The Damned, "New Rose"

Last week I had the good fortune to see my friend Greg's band The Downstrokes perform at the Bowery Electric. The club is just a block north of where CBGBs used to be, and continues its spirit. Down in the basement a bunch of bands played hard, fast and loud.

Since then I have been revisiting the first wave of punk rock, music that had first energized me in my teen years. All the grunge bands I loved referred to this stuff as an influence, and the first time I popped Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols into the tape deck of my 1992 Mazda Protege I fell in love. This music was so much more vital, energizing, and just plain electrifying than anything I was hearing in the early 90s.

Around that time Rhino put out a series of compilations on early punk, and I played the one on the first wave of UK punk almost to death. This was where I first learned of X Ray Spex, Wire, and The Damned.

The latter were the first UK punk band to release a single and an album. That first single, "New Rose," was about the phenomenon of punk rock itself. The "rose" of the title is not a new girlfriend, but the new punk rock sound. It's about falling in love with this new music, and that swooning, intoxicating feeling of a new infatuation. (Appropriately enough, the Downstrokes' latest album is called Fall In Love With Punk Rock Again.)

That first wave of punk felt less like a new music and more like a new religion. The young and hungry Savonarolas had burst into the gilded palaces of 70s rock to smash the idols and erect a bonfire of the vanities to burn to the ground. It was such an exciting moment that there were people still chasing it in a bowery basement 43 years later. No song channels that feeling better than "New Rose."