Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons are very mean people. Vicious people. In their 1978 history of punk and its precursors “The Boy Looked at Johnny.” A Rock and Roll Obituary (Pluto Press) the pair lead to slaughter a long list of sacred cows that includes the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Brian Eno, Television, the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Clash, the Jam and the Damned, amongst others. The Boy Looked at Johnny. is one long and extremely cheeky assault on the punk pantheon, and without a doubt the funniest book I’ve ever read about rock and roll.
Burchill and Parsons take positive glee in slashing, slandering, skewering, slagging, stoning, and tarring and feathering virtually everyone on the punk scene, and they do it in such an entertainingly scabrous way it’s easy to ignore their frequently wrong-headed conclusions and errors of fact. I’m sure they didn’t lose any sleep over such minutiae. They were having far too much fun setting the London and New York scenes on fire, then fiddling while they burned.
Burchill and Parsons set out to outrage from Sentence One, which reads “Bob Dylan broke his neck—close, but no cigar.” And they haven’t even gotten around to gutting punk yet! From there they turn to dismissing Iggy Pop and Lou Reed as “flamboyant closet cases fronting amateur-hour wimp bands,” labeling the Jam’s Paul Weller “the Barry McGuire of punk,” slagging the New York Dolls as “a dead-on-arrival disaster outfit … who by 1975 had achieved the popularity of acne-blitzed transvestite lepers addicted to heroin,” and dropping Agent Orange on the MC5’s debut, cheerfully dubbing it a “fumbling mating of screeching, headbanging Heavy Metal and fashionable politico-platitudes delivered in best/worst Billy Graham Bible banging self-righteous rhetoric.” One occasionally wishes they weren’t so diplomatic.
And on and on it goes. The duo label the music of the Ramones “Retard Rock,” quip that post-Voidoid Richard Hell “makes Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard look like a happy property,” and assert that Hell’s departure from Television left Tom Verlaine “happy as a surrealist sand-boy, backed by a band as faceless as session men and as functional as wallpaper.” Oh, and the duo end their discussion of every new waver’s favorite TV set with the line “Their last album, Adventure, stinks.”
They do have a scant few positive things to say. They boldly (and absurdly) declare that Roxy Music’s “first and second albums contain the only truly timeless rock music ever made,” label Patti Smith’s Horses “the best debut album of all time,” and call Blondie’s 1976 debut “the only album ever released on which every song could/should have been a hit single.” And while they don’t exactly sing the praises of David Bowie, they don’t burn Ziggy of Arc at the stake either.
The book’s only true heroes are Johnny Rotten and X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene. Rotten because he meant it; he had no illusions he was being groomed for the role of punk Monkee by huckster on the make Malcolm McLaren—Johnny’s audition consisted of his standing in front of a jukebox lip-synching to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” But Rotten was the real snarling article, a seething vessel of adamantine scorn, and compared to him the other punks on the scene—including pathetic chum Sid Vicious—were play actors only too happy to trade in their ripped “No Future” t-shirts for a record contract from a major label looking to exploit them after first defanging them.
Poly Styrene, on the other hand, was a defiant feminist who rejected both her status as woman/commodity and consumer society as a whole. One gets the idea she’d have happily torched the local Marks & Spencer had she not been such a fundamentally decent person. And she had—as women always do—good cause. An extreme example of the scene’s sexism were its Rastafarians, who Burchill and Parsons single out for their loathsome beliefs. “Hatred of women is the foundation of fascism,” they write, “but for sheer vitriolic venomous malignancy, the misogyny of the Rastafarians surpasses that of even the Nazis.” And lest you think that’s an absurd and unfair overstatement, they quote Black Slate bassist Elroy saying, “I’m more opposed to the National Abortion Campaign than I am to the National Front.” Then (with a smile, note the authors): “You get certain African tribes where the woman, if she’s seen gets stoned. Stoned.”
One of the wonderful ironies of the Sex Pistols is they revealed who the real savages in English society were. The decent and upright citizens of England attacked, broke limbs, split skulls, and did their best to maim the Pistols, and for comic relief Burchill and Parsons describe the reaction of an average member of Britain’s civilized citizenry to the Pistols’ obscenity-happy appearance on ITV’s prime time Today Show. After putting his foot through his television he told reporters “It blew up and I was knocked backwards but I was so angry and disgusted with this filth that I took a swing with my boot! I can swear as well as anyone, but I don’t want this sort of muck coming into my home at teatime.” Now there’s some real anarchy in the UK for you, and it extended to all social classes. The Sex Pistols revealed English civilization to be nothing more than barbarism in a Saville Row suit.
But nihilism of the Rotten stripe is unsustainable unless one has access to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and all angry Johnny had at his disposal was loathing, disgust, and a set of bad teeth. So it came as no surprise when the Sex Pistols imploded at the final stop of their chaotic American tour, leaving open the door to a slew of feckless punk manques. Burchill and Parsons take especial pleasure in slandering the Damned, whose “tame and mercenary mindlessness made them the most distrusted figures on the punk scene.” They also skewer the Clash as “the MC5 of the new wave… set on “revolution for fun and profit,” and “the first band to use social disorder as a marketing technique to shift product.” “I have gobbed in the eye of the whirlwind,” they mime the Sandinista wannabes, band, “please buy my record.’”
The women of punk fare far better. The duo praise “the magnificent Suzi Quatro,” laud Joan Jett (“the only woman yet to eternally subjugate the heckling male audience down to its rightful station”) and heap plaudits galore on the aforementioned Poly Styrene, who “realizes that without a general declaration of commitment and the exertion of whatever influence a musician may have, then rock and roll is pointless, useless, worthless.” In short, The Boy Looked at Johnny. is less obituary than call to arms. The two journos undermine their own premise; rock isn’t dead, it’s simply in need of more Poly Styrenes.
Burchill/Parsons get plenty of things wrong, both critically and factually. Their chapter on drugs is particularly dunderheaded. They reach their pharmacological nadir when they sing the praises of amphetamines, calling them “the only drug that makes you sit up and ask questions rather than lie down and lap up answers.” They’re right about one thing—on speed you can’t lie down. And the question most often asked by amphetamine users is “Where can I get more amphetamines?” And the duo descend straight into amphetamine psychosis when they write amphetamines “increases the IQ by an average of eight points.” Tweakers, take note—that unbearable craving in the brain isn’t withdrawal, it’s your IQ on the rise!
As noted above, The Boy Looked at Johnny. is no obituary—there will always be bands making committed music for reasons other than buying themselves Lear jets. But by the same token there will never be another book about rock and roll as thought provoking and positively hilarious as this one. Hyperbole, excess, and outrage—what could be more punk rock than that? Not the Clash, that’s for sure.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
