Proto-Punk and Garage Punk

Proto-punk is a name for the bands who arrived too late for the 1960s garage boom and too early for 1977. None of them called themselves that. The word was fixed on them afterwards by people trying to explain where the Ramones came from, and it covers bands that sound almost nothing like each other.

So do not read it as a genre. Read it as a road map. Several routes leave the 1966 regional single, each passes through a different city, and they all arrive at the same place. Follow them and you understand why garage punk sounds the way it does.

What proto-punk is, and what it is not

The working definition: rock bands active roughly between 1967 and 1975 who cut the music back while everyone else was inflating it. Long solos, concept albums, orchestras. They went the other way. Most sold badly and most were dropped. Their records became the reading list for the people who started punk.

It is not a sound. The Velvet Underground’s drone and the MC5’s high-energy soul revue share almost nothing musically. What they share is contempt for polish and a belief that the take with the mistakes is the take with the life in it.

It is also not 1960s garage. The garage bands were teenagers chasing one hit on a local label. The proto-punk bands were older, usually on majors, and made albums. Different money, different ambitions, same refusal to improve. The naming fight between those two worlds has its own page: garage punk vs garage rock.

Where the term gets contested

The edges move depending on who is drawing them. Some writers stretch proto-punk to cover Patti Smith, Television, Suicide, Pere Ubu and the Detroit trio Death, whose 1974 recordings sat unreleased until Drag City put them out in 2009. Others keep it narrow: bands whose records the 1976 groups demonstrably owned and copied. Some critics reject the term outright, on the reasonable grounds that it judges a band by what came after it rather than by what it did.

Both camps have a point. We use the narrow version here, because it is the one that explains garage punk. Patti Smith matters enormously to punk. She matters much less to the Oblivians.

The starting point: Count Five and the one-hit single

Every route starts at the same kind of record. Count Five, from San Jose, took “Psychotic Reaction” into the Billboard top five in 1966 with a Yardbirds rave-up borrowed nearly whole. They never repeated it. In 1971 Lester Bangs wrote a long, deranged piece for Creem imagining the albums Count Five should have made next. That essay is roughly where rock writing decided a one-hit garage band could be a serious subject.

The bridge also had a human form. Lenny Kaye compiled Nuggets for Elektra in 1972 and then became Patti Smith’s guitarist. The man who canonised the 1966 singles was on stage in the bands that followed them. We covered the compilation side in the history of garage punk, so we will not do it twice.

The Detroit road: the MC5 and the Stooges

Detroit and Ann Arbor are where the volume came from. Danny Fields signed both bands to Elektra in 1968, and later managed the Ramones, which makes him the shortest line on this whole map.

The MC5 recorded Kick Out the Jams live at the Grande Ballroom in October 1968. It is a soul revue played by men who think the amps should be louder than the crowd, with John Lee Hooker’s “Motor City Is Burning” turned into a riot report. Elektra dropped them anyway. The follow-up, Back in the USA (1970, Atlantic), was produced by Jon Landau and sounds like a different band: short, tight, almost thin, with Chuck Berry’s title track and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”. It flopped. It is also the more important record for garage punk, because it is the Ramones’ method six years early: brief songs, 1950s covers, no jamming.

The Stooges went down instead of forward. John Cale produced their 1969 debut, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is three chords, Ron Asheton’s fuzz and a sleigh bell. Fun House (1970) is the one we would play first. Its producer, Don Gallucci, had played organ on the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie”, which ties the most violent record of 1970 directly to the most famous accident of 1963. Raw Power (1973, Columbia) brought in James Williamson’s guitar and a David Bowie mix that people have argued about ever since.

The New York road: Velvets, Dolls, Dictators

The Velvet Underground are the hardest fit. Lou Reed had worked as a songwriter for hire at Pickwick, a budget label turning out cheap knock-offs, and their 1967 Verve debut came with Andy Warhol’s banana on the sleeve. Moe Tucker stood up to play a stripped-down kit. This was art-school music, not teenage music. What it handed down was permission to repeat one idea until it becomes hypnotic, and plenty of garage punk runs on exactly that.

The New York Dolls were the opposite: no drone, all swagger. Todd Rundgren produced their 1973 debut for Mercury. For the second, Too Much Too Soon (1974), they hired Shadow Morton, who had made the Shangri-Las’ records. That choice tells you what they thought they were: a 1964 pop group with Johnny Thunders’ guitar. Malcolm McLaren managed them briefly in 1975, then went home to London and put together the Sex Pistols.

The Dictators are the funniest stop and the most underrated. Go Girl Crazy! came out on Epic in 1975, produced by Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, and it sold almost nothing. It includes a cover of the Rivieras’ “California Sun”, the 1964 surf-pop hit the Ramones also cut for Leave Home two years later. Two bands from the same city reached for the same frat-party single. It also includes a song called “Teengenerate”, which a Tokyo band borrowed as a name and then took to Crypt in the 1990s. That is one record, two decades of the map.

The holdouts: Flamin’ Groovies and Modern Lovers

Some bridges were built by people who simply refused to move on. The Flamin’ Groovies played Chuck Berry and Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll in San Francisco while the city wanted twenty-minute jams. Teenage Head (1971) is their peak as a rough band. By 1976 they had gone power-pop: “Shake Some Action”, produced by Dave Edmunds, came out on Sire, the same label as the Ramones.

Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers came out of Boston as Velvet Underground obsessives. John Cale produced demos for them in 1972. Those tapes sat until Beserkley released The Modern Lovers in 1976, by which point the band was gone and Richman had moved on to quiet songs. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads; drummer David Robinson joined the Cars. “Roadrunner” is the track: a riff that barely changes, a car, the radio on, and enough joy to carry the whole thing.

The far road: Brisbane and Sydney

The cleanest proof that this was a map rather than a scene is Australia. Radio Birdman formed in Sydney around Deniz Tek, a guitarist from Ann Arbor, and took their name from a misheard line in the Stooges’ “1970”. Detroit was exported to Sydney by one person in a suitcase. Radios Appear (1977) is the result.

Up the coast, the Saints in Brisbane self-released “(I’m) Stranded” in 1976 on their own label. The British music press noticed and EMI signed them. Chris Bailey sings like a man with no interest in your approval, and Ed Kuepper’s guitar is a wall rather than a lead.

What the archive says

We keep the recovered playlists of sixteen underground radio shows, and we count how many separate shows played an artist at least once. The Ramones turn up in nine of the sixteen. The Saints turn up in five. For a Brisbane band whose best-known record is half a century old, that is a lot of hosts, on shows built around current garage punk, independently deciding it still belongs on the air. Proto-punk is not a museum wing to these people. It is in the rotation.

Where to start

Six records, in this order: Back in the USA, Fun House, Go Girl Crazy!, The Modern Lovers, the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded and Radios Appear. Then go straight to the Gories and hear how much of that survived.

For the bands that took it from there, ranked by evidence, see the best garage punk bands. The counts come from our archive, documentation rebuilt from Internet Archive captures of a network that no longer runs. This site is independently owned and not affiliated with that network, its hosts or its contributors.