Words and Guitar, Vol. 2: The Punks and the Godfathers

The second entry in a weekly column by Terence Cawley. 

Like many people, I have been motivated by quarantine to finally get organized. Since wrangling my anachronistically large CD collection is sure to be a daunting task, I’ve been working up to it by slowly reorganizing my smaller cassette and vinyl collections. Rather than sorting them in the standard alphabetical-by-artist format, however, I’ve decided to order them chronologically, so that all the albums released in 1981 will fall between those released in 1980 and 1982 (and so on). I’ve also taken my homebound status as an opportunity to actually relisten to all of the albums I’ve accumulated over the years, also in chronological order.

Beyond being an incredibly soothing ritual and confirmation of my total, hopeless nerd-dom, this has gotten me thinking even more than usual about the history of popular music and how styles and trends evolve over time. I’ve been particularly fascinated by the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, where records by representatives of the emergent punk rock and new wave scenes like Devo and Elvis Costello now intermingle on my shelf with the California soft-rock aristocracy of Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, and Jackson Browne. Which leads me to this week’s list!

Top 5 Songs Written by Classic Rock Dinosaurs in Response to Punk

When the history of rock and roll is told, punk is invariably cast as a bloody revolution which rendered ‘70s prog and arena-rock excess forever irrelevant. But the old guard didn’t just roll over and admit defeat; in fact, punk did little to slow the continued ascent of most of the big-ticket names on this list. Some of the established rock stars of the time, like Neil Young, were vocal fans of punk; others seemed content to more or less ignore it. The third category is the one I find most interesting: those who felt compelled to respond to the movement in song. From snide dismissals to tongue-in-cheek hat-tips to competitive ripostes, the short-lived subgenre of the punk response song offers a revealing look at how the “dinosaurs” of rock handled it when the younger generation began to question their sovereignty.

5. Billy Joel – “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” from Glass Houses (1980)

Technically, this is more of a new wave response song, but close enough. In a typically combative Rolling Stone interview at the time, the piano man made it clear that he was no fan of punk (““The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ bored the hell out of me”) while also making the not-entirely-wrong (if oft-repeated) point that new wave wasn’t actually new, but merely a return to the stripped-down roots of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. Though Joel was sympathetic to their cause (in his own needlessly unpleasant words: “I think it’s good and necessary. Kick out the Emerson, Lake and Palmer shit and all that overindulgence. Give the whole damned industry an enema, jam that plastic tube right up its rear end”), he clearly resented the idea that he had to jump on the bandwagon or risk getting left behind.

And yet with Glass Houses, jump on the bandwagon is exactly what Joel did. The tougher, tighter sound yielded one of Joel’s best albums, though despite being a Joel apologist in general, I’ve never much liked “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” As Tom Breihan put in his entry about the song for his The Number Ones column, “It’s like Billy Joel is dressing up in a costume and then pointing out to everyone he sees that he thinks the costume is stupid.” It’s also mostly a response to Joel’s critics, and there is nothing more tedious than a rich, beloved rock star complaining about their mediocre press. The song’s condescending tone certainly rubbed noted new wave fan “Weird Al” Yankovic the wrong way, inspiring him to pen one of his most biting parodies, the never-released “It’s Still Billy Joel To Me”.

4. Tom Petty – “Zombie Zoo,” from Full Moon Fever (1989)

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got lumped into the new wave movement when they first emerged in the late ‘70s, though by the time he put out his solo debut and arguable career peak Full Moon Fever, the world had correctly reclassified him as more of an old-school type. The lyrics to “Zombie Zoo” are a somewhat mean-spirited put-down of the makeup-clad nihilists Petty was encountering in downtown Los Angeles- one of the first signs of a curmudgeonly streak that would reach its full flower with the old-man-yells-at-cloud-isms of 2002’s The Last DJ. To Petty’s credit, even he didn’t think the song held up, saying in his final Rolling Stone interview, “I hate ‘Zombie Zoo.’ I do not understand how that got on the record.”

3. The Rolling Stones – “Respectable,” from Some Girls (1978)

Some Girls saw the Stones lift themselves out of their mid-‘70s creative rut. Mick Jagger had been spending a lot of time hanging around New York, as Keith Richards dealt with what Wikipedia demurely calls “legal trouble.” While it was the city’s other new big thing, disco, which inspired the chart-topping hit “Miss You,” punk left its mark too, inspiring the band to pare their sound back down to its gritty, impeccably disheveled core. Naturally, the band’s punk pastiche, “Respectable,” sounds like sped-up Chuck Berry, though the sardonic lyrics (“we’re talking heroin with the president”) were far more vulgar than the likes of Berry could have gotten away with in the ‘50s.

2. Van Halen – “Loss of Control,” from Women and Children First (1980)

In the 1980s, the Sunset Strip was overrun with party-hardy, shred-happy heavy-metal bands hoping to catch a little of that Van Halen magic. Yet when Van Halen first started playing the area in the late ‘70s, it was punk that ruled the Strip. Not surprisingly for a guitarist who prided himself on his world-class musicianship, Eddie Van Halen saw little of value in punk: “We’re not punk, we don’t dress weird. We play good music.” Eddie and his bandmates even went so far as to prank their adversaries by storming the Whiskey A Go-Go stage disguised as a fictional Scottish punk group called The Enemas (a tale recounted amusingly here).

Though David Lee Roth proclaimed himself the “Atomic Punk” on Van Halen’s 1978 debut album, they never got closer to replicating the genre’s streamlined attack than on “Loss of Control.” As Roth dismisses a lover who’s “way too civilized” for his taste, the band thrashes frenetically behind him, always stopping themselves just as they’re about to fly off the rails. The implicit taunt is as infuriating as it is irrefutable: if you want to sound this chaotic, it might help to learn how to play your instruments.

1. Queen – “Sheer Heart Attack,” from News of the World (1977)

There’s a semi-famous story about the recording of News of the World, during which Queen shared a studio with the Sex Pistols, who were working on their first (and last) album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. You can read about the confrontation between Freddie Mercury and Sid Vicious (and also about the time Johnny Rotten crawled up to Mercury on all fours) in The Quietus’ 40^th-anniversary retrospective on the album. As that article explicates, Queen had a complex relationship with punk; though their stadium-filling pomp and circumstance would seem to make them the antithesis of anarchy and rebellion, they were also, like The Rolling Stones with Some Girls, willing to take punk’s rebuttal of such indulgences as constructive criticism.

News of the World is only minimalist by Queen standards- there are more spare piano ballads and tough hard-rock riffs, sure, but there’s also “It’s Late,” a 6-minute power ballad with an epic guitar solo, and the two biggest soccer-chant anthems of all time, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions.” On “Sheer Heart Attack,” however, Queen got closer than any classic rock band before or since to beating the punks at their own game. You could argue that the song is actually proto-punk, since drummer Roger Taylor wrote the song for the group’s 1974 album- which would explain why that album is called Sheer Heart Attack. Still, if the Pistols and their peers hadn’t come along to create a context in which the track’s pummeling riff and teenage-alienation lyrics made sense, who knows if Queen would have ever bothered dusting it off.

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Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did researching and writing it! Check out the Spotify playlist, let me know if there are any good punk response songs I missed, and I’ll see you here next week!