Filled-in blanks

Revisiting the glory days of punk rock

by Ted Drozdowski

Blank Generation Revisited: The Early Days of Punk Rock Photographs by Roberta Bayley, Stephanie Chernikowski, George DuBose, Godlis, Bob Gruen, and Ebet Roberts. Schirmer, 200 pages, $20.

I remember punk rock just like these photos -- in living black-and-white, kinda blurry, breathing in the dirt of CBGB or sitting out front on the curb of the Bowery at the end of the night, finishing a Bud snuck out in my jacket pocket. And feeling half-guilty after seeing the Ramones and thinking how I'd let my fuckin' meathead friends back home set a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols on fire and throw it in a Connecticut lake as the pyrotechnics display for my birthday.

I'd felt I'd betrayed the ideas -- the art -- that these people who were transforming themselves and their clothes and their music were living. I was an interloper, a thrillseeker, just trying to get a grasp on where this new and fascinating bohemian liberation front was headed. But the people who were playing or roosting at CB's and the Mud Club every night from '77 to '80 were right in the thick of it -- on the front of a cultural battleground that would change a generation's aesthetics. And the shooters of Blank Generation were among them.

These photos -- from glorified snapshots to compelling night portraits that sum up the glorious gray areas of art and psychology that early punk's embrace held -- speak of a time when the music and lifestyle was fresh enough to snap when it bent. They're old postcards from white America's last great creative edge -- from a time when being a "punk" meant you really were an outsider. (By the way, if you think there's anything "punk" about bands who get ferried to gigs by their parents until they sign a big record deal and get mass-marketed to multi-platinum . . . you're wrong.)

Some of this is very familiar: Roberta Bayley's shot of the Ramones from their first album cover and her chocolate-syrup bloodstained portrait of the Heartbreakers; former Spin photo editor George DuBose's fiery satanic rendering of the Fleshtones from their Hexbreaker album; Bob Gruen's shot of the Sex Pistols clowning in a bar with straws; Ebet Robert's Village Voice cover shot of a remarkably fresh-faced Elvis Costello on stage at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, in '78. They're stage shots, dressing-room moments, publicity pix, and street scenes -- capturing all the sweat-tightened leather and attitude we've come to expect from high-quality rock photography.

But the work of Stephanie Chernikowski and Godlis cuts beneath the surface of the early punk scene. Chernikowski gets into her subjects in ways that we haven't often seen. There's a close-up of David Byrne's head, taken from below. And the shadows play on his face in a way that accents the strength of his jaw and his solid cheekbones, making him seem more like a young Marine than a birdlike minstrel. Her shot of Television's Richard Lloyd at CBGB -- the light reflecting off his pageboy haircut, hexagonal sunglasses on well after midnight -- reveals the hustler behind the unpretentious image. There's also Scott Kempner of the Dictators, sweat-soaked and reclining on an abandoned car behind CBGB, that's the essence of a performer who's just hollowed out his soul in performance. Nice stuff.

In his photos of scenesters giving each other haircuts with a cigarette lighter, Patti Smith standing on the corner of Bleecker and Bowery, Arto Lindsay strolling rain-streaked streets, or Richard Hell on stage, a cigarette burning between his fingers as he warbles into the microphone, Godlis brings the surreal edge of the blossoming punk scene into our laps. Like the artists he photographed, he worked in extremes for these pictures -- eschewing flashes in favor of pushing his film to create grainy textures and sharp contrasts in light and darkness. And he shows a knack for capturing great moments, whether it's the Ramones playing on stage at CB's to a packed house or Alex Chilton standing on a median strip, his head illuminated by a shaft of streetlight, an ambulance with flashing lights whirring toward the camera, cars speeding past -- all amplified by a raindrop that hit the camera lens, casting dark little clouds into the image.

Striking as these images can be, the bottom line here is fun. That's how it was for the musicians, too. It's also a blast to see once again faces that have drifted into obscurity, like Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, or Snooky of the Sic Fucks wielding a gigantic meat cleaver. If these artists were indeed part of a Blank Generation, they found plenty to fill that empty canvas.