#375/1011
1985 Housekeeping
Johnny Thunders
Que Sera, Sera
Genre: Punk…?
2.5 out of 5
Highlights:
I Only Wrote This Song for You
I just finished reading Please Kill Me, an overlong but exhaustively interesting book about the birth, life and death of the first wave of Punk.
There are a lot of takeaways, most notably that Lou Reed is a semi talented (my thoughts) asshole (Legs McNeil’s depiction) and that Patti Smith was a tourist who really just wanted to be a suburban housewife after she dabbled in music as the godmother of punk.
One of the things I found most interesting is how punk starts with (among a few others) The New York Dolls. How that morphed over 10 years is fascinating. Especially since the Dolls don’t sound “punk” to me. But I grew up in the Dead Kennedys era.
The Dolls just sound like the Rolling Stones if the Stones can’t play their instruments all that well and were on heroin.
Speaking of heroin, the book ends with the death of one of the first punks, Johnny Thunders, a musician looking for a way to be his true self: a junkie.
When he’s on his game (“I Only Wrote This Song For You”, “Little Bit of Whore”) it’s like the Dolls never went away. Then there’s shit like “Cool Operator” (though not as bad as Dee Dee Ramone’s foray into rap) and “Tie Me Up” and you know why this record didn’t save Thunders from himself.
The title song, the cover of the Doris Day hit, doesn’t appear on the proper lp but I had to listen to it. It doesn’t succeed in the same way that Vicious’ “My Way” did. It’s cute and it’s a harbinger of what will and has come from the likes of every punk band ever (DKs “Rawhide”, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes).
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