by Tom DeSavia
I wasn’t there, but it was about to change my life.
Living in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, punk rock was simply the scary legend that came from the big, dirty metropolis. Punk itself was kind of a pop-culture mythology proven to exist only by the desolate outsider occasionally spotted wandering our streets, causing the community to collectively clutch their pearls and pray they were just passing through. In our minds these punks shared space only with the homeless and war vets, except they scared us more because it was obviously a rebellious choice they had made to live this way. Punk was dangerous, a gateway drug to a dark, violent world. This wasn’t teenage rebellion—this was alarming, ugly, and threatening.
The first time I became aware of punk rock was as a lad in 1976. There was TV coverage of the Sex Pistols in America—the only footage I recall was showing the audience spitting on this hideous band of post-apocalyptic clowns. The only reason I even recall it was because of the distaste it drew from my parents, and I couldn’t have agreed with them more. It was disgusting, obviously immoral, and seemingly devoid of all melody. Also, they seemed angry. As did the crowd. It was shocking on all levels; the newscasters reporting enthusiastically agreed.
I was young enough to be intimidated by the images that came over the local news channel that day but just becoming old enough to begin to sort of learn what rebellion meant. Those images stuck with me strong . . . and I always associated them with my folks being so offended by this. Perhaps that was why I needed to find out more. More images started to creep in, mostly in the pages of the rock magazines I began to devour religiously: Circus, Creem, even Rolling Stone.
I wasn’t even ten years old, but I was just starting to realize the world was a real fucked-up place. Saigon fell in 1975, ending the Vietnam War. Hippies were turning into cultists and murderers. This Nixon guy seemed to have fucked up a lot of shit. Basically it seemed folks were prepping for the arrival of four horsemen. In only a few short years the hippies became unflinching heartless businessmen, greed was good, and Reagan would introduce Jesus Christ into the Republican Party. Combine with that pop radio so smooth that flute solos were replacing guitars, and you had a larger sect of the American mainstream ready to accept punk rock in their hearts, just as our compatriots on the other side of the pond had been doing for a few years.
Looking back on that time, I suppose the hippies and the punks had more in common than they would have chosen to believe, especially back then: political rebellion, the rise of counterculture activism, economic uncertainty, and needing art that spoke to these and other issues in an unflinching way.
As the 1970s were starting to come to a close, suddenly the radio really began to sound different: songs by bands like The Clash, The Pretenders, Blondie, and Devo were creeping into our bedrooms, some even going on to become pop hits. I remember hearing DJs on rock stations make fun of punk as they were obviously forced to play some of the bigger tunes due to listener demand. Devo’s “Whip It” and the Vapors’ “Turning Japanese” were straight-up pop-radio smashes, so was Blondie’s disco-ish/new-wave hybrid “Heart of Glass,” which soon led me backward to discover the band’s less radio-friendly tunes, like the alarming “Rip Her to Shreds.” Nick Lowe’s power-pop masterpiece “Cruel to Be Kind” single-handedly enabled me to unearth the whole Stiff Records culture. I had discovered a treasure map with so many roads to follow, and I was equally overwhelmed, enthralled, and confused.
This Reagan guy had arrived in office and was suddenly the target of and inspiration for a whole wave of US punk anarchy. Politically charged bands and songs began to creep into our consciousness, with not-so-subtle Reagan Youth, the UK’s Crass and The Subhumans, and, of course, the West Coast’s own Dead Kennedys and Avengers, who took fierce and unapologetic aim at both political figures and policies with such brutal imagery (both lyrical and visual) that they would make more melodic activists like The Clash and the Sex Pistols blush.
At the same time, ’70s arena rock was making its evolution into what would become labeled, accurately, “corporate rock.” And lines in the sand were officially drawn. You picked a team: you liked Journey or you liked Black Flag. Never both. Not ever. The punk kids and the heavy-metal kids did not play nicely, though as a result of this postmodern Montague/Capulet war, I never saw Motörhead, arguably a great punk band, as clad in leather as they may have been. I’m not sad I never saw Journey. Fuck them.
It was around that time that friends led me to a Sunday night show on KROQ by the most nontraditional DJ I had ever heard, Rodney Bingenheimer. At first I found both his unconventional voice and on-air awkwardness annoying, but after a while his fan-boy exuberance became not only endearing but vital. And then there was the music: I was hearing hefty doses of bands called The Ramones and The Runaways and that band from the news a couple of years back, the Sex Pistols. There was bad and good—some were novelty records, some were plain ol’ weird, and some seemed brilliant. I listened intensely with the headphones on . . . it was my secret. The folks would be worried if they knew what I was listening to, I knew that. I liked that.
That year I made bona fide punk-rock friends. They were my age, but they had all these records by bands with names like The Flesh Eaters, Christian Death, the Circle Jerks, and Agent Orange. The records were harsher than what I was used to, and the accompanying art was often shocking. They didn’t get along with their parents that well, so while trying to listen to these records in darkened bedrooms after school, the tunes were regularly drowned out by the sounds of mothers and fathers and kids screaming at each other. This was the uncomfortable compromise that came with hearing new music then—and it became normal in its own weird way. These were the misfits, I guess, and they had the best and most interesting record collections. These were the kids who told their folks to fuck off and the parents just walked away. What kind of world was this?
Another constant in the suburbs was the local paper, the Los Angeles Times. Every Sunday featured a pullout section called Calendar, which provided a fantasy into a world of clubs that I could only dream of—I wondered what these places looked like inside. In it were also reviews filled with words I didn’t understand, so I usually just liked to stare at the album covers that accompanied them and fantasize about having them in my collection. It was about that time when there was a lot of press about this band called X. I had heard Rodney play them before, and once I got past jarring harmonies unlike anything I had ever heard, I decided I really liked them. I saved up my money and bought their album Wild Gift at the local Music Plus after I had heard “We’re Desperate” and “The Once Over Twice” at a friend’s house. I didn’t really understand what they were singing about, but I got lost in the words anyway. And I couldn’t stop listening. I played it every day.
In 1981 or 1982 I discovered this record store in the San Fernando Valley called Blue Meanie. It was a great import and alternative record shop specializing in punk, metal, and new wave. I would save up all my money to spend there, and when I went, I would literally stay for hours . . . getting dropped off to go through every record in the store. I spent so much time at the store that I soon befriended two of the clerks there, two mods who were about my age named Lance and Jeff. It was a great, unique store where I learned of The Damned, The Jam, and even classic soul. It was also the store where those clerks led me into the living world of punk rock.
I already knew some of the counterculture stuff that I liked: the aforementioned Stiff Records canon and a lot of the British new wave and punk that I was really starting to dig. Soon enough I was hanging out with Lance and Jeff outside of the store and listening to records at their homes, but this time we had cigarettes and beer and weed. Holy shit. This was teenage rebellion, and I was really starting to get that it had a soundtrack. The words were starting to make more sense. I was a kid from a slightly lower-middle-class family living in an apartment in an affluent suburb—I wasn’t exactly desperate, but now I longed to be.
It was then, during my fifteenth year, when my new mod pals took me to my first punk-rock show. When we walked into the club we walked into a nightmare: everyone there looked like they belonged—I stood out. I didn’t have the right haircut or clothes. Everyone looked pissed off or drunk or both. I was way out of my element and wasn’t happy about it. And I was scared. Full-on I’m-gonna-crap-my-pants scared. I was going to be killed here, or at least have the shit beat out of me. I still remember the argyle sweater I was wearing and how it looked among the ripped T-shirts and mohawks. I found a spot in the very back of the club and pushed myself so hard into that wall that I felt I could have gone through it—and it would have been a welcome escape from this unspeakable land of Oz that I wandered into. All the records I had listened to and all the photos I had stared at, and I still wasn’t prepared for this world. Not even a little bit.
We were there to see X. I had been so excited to finally see this band I loved, but I had envisioned something different. I envisioned seats and appropriately timed applause, and probably a clean snack bar. Also we had arrived to the show in a “borrowed” car and ingested a good amount of cheap beer and San Fernando Valley weed, making the evening all the more surreal. I quietly prayed to myself that if I made it out alive, I would not put myself in this situation again—in the same way a kid bargains with God to get them through a night of alcohol poisoning: survive and you’ll never touch the sauce again.
But at some point during that gig—once the sensory overload of the environment slightly subsided—the music began to come into focus and enveloped me whole. I knew everything would be different after that, whether I liked it or not. I had lost my virginity, innocence gone. Good riddance.
Through the thunderous white noise of the crowd the music began to come into focus. Everything else vanished and I sat there transfixed. Like anyone who has ever seen X perform, I was completely captivated by Exene and John. She was gripping the mic with both hands, leaning in almost menacingly and defiantly toward the adrenaline-filled crowd, the two of them soundtracking the scene unfolding before me perfectly with high-decibel poetry and a brash dual lead vocal like I’d never heard:
I play too hard when I ought to go to sleep
They pick on me ’cause I really got the beat
Some people give me the creeps
Song after song, I was getting dragged in deeper. Not everything was sounding like the albums—songs were faster, louder, and Exene’s vocals would often trail off into undecipherable guttural growls. John Doe and DJ Bonebrake played like no rhythm section I’d seen before or since, and of course, Billy Zoom, poised—almost motionless among the chaos—eerily grinning like I’d seen in dozens of photos.
Still, all these years later, if I close my eyes, I can recall every bit of the sensory overload of that night: the smell of stale cigarettes and sweat, the way my face flushed with panic and humiliation at the stares I knew I was getting, and the eventual exhilaration at the feeling that I had discovered a new world that was mine, that was dangerous and challenging, that would give me a new identity. It wasn’t exactly acceptance—I didn’t need acceptance—it was more a feeling that challenged everything I thought I knew. I had gone through the mirror. I liked it.
Now I felt indoctrinated into a world where The Flesh Eaters’ Chris D. scared the shit out of me way more than an Ozzy Osbourne ever could. It was wonderful. We had known of the legend of the clubs that had already closed; the Masque, Hong Kong Café, and the Starwood were the stuff of punk-rock legend to us. We would endlessly fantasize out loud about how we wished we had been able to experience them. But venues still remained for us: in the form of the Whisky a Go Go, the Cathay de Grande, the Anti-Club, the 818’s own Country Club, bigger settings like the Santa Monica Civic, downtown LA’s Olympic Auditorium, and a host of other fly-by-night—and I’m guessing hardly legal—rooms that would host bands like The Gun Club, Meat Puppets, The Cramps, The Vandals, Social Distortion, The Plugz, 45 Grave, Agent Orange, T.S.O.L., the Circle Jerks, Wasted Youth, D.I., Fear, Tex and the Horse-heads, and literally countless others.
I wasn’t there for the birth, but I was there for the evolution. When members of X, The Blasters, and The Red Devils formed The Knitters and made it okay for us to like real country music. When bands like Lone Justice, The Beat Farmers, Long Ryders, Rank and File, Green on Red, and Blood on the Saddle challenged our thoughts on “modern rock” and brought influences from both punk and the world of roots music. When The Plugz and Los Lobos opened our eyes to a Chicano artistic subculture that we, as suburban white kids, were painfully unaware existed. The treasure map was expanding, and so was our knowledge of the world that came before punk: the worlds of Eddie Cochran, Merle Haggard, Muddy Waters, Ritchie Valens, Gram Parsons, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Motown, Stax and Chess Records, and so many more.
That’s how punk rock changed my life. I know that’s how punk rock changed a lot of folks I know, and an army of those I’ll never meet. It’s an education and lifestyle we always keep with us. And those early bands, completely unbeknownst to them, became our teachers, role models, and influencers.
In 1996 I went to work as an A&R man at Elektra Records, once the home of my favorite punk-rock band. I was hired by the legendary Seymour Stein, arguably one of the most important architects of bringing punk rock to the mainstream. During my interview process I pitched the idea of an X anthology—the company bit. I slowly reached out to the band, one by one, and we assembled what would become Beyond and Back: The X Anthology, a two-disc career retrospective tracing back to the band’s roots. It was amazing fun to put together . . . and even resulted in a Tower Records autograph-signing appearance that would reunite the four original band members together for the first time in over ten years, spurring the second wave of the band’s existence.
During the process of assembling the compilation, somewhere between going through a million old shitty cassette tapes, John Doe became my pal. As I began to chat with John I would very surreptitiously dig for stories from the scene, soon discovering that a lot of what I thought I knew from those early days of LA punk was wrong. There had been no real documentation from that time, save for some salvaged fanzines, films like Penelope Spheeris’s groundbreaking The Decline of Western Civilization and Urgh: A Music War, some brilliant writing by the likes of Chris Morris in the sort-of-underground LA Reader, and the mainstream press reviews in the Los Angeles Times. And, of course, W. T. Morgan’s X documentary, The Unheard Music.
To unapologetically generalize history: the New York punk-rock scene was born from the city’s art scene and community, while London’s influence came from both reggae and the UK invasion of the New York punk scene. Both landscapes produced stars, widely documented and deservedly securing their place and stories forever in history. At the same time it was evident that there was very little being said about the LA scene; it was becoming a footnote—if not overlooked entirely—in articles and documentaries chronicling the rise of punk rock. With very little documentation of that era easily accessible, it seemed it was also falling to revisionist history. LA punk was born from rock ‘n’ roll, from country and blues and Latin music, the true next step—and one of the last steps—in the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll music. Although legends were born from this scene, there were very few stars and really no celebrities.
This is an attempt to tell the story. When John and I first spoke of writing this book, I told him I thought it was important for the true story of LA punk rock to be told. He replied that everyone in the scene probably had their own truth to tell. He would be interested in that story, regardless of whether it matched his own memory. So here it is—the many true stories from a mostly undocumented era in cultural history. This book is about that time. The time before the major label deals and the mainstream press. This is about the birth of the true second coming of rock ‘n’ roll—a story most haven’t heard, told from the voices of those who were there.