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The term "punk," when used in reference to '60s garage music, is not well understood. In essence, garage punk developed when American youths mimicked the sound of British R&B and the attitudes of British rockers, but ended up creating a cruder, snottier, and more urgent sound that expressed their own concerns and views of life. Garage punk focuses on liberation from social expectations, conventions, and mores, and it usually takes the form of songs in which the garage punk puts down or rejects his errant girlfriend, professes his enlightenment or hip superiority, or describes his "psychotic reaction" to some emotional trauma.
The word "punk" is loaded with associations these days, but most of them have to do with the "blank generation" of the 1970s rather than garage music of the 1960s. For those who know anything at all about rock music, "punk" evokes memories of short, frenetic bursts of discordant sound, pogoing, spiky haircuts, ripped clothing, and safety-pin jewelry. When used in reference to '60s garage bands, the word "punk" conveys much less definite impressions, even though the term was coined by Lenny Kaye back in 1972 while writing liner notes for the first-ever collection of '60s garage music called Nuggets. Greg Shaw, another giant in the world of garage music, explains that a few years after he and Kaye began using the phrase "punk rock," it was appropriated by the Sex Pistols and their ilk so he went back to using the label "garage music" (21). For Kaye and Shaw, then, "punk" was synonymous with "garage." However, in looking over the 27 songs collected on Nuggets, I would classify only about ten of them as garage punk; the other 17 are pop or rock and roll or some variation on these two forms. Clearly, the meaning of the word "punk" has evolved since the early '70s.
So what does "punk" mean when used in reference to '60s garage music? The beginnings of a definition can be found in the liner notes of Nuggets, where Kaye describes "punk-rock" as the music played by "young" and "decidedly unprofessional" teen groups that "exemplified the berserk pleasure that comes with being onstage outrageous, the relentless middle-finger drive and determination offered only by rock and roll at its...