Nirvana And Co. Are Carrying Punk's Torch

"AGerman interviewer asked me why I was ripping off Nirvana.

"I politely told him that he was Very Mistaken Indeed."

So says John Lydon - better known as Johnny Rotten, the voice of the Sex Pistols, perhaps the most influential rock vocalist of the past two decades. He arrives in Seattle on Tuesday for what could be the most important show he has played in years, the "MTV 120 Minutes Tour" at the Paramount ($21.50; 628-0888).

In the past he has seemed untouchable to rock fans: a demigod in monster's clothing; the man who wrote a dozen punk-rock anthems; the voice that brought Great Britain to its knees. Public Image Limited, the band he has led for the past 14 years, might never have reached the same heights, but Lydon remains the King of Punk.

Jonathan Poneman, of the local record label Sub Pop, still ranks the Pistols' solitary album, "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" (1977), among the most important records ever - not only as a musical testament but "as a manifesto which has strangely become more apropos to our circumstances right here and right now than to their circumstances, there and then."

"What the Pistols said to Britain in 1976-'77," he notes, "they are still saying to America today." The difference is, this time they are not alone in saying it.

Lydon refuses to discuss the legacy he has laid down.

But he is as aware as anyone that when he steps out on the stage, the demand on everybody's lips will not be "show us what you can do," but "let us show you what we've done."

Robert Roth, vocalist with Truly, a Sub Pop band, sums it up best.

"Nirvana has done what the Pistols, the Clash and all those could never do. They've taken punk to the top of the charts."

That much is true.

The Pistols' album stalled at No. 106 on the Billboard chart. The Damned - the first British punks to reach the U.S. - never scored an American hit. Even the Clash, whose Mick Jones will also be on the MTV tour with Big Audio Dynamite II, only scratched the national Top 10.

But Nirvana's "Nevermind" went all the way to No. 1, and not only in the U.S. Their success repeated itself in Britain, to the exclusion of the home-grown punks.

What, then, has Seattle punk got that its British counterpart hasn't?

According to journalist Jon Savage, author of the newly published punk history "England's Dreaming" (St. Martin's Press, $27.50), the failure of British punk to make a commercial breakthrough to rival its media impact was the result of distrust. The musicians, scornful of traditional music-biz practices, refused to conform to its demands; the industry, in turn, refused to take punk seriously. By the time the two were ready to embrace each other - which in the U.S. was as late as the mid-1980s - virtually all the original punk bands were finished.

In a book that otherwise weighs down its painstakingly well-researched background with a lot of politicizing ("irrelevant waffle!" says Lydon), that's a pertinent observation. Savage paints a scenario in which Nirvana's success is essentially the commercial fulfillment of a drama that opened in London 15 years ago.

"If Elvis Presley and the '50s' rock-'n'-rollers set the tone for music through the '60s and '70s," says Roth, the vocalist with Truly, "the Pistols did the same for the '80s and beyond. They redefined rock-'n'-roll."

Presley died in 1977, just as the Pistols were reaching their peak. They simply picked up his torch, Roth says, and have been running with it ever since.

Dustin Waln, manager of the Moore Theatre, agrees. "It was the Ramones and the Pistols who sparked the Seattle punk scene, just as they did everywhere else in America. People heard them, saw they had records out. It was really egalitarian; `Hey, I can do this.' One note, three chords and a cheap Japanese guitar, and you're a punk group."

The difference was, as Roth emphasizes, "in other cities, new ideas come in and displace those that are already in place."

But in Seattle, "they just join the stew, swirl around with everything else that's in there," he says. "What comes out of Seattle simply combines everything that's gone in - heavy metal, punk, whatever."

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on "Another Damned Seattle Compilation," the recently released tribute album to (who else?) the Damned, the group who, with the Clash and the Pistols, made up punk's original Unholy Trinity.

Mudhoney, Skin Yard and Love Battery are among the 18 local acts coming to grips with the band's back catalog. Brian James, the Damned's original guitarist and songwriter, happily admits that there are some ideas going into those songs today that he would have loved to have dreamed up himself.

"It's a cross-fertilization of cultures," James says. "You can see the different influences - metal, punk, whatever - going on in (the album), and the result, although it remains true to the songs, remains true to the bands as well." It isn't, he concludes, the sound of people playing at punk; it's the sound of them still living it.

Buzz Osborne, leader of the Melvins (a band formed in Aberdeen but now based in San Francisco), describes this cross-fertilization in action.

Osborne says he was brought up on a diet of " '70s metal - Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, things like that." His conversion to punk, he says, was no different from that experienced by any "reasonably aware, reasonably curious, 14- or 15-year-old." He saw photographs of the Sex Pistols and the Clash in such magazines as Hit Parader and Creem.

"I bought the Sex Pistols album out of curiosity, to find out what people who looked like that could sound like."

What affected him was "the energy and aggression. The political message didn't really mean much. It was more the idea of music seeming so uncontrolled, but having such a tight musical focus. It was so different from anything I had ever heard before.

"Then I met someone who had all the British punk records - the Vibrators, 999, Buzzcocks - stuff that I'd never heard of."

A lot of it, he says, was rubbish - nothing more than a buzzsaw guitar and somebody screaming. But it was vital nevertheless.

"It let me sort out in my own mind the stuff I wanted to live with - and the stuff I could live without. That collection was my education."

Osborne remembers his first meeting with Nirvana's Kurt Cobain: "He looked like a teenage runaway. Still does, in fact." But within days of their meeting - legend claims it was Osborne's Sex Pistols books that first interested Cobain - Cobain had spiked his hair and started spray-painting cars. "I claimed I would forever be a punk," Cobain told Alternative Press magazine.

So far Nirvana, and other bands that have grown up in this area, have remained true to that pledge.

"Punk rock is about total rejects," says Mudhoney's Steve Turner. "If you see a bunch of guys on the stage that look like `rock' people, you say, `Oh, a rock band.' It's far scarier to see total freaks up there going AAAAAARRRRUUUGGGHHH!"

"I saw a couple of (punk) shows where, if the guy broke a guitar string, he'd pull it up and cut his gums, then spit blood at people," says Waln, the manager of the Moore. "Visually and musically, punk was a departure from everything that had happened before."

It still is. In an age where too many pop stars come neatly packaged and safely sanitized, Nirvana, Mudhoney and company stick out like sore thumbs - just like the Pistol-led punks did a decade and a half ago.

The only problem, notes Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop, is where does it go from here?

"Musically, it's very satisfying to see what's happening, not only to Nirvana but to the other bands as well," he says.

"But more exciting are the political ramifications. People buying a Nirvana record are, in effect . . . throwing the old bums out. And that's what punk rock was all about, tearing down the established rock hierarchy and trying to create a new one.

"But no one ever asked what would happen if it succeeded. By demolishing the old establishment, you automatically become the new one. Like Pete Townshend said, `Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' "

It's taken a very long time, but thanks to Nirvana, punk rock is the new boss. The rebels have captured the palace at last.

"Now," says Poneman, "we have to wait and see what will come along next to displace them."

David Thompson, a British-born Seattle writer, is author of the rock-music books "Beyond the Velvet Underground" and "Johnny Rotten in His Own Words," both published in England.