Can't kill the Rooster!
The term "punk" as applied to music probably originates in cartoonist John Holmstrom's Punk magazine, launched in 1975. The name was inspired by an album cover photo of Detroit band the Dictators hanging around a White Castle hamburger stand. The writing in the magazine was inspired largely by Michigan-based Creem magazine writers like Lester Bangs.
Bangs and his fellow travelers admired early rock 'n' roll (and bands like the Dictators were heavy on the Chuck Berry riffs), forgotten psychedelic garage bands (which Bangs later called "proto-punk"), and some of the more straight-ahead efforts of Brit Invasion bands like the Stones, the Who, and the Kinks. This spirit lived on in bands like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the MC5, the Modern Lovers, and the New York Dolls.
Any analysis of the origins of punk is going to focus on the New York Bowery club CBGB/OMFUG and the bands that played there in 1976-77: Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, Television, and others. Bangs did not greet these bands as "punk" when he first arrived in New York, but eventually rolled them into the aesthetic.
Malcolm McLaren claims to have "invented" punk. Malcolm McLaren is a con artist who is totally full of shit. We could talk about how punk developed in the UK (as well as the West Coast and Great Lakes regions of the US), but no one "invented" it. I imagine punk developed in those places much as it did in New York-- at the intersection of journalism and performance, individuals rebelling against the glamor and overproduction and "overplaying" (Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Eagles, and disco as a whole) prevalent at the time. They scoffed at virtuosity, favoring raw, direct expression.
We should be skeptical of the term "punk," because what this is, is rock 'n' roll. As opposed to the "rock music" of an industry that was, at the time, collapsing under the weight of its own vanity. A large number of people in different places reacted and called it "punk." It is important to remember that the name is not the thing, and that the thing is far older.
But if you're looking for the birth of that name and the whole wave that identified with it, I think you'll find it in Detroit and New York, in Lester Bangs and the bands he wrote about.
