The Stucco-Coated Killing Field
by Henry Rollins
I came to Los Angeles in the late summer of 1981, having joined the band Black Flag.
Before then I was well aware of the amazing music scene in Los Angeles but only through the records I mail ordered or managed to find in record stores in the Washington, DC, area where I was from.
This association was in many ways quite pure. I evaluated the bands solely from their recorded output. Some of the bands I was listening to included The Germs, X, The Weirdos, The Alley Cats, The Bags, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, The Middle Class, The Deadbeats, and others. Besides the singles, the Yes L.A. and Tooth and Nail compilation albums were useful to try to get an idea of what was happening.
These were incredible records. I remember buying The Weirdos’ Destroy All Music 7” on Bomp! through the mail. I played it over and over. The song “Life of Crime,” to this day, strikes me as a 140, and some second masterpiece. In fact, I can’t find one Weirdos song that isn’t great.
I do remember that all these records seemed to have one central theme running through them: danger. The Black Randy singles, all of them amazing, were scary. It occurred to me that Randy was a genius maniac who didn’t have long to live. The song “Trouble at the Cup” laughs off life in favor of some huge, absolutely lethal darkness.
There was a seasoned adultness to the music that made me think that the bands were living fast, free of life expectancy, making the soundtrack for a scene that was going to tragically self-extinguish.
The first proof of that was when, in December 1980, I read that Darby Crash of The Germs had died. The Germs’ singles and their one, full-length album, G.I., was music from a different place. From then to now I have never heard anything like it. Crash’s death, which I knew nothing about more than what scant information I was able to find, made sense. There was a haunting finality to the G.I. album. The nine-minute song that closes out the record, “Shut Down,” is the sound of a cold, dark, solitary walk into the abyss. How could the band have followed up? What could Crash have done next other than die? As upsetting as it was, it all made some kind of Rimbaudian sense. Mind you, this is all being contemplated from thousands of miles away, having no contact or context from which to draw from.
So when I finally arrived in Los Angeles with a duffel bag and about $200, I immediately realized I was going to have to make some adjustments.
The differences between what I was raised in and what I entered into were profound and changed the way I thought about the world.
I came from a music scene that was small enough to fit into a small to medium-sized venue. There were a handful of bands and a few record stores. There wasn’t much interest in this different music on local radio, and the local press largely ignored or insulted it.
Los Angeles, on the other hand was an independent music boomtown. There were bands all over and venues for them to play in. There would be multiple shows in the city on any given night, and every one of them would be packed. There was Rodney Bingenheimer and his longstanding show on KROQ, which was a great messenger for music and information.
It was, for me, an overload. Beyond the abundant music, youth culture in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, at least in the music scene I found myself in was something else entirely, and I found myself all but totally unprepared to deal with it.
I fairly radiated naïveté. I was a walking billboard for it. I remember, weeks after arriving, stupidly asking a teenager why he wasn’t in school. He thought that was hilarious and informed me that he dropped out somewhere in early high school and had run away to Los Angeles. Again, another wide-eyed question about where he would sleep that night, resulting in more laughter. I had been out of my all-boys prep-school uniform for a little over two years, but it might as well have been two minutes. It was in Los Angeles, in the second half of 1981, where I started to learn the ways of the world.
This world that I am telling you about existed almost completely disconnected from the “real” one of the citizens. With no exaggeration, I can tell you that I was surrounded by people who did drugs (the kind that kill you), committed crimes of all kinds, perpetrated deeds of life-changing violence with a casualness that was truly terrifying. One time, sitting on a bench at Oki-Dog, where Fatburger is now, at Gardner and Santa Monica Blvd., I saw a man walk by, heading east on Santa Monica, seemingly oblivious to the loquacious din we were making. Two guys at a table near me stand up at the same time, peel off from the crowd, and fall in behind the guy. It was obvious they were going to roll him. It was the seeming ease and confidence with which they made their move that was troubling—they were not new at this. They returned awhile later, laughing. They had indeed robbed the guy. It was no big deal. Around that time I had heard that a young girl’s body had been found at the site of Errol Flynn’s mansion, a popular party spot. Apparently it was a suicide. Right after I heard that, a woman told me how she had scored the drugs the girl had used and actually helped her kill herself by getting her to drink a large quantity of milk to make sure she choked if she happened to vomit. She laughed as she said this. I am willing to bet that if you were to talk to other people who were in this scene at this time, they might have a story or two like this.
Although it never once appealed to me nor did I ever feel remotely a part of it, it was more than fascinating. If your parents ever warned you about the big bad world, I don’t think they really had much idea of what they were talking about; they just wanted you to be careful and get through in one piece. What they thought they were speaking to with authority was quaint and anemic compared to where I was. Generationally they simply had nothing with which to compare.
What I noticed immediately upon arrival was the influence of “Hollywood” and the culture of Southern California in the Los Angeles punk scene. There was an aspect of glamour and understated confidence that was James Dean–esque. Many of the males worked on their rugged, heroic looks with almost aspiring-model earnestness, and the ubiquitous beauty of the females was more than just the observational hunger of my youth—these were really good-looking young people. Many of them seemed as ready for their close-up as they were to go to the next show. I am in no way trying to imply that these were lightweight scenesters, but the fact that so many of them were so cosmetically evolved gave the overall scene an attraction that could not be denied. I think this was one of the things that made the LAPD hate punks and assault them with regularity. It is also why this time period is so well documented by local photographers; it was an irresistibly photogenic happening that was going to be over almost as quickly as it started.
As far as I knew, this was a very insular scene. X had come to the East Coast to critical acclaim, and The Dickies had made it there as well but canceled their Washington, DC, show. Beyond that, all these bands existed in fanzines and cassettes of Rodney Bingenheimer’s radio show, dull sounding and off pitch due to multiple duplications. From the outside it seemed like a scene that wasn’t driven by ambition or financial gain but capturing the moment whenever possible. Just listening to live tapes from the legendary Masque Club, you can hear the reverie and minute-to-minute discovery, especially in the recordings of The Screamers.
When I arrived in the summer of 1981 I couldn’t figure out if something new had taken the place of what had so recently transpired and deconstructed, or if this was the moment before the next thing was about to happen.
One thing was undeniable: the level of drug abuse in the scene was toxic. The scene was teeming with danger and die-young vigor but seemed devoid of any motivation, purpose, or intellectual/artistic content. What I saw made me conclude that it was a scene full of beautiful young people trying to off themselves. I never thought myself any better, but my inability to understand things in a larger context alienated me almost completely.
The cultish isolation of Black Flag soon separated me geographically from the LA scene as we soon relocated to Redondo Beach, where the band had its roots.
It was only several miles down the 405, but it felt like we were a world away. Occasionally we would go into Hollywood to see a show and felt the “you’re not from around here, are you, son?” sneer. I remember seeing members of these Masque-era bands at shows. For me it was being in the same room as the legends from my record collection. I met a few of them, but it didn’t go very well, so I left them alone.
Black Flag founders Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski had a label called SST Records. They were ambitious and driven as any two people I have ever met. The label released not only Black Flag’s recorded output, soon-to-be quite prolific, but also the work of other bands like The Minutemen and Saccharine Trust. They had no interest in remaining local; they were looking to get as far into the world as possible.
I can only speak for myself, but I thought our method was not to write some kind of hit but, through a rapid release schedule and relentless touring, to conquer by sheer ubiquity. This approach takes all you can give to it and is rife with confusing, ironic twists. For me it made the concept of success, beyond a severely defined idea of artistic truth and unrestrained fury against any and all who sought to neutralize us, to be repellent. So if the goal is to do the work as you see fit, any slings and arrows that may come are as much a part of it as anything else.
Whether real or imagined, we considered ourselves in opposition to almost everything and everyone. The artwork on the album covers and flyers was specifically meant to upset and provoke. At times I thought we were so extreme, we didn’t want to have an audience at all.
As a result of our actions, we existed in a world of high contrast. We were rarely considered less than in the extreme. We studiously sought to obliterate the middle ground.
Within a few months of joining Black Flag and moving to Los Angeles, I spent most of the year on the road on tours that lasted months. We would return to Southern California primarily to record so we could leave again. Although the stays were longer, California became a state that was one of many I frequented. In a strange way I became the quintessential American, meeting people from all over the country, month after month, year after year.
Between tours I would visit Los Angeles in a series of brief jump cuts. I would find out what happened to some of the people I had met when I first arrived. There were deaths from overdoses and suicides, stints of incarceration, and other bad news. I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of heroin going around. I found out that it was plentiful as it was potent and cheap. At that time, I had never heard of Hoover’s COINTELPRO efforts, but it seemed obvious to me that these people had been targeted in a campaign to clean things up, perhaps for the upcoming Olympic Games.
I identify with Los Angeles through the filter of music. It’s the city that was as immortalized and defined by The Doors’ keyboard-driven, poetic nihilism and X’s first album as any industry, innovation, or event.
I have often referred to Los Angeles as “the stucco-coated killing field,” and in a way, that’s true, but you have to live here to die here. That is to say, there are no babes in these woods.