'Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols'

I think it is funny when “punks” make a really clean, melodic rock album. What’s less anarchic than recording an album for Virgin? 

Interestingly, Sid Vicious (the noted drug addict, who sometimes played bass guitar) is featured just on one song on the Sex Pistols’ only record. Former bassist Glen Matlock was asked to return, but once he wasn’t paid he laid down only one song. Guitarist Steve Jones played bass on every other track.

Say what you will about the vapid modern entertainment culture, but Vicious is a well-known “rock god” for basically dying. He’s famous for nothing.

'Cut'

I'd never heard The Slits before this and you can color me green with envy for anyone who'd been listening to them since the 1970s. This is a tremendously cool record. Nothing fancy, just some rocksteady ska rhythms mixed with a robust slate of bass lines.

This is a must-listen for anyone interested in early punk.

Lead singer Ariane Foster (or Ari Up) was at the ground floor of it all. She was the god daughter of Jon Anderson from Yes. She also wound up married to hot head John Lydon, lead singer of The Sex Pistols. Their house became a hovel for the young punk bands including Joe Strummer, who's own music is a direct cousin to The Slits.

The Slits were an all-female group. It's worth noting I think that the album cover to Cut was the band nude and caked in mud.

'I Against I'

One of the weird shows that I can’t believe wasn’t more popular among my generation was Degrassi High, the teen Canadian melodrama. Edgier than Saved by the Bell but safer than Gossip Girl or My So-Called Life. 

ANYWAY, the bit with Degrassi: The Next Generation was that each episode was titled after a song. There are currently 13 seasons ranging from 15 to 40 episodes. That’s a lot of songs.

Of course, in season five, episode 14, there is an episode titled “I Against I.” Because Gen Y Canadian teenagers love American hardcore from the 1980s.

In all seriousness, this is a very cool album to listen to. Even for Canadians.

'GI'

For being achingly unpopular, the Germs are an interesting collection of … a walking punk band stereotype.

The group was Jan Paul Beahm and Georg Ruthenberg (they actually sound like guys from Kraftwerk)

, who would make names for themselves under different names: Darby Crash and Pat Smear. They went through drummers like socks including a stint by future Go-Go Belinda Carlisle, who actually never played with them thanks to a batch of mono.

The band’s first show was at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, where Crash stuck the microphone in a jar of peanut butter and the group made noise until they were kicked off. Nothing like making a statement.

They recorded one album, this one, produced by Joan Jett. All during, the band was handcuffed by hard drug use, heroin being the intoxicant of choice.

The band split only to get back together for one show at the behest of Crash, who supposedly told Smear he needed cash in order to buy heroin for his suicide. After some haunting quotes at the show, four days later, 

Crash indeed died of an intentional drug overdose, a pact with a friend. The next day, John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman making Crash’s death a bullet point.

Smear infamously was witness to a similar meltdown when he joined Nirvana late in its existence until Kurt Cobain swallowed the business end of a shotgun. He also joined Dave Grohl in the Foo Fighters.

At some point around 2007, a film was developed about the Germs with hunky actor Shane West portraying Crash. Coincidentally or not, to the surprise of everyone on Earth, West had fronted a pop-punk band. After the film’s release, the Germs actually began performing with West as the lead singer.  

If I were the Germs, I would’ve played one show with West and used the money to buy drugs in order to overdose.

'Go Girl Crazy!'

What I dislike the most about punk bands is that they are almost always manned by smart alecks. As much as the genre and its players reject the notion of conformity and the shallow veneer of popular music, punk musicians are no more sincere or real than their richer, more popular counterparts.

More often than not, you'll find more stage acts, nicknames, make-up, costumes and theatrics in punk rock than you'll find anywhere.

I don't know how sincere The Dictators were about the song "Master Race Rock" considering they might not be serious about anything, to the point that they're covering Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe."

Maybe all of this is irrelevant (it is) and it's more about the sound (it is) and attempting to find genuine feeling in these knuckleheads' music is folly. It'll just frustrate anyone.

The Dictators make this list because in 1975 they had set the stage for the punk explosion and the landscape of rock music being changed forever. Not only the music, but also their smart aleck attitudes.

'Dookie'

It's funny that if you Google "Dookie" the first search result is the Wikipedia page to Green Day's third album, the 1994 smash hit.

The second result is the Urban Dictionary definition for poop.

There are albums on the 1,001 list that have value for different reasons, whether they pushed boundaries, were popular or just brilliant. Dookie was popular, but it also a four category: The game changer.

I was told by a college literature professor that of all the people that say they read Moby Dick, probably 95 percent were lying. I'll go ahead and assume the same for people born after 1980 or so that say they cut their punk teeth on Black Flag or Circle Jerks or The Germs. That percentage increases the further you get away from, say, Los Angeles, New York or possibly Washington, D.C.

For a dorky kid living in the East Texas country, Dookie was our Damaged. It changed everything and not in the way that Nirvana's Nevermind changed the game. We didn't get Nevermind. It was full of influences and darkness that your average 13-year-old kid didn't understand.

Dookie we understood. Yes, Green Day sold out, and it was wonderful. The album's a pop-punk paradise. Re-listening to the record now, it's shocking that I knew 95 percent of the lyrics and how many "hits" there were off the album. It's melodic and danceable and singable.

I distinctly remember my first exposure to the album. I was watching MTV in my mother's house (I was 13 ... my parents had just separated) and the video for "Basketcase" comes on. It's the band, hair spiked with these wide-eyed looks on their faces wheeled into the activity room of an insane asylum. The lead singer has a guitar placed around his neck and he starts with the power chord intro. "Do you have the time ..." Like it was fucking yesterday.

The chorus comes in and there are harmonies. Harmonies with a distorted guitar being beat on like a rented mule? Then the end of the chorus and the machine-gun drums come in with that bass that had the best sound ever.

As accessible as the music is, the lyrics are even more so. Billie Joe Armstrong talks about masturbation, loneliness, depression, boredom and girls. There was a darkness to it, but unlike a Metallica album, it wasn't an obtuse or confused anger. It was an angry frustration of just always feeling left out.

We might have wanted to rage like Metallica or mope like Nirvana, but all we really wanted to do was pogo with Green Day. And masturbate.

'Out Of Step'

I was at a friend's house recently. This friend was a bit of a middle-aged punk: A guy that lived through the so-called "punk" movement and, naturally, looked fondly upon that time in his life so much so that he hangs on it still a bit too much.

He decided to put a record on the turntable. It was apparently punk rock from a country in Asia. China, maybe.

About 30 seconds in, it was clear that we weren't feeling it.

Punk has its place: In the bedroom of a 16-year-old kid.

Sorry Ian MacKaye. Time to grow up.

'London Calling'

My first exposure to The Clash and 1980s punk and ska came in or around 1997. I was 15 and my parents were divorced. At the time, my sister was getting a divorce and living with my mother for a brief time.

She had the soundtrack to the John Cusack film, Grosse Pointe Blank. I tried several years later to watch the film, but I fell asleep.

Anyway, the soundtrack was composed by Joe Strummer, the ultra-cool lead singer of The Clash and featured two Clash songs and a bunch of cool 1980s music.

One of the songs included "Rudy Can't Fail," from The Clash's best album, London Calling.

What makes it the best Clash album is that it encapsulates all of the music that truly inspired the band, including punk, rockabilly, ska, reggae and rock. It's melodic as any Beatles album, yet it's edgy and raging. It matches the cover as well as any album in history.

One of the greatest album covers of all time.

'Repeater'

In the early 1990s, the landscape of rock music changed forever.

No, Nirvana didn't jam a wooden stake into the heart of hair metal. It was Fugazi. Two years before Nirvana and Co. (and just one year after Skid Row was released) , Ian MacKaye's Fugazi got together and recorded an album to be released in early 1990 letting everyone know that they were living a soulless and bankrupt existence.

Sebastian Bach was too rich to care and Kurt Cobain cared entirely too much, starting shooting up heroin and blew his face off.

'Ramones'

I recently visited a Whataburger near my work. Right when I walked in, I noticed a woman in the Whataburger gear with Down's Syndrome.

I ended up noticing this woman during my entire visit. For nearly 25 minutes straight, she was cleaning tables, floors, clearing out trash and trays, and emptying trash cans. Busy. The entire time. It made me sad that she was entirely more efficient and a better employee than anyone that I knew. All of whom do not have Down's Syndrome.

When I was a kid -- like eight or nine -- the local grocery store had guys that would push your cart of grocery's to your car and load the bags into your trunk or bed of your truck.

There was this one guy who always ended up carrying our bags out. I don't remember his name, but I do remember he was relatively good looking, in his mid-20s and extremely nice. However, he was relatively good looking, in his mid-20s, extremely nice and working as a bag boy at a grocery store.

Later I would learn that this young man was mentally handicapped. Thus the job and his pleasant demeanor.

My point? The Ramones are the retarded people of rock music.

Don't let them do too much (say, three chords and carrying groceries or wiping tables), but don't expect visions from the Algonquin roundtable.

The Ramones were sophisticated and even at their most basic, the Beatles or Colplay were 100 times the band that the punks from Queens, New York were.

But they were efficient. They did just as good at two minutes than Yes or Dream Theater do in 10. Most bands would dream of keeping it real like the Ramones did for two decades.

Employers would dream of having a dozen Down's Syndrome girls from Whataburger or retarded guys from grocery stores.