Hinkle sensed a change in the atmosphere. There were DC police everywhere, some patting down concertgoers against squad cars, others patrolling the site on horseback, dozens more sitting in buses in full riot gear. In a field adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial 800 punk rockers watched Houston’s D.R.I. hammer through their hate songs in E minor, with vocalist Kurt Brecht railing against American consumerism, the military-industrial complex and the evil deathmonger in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, over guitarist Spike Cassidy’s filthy, gnarled, slamdance-on-a-dime riffs. When the band finally stopped to draw breath, an impressed Dave Grohl immediately walked over to their tour van and bought a copy of their self-titled 22-song seven-inch EP from the sweating, panting Brecht.
As the sky darkened, so too did the mood on the Mall. The punks grew mouthier, the tourists more bellicose. There were catcalls, confrontations and scuffles, raised voices and raised fists. Drunken college students pushed beer kegs around in shopping trolleys and stoned, naked hippies frolicked in the Reflecting Pool. The police got edgier and the bands played on, harder, faster, louder. As the sun dipped below the skyline, the Dead Kennedys walked on stage to face pandemonium.
‘I get chills just thinking about it,’ says Grohl. ‘There were police helicopters going around with their lights on the audience and cops on horseback just fucking billy-clubbing punk rockers. Dead Kennedys are playing “Holiday in Cambodia” and Jello Biafra is pointing at the Washington Monument with its two blinking red lights and he’s saying, “With the great Klansman in the sky with his two blinking red eyes …”, it was unbelievable, it was like Apocalypse Now. The whole night was like a scene from Lord of the Rings where there’s twelve people that have to fight their way through an army of orcs, and there’s just no way they can possibly win – that’s how it felt to be a punk rocker in the middle of five million rednecks in Washington DC on the 4th of July. I had just discovered punk rock, and it was so unbelievably moving. It was like our own personal Altamont, our Woodstock. And that’s when I said, “Fuck the world, I’m doing this …”’
Music historians will argue forever about the origins of punk rock. Some lay the blame at the feet of Ann Arbor, Michigan’s The Stooges, blank-eyed degenerates who channelled desperation and isolation and boredom and violence and sex and confusion into brutish, nihilistic numbskull anthems. On ‘1969’, the opening track of their self-titled début album, released in the year of Dave Grohl’s birth, vocalist Iggy Pop looked outside his window to see ‘war across the USA’, before turning his disgust inwards, mocking his own sullen self-pity (‘last year I was 21 / I didn’t have a lot of fun’) with a deceptively throwaway, infantile bubblegum-pop lyric – ‘I say Oh-my and a boo-hoo’ – positively dripping with sarcasm and self-loathing. Every bit as combative and confrontational as the cold, hard stares of the four lank-haired thugs glaring out from the cover artwork, The Stooges was also music to beat yourself up to, a recurring theme in punk rock to the present day.
Other music critics see the form as pre-dating The Stooges, with its roots in the primitive, animalistic poundings of The Sonics, The Seeds, The Wailers and a thousand more unsung hooligan-blues heroes of the early 1960s who never meant jack-shit outside the bare brick walls of their own suburban garages. These bands took the thrust-and-drag dynamics of The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of Richard Berry’s deathless rock ’n’ roll standard ‘Louie Louie’ and The Kinks’ 1964 hit ‘You Really Got Me’ and amplified them with brute force and ignorance, getting high on volume and fuzz and speaker-hiss and adrenaline. Drawn together on Rolling Stone writer Lenny Kaye’s seminal 1972 compilation album Nuggets, bands such as The Barbarians and The Mojo Men and The Amboy Dukes made a forceful case for being the true defenders of the spirit of rock ’n’ roll.
In the early seventies, though, rock critics seemed keen to label just about anyone punk. To New York Times writer Grace Lichtenstein, Alice Cooper was a punk. To England’s New Musical Express Gene Vincent was a punk, as was Eddie Cochran. To Zigzag magazine Bruce Springsteen was ‘a rock ’n’ roll punk’. To Greg Shaw of Rolling Stone magazine, fifties teen idol Dion was ‘the original punk’. As English rock writer Mick Houghton cannily observed in 1975, ‘the term “punk” is bandied about an awful lot these days. It seems to describe almost any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off-stage, or who displays an arrogance and contempt for his audience.’
By consensus, however, New York and London are generally acclaimed as the parent cities of the modern punk sound. The New York punk scene revolved around the CBGB club on Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a scuzzy, graffiti-covered fleapit which, from 1974, played host to nonconformist, experimental artists such as Ramones, The New York Dolls, The Heartbreakers, Suicide, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. London’s vibrant scene, centred around the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Adverts, kicked in two years later, in 1976. But it was the latter scene which first received mainstream press coverage in the US, when Rolling Stone writer Charles M. Young was dispatched to London in August 1977 to write a cover story on the Sex Pistols, then still unsigned in America.
The Sex Pistols were England’s most notorious rock band, even before their first single, the electrifying Anarchy in the UK, débuted in the UK charts. In their very first press interview guitarist Steve Jones commented, ‘We’re not into music. We’re into chaos,’ words that would prove astonishingly prescient. Following a fractious appearance on primetime television show Today on 1 December 1976 – where the Pistols responded to host Bill Grundy’s goading putdowns by calling him a ‘dirty fucker’ and a ‘fucking rotter’