JACKET COPY

CBGB. The Ramones. The Sex Pistols. Rage. Anger. Spitting. It was all so in-your-face. It was all so punk.

Now, with “A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982,” Nicholas Rombes seeks to explain the finer points of the genre through critical analysis and creative writing. The encyclopedic tome, which took Rombes several years to research, is laid out in alphabetical order, so readers can take in everything from the Adolescents to the Zeros.

Rombes, a professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, recently spoke with Jacket Copy.

--

Have you always loved punk music?

No. I was a raised in northwest Ohio, near Toledo. It is kind of a classic-rock town. Punk was sort of a rumor. But it wasn’t on the radio. I knew about it from the margins in Cleveland.

I kind of discovered the whole punk scene as it was ending.

--

How did you pull together the research for this book?

I wanted to go back to original sources as much as possible. I had some original fanzines. Living in Ann Arbor, you can still go into these vinyl record stores and buy a Germs album for seven or eight bucks.

I probably ramped up the eBay account pretty high. I borrowed from friends and bought and accumulated. I went back through articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post and others. It took three or four years to write, and it wasn’t so much the writing, but the accumulation and putting myself in that time period.

In the fanzines, I found there were impressive sociological comments about what was going on. That’s what surprised me most -- the insight there.

--

Where does punk stand today? Could you imagine a punk revival in the future?

No, I don’t think so. Because I think ultimately punk is about destroying the past. Punk was about destroying the 1960s. Just like the Ramones destroyed the long concept albums into these short, fast songs about nothing. . . . A true punk revival would spit on punk.

--

What was the most interesting fact about punk that you weren’t expecting?

I had no idea how hostile they were to the hippies. You look at the Ramones and they all had this long hair, and what I didn’t realize is how in England, New York and Los Angeles, how they were all breaking with the hippies. Johnny Rotten hated the hippies. Both the Ramones and the Sex Pistols saw the hippies as an unfortunate detour from the heart of rock ‘n’ roll. They said: We are going to reject peace, love and understanding.

-- Lori Kozlowski

--

latimes.com/jacketcopy

For more books coverage, including more of this Q&A;, visit the Jacket Copy blog.