Born in 1966 in Los Angeles, California. Worked in L.A. as a photographer and writer for fanzines (including Flipside, Maximum Rocknroll, and We Got Power) and as a columnist for Maximum Rocknroll, and attended shows at various venues throughout Los Angeles County in the ’80s. Currently lives in Seattle, Washington, and works as a program manager at an advertising agency.
I WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS OLD and I got introduced to punk rock by some people I met at school. They were into this music and I thought it was really cool. I had never seen anybody like that before. It just seemed really different and interesting. This was probably 1980 when this happened.
From the start, what I wanted to do was make a mark in the scene and put something into it, instead of just being a fan and going to shows. I wanted to give something back to the scene. Almost immediately I brought my camera to shows. Some of the first shows I ever went to, I started taking pictures.
Back in that time, nobody stopped you. You could just take pictures. I would get the pictures and do a couple of things with them. I would send them off unsolicited to some punk rock fanzines and I would give them to members of the band. I would say, “Here’s some pictures I shot. If you put me on the guest list, I’ll give you these pictures or I’ll take more pictures.” I had a darkroom, so it was really easy for me to take pictures and go home and process the film and make prints. It was a little enterprise I had going.
The other thing I started doing through my photography was getting involved with people who were publishing their own fanzines. Two in particular were We Got Power and Flipside. I started doing band interviews. I had photos in Flipside. I started writing for another fanzine that was based in the Bay Area called Maximum Rocknroll. Before long I was shooting bands, doing interviews with bands, writing a Los Angeles scene report, and then I had my own column in Maximum Rocknroll: “Memos from the Mousetrap.” I even had a silly punk rock pseudonym. I went by the name Mouse. The column was anything I wanted to talk about. It usually had to do with my parents or school. I wrote the column from age sixteen to eighteen or nineteen. I got a lot of correspondence. Some of it was good and some of it was weird. Anytime you put your name and your picture next to something you get a weird cross-section of people.
I would do interviews at my house. Bands would come to the house. I remember one time the Necros were over and my mother was serving them cookies. They would sit in the living room and my parents would be there. My mother knew these people. Pretty soon my dad was supplying a tie so Jello Biafra could go to court.
I grew up in Studio City, California, and that’s the Hollywood Hills, so I would mostly frequent clubs in Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. In Los Angeles, if you wanted to go into a bar, there wasn’t an age limit. If you wanted to drink, you had to present ID. At age fifteen, I was able to go into the clubs. The Whisky was a home away from home. The Starwood. The Cathay de Grande. I spent significant parts of my teenage years there.
The Whisky was painted all black inside. It wasn’t very big. It had two levels. There was an upper lever where you could stand and look down and then there was a lower level and there was a bar on one side. It was just a typical club. It had a backstage that went up a steep set of stairs. There were some dressing rooms at the top of these stairs. It was always hot in there and not very clean. It was an extremely smoky, hot, sweaty club. Your clothes would smell like smoke. Your hair would smell like smoke. My camera bag would smell like smoke. It was not fancy at all. When it got crowded, it was very uncomfortable to stay in there. I would usually sit on the stage and take pictures. Between shows I would go backstage and hang out in the dressing room and clean my lenses.
The Cathay de Grande was much more of a dive. It had two levels. The upstairs had a small stage that sometimes had acts, but most of the bands played downstairs. It had a wickedly low ceiling and a low stage. If you were a singer in a band and you were tall and you jumped, your head would go through the false ceiling. That actually happened. It was just gross. None of these clubs were very posh, but we were all comfortable there. We knew people. It was another home away from home.
There were some bands I really liked. I liked Battalion of Saints a lot. I liked Dead Kennedys, Social Distortion, and TSOL. A lot of people in bands became my friends and I made lifelong friendships with the people I photographed.
I can’t even listen to punk rock now. Every once in a while there will be a documentary on TV about punk rock, featuring people I knew. Or I’ll come across some old music I have and I’ll play it. I can’t even listen to it anymore. This was some music that I thought was the greatest thing in the world. I was so incredibly into it. I don’t know what happened. It just seems so silly.
The Dead Kennedys is the exception. I still love their music. I was just listening to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. I was listening to Klaus Flouride’s guitar—that sort of chunky, surf guitar—and I thought, “Wow! That will never be heard live again.”
The way you look at yourself as a woman, as a grown-up, is a lot different than your perception as a woman when you’re a teenager. I don’t think I thought of female empowerment, but I felt empowered to be an artist, a photographer, a writer, and a journalist. It was obvious that in some cases I was the only girl in the van. There were certainly a lot of girls in the scene, but there was definitely a male energy. I didn’t look at it as not welcoming or threatening. I just went about my business. I have to thank my parents for that.
My mother and father were both very supportive of what I was doing. They instilled in me values about respecting myself. I would go to questionable neighborhoods at night by myself, after I got my driver’s license. I was just taking pictures. Now I see the value of it as a middle-aged woman, looking back on what I did as a teenager. It was really great as a young woman to do all this.
A lot of my friends are dead now. They had drug problems. They had drinking problems. A lot of my friends in the scene were heroin addicts. I had a couple thousand dollars of gear around my neck, so I was constantly aware of the package I was carrying. I couldn’t be drunk or out of my wits. Something would happen to my camera. So, I was always acutely aware. I didn’t want to be the idiot at the party drawing attention to herself. I was very aware of my surroundings. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. If I came home completely wasted or my grades slipped, there is no way my father would have let me continue to go to punk rock shows in Hollywood on school nights by myself. They allowed me to do this, not fully understanding what that meant and it was sort of a bond of trust that I was not going to break.
To put it into perspective, I had a brother in the late ’70s who died of a drug overdose. I was aware of how that happened and the cops coming to our house in the middle of the night, informing my parents that my brother was dead. I made a promise to myself after watching that unfold. My dad was not going to bury another one of his kids.
I really want to give a shout-out to my dad. My dad was part of the L.A. punk scene in his own way. Before I could drive, I had to get to these shows somehow. My dad would come to the Whisky and pull up in front of the club. If I wasn’t outside waiting for him, he would come in. There was a club called Godzilla’s in the San Fernando Valley. Once I was at the stage taking pictures. No shit. The music stopped and they said, “Alison, your mom’s outside.” It was just hysterical. I figured there were a couple of ways I could integrate my parents or I could somehow work them into my play. If I was going to shows and I was going to a terrible neighborhood, my mother would say, “You can’t go unless your father goes with you.” I just incorporated him into the scene. Instead of being embarrassed by my parents, I sort of owned it.
My dad, in his post-World War II slang, kind of endeared himself in the most uncool way to my friends. We’d go to a show and I’d install him at the bar. He would watch the show from the background. He would have a beer and try to be cool, talking to the bands and using his “Big Daddy-O” type talk. He was so funny. He saw a lot. He saw police brutality. He saw a lot of things that I think opened his mind. He was kind of a right-wing reactionary guy. He met people who were gay. He met people who had blue hair. He met musicians. He met junkies. He met all kinds of people that he had absolutely no exposure to. It kind of opened his mind that these people that look weird are actually really nice people and you can’t look at them at face value. He really grew by becoming part of my scene.
It’s just funny thinking of my dad sitting in the Cathay de Grande having a conversation with El Duce. This actually happened. Here’s my dad. Here’s El Duce. And we’re sitting in a booth talking. He was such a good sport. Even when he got caught in a punk riot at Bard’s Apollo. The cops were beating people up and he saw it. How weird and surreal was that?
He never pulled the plug on it. He continued to let me do it. As long as I got straight A’s and kept up my part of the bargain, he was a party to this whole madness. He got me my first camera. I think he looked back on it fondly. He would always ask about people. He had an interest in it. If my dad wasn’t affixed to my punk rock story, then it wouldn’t be my story. He was the great enabler.
I think the idea of thinking for yourself and, regardless of what punk rock became or how it ended or the derivative nature that it morphed into—all of that aside, I think being a part of that music scene in L.A. in the early ’80s gave me the opportunity to be independent, create things, see things that I wouldn’t normally see, and meet people I wouldn’t normally meet. It enabled me to grow up a lot faster. I saw a lot of things that a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old shouldn’t see. I became jaded or streetwise pretty quickly. I think punk rock enabled me to be more aware of my world and more understanding of different types of people. I have certainly kept a little bit of the rebel outlook. Never bowing down to “the man.” I always feel like this little punk shit at heart. There’s a little part of my reptilian brain that is still a snot-nosed punk.
It was very good. It taught me to think for myself. I never really bought into the whole labeling. I never became much of a consumerist. The way I think is directly related to the experiences I had. It’s kind of like people who take acid. You take acid the first time and it changes your life. The way you think after that, years after that first trip, your mind has changed. I think that is sort of the outlook. My mind was forever changed by being exposed to that information and that stimulus.
I feel a connection to the memories. I don’t feel a connection to the scene. There is no punk scene. There is no L.A. punk scene. Sure, there are people who still carry the torch. Some of my old friends still have the band going. That makes them happy or productive. I hold the memories fondly, but I don’t think of the scene anymore. It’s like people who were hippies that went to Woodstock. It’s something you did, something you lived, and you remember it fondly and move on.