Punk: A Logical Extension of Prog?

5,000 miles to CBGBs was a bit too much of a commute for me, so yeah, I wasn't there. But venues in the UK were less of a trek, trips to the local record store were even easier, I could walk to the shops to buy the weekly music rags and reaching over to switch on the radio to listen to John Peel was hardly a stretch. Sure, I have no idea what any of those bands sounded like before they actually produced a record for anyone to hear, aside from the 150-200 people who could squeeze into a sweaty NY club, none of us could have heard them before then. You were one of those lucky few. Good for you. But to say I know nothing about that era and its music and didn't experience it first hand is another of those uninformed assumptions you are so crap at making. Sure all of the information I received of the NY scene was not experienced first-hand, it was second-hand knowledge filtered through the myopic eyes of British Rock press, John Peel, Jon Savage, Caroline Coon et al, and that in turn influenced my first hand experience of Punk Rock as it burgeoned onto the British music scene. Standing in Dingwalls in Camden Town or The Marquee in Wardor Street watching lesser known Punk bands whose names escape me and probably every other person who was there wasn't the same as being in CBGB or Max's Kansas City, it was a filtered, watered-down copy, but no less authentic. Just as watching kids in the provinces pick-up on that style of music in pubs and smaller clubs wasn't quite the same as being in those London clubs.