Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard

by Roni Sarig

  David Pajo, Tortoise / Slint:

  Everything about them was like the coolest of the cool, we thought. The drum programming was super-cool, and the guitar tones were so brittle and machine-like. I just never heard anything like that before. And the lyrics were really cool and super-dark.

  After Big Black, Albini formed two more bands: Rapeman in the late ‘80s and Shellac in the ‘90s. He also made occasional forays into zine writing, where his punk puritanism often took the form of pointed, self-righteous attacks on those not meeting his standards. He reached his highest profile, though, recording other groups. Now, over a decade since Big Black last unleashed its terrorizing growl, Albini’s trademark sound graces the grooves of multiplatinum records.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Lungs EP (Ruthless, 1982; Touch & Go, 1992); a nearly all-Albini production, with the help of Roland, the drum machine.

  Bulldozer EP (Ruthless-Fever, 1983; Touch & Go, 1992); a fuller sound, with the addition of a second guitar and bass.

  Racer-X EP (Homestead, 1984; Touch & Go, 1992); an even more refined sonic assault.

  The Hammer Party (Homestead, 1986; Touch & Go, 1992); reissues the first three EPs on one CD.

  Atomizer (Homestead, 1986; Touch & Go, 1992); the band’s first full-length release finds the group at the peak of its powers.

  Headache EP (Touch & Go, 1987; 1992); a release notable mainly for its particularly gruesome cover art, since deleted.

  The Rich Man’s 8-Track Tape (Homestead, 1987; Touch & Go, 1992); reissues on one CD of Atomizer and Headache.

  Songs about Fucking (Touch & Go, 1987; 1992); the final studio album, which ends the group’s career on a high note.

  Pigpile (Touch & Go, 1992); a live album recorded on the band’s final tour in 1987.

  BRITISH POST-PUNK

  Music historians retelling the glorious tale of the Sex Pistols and the British punk explosion of 1976 can make it seem that punk was spontaneously generated by the Pistols, that nothing like it had existed before and nothing was ever the same after. But though punk rock may have represented a revival of youthful energy and subversion in rock – a rejection of the overly professional, overly pretentious megalith that rock had become – punk’s sounds and ideals were almost immediately integrated into a recent past which included the very things punk orthodoxy claimed to hate: prog rock, glam rock, art rock, classic rock. As Colin Newman of the influential post-punk band Wire remembers of the punk era, “People weren’t throwing away their Roxy Music and David Bowie records.” As quickly as British punk’s identity had been defined – not only by the Sex Pistols, but by the Clash, the Damned, and others – it was taken apart. Punk became fair game for anyone’s use, and it was picked up not only by bands with a taste for the raw and unrefined but also by those with art rock leanings – groups that never felt a need to define themselves as one or the other, punk or prog. Therefore, nearly coinciding with punk was a genre that simultaneously took a step away from punk while it moved a step forward: for lack of a more original title, this newer music was known as post-punk.

  Tim Gane, Stereolab:

  At the time, punk did follow the rules a bit. And that was the interesting thing about punk to me: The music it influenced was much better than the initial thing itself. Though I love a lot of the initial ideas, the Clash and so on, it really was the way it came out later – everything from Joy Division to Public Image to post-electronic music – that allowed everything to come out.

  Though it seemed to betray punk’s anti-art stances, post-punk was in many ways a more true expression of punk’s anarchistic ideals. For all its antiestablishment pronouncements, the Sex Pistols / Clash version of punk rock was, after all, the product of major labels that employed basic hard rock sounds and structures. Bands like Public Image Limited, Wire, and Swell Maps took punk’s no-rules, do-it-yourself, destruction-of-rock promises literally and proceeded to create some of the most challenging, foreign, distinctive, and truly rebellious music of recent decades. This music was often so far ahead of its time that only in later decades would post-punk’s musical ideas reach the mainstream, through the music of post-punk’s successors: R.E.M., U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, and many more.

  PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED

  Tim Gane, Stereolab:

  Metal Box is probably my favorite album ever. I was completely blown away when I heard that. It was pure creativity... And as years go by, it sounds more potent than it did. It sounds like everything is headed in that direction. It’s very futuristic music, really. The bass and the drums, it’s a lot of what people do in dance music. The repetition and groove of it all. They’re a more important band than the Sex Pistols, musically. Much more important.

  Though it’s impossible to say definitively – and certainly the seeds were sown long before – you might pinpoint the start of the post-punk era at January 1978’s final Sex Pistols gig, when singer Johnny Rotten uttered his band’s famous last words: “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” and disappeared forever into history. Emerging to tear down everything his band had built up – and in doing so, actually accomplishing what punk only threatened – was the person behind the ridiculous stage name, the 22-year-old son of working class Irish immigrants, John Lydon. Within months – before the dust had even settled on the tremendous cultural force that had been the Sex Pistols – Lydon unveiled his new band, or as he claimed, his multimedia “corporation,” Public Image Limited. The goal this time was to destroy rock and start over. To retain complete control within a band, both financially and musically. To create an artistic entity that would replace the very institution of the rock band with something free to explore all avenues of creativity, musical and beyond. To mold new music rooted in sounds entirely foreign to traditional rock, part avant-garde and part world music, part nihilist and part spiritual. Though Lydon’s uniquely post-punk concept of Public Image Limited would arguably prove more revolutionary than his punk assault as a Sex Pistol, PIL has been largely overlooked in music history while volumes have been written about the Sex Pistols.

  Mark Robinson, Unrest / Air Miami:

  I liked how they had members in the band who didn’t play instruments, and they were like a company. We tried to do that with Unrest. Our friend was in the band but wasn’t really in the band – supposed to be a slide projector person. It gave me the idea you could do interesting stuff with this rock and roll thing, you don’t have to just play in front of the audience, you can do all this other weird shit.

  With their first single, 1978’s Public Image, as a calling card and manifesto, Lydon let everyone know, “I will not be treated as property... the public image belongs to me.” By the end of the year – with the release of the album Public Image: First Issue – it was clear Lydon was not about to rely on the sounds or notoriety of his former band. In the place of catchy punk rock, PIL offered a stark noise dub with little regard for song structure or melody, while Lydon’s vocals traded in forceful singing for slow moans and tortured howls.

  David Yow, Jesus Lizard:

  I’d never heard anything like it before. The way the guitar and bass didn’t go together – none of it went together – in a traditional way. Public Image were really influential to everyone in [Yow’s first band] Scratch Acid.

  While First Issue contained its share of provocative lyrics, including an unrestrained attack on organized religion, unlike the Sex Pistols’ formula of shock lyrics over hard rock songs, PIL focused almost entirely on musical innovation. Keith Levene, a classically trained musician who played briefly in the Clash, provided the angular and agitating guitar figures, more reminiscent of Captain Beefheart than Joe Strummer. Lydon’s childhood friend Jah Wobble (John Wardle) weighed in on bass with an equally hypnotic and erratic groove, derived as much from German groups like Can as from Jamaican reggae. The remainder of the group testified to PIL’s cynical experimentalism: Jim Walker on drums (soon gone), Jeanette Lee producing video, and Dave Crowe taking care of finances.
And their liner notes – ”Public Image Ltd. would like to thank absolutely nobody, thank you” – made their attitude perfectly clear.

  Carlo Bozulich, Geraldine Fibbers:

  I thought it was great because they were doing a big “fuck you” to the punk rock thing... Jah Wobble is the ultimate bass player. It sounds tike he didn’t know how to play, and it didn’t matter because he was so good. The music was so simple, so stripped down, really repetitive, with all this empty space. It didn’t necessarily need to rock.

  Following the terrifying “party dirge” single Death Disco (which included remixes, a practice virtually unheard of for rock bands of the time), Public Image dug even deeper in their aggressively uncommercial antirock aesthetic to produce their second album, Metal Box. This was a limited-edition set of three 12 – inch 45 rpm singles packaged in a metal film canister (and later reissued as a double album called Second Edition). Now thoroughly rid of any traces of their punk pasts, Lydon, Levene, and Wobble (with drummer Martin Atkins, later of industrial supergroup Pigface, becoming an off-and-on member as well) created their masterpiece. A relentless deconstruction of rock that at the same time makes remarkably effective use of rock tools, Metal Box / Second Edition stands as the defining document of post-punk. The influence of Levene’s tightly wound guitar screech would be felt immediately in bands like Killing Joke, Gang of Four, and the Birthday Party, and would soon emerge in the guitar playing of U2’s Edge and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.

  Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

  People didn’t know what to think of the first record, it was such a damaged sounding thing. Uneasy listening. For us, and just about everyone I knew in bands, it was such a godhead. We had just started the band, and we were very influenced by PIL... I remember meeting Kate [Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson] when she was like 14. Her mom was a friend of [Sonic Youth’s] Kim [Gordon], and she gave me this fanzine she was doing that had pictures of the Public Image gig [in New York] where they destroyed the screen and there was a riot. I was at that gig, it was great. Kate, and the Beastie Boys, were part of this whole scene of kids into hardcore and PIL.

  Despite his lack of technical chops, Wobble was also recognized as a major post-punk innovator, with loping and watery basslines that introduced the more linear elements of dub and Eastern music into punk. Inner-band strife, though, led to Wobble’s dismissal from the group, and 1981’s Flowers of Romance was less successful without him. Still, Lydon, Levene, and Atkins managed to create another major breakthrough by building free-form songs around short, repetitive (at times Middle Eastern-sounding) percussion patterns. The band continued to grow in the studio and further explore their unique sound. Multimedia projects, which they’d promised from the start but hadn’t followed through, began panning out as well.

  By 1983, during the recording of their fourth studio album This Is What You Want, tensions peaked between PIL’s remaining creative forces, Lydon and Levene. When the two determined they could no longer work together, Levene quit and Lydon erased Levene’s guitar parts before completing the record on his own. Levene, in turn, released his own version of the album, called Commercial Zone, before embarking on a solo career. While This Is Not a Love Song became a minor hit for the band, under the sole direction of Lydon, PIL was never the same. They continued for another decade, but never produced material as defiantly transgressive as the initial trilogy of records.

  Kate Schellenbach, luscious Jackson:

  They were overshadowed by John Lydon’s personality, but with their combination of the heavy dub sound of Jah Wobble’s basslines and the scratchy minimalist guitar of Keith Levene, it seems like they were mixing up styles. And that applies to what we do as well. They seemed to be ahead of their time, and spawned that whole experimental world, like Sonic Youth, in the direction of post-punk. I also think they really influenced bands like Jane’s Addiction, and I don’t know if they get credit for that.

  Following Levene’s departure, PIL became Lydon’s sole property, with a revolving lineup (featuring at various points members of the Damned and Siouxsie and the Banshees) and a turn toward more cohesive, structured music. Lydon joined hip-hop pioneer Afrika Baambaataa on the memorable single “World Destruction” and also worked with world dub producer Bill Laswell on PIL’s 1986 release, called Album, Cassette, or Compact Disc (depending on the format you bought). The group generally went downhill from there, and seemed to fade away after ‘87’s That What Is Not. Following the release of Lydon’s autobiography, Rotten (curiously sparse on PIL history), the Sex Pistols re-formed in 1996 for a reunion tour. Lydon released his first solo album to mixed reviews in 1997.

  Wobble has made many solo records, as well as collaborations with Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, and Jaki Liebzeit of Can, and U2’s Edge. In the late ‘80s he formed the New Age / world trance group, Invaders of the Heart, whose albums have featured Sinead O’Connor, Transglobal Underground’s Natacha Atlas, and the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Keith Levene produced an album under the name Keith Levene’s Violent Opposition, which included members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, and Thelonious Monster as his backing band. There is no talk of a PIL reunion.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Public Image·– First Issue (Virgin, 1978); a promising debut, though only a half-step removed from Sex Pistols-style punk.

  Metal Box (Virgin, 1979); the earlier, limited version of Second Edition, packaged as three 12-inch 45’s in a metal canister.

  Second Edition (Island, 1980); a huge leap into antirock/post-punk neverland, the band’s finest moment.

  Paris au printemps (Virgin, 1980); a live album recorded in Paris.

  The Flowers of Romance (Warner Bros., 1981); a percussion-heavy record that continues their experimental path.

  Live in Tokyo (Elektra, 1983); features Lydon and backing musicians in concert.

  This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get (Elektra, 1984); stripped of Levene’s guitar, the record still has some worthwhile elements.

  Commercial Zone (PIL, 1984); Levene’s version of This Is What you Want, released independently.

  Album / Cassette / Compact Disc (Elektra, 1986); the name of this first entirely post-Levene studio release depends on the format you buy, with Lydon in full control and Bill Laswell producing.

  Happy? (Virgin, 1987); another studio album.

  9 (Virgin, 1989); and another.

  The Greatest Hits, so Far (Virgin, 1990); a good overview of career highlights, including the weaker later stuff, with one new track and some remixes.

  That What Is Not (Virgin, 1992); a forgettable record, probably the band’s final release.

  WIRE

  Mike Watt, Minutemen / fIREHOSE:

  This band Wire, we got their record Pink Flag, and these cats didn’t know how to play, they were like art students or something. And it was just this fucking lightbulb over our heads. We said, “Man, if we do this, people will never know that we used to like Blue Öyster Cult. “

  While the initial British punk explosion had, on the surface at least, some very working-class and anti-art overtones, it was immediately adopted by art school kids who saw no necessary contradiction between the art rock of the early ‘70s and the newer punk that had positioned itself as a reaction to art rock (anti-art, after all, was itself an artistic statement). This was particularly true for the older and more sophisticated art-schoolers of Wire, whose ideas about music were shaped by avant-garde and prog rock in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. While they were energized by punk’s creative spark, and punk formed the basis of their music, the South London quartet was never motivated to follow a punk agenda. Unlike other bands that formed during the punk era, Wire had no problem being called a progressive rock band; in fact, Wire was from the start (and is still today in their solo projects) obsessed with moving forward. A driving desire never to repeat themselves has motivated just about everything the band members have done – from their records to their breakups.

  Though Wir
e never achieved any great mainstream success in either the United States or Britain, time has revealed their tremendous influence on subsequent rock music. In the ‘80s, their jerky minimalism shaped the early sound of British new-wave bands such as the Cure and guitar rockers like U2 and Simple Minds, while their post-punk angularity impacted American bands from the Minutemen and R.E.M. to Fugazi and Sonic Youth. With punk-inspired alternative music and the resurgence of new wave in the ‘90s, Wire has popped up again as a key element in the music of bands like Elastica, Menswear, and Blur.

  Scott Kannberg, Pavement:

  Wire was a big band for us. They’re one of those bands that R.E.M. used to talk about, “Go check out Wire.” I didn’t understand them at first, but then I kept listening and I got it. No one sounds like them at all. ‘You’re Killing Me,” from our first single, is a Wire rip-off, in the fast guitar playing.