The alienation and social unrest found in the three chord hopped up music called Punk didn’t just appear in New York in the mid seventies. Long before CBGB’s became the epicenter for a new music there were bands pushing back against the corporatization of Rock and Roll. The polished, radio friendly sounds of bands like The Beach Boys, Beatles, Elvis and Motown had become passé while songs like “Louie Louie” by The Kingsman were pushing boundaries. The barely intelligible “Louie Louie” was actually considered subversive with the FBI investigating Richard Berry in February 1964 over complaints the lyrics were obscene. Nothing came of it, but the point was made; rock and roll was dangerous.

These new sounds were played fast and loud for a disenfranchised youth audience, fueling the dreams of hundreds of kids in high school rock bands pounding away on 2nd hand guitars. If you knew 3 chords and could play for 2 and a half minutes you could do this rock and roll thing. Groups like The Monks “I Hate You,” The Count Five “Psychotic Reaction” and The Sonics “Psycho” stripped back all the gloss and pomp. It was attitude over virtuosity. Teen angst unrestrained and amplified through a blown speaker. They were playing by their own set of rules.

You can say it started in 1955 when a new sound came across American radio. Sonny Burgess “Red Headed Woman,” Billy Lee Riley “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll,” Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” and of course Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls Of Fire” were all attitude and wild showmanship. They were pushing boundaries with their shows, lyrics and primal beat. In 1958 Link Wray upped the game, releasing “Rumble,” a down and dirty instrumental that Iggy Pop said inspired him to join a band. From this even rawer sounds like Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs “Wooly Bully”, The Kingsman’s “Louie Louie” and The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” entered the mainstream consciousness, further pushing the idea of what rock and roll was.

It was even happening in the heart of Motown where Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith together with Rob Tyner, Michael Davis and Dennis Thompson started what would become the first cornerstone of Punk Rock’s foundation, The MC5. It was 1964 and the folkie movement had gained steam with the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Oakes making protest music with acoustic instruments. It was there that the idea that you could protest with electric instruments just as easily was planted and over the next few years the band got tighter, began writing songs and by the late 60s were waiting for a chance to be released on the world.

American popular culture in 1967 took a 180 with what was known as the Summer of Love. A media construct to try and explain what was happening socially, musically and culturally in SF. Bands played long free form shows at various reclaimed ballrooms around the city and a reevaluation of what could and couldn’t be done within the context of a rock and roll show started. Sex and drugs were no longer seen as taboo and a new way of thinking was born. Sadly, the Utopia that was being sold didn’t last long and by 1968 the whole thing had become a shitshow.

A big factor in the decline of the SF scene was the rise of FM radio. KSAN in San Francisco had become a model for the wild west that was FM radio, playing deep album cuts, unknown bands and live performances, but what started as a means to share new sounds and a new philosophy to a larger audience was co-opted in 1968 by big media conglomerates to sell records. FM stations began to pop in small town America and bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, whose long jams were favored on these formats, became stars. There was also an unintended consequence, it opened people’s minds and the kids began flocking to San Francisco to take part in free love, music and drugs. The problem was this perceived ‘unlimited freedom’ led down some dark roads and the Summer of love was over as quickly as it began in a haze of bad drugs and broken dreams. As FM became co-opted by the industry, a new underground energy sought to reclaim rock for the disaffected, paving the way for punk’s DIY ethos.

At the same time anger over the Vietnam war had begun to stoke serious upheaval in middle American. Children were pitted against parents and friends against neighbors, the Tet Offensive showed America losing a war they shouldn’t have been in, RFK and MLK were assassinated and the Democratic National Convention fell into chaos with cops beating kids in the streets. The call to peace and love began to fall on deaf ears with the daily assault of images of the war on television and the time was right for the MC 5. They became the soundtrack for the violence the country witnessed at the 1968 Democratic Convention and had found their voice.

By 1969 the SF scene had completely collapsed with the Hell’s Angels killing a concert goer at Altamont Speedway while The Rolling Stones played Sympathy For The Devil. Out of the ashes came the MC5’s seminal release Kick Out The Jams and they provided a much needed foil in American music to the sounds on the radio that had grown from a counterculture movement to a pop cliche. Recorded live at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom on October 30 and 31, 1968, it preached something radically different, embracing their militant activism of their manager, the poet, John Sinclair. They were throwing a different kind of Party.

The music they played was similar in some ways to the SF sound in as much as it was loose and favored longer solos, but it was differentiated by the intense edge of the songs, raw and unpolished, overtly political and not shying away from inciting violence. Because they were, in the end, a reaction against and the next logical step to the SF counterculture. Sadly, they didn’t find a mass market and even after getting a big feature in Rolling Stone, never were more than an underground band. By 1972 were done. Their influence continues to this day, but at the time it left the underground with a void waiting to be filled.

Flower power had become a tourist trap, a glittering corpse of failed idealism, and bands like the MC5 appeared to fill the void. Slick production and love and light lyrics gave way to music that could punch you in the gut; three chords and maximum noise with lyrics rooted in a spit in the face of authority manifesto fueled by casual nihilism.

From the smoke filled basements in Detroit the sound of kids who were sick of the charade called FM radio with it’s sixties idealism appeared. It answered the call for unpolished, raw, uncut music. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t pretty. It was a musical middle finger to a society that had failed the youth with the promise of freedom and instead delivering disappointment. They answered with a revolution made up of amps, sneakers, and sneers.