’96 Tears’: The illustrious story of the first ever punk song

Posted On October 29, 2025October 29, 2025

You could toil through the pages of musical history for decades, and any attempt to pinpoint the exact origin story of punk rock would still be ambiguous at best.

It might have exploded onto the scene during the mid-1970s in a flash of safety pins and hepatitis, but the sonic lineage of the endearingly abrasive genre stretches back much further, and owes a lot to the garage rock mastery of groups like Question Mark and the Mysterians. 

With a seemingly endless array of subgenres and offshoots, there is no one definitive sound of punk; the heart of the genre instead lies within its attitude, energy, and unwavering DIY ethos, which has been a cornerstone of punk rebellion since the very beginning. Long before Patti Smith took to the stage at CBGB, the Ramones ripped their jeans, or the Sex Pistols swore on TV, though that DIY influence emerged during the age of 1960s garage rock, when teenage rock and roll outfits cobbled together short, sharp songs from the comfort of garages and college dorm rooms. 

Much like the popular punk which emerged the following decade, garage rock had a raw power which immediately set it apart from the guitar bands clogging up the mainstream rock charts of the time; you didn’t really need profound musical skill to be in a garage outfit, in fact, that was largely discouraged, so long as you had the right attitude of rebellion. It was with this DIY manifesto that groups like Los Saicos, The Sonics, and Question Mark and the Mysterians made a name for themselves.

That latter outfit, in fact, is often credited with having created the first-ever punk single, in the form of their 1966 track ‘96 Tears’. Despite multiple other contenders to that accolade, you can certainly hear the influence of ‘96 Tears’ on countless future punk outfits – moreover, the song has since been covered by everybody from Aretha Franklin to Primal Scream, so its influence stretches far beyond the confines of punk. But how exactly did an unknown band from Michigan create the ultimate garage rock masterpiece?

Rudy Martinez, Question Mark himself, is the man responsible for the song, and he reportedly wrote it fairly quickly in the living room of his manager, built around an electric organ and the spirit of rock and roll rebellion. Like the vast majority of garage rock anthems, there weren’t any extensive studio sessions or high-brow writing sessions which stretched on for months – the song was thrown together quickly, and released just as quickly. Spontaneity is, after all, key to the appeal of the track.

That name, however, went through multiple changes over the course of the track’s illustrious history. As guitarist Bobby Balderrama told Vice back in 2014, “When we were putting the song together, Question Mark was singing, ‘Too Many Teardrops,’ and I think we wanted to call it that, but then our drummer said, ‘Let’s call it ’69 Tears’”. 

It is perhaps worth noting, at this point, that the band were still teenagers when the song was released, which might account for the song’s provisional title. “We said, ‘Well, it’s a real catchy name, but we don’t think that they’ll say that on the radio; it’s too dirty.’”

The guitarist added, “Even though I was only 14 when we were recording the song and 15 when it came out, I knew what 69 meant […] so the drummer [Robert Martinez] said, ‘Let’s turn the numbers around.’” 

Thus, ‘96 Tears’ was born, and it managed to gain enough radio play to shoot the single right to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, becoming a defining track of the garage rock age and a progenitive moment in the lineage of punk rock.

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