Before long, punk was used to describe contemporary music. “Punk-rock has become the favoured term of endearment,” Ellen Willis wrote in December 1972, for “the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll.” Willis particularly liked what she called the “neo-punk sensibility” of Five Dollar Shoes, who she saw at the Mercer Arts Center in 1972, in one of the earliest references to underground New York rock as punk. (Lynn Van Matre had called Moogy And The Rhythm Kings “New York punk rock” in the Chicago Tribune that summer. Lillian Roxon also frequently praised a band called Street Punk, regulars at Max’s Kansas City.)

Although it was often used for artists that are now thought of as punk’s forebears — Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies —the word refused to be pinned down in the first half of the seventies, such was its ubiquity. Punk was used for a kind of “back to basics” blues rock (Black Oak Arkansas, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, Grand Funk Railroad, Edgar Winter, Status Quo), heavy metal (Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC), progressive rock (Family, Peter Gabriel, Pavlov’s Dog), and dozens of pop and rock acts with little else in common (Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Dr Feelgood, Jefferson Airplane, Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, Frijid Pink, Mott The Hoople, Hall and Oates, David Essex, Big Star, Yoko Ono, Suzi Quatro, 10cc, Showaddywaddy, Mud, The Rubettes, Manhattan Transfer). The Monkees were “what punk rock is all about.” “Dion was the original punk,” according to Greg Shaw in Rolling Stone. For the Philadelphia Daily News, Connie Francis’ ‘Lipstick on My Collar’ “epitomized the adolescent worst of punk rock.”

“What Punk Rock Is All About”, 1973 (Source: Hartford Courant)

Soon, bands began to adopt the term. The Who included ‘The Punk and The Godfather’ on Quadrophenia in 1972. As well as Street Punk in New York, a band called The Punks formed in 1973 in Detroit. “Patrician rock is going down now,” Don McLean said that year, trying to shake off the success of ‘American Pie,’ “I like punk rock.” Brownsville Station released School Punks in 1974 and told journalists that they were “punk rock.” In 1975, Lowell George of Little Feat, once of The Standells and The Mothers of Invention, claimed that his current group, five albums in, were “just another punk band from L.A.” That year, The Tubes released ‘White Punks on Dope,’ reportedly about Jefferson Starship.

For much of the seventies, punk was often interchangeable with glam rock. For the New York Daily News, “punk rock” was a “subdivision” of “glitter rock” or “drag-rock.” Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade, and The Sweet were all called punk, and Roxy Music were “punk rock in space.” According to the Los Angeles Times in 1975, hitmakers Chinn and Chapman were “the masters of the English punk-rock sound,” but were “tired of the punk-rock wave that they rode to success in England.” In the British music weeklies, as Simon Reynolds observed in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, groups such as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Heavy Metal Kids were “punk before punk.” One headline about Harvey suggested “Thou Shalt Have No Other Punk Before Me.”

The Sweet and Chinn-Chapman as punk, 1975 (Source: Los Angeles Times)

Indeed, the word was used frequently in the British press. As early as 1972, Charles Shaar Murray had described The MC5 as “punks,” after quoting Lester Bangs’ Rolling Stone review. Mick Farren often used the word for 1950s rock’n’roll, or those influenced by it. By 1973, NME was writing about “rock ’n’ roll’s punk-junk revolution.” In 1974, Melody Maker discussed “these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock,” and NME reported that record companies were actively searching for “punk.”

More than anyone else, Alice Cooper was the most high profile punk of the early seventies. He was “archetypal punk rock” for Grace Lichtenstein in The New York Times, and “mainstream punk raunch” in Rolling Stone. Punk was “a style that began and should have ended with Alice Cooper,” the Tampa Times argued. In Creem, Cooper won the new “Punk of the Year” category in the 1972 Readers’ Poll, with Lester Bangs placed in sixth. The next year, Billion Dollar Babies was “the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom.” After seeing a disappointing Alice Cooper show, a critic in Ontario wrote, probably for the first time, “punk rock is dead!”

Despite its popularity, punk still often betrayed the attitudes of those who used it, riddled with the problems of its etymology. In 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote to members of the Black Panthers, in a letter widely republished in the underground press, urging them to see the “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements as allies, and that “the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” Even where the word had come to mean a delinquent, it still sometimes echoed with homophobia or misogyny; liner notes to a 1973 compilation of The Sonics suggested that “it’s like if delta blues oughta be played by old black men, and if fag rock oughta be played by real queers, then it stands to reason that punk-rock oughta be played by punks!” For Ellen Willis, in 1974, “nouveau punkism… became an excuse for blatant male chauvinism and nihilistic trashing of every value and aspiration beyond (male) orgams and (male) violence.” In 1975, Let It Rock noted that “the term punk is bandied about an awful lot these days, it seems to describe any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off stage.”

Lester Bangs became sceptical about the term. In 1975, he wrote that “I try to completely dissociate myself” from people who think of themselves as “punks,” “because I don’t want to be the king of the punks or the king of the rock critics or any other such thing.” “This is punk?” he asked, when his friend Billy Altman took him to CBGBs for the first time, to see Talking Heads and Television. “This is just San Francisco all over again.”