I was a roadie for The Clash's North American Tours and worked with many of the seminal bands in 1975 on. My brother was with Iggy during that period. So I was a witness to it all. I was 15/16 years old, so you can imagine seeing this through those young eyes.
As mentioned above, the movement is really linked to the Detroit bands like the MC5 and Iggy in 1969. The intention was to get back to the roots of rockabilly and 50's rock, where it was more about raw feel than precision, which these Michigan bands represented in spades. Another influential band was the NY Dolls. In my conversations with Joe and Mick of the Clash, they were the bands mentioned the most as influences. Joe was also very much influenced by seeing the early Pistols at the Nashville, a pub in Fulham Road in London. He quit his pub rock band the 101ers to form the Clash with Mick and Paul after seeing them play those shows. They admired the Ramones (more on this in a moment) but never talked about them much in my conversations with them.
Malcom McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, had visited NY to see the Dolls in 1973 and that band was used as a template to launch a response to prog rock and pub rock that was the prevailing sounds in the UK at the time.
The NY Bands and the English bands that followed fed off this need to re-energize the music around simple chord structures and energetic time signatures. The emergence of the Ramones in 1975, and their landmark show in July of 1976 in London, launched forty bands in its wake in London alone. The Damned were a direct response to these shows.
Malcom ran a bondage shop called SEX that became the defacto shop for what became the punk look.
The thing I remember most was the shows were very small. In LA, The Dickies, The Circle Jerks, The Germs, X, the Alley Cats, and Fear all played to crowds that averaged 50 to 500, so despite what anyone says, this was music for outsiders. The NY clubs were no bigger.
To my knowledge, only the Clash really broke through, and played at the US Festival in 1983 in front of 100,000 people.
