No Slow Songs Tonight: 1979–1982
by Dave Alvin
“Those of us who are about to die . . . salute you!”
With those words Lee Ving, the lead singer of the ferocious punk band Fear, raised a beer to us Blasters as he stopped by our open dressing room door. We laughed nervously, raised our beers, and saluted him back. Then he walked down the long, smoky hallway and on up to the stage of the gritty, old Olympic Auditorium just south of downtown LA to face five thousand restless and agitated punk kids. It was New Year’s Eve 1981, and we were sharing a bill with not just Fear but also the relentless noise-jazz-punk of Saccharine Trust, the art-punk veterans Suburban Lawns, and, most intense of all, the headliners were the fierce, brilliant kings of hardcore, Black Flag.
There was no applause as Fear was announced, but in those days there rarely was any applause at real hardcore shows. This wasn’t really a show for people who came to clap, cheer, and celebrate their musical heroes; it was more like a gathering of people alienated from polite consumer pop culture, who wanted to get fucked up past the point of feeling pain, ready and willing to beat each other into bloody pulps in the mosh pit or even attack the bands onstage as a primitive initiation rite into an exclusive alternative society of pain. I couldn’t help but hear the crazed roars, insane boos, and threatening catcalls of the audience upstairs echoing through the cavernous, cement halls of the underground backstage. Mr. Ving’s first words to the audience were simple enough: “We’re Fear. Fuck you!” This sent the crowd into a rage of even louder boos that quickly grew into throat-ripping shouts and booming death threats. Something ugly was going on up there or was just about to. Between the drunk, unruly crowd and the overzealous security guards, more than a few people were probably going to get the living shit kicked out of themselves that night.
Unlike the modern, clean LA sports venues like Dodger Stadium or the Fabulous Forum, the Olympic was a large, dingy concrete bunker built in the 1920s for the 1932 Olympics. Fifty years later, though, it had become a legendary, rundown bucket of blood. For decades it had been the historic home for such blue-collar sports as wrestling and roller derby, but the Olympic was especially famous for its boxing matches. It was a well-known fact among locals that the prizefights in the ring were often much tamer than the fights outside of the ring out in the crowd, and so it was now a perfect place for a night of drunken mindless violence and guaranteed teenage mayhem.
“No slow songs tonight,” my brother Phil commanded as I wrote our set list. I agreed wholeheartedly. There would be no arguments between the Alvin brothers on this night. I looked around the dressing room at bassist John Bazz, pianist Gene Taylor, and drummer Bill Bateman and announced, “All right. We open up with ‘High School Confidential’ and then don’t stop playing even if someone gets killed.” I smiled, but I was only half joking. Bill stared back at me with a blank-stone face and said, “Anybody fucks with me and I’ll kick his fucking ass.” Gene just laughed: “If any trouble starts, Bill, you’re gonna have to kick three thousand crazy motherfuckers’ asses. Good luck with that.” “Hey, fuck you, Gene,” Bill shot back. Then we drank more beer and prepared to die.
We’d been in similar surreal and borderline violent situations before, though. The front of my 1964 Fender Mustang guitar has many shards of glass permanently embedded in it from beer bottles thrown at us by pissed-off audience members at punk shows. These wounds were badges of honor to me back then. One is a long gash from a beer bottle thrown at me by a dissatisfied patron at an early 1980 show with the Angry Samoans at the Shark Club in San Diego, while another is an almost delicate spray of tiny brown glass fragments from a beer bottle hurled at the stage when we played with The Weirdos about a month later at West LA’s Club 88. The deepest, most dramatic slash running across the front of my guitar was from when we opened in late 1979 for Orange County hardcore heroes The Crowd at the Cuckoo’s Nest (a particularly vile former industrial Quonset hut turned punk-rock dive bar in Costa Mesa). The kid who threw that bottle had a pretty damn good arm and great aim, but I was just fast enough and lucky enough to see it coming, so I had a split second to raise my guitar in front of my face and deflect his projectile. Over thirty years later these lacerations are still visible on the front of my long-retired Mustang, and yes, I still view them proudly as badges of honor.
You might be asking: How did this happen? How did The Blasters, a pompadoured blues/R&B/rockabilly band from sleepy old Downey, California, end up playing shows with the legendary LA punk groups? How did we wind up hanging out with, getting bombed with, becoming close friends with, and, in a small but meaningful way, being proudly linked with the glorious LA punk/new wave rock world of the late seventies and early eighties? It’s not a bad question, really. The full answer is sort of complicated, but one simple reason was, despite all the anger, desperation, and alienation in the air, we really fucking loved it.
Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, my brother and I were odd ducks among our teenage peers. We certainly heard the underground rock music of the time and enjoyed much of it, but we hated most of the Top Forty hits of that era. Listening to Jimi Hendrix, among other artists, helped us become aware of and deeply fascinated by older American music, especially the blues. Because so much of that music wasn’t available anywhere at that time, we searched thrift stores and swap meets for hard-to-find old 78s and 45s. Soon we discovered music by more and more obscure artists as we were self-educating ourselves in not only the blues but also jazz, R&B, folk, country swing, rockabilly, and early rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t too long before we learned that some of the older blues musicians lived and still performed relatively nearby, so we started sneaking into neighborhood bars to see them perform. Eventually we became underage regulars at a funky little club about twenty miles away in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove. It was a unique place that mixed blues and bluegrass with politics and social consciousness. Even though I was only fifteen, I felt I’d found a second home among the Ash Grove’s eclectic crowd of blues singers, hippies, folkies, artists, radicals, truck drivers, card sharks, and record collectors. When it closed down in 1973, I felt more than a little lost and searched for years afterward for some place, some social scene where I could feel that sense of community again.
By the late seventies all the future members of The Blasters were working day jobs and figuring that life had passed us by, but then we discovered that we were the same ages as the guys in The Clash and the Sex Pistols. So before we even thought of starting The Blasters, we began cautiously venturing from Downey and Long Beach up to Hollywood to see the local underground punk shows at the Masque, the Whisky, and the Elks Lodge, just to check out what all the buzz was about. We were completely blown away by the stunning variety of the first generation of LA punk bands we saw. Some bands, like The Weirdos and The Dickies, were loud guitar combos pounding out Ramones-influenced eight-note bar chords with clever, ironic lyrics. Some were hilarious pranksters like Black Randy, Arthur J. and the Gold Cups, or The Deadbeats. Some were full of angst and conceptual art dogma like the early techno squall of The Screamers, while the tough Plugz and The Bags sang Chicano street poetry and the very early, sweetly amateur Go-Go’s played a noisier, sloppier punk/pop than their later million-record-selling slick hits would show.
Some bands, like The Germs, were highly literate with low musical skills, while others were highly literate with very high musical skills, like X, The Alley Cats, and The Nerves. Each of them had their own look, attitude, sound, and almost cult-like fans.
The groups and the audience who followed them were a wide cross-section of nonconformists, oddballs, rejects, and visionaries who couldn’t fit in to mainstream society and had finally found a wild home in the developing punk scene. It was a unique community of people who’d come from Venice Beach and East LA, Beverly Hills and Highland Park, Torrance and Pacoima—poor, middle class, rich, the innocent, the guilty, loners, social butterflies, runaways, gays, students, poets, artists, actors, hustlers, bad musicians, great musicians, surfers, Anglophiles, Anglophobes, dealers, addicts, former glam rockers, former hard rockers, prostitutes, strippers, scam artists, older survivors of the sixties Sunset Strip era, whites, Chicanos, blacks, Asians, phony nihilists, wanna-be anarchists, pretend communists, progressives, apoliticals, and even a stray Republican or two, all united by this new music and the seemingly adventurous lifestyle that went with it. Even the mosh pits at the early punk shows were less about beating the shit out of somebody and more of a slightly rough physical expression of communal celebration of being with other misfits just like yourself who had somehow found each other. In 1979 I was a failed college student in my early twenties working as a cook, and after many years of feeling lost and confused about my future, I saw this inspiring—if a bit intimidating—scene and thought that maybe I belonged there as well, just like I had felt at the Ash Grove.
One reason The Blasters sort of fit in to this new scene was how we played our version of old roots music. Unlike most of the great but mellower blues bands making a living working the then-jumping beach-town bar circuit or the very talented country combos grinding out a living in the then-still-thriving California honky-tonks, The Blasters played really fast and really loud. We happily and proudly bashed our tunes fast enough and loud enough to compete sonically with most of the cutting-edge groups on the LA scene. We didn’t want the music we love to become a delicate and dusty museum piece. We sincerely felt—and I still do—that older American music could be as artistically challenging and viably contemporary as the latest disco and soft-rock hits on seventies and eighties Top Forty radio or whatever was the latest hip trend coming across the Atlantic from England. If that meant playing fast and loud, then so be it.
Phil and the other guys, because they were better, more experienced musicians than I was at the time, could easily play the blues slower, softer, and more traditionally than we did in The Blasters. They certainly could have gotten a technically better guitarist than me, but there was some sort of undeniably manic, energetic magic that occurred when the five of us played together that most roots-revival combos didn’t have. It may have been because there were two close brothers in the group, but, as we’d all grown up together, listening to the same old records, going to the Ash Grove together, getting into and out of trouble together, we were actually five close brothers. When we started to play, the intensity came easily and naturally. With the veins in my brother’s neck straining almost to the point of exploding as he sang and Bill Bateman pounding his drums as if he were trying to kill the damn things and bassist John Bazz pumping decades-old walking bass lines like they were brand new and pianist Gene Taylor hammering his piano like Vladimir Horowitz on methamphetamines, we were one tough, passionate, and more-than-a-little-insane orchestra who could proudly hold our own with anyone. When we hit the stage I would go into a near-transcendental state from a primal rush of playing music with the older guys who I’d grown up admiring, cranking up the amps, bashing on my guitar, drinking a lot of beer, jumping around the stage, sweating through my clothes, making dumbbell musical mistakes, and rushing the tempo as the band pushed the music, the audience, and ourselves to the limit. I’d never been happier in my life.
A big part of our band philosophy was that, despite being partial to playing with punk bands like X or raw local pop masters The Plimsouls, we would accept just about any show playing with just about anyone, anywhere. We believed American Music was for all Americans. We wanted the scenesters at the Whisky or the Starwood to like us, but we also wanted truck drivers at honky-tonks like the Palomino Club or the shuffle-groovin’ crowd at the Long Beach Blues Festival to dig us as well. This attitude led to some wonderful shows but also an absurdly bizarre gig or two. In our effort to make a name for ourselves and win over converts to our cause, we opened shows for an abnormally wide variety of punk, power pop, and roots acts from late 1979 up to the 1981–1982 show with Black Flag. Besides X and The Plimsouls, we also shared bills with The Cramps, Asleep at the Wheel, The Go-Go’s, Ray Campi and his Rockabilly Rebels, The Plugz, The Motels, The Weirdos, Wall of Voodoo, The Ventures, Levi and the Rockats, Sir Douglas Quintet, Split Enz, Rubber City Rebels, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and The Boomtown Rats.
The strangest without a doubt was when we opened eight arena shows for the monstrously popular rock band Queen in the summer of 1980. Some of the members of Queen had seen us playing a ridiculous gig at an old Hollywood roller rink that had turned into a new-wave venue/pick-up bar called Flippers. They liked what they saw and nicely asked us to open their West Coast tour. We’d certainly heard of Queen, so of course we said yes, but we had no idea how hugely popular they were or how, let’s say, vocally opinionated their fans were. We went from playing little two-hundred-seat dive clubs to facing seventeen thousand angry Queen fans in sports arenas who had no idea why some pompadoured guys from Downey who bashed out old three-chord American rock ‘n’ roll were opening for their glamorous English heroes. Oddly enough, having seventeen thousand pissed-off classic-rock fans booing and throwing anything they could get their hands on at us did not deter us in the least. If anything, it only strengthened our brotherly Blaster bond and our “us against the world” mentality. From then on, whatever scorn five hundred punk kids in a club could spew at us was nothing compared to the venom of thousands of Queen fans. Well, at least I felt that way until we were about to go up against five thousand riled-up Black Flag fanatics.
It was very difficult at first, though, to overcome the prejudice many Hollywood club bookers and promoters had against a rockabilly/blues band from Downey. We weren’t cute enough or well connected enough socially for most of them to bother with. One woman who booked a legendary Hollywood club flatly told me that if we weren’t fucking somebody famous, she would never give us a gig. Thankfully The Blasters’ reputation and coolness profile was helped immensely when LA scene heavyweights like John Doe and Exene from X, Belinda Carlisle of The Go-Go’s, and Peter Case from The Plimsouls gave us opening slots at their shows. Many other bands, plus nonmusicians yet hip tastemakers like Pleasant Gehman and Anna Statman or enlightened club bookers like Mac at the Club 88, generously spread the news about us around town or gave us much-needed shows. After the initial period of struggling to get booked, we slowly started building enough local notoriety to get more and better gigs and then, eventually, to make enough money to quit our damn day jobs. Within a year of denying me a show, that club booker who was so interested in The Blasters’ nonexistent sex life with celebrities was happily offering us shows at her club without asking any ridiculous personal questions.
Bands’ willingness to help each other was one of the great attributes of the LA scene in those days. There certainly were petty feuds between bands for whatever personal reasons or between punk rockers versus new wavers or between bands who didn’t have record deals against bands who did. Overall, though, most of the groups felt a sense of unity against the record labels that wouldn’t sign us, the radio stations that wouldn’t play us, the clubs that wouldn’t book us, and the promoters that might rip us off.
My favorite example of this band solidarity was when we were scheduled to open for The Plimsouls at their sold-out show at the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1980. I got into a heated, physical argument with some blockheaded security guys over whether I could bring a harmless bottle of milk into the club. They insisted I couldn’t bring it inside. In my righteous and perhaps silly anger, I said, “Fuck you. Tell your fucking boss that we ain’t playing your fucking club.” Three security goons grabbed me and threw me and my bottle of milk out of the club. One of them said, “Big fucking deal, asshole. You’re a fucking piece-of-shit opening act.” When Peter Case heard this, he instantly declared, “Fuck the Cuckoo’s Nest. We ain’t fucking playing unless The Blasters play.” I was astonished by Peter’s hard-line stance. I’d only met Peter once before, but he knew and enforced the unwritten code of the underground scene: don’t fuck with the bands. Within a few minutes the owner and the security crew profusely apologized, and with my bottle of milk in my hand, I proudly walked in and played the show.
As The Blasters made the transition into being a headlining act at the Starwood, Whisky, and Roxy, we tried to return the favors shown us by giving opening slots to new or unknown bands like Rank and File, The Gun Club, or Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions, bands we thought deserved attention. Some of those then-little-known opening acts, like Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, would move on to greater fame and success than we ever imagined for ourselves. We also gave gigs to some of our blues idols from our Ash Grove days like Big Joe Turner and Roy Brown, or we put together shows at Hollywood clubs where we would be the back-up band for Big Joe, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, and Hank Ballard, exposing them to a brand-new audience. It wasn’t until much later, after venturing away from the protective cocoon of the LA scene, when I sadly discovered how cutthroat and self-serving many musicians/songwriters out in the cold world of the music business actually were.
Despite the fact that we were now selling out the Whisky for two or three nights in a row and had accumulated a decent amount of good, original songs, no major label was remotely interested in signing us. Eventually we signed a recording contract with the local independent LA label Slash Records. We owed some of Slash’s interest in us to our friends in X, who were also on the label and had been prodding Slash’s owners to give us a deal. Slash was a spinoff of the groundbreaking punk music/art magazine of the same name and had already released, to unexpected commercial success, the seminal first Germs album as well as the first two masterpiece albums by X. This certainly sold me on being on the label, despite some trepidation from my brother and other Blasters. Plus, they had smart, passionate people working in their office, like the enlightened A&R staff of Mark Williams and Chris D. plus committed publicists like Susan Clary and Bill Bentley. It was also a nice bonus that their employees were also our friends. Over the next few years Slash (and its subsidiary, Ruby Records) gathered a remarkable stable of important bands, both local and national, like Los Lobos, The Violent Femmes, The Flesh Eaters, Fear, The Del Fuegos, The Gun Club, Rank and File, The Misfits, Dream Syndicate, and Green on Red. To say I was proud to be associated with Slash would be a major understatement.
Sadly our relationship with Slash was a mixed bag. On the plus side, Slash was a sympathetic environment that gave us more creative freedom than any major label ever would have given us. Unfortunately the two charming rascals who owned Slash were first-class purveyors of high-end cultural revolutionary sweet talk. At the time that sort of rebellious rhetoric meant an awful lot to me, though it certainly didn’t mean quite as much to the other members of The Blasters. The depressing realization that, perhaps, the owners of Slash really weren’t quite as interested in cultural revolution as much as the big money that can be made by telling people that they were interested in cultural revolution didn’t become clear to me until much later. It seems to me the rascals at Slash also weren’t terribly interested in accounting to us either. You live and you learn.
About a year before The Blasters signed with Slash I was invited by poet-songwriter Chris D. to be part of the latest lineup of his band, The Flesh Eaters. I’d gotten to know Chris a little through my friendship with John Doe and was honored but slightly intimidated when he asked. I felt I might not be good enough, but I quickly lost my initial sense of trepidation when Chris said that this new version of The Flesh Eaters would be a combination of members from X and The Blasters. Chris would be singing and John would be playing bass, DJ Bonebrake would be on marimba, timbales, and assorted percussive noisemakers while Steve Berlin would play various saxes and Bill Bateman would be the drummer. All I had to do was be the loud guitar player. All right, I thought, I can certainly do that.
Chris, who didn’t play any instruments, had been driving around town, singing his new songs into a cheap cassette recorder he kept in his car. Chris gave me and John these rough tapes, and we divided the songs up between the two of us. We then separately figured out the chord changes and modulations of each song and devised loose arrangements to take to the band. As each musician added their own musical twists and Chris started singing his complex lyrics with his very distinctive voice, we were thrilled to discover that we had come up with a sound unlike any of the bands any of us had ever been in before.
Instead of X’s razor-sharp punk or The Blasters’ pounding roots rock, our one Flesh Eaters album, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, sounded like the murky soundtrack to a midnight voodoo ceremony being performed by junkies in an East Hollywood alley. It was a crazy blend of Catholic and Santeria liturgies, sixties garage rock, free jazz, swampy rhythm and blues, surrealist poetry, and zombie movies, but somehow it all worked together. The album and the few live shows we played did confuse some folks back then. Some punks didn’t like the slow, trance-like drones of certain songs, while some rockabilly purists didn’t dig the modern jazz stuff, and even a few religious evangelists held the album cover up on TV and denounced us as evil Satanists doing the devil’s work. However, we did have many passionate fans and admirers. The respected underground music scribe Byron Coley boldly stated that it was “the greatest rock album ever made.” That might be going a bit too far, but many younger bands over the years, like Mudhoney, have been profuse in their praise of our album as a major stylistic influence. Not long after the album’s release I read a very positive review of it in which the writer called the music of The Flesh Eaters “postpunk.” I’ve never been quite sure what that term actually means, but it seems like as good a description as any other.
Whatever punk rock in Southern California was or wasn’t by late 1981, it and the scene around it were changing quickly. Many of the older, initial LA punk scene makers were starting to stay away from the shows or moving off into different musical directions, from funk to western swing. Some of the original LA punk bands like The Go-Go’s and X had signed major label deals and were spending as much time touring out of town as they were playing in LA. Many of the newer punk bands were less quirky and individualistic and more stereotypically what most folks thought of as punk. For The Blasters it was becoming apparent that, as we were then achieving a measure of local fame and headlining once-out-of-reach clubs like the Whisky, that our future ahead was one of hitting the highways to become roots-rock road warriors.
Violence at shows was now becoming commonplace, both inside and outside the clubs. High school kids who had just discovered punk rock were driving up to Hollywood from outlying towns just to get wasted, look for fights, and, as we used to say, fuck some shit up. They also became the arbiters of what was and what was not punk rock. This may have been the proper course of things or it may not have been. I certainly didn’t know. I’m not a psychologist nor an anthropologist. I’m not sure what drove the LA punk scene to become a violent world with kids beating the fuck out of each other. Blame Reagan or a lack of spiritual direction or the lack of meaningful work. Blame drugs or alcohol. Blame The Eagles or disco music. Blame the boredom of the suburbs or shitty fast food diets. Certainly some of the shoving and fighting kids in the Black Flag Olympic crowd would end up in jail, while others would tragically die young due to one sad reason or another. Most would probably finish school, maybe join the Armed Services, then get jobs, buy houses, raise families, become regular solid citizens, paying taxes and mowing lawns. A lucky few, though, might leave the Olympic Auditorium inspired by the music they heard and walk into the new year of 1982 to start their own bands, playing whatever the hell kind of music they wanted, creating their own new scenes and their own new worlds.
When Fear ended their set it was our turn to face the ominous Olympic crowd. Lee Ving, who had just survived the onslaught, was laughing as he passed us in the narrow hallway that led to the stage: “Heads up, Blasters. They’re throwing a lot of fucking shit out there tonight.” Though I actually heard more than a few people clapping and cheering as we walked on the stage, the bulk of the crowded auditorium erupted into a cascade of boos and angry screams. Some big guys were still fighting in the mosh pit, even though there wasn’t any music to encourage it, and a few skinhead kids smashed against the front of the stage and screamed, “Rockabilly Sucks!” as they flipped us off. Bill glared at them and flipped them off as he stood behind his drum kit, taking a long pull from his beer bottle. John stood stiff and straight by his bass amp, ready for whatever nonsense might soon happen. Gene Taylor, built like a Sherman tank, stopped at the edge of the stage and stared down at the offenders, his beer bottle gripped menacingly in his fist, daring them to start something. They shut up. He took a long swig off his beer, walked to his piano, and sat down. My brother stepped up to his microphone and calmly yet proudly announced, “We’re The Blasters from Downey, California.”
As I walked onto the Olympic stage that night I had no idea what would happen with the crazed audience waiting for us. I had no idea what would happen in the coming years. I had no thought that I would ever leave my Blaster brothers or that there would be new scenes for me to be a part of, with different brilliant musicians to make glorious noise with. I had no thoughts of the different highways I’d soon be traveling on and no thoughts that I’d soon be mourning the deaths of friends, fellow musicians, and family members. All I thought at that moment was, “Yeah, we are the goddamn Blasters from goddamn Downey, California, and nobody is ever going to stop us from playing our goddamn music.” Then I just turned up my guitar even louder, walked to the front of the stage, and faced the unruly audience as my brother confidently counted off “High School Confidential” at a tempo as fast as any punk song Fear had just played. There would be no slow songs tonight.
