And, what album defines this better than Young, Loud, and Snotty, the first album
by Cleveland, Ohio’s DEAD BOYS? It was released in October of 1977, right
around the time that the Sex Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks… Here’s the Sex Pistols, but received only
a fraction of the attention.
The reason for this, quite simply, is that Dead Boys
were viewed as heavy metal knuckleheads wearing punk garb, singing about being
assholes, and just being rude and offensive without any overarching political
or artistic motive behind what they were doing; or like a lower IQ IGGY AND THE STOOGES. But, I mean, at the end of the day, it is punk, isn’t it?
But, hey, the critics may have had a point. Like THE SAINTS, THE STRANGLERS, and SLAUGHTER AND THE DOGS, the Dead Boys were just a rock ‘n’ roll
band that happened to make music that coincided with what became known as punk
rock. On one hand, they have all the punk rock window dressing, from singer
Stiv Bators’ slurred, pissed off shouting, which manages to be obnoxious and
punky without doing the Cockney accent, to the members’ punky names – lead
guitarist Cheetah Chrome, rhythm guitarist Jimmy Zero, bassist Jeff Magnum, and
drummer Johnny Blitz – and songs that are raw, aggressive, fairly short, kinda
fast, and poorly produced.
So, from the surface, if your definition of punk is just
raw, lo-fi, hard edged, rock ‘n’ roll, then, yeah, that’s Young, Loud, and Snotty. But, that’s betrayed by the fact that some
of the music sounds more like hard rock.
For instance, check out the two slow songs “Not Anymore” and “High Tension Wire.”
The excellent duel guitar interplay on those sounds closer to Glenn Buxton and
Michael Bruce from ALICE COOPER than, say, the 1-4-5 aggressive down-strumming
of Johnny Ramone.
I mean, sure, you have the freakin’ four-chord punk anthem “Sonic
Reducer”, which kicks off the album, but even that one has some dynamics vis-à-vis
two guitar chords played in succession, some phasing on the cymbals, playing
the root notes of the four chords while the second guitar produces a
high-pitched sound, a few tom hits, and then, WHAMMO, the song firing on all
cylinders. Call it punk all you want, but there’s a reason why OVERKILL had no
problem covering it on their first album! Yeah, yeah, I know MEGADETH covered “Anarchy
in the U.K.”, and Metallica covered those MISFITS and DISCHARGE songs. But, of
these, “Sonic Reducer” is the one that most easily translates to metal.
Not to mention that GnR coverd “Ain’t It Fun” from the
second DEAD BOYS album, We Have Come for
Your Children, but we’ll save that for another time.
You DO have a couple anti-social punky gems on Young, Loud, and Snotty, like “What Love
Is” and “Ain’t Nothin’ to Do.” You also have a couple of mid-tempo tunes, which
kinda sound like the slower songs on Never
Mind the Bollocks. There’s the catchy-as-all-hell statutory rape admission “All
This and More”, which is so catchy, mind you, that I had TWO girlfriends lovin’
the bejeezus out of this absolutely trashy little song and its romantic rhyming
couplet “all this and more, little girl/how about on the floor, little girl”,
and “I Need Lunch”, a tribute to local New York no-talent no-wave queen LYDIA LUNCH,
and just sluts in general. Left-wing sluts, that is, since this is punk we’re
talking about!
And, rounding out the ten-track, 30-minute LP, is a cover of
“Hey Little Girl” by mid-60s garage rockers SYNDICATE OF SOUND, recorded live
at New York’s CBGB’s, because why not?
Anyway, it’s one of those punk rock classics that the
artsy-fartsy and political guys don’t talk about, since they can’t find a way
to crowbar it into their pretentious art or political movements. Good. Who needs ‘em? It’s only rock ‘n’ roll.
GOOD rock ‘n’ roll. Buy it.
Revenge of Riff Raff
10th October, 2021
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