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By Root 815 0

were needed to keep everything twitching. Punk was an after-dark pursuit, but the darkness doubled, to quote a Television lyric, and acquired a taste of blood in its mouth and the oral archery of letting fly with saliva and phlegm. The array of spit tricks that came to be associated with punk were a British import, Talking Heads and other New York bands returning from their first English tours full of battle tales about being saliva-bombed in a relentless bukkake while onstage; as I recall, Tina Weymouth was a favorite rain target of punk gobbers, being spat on cited as a welcoming gesture of acceptance, like the Hells Angels pissing on an inductee’s jeans as part of the initiation ceremony, then making him put them on. Coming offstage night after night and removing a dripping coat of spittle with a dry towel didn’t foster a sense of belonging, however, no matter how favorable the subsequent reviews. Pogoing, too, was an English import, an indoor exercise perfect for tight spots, turning the pogoer into a hopping human exclamation mark. (Whereas disco demanded tons of hip room under the dome to set Dionysian centrifugal forces into motion.) Pogoing was compared to the hopping of the Masai, but the Masai hopped in unison, at least in the African documentaries and dubious colonial-war movie footage I had seen, whereas this indoor bouncing was closer to Whac-a-Mole with shaven and Mohawked heads popping up through the holes.

The droogier members of the English punk scene and the rock journalists who critically ransacked their way through the columns of New Musical Express (NME, as it was better known, a homonym for “enemy,” as the Sex Pistols reminded us in “Anarchy in the U.K.”) and Xeroxed fanzines with names like Sniffin’ Glue and ransom-note layouts found much of the New York punk scene de-balled with artiness, affectation, and rhyming couplets, unwilling to wage militia battle against the deadwood holding insurrectionary energies down. While David Byrne seemed to be knitting a cardigan with his acoustic guitar and Tom Verlaine conducted a séance with the French Symbolist poets in some automobile graveyard, English punk bands such as the Damned had songs titled “Stab Your Back,” and another band with a heavy rep was called the Stranglers, as if it had no need of sharp implements to inflict harm. None of the CBGB’s punk bands were politically, militantly barricades-smashing like the Clash, a band Patti was the first to clue me in on and who seemed to have scoped out the field of fire for themselves. Unlike the Sex Pistols, whose cobra attack and anarchist cry, thrilling as it was, seemed too obvious a wicked potion whipped up in the manager-impresario Malcolm McLaren’s Dada lab. A brilliant magpie with a knack for extracting the most delectable, usable bits, McLaren played his protégés and the press like a cross between Dickens’s Fagin and Diaghilev, an exploiter capable of producing exaltation, although the corrosive charisma of Johnny Rotten—who always looked a little jaundiced around the gills—and the nose-bloodied insensibility of the bassist Sid Vicious proved more than even McLaren’s mesmerist power could handle.

As English punk bands snatched the imaginations of New York rock fans by the scruffy balls and snub-nosed tits, the New York scene began to sling the drool around like sloppy seconds, and bands such as the Dead Boys became the house sensations. They were not subtle, the Dead Boys, jingling with Nazi regalia and flying a snot rag as their pirate flag, but they made for good copy and oodles of after-dinner conversation, taking romance for a spin with such numbers as “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth” and “Flame Thrower Love.” While their black leather look may have been borrowed from the Ramones (with Joey’s blessing—he noodged them to move to New York), their stage exploits were more Iggy Pop–ish, each set a roller-coaster ride on a pain-pleasure sine wave. Pain was represented by the lead singer, Stiv Bators, looping the mike cord around his neck into a noose and hanging himself from the stage’s light