Contemporary American Ethnomusicology

Did you know that were it not for The Spectrum, punk rock may never have happened?

It was the spring of 1973, and after nearly six years as an undergraduate (don't ask), I was finally nearing the end of my nearly-as-long run as music editor on the paper's arts & entertainment staff. My Spectrum career had started back in freshman year, when I sent in so many letters complaining about quality of the music pieces that were running that the then-entertainment editor, Jim Brennan, sought me out and called my bluff.

If I thought I knew so much about music, he said, maybe I should prove it by writing my own pieces for the paper.

Suffice it to say that I took the bait and started contributing to the paper, and the following year, when Brennan became editor in chief, I became music editor – and before long I was devoting far too much time to the paper and far too little to my studies (which is why it took me six years to graduate).

In fact, so consumed was I by listening to and writing about rock and roll that at some point I successfully petitioned the school to let me pursue a double major: English and (to give it a ring of academia) "Contemporary American Ethnomusicology."

While earning a BA in Rock from an accredited institute of higher learning was certainly a cool thing in its day (while it's never directly gotten me a penny's worth of work, it does look good on the resume), I'm probably prouder of my two biggest personal achievements at The Spectrum.

In either 1969 or 1970 (too many brain cells under the bridge for me to recall precisely), we were getting so many music, film, theater and literature articles bumped from the Monday and Wednesday editions because of (ostensibly) more important news stories that I led a small revolt, which resulted in the establishment of the freestanding Friday arts supplement The Prodigal Sun. I named it, Tom Toles drew the logo for it – and the rest, as Spectrum staffers and readers for decades to follow know pretty well, is history.

History also notes that, in the spring of 1973, the first issue of the first magazine ever called Punk appeared – as a "special supplement" to The Spectrum!

How did we pull it off?

Well, in those days, The Spectrum used to budget a monthly feature magazine called Dimension which, under the supervision of the paper's different departments, focused in on various topics and issues. And when I found out that it was the music department's turn that year, I decided to try and create a "fanzine" that reflected an emerging new musical aesthetic – one that frowned on things like progressive rock from the UK and country-rock from Southern California and, instead, touted the more, shall we say, "primitive" values of old school garage rock and new school glam rock as ones to aspire to.

With the considerable help of my fellow Spectrum music freak, the late – and great – Joe Fernbacher, I managed to talk Editor in Chief Jo-Ann Armao and Managing Editor Jeff Greenwald into giving us the go-ahead for the project, and with the layout and production crew's unquestioning assistance, we made our out-of-left-field dream a reality. On May 7, 1973, stuffed inside issues of that day's Spectrum, was the 20-page inaugural edition of Punk Magazine devoted to (as I said in my editor's note) "rock 'n' roll, sports, and anything else that isn't boring."

On the cover were the Seeds, the snotty mid-1960s L.A. quartet known for their one-hit wonder "Pushin' Too Hard," and inside were stories on topics ranging from the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Hawaii's Don Ho being separated-at-birth twins to Happy Humphrey, Fritz Von Erich and other stars of professional wrestling, as well as a double-truck horror fantasy comic strip (written by me, drawn by the aforementioned future Pulitzer Prize winner Mr. Toles) starring David Bowie and Lou Reed as lab-created rock star monsters.

That first issue of Punk drew great response; we actually made some noise nationally. While I only wound up publishing one more issue on my own before graduation, and the realities of actually trying to make a living as a writer led me to finally leave Buffalo and seek fame, if not fortune, back home in New York City, my Spectrum memories remain some of the happiest and most cherished of my entire life.

Just remember, Brennan, it's all your fault.

Billy Altman has spent more than 40 years writing about "rock 'n' roll, sports and anything else that isn't boring." A consulting curator for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a past winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Journalism, he teaches in the Humanities Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Email: alumni@ubspectrum.com