Not Quite Headed for the Coffee Table

[schwenko]

from the NY Times

Not Quite Headed for the Coffee Table
By CATHY HORYN
Images from a new anthology called “The Best of Punk Magazine.â€￾ Debbie Harry, in middle, in a 1970s portrait, contributed to the book’s foreword.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images (middle)Images from a new anthology called “The Best of Punk Magazine.â€￾ Debbie Harry, in middle, in a 1970s portrait, contributed to the book’s foreword.

There are some great books on the history of punk, like Jon Savage’s “England’s Dreaming,â€￾ but now there’s a history of Punk, the loudmouthed, comic-stripped magazine that helped define the scene in New York in the mid-1970s, when everything was fun and filthy and the city was trying to avoid bankruptcy. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, in a foreword to “The Best of Punk Magazine,â€￾ write that they assumed Punk was a really obvious, junky name, “but no, it was a periodical.â€￾

That almost conveys the tone of the magazine; actually what you would get from the editors of Punk would be unprintable. They pulled everyone’s chain, on the grounds that it would have been lame not to. “If we didn’t come off as authentic, we’d be laughed out of business, and if we took ourselves too seriously we’d be in bigger trouble,â€￾ John Holmstrom says in the opening.

Mr. Holmstrom founded Punk in 1975 with two childhood friends, Ged Dunn Jr. and Eddie (Legs) McNeil, from Connecticut. Mr. Holmstrom was taking cartoon and comics classes in at the School of Visual Arts and selling work to magazines like Screw and Bananas when, in the summer of 1975, his brain was rewired by the record “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!â€￾ He wrote: “That summer I also read about the Ramones in Creem and the Village Voice, thanks to rock writers Lisa Robinson and James Wolcott. From what Lisa wrote, the Ramones looked like a band I wanted to see, and from what Wolcott wrote, the Ramones sounded like the band I’d always wanted to hear.â€￾

So Mr. Holmstrom went to see them at CBGB’s summer rock festival. And not long after that, Punk magazine was born, in a dumpy $195-a-month office on the West Side that also served as Mr. Holmstrom’s living quarters.

So many books that retrospectively cover a music or pop-culture moment tend to be offered, and digested, for their style points. The fashion industry has certainly appropriated punk (Gianni Versace always springs to my mind, but there have been many), and you sometimes feel that these coffee-table volumes are really for that purpose. The Punk anthology is different. For one thing, the magazine was text-driven, with the interviews done in comic strips, and the photos, many by Roberta Bayley, had a genuine antiglamour.

But the best part of Punk was its merciless humor. I guess we would call it snark today, but the editors headlined its debut interview with Lou Reed by calling it “rock n’ roll vegetable,â€￾ and then let him rant.

The editors were duly rewarded and delighted when Mr. Wolcott, in the Voice, plugged Punk “the ululations of the new zeitgeist.â€￾ As Mr. Holmstrom wrote, “Once we looked up the words in the dictionary, we knew we were on to something.â€￾
A version of this article appeared in print on 12/09/2012, on page ST4 of the National edition with the headline: Not Quite Headed for the Coffee Table.



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