Punk And My Experience

[RonPrice]

PUNK

 

By 1973 I had had twenty years of listening to products of the rock ‘n’ roll industry. By 1973 rock ‘n’ roll had fractured, splintered into many sub-genres and hardly meant anything coherent. Still, it was big business and had come to mean many things. I, too, had come to mean many things by the late 1960s. I had had my period of total incoherence before rock ‘n’ roll came to enjoy its incoherence in the years ahead. The first manifestations of a bi-polar disorder kept me busy in the sixties. I had splintered and fractured and was trying to put myself, like humpty-dumpty, together again. It was about this time, in 1973/4, that punk and disco music had their embryogenesis. By that time I, too, was experiencing an embryogenesis. This rebirth, this getting it together, as we used to call it, was taking its primary forms in an impressive job as a senior tutor in human relations at a College in Tasmania Australia. I was also getting something else together as a husband and step-father, roles insensibly acquired as a result of an incalculable blend of id and super-ego.

 

I don’t think I ever had any idea of what was happening in the overall picture of the music world in rock, in jazz, in classical, indeed, music in any form. Life had kept me busy with sport, studies, relationships, jobs, Baha’i life and its attendant communities, health and with moving from the land of the Inuit to the land of the Aboriginal. It was impossible for me to keep up on who was singing what in: soft-rock, hard-rock, country-rock, folk-rock, punk-rock, shock-rock, disco; who the artists were and what record was coming onto the charts. My emotions and intellect were chocker-block full of other stuff and music remained something it had always been, sweet and stimulating, but something on the periphery of my life.-Ron Price with thanks to “Songs That Changed The World,” 1:00-1:30 am, SBS TV, August 8th, 2005.

 

I got it with my mother’s milk

and my father’s ear—a man

who could tune a piano by ear,

self-taught, strong Welsh voice,

choirs, singing around the piano,

my little blue radio, 2nd generation,

bringing sound into my bedroom

night after night; TV, 1st generation

watching sweet sounds generated

for the eye and ear more than any

generation in history, a kaleidoscope,

a cornucopia of stuff to keep the senses

as busy as little beavers, to keep our search

exceeding our grasp more than ever before,

hopefully dissatisfied more than ever before,

but not necessarily a divine discontent and

with no idea what heaven was for any more.

 

All part of a universal servicing and supply

system for the private realm and community

just about obliterated by individualism’s place

where no community can be constructed.

Democracy may lead to a sterilisation

of differences, as some argue, and here,

in this new Order differences are a spice

we have only begun to learn to deal with—

community building has only stuck its head

above the ground and music, man, it’s everywhere.

As Neitzsche once said: we can drown in its rhythm.

 

Ron Price

August 11th 2005