“Then, all of a sudden, we’re ready to play, and the kid swings the garage door up, like it’s some wooden curtain, and we start playing. And the first thing that happens is, a fight breaks out, like, three or four feet away from us. All of a sudden, people are all, ‘What is this shit? What the fuck is this? Who are these guys?’ That’s when the bottles and cans and empty cups started flying through the air, and the glass started shattering in front of me, and it got really wild. The dude who was having the party was, like, ‘Oh my God’: all of a sudden there’s five fights in the backyard, and these bikers doing donuts in the front lawn, ruining the grass and grinding it to mud.”20
Solid State Tuners, Greg’s bedroom mail-order business, had become a rapid success, thanks to advertisements he had judiciously placed in the back pages of national amateur electronics and ham radio magazines. The company’s operations could no longer be contained within Greg’s bedroom, and so SST moved out of Artesia Boulevard and over to a workshop on Pier Avenue, a few blocks up from the beach. Business was booming enough that Greg was able to hire staff, forming a primitive production line, assembling the various gizmos he had invented.
One of his first employees was Keith Morris, who had been looking to extricate himself from the family bait shop concern. “At the time, I’d quit working for my dad,” he remembers. “I’d decided that being groomed as the heir to the fishing-tackle throne of Hermosa Beach, being a part of that Royal Family, wasn’t really in my blood. Working 10 hours a week at Rubicon didn’t make me enough money, so I began working for Greg.
“I’d get there around 9am, probably recovering from a hangover, grab myself some coffee, take some speed maybe, put on some music and get to work. We knew what we were doing... I was basically just soldering wires, and then another guy assembled the little metal boxes. We were building these attenuators, to pump up the volume, get the juices flowing for the ham radio, soup up their signals. I never used a ham radio myself, I had no interest. I didn’t really wanna talk to some guy I didn’t know in Thailand or whatever.”
Keith and Greg whiled away their hours together at Solid State Tuners discussing music, developing a friendship that centred on going to shows together, and their shared love of raw, underground rock’n’roll. It was during one of these conversations that Greg told Keith about his plans for starting up his own group. His discovery of The Ramones’ music, the power and immediacy stirred up by their blunt, back-to-basics ramalama, had emboldened Greg. He began to see new potential in the songs he’d been writing, these primitive riffs matched to lyrics that sardonically spelled out the blues of a middle-class adolescence.
“My starting a band with Greg Ginn was a pretty spontaneous experience,” smiles Keith. “We’d gone to see Thin Lizzy play in Los Angeles with Michael Piper, supporting Journey at this little place that held, like, 1,200 people. This was Journey before they got that castrato girl/guy singing for them, when they actually rocked, when you could listen to them without thinking, ‘Does that guy who sings actually have any testicles?’ Thin Lizzy were amazing; they played ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, ‘The Cowboy Song’, ‘Jailbreak’. And a little while afterwards, Greg looked over at me, and we decided to start a group. We just looked at each other and decided, ‘Hey’. Greg had been playing guitar, but we were just starting to toss around the idea of getting into a room and bashing out some songs.
“I wanted fame, fortune, girls, money, to be able to jet-set, hang out by swimming pools,” he laughs. “My motivation for wanting to be in a group was that I didn’t really have any motivation. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m joining a band, and I’m going to have new people in my life, and I’m going to be really popular.’ I didn’t think about any of that stuff.”
Greg’s ambitions for the group were a little clearer. “I think I had a general feeling that we could add something to what was missing [in rock’n’roll],” he told Gadfly’s Richard Abowitz in 1999, “rather than revolutionise things or get rid of the old and bring in the new... mid-Seventies rock was getting kind of stale: the edges had been buffed off of a lot of it.” As might be expected from a man with a degree in business management, with experience of running his own successful company since his teens, Greg felt there was a gap in the market, and realised he was the man to remedy this. “People wanted a more hard and aggressive sound. We could add something that was sorely missing to the landscape.”21
It was hearing Greg’s songs for the first time that sold Keith on starting a group with the guitarist. “I thought Greg wrote some fucking mind-boggling, incredible, totally in-your-face, rip-your-fuckin’-brains out songs. In our neighbourhood, nobody did that. Because nobody would like you, they’d run you out of the neighbourhood. They would tar and feather you.”
Initially, Morris planned to play drums with the group, which seemed a good fit for his restless abundance of energy. “I liked the idea of buying a drum kit and bashing away on it,” he smiles. “At that time, Greg was just beginning on the guitar, really, so I thought, if he’s learning how to play guitar, I might as well learn how to play drums. Then, one day, we were in his work space, and we were drinking some beers, listening to the radio, and something really wild came on, The Ramones I think. And I jumped up on the desk and dove off... I did like a triple somersault, landed on the couch and then jumped back up off, running around like a madman, screaming and yelling. Greg was laughing, and he said, ‘You’re not going to play drums, you’ve gotta be the vocalist.’
“I’d never really sung before. At Pier Avenue Junior High, we had to sing every morning; our first class was choir, and we would stand up and sing with Miss Watson, our teacher, playing the piano as accompaniment. We sang ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, American folk songs, ‘Ezekiel Saw The Wheel’, stuff like that, traditional American folk and hymns ... We’d sing ‘America The Beautiful’, we’d sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, being the great patriotic kids that we were, standing and staring towards the flagpole. But those classes weren’t really training anyone to become a vocalist or a singer, it was just a bunch of kids in a room.”
Nevertheless, when the pair began tentatively jamming together in the summer of 1976, with Greg’s brother Raymond playing along on bass, Morris reluctantly agreed to sing. His lack of vocal training notwithstanding, Keith proved a natural behind the microphone, swiftly developing a sneering, sarcastic vocal that was perfectly suited to the wittily scabrous and misanthropic lyrics Ginn had begun to write. “In the beginning, I was just a screamer and a yeller,” Keith says. “To even consider me a singer would have been completely ridiculous. You could hear a little Johnny Rotten in my vocals. Actually, my main vocal influences were guys like Ray Davies, Mick Jagger... Mick Jagger’s not a singer, he’s a vocalist. And I’d say that’s pretty true of me also.”
Both Keith and Greg left the session feeling electrified by the results, and the dynamic of their relationship began to fall into place. “There would be Greg, with all of his big ideas and his suggestions,” laughs Keith. “And there I was, always playing devil’s advocate, irritating him by asking all these questions... ‘Where are we gonna play?’, ‘Where are we gonna rehearse?’, ‘Who’s gonna play drums?’, ‘Who’s gonna play bass?’”
By early 1977, the duo had recruited a makeshift rhythm section, press-ganging members from Keith’s circle of ne’er-do-wells congregating down on the Strand. Raymond had bowed out of the group, focusing on his economics degree at UCLA and finding work as a high school mathematics teacher. In his place came a dude known only as ‘Kansas’, one of Keith’s beach-rat buddies.
“Kansas was just this huge stoner,” says Keith. “He wasn’t even a hippie, he was just so far gone; he had no cause, no purpose... His older brother was just as bad, they were this pair of knucklehead stoner goof-balls, real nitwits. They’d pick mushrooms off of peoples’ lawns and make soup out of them, hoping that the toadstool might give them a buzz, never thinking that it was probably powerful enough to kill ‘em. Our drummer, Bryan Migdol, was also a part of that crew.”
The group chose a name, Panic, which adeptly referenced the short, sharp, shock attacks of Greg’s songs, and began clandestine rehearsals down at the workshop. Approaching his music with the same focus and drive he’d dedicated to SST, Greg believed it was important that the group rehearsed as often as possible. If you were to call yourself a band and claim to play music, he reasoned, it wasn’t too much to ask that you practise a couple of hours, five nights a week.
Not everybody shared his focus or commitment, preferring to party instead of giving their time to honing Panic’s raw attack. Those slacker sentiments were shared by Migdol and Kansas, who would often flake out of rehearsals, leaving the guitarist and singer to practise alone. In response, Greg modified the way he played his guitar, nurturing a heavily percussive strum that, due to the violence with which he assaulted his instrument, ensured it doubled both as lead guitar and rhythm section. Still, even if their other bandmates had been showing up to rehearsals, it wasn’t as if Panic could have booked themselves any gigs. The live circuit in the South Bay was a no-go for groups who wanted to play their own material, with bars hiring only bands willing and able to play covers of the songs in the Top 40, songs their customers would recognise and know, songs that would get them to dance, and to drink.
“We grew up in a local scene that was pretty much nonexistent,” says Keith. “There were bands playing in Hermosa Beach, in the South Bay, and some of ‘em were cool, but only because they covered cool songs, that was how you could judge them. One band covered Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Mott The Hoople, and they were cool. And then there was the band that would cover The Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, and they weren’t cool.”
It was a concept that was frustratingly familiar to Joe Nolte, another South Bay resident who fronted his own group, The Last. “The concept of playing one’s own music out here was revolutionary,” Nolte says. “There was some kind of a cultural vacuum in the mid-Seventies. In the Sixties, and in LA in particular, there had been a really thriving garagerock scene, and the Sunset Strip scene that gave us Arthur Lee, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield and everything else. And that scene was basically shut down by the city officials and the police, on behalf of local merchants, by the beginning of 1967. From that point on, there was no scene. A few clubs remained, but they would be basically hosting record industry-approved bands, bands that were either on their way up or down the ladder. The industry was very much in control of ‘rock music’, which had become generic and boring, for the most part. And nobody wanted to know about original bands.”22
It seemed that no venues existed for groups who wanted to perform original material; even though there were thousands of bars across Los Angeles, those that hosted live music would only book covers bands. “Bar owners would ask me, ‘Why do you want to play your own songs? People don’t want to hear that, they want to hear songs they’ll recognise,’” says Nolte. “That was the mind-set. Around 1975, I thought, something’s got to give. I was trying to put something together out of the remnants of my high school band, but I was looking for direction... What were we going to do? You couldn’t send a tape to the record label unless you already had some connections. You can’t play original music anywhere, so you can’t showcase it and hope somebody accidentally hears it. It was positively Kafka-esque!”
Nolte was a misfit in the South Bay, eschewing the beach-rat uniform of long hair and denim flares, in favour of clothes that echoed his interests in Sixties garage rock and pop. “It was considered shocking then,” he laughs. “I would wear a black T-shirt, straight-leg blue jeans and boots, and my hair was short. And I would get things thrown at me, for looking like that. Everyone else wore bell-bottoms or cut-offs, especially down at the beach. There was this generation of kids who were still dressing like it was Woodstock, because they didn’t know anything else. It wasn’t political any more, you just did it because that’s what was done: you smoked pot, you listened to Led Zeppelin, you wore bell-bottoms and had long hair. It was incredibly conformist. And, of course, a group of adolescents will always attack people who are different to them...”
The Last’s repertoire of furious power pop was, he says, “a weird, unholy marriage of Sixties-damaged stuff and straight-ahead pop, and some psychedelia, and hopefully some of the energy I’d heard in The Ramones.” A voracious reader of The Village Voice and rock’n’roll magazines like Creem, Nolte had been an early adopter of The Ramones, and the nascent punk-rock scene in general, even before he’d heard The Ramones’ first “1, 2, 3, 4!”
“In 1975 I started reading little press reports on this scene in New York,” he remembers, “and these bands’ influences were apparently heavy Sixties damage, Stooges/Velvets damage, and it was called ‘punk rock’. My first thought was, this is my fantasy come true! And then I thought, ‘This isn’t going to last six months.’ I wanted to get to New York before it all disappeared! Then I realised, I can’t afford to get to New York... But I knew now the direction I wanted to take musically, even if there wasn’t a chance in hell of anything coming from it.
“None of the New York bands had records out; Patti Smith had released Horses, but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. The Ramones didn’t have any records out, and that was the main group I wanted to hear. So I had to guess what this group I’d read about actually sounded like. The only vaguely ‘punk rock’ record I had was the first Modern Lovers album. That was my one real source of inspiration, and it was amazing. I took all my influences, ran them through the Modern Lovers’ prism, and started writing my first prototype ‘punk’ songs, and had my first band together by the summer of 1976.”
Eighteen-year-old Nolte had just recently moved to the South Bay to live with his mother, following a period bouncing on friends’ floors, after deciding that he and his father “were probably just not meant to live under the same roof. Ostensibly, I moved to the South Bay to go to school, but I was also drawn by the fact that she had a garage, and that maybe I could practise with a band there.”
A covers group Joe knew in Hermosa had secured an audition to play at a bar in Santa Monica, but their guitarist had just quit. Nolte offered his services, salivating at the chance to play a live show before a paying audience; immediately, his imagination ran riot, so inspired by the opportunity.
“It was a dream born of desperation,” he says. “I thought we could maybe turn this bar into the CBGBs of the West Coast somehow. We could begin by playing the stupid cover songs they wanted us to, and slip a couple of our own songs in the set and see how they do.”
Joe’s group didn’t win the slot in Santa Monica, but the club owner recommended them to his cousin, who ran a bar down in the South Bay called the Flame Pit. “He gave us a weekend slot,” remembers Joe, “and we got all our friends to come along. None of us were 21, so it was illegal for any of us to be there. But we played our covers, and there were a lot of people there, and everyone was drinking. We were playing ‘Green River’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and I was looking around and thinking, the people here don’t care what they’re dancing to at this point. So I signalled to the bass player, and we segued into The Modern Lovers’ ‘Pablo Picasso’, and then we went into The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, and all these people - who would’ve been mortified if they knew what they were dancing to - were just whooping it up. I heard later that the bar set a record for drinks sold that night.”
Emboldened by their success, Joe’s group returned the next night, expecting to repeat the triumph, and maybe even build upon it. “Unfortunately,” he sighs, “the next night the bar was only half-full, and so that was the end of our experience there. It was a short-lived little thing. At that point our drummer disappeared.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, unreliable stoner Kansas’s tenure as Panic’s bassist was brief. He exited the group before the summer of 1977, to be replaced, temporarily, by a local musician friend of Greg’s. Like Greg, Glen Lockett’s father had served as a pilot during World War II, a member of the 332nd Fighter Group of the US Army Corps. Better known as the Tuskegee Airmen, the 332nd were the first African-American pilots in the Air Force, defending B-17 bombers as they deposited their payloads on Europe; their group emblem was a fire-breathing black panther. Ginn and Lockett’s fathers would meet some years later, via their sons, and took great pleasure in swapping war stories.
Lockett had moved to Hermosa from Hollywood in the mid-Seventies, left cold by the glitter-rock scene that had latterly blossomed in Los Angeles, centered on Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. The Sunset Strip nightclub was run by music industry scenester Bingenheimer, who had opened his disco in 1972, inspired by a recent sojourn in London, where he’d befriended Rod Stewart and David Bowie and watched the birth of glam rock in the UK. Bingenheimer who had secured the nickname ‘The Mayor Of Sunset Strip’ in the Sixties, in reference to his ubiquity on the party circuit and his formidable connections with LA pop royalty - possessed an admirable ear for talent, which would find its best expression in his later tenure as a DJ on Los Angeles FM station KROQ.
Rodney’s English Disco would serve as the venue for performances by The Stooges and The New York Dolls, and put on shows by a number of local Los Angeles groups, many of whom never made it to vinyl, but whose eccentric mutations of rock’n’roll laid the groundwork for the punk-rock scene that would soon flourish. There were The Berlin Brats, a druggy bunch with a penchant for The New York Dolls; there was Zolar X, a synth-heavy collective who dressed in plastic and acrylic and claimed to be from outer space, talking only in their own invented alien language; there were Les Petites Bon Bons, described by music journalist and publicist Harvey Kubernik as “the antithesis of the Laurel Canyon buckskin-jacket country rock people. They were into clothing, they were into art, they were into make-up and drag… They were scene-makers and tastemakers who happened to dress outrageously with shaved heads, jewellery, dresses, boas, stuff you just didn’t see.”23
But the Disco became more famous, and infamous, for its loyal clientele of wild Los Angeleno teenagers. A younger, West Coast precedent for the kind of glammy debauchery that would secure New York nightclub Studio 54 its legend a couple of years later, the Disco’s denizens would dress up for the occasion, daubing themselves in glitter make-up and extravagant glam wear. Bowie’s enduring influence on the scene set a gender-neutral tone, and on the dance floor and within the club’s many shadowy nooks the kids flirted with various variations of sexuality; often, they pursued these several bases beyond mere chaste flirtation. Drug use was widespread, often in the form of Quaaludes (a barbiturate muscle relaxant and sedative) washed back with malt liquor, delivering a woozy, hazy high that made each night’s wild misadventure unfold a little more smoothly.
Rodney’s wasn’t for Lockett; his musical interests stretched wider and deeper than that druggy scene could satisfy. His ambitions to work as a record producer drew him south, where a new recording studio, called Media Art, was being constructed on Hermosa Avenue. He got work as a staff engineer and was, he later wrote, “fulfilling one of my biggest dreams. But on the other hand, I was recording some absolutely godawful music, played by people with absolutely no talent. And then there was the wonderful Disco Era... Yuk!”24
Media Art’s early client list was clearly unedifying to Lockett, and he didn’t make enough cash from working at the studio to pay his rent, so he took shifts at the Garden Of Eden, a nearby vegetarian restaurant located on Hermosa Avenue, in between Solid State Tuners and the beach. He also freelanced for the Easy Reader, a weekly paper that had serviced the South Bay since 1970; under the name Spot, the nickname his friends knew him by, Lockett contributed record reviews.
A new transplant to the South Bay, Spot appreciated how Hermosa served as a haven for art and creativity in the area. “Hermosa Beach was a perfect haven for substantive West Coast bohemia to thrive in the post-WWII era,” he told Joe Carducci. “Perhaps what saved it was the demise of the Red Line streetcars, the easiest way for the Angelenos to get to the South Bay. Even with the advent of the freeway system, roads led tourists and inlanders more easily to Santa Monica and Venice Beach, both towns already noteworthy for their pleasure/amusement piers. Hermosa Beach was a quiet, insular community, with a pier only good for fishing, and aside from surfing, jazz and intellectualism were not worthy attractions for most people. This helped the city resist most development, and it remained a quiet, unassuming, mostly inexpensive place to live until the late Seventies, when economic tides finally changed back in the carpetbaggers’ favour.”25
Spot first met Greg Ginn during a shift at the Garden Of Eden, where Greg often ate after work at SST. Spot would later describe Greg as “one of the strangest people I had ever met in the South Bay. Here was someone totally out of step with the sunshine and the surf and the skateboards, and although you did have your outcast types who blended into the environment, he even seemed out of step with them. But leave it to my knack of communicating with these strange individuals... Greg and I ended up in many discussions on music.
“One night, we got into a particularly opinionated discussion about one of my reviews. During the course of it, he said how he wanted to start his own band. I thought, ‘What? This geek in a band?’ So I asked, ‘What kind of band?’ He answered, ‘A punk band’. That was it! I couldn’t hold it back! I laughed in his face and said, ‘That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard!’ But the geek didn’t blink. He just kinda twitched a little, without seeming any less determined.”
At the time, Spot considered punk rock to be “a lotta noisy bunk”, adding that “back then I was into the ‘progresso-sophisto’ music thing”. In response, Greg loaned Spot his copy of The Ramones’ first album. “I thought it was great,” he admits. “Not quite a religious musical experience, but The Ramones at least had an overload of grinding chainsaw noise and straightforward rock’n’roll 4/4 energy. Y’know, the kinda stuff that was missing from modern music. I loved to play it for people. I liked to watch them cringe.”
After Kansas’s exit from Panic, Greg extended an invitation to Spot to jam with them. The group had secured a rehearsal space down on the beach, in the Hermosa Bathhouse, located on the Strand, a block from the pier; Spot visited one night early that summer, picked up the group’s battered bass guitar, and prepared to sit in with Panic for a rehearsal.
“Greg picked up his guitar and started playing loud, distorted, atonal riffs and I cringed and wondered what I was doing in this dank decrepit dungeon with these strange cretins,” Spot remembered. “The band had a total of six songs, each of which lasted no longer than one minute. Greg showed me the simple repetitive chords... ‘OK, here we go, 1-2-3-4...’
“And BANG!! the drummer started smashing out a fast, trashy straight four-pattern beat, and the wiry little singer started bellowing and jumping around wildly, and Greg’s body lurched forward as he underwent a remarkable transformation from Jekyll to Hyde. His head shook, eyes flashed and teeth bared maniacally as he began to grind thick chords out of a guitar that, in the shadowy light, could have been mistaken for a chainsaw. Within seconds it was over. Jekyll calmly stepped out of his Hyde as if stepping out of routine nightmare.
“I was dumbfounded, shocked; my eyes wide in amazement, my mouth hanging open in disbelief. We played again. ‘1-2-3-4!!’ Jekyll became Hyde, music became noise. Punk rock became a resident of Hermosa Beach. Ten minutes later we had played the entire six-song set twice.”
Panic shared their rehearsal space at the Bathhouse with another group, a trio who went by the name of Würm. The brainchild of guitarist Ed Danky and his best friend, bassist Gary McDaniel, the group brewed a fierce stew from various underground and proto-punk influences, but had recently found themselves ploughing a lonely, disaster-strewn course, struggling to score gigs or hold down a drummer, while enduring a series of evictions from practice pads and squats.
“I was super-interested in music,” remembers McDaniel, “especially harder music. Ed and I were always seeking out new bands and records. We were really deep into The Stooges, and we went to all the music performances we heard about.”26
McDaniel was born in Los Angeles on February 1, 1954, and grew up mostly in San Pedro, with some interruptions; his mother was German, and Gary had spent parts of his childhood in her hometown of Sonnenburg. “My dad was a rocket scientist,” he says. “He worked on developing satellite systems and had to spend a fair amount of time in Europe, so we had extended stays at my mother’s parents’ house.”
His parents were avid classical music aficionados, and his mother’s family could boast professional musicians and composers within their bloodline for many generations. “As a little kid I liked all sorts of music,” says McDaniel. “I’d sing in restaurants with my grand father, and I loved to listen to the Dixie bands that played in pizza places. When I was about eight, I started getting into pop music on the radio, twisting and rocking around the clock, splish splashing and surfing USA, ticket to riding and on and on. I began to think being a musician would be the coolest thing possible.
“I wanted to be a drummer and bugged my parents to get me a drum set. I would drum on everything and drove my parents crazy. They thought if I had an actual drum set it would be unbearable, so, no drum set. The compromise was drum lessons and a snare drum. I filled in with boxes, pots and pans and anything else that made noise but I never really got off the ground with it. The lessons really turned me off and intimidated me.”
By the time he was 11, Gary sensed that he had outgrown the tame fare that was being played on pop radio, and began regular visits to the record store to check out other avenues. His timing was impeccable, as the second half of the Sixties witnessed the dawn and rise of the album as a medium for grand artistic statements on the part of the more ambitious and visionary rock’n’roll groups. His first seven-inch purchase was ‘Sunshine Superman’, a trippy groove cut by Donovan. His first album was Wheels Of Fire, a 1968 double-set that was the third, and wildest, release by British psychedelic-blues supergroup Cream.
“I loved their song ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’,” remembers McDaniel, “and Wheels was the new Cream album, so I got that. I’d lie in front of our mono hi-fi, blasting it through my dad’s giant JBL speakers, trying to have myself a psychedelic experience. I didn’t have any older siblings to copy, so I was pretty much on my own figuring out what music to buy. I was very into my trusty AM radio, which, unlike my records, I could play in my room. I read about the hippie scene in the newspaper and my dad’s magazines. It seemed awesome and I wanted a piece of it all.”
Aged 16, McDaniel got to attend his first live show. “I met a guy whose brother was a hippie. He took us to our first rock concert, where we heard Sly & The Family Stone and Mountain. There was a riot when Sly played ‘Stand’. The Navy Shore Patrol pigs that had been hired to do security shut down the show. It was all scary and awesome.”
McDaniel soon grew addicted to the electrifying rush of live rock’n’roll, and began attending every show he could. “I saw Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and more underground bands, in addition to the stuff I was hearing on my AM radio. There was no Hendrix on the AM, but lots of Stones, Beatles, Animals, Supremes, Creedence, and other stuff. But I started to think some of it was sucking by then. I didn’t reject all of the AM stuff. But I kept going with more and more musical exploration - Hendrix, King Crimson, Beefheart, Alice Cooper, Neil Young — and got in with more friends who were interested. We listened to everything we could get, and shared our records. I bought a first-generation cassette recorder and taped everything I didn’t have.”
One of McDaniel’s friends was considerably wealthy, and had convinced his parents to convert their two-car garage into a soundproofed space where he and his buddies could make as much noise as they wanted. The kid had decked the garage out with guitars, a bass, amplifiers, a four-track tape recorder, and a top-of-the-line stereo system, and Gary and his friends would assemble there, get high, listen to music and start playing the instruments.
“I tried all of it, and really liked playing bass,” says McDaniel. “It was natural for me; I was struck. I ordered a bass for $50 from the Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue. I played it every day through my parent’s stereo. Those two JBL D130 15” speakers sounded great.” By the time he was 18, he’d hooked up with a drummer and a guitarist, and had begun jamming with them. “This was my first experience in an actual band with a drummer and people who could actually play their instruments,” he says. “I was in over my head but I loved it.”
Würm had formed in 1973, slowly gestating as McDaniel and Danky distilled their myriad influences into an oozing, Stoogian, psychedelic and sludgily metallic beast. The group’s sound was in a state of constant mutation, however, as the duo’s hungry ears drew fresh inspiration from whatever new noises they came across. Their development wasn’t merely sonic, however; McDaniel was considerably impressed by the ethos and energy of the New York scene, and by its jettisoning of much of the pomp, grandiosity and ego that had latterly affected the culture.
“We’d heard about the New York scene and went to hear The Ramones in ‘76, at a place called the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach,” he remembers. “We watched the band get out of an older van and go in to play. No roadies or tour bus or other stuff. This brought it way down to earth. ‘Wow, they’re almost real people.’ It seemed achievable. They played faster than any group I’d ever heard before. I wished they played some lead guitar lines, but it was mind-blowing.”
The pair began regularly attending concerts at a new venue in Los Angeles called the KROQ Cabaret. The Cabaret was a cool and eccentric room, with a downstairs lounge furnished and designed with a ‘cave’ theme. The radio station sponsored shows there, with scenester and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer often serving as emcee.
“We’d see bands like the Dogs, Max Lazar, Berlin Brats, Motels, Quiet Riot [crazy eh?], Zolar X, The Pop... We wanted to play there, but the Cabaret soon closed. But then the Dogs and some of their friends started a thing called Radio Free Hollywood, and would put on shows at local halls, including the infamous Bace’s Hall. The Dogs put out a seven inch... It was all beginning to get a little exciting.”
With the recruitment, after a year-long search, of a drummer who could ably power their primordial riffage, Würm were ready to participate in this scene. They scored a couple of shows in Hollywood, and one in Redondo Beach. Casting their net wider than typical venues for rock’n’roll performance, they also staged concerts at a few local high schools and parks. They auditioned when legendary Sunset Strip nightclub the Whisky A Go Go began promoting some shows by Los Angeles underground groups. “They didn’t have us play but we went to the shows,” he says. “This was punk music as we know it today: The Weirdos, Zeros, Dils and a couple of others all played. It was edgier music than I was used to. It challenged my aesthetic vision, but I found it compelling at the same time. The music was hard and intense, and I could sense something was happening that was embracing many of the qualities I liked and felt was missing from the music coming out at the time.”
McDaniel first met Greg Ginn early in 1977, when he sold the guitarist a Marshall speaker cabinet, the same kind Ritchie Blackmore, guitarist of Deep Purple, used. “That’s how Würm made money,” McDaniel told MOJO’s Jay Babcock. “We bought and sold musical equipment.”27
“It was really just a momentary meeting, though,” McDaniel says today. “Though I do remember that he commented on the sleeve to Iggy and The Stooges’ Raw Power, which I had pasted to the door of my room.”
The pair would meet again in the summer of 1977, shortly after Würm had relocated to the Hermosa Bathhouse; doubling as both their rehearsal room and their home, they’d rechristened the space the Würmhole. Ed Danky bumped into Keith Morris on the Strand one afternoon and, on learning that Morris also played in a band, invited him to hang out at the ‘Hole. When Morris came over later that evening, to meet the Würm crew, he brought Greg along.
“Keith used to come down to the Würm practice space on lunch with a six-pack and a quart,” McDaniel told Babcock, “and sometimes he would leave some of it behind, come back after work, and start back up. I’d never met anyone like this, Keith was just great. He was ‘on’ 24-7, very emotive, a little teeny guy. As far out as Iggy, and not self-conscious.”
McDaniel remembers Greg as “geeky and enthusiastic. He had Peter Frampton hair! Then again I had some scraggly long hair too...” Of Panic’s music, he was struck by “the feel of the execution, the way the beats were accented. Panic had a rhythmic approach and energy that was original. I thought their music was catchy, it was music that made you sing along.
“It tripped me and Ed out how quickly Greg and Keith moved in on our scene,” continues McDaniel. “Before we knew it, they were contacting the landlord of our place and renting the vacant half of it, which we had been using without permission. But they were friends, so it was OK.”
As Spot had decided that he couldn’t commit to the role of bassist for Panic, McDaniel would often roll his bass amplifier over to their practice space and jam along with the group. He proved a good fit with the other members, and not just musically; Greg in particular was impressed with McDaniel’s outspokenness, his intellectual restlessness. “He would always have a lot of theories on life, on this and that; he was a thinking person,” he told Michael Azerrad. “He didn’t want to fit into the regular society thing, but not the hippie thing, either.”
As the year wore on, Würm’s unlucky streak resurfaced, and the band were soon ailing. “We’d had some trouble,” says McDaniel. “We were out of money and everybody got the flu. There was no food, we were getting mad at each other, so we decided to break up. The next day, Greg said, ‘You wanna make the Panic thing permanent?’ I said, ‘Well, sure’.
“I was bound and determined to be successful with music, music that was new and groundbreaking,” remembers McDaniel, of the impulses that drove him to join Panic. “I had dedicated my life to making that happen. I wanted to tour, I didn’t want to just play in my living room. I thought Panic’s music was easy to ‘get’. It came across. Later, our music became more challenging to the audience; but back then, it hit heavy and hard, and people got it instantly.”
“In the beginning, there hadn’t really been an ‘LA Scene’ at all,” remembers Joe Nolte, of West Coast punk rock. “It didn’t really all come together until Brendan Mullen opened the Masque.”
Located in Hollywood, down an alleyway between Selma Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, in a dark, 10,000 sq ft basement at 1655 North Cherokee Boulevard, the Masque was founded by Brendan Mullen, a wild Scot who’d rented the space “literally as somewhere for me and my cronies to experiment with beating on drums and anything else that showed up, undisturbed by neighbours and cops, 24/7”.28
Previously, the basement had housed the Don Martin School of Broadcasting, an academy for training would-be radio presenters, although they had vacated the premises some years before. On hiring out the location, Mullen had to clear a vast amount of the School’s detritus out of the premises, for which he was granted a month’s free rent. By the end of summer 1977 Mullen was renting the basement out to bands during the day as rehearsal space, and often booked those same bands to play there at night, hosting shows at what he called “probably the first illegal club space since Prohibition”.
“The wonderfully chaotic old Masque basement was frequently a free-for-all of people getting up at all hours of the night, sometimes till dawn on weekends,”29 remembers Mullen today. He originally held these night-time concerts as Bring Your Own Bottle free parties, until Cliff Roman of LA Punks The Weirdos asked why they weren’t getting paid for performing.
The Masque soon became the focus for the fledgling LA punk scene, its rehearsal rooms and illicit club nights playing host to a menagerie of raucous underground groups who’d previously played stray shows at more traditional locations like the Whisky. These groups included the aforementioned Weirdos, whose blunt underground anthems cross-pollinated Iggy-esque snarl with the fist-pumping energy of British punk; The Dils, who plied rabble-rousing rock-outs like ‘I Hate The Rich’ and ‘Mr. Big’, which tempered their righteousness with a rousing gift for melody and sophisticated rhythms; X, who brilliantly juggled John Doe and Exene Cervenka’s tempestuous boy/girl vocals with Billy Zoom’s rockabilly guitar runs; and The Germs, a hurtling and chaotic group fronted by Darby Crash, a darkly charismatic and assuredly self-destructive singer who seemed to want to take the whole front row out with him when he went.
The Masque gave these groups a spot to congregate, to build a community, to pool their resources and share their fan bases. No longer were they playing low on the bill at the established clubs up on the Sunset Strip; at the Masque, these groups became stars. The venue attracted a mix of arty bohemians, refugees from the glitter era, and Hollywood kids looking for wild distractions. The scene could be pretty hedonistic; Mullen and Marc Spitz’s oral history, We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story Of LA Punk, and Mullen and Don Bolles’ Germs biography, Lexicon Devil: The Short Life And Fast Times Of Darby Crash, chronicle lives as chaotic and dangerous as the punk rock that soundtracked them, from the frankly terrifying drug diets consumed by artists and audience alike, to the more fanatical Germs followers, who proudly displayed welts from cigarette burns Darby Crash had inflicted on them.
The scene was also a hell of a lot of fun. Live At The Masque: Nightmare In Punk Alley, a lush photo book assembled by Mullen, captures the ambience of the club via the photographs shot by Masque regulars and professional snappers, including Jenny Lens, Al Flipside, Frank Gargani and Bibbe Hansen. Author Kristine McKenna’s foreword to the tome recalled the halcyon months of the club’s existence, and the audience of “rich kids, poor kids, drug addicts, alcoholic art students. On the surface nobody had much in common, yet all were unmistakably members of the same tribe... The Masque was a haven for weirdos, nerds, borderline sociopaths, and assorted misfits with attitude problems, and the people who hung out there had an unusually high tolerance for those different from themselves.” Describing LA’s punk rockers as “smart, defiantly original, truly creative people”, McKenna adds, “It was worth the price of admission just to see what Exene [Cervenka], Trudie [the Masque’s “mascot”] and Pat Bag [bassist for LA punk rockers The Bags] were wearing every night.”30
In the photography of Live At The Masque, the club’s walls are thickly clad with graffiti, tags, band logos, slogans and dirty jokes spray-painted in lurid green and harsh red and scrawled in black permanent marker. On some walls, the graffiti is obscured by prints and portraits of historic Hollywood royalty like Mae West and Jean Harlow, gazing silently out at a crowd giving their glamour a run for its money. While mainstream America either wore the same dirty denims they’d sported circa Woodstock or the wannabe-bourgeois polyester leisure-wear of the nascent disco set, the Masque’s demographic dressed up for their nights out, a daring individuality displayed on the part of both the audience and the artists. The girls dressed in leopard-print leggings and skirts and tops, or a man’s shirt’n’tie, or distressed Frederick’s Of Hollywood lingerie; the guys wore badge-strewn leather jackets, or Sixties mod gear, or white shirts with slogans printed on them.
“It was a dingy, dusty concrete labyrinth,” remembers Joe Nolte, “this wonderful hellhole, in a really dismal part of Hollywood Boulevard. It was different from the postcards you get of LA, that’s for sure. As soon as I heard about the Masque I went right on down there, and became friends with Brendan.” Nolte’s intention was to score The Last a show at the Masque; the group hadn’t performed since late 1976, when they played the Sweet Sixteen birthday party of Debbie Keaton, a friend-of-a-friend who also turned out to be Buster Keaton’s grand-daughter. “That was pretty fun, but it was the last time we played anywhere. We’d begun some tentative recordings in mom’s garage, and the cops got called on account of the noise. It turned out I had an old traffic warrant outstanding, so not only did we lose Hermosa as a place to practise, but I got hauled off to jail, briefly.”
Nolte first visited the Masque on September 4, 1977, which was also The Germs’ first show there, supported by Skulls (an LA group whose guitarist, Marc Moreland, was brother of the club’s emcee, Bruce Moreland), the Alleycats (a South Bay group fronted by husband and wife duo Randy Stodola and Dianne Chai) and Needles & Pins (Sixties-influenced Phil Spector-styled pop, fronted by Denny Ward). “I quickly fell in love with The Germs,” Nolte says. “Not only did they never play their songs the same way twice, but frequently they weren’t even playing the same song at the same time! I witnessed that! And they looked at each other, realised they were playing different songs, and just kept on doing it...”
Mullen told Nolte that the following week’s show — The Bags, Eyes, Spastics — was already fully booked, but that there was a spot free on the bill the week after. “But the week before we were going to play, the Fire Marshal showed up... If there had ever been a fire at the Masque, the whole scene would have died, literally. The Marshal closed the place down, boom, over.”
But Mullen was not defeated, and after a month’s respite, he quietly re-opened the Masque at the same location on October 15. During its four weeks in purgatory, its scattered audience had built the club a legend via word-of-mouth, and Mullen soon found himself assailed by requests to play the basement.
“Suddenly there were like a hundred bands that wanted to play there,” laughs Nolte, ruefully. “In the space of that month, word had gotten out, and from every surrounding suburb and outlying area, all these bands that wanted to do this punk-rock thing had appeared out of nowhere. Which meant The Last weren’t going to be able to play... But, on the positive side, suddenly there was a scene for punk rock in LA, and the Masque was its rallying point.”
The guys from Panic happened upon the Masque at around the same time as Joe. A photograph of the audience in 1977, taken from the stage by Gabi Berlin and reprinted on page 60 of Live At The Masque, finds Nolte stood before a rapt Greg Ginn, who’s dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket, with his long Frampton locks hanging down to his shoulders.
“We kind of stumbled into the Masque scene during our musical exploration, our ‘noise safari’,” says Keith. “It blew up in our faces; it was like, this is what we’re into, fuck all of these Top 40 covers bands down by where we live. We walked into this room, and it blew up in our faces, and it was like the greatest thing that ever happened to us... Here’s The Germs, here’s The Bags and The Dils, here’s The Cramps, here’s X…”
“I pogoed and got all crazy,” adds McDaniel. “I was on board. I went to every show I could. People would pass out flyers at the shows so you could learn about more shows each time you went. It was astounding to go from the rarefied atmosphere of arena rock to a world that finally embraced the audience as a participant.”
Despite their love for the Masque scene, however, the South Bay boys felt somewhat apart from their Hollywood kindreds. “We certainly didn’t fit in with people like The Germs,” says Keith. Panic didn’t ‘dress up’, they didn’t subscribe to the flamboyant costumes and uniforms worn by the guys, girls and groups down on the Boulevard. Their Hermosa Beach take on punk-rock style was somewhat more laid-back.
“We just looked like a bunch of guys that would have hung out and drunk a quart of Budweiser under Hermosa Beach pier,” laughs Keith. “We weren’t in it for the fashion; we were in it for the music, its intensity, and the volume.”
While Hollywood’s punk rockers were negotiating with old-school rock venues like the Whisky, and finding a home at the Masque, South Bay boys Panic made their public onstage debut at a friend’s garage. And what were Panic, anyway, but a modern-day garage-rock band, in the fine lineage of other primitive and raucous groups like The Seeds, The Standells, The Sonics, and hundreds more, cranking out their own handmade, home-fried version of rock’n’roll in suburban car ports across America?
Garage rock first flourished during the early to mid Sixties all across America, but often in the pockets a certain distance from the hubs of the entertainment industry. Far from professional recording studios and rehearsal spaces, a certain do it yourself spirit prevailed, these groups conjuring makeshift facilities from their surroundings. America’s voluminous garages — attached to every modern suburban home, in deference to a consumerist culture that had began to expect, demand multiple automobiles for every household — provided the ideal venue for countless fledgling groups to woodshed and find their sound, and discover the pleasure of cranking distorted riffs at cold brick walls, with only a single light bulb for illumination.
For many garage-rock groups, 1966 was their Year Zero, when the British Invasion of Beatles pop and Stones R&B was at its zenith, while underground groups like The Yardbirds fused the blues with the first strains of psychedelia and the brutal, distorted rasp of rock’n’roll guitar, turning it into something that would swiftly evolve into the heavy metal of Led Zeppelin. But the garage-rock groups were pre-Zeppelin, their reference points crucially pre-Sgt Pepper; they displayed no real pretentions to art. They couldn’t secure recording contracts from the big labels of the day, so often recorded with tiny independent labels, or even released their records themselves. The studios they worked in were spartan, often barely fit-for-purpose. Few of the groups ever found fame, or made any real money, or even got to perform or be heard outside their home state. Still, they rehearsed, lusty, desperate, degenerate and wonderful rock’n’roll faintly echoing throughout the suburban American evening.
In the absence of thriving local music scenes, these groups would play anywhere they could - bars, barn dances, bar mitzvahs; accordingly, they had to be able to play music that could get kids dancing, their set lists often including staple covers of Them’s ‘Gloria’, The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, and other R&B favourites. Nearly every garage-rock band knew the infectious up’n’down chords of ‘Louie Louie’, a ribald sea shanty recorded by many, but most definitively by The Kingsmen, a frat-rock group from the Pacific Northwest.
These groups’ own original material rarely strayed from this field of reference; they sought, often unconsciously, to further distil that primitive first rush of early rock’n’roll, when the electric guitar was still considered an ugly, antisocial noise, when R&B’s sinful rhythms alone could still inflame controversy. Evolution was not on the agenda, sophistication was not the point; garage rock offered more primal, less intellectual thrills. Where they used the contemporary gizmos and effects, it was always in a thrillingly clumsy manner, going for instant impact, and delivering a rock’n’roll that was deliciously raw and pulpy.
As the rock stars got off on their increasingly esoteric, intellectual trips, garage rockers could still deliver the essential brute force and the irresistible groove of the greatest rock’n’roll, a fact recognised by only a handful of more insightful rock critics of the time. Rolling Stone writer Lenny Kaye - later to play guitar alongside Patti Smith - compiled the influential Nuggets album in 1972, collecting then-relatively obscure garage-rock ‘hits’ by the likes of The Strangeloves, The Electric Prunes, The Barbarians and The Remains, developing a canon for, and defining the genre of, garage rock. Lester Bangs, meanwhile, re-evaluated garage rock while praising his beloved Stooges in an essay entitled ‘Of Pop, Pies & Fun’, which ran across the November and December 1970 issues of Creem magazine.
Bangs knew that originality wasn’t the garage rockers’ strongest suit, that their simplistic songs cribbed shamelessly from the greats and rarely attempted to cover their tracks. He also knew that this didn’t prevent those same songs from delivering a primal, essential punch that rock’n’roll seemed to have abandoned after the Age Of Aquarius, and found something life-affirming in the way these groups often pushed beyond the limitations of their technical abilities and their equipment, resulting in records ruled by feedback, distortion and chaos, records that could sound so electrifyingly (and often accidentally) ‘avant’, abstract and experimental.
For Bangs, “the only hope for a free rock’n’roll renaissance which would be true to the original form, rescue us from all this ill-conceived, dillettantish pap so far removed from the soil of jive, and leave behind some hope for truly adventurous small-group guitar experiments in the future, would be if all those ignorant teenage dudes out there learning guitar in hick towns and forming bands to play ‘96 Tears’ and ‘Woolly Bully’ at sock-hops, evolving exposed to all the eclectic trips, but relatively fresh and free too, if only they could somehow, some of them somewhere escape the folk/Sgt Pepper virus.”31
Garage rock was, in many ways, the first true wave of American punk rock, and it’s arguable that the punk rock that followed took Bangs’ above statement, at least implicitly and in spirit, as its founding ethos. Detroit’s MC5 had been a James Brown-besotted garage-rock covers band, playing house parties and weddings, before becoming politicised and conspiring to Kick Out The Jams. The Ramones, meanwhile, clearly dug the simplicity, the concision, the primal power of the original garage rock. “If you look at The Ramones, they don’t look anything like a ‘punk rock’ band,” says Keith. “With their Prince Valiant bowl-cut hairstyles, they look like a band like The Seeds, or The Electric Prunes, or The Strawberry Alarm Clock, and it’s obvious that The Ramones were influenced by the garage bands, the psychedelic bands, and certainly the Beach Boys.”
And so it was, that in a suburban garage in Redondo Beach, sometime in December 1977, Panic unchained themselves from the rehearsal space where they’d been tirelessly, ruthlessly woodshedding for months, and played their first-ever public performance. As the entertainment for a friend’s house party, Panic were an odd choice, perhaps: their repertoire contained no familiar cover versions, and made few concessions to the dance floor. Panic weren’t looking to entertain their audience, they were looking to obliterate them.
“The party was full of stoners, and beach rats, and surfer chicks and dudes,” says Keith, “people showing off their tans and comparing drugs and tappin’ into the keg. I remember there were some bikers, and some jocks, a normal gathering of people, all from different parts of the South Bay. It was just like high school.” The milieu suited these misfits perfectly, setting up an aggressive dynamic between the band and the audience that translated into their music.
“We were kind of like the guys in school that got pushed around,” remembers Keith. “When they were choosing teams, we would be the last guys picked to play, that kind of thing. So, you know, getting knocked around by the jocks and the athletes, getting dissed by all the popular girls - this was our statement, saying ‘Fuck You’. We were just going to blow people away. It wasn’t really about saying, ‘You can’t push us around any more’, because in the beginning we cleared a lot of rooms [laughs]… So people weren’t really sticking around to get that message.”
Even though this debut performance was happening in so modest a setting as a simple garage, their party host friend was determined to lend a little showbiz pizzazz to the performance. “He was all, like, ‘When you guys are ready to play, let me know and I’ll swing the garage door open and you can start playing, and it’ll be rockin’! People will love it!’”
The people were certainly ill-prepared for the freshly uncorked frustration and aggression that would soon rain down on them. For during those endless hours of rehearsal down at the Würmhole, Panic had honed the untrammelled energy and ferocity of Greg’s songs to a tightly anarchic blast, delivered with an unforgiving, uncompromising conviction.
“The group was Greg’s baby,” Keith told MOJO’s Jay Babcock. “Greg was frustrated. You couldn’t tell it until he picked up the guitar. This guy’s taking no prisoners; shoot from the hip, let all the smoke clear, and then ask everybody what their name is. I loved it. I thought, let’s just throw ourselves into it, deal with the consequences later. My first instinct whenever we played was to lunge at the microphone, attack it! It was like, ‘This is our chance, let’s go level the forest.’”
The group’s 10-minute, six-song set provoked an instant and decisive response. “All of a sudden,” Keith says, “Panic’s ready to play, and the kid swings the garage door up, like it’s some wooden curtain, and we start playing. And the first thing that happens is a fight breaks out like three or four feet away from us. All of a sudden, people are all, ‘What is this shit? What the fuck is this? Who are these guys?’ That’s when the bottles and cans and empty cups started flying through the air, and the glass began shattering in front of me, and it got really wild. The dude who was having the party was, like, ‘Oh my God’: all of a sudden there’s five fights in the backyard, and these bikers doing donuts in the front lawn, ruining the grass and grinding it to mud.”
The Redondo Beach party was the first of several such shows Panic would play in the months to come, often to a similarly uncomprehending response. In the meantime, the group continued to feverishly rehearse, this time for their first recording session.
Since abdicating the role of Panic’s bassist, Spot had refocused his energies at Media Art, and realising that they might, even fleetingly, deliver him from the disco sessions he was having to engineer, convinced Greg to take the group into the studio and record some songs. In January 1978, Panic booked themselves in for four hours late at night, when the rate was cheapest, and rolled their gear up to the studio from their rehearsal space, several blocks down. Spot being only an apprentice engineer at the time, his responsibilities during the recording were restricted to setting up the microphones and helping with the mix. The producer for the session would be the studio’s senior engineer, Dave Tarling.
“We’d never been in a studio,” says Keith, “and it was kind of an odd experience. The studio was situated above a bar that had a Top 40 band playing. We were recording, and we’d stop, and all of a sudden there’d be music coming up through the floor, from the band downstairs. And so it was like, ‘OK, well I guess we’re just going to have to turn the volume up, aren’t we?’”
For the session, the group turned their amplifiers up to full from the get-go, to audible effect: the guitar on these tracks has a feral quality, revving like a broken carburettor, spitting splintered black noise in brutal bursts. Greg’s guitar tore with a furious rhythm, never pausing to solo, with McDaniel’s bass echoing the riff on pulverising low-end. Bryan Migdol, meanwhile, nailed the songs cold, his drum rolls and cymbal splashes switching up the songs’ helter-skelter tempo changes, and powering their driven gallop.
Greg’s songs were defiantly elemental, exactly the kind you would write soon after picking up a guitar for the first time and discovering how the most basic one-string lick can set hairs on end. They revelled in the pure rush delivered by riffs that, in their ascendant/descendant simplicity, packed an almost physical punch, thanks not least to the lurching rhythms. These songs pelted forward at reckless velocity, then got stymied in primordial ruts, the masterful stop-start of ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ enough to give a mosher whiplash. The slow-build opening to ‘Nervous Breakdown’, meanwhile, highlighted Greg’s growing feel for dynamics, drums and bass itching an impatient rumble behind the riff until the song rockets forward with a blast, fuelled by crashing cymbals and Keith’s manic foghorn vocal.
The confidence audible in Panic’s first ever session in a recording studio is still startling when you hear these tracks today, and no more apparent than in Morris’ unhinged performance. While he modestly declares himself a vocalist and not a singer, he’s certainly an adept interpreter of Greg’s dark and hilarious lyrics: on ‘I’ve Had It’, his snarled garble sounds like the desperate sputter of a man one slim step away from oblivion; on the sardonic ‘No Values’, he delivers Ginn’s deceptively nuanced lyric (lampooning the ‘rebel without a clue’ stereotype of punk rockers, while also revelling in that assumed nihilism a little) with an infectious, anarchic glee, a self-rhapsodising sociopath given to an ecstatic stutter on his final yell of “N-n-n-n-n-no values!”
While Ginn’s songs took frustration - and its eventual, apocalyptic release - as their thematic thread, perhaps reflecting the turbulence that crackled beneath his soft-spoken, focused demeanour, Keith’s two lyrical contributions were similarly reflective of his personality. Equal parts obnoxious and hilarious, they were the funniest of the Panic repertoire; ‘I Don’t Care’ was smutty and winningly immature in its knowing, blatant offensiveness, Keith informing the object of his momentary affections that he will fuck her, regardless of the fact that her boyfriend and parents are present, that she’s wearing a tampon, and that she “looks like Greg in a wig”.
‘Wasted’, meanwhile, was a snarling paean to hedonism, a celebration of squandering one’s potential that came off like the boorish boasting of a party animal the morning after, faintly aware of its own ridiculousness. ‘Wasted’ carried the listener along with its fist-pumping dash of guitars, and Keith’s charismatic swaggering oafishness, but there was just a little self-loathing and self-consciousness present, lines like “I was a hippie, I was a burnout, I was a dropout” and “I was so jacked up, I was so drugged-up” taking a sharp jab at the ridiculousness of being so macho about your self-abuse, while also celebrating that self-destruction.
“I wrote the lyrics to ‘Wasted’,” says Keith, “because that’s what I was. It was a self-deprecatory stance, but at the same time, there’s a coolness to it, because I’m saying this is what I am and where I’m from, and you’re not. But the sarcasm... we were hearing all these bands that were so fuckin’ serious, so serious about everything they were doing. It was like, ‘Do you even take time to live your lives? Do you not, like, realise that playing music in a band is pretty much one of the least intelligent things you could do, so why be so pompous?’”
Panic had never stepped foot in a recording studio before — not even one so modestly appointed as Media Arts; they had only played a scant couple of shows before an audience of any kind. Nevertheless, on these tracks, Morris’s howl had already distinguished itself as one for the ages; on ‘Wasted’, his nasal sneer sounds like a jet engine’s dying drone, a sulphurous, deathly roar. On the final chorus of ‘Nervous Breakdown’, he abandons the lyrics to rant “Crazy! Crazy!” a couple of times, before breaking into a vile gibberish and, finally, an anguished howl so loud and fierce, it disintegrates into electrical crackle and hiss in the fadeout.
“The session was about four hours,” remembers Keith. “Quite a lengthy session. It was about three and a half hours longer than it should have been.” Though brief, it nevertheless left quite an impression on engineer Dave Tarling. “I read a statement from Dave somewhere later,” Keith laughs. “He said, ‘They look real strange, and they had big amplifiers. Then they started playing. The volume! And the songs! They wouldn’t stop coming. I asked them to stop, but they kept coming and coming. I asked them to stop, but they wouldn’t stop!”