by Chris D.
Set with the task of writing this, I had to ask myself what really is punk rock? It seems to be something very different to different people, depending on whom you ask. To me it is doing your music, art, or writing exactly as prescribed by what feels right inside of you. Because it was and still is to some extent tied to youth or youthful feelings, many of the sentiments expressed are by way of channeling all sorts of unfocused anger through a prism—defiance of authority and the status quo. And, to paraphrase Joe Strummer, it is not accepting bullshit for an answer; it is about truth. Telling it as well as hearing it. For me, carrying over from pre-punk and proto-punk icons like Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Iggy Pop, it is also about sexual politics, trying to determine what love between two people truly represents. John and Exene from X and Jeffrey Lee Pierce from The Gun Club were on a very similar wavelength. X’s song “The World’s a Mess (It’s in My Kiss)”—just the title alone—is a perfect illustration of this.
Since I started writing poetry before making music in my bands, The Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen, my focus was initially on the song lyrics. And poetry is how I got involved writing record and live reviews for Slash magazine, submitting poems for consideration. Slash did not do poetry. Philomena Winstanley, co-editor of Slash along with Claude “Kickboy” Bessy, liked the writing enough, though, to solicit record reviews from me. Thus my first, an appraisal of Iggy and the Stooges’ “I Got a Right/Gimme Some Skin,” appeared in the third issue, the one with Johnny Rotten on the cover. A plethora of reviews followed in subsequent issues, under my own name, Chris D., as well as a variety of pseudonyms, including Half-Cocked, Mr. OK, and Bob Clone. I met other Slash-ites in due course, opinionated (and often very funny) scribes like Allen “Basho Macko” McDonnell, Ranking Jeffrey Lee (aka Jeffrey Lee Pierce), Will Amato, and Pleasant Gehman.
During the summer of 1977 I’d succeeded in making a mess of my personal life, with my first marriage disintegrating due to chronic infidelity. I had just finished grad school, getting an MFA in communication arts (in screenwriting). Life should have been roiling with promising possibilities, but I, in retrospect, could not navigate into some filmmaking harbor. I was and still am socially inept—a perfect recipe for involvement in punk rock. Networking with fellow grad students or show business contacts made through college at Loyola Marymount University should have been a piece of cake. But there was no one I had met to whom I felt connected, at least in filmmaking circles. The new music scene was another story, however. Through my connection with Slash magazine, I was going out to punk-rock shows at places like the Masque and one-off shows at galleries and lofts three or four nights a week, minimum. I was meeting like-minded people, many of whom were musicians themselves. My long-held second love, being in a rock group, was raising its unruly head.
Coincidentally I had just landed a job teaching English at a private high school on the border between Westchester and Inglewood near LAX. On weekends it was a synagogue school, but during the week it was rented out to a middle-aged couple who apparently held some kind of charter for private education. The principal, whom I admired for his tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds against him, was morbidly obese and, when I met him, was already paralyzed on his right side. I had my long locks of hair shorn, needing to do this for the job as well as figuring I’d fit in better with all the punk-rock kids inhabiting my night life.
Newly separated—yet again—from my first wife, I was living in an apartment on Venice Boulevard across from the old abandoned police station (or was it the defunct city hall?) John Carpenter had used a few years before as a location for his exploitation action tribute to director Howard Hawks, Assault on Precinct 13.
Living in the apartment was a mixed bag. I was afflicted with an upstairs neighbor who did not appreciate me playing at full volume on my 1970 vintage Spectrasonic solid-state stereo The Stooges’ LPs Funhouse or Raw Power or miscellaneous singles I needed to review for Slash. I remember him calling my landlord at least twice rather than calling me first as I had requested.
I was convinced something awful had happened in the apartment in the past. It was 1950s (if not ’40s) vintage and had a long catalogue of tenants tromping on its hardwood floors. Abetting the uneasiness was my separation from my estranged spouse, which had left me with a Spartan collection of secondhand furniture: one large antique dining table, a red leather-upholstered easy chair, my stereo (in the living room), one basic double bed with no bedstead accoutrements (in the master bedroom), three cinderblock bookcases filled with vintage pulp crime and science fiction paperbacks, a crappy black-and-white TV, and a mattress on the floor (in the second “guest” room). I had at least two ghostly experiences while living there, one seemingly so genuine—waking up in the middle of the night feeling as if something invisible was latched onto my chest, trying to suck out my soul—that I, still to this day, feel it was the real thing. Then again, I was smoking a lot of pot as well as drinking heavily in those days, so I suppose this experience could have been self-generated.
Claude and Philomena lived on Speedway in Venice, and Allen “Basho Macko” McDonnell and his then-wife, Delphina, lived off Rose Avenue. Sometimes various combinations of us would share rides to shows in Hollywood.
I remember driving my 1969 Ford Falcon all the way down east on Venice Boulevard to La Brea, then north to where it split off onto Highland, homing in on the Masque on Cherokee in the basement of the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, homing in on it like a beacon of gravel-pitted, concrete-blocked, acne-scarred depravity.
At the time, a block south, on Selma Avenue (spanning east-west) was a notorious cruising area for gay hustlers. The Gold Cup on Las Palmas and Hollywood was a tiny coffee shop and covert hangout for “chicken hawks” (older men interested in young teen boys), immortalized in song by Black Randy and the Metro Squad and as a band name by Arthur J. and the Gold Cups.
Often I would drive drunk, with a pint of Kamchatka, Jack Daniel’s, I.W. Harper, or a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon at my feet. It is a miracle I was never arrested for a DUI.
The first show I remember seeing at the Masque was The Bags and a short-lived combo called The Spastics. On subsequent nights I caught The Skulls, The Eyes, X (every time they played), The Dils, The Germs, The Screamers, The Weirdos, The Alley Cats (nearly every time they played), The Deadbeats, Arthur J. and the Gold Cups, The Zeros, so many others. My memories of these shows all blend together. They were fun, they were chaotic, they were exhilarating, and they were sometimes scary and sometimes boring. Though I was in the process of separating from my wife, Bonnie, she still accompanied me to some of these early shows. She shared my interest in the scene, but things were uneasy between us, and I had already met someone who would take her place as 1977 gave way to 1978.
I had started to take tentative steps trying to put a band together—I’m not sure when, I believe it was as early as that past summer. Our first rehearsal was at DJ Bonebrake’s house out in the Valley. DJ was a friend of Joe Ramirez, as DJ was also drummer for The Eyes, and Joe, who was The Eyes’ singer-guitarist, was also playing drums for me. John Richey was on bass, and Bob Grasso, a crazy jokester of a friend of mine from college, played guitar. Bob only lasted that first rehearsal, and soon Tito Larriva, who was starting his own band The Plugz, replaced him. The Masque had rehearsal rooms as well as their main performance area, and we started to rehearse there. It was ratty, cold, and ill lit. I don’t remember the rooms having PAs, and if I’m not mistaken, I think I sang my vocals through an extra Fender Twin guitar amp.
On the job front, halfway through that autumn semester the principal, Mr. H, had another stroke and went into the hospital and died. He was a master disciplinarian, despite his infirmities, but when his wife took over, all hell broke loose. There were several borderline criminal kids in the school, and Mrs. H, wanting to be everyone’s friend as opposed to an authority figure, let them get away with all kinds of outrageous shenanigans. I drew the line at letting the kids roll joints in class, and I gradually became known by a handful of them as the killjoy pariah. By the end of the first week of January 1978, I was history. My eleventh-grade class, composed of mostly A- and B-grade African American female students, was sad to see me go. But four or five of my male nemeses in the tenth grade threw rocks at my car as I made my final exit.
By that time The Flesh Eaters had already made their debut at the Masque on December 23, 1977, opening for The Dickies, The Nuns, and The Eyes. This was the last Masque show I went to with my wife.
The official nail in the coffin of my marriage was divorce papers in the mail, but before that a more potent declaration came with Bonnie’s father arriving in a truck by himself to pick up the big double bed that technically belonged to them. Bonnie’s father was a tall, rangy self-made millionaire, a poor guy with a gravelly voice from the Mississippi hill country who married a senator’s daughter (really) but made his fortune while doing research at Lockheed, inventing on the side, with his business partner, one of the early versions of Krazy Glue. I was always grateful to him for not thrashing me within an inch of my life for the way I’d treated his daughter.
By this time I was a week or two away from moving to new digs in Hollywood on Fairfax between Willoughby and Waring.
When I finally arrived in Hollywood I was already on the first of many “outs” in my new relationship with Judith Bell (soon to become an artistic collaborator), which made it awkward, as she was close friends with the three gay tenants who shared two of the other apartments. The fourth apartment, the one right above me, was inhabited by a scary, very cranky Korean War vet everyone had nicknamed Lurch. Lurch was a handyman and seemed perpetually drunk. I was soon to torment Lurch—unintentionally—on a nearly daily basis with my stereo cranked high.
At first I had virtually no furniture except for the mattress on the floor in the bedroom and the stereo and red leather-upholstered easy chair in the living room. I remember falling asleep on the living room floor that first night there, cold winds howling outside down the narrow driveway alley (the apartment building was set back from the street, located behind a kitchen cabinets shop run by the landlord.) I was slightly drunk and in a funk, using my father’s rolled up WW2 sleeping bag as a pillow while I drifted in and out of consciousness.
Judith and I were soon back on good terms, and we could be found at the Masque at least twice a week and sometimes at the house and rehearsals of our new friends, John and Exene, of the band X.
Judith also wrote for Slash mag, and I can best describe the newsprint tabloid as a unifying force, something that inspired people and spawned other homemade, Xeroxed fanzines (Judith and I even had a two-issue enterprise called the Upsetter that featured all kinds of detritus, including interviews with bands like The Germs, The Bags, The Dils, X, and irreverent graphics spoofing various trendy fashions and music styles popping up in the subterranean subculture). I’ve mentioned Claude and Philly, who tended to the editorial content (i.e., verbiage) of Slash mag, but two other people, artist and graphic designer Steve Samiof and photographer Melanie Nissen, were responsible for the iconographic masthead and striking visuals, aided and abetted by soon-to-be-legendary artists like Gary Panter, best remembered for his back-page comic strip about the super, subhuman punk Jimbo as well as the Slash mag logo that replaced the beautifully executed initial dripping blood one after thirteen or so issues.
Melanie Nissen remembers, “Steve and I used to put the mag together, paste it up—this was before computers, of course—out of our dining room or bedroom, wherever we were living. Steve had seen some newspaper stories about what was going on in London and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we do a magazine about this?’ It was never about money. So in the beginning it was just Steve and I and Claude and Philly.” Were there ever any problems with the printer about content? “Oh, no. They didn’t care. Who knows if they even really looked at it. We just found the cheapest place we could. It was way out in the Valley, kind of funky. But we were just happy to get it printed every month. You know, it was a really special time. There was no one around to tell us, ‘You can’t do that.’ We were young and didn’t have all that crap in our heads yet, you know? I think that was one of the most special things about it.” Midway through Slash magazine’s lifespan Steve and Melanie and Claude and Philly got to move into a real office on the southwest corner of Santa Monica and Fairfax.
This DIY spirit Melanie mentioned was crucial to the scene, and I don’t think one can overestimate Slash magazine’s ripple effect on, at first, dozens, then hundreds of little mini-scenes on the punk front that carried on the torch to new, sometimes seemingly incongruous frontiers. There were other newsprint tabloids and magazines too, such as Bruce Kalberg’s No Mag (with its emphasis on avant-garde art as well as punk), Hudley and Al’s Flipside (with its egalitarian participation of band and audience members alike), Greg Shaw’s Bomp magazine (with its catholic taste running the gamut from punk to power pop), and the pioneering Back Door Man (1975!) with such alumni as Don Waller, Phast Phreddie Patterson, and D. D. Faye, all making an impact along with Slash. Other mags like San Francisco’s Search and Destroy and, from the East Coast, New York Rocker (edited by swell guy Andy Schwartz) and Boston Rock were also influential. Surprisingly, too, enormously significant UK rags like Melody Maker, Sounds, and New Musical Express could be found on many local Hollywood newsstands as well as at hip record stores, and they had their own collision of styles and tastes rubbing off on the local scene.
Slash was relatively successful, considering the competition it was up against on magazine racks, in record stores and newsstands across the country. Not that people got paid, but it always seemed that the magazine was able to secure advertising from various major record labels looking to hawk their “new wave” acts as well as the smaller indies who were promoting the “real thing,” thus breaking even.
I started recording various versions of the initial Flesh Eaters songs at Randy Stodola of The Alley Cats’ house down in Lomita. I believe it was in January 1978. He had a four-track recorder. It may have been low-tech, but Randy was a whiz with that four-track. Shortly after the first session of three songs, we lost guitarist Tito Larriva, who gravitated to devote his full time to his own band, The Plugz. Following his departure, Stan Ridgway (later of Wall of Voodoo) joined the band for a couple of months. Finally, around the beginning of the summer, I was back to square one and, despairing of ever holding a semipermanent lineup together, I asked another local trio, The Fly Boys, who were a bit more pop flavored, if they’d join me for a limited time, backing me on a four-song 7” EP and doing a few shows. Thus, the first Flesh Eaters recordings, once again recorded at Randy’s, were unleashed on my own label, Upsetter Records.
One of my most vivid memories I have is of how cold and windy it was on the autumn and winter nights of 1978. I had one of those bronchial coughs that wouldn’t go away. Partially surviving on unemployment and the largesse of my parents, I was getting to devote most of my time to writing for Slash and making music. I got a job in the tape library of Century City’s CBS Records HQ in late 1978 through a temp agency Judith worked for, and I toiled away in the salt mines of their master vault, carting around multitracks of artists like Barbra Streisand and Toto. I always resisted some of my friends’ suggestions to toss a couple of magnets into select boxes of analog twenty-four-track tapes.
The year 1979 saw the genesis of Tooth and Nail, one of the first—if not the first—Los Angeles punk compilation LPs, along with Dangerhouse’s Yes L.A. one-sided album. I must give credit to Judith for really being a prime moving force behind making Tooth and Nail happen. I can’t remember who came up with the title for the compilation, but she secured the financing from Rocky Stevens, a gay Oklahoma millionaire who was a friend and loved punk rock. It’s hard to believe we did the whole thing—the recording and mixing, the pressing and manufacturing—for so little. Still, no one made any money beyond breaking even. Of course, looking back on it now, some of the recordings don’t live up to the more polished productions coming out of London or even local labels Dangerhouse or Posh Boy. Selection of the bands was partly based on who were our friends and also who we felt deserved exposure and hadn’t gotten their share yet. In a classic example of DIY self-interest, that included my current lineup of The Flesh Eaters. Originally X was also scheduled to be included, but after their experience with Dangerhouse, guitarist Billy Zoom nixed any more involvement with small indie labels, including us, choosing to wait for a bigger label to take notice. Exene stayed tangentially involved, codesigning the Tooth and Nail record labels with Judith. The Controllers, Middle Class, and The Germs were all Southern California bands, and Negative Trend and UXA were originally from San Francisco. Negative Trend was the only band with previously recorded material, and their inclusion was heavily influenced by the presence of their then new vocalist, Rik L Rik. I was a big fan of Rik’s previous aggregation, F-Word.
By late 1979 I had a part-time job with Slash magazine at their new offices on Beverly and Martel, working as circulation manager in the downstairs storeroom. Current and back issues of Slash resided in organized heaps on the dirty linoleum floor. Upstairs, in addition to housing the new studio for laying out the templates for the tabloid’s printing, Bob Biggs had taken over financial and creative control of the fledgling Slash Records. Slash had already released a single by The Plugz and a 7” EP by The Germs, and Slash’s first album, The Germs (G.I.), produced by Joan Jett, was about to be released.
Photos by Gary Leonard
Bloodied fan
Top Jimmy and Luci Diehl wedding, 1981 (from L-R): Luci Diehl, John Pochna, Top Jimmy, Exene, Lydia Ortiz, Junco, unknown, Dig the Pig, Chris D., the rest all unknown, John Doe at lower right
The Alley Cats backstage (from L-R): John McCarthy, Dianne Chai, Randy Stodola
Gina Schock and Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go’s
Chris Morris and Phil Alvin at the Zero Zero
From L-R: David Hidalgo, unknown, Cesar Rosas, Michael Wilcox, unknown, Bruce Barf, Dave Alvin, Conrad Lozano
Hardcore Invasion
Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Texacala Jones at the Whisky, 1981
Luci Diehl and Gerber
LAPD’s finest
Photos by Melanie Nissen
Darby and Exene, Slash Records rooftop
John Denney of The Weirdos meets LA’s finest
The Zeros in another rented hall, 1979 (from L-R): Hector Penalosa, Javier Escovedo
Black Randy at the Whisky
The Weirdos being shut down at Larchmont Hall, 1979 (from L-R): Dix Denney, Nickey Beat, Dave Trout, Cliff Roman (obscured from view), John Denney
Photo by Rick Nyberg
Dinky and D. J. Bonebreak at the Starwood, 1980
Photos by Ruby Ray
LA Line-up, West Hollywood, 1977 (from L-R): unknown, Hellin Killer, Trudi, Pleasant Gehman, Bobby Pin, Nickey Beat, Alice Bag, Delphina, Lorna Doom, Pat Smear, Jena
Welcome to Los Angeles, 1977 (from L-R): John Doe, Rand McNally, Exene, Black Randy at the Palladium-Punk fashion show
The Zeros, San Francisco, 1977 (from L-R): Robert Lopez, Baba Chenelle, Hector Penalosa, Javier Escovedo, Hellin Killer
Photos by Ann Summa
The Adolescents’ Tony Cadena in his backyard in Fullerton, CA, 1982
Pat and Alice Bag at the Hong Kong Café, 1979
The Plugz (from L-R): Chalo Quintana, Tito Larriva, Tony Marsico
Circle Jerks at the Country Club in Reseda, CA, 1982 (from L-R): Keith Morris, Greg Hetson, Roger Rogerson
Tito Larriva of The Plugz at the East LA studio of graphic artist Richard Duardo, 1979
John and Exene post-show, Troubadour
I wound up my tenure at CBS Records’ tape library around the same time. I remember giving a copy of The Flesh Eaters’ EP to an A&R secretary I knew on the sixth floor, which was largely Epic Records label turf. She was nice and cool, but I honestly didn’t think it was going to be her cup of tea. Then again, she was familiar with The Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope and London Calling, both of them on Epic. I never did find out what she thought before I left. A weird memory from that job: at one point a few people in the building had tested positive for hepatitis B, and gamma globulin shots were pretty much mandated by a temporary medical station in the big boardroom off the downstairs lobby for everyone before leaving work for the day. Strange.
At Slash, down in the first-floor vault (or, once again, in less glamorous terminology, storeroom), I toiled going through the binder with the circulation sheets, a notebook with the accounts of every newsstand, record store, and bookstore that carried Slash magazine in the United States. I took out the required number of copies (usually five, ten, fifteen, at most twenty) of the current issue from the piled stacks, rolled them up, and wrapped them in plain brown paper. Once the orders were filled, the oblong parcels went flying out to their far-flung destinations on successive trips to the local post office on Beverly Boulevard and Spaulding. In the coming years those piled heaps of mags would gradually be replaced by columns of boxes of Slash Records releases (promotional copies and what-have-you). For a brief period—I think in 1982 or 1983—the storeroom, because it had a bathroom, even played host to a couple of band members of Aussie garage kings The Lipstick Killers, who took over my stockroom job once I’d been kicked upstairs.
No Questions Asked, the first Flesh Eaters album, was recorded in a real mix-and-match mode of personnel all through the beginning of 1980. Released on Upsetter Records the same year, it was written up, along with The Germs (G.I.) LP, by Richard Meltzer in his infamous “blabbermouth lockjaw of the soul” review in the Village Voice. But No Questions Asked was dwarfed, as were so many other Los Angeles band releases at the time, by Slash Records’ second album out, Los Angeles, X’s debut LP. The production and material (already familiar to X’s live audience) was startling not only in its competitive professionalism but also in its uncompromising attitude and lyrical imagery. One could hear distant echoes of other past California bands in the vocals and melodies (e.g., The Doors and Jefferson Airplane), yet it blazed new territory by incorporating the hard edge of the UK’s Sex Pistols and The Clash as well as the chaotic, bourbon-fueled rockabilly swirl (on heavy metal steroids) of such artists as Billy Lee Riley, Hasil Adkins, and even Johnny Cash.
I don’t remember the exact date, but somewhere in, I think, the spring of 1980, Bob Biggs hired me as his third employee at the record company, nominally an A&R rep for the label. There was always a creative tension between Biggs and I, and it gradually escalated through my term there, from 1980 through the last months in the spring of 1984. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. More on that later.
The magazine was still going, and as Steve and Melanie became less involved with the production side, I spent almost every other day running to the photography place over on the corner of Curson and Wilshire Blvd where they shot the halftones and line shots for our photographs and artwork that would end up in paste-up. You must remember this was before computers, before Photoshop and the advent of such futuristic inventions as JPEGs and desktop publishing.
In some respects I’ve felt the need to render everything here in this chapter in as chronological a fashion as possible, but I think with the remainder I’m going to have to break it up into a scattered mosaic jumping back and forth in time.
Slash magazine’s days were numbered, what with the crush of the new record label and the diffusion of energy from contributors getting involved in various other creative endeavors. The last issue went out with a bang near the end of 1980, and it was the closest we got to a “slick” publication, with staples (instead of folded layers) and approximately twice as many pages. Judith and I were still reviewing singles, LPs, and live events, but we also conducted a mammoth interview with Hollywood maverick director Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss), who was just gearing up for release of one of his final films, a magnum opus about his military exploits in WW2 in the invasion of Sicily and, much farther north, liberation of a concentration camp, called The Big Red One. It was one of the longest and best interviews we had done for the mag.
Late in the year I began readying the material for a different kind of album as The Flesh Eaters’ second LP. I was fortunate enough to corral friends John Doe and DJ Bonebrake of X, Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman from The Blasters, and Steve Berlin from Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs (who would go on to join Los Lobos) into a lineup for an eight-song extravaganza, a mélange of seventies-style garage band punk, Link Wray–meets–Bo Diddley rhythm and blues, and African roots music. The lyrics were French symbolist-inspired mixed with voodoo-hoodoo/tragic country blended with imagery from transgressive cinema. The title, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, was also the moniker of a favorite spaghetti western from the sixties. Recorded in January of 1981, this was a prime example of the kind of fruitful creative DIY tension that was starting to rear its head between honcho Bob Biggs and me. Rather than bring out the unique effort on Slash, Bob decided to generate a subsidiary label called Ruby Records that would be primarily, though not exclusively, my province. A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die was released in the spring of 1981, right around the same time as X’s second celebrated effort with Slash, Wild Gift. Things were moving fast with the labels, and many of the events, gigs, and releases tend to blur together in my memory, partly no doubt to a haze of incipient alcoholism.
The creative tension of working at Slash was a challenge and sometimes frustrating experience for someone like me who was and is, to this day, still a basically impatient person. Robin Weiss, Bob Biggs’s secretary and Slash receptionist, and I were good friends with Jeffrey Lee Pierce and were fierce champions of the material he was starting to demo under the band name The Gun Club. It took months for Robin and I to whittle down Bob’s resistance, playing for him the songs Jeffrey had already recorded with producer Tito Larriva to get him to agree to finance a second outing in the studio with me producing to complete a releasable LP. Finally, in the late summer of 1981, The Gun Club’s debut album, Fire of Love, was unleashed to universal acclaim.
About the same time when Fire of Love was accumulating accolades, The Blasters were preparing their first phenomenal Slash record (they’d already had one LP, American Music, released by rockabilly label Rollin’ Rock). Their newest album was so well received, it cracked Time magazine’s Top Ten albums of 1981 and peaked at number thirty-six on Billboard’s charts. This was something unheard of for an indie punk-rock label, and along with X’s success, it was a major impetus in getting Slash Records picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers.
Simultaneously I was putting together a new lineup of The Flesh Eaters. This was going to be a slightly smaller unit and, as it turns out, have a bit different dynamic as far as composing the music. Don Kirk on guitar, Robyn Jameson on bass, Chris Wahl on drums, Steve Berlin on saxes (on the recordings only), Jill Jordan on backing vocals, and I recorded The Flesh Eaters’ third album, Forever Came Today, on St. Valentine’s Day in 1982. Once again we did the tracks at Quad Teck, engineered by Pat Burnette (whose father was country star Dorsey Burnette) on 6th Street, just two blocks west of Western Avenue. All of The Germs (G.I.), all of A Minute to Pray, and roughly half of Fire of Love were also recorded there, and so was The Dream Syndicate’s Days of Wine and Roses and Green on Red’s Gravity Talks, both still to come in 1982 and 1983, respectively. The studio is now long gone.
Perhaps this is a good place to wind down my saga in some closing paragraphs.
Things were becoming increasingly clique-ish. A huge party thrown near the close of 1981 in Slash’s upstairs lobby was the first scrawl of that writing on the wall. Or maybe it was just me being uptight. I remember having to throw Derf Scratch from Fear and John Belushi out of my office because I didn’t appreciate them closing the door and snorting coke off my desk. There was a grassroots Hollywood-doing-music-business-as-usual vibe that was very gradually, almost imperceptibly creeping in—and I was intent on ignoring it as long as possible.
There were personal disappointments along the way during those years, nothing too big on its own, but the number of small setbacks at Slash had a cumulative effect on my morale. Some of this, to be fair to Bob Biggs, was self-generated by my two-margarita-doubles-a-day for lunch. In general, I felt no one at the label—except for maybe friend and publicist Susan Clary (who had her office next to mine)—was on the same wavelength. Sometimes I felt we had our own little separate cabal there sequestered across the large entry hall. I increasingly had to fight for the bands I wanted to produce and release on subsidiary Ruby Records. My friends in X and The Blasters were constantly on tour. X decamped for a major label, Elektra. When it came to re-sign on either Slash or Ruby, both The Gun Club and The Dream Syndicate declined, opting for major label deals. It was nothing personal, but you know how that goes. Fear and Los Lobos came on board, but though I thought they were super-great, I didn’t really connect in the same way with them on a personal level as I did with X and The Blasters. Other bands that I didn’t care for, like The Violent Femmes, got signed. A group I really fought to get signed, Boston’s The Neats, did not pass muster with Biggs. I was also having diverging inner conflicts between my ambitions at Slash and my vision for my band, The Flesh Eaters. Many times after returning from lunch, around three in the afternoon, I quietly closed the door to my office and lay my head down on the desk.
One thing, though, that changed all of us early on—a rite of passage, a coming of age, shedding any last vestiges of youthful illusion giving way to full-blown adulthood—happened in the spring of 1980. Exene’s sister, Mirielle (aka Mary Katherine) and her husband, Gordon Stevenson, had come to town from New York City to promote and screen Ecstatic Stigmatic, an indie underground feature they had made. Gordon had written and directed it; Mirielle had starred. Mirielle and Gordon along with a number of other mutual friends down from San Francisco were staying at my apartment on Fairfax while I temporarily moved in with Judith at her digs a couple of miles away on Beachwood just south of Melrose.
On Friday, April 11, I drove to work at Slash and arrived at about 10 a.m. I parked on the side street Martel, right outside the storeroom. No sooner had I stepped out onto the pavement then another car, going perhaps sixty miles an hour, missed me by literally inches and sheared off my door. They never stopped. I was so shaken, I had to go back to Judith’s and chill out for an hour or two. Around noon we drove my car to a body shop on Gower across the street from Paramount Studios. Just as I was about to turn left into their parking lot, I realized a car coming in the opposite direction was driving faster than I’d thought, and I stopped to let it go by. The driver, however, thought I was going to follow through and, panicking, jumped her car up on the sidewalk, taking out a parking sign. What the fuck was going on?
The next day X was headlining at the Whisky, doing two sets. I don’t remember the opening act. Steve Nieve, keyboardist for Elvis Costello’s Attractions, and his wife, Fay Hart, good friends of Mirielle, were in town, having taken an apartment across from Paramount. The three of them—Mirielle, Steve, and Fay—had been doing their laundry earlier that night. They were supposed to meet Judith and me at Judith’s place before we all went to the Whisky to see X. However, many minutes, then an hour ticked by. We hadn’t heard from them, and it was getting late. You have to remember this was at least a good fifteen years before people had cell phones. So Judith and I left a note on the door and headed for the Whisky.
In between the first and second set we were upstairs, backstage with the band, when a couple of uniformed LAPD officers made their way through the punks who lined the hallway. We saw them speak to Exene, and she almost immediately slumped to the floor.
On the way to Judith’s neighborhood Steve, Fay, and Mirielle were crossing on the green on the street of Willoughby at Vine when a drunk woman in a muscle car was barreling south on Vine and ran the red light, hitting the trio’s Volkswagen, spinning it around, and turning it on its side. Steve and Fay both had broken bones, but Mirielle, sitting in the backseat, was killed instantly.
John and Exene, bereft though they were, decided to go on and do their second set. Judith and I left early, homing in on the supermarket, determined to buy up as much hard liquor as possible before the 2 a.m. cutoff for sales. We headed over to John and Exene’s apartment (one half of a tiny duplex on Genesee, half a block north of Santa Monica Blvd) and waited for people to show up. That night everyone—and there were quite a few friends there—got blind drunk, staging an impromptu wake, trying unsuccessfully to obliterate our feelings and blunt the edges of a sharp, all-consuming grief. The night climaxed a couple of hours before dawn with several of the men chasing after an unbalanced, disgruntled next-door neighbor, and one or two of them ended up in jail overnight.
There were other deaths still to come—Darby Crash, Paul Zacha, Jules Bates, Robin Weiss, Jeffrey Lee, and so many more. But for me and, I think, many of us, this was the weekend that would stick with us like no other.
I’ve long swung back and forth between believing in astrology, fate, signs from God, but this was one of those weekends that was a life-changer, shaking us all to the core, a demarcation point from youth to adult that seemed to be barely harboring us from some malevolent curse, and all of us who lived were somehow lucky we had come through it on the other side.
Growing up and becoming an adult, dealing with very real, inescapable things like death, that was a big part of punk rock too.
