In his new book We Never Learn, the Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books, 2010), former New Bomb Turks frontman, and now author Eric Davidson occasionally uses phrases like “the last moment,” and “the end days.” Such phrases usually appear in the context of describing some aspect of now-extinct New York City and its last relevant spurts of rocknroll. For example, according to Davidson, the band Pussy Galore rose from “the very last moment of lower Manhattan as the glorified dung heap at the end of the American empire.” Similarly, the Devil Dogs, who formed in New York in 1989, did so during “the end days of the ol’ Bowery landscape.” These qualifiers get dropped into the copy fairly early on, and seem incidental enough at first. But read on and they begin to take on broader implications. In coining the admittedly silly name Gunk Punk and shaping it into a coherent scene worth chronicling, Davidson might be writing about the “last moment” and “end days” of rocknroll itself.
About that scene: the Undergut stretched way past New York City, reaching as far as the West Coast, Europe, Japan, Detroit, Memphis, even Ohio! For its pioneers Davidson nominates bands like the aforementioned Pussy Galore, plus the Raunch Hands, Lazy Cowgirls, Dwarves, Cynics, Gories, Billy Childish, and Death of Samantha, among others. Somehow, without these antecedents, most of which go back to the ‘80’s, the early aughts wouldn’t have been blessed with goobers like the White Stripes and the Hives. Or so the hypothesis goes. In the middle limbo between the scene’s earliest detectable pulse and its commercially viable culmination, we get pretty much the entire Crypt Records catalog, circa mid-90’s.
