by Robert Lopez aka El Vez
In 1975 I was 15 years old. I had just left being fat, long haired, and bad skinned. I was born and raised in Chula Vista, a suburb of America’s finest city, San Diego, California.
My family floated somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. Our diet included government cheese and something we called “poor people’s chop suey” a few times a week. I attended Chula Vista High School in the later seventies. Surprisingly, compared to today’s population, it didn’t have many Latinos. It was mostly a surfer, stoner, sosch crowd. I didn’t get high or play the sports ball, so I wasn’t in any of those groups. I was not very popular.
I had always been a misfit. I cried very easily in elementary school. Didn’t have many friends. By high school I was used to it. I was a very, very chubby kid who had found his nest of salt in Warhol, Dali, and the arts. I would spend my lunchtimes in the school library.
Looking back, I seemed to be an aware kid, at least that’s what I remember. Insecure, for sure, but I would hope we all were. I had knowledge of things other than just the school and its student body’s curriculum. The year before I had gone to my first concert: Led Zeppelin. I much preferred my second concert: the New York Dolls. I read Creem and Rock Scene magazines. I was up on the latest bands, albeit through the writers’ reviews: I had to use my imagination as to what the bands actually sounded like. On PBS television I watched An American Family, perhaps the first actual reality TV show. It was about a Southern California family who were about to implode by divorce. That is where I was introduced to Lance Loud and Kristian Hoffman (both of whom would go on to form the NYC-based punk band The Mumps). They too were Southern California guys who loved rock music and Warhol and knew that New York was the place to be. In 1975 they would be my first gay role models from watching television. They would become my friends that next year. I saw Iggy Pop smear peanut butter all over his shirtless body as he walked on the uplifted hands of people! PBS was pretty informative back then. These things, plus my older sister Rhoda, were my first exposures to punk rock. There was always something earlier that influenced punk—Iggy and the Stooges and the garage bands of the sixties that Creem magazine would write about, and so forth. The end of glitter rock had lots of foreshadowing to punk rock. These things served as a small but constant stream of “something else beside the norm” for me. I knew there was a whole different world out there after high school. I just didn’t know yet what it held for me.
1976 I cut my hair very short in my parents’ bathroom. I used my mom’s scissors and caught the droppings into a brown paper bag—I was a tidy punk. I unevenly clipped down to maybe an inch all around. The back of my head looked very chemotherapy. I was in a band called The Zeros, and we were on our way to play our first show outside our hometown. (Playing a quinceañera in Rosarito, a sleepy town south of Tijuana didn’t count. That band was the Main St. Brats and had had only half of The Zeros.) This would be our first show in Los Angeles!
Now, we were a real band of like-minded Latino teenagers: me; Javier Escovedo, from the Main St. Brats; my cousin, Baba Chenelle; and his friend Hector Penalosa. Javier was the oldest at 18. Baba and I hovered at 16 and Hector was someplace in between. We had our own amps and guitars—mine bought from what I made from my paper route. I had bought a black Astoria Les Paul copy with three pickups, just like Ace Frehley, at Harper’s Music Store in Chula Vista. We had our own original songs, plus a handful of covers from our favorites: The Velvet Underground, The Seeds, the New York Dolls, and The Standells. Javier borrowed his parents’ brown Dodge Coronet station wagon with the modern cassette player, and we all piled in.
Jackie Ramirez from San Diego had a friend named Audrey who lived in Los Angeles. Audrey was dating this guy named Phast Phreddie, a writer for a magazine called Back Door Man. We had all seen it at the record store. Jackie had mailed him a C-30 cassette of one of our rehearsals with our songs: “Don’t Push Me Around,” “Wimp,” “Hand Grenade Heart,” “Main St. Brat,” “Beat Your Heart Out.” He liked it and asked us to be part of a show of new bands.
This was the infamous Orpheum show, across the street from Tower Records; the Whisky a Go Go was down the block. Perhaps the first punk-rock show in Hollywood—The Germs, The Zeros, and The Weirdos. Many of the audience would end up being my friends and neighbors. It was The Germs’ first show. They made a mess, were full of noise and great to see. To me that first show seemed more like performance art: How much could we get away with before someone told us to stop? We were all starving for something new, so it wasn’t going to be any of us. Bobby Pyn (later to become Darby Crash) did the “Iggy Peanut Butter” I had seen on TV! The Weirdos were fantastic! Older than us, they had a more mature vision, sound, and look as well as great songs. They wore Jackson Pollock/Robert Rauschenberg–inspired outfits they made themselves of jumbled-together clothes that were splattered and spray painted, cobbled together with pins, staples, and tape, adding chains, bits of plastic from six-pack holders, and whatever else was about. Each outfit was different, but together they looked like a unit.
We were pretty tame in comparison. Straight-leg slacks and button-down shirts—no antics. Someone noted that we looked like the Jets from West Side Story. D. D. Faye said we looked like four young Sal Mineos, the actor from Rebel Without a Cause. She insisted we change our name to The Mineos. I think we mainly just looked down when we played that night. Our songs were short and fast or slow and short, a mix of the New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground. As I was still just sixteen, but now I see the KISS influence also. I think we played well.
Our songs were teenaged because we were teenagers. We were the youngest ones there that night. We were quiet and shy, which translates in having never been popular in school. These new people liked us and what we did. This was a new social experience!
Greg Shaw from Bomp! Records saw our show. He liked us! He asked if he could put out a 45 record of us on his label. Of course we said yes! Javier drove us back to Chula Vista late that night. We were more than excited from what had just happened: playing on a stage in the big city in front of strangers—who liked us! And then being asked to put out a record by a guy we’d read about in magazines. This was punk teenage rock ‘n’ roll heaven!
We were back in high school the next morning. Before this, I had been an A and B student; I would receive my first D that year in US history—my first class of the day. Thus came my punk-rock education!
We quickly got labeled the Mexican Ramones. I loved The Ramones, so I didn’t mind the title. But we thought our style was more New York Dolls and Velvet Underground; after all, we had guitar solos. Yeah, we were Mexicans—so what? It wasn’t our calling card. Funny enough, that would become my raison d’être for my later performing—always a “Mexican” something.
Back then the California scene only existed in Hollywood and San Francisco. There was nothing in San Diego; that’s why we had to drive all the way up to LA. Javier did the driving—none of the rest of us had our driver’s licenses yet. It was sort of a blessing to be of the scene but not in the scene. We were still in high school in Chula Vista. We would go to LA as often as we could or when the shows asked for us, but we were not constantly there. Perhaps that kept the best parts and the bad parts at a good distance. We could scheme and dream for the week and then be back with fresh eyes for the weekend.
Those early shows were pretty inspiring. I felt part of a movement, or something at least. Part of a music scene. It was a great feeling after years of misfitdom. Your friends and peers were in the audience, then performing onstage after you. Or they were making posters or paintings. Gary Panter’s angular, punky cubist art was a perfect companion for the times. There were writers like Claude Bessy and Craig Lee spouting opinion, making comparisons, or just talking trash. You would get a review in their fanzine and even in the major city newspapers. We even got to be on TV to promote our first single! (Sure helped that my dad worked at the local TV station in San Diego.) The always-great question of the morning TV show host would be: “What exactly is punk rock?”
These were great times to feed a developing teenage performer’s mind. There were performance artists too! The Kipper Kids and Johanna Went—all the art forms I had read about in the school library, my friends and I were now doing.
I remember a rare underage drunk evening at the Masque (looking back, I rarely drank and wasn’t having sex, which really seems like a missed teenage experience). This was later, after I had moved to Hollywood.
I had just seen Hal Negro and the Satin Tones, who ushered in the first wave of joke bands. The joke bands were pop-up groups who would quickly form to parody a certain current trend or comment or would form simply because they found matching orange tennis shoes at the Pic ‘N’ Save discount store. The Satin Tones were good, actually. Pat Delaney played saxophone and looked like a high school band sax player. They had a concept and a look. They were a piss-take on lounge music, way before its time, playing a cocktail classic in a punky style. Back then you could get the best matching horrible tuxedos for cheap at the La Brea Circus.
As they played, I was yelling for them to stop.
Trixie Plunger tried to console me as I was crying, “No, you don’t understand! They are making a joke of us. They are making fun of our scene! They are making fun of us!” I was actually crying. (And I am usually a happy drunk! Perhaps this was the last of my “and easy to make cry” from my elementary school days.) Now it seems sweet that it meant that much to me, to have respect for the scene. Funny that those cursed and hated joke bands would become the bread and butter for my later success.
My most romantic sixteen-year-old mind’s eye paints it as a group of misfits joined together by a common love of the new music. We were trying to build something. We couldn’t afford to exclude someone because they were a girl, a person of color, gay, or had long hair and flares. Sexism, racism, and homophobic ideas didn’t come along until later, when the new music spanned so much wider than what it would narrow itself to—ahh, success!
We were like-minded outcasts. I may not have had friends in school, but here I made friends who spoke my language. In 1976 nobody at school knew of The Damned, The Clash, and the Sex Pistols. Here they did and could go back further musically! The bands I loved that got you labeled a freak to begin with—Bowie, Alice Cooper, and the New York Dolls—they loved them also! They knew the odd films too—The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Un Chein Andalou, Salo, 120 Days of Sodom, and Pink Flamingos! Everyone knew who Warhol and Picasso were, and some even knew of the Dadaists. All the knowledge from my high school lunch library was blooming! All freaks were allowed, it seemed to me.
We didn’t bond because you were the same color as me, the same gender as me, the same social class as me; we were trying to unite a scene of oddballs. It was hard enough to be an outcast—why would you not let somebody in if they would admit that they, too, were an oddball? Of course, jerks and assholes were quickly shown the door and given the boot with a then-rare and hard-to-find Doc Martens Air Sole. If you look back at any of the pictures from the period, it was not a sea of camera-ready punks. There were kids with long hair and flares; there were regular, 1970s-looking folks tossed in with the mess. There was no need to specialize and subsect the Latino punks from the gay punks.
In 1976 and 1977 there was no East LA scene yet, but there were always Latinos. I remember the Latino punks Alice Bag, Delphina, X8, Brian Tristan, and Tito Larriva, amongst others. Being Latino never made much of a difference. We knew we couldn’t bleach our hair like the other kids who would use the crazy color dyes. Black hair just turns this brassy orange kind of thing and doesn’t take on color—Alice and my brother Guy had that a lot. It turns to a dried, dead-looking ocher, not a Bowie red or a natural ginger that goes well with bright pink clothes. It was a non-issue, no gathering “Oh, you are Latino too!” It didn’t matter in the least. We came from a common background, but we were moving forward into the uncharted territory of the new music and scene. But we were growing up too. These were my first times far away from home without parents.
Once I remember someone asking a Latino if they liked Los Lobos in that early period. She said, “Naw, too beaner . . . ” It made us chuckle. It didn’t seem disrespectful or self-hating to be Latino punk and think that. We weren’t ashamed to be Mexican or embarrassed of who we were; rather, we didn’t want to be what you expected us to be. Perhaps stereotypes loomed louder back then: jocks, sosch, stoners, hippies, or beaners. We were a new social set. All the Mexican standards were in our Latino heads; we all were brought up with them. You would know them by heart, but we didn’t need to use that stuff. We were teenagers—well, The Zeros were. We didn’t want to be our parents or our aunts and uncles. Their musical references—Vincente Fernandez, Eydie Gormé, Carlos Santana, or “Angel Baby”—was the old establishment. We wanted to be new!
It was 1977—“no Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones.” So that for sure included Art Laboe and the Oldies. For The Plugz to take “La Bamba” and explode it seemed especially subversive, taking what you expected—Latinos playing “La Bamba”—and turning it on its head.
Los Lobos was ahead of the curve. They had been together longer. They were already into roots rock, including Mexican rhythms. Many of us—Alice Bag, Tito Larriva, Kid Congo, and myself as El Vez—would later mine our roots, embracing the music we heard as kids. But at that time, to forget your past and be now was the call of the day.
“No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones.” Indeed. I surely grin at the fact that I went on to be El Vez, the Mexican Elvis. Hector Penalosa went for the Baja Bugs, an all-Latino Beatles tribute, and Javier Escovedo’s little brother Mario would do a yearly Christmas Eve show at the Casbah in San Diego based on The Rolling Stones.
We are new! What we are doing has never been done before. We are part of a change—at least in our own lives.
One should be allowed to think like this at 16. It is good for the soul, if somewhat bothersome for parents. I had friends my age and older who were recording 45s and LPs, making their artwork for posters, writing stories for fanzines, making—well, altering—their own clothes, playing in bands, doing performance art, being loud and disorderly. We were making ourselves known and heard, no longer hiding in the library during lunch.
One of my heroes of the scene was Tomata du Plenty. To me he was the man—funny, witty, irreverent, always trying new things but still rooted in vaudevillian showmanship and old-style Hollywood glamour (via the punk-shattered mirror). His life was his art onstage and off. He was an incredible front man to a groundbreaking, no guitar band, The Screamers. They were my favorite! They represented art, punk, sex, comedy, tragedy. And you could dance to it. They had the beat.
He was a magnet of personality. He knew everyone, and those he didn’t know he named “Luigi,” and they became instant friends. He would introduce people to other like-minded people.
He flirted with men and women, endeared himself to all. He made everyone seem like part of a party that was just about to start now because he had finally found you. The Screamers’ parties at The Screamers’ house (on Wilton Place), dubbed the Wilton Hilton, were the very best! A great old-Hollywood house painted flat black on the inside, maybe a chandelier hanging above the stairway with some great poster or found art on the wall. Fantastic music blaring—the latest punk single, to sixties garage, to Motown, to the soundtrack to Suspiria by Goblin. There was food and drink galore. Food was always a plus! I recall eating a lot of the Army ration crackers found at the Masque, the remnants of its past life being an air-raid bomb shelter. Being a former fat kid, I was still hooked on food. I think eating was a social relaxer to me in my early awkward days. Thanks to puberty, though, I could now eat like a horse—and did—and still stay slim.
The people at these parties were the greatest—gay, straight, black, white, bikers, rich kids and poor kids, lowriders, male hustlers, young Hollywood actresses, drag queens, the soon-to-be famous, the used-to-be famous, hippies, and Wild Man Fischer standing in a corner singing about “Taggy Lee,” plus the punk teens! All talking together, mixing ideas: “So what is this punk thing?” “You don’t know about EST?” “No, video is the coming wave—it’s going to change filmmaking.” “Yeah, Frank Zappa used to live right down the street.”
These were low-rent versions of the parties I had read about in the library, Truman Capote’s black-and-white ball in New York, Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris—or at least a punk version of the Peter Sellers’s film The Party. Here they served giant tin pans of Mama du Plenty’s famous potato salad and containers of boozy punch. One time someone brought bags and bags of McDonald’s hamburgers. Still eating government cheese at home, I remember being impressed with that luxury bounty.
These were the teenage high school house parties I never got invited to in Chula Vista. But in Hollywood I was part of the club.
The Zeros went on to record a second single with Bomp! Records, “Wild Weekend” b/w “Beat Your Heart Out.” The front sleeve showed our pointy toed shoes—we would buy new old stock in Tijuana—and the back showed our home away from home, the infamous Plunger Pit. The Plunger Pit was a 1930s studio apartment behind a magazine stand/adult bookstore known as Circus Books in West Hollywood. It was the after-party crash pad ruled by Trudi, Trixie, and Hellin, the members of the made-up band The Plungers, the answer to the constant plumbing problem at the abode. We toured up and down the coast but had no real direction for what we were doing, which seemed normal for a seventeen-year-old.
This is how I remember The Zeros breaking up. Javier was complaining that Hector was playing in too many different bands. (He was. He played with F-Word; Black Randy’s side trip Mexican Randy, which I wish I had seen; and anyone else who needed a bass player. I thought it was great, like a jazz cat, playing with any gig just to play.) That seemed the main complaint, though there were others. And so we broke up. I don’t remember an artist plea of “Let’s stay together” or “We’ve come so far in such a short time.” I suppose I was ready for a change. They re-formed the next week without me and then moved to San Francisco. I don’t remember being too broken up about it.
During my early years in music I was pretty much a passenger, along for the ride. I don’t think I added that much to projects. But watching and learning from other people put me in better control when I later took the driver’s seat. I had graduated high school early that year and would be turning 18 by summer. And I knew where I was going.
A girl named Doris helped move me from Chula Vista to Hollywood. She was friends with that new group of kids recently arrived from Phoenix, Arizona. They got called The Cactus Heads—Don Bolles, David Wiley, Paul Cutler, and Rob Graves. They were great little bits of smarts and poison who would come to shake things up in little Hollywood. We stuffed Doris’s blue Volkswagen Golf with all my possessions from home. After one last trip to my favorite thrift store in Chula Vista, Am Vets, we made the drive to Los Angeles. It was September 28, 1978. Pope John Paul I died that day. Pope Paul VI had just died thirty days earlier. I took these as good omens.
Jane Wiedlin had just moved out of the Canterbury. The Canterbury was the wonderful, terrible punk home, crash pad, after-show party central, rehearsal space, four-story, collapsing 1920s apartment building right off Hollywood Boulevard, the avenue of the stars. She left me her apartment and mattress! I was set! She had painted the whole room white, with white enamel floors. She had left boxes of sixties fashion magazines, remains from her design school days. She was on her way to becoming a rock star. I had windows to the courtyard, where I could hear my friends yell to each other from their apartment windows, like in the New York movies! I would hear fights from different floors and people practicing their guitars over and over.
I got a job as a waiter at the Pizza Hut on Hollywood Boulevard. I got to serve beer and was only 18. Older men asked me whether I wanted a sugar daddy. I would feed my punk-rock friends free pizza and beer. Of course, I didn’t have a car—I could walk to work! It was four blocks from the Canterbury, which was right across the street from the Masque. How much more punk-rock teenage heaven could I be in?
That winter Margot Go-Go and I went to New York City. She had just gotten kicked out of The Go-Go’s, and their band’s ascent seemed for sure: “Hey, I got kicked out of a band too, so let’s go!” We got round-trip tickets for $99. It was the first time for both of us. This was before I HEART NY—the city was a wonderful bankrupt shell of its older, former self, a completely different world from what it is today. I remember going to a party way below SoHo, and the taxi driver told us, “You know, you won’t be able to get a taxi back—nobody comes to this area at night.”
I first stayed with Trixie Plunger, who had recently transplanted herself from Hollywood. Then I stayed in a mid-town basement apartment with Chase Holiday. Before I moved to Hollywood, I lived in her spacious hallway closet at the Canterbury, where I hung a black-and-white poster of Yoko playing golf. Chase worked at an amazing record store. I stole every Shaun Cassidy and Nino Rota soundtrack albums I could. I still have them all to this day.
I had my first beer at a bar in Saint Mark’s Place, bought for me by Howie Pyro and The Blessed. You could drink at 18 then! 15, 17, and eighteen-year-olds in a bar, being served! This was truly a wonderful place.
I saw Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, The Contortions, The Cramps, and Johnny Thunders at all the spots—CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City. I would go to Studio 54 to pick fights with Steve Rubell. I refused to dance (although I really wanted to)—I stuck to my punk-rock morals of that time. Then I would go to the Mudd Club and hang with Klaus Nomi and the kids of that time. It was the New York City of my Velvet Underground dreams back then. I was there for a few months. It was a great eye opener for an eighteen-year-old. New York was a much darker colder place than palm-tree-lined Southern California. It was my first actual cold, cold “winter”—but not of my discontent.
Then it was back to California, where things seemed different. I was becoming a jaded nineteen-year-old. I got an older boyfriend. Gorilla Rose, an art director/ideas man/lyricist of The Screamers, was moving out of his black room, where 1930s rose-patterned wallpaper peeked out at the ceiling’s edge. I moved in. It was just west of La Brea near the Rock & Roll Ralphs—almost the suburbs compared to living right off Hollywood Boulevard. I would swim twice a day at the Hollywood YMCA and showered with Bruce Springsteen. I was the only one there who knew who he was. He asked me not to blow his cover, but I still got his autograph for my friend Ruth. I think I worked at El Coyote, the cheap Mexican restaurant of choice, as a cashier. I was in a couple of bands, The Johnnies and another called Catholic Discipline.
The music scene then had seemed to take on a different format—harder, faster, shorter. Catholic Discipline headed in the opposite direction: longer, slower, scarier. I think we saw Catholic Discipline as a “postpunk” band. Claude Bessy, singer and editor and writer for Slash magazine, was our figurehead. I think he felt a little constrained with his editor duties at Slash, and here was a way for his words to leap off the page and onto the stage. Craig Lee, our drummer, was the music writer for LA Weekly. Perhaps that gave us our literary bent. He would give me notes on how I played my Farfisa Combo Compact—“Play spookier.” Craig was afraid I didn’t like Claude’s wild-man antics—swinging his mic stand as a weapon to go with his verbal assaults. But, actually, I thought it was great. I was still pretty stoic in my demeanor in those days. I think I was sitting, waiting, and learning for my lead singer time.
Admittedly Penelope Spheeris came into the game pretty late. She started hanging out at our rehearsals before filming us for her movie, The Decline of Western Civilization. The scene had changed a lot by then, and not for the better, if you ask me. Clubs were shutting down because of the violence caused by people we didn’t know, those new guys from Orange County. Punk had turned a corner. Less art and more machine, punk wasn’t dead; it had just become something else.
