![]() Flipping open the book at random, I find this passage, which is fairly typical: “’Twas a doozy, the kind of rickety boho warehouse loft gig a Cleveland kid dreams of when reading his first Creem magazine Warhol Factory reminiscence in ninth grade. There are too many adjectives too many adverbs too many descriptions (of venues, for instance) too many bad similes. How can a book about rock & roll, or punk or whatever, be so goddamned dull?ħ. But, stylistically, this book is not well done. This book restores those bands to punk history. ![]() The later garage bands, those of the eighties and nineties (or even the seventies, in the case of the Cramps), have pretty much been written out of punk history (as the Cramps, I know, have sometimes complained, though they were present in the CBGB scene of the Patti Smith/Television era, and Ian MacKaye has often said that he broke his punk cherry, show-wise, with the Cramps). He used it specifically in reference to the bands included on Nuggets.ĥ. These bands were largely dismissed in the sixties in favor of the likes of the Beatles they got their due later, beginning with the famous 1972 Nuggets album, which was curated by Lenny Kaye, who may have been the first to use the word “punk” as it’s now understood. “Gunk punk,” the book's subject, is a term that the author, the erstwhile frontman of New Bomb Turks, invented for the retro rock heavily influenced by, or imitative of, sixties garage bands, such as the legendary Sonics. Those twenty songs are now on my hard drive. The reader is even supplied with a code that allows him (or her) to download twenty songs by some of the profiled bands. I bought this book because I have a sweet tooth for almost any book related to rock & roll, specifically punk (if rock & roll and punk are the same, or almost the same, as some would say they’re not), and I thought this book would fill in some of the gaps in my rock & roll (or punk, if rock & roll and punk are not the same) education.ģ. I’m too lazy to write a real review for this book, having arbitrarily promised myself that I would review on Goodreads every book I read in 2011, so I’m going to do it this way: sloppily, in a numbered list.Ģ. Truly, this is the last great wave of down-and-dirty rock 'n' roll.ġ. ![]() What they did have was free liquor, good drugs, guilt-free sex, and a crazy good time, all the while building a dedicated fan base that extends across America, Europe, and Japan. ![]() The majority of bands that populate this book the Dwarves, the Gories, the Supersuckers, the Mummies, Rocket from the Crypt, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Muffs, and the Donnas among them gained little long-term reward from their nonstop touring and brain-slapping records. They reveled in '50s rock 'n' roll and '60s garage rock while creating their own wave of gut-busting riffs and rhythm. What they took, they fought for, every night. We Never The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 tracks the inspiration and beautiful destruction of this largely undocumented movement. Includes a code for free CD download of many of the bands featured in this book! Nirvana, the White Stripes, Hole, the Hives all sprang from an underground music scene where similarly raw bands, enjoying various degrees of success and hard luck, played for throngs of fans in venues ranging from dive bars to massive festivals, but were mostly ignored by a music industry focused on mega-bands and shiny pop stars.
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