Inspired by the comments on a reddit post, I wanted to dig into some pre-“punk” proto-punk. I set Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, & Copilot to the task as I’m fascinated by their ability to parse & compile information if prompted accurately. (I’m also fascinated my their penchant to provide completely incorrect or even made-up information. Some time I will have to blog about my experiment in having them search restaurant menus in an area to see if they serve shellfish. Copilot recommended some seafood places, so clearly it wants to kill me.)

I added my own stuff that some of them disagreed with, but it is my list after all. 🤣 Going back to little Richard and including Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” were points of contention, as I would expect from a conversation with people.

Music snobs aficionados, audiophiles, and punk rock gatekeepers will argue all day every day about the origin of punk… but for me, to be clear, it’s the moment that the Ramones’ self-titled album dropped. So, with that in mind I gave the language models this prompt:

There is and always will be constant debate, but if we agree for the premise of this exercise that the Ramones self-titled debut album was the first punk album… What are 25 songs that should belong on a proto-punk or punk precursor playlist?

I would assume bands that get mentioned as the progenitors would most likely include The Kinks, the Sonics, Link Wray, The Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, & more I’m sure to be missing. Maybe even the band Death who hailed from Detroit MI?

All songs on the list should have been released before April 23, 1976… and be listed in order if release date by single or album, whichever dropped first.

This has been corrected for my typically egregious spelling/typing/lack-of-proofreading errors. After tossing the rules to the wind, keeping to the spirit of punk rock, we arrived here:

• “Little Demon” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1956)
• “Tutti Frutti” – Little Richard (1955)
• “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” – Jerry Lee Lewis (1957)
• “Rumble” – Link Wray (1958)
• “La Bamba” – Ritchie Valens (1958)
• “Love Me” – The Phantom (1958)
• “Louie Louie” – The Kingsmen (1963)
• “Surfin’ Bird” – The Trashmen (1963)
• “Baby Let Me Take You Home” – The Animals (1964)
• “House of the Rising Sun” – The Animals (1964)
• “I’m Crying” – The Animals (1964)
• “You Really Got Me” – The Kinks (1964)
• “Gloria” – Them (1964)
• “I Can’t Explain” – The Who (1964)
• “Dirty Water” – The Standells (1966)
• “My Generation” – The Who (1965)
• “Strychnine” – The Sonics (1965)
• “I’m a Man” – The Yardbirds (1965)
• “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” – The Animals (1965)
• “96 Tears” – ? & The Mysterians (1966)
• “Wild Thing” – The Troggs (1966)
• “Complication” – The Monks (1966)
• “Psychotic Reaction” – Count Five (1966)
• “Pushin’ Too Hard” – The Seeds (1966)
• “7 and 7 Is” – Love (1966)
• “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” – The Kinks (1966)
• “You’re Gonna Miss Me” – The 13th Floor Elevators (1966)
• “Talk Talk” – The Music Machine (1966)
• “I’m Waiting for the Man” – The Velvet Underground (1967)
• “Doctor Please” – Blue Cheer (1968)
• “Sister Ray” – The Velvet Underground (1968)
• “Fire” – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968)
• “Jigsaw Puzzle” – The Rolling Stones (1968)
• “Kick Out the Jams” – MC5 (1969)
• “I Wanna Be Your Dog” – The Stooges (1969)
• “Little Doll” – The Stooges (1969)
• “TV Eye” – The Stooges (1970)
• “Paranoid” – Black Sabbath (1970)
• “Get It On” – T. Rex (1971)
• “School’s Out” – Alice Cooper (1972)
• “Suffragette City” – David Bowie (1972)
• “Raw Power” – Iggy & The Stooges (1973)
• “Search and Destroy” – The Stooges (1973)
• “Personality Crisis” – New York Dolls (1973)
• “Jet Boy” – New York Dolls (1973)
• “Urban Guerrilla” – Hawkwind (1973)
• “Violence” – Mott the Hoople (1973)
• “Cum On Feel the Noize” – Slade (1973)
• “Editions of You” – Roxy Music (1973)
• “Ooh La La” – Faces (1973)
• “Subway Train” – New York Dolls (1974)
• “Hey Joe” – Patti Smith Group (1975)
• “Piss Factory” – Patti Smith (1975)
• “Roxette” – Dr. Feelgood (1976)
• “The Next Big Thing” – The Dictators (1975)
• “Chez Maximes” – The Hollywood Brats (1976)
• “After Eight” – Neu! (1975)
• “Ghost Rider” – Suicide (1977)
• “Little Johnny Jewel” – Television (1975)
• “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” – Pere Ubu (1975)
• “Burn My Eye” – Radio Birdman (1976)
• “Politicians in My Eyes” – Death (1976)
• “Cherry Bomb” – The Runaways (1976)
• “Roadrunner” – The Modern Lovers (1976)
• “She Cracked” – The Modern Lovers (1976)
• “Shake Some Action” – Flamin’ Groovies (1976)
• “Blank Generation” – Richard Hell & the Voidoids (1977)
• “Anarchy in the U.K.” – The Sex Pistols (1976)
• “Sonic Reducer” – Dead Boys (1977)
• “Neat Neat Neat” – The Damned (1977)
• “Chinese Rocks” – Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers (1977)
• “Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads (1977)

I used Tune My Music to import it to Spotify from a text file, then copy to Amazon Music from there. I tried to go to Amazon first, but it messed up quite a bit of the songs. I did have to add “7 and 7 Is” by Love manually as it shows as “Seven and Seven Is” on Spotify. It weirdly plopped a Bob Marley song in that spot. Amazon was full of weird covers and the wrong songs when trying to import from text.

• Proto-Punk 🧷 | Amazon Music playlist by AiXeLsyD13
• Proto-Punk 🧷 | Spotify playlist by AiXeLsyD13

So, what do you think of the list? What’s missing? What needs added? Are my parameters skewed? Do you not accept anything past the date of what parameters were set? What obscure band that 14 people heard at the time is missing from this list? Don’t come at me with the Sex Pistols over the Ramones. Should we whittle it back to 25? Only have 1 song per artist? Come at me with healthy discourse.