as for punks getting beat up, i'm not sure about that. laughed at, gawked at, yeah. in 1979, I grew my hair really long -- I liked to make myself look like Cousin It while stoned at parties. I then decided I needed to perm the hair so it was a mass full of curls -- musta been stylish then or something.
All my long hair nearly fell out, bleached white and completely burnt from the perm (which didn't mix well with hair that had been chlorine damaged from a summer of swimming).
Given punk fashion was in style -- though few people in my hometown actually dressed this way -- we joked that i was cutting edge stylish. a couple of months later, sick of the white hair and darker roots, I decided to dye it with store bought hair coloring kit -- which turned my hair the color of a pine tree. Again, a lot of people who heard about it (thankfully my mother took me to a salon where they cut is short short and then made my hair brown to cover the green so most ppl never actually saw it) just thought I wass going the next step with my appreciation for The Ramones.
It wasn't beatlemania, but if people heard of The Clash and The Ramones in my backwoods home town, where the joke was that we were always 10-15 years behind the times anyway, then punk was obviously not as underground and reviled as B's making it. Also, I've forgotten the club in Syracuse where I used to go, but again, it was just people going to a club and piercing their faces with diaper pins and sporting bleached out or dyed green hair -- and no one got beat up over it. And even if they did, I don't see how that's different when someone I know got beat up in a small town for having long hair. They thought he was a hippie -- which was really funny. He wasn't, not in the least, he was just wearing hair below the ears, which was in fashion in most of the rest of the world at the time.
For the people who were into punk, then, it was sported as a way to buck the tedium of pop rock, etc., but also a way of being hip and cool -- different from everyone else. Like my taking men's boxer shorts and sweing eyelets, lace, bric a brac, and wearing them as shorts. Or surplus uniforms off the rack at the salvation army. or wearing navy uniform pumps and old 40s dresses i fished from the thrift shop. I was trying to be different -- but stylishly different.
Some people mocked and hated the music and the styles, of course, but in the
> No, but you are overstating this distinction. Punk was big in the late
> seventies and I recall several of the Pistols' singles being top ten
> hits in the UK including God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK.
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