I loved (and still do) the first 2 Zep albums, but after that it was awful bloated shiteeee.
The freshness of The Buzzc--ks or The Undertones and the raw energy of the Pistols, who never were a favourite of mine, really showed how bad the previously excellent bands had become.
I'm sorry, Clyde, but it's words like this that depressed me about punk and continue to do so now.
If you'd written the following:
" I loved (and still do) the first 2 Zep albums, but after that it seemed awful bloated shiteeee to me.
The freshness of The Buzzc--ks or The Undertones and the raw energy of the Pistols, who never were a favourite of mine, really showed how irrelevant the older bands had become to me and my friends."
Then I wouldn't feel so depressed about it all. But instead, it's invariably written in the words that you used.
To a large number of folks, Led Zeppelin III onwards were not awful bloated sh!te. None of the previously excellent bands had become bad, they just became unfashionable, mainly in the media - there were probably at least as many people listening to them as there were listening to punk music, and a lot of the folks into the dinosaur music also liked the punk - but they couldn't understand why they had to hide the fact they liked BJH or whatever. (Btw, I actually loathed stuff like BJH and Genesis - mainly because I couldn't hear any decent guitar playing in them :lol:).
Those of us who were checking out the "dinosaurs" were also checking out all the 50s and 60s stuff (it was Led Zeppelin and Ritchie Blackmore that turned me on to blues). We also appreciated a lot of the good pop songs that came out of punk (I have to admit that I'm with Richard on Hong Kong Garden though :lol:, there was some git in our 6th form who insisted on playing it every bluddy break for an entire term, repeatedly - 3 or 4 times in a 15 minute break was a bit trying. We found it an effective tune to start with, but boring as hell after a few listens! Incidentally, he got a band together and played, they were pretty good, nothing wrong with them - except they sounded like a rock band!! If we'd got our hands on a decent recording of them, and tried to play that in the 6th Form Centre - he'd have chucked the tape out the machine as "dinosaur music"!! Complete prat...).
I was a bit weird, even in my group, because I also liked all the music that was in the charts at the time - there was some seriously good music getting made then, I liked all new music that was appearing through various channels, pop, rock, disco, country (including the punk tunes that got popular) - even Rene and Renata had something going for them (as long as you only had to hear it once or twice!! :lol:). There's probably some seriously good music getting made now, except I'm not listening to it - I don't have time to listen to the stuff I like and to learn to like other stuff...
But the other thing about punk, for me, is that it had a big hand in killing live music - especially the pub rock scene that so many of us musicians at the time needed. I suspect that it would have died anyway, but punk seems to have accelerated it. I was in Bristol when it was happening, and then Exeter for 4 or 5 years. By the time I got to London, the pub rock scene that I'd been promised was dwindling very fast. You had to be playing music from one of the fashionable strands of pop/rock, mostly with a punk background/attitude to it, to get a gig. To keep the gig you had to bring a load of erks. The problem is with this "inclusive music" that punk brought in, no f*cker wants to listen to an evening of it except the band's mates!!!
- The regular "British RnB" audience, stopped turning up when the British RnB dried up...
It really got brought home to us when we went back to Exeter on tour. We were setting up in one of the Student Union bars at about 5pm. That was when folks were popping in for a quick one after lectures before going home and then coming out again. There was a bunch of them who came in and looked horrified at the drum kit etc. Some left immediately in disgust, but half stayed. That half stayed all night and talked to us at the end. They'd expected us to be some "awful punky thing", but they wanted the cheap beer to start the night. When they found we were playing "proper music" (their words) they decided to stay. If the mobile phone had existed then, they probably would have brought the others back.
Punk had a lot of good things going for it, but with just as many charlatans as the previous regime. But the big problem was that, for it to work, everyone had to be brainwashed that everything else was "bloated sh1t" to be sneered at.
