robert quine

Punk rock meant different things to different people in the 70s. For every band like the Ramones, Dead Boys and Stooges, where the music was like a nihilistic sledgehammer, pulverizing the last remnants of 60s idealism into oblivion, you also had Wire, Pere Ubu, and the Voidoids, among others, bands with artistic pretensions, attempting (however obliquely) to make significant cultural statements. I tend to be suspicious of artistic overreach and self-importance in rock ’n roll no matter whether the package it comes in is punk, or 60s protest music, or R&B, or whatever.  The nostalgic conservative in me wishes that pop music had never transcended fast cars, pretty girls, and burger stands glistening in the neon night. I know that American Graffiti is a deeply reactionary film, yet I love it and identify with it in spite of myself. It’s probably no surprise, then, that art punk is a particularly difficult pill for me to swallow.  But there are nevertheless a handful of arty punk records that I find irresistible, and one of them is Richard Hell and the Voidoids classic, Blank Generation, which has been a part of my life since I was 16 years old.  More than any other record out of mid-70s New York, including Television’s Marquee Moon, Blank Generation evokes the Great Society's demise as refracted through the lens of the piss-stained alleyways on the lower East Side.  In lesser hands, this would be a depressing backdrop to work with, but Hell has a way of turning cultural decay into an occasion for a perversely celebratory work of art.  Hell is, of course, the main focus of Blank Generation with his fragmentary observations, offered nasally with a vocal delivery that’s somehow both emotionally flat and supremely affected. But it’s really the late Robert Quine’s guitar playing, taut and angular, that gives the record its distinctive sound.  There are very few records that sound like Blank Generation primarily because there are very few guitarists who play like Quine. I can’t think of any off hand, actually. His style is dissonant, almost avant-garde, and not the kind of thing I normally buy into, but he’s so good and so fearless in his playing, and it’s impossible to ignore just how intimately he understands and actualizes the full potential of the guitar.  Quine played with lots of different people and almost always elevated the music he was a part of, but I will always think of him as the guitarist for the Voidoids. I’m still discovering new things in his playing after almost 30 years of listening to Blank Generation, and still completely turned on by the things I discovered long ago…