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«Hey, have you heard Patti Smith, the poetess of punk?»
«Fuck Patti Smith!»
«What about a groundbreaking group like the Talking Heads, what do you think of the Talking Heads?»
«Fuck the Talking Heads too!»
«I see, you don’t like art school punk, you're more of a Ramones type.»
«You've got it figured out, man, fuck the Ramones!»
«Come on, the Ramones are the new thing, I saw them at CBGB's last week, they're awesome.»
«You know what? Fuck CBGB's, you and all the suckers who hang out there. And while we're at it, fuck Max's and fuck Wayne County.»
«But is it because you're stuck in the sixties? Are you still into proto-punk?»
«Exactly, man, fuck the New York Dolls, above all, fuck that junkie bastard Thunders and fuck all the Heartbreakers.»
«I've got it! You think punk was invented by the Pistols.»
«See, you got there yourself? Fuck the Sex Pistols!»
This is what «King of Punk» is, the most solemn yet profane fuck you spat in the face of the punk scene of any place and era, from San Francisco to New York to London to Sydney.
The foul mouth belongs to David Peel, no, not the DJ, that’s John, and they’re not even remotely related.
Impossible to define, some tried branding him hippie, others a freak show; to me, he seems like one of the Fugs on a spree, with the difference that they stick it to Congress, David sticks it to half the world.
In 1978, he can no longer hold back and tells the corpse of punk to go fuck itself, and it’s the most punk – in the sense of outrageous, irreverent – gesture imaginable. As if, at the funeral of the beloved deceased, someone comes forward from the pews and begins to shovel industrial quantities of shit onto the coffin lying before him, everyone is petrified, someone calls the authorities who take him away among looks now horrified now pitying to entrust him to the care of the nearest mental rehabilitation center and then everything vanishes into nothingness like a waking dream.
In short, David proclaims himself the king of punk just as Willie Dixon proclaims himself the blues, it could fit.
Because David is one of those who invented the punk movement, giving reason to those who believe that punk is just a hippie with slightly shorter hair: when he sings and plays in Washington Square Park and every day that comes before him stand Jeffrey, John, Douglas, and Thomas and they don’t even know each other and least of all do they dream they’ll be christened brothers; or when, with «American Revolution», he paves a golden path for folks like the New York Dolls and Dictators and they screw it all up.
And if someone claims that «King of Punk», which opens, is seven minutes and seven of fuck you's scattered around with obvious regal flair and reiterated in «Punk Rock», someone else holds that «Who Killed Brian Jones», which closes, is over eleven minutes of healthy conspiracy theory about Brian Jones's death, drowned by some mercenary at Jagger and Richards’s behest because they want him out of the band because they don’t like how he plays and they don’t like how he acts, so they get rid of him to take the reins of the Rolling Stones and become the masters of the world, more or less. In between are David’s rants on the CIA and how it manipulates free thought and brainwashes – exemplified by «Uptight Manhattan», «The Master Race», and «He's Called a Cop» – the everlasting odes to marijuana, and snippets of what they call counter-culture. I trust blindly, because I don’t quite understand what David sings and the lyrics to the songs on this album are harder to find than the Holy Grail.
Then, whether David is a genius or a fool, having nonchalantly gone from Elektra to Apple without accomplishing much, who freaks out when overtaken on the right by hordes of fake revolutionaries with no art or part and thus wears their very clothes just for the pleasure of vomiting everything on them, this I haven't the slightest idea about even today.
Only, when the royal casket passed some years ago, I bowed respectfully.
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