How to Build a New World Then Tear It Down
by Kristine McKenna
The first generation of punk rock in Los Angeles? First, I have to tell you about the city at that time. Let’s say our story begins in 1976—that’s when the players in this particular drama started drifting into town from all corners of the country. It was the year I arrived in Los Angeles, and what did I find? In my memory it was like a ghost town. It seemed like there just weren’t that many people around! You could sail down the freeways and pull up and park right in front of wherever it was you were going, and it felt spacious and quiet. You could do your thing in private, and the city would courteously ignore you. I loved it.
That world is gone now, and the locations and venues that gave shelter to LA’s first punks, stretching from downtown LA to the beach, are mostly gone too. The Masque; the Starwood; the Anti-Club; the house where X lived at the corner of 6th and Van Ness; Licorice Pizza, across the street from the Whisky (mercifully, the Whisky hasn’t been demolished yet, but it seems kind of creepy now); Club 88; the offices of Slash magazine on the second floor of an office building at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax; the second Masque, at the corner of Santa Monica and Vine; the Stardust Ballroom; the Hong Kong Café; Madame Wong’s; the Nickodell; Vinyl Fetish on Melrose; the Atomic Café; and LACE, on Broadway, downtown. They’re gone, as is the Greyhound bus station on 5th Street in Santa Monica, where Exene arrived from Florida on a rainy morning in 1976. John and Exene’s house on Genesee, where they birthed their fantastic song “In This House That I Call Home” is still there, but I feel sad when I see it. A few weeks ago I found myself winding across town through the city streets, clogged with traffic, of course, and I passed some of these absent landmarks and actually cried. It’s not my city anymore. But maybe that’s how it works—cities belong to the young and are transformed from one generation to the next for use by the new breed. Good luck to them.
By the time the Sex Pistols released their first single, “God Save the Queen,” in May of 1977, the LA scene was already percolating, so we found our way to the mountain without a map. We weren’t copying anybody else, and from the start there were things that distinguished LA’s punk scene from the scenes in other cities. The first generation of LA punk was literate and really smart, for starters, and each band had its own sources of inspiration. Much of the punk that came in its wake wasn’t very smart at all, nor was it particularly original. A tremendous amount of diversity coexisted under the rubric of early LA punk too, and there was a surprising degree of parity between men and women—it was not a sexist scene, and women were treated as equals. Latinos and gays were welcome too, as were old people: your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? It was that way for a brief spot in time.
There was a period, from the mid- to late seventies, when punk existed, but the punk fashion industry had yet to co-opt it, so if you saw a punk-looking weirdo on the street, it probably was an authentic punk weirdo. There was no blueprint to work from, so dressing in an interesting way demanded real imagination. People rose to the occasion too, taking personal style in any direction they chose. Everybody in the first generation of punk was a star, whether onstage and off—it really was a fascinating hodgepodge of people. You’d see a girl in a prim, secretarial-type cotton shirtwaist dress next to a dude with a mohawk, next to a girl dressed like a hooker. All kinds of people materialized, and anybody who’d gone to the trouble of showing up had a right to be there. It took a while for all this to start cooking, though, which brings me to the scourge known as social media. LA’s first punk community took a while to get up to speed because things didn’t “go viral” then. The jungle drum of word-of-mouth was how information got around, and measured against the lightning speed information travels today, LA’s first punk community coalesced at a glacial pace. People had to physically be in rooms together and talk to one another to learn about things then, and that world was intimate and tactile and visceral in a way texting can never be.
I was a journalist covering the “new music” for various publications, and as such, I stood slightly apart. I wasn’t one of the people getting drunk in an alley with misbegotten mascot Darby Crash—there was something genuinely mad about him, and frankly, he kind of scared me, which I assume was his intention. I felt straight and responsible compared with members of the community who were truly living on the edge—and some of them really were—but I had my place in the scene, and people respected it, as I did theirs. It wasn’t, however, a user-friendly crowd. This was, after all, a community of very young people, so there were feuds, misunderstandings, grudges, warring factions, and lots of dialectical discussion about who was and was not a “poseur.” People tended to be a little gruff with one another, but if an outsider went on the attack? First-generation punks were fiercely loyal to the community in that case, and mainstream opposition only made the scene more cohesive.
A few names survived that time and achieved varying degrees of immortality, but so many amazing supporting players disappeared into the past. Every single one of them was a crucial thread in a shimmering tapestry, and in my mind the famous and the forgotten alike remain as pure and incorruptible as they were the first day I saw them. There was Rik L Rik, scuffling around barefoot, looking like he’d just hitchhiked into town from Appalachia; his manager, Posh Boy, a.k.a. Robbie Fields, in his cheap, shiny suit—Posh Boy always seemed to be selling something; fancy-dancing heartthrob Spazz Attack, who served as janitor at the Masque and lived there too, I think (a rather gruesome thought, as the place was filthy); rockabilly vixen Kitra; Belinda Carlisle, dressed in a billowing, belted, black Hefty bag, with bee-stung lips and baby fat that made her seem soft and sweet; Lee Ving, a stevedore who looked as though he could kick anybody’s ass but was a lovely man and never would; K. K. and Trudi, who were like king and queen of the prom—there was something regal and dignified about them. And, of course, there was impresario Brendan Mullen. Equal parts P. T. Barnum and the absentminded professor, Brendan always seemed to be in a kerfuffle of some sort. There were dozens more, and somehow they all hung together and created some beautiful things.
So why did it end? Where did it go? In retrospect it’s obvious that LA’s first generation of punk was an exotic flower meant to bloom for a short time; these things aren’t supposed to last, and that’s what makes them precious. The forces that brought about its demise are beginning to be clear to me now too. Darby Crash’s death by OD, in December of 1980, has been cited as marking the end of something (an era? A life?), but the evaporation of the scene was more complicated than that. Cyndi Lauper (yes, I know—how did she get in here?) has a song called “Money Changes Everything,” and it says a lot about what happened to LA’s first generation of punk rock. It’s easy to have ideals when there’s little at stake, and it’s very hard to say no to money. Poverty is tolerable, even romantic when you’re young, but it gets wearing in fairly short order, and given the chance to leave it behind and live the high life? People just don’t say no. This is America, after all, and temptation crept into LA’s world of Baker Street irregulars. Some people got, others did not, and that bred animosity.
MTV invaded public consciousness in 1981, and that took everything down a notch too. It’s almost impossible to make a three-minute video, conceived to promote a song and sell records, that doesn’t reek of inauthenticity, and MTV made music stupider. Anything you see on television is harmless and familiar—we’ve been sucking our thumbs to television for decades—and mass culture has a terrifying ability to absorb and neutralize everything in its path. MTV did that to punk, to a degree. Revolutions need something to kick against, and you can’t rebel against somebody who’s hugging you.
There were defections in the original tribe too. When X released its debut album, Los Angeles, on Slash Records in 1980, it was like the hometown team won the Super Bowl. But when The Go-Go’s turned their backs on punk the following year, transformed themselves into harmless sorority-type chicks, and had a best-selling record with Beauty and the Beat, it was more a case of what the fuck? This really did seem like the beginning of some kind of end, and things began to sour right around then. Some punks retreated to depressing living rooms to shoot heroin, and we all know what that leads to: apathy and drool. Others returned to the “straight” world because they were able to. There were plenty of serious misfits who couldn’t possibly function in mainstream society, though, and god knows what happened to them. They started falling away in the early eighties and simply vanished.
The official scribe for LA’s first generation of punk, Claude Bessy, summed up the community nicely when he wrote, “We’re just a pack of off the wall weirdoes with fringe leanings,” in the pages of Slash magazine. There was lots of adrenaline churning around, yes, but mostly we were a ragged pack of kooky people in pursuit of genius and fun. This came to a screeching halt when Black Flag and the rest of the South Bay crew on SST Records came roaring onto the scene. Greg Ginn founded SST in 1978, but it wasn’t until the early eighties that its ascendancy began, and when it did, it unleashed a furious wave of testosterone on the scene that was crushing. Women were the first to leave—there was no place for them in the world of hardcore punk; gays and sensitive artist types went next, and the audience began to change. People who went to punk shows in the early days were respectful, they listened, and they were genuinely interested in the band onstage, even if they’d seen the same band four nights earlier. We knew we’d always see something new, partly because these were mostly not professional musicians, and nobody did the same show twice, because they weren’t able to. Professionalism came later for some, but in the beginning the scene was truly experimental, and the audience was tolerant and supportive. With the arrival of hardcore, punk became a blood sport, and the mosh pit was colonized by sixteen-year-old boys with plaid flannel shirts tied around their waists, determined to transform themselves into human cannonballs. The entire scene became about one thing, aggression. Claude Bessy was long gone by then—he’d moved to England in 1980—but I imagine he would’ve found the whole thing boring because the undercurrent of humor that originally made punk so brilliant disappeared completely when hardcore took over.
So many members of this community are dead now—I won’t recite the R.I.P. list of LA punk’s first generation because it’s too long and too sad. We’re all like trees, and the leaves that are the people we love flutter to the ground one by one. Time is a brutal, devouring force, and until it’s begun to do its handiwork, it’s impossible to comprehend how very beautiful it is to be young, how privileged and innocent it is. You may think you know the score when you’re twenty-four years old, but you never do, for the simple reason that you can’t: life lobs curveballs that are unimaginable at twenty-four. We believed we were dangerous and subversive back in the day, but in fact, we were babies, yet to rub the fairy dust from our eyes. Time takes a heavy toll on ideals, and looking back, it all seems unbearably idealistic and sweet.
So the scene is gone, and many of the people who created it are gone too, and I suppose that’s how it’s meant to be. Great art is immutable and eternal, though. I recently attended an X show where I watched young people—yes, they were young—crowding the lip of the stage, mouthing the words to “White Girl” and “Year One.” The music continues to mean something to those who need it, and those who need it will continue to find it.