Suicide called themselves “punk” as early as 1970, a year after Woodstock and somewhere around Johnny Rotten’s fourteenth birthday, well before the term’s usage soared. The word was printed in their flyers. But come 1976 and 1977, when punk emerged as a phenomenon, Suicide didn’t look like punk, if only because they lacked some of the genre’s defining features, such as a drummer and a guitar player. They weren’t like the Ramones or the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions or Blondie. There was a classification dilemma, based in part on all that was missing. It was two men, one doing
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