Best of NYC Underground PUNK ROCK

The shock that was punk music is now an important part of rock history, with key figures in the movement being enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Back when the music was just starting to get media attention as a “threat to society,” porn producer Carter Stevens -- a man who prided himself on scoring “firsts” in the industry -- produced the first-ever punk rock porn movie.

Not content to simply make any old punk-porn pic, Stevens created a tough-cop thriller/parody that had the NYC punk scene as its backdrop. Stevens may not have understood the tone of the music, but he knew where to go to film it: the legendary Max’s Kansas City in lower Manhattan.

A central location in Punk Rock, Max’s started as an artist’s café in the Sixties, became a key nightspot for the Warhol superstars, and played host to Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop in the early Seventies. By the time Stevens put it on film, it was, along with the new upstart club further downtown called CBGBs, the home of the burgeoning punk scene.

Stevens’ delightfully demented plot sketches the punk musicians at Max’s as pimps working for the Mob, luring young runaways into lives of drugs and prostitution. A bit of porn poetic license on Stevens’ part, but the bands in the film were actually Max’s mainstays: The Fast, Squirrels, Spicy Bits, and the Stilletos, the band that spawned Blondie. The leader of the last-mentioned, Elda Stilleto, even appears in a prominent acting role in the pic as the foremost female pimp-punk chick.

Stevens shot both R-rated and triple-X versions of Punk Rock, and Secret’s Key’s immaculately restored release is of the R-rated cut, which has none of the hardcore sex, but does include entire numbers by the performers at Max’s, and finds detective “Johnny Dillinger” (Wade Nichols) journeying through even more of Greenwich Village, circa ’77.

Our hardboiled P.I. not only searches for his client’s runaway daughter in the mean streets of Times Square – including the late, lamented Forty-Deuce – but he hits just about every punk hangout downtown. From still-standing landmarks Trash & Vaudeville and Bleecker Bob’s to long-lost punk-haircut salons, clothing stores (the wonderfully named “Revenge”), and record stores, Dillinger combs the town, meeting hammy informers, helpful punk girls, and sleazy pushers everywhere he goes.

In recent months, the lasting impact of punk music has been reinforced by widespread news coverage of the closing of the legendary CBGBs (its predecessor Max’s closed back in 1981), and mainstream coverage by Yahoo!, MTV, and Rollingstone.com of the deaths of punk pioneers Lux Interior of the Cramps (who debuted in NYC at Max’s) and Ron Asheton of the Stooges.

Punk Rock is an unusual, unseen tie to this cherished era, when renegade music (now mainstream enough to performed on “American Idol”) was played loud, hard, and fast in clubs and dive-bars around the country.