The most eye-opening thing about this documentary however, is just how different most of the New York bands who were lumped together under the punk label actually were.
Where the Dolls and the Ramones stripped everything down to a basic core of aggression and volume, bands like Television and the Patti Smith Group were actually taking a far more experimental tack. While Debbie Harry and Blondie were a throwback to the early rock of the sixties (they even used a farfisa organ), Patti Smith took the concept of spoken word, or "beat poetry," and gave it an actual beat.
And despite Legs McNeil's prattling on about how punk was a reaction to rock's then bloated virtuoso musicality, it really doesn't get more artistically pretentious than the Talking Heads when you get right down to it.
The story of course reaches its foregone conclusion when England sells punk rock back to America in the form of the Sex Pistols, and Seattle takes it to a mass audience with Nirvana more than ten years later. The interview segments with Dee Dee Ramone really bring all of this home — not so much because of what he says, but because of how he looks. For the guy who was one fourth of the band which most influenced much of everything that followed, its a sad picture that really is worth a thousand words.
For all of its shortness, The House Of The Rising Punk pretty much hits all of the key points and players of the brief supernova that was New York's '70s punk-rock scene. For students of rock history, it's a great crash course while for those who remember, it provides a nice recap.
Article comments