Ridiculously incorrect beliefs you had about music and musicians while growing up

Sonic Youth were absolutely beeing cheeky with "The Year Punk Broke" etc, since they knew full well the US was way behind on punk

Punk rock was considered corny as hell in the UK by the time all these US bands washed up on our shores blithering on about it.

The year punk blithered and died.

I remember hearing the Clash when "Rock the Casbah" was an actual Top Forty hit in the US (and liking it), but nothing else, on the radio anyway.

I also remember one character in a Stephen King book saying to another, "You've gotta hear this band the Ramones — they're hilarious." I didn't actually hear the Ramones until maybe...1985? I bought Leave Home and then a couple of years later I bought the Ramones Mania compilation and eventually got around to the first two albums.

I had a slightly older friend whose slightly older brother was into punk in the early 80s, though, so I heard Black Flag and Flipper and Dead Kennedys by around 1983. That same friend insisted that Motörhead were the only metal band worth listening to, so I bought No Remorse (which was new, so this would have been 1984) even though I was already listening to Judas Priest.

Suicidal Tendencies and DRI got played on MuchMusic's metal show but I just thought they were metal (which they were by then).

My oldest brother only listened to Jethro Tull, but his girlfriend had Ramones records (probably more inspired more by fun novelty than punk orthodoxy). My middle brother listened to Rush and Led Zeppelin, but also Sex Pistols, Clash, PiL and Siouxsie. So reading a few years later that fans of these artists were supposed to be at war with each other was an incorrect belief I had to question.

https://www.tshirtsonscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/theyoungonesrushtshirt-e1450118659710-1024x598.jpg

Well I never!

I recall being in a record store around the time the Sex Pistols album came out, and the guys that worked there slapped it on the turntable and proceeded to ridicule it for its "amateurism." I thought it sounded pretty good, not that different from the hard rock I was into at the time (Alice Cooper, Blue Oyster Cult and Bowie, primarily.) Didn't get where they were coming from.

I was thinking about Xmas '79 the other day... how Pink Floyd seemed like a bunch of old geezers (my brother had had WYWH on cassette, and I associated that with the tail end of his ELP prog phase, years before), like 50-something at least, and how shocking it was to discover that Dave Gilmour was younger than Debbie Harry! I also thought of Bryan Ferry as much older than, say, McCartney or Bowie.

I can't recall ever not knowing "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go." Both were played on normal pop radio in St. Louis when I was in junior high school, 1983ish. But I doubt I heard "London Calling" or "Train in Vain" until high school, and wouldn't have heard (for example) "Guns of Brixton" until college.

v surprised to hear that "Should I Stay or Should I Go" was a chart hit in 1990(?), apparently it was in a commercial?

My father was into the Ramones and New York Dolls, so I must have heard those things but they didn't leave an impression on me. I considered myself a New Wave kid. Even when I moved to DC, punk manifested itself more as a group of fashion choices than a music genre. "Punks" were people who went to Commander Salamander and Smash for purple temporary hair dye and shirts made of safety pins, plaid miniskirts, Docs, etc. You could have a Dead Kennedys pin on your backpack, and it read as "edgy," but no one in my personal orbit connected it to owning or listening to music.

I dressed up as a punk for Halloween in 1st or 2nd grade. Think I actually repeated the costume the next year or year after. I have no idea how I was even aware of what a punk was. Def hadn't heard actual punk music.

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite did a report on the Sex Pistols American tour in early '78, so probably loads of middle-aged and older Americans were exposed to punk at the same time or before younger Americans were.

I mean people knew what it was, but it didn't get played on the radio, outside from niche shows on college or New Wave stations as mentioned above.

Actually I remember one week one of the big AM Top Forty stations announced they were doing as a service by playing one Punk song per evening. Feel like I managed to hear two or three: The Stranglers, "Hanging Around"
The Ramones, "Rockaway Beach"
The Sex Pistols, "Pretty Vacant"
(maybe for the latter he said "I can't say their name")

wait, I thought British people copied punk from Dee Dee Ramone?

Yeah, sort of.

But they made it their own!

Sure but it was easier for them to do so bc the Ramones had top 40 hits in the UK and not in the US.xps

Also James Redd otm.

Really the way I experienced it is that punk became post-punk New Wave etc so soon and those other, um, genres outlived and outlasted punk for quite a while, so I only ever heard the initial blast of punk - from a year before!- as some kind of underplayed oldies- the same way I heard a lot of classic rock before I heard some of the deeper 50s stuff.

Yeah the caveat in this whole argument (apologies for the digression) is that, even setting aside the early NYC bands, LA and SF already had their own punk scenes in 1977, so we’re not talking about coastal hipsters here but about the mass US culture where punk was kind of a shadowy, negligible presence.

(but seriously tho) afaict extent of the way punk "happened" on North American rock radio was that a punk element infiltrated hard rock and metal (van Halen, Guns N Roses, etc). And even the Nirvana and Green Day wave of punk is basically a version of this.

The artier side of punk only made it over here as new wave, i think.

Just checking the release dates of Never Mind the Bollocks and This Year's Model, and maybe I'm amazed or maybe I am not at how closely one followed on the heels of the other.

I def felt, as a kid who liked classic rock and "oldies" and prog etc in the mid 90's, that there was a sense the Nirvana and Green Day wave of punk had killed off the bloated old dinosaurs, yeah. The few bands acceptable to both parties were on the hard rock-metal spectrum, like GNR or Metallica.

I don't know in what way they were killed off, though? You hear "Aqualung" less than you used to but I think that has more to do with the classic rock format updating itself in subsequent years rather than something that happened in response to Nirvana or Green Day. (I was going to say "Roundabout" too but that's become a meme. It has 20M more Spotify plays than "Anarchy in the UK".) Aerosmith and Eric Clapton were still among the biggest artists of the 90s, Pink Floyd's Division Bell tour was huge, "Stairway" and "Hotel California" were still topping the classic rock station's 'greatest songs' lists, and then we got OK Computer a couple of years later.

Smashing Pumpkins, NIN, and Soundgarden were all earnestly paying tribute to 'dinosaur' bands.

it's all tidy rock-crit narrative and not worth fussing over TOO much..... but could there be a case that more broadly, punk and new wave didn't kill off the towering monumental AOR bands, but DID maybe kind of gradually change the sound/style of the average local band, average bar band? like, not that there was a national ban on chooglin' or white blues imitation, but maybe that more and more bands were trying to sound more like The Cars than like Grand Funk. iow it's more like local 60s garage-rock displacing Elvis and Frankie Valli wannabes than a mass deletion of the big names...?

and in terms of chart action you'd find it in Hall and Oates updating their sound, Huey Lewis scoring big, etc., not in more aggressive stuff tearing up the airwaves (until GnR and then Nirvana maybe)... idk.

Yes, my theory of grunge rock is that people around my age (born late ‘60s) who were schooled on rock as adolescents via ‘70s bands like Kiss, Cheap Trick, BOC, Aerosmith, perhaps Sabbath, Zeppelin… larer discovered punk in high school, very likely playing in a punk band at that time and adopting a punk philosophy… and then at some point post-high school had the epiphany that those old school hard rock bands were actually kind of good, and that one could meld the punk rock attitude and punk principles with the chops and weightiness of those classic ‘70s bands. And grunge rock was that melding.

not that there was a national ban on chooglin'

If chooglin' is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

That photo above of Vyvyan jogged my memory - he was probably my first impression of whatever "punk" was (when The Young Ones started running on MTV in 85/86), until I started seeing/hearing whatever punk/post-punk Dave Kendall would dredge up on 120 Minutes a year or two later.

I used to think that making music was super difficult and virtually impossible for a person like me (even in spite of the punk "anyone can do it" mentality + riot grrrl emerging during my most formative years) but as it turns out, that is not so.

I mean, I was into punk/hardcore/noise-rock in the mid-90s but everyone involved with it thought of it as an underground thing vs behemoths like Aerosmith that dominated the airwaves.xp

I was watching Repo Man from an early age, so I had a pretty good idea of what at least that slice of punk culture & music was about (not to pat myself on the back, just adding my experience). Plus, like someone else above, I'm sure I saw punks in Georgetown (D.C.), near where we lived.

Until I was well into my college years, I assumed that artistic merit was sorta inversely proportional to popularity. Like all these obscure indie/punk bands that people had buttoned to their jean jacket were inherently better than the top 40 I was listening to, but my ear just wasn't discerning/mature enough yet. I didn't really occur to me that they might be obscure because they were bad, or that they might be lo-fi because no one wanted to advance them any money to record their songs properly.

If I'm honest, I still haven't completely shaken off this prejudice.

Kelefa Sanneh personal history piece slots nicely into this derail

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-education-of-a-part-time-punk

Growing up in the New England countryside, punk was a definately a thing, but it was an inner suburb/urban thing. Punk got to me via a state collage radio station, early-80s high school. I was the only kid making a Clash tshirt in the printshop class - much easier than making a one-pass silkscreen out of a Journey cover, as I saw a classmate struggle with. Jocks and burnouts knew about it, but it wasn't present. The quarterback was in my guitar class, and he'd heard a Fear song, but didn't know any more than that, but thought the bile was hilarious. He taught me how to play Misty Mountain Hop. My clique could get a ride to a train to get into the subway into Boston, and that's how we got the records and eventually, the shows.

At this point maybe the use of the word “punk” is kind of like the use of the word “surreal”: does it refer to a specific, somewhat brief moment in time or does it refer to all kinds of other stuff that came afterward and was somehow inspired by the original thing?

When graphic equalisers became fashionable in the early 80s I thought that they were used to isolate the different instruments on a track so you could only hear the bass guitar or drums or whatever.

Haha so did I. I was SO disappointed to find this wasn’t the case.

I know this is just a misheard lyric, but to me it transcends that because I had the title of the song wrong in my head for years. When the song Cult of Personality came out (I was 10), I somehow took it in as “Cultive Personality”. It never came up in conversation, so I was never corrected, and somehow I never saw the actual song title in print. The mishearing stuck with me, unquestioned, until my middle teens when I “rediscovered” Living Colour and read the lyrics. It took some serious recalibration to come to terms with the actual title/lyric and the fact that I had had it wrong for so long.

For at least a few months I thought it was "pumped-up personality".

Well, this isn't music related but I used to think Timbuktu, Abu Dhabi and Walla Walla, Washington were made up place names.

FP'd you for racism

(ie not including Woop Woop, Woy Woy, or Wagga Wagga)

i'm MENA fwiw and p sure my mom still thinks Timbuktu is not a real place

I have a vague recollection of thinking that electric guitars weren't real guitars, you just plugged them in and they would play themselves and guitarists were just pretending to play them during concerts (I guess electric to me meant that it was somehow all automated). This was when I was probably 5 or 6.

I thought it was standard practice to include not just lyrics but guitar chords in your CD inlays, like on Blur's Parklife and was disappointed to realise this was just Blur. More bands should have done this

Complete notated transcriptions or gtfo

Otm

I thought you could just nail a wire into an acoustic guitar then nail the other end into a stereo speaker to make it electric

I thought it was standard practice to include not just lyrics but guitar chords in your CD inlays, like on Blur's Parklife and was disappointed to realise this was just Blur. More bands should have done this.

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin)

I wish.

Not on the US CD. No lyrics or chords.

We were strumming along
To Beetlebum

I thought John Cale and JJ Cale were the same person