History ain’t what it used to be … Thirty years ago, in 1978, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London presented a major exhibition to mark the 15th anniversary of the rock band The Who. This was a big deal. No one had based a museum-quality art show on a rock band before. But even more mind-blowing was the idea that a band could last that long. In those days, 15 years seemed like an eternity.

At least that’s how the likes of Malcolm McLaren, John (Rotten) Lydon, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones looked at things. As far as these progenitors of punk were concerned, bands like The Who belonged in a museum. The punks were insurgents, upstarts dedicated to liberating a scene corrupted by the power structure that had coalesced around the superstar bands of the ’60s. Their story is briskly told in an entertaining new book about punk’s moment, Pretty Vacant: A History of U.K. Punk by Phil Strongman (Chicago Review Press).

Strongman’s story actually gets rolling in the States, as he outlines how bands like the Velvet Underground, MC5, the Stooges and the New York Dolls set the stage for punk by deliberately flying in the face of the prevailing late ’60s penchant for psychedelic narcissism and endless guitar solos. Eventually, a scene would emerge in New York around the Mercer Arts Center and CBGBs, with bands like The Ramones, Blondie, Television and Patti Smith.

I happened to be in London in 1976, when Smith played her first concert in the U.K. I was hanging out at the National Poetry Centre and taking a fan’s pride in turning people on to Smith’s first album, Horses. This was a gas because as soon as people heard this record they went nuts with enthusiasm. And no wonder: In a musical landscape dominated by Fleetwood Mac and Frampton Comes Alive, Horses was the sonic equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver.

The British music press didn’t know what to make of Smith. In the days leading up to her show, there were articles intimating her sexuality wasn’t quite right. One writer in the New Musical Express seemed put off by her androgynous image. But this didn’t keep a huge crowd from showing up at the Roundhouse to see her.

Punk began being born that night. I’d never seen anything like the weird confederacy assembled there. Proto-punks The Stranglers opened with a hostile set designed to antagonize everybody. Then Smith and her band came out.

I wish I could say it was a great set, but Patti was out of it. She shambled about the stage, ran off at the mouth and forgot the words to songs. The crowd, which had been in a fever to see her, grew restive, then strangely quiet. At one point, a woman yelled out, “We love you, Patti!” as if to try and will things back to coherence. It didn’t work.

Strongman includes a photo of this wild-eyed debacle in his book. He also does a fine job of evoking the mood in London in that year before punk broke through. The city was hot and plagued with break-downs, strikes and impatience. The Labour government was on its last legs and Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady,” was in the wings, about to make the punks’ most paranoid dreams come true.

If, 30 years later, punk rock lives on as one genre among a plentitude of musical offerings, its exhortation to Do It Yourself is more relevant than ever. New technologies have put a recording studio in every laptop, and every band can be its own label. The result has been an ever-expanding musical universe in which history has ceased to be a progression of one Big Thing after another in favor of a continuous present in which everything is included and available.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Three Oaks, Mich., to see a documentary film about Frank D’Rone, a 70-something cabaret singer who has counted Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett among his biggest fans. Like those artists, D’Rone is a master of the classic American Songbook, a body of work that fell out of commercial favor through the 1970s and much of the ’80s. D’Rone was in the wilderness for a while.

But the other night, D’Rone was beaming, with a new DVD, a Web site and an audience who thinks he’s cool. Strangely enough, that’s because 30 years ago the punks stood history on its ear.