Punk history boys

THE ROOTS OF punk rock. Critics and musicians have been scrapping about that one for years. Did it start in New York with the Ramones, or in London with the Sex Pistols? Was Lou Reed its godfather, or David Bowie?

Compounding the confusion was the myth of punk itself, according to which 1976 was the Big Bang and everything before it a floating murk of hippie rubbish. The punk rockers had an allergy to the retrospective. They took new names, walked in new ways. Old lives and habits of mind were erased: Woody Mellor, pot-smoking gravedigger, became Joe Strummer of the Clash.

But with the publication in October of Steven Lee Beeber's "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk" (Chicago Review) a past has been found for punk rock. Beeber has pointed out what now seems blindingly obvious: That from Lou Reed to Joey Ramone to Voidoids frontman Richard Hell (author of the song "Blank Generation," who invented punk style by hacking at his hair and writing "Please Kill Me" on his torn T-shirt), a clear majority of punk rock's prime movers were American Jews.

For Beeber, this is anything but a coincidence: Stripped of illusion, living in exile, gifted with savage irony, the American Jew is his echt punk rocker, and New York City the true theater of punkdom. Above all, it was in their complex confrontation with the darkness of the Holocaust (partly expressed in punk's Nazi fetish) that these musicians found the energy to create what Beeber calls "a new rock."

In 1977, heyday of the new mood, I was residing at an all-boys Catholic boarding school on the sodden plains of southeast England. To me and my short-trousered peers, all of us smelling of burned toast and head-lice ointment, punk rock was without origin: It was a sort of roving brainstorm, a bristling in the air -- the antithesis of our surroundings. While our half of the country obediently prepared to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee, the other half seemed bent on lascivious uproar; the Sex Pistols's "God Save The Queen" ("God save the Queen/ The fascist regime/ They made you a mo-ron") was No. 2 on the charts. (We couldn't hear it, of course: The BBC had banned the song on account of its "treasonous sentiments.") For us, sealed behind our gray walls, this blaspheming, unmanageable, proletarian music had no history at all. That was why we liked it.

We were sure, however, that punk rock was English -- that it expressed, for our generation, the permanently riotous underside of Englishness. In what other country would punk's messy egalitarianism have been reduced to the practice of "gobbing," or spitting at performers as they played onstage? (Visiting US punk bands were disgusted by this manifestation of English anti-manners.) And where else but glum, strikebound 1970s Britain could the concepts of "boredom" and "anarchy" -- English punk's yin and yang -- have become so twinned? The kinetic interplay of these two mutually dependent states could be observed in the merest street-level follower: In the blank, combustible affect of the local punk drinking cider on the park bench, or halfheartedly vandalizing a phone booth.

Beeber's Jewish punk rock intersects with the English version in the person of Malcolm McLaren -- maven, impresario, and all-round provocateur. Raised in postwar London by a Jewish grandmother who despised conformity -- "A Jew has nothing to do with the police," was one of her mottoes -- McLaren made trips to New York in the early '70s and was deeply impressed by the sensationalism of the New York Dolls (whom he briefly managed) and the stylized nihilism of Richard Hell.

Returning to London, he opened an outre clothing store called Sex and began to assemble the mightiest of his weapons against the straight world: the Sex Pistols. "When those boys were stealing clothing from my shop on the Kings Road," he tells Beeber, "I took them and made them my own. Those 'artful dodgers' became my gang, my band, the Sex Pistols."

Artful dodgers: McLaren's grandmother had taught him that Fagin, a caricature of Semitic villainy, was the true hero of Dickens's "Oliver Twist." McLaren's media smarts and ruthless timing ensured that the Sex Pistols were headline news for almost three years. His relentlessly antagonistic, exhibitionist style -- often blamed (not least by its ex-members) for the downfall of the band -- was, as he saw it, an outsider's response to society: a Jew's response. "It all came naturally," he tells Beeber. "This was my childhood. This was how I was brought up. This was my world, my anti-world if you like."

That does it for me. I'm convinced. Punk rock? It's a Jewish thing. And as for the Brits -- well, we'll always have gobbing.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.