How a girl group called The Shangri-Las inspired a generation of punks
With iconoclastic lunatics like the young Iggy Pop tapping the drums behind them, their music had to be befittingly dark. They traversed subject matters that no typical girl group would go near, tackling motorcycle beheadings, heart failure of the spiritual bent and all the darkest pages of a teen’s diary. However, it was darkness tempered with the light touch of pop sensibilities.
In short, punk followed a similar principle of finding fun in darkness, being brattish and proud, and swimming against the current of expectations. The Shangri-Las were unruly outsiders refusing to succumb to an exploitative business much like the disenfranchised youth of New York where punk was spawned and kids sought their own clutch of exultation amid the comic book dystopia. As Mary Weiss will tell you herself: “The Shangri-Las were punk before punk existed. People thought we were tough.”
They were tough. And they were wildly carefree. They pranked the likes of Marvin Gaye and boldly shared the stage with the eponymous scene-stealing James Brown, in such a way that proved sometimes to hold your own you simply have to be yourself. Most of all, they inspired punk because they did what they wanted, they did it for fun and they proudly laughed at the notion of being packaged into something acceptable. When the sixties were reappraised by the next generation, this is what would stand out.
As Patti Smith once told William S Burroughs: “We all felt loneliness as a hunger for something to happen. As we thought we were lonely, a group like Television thinks they’re alone. The boys that later became the Sex Pistols thought they were alone. All of us people that should have been perpetuating, or helping to build on, the Sixties, we were dormant. And we thought we were alone. Our credo was, ‘Wake up!’ […] I didn’t want to be a giant big hero, I didn’t want to die for the cause. I didn’t want to be a martyr. All that I wanted was for the people to fuckin’ wake up. That’s all I wanted them to do, and I feel that that’s what happened.”
The Shangri-Las were a wake-up call in themselves. And when punk was fully formed like Frankenstein’s monster and ready to emerge from the mire in its final form, the half-man, half Afghan hound, forefather Joey Ramone would tout the ways of the Shangri-Las as an inspiration. “The jukebox at CBGB had a lot of Shangri-La cuts on it,” says Weiss. “I was amazed. And I was deeply touched when Joey Ramone told me what a big influence we were on them.”
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-a-girl-group-called-the-shangri-las-inspired-a-generation-of-punks/
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