Born in 1967 in Oxnard, California. Lived in Oxnard, Los Angeles, California, and London, England, and attended shows at various venues throughout Los Angeles County and Ventura County in the ’80s. Worked as a photographer, contributed to 60 Miles North fanzine, and created Mute on the Floor magazine (1990s). Currently lives in Ventura, California, and works as a photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and journalist.
MY PARENTS HAD CHILDREN LATE IN LIFE, so unlike other children born in the ’60s that maybe had hippie parents, my parents were more from the ’50s. I grew up hearing Frank Sinatra, ’50s big bands, and Nat King Cole.
I had two introductions to punk rock. A neighbor girl, Debbie, was into everything and was very progressive. She was six years older and her sister was the same age as me. This would have been about ’76 or ’77. She was buying the B-52’s, the English Beat, Van Halen, and Led Zeppelin—literally everything. She was really immersed in music. When I would go over to get her sister to play, we would end up in Debbie’s room listening to records. There were no categories. I didn’t know that the English Beat was ska. It was just music to me and it was cool. She had the Sex Pistols, but I didn’t know that was punk. I was just nine years old. A nine-year-old ear is different than a thirteen-year-old ear. I think the cool thing about her is that she didn’t really define anything, so I liked that she was almost more punk than punk.
Then, when my sister was in high school and I was in seventh or eighth grade, I distinctly remember she came home from school and she was pissed off. In science class you had to have a partner, but she didn’t discuss this with any of her friends in advance. She got to class late and got stuck with a punk. She was not happy about it, because she felt that he was going to just take advantage and have her do all the work. Little did she know, he was really smart and pulled his weight. He started telling her about his band and this radio station that played punk rock and that she should listen to it. It was KROQ and the show was Rodney on the ROQ. We could barely pick it up. My brother ran a wire out my window to the TV antennae to get better reception.
I would make tapes of the show. Some of the tapes are amazing and I still have them. It was like the best of punk rock. I was fixated on listening. I got really into the Germs. I was really into X. One of my favorite bands is the Clash. My background was such a mix of influences, and Joe Strummer loved reggae and loved ska and brought all of that to his music. They weren’t just punk rock songs. I can remember hearing the Clash, and they just sounded so different than the bands that were really trying to be punk rock.
I was considered too young to go to shows when I really started getting into it. I used to cut the listing of the shows I wanted to go to out of the L.A. Weekly. This same time period, my mom had gotten sick and was being treated at UCLA. We would drive there for her checkups. She had breast cancer, and had major surgery. She didn’t get chemo or radiation, but I think she got checked on quite a bit. She would drop me off at Melrose, so I would go and spend the day on Melrose while she was at UCLA. I didn’t get to go to shows. I would just daydream about going to a show and meeting more punks. I was twelve or thirteen. I would buy records and just obsess about it. My sister started dating a guy that would go to punk shows. I think I ended up going to a show with them. Then we got tickets to the second concert I ever went to. It was the English Beat opening up for the Clash.
I think maybe the third show I went to, I took my camera. I believe I was fourteen and already in high school. It was a Misfits show and the film didn’t come out, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I kicked myself on that one. I got it figured out and stopped shooting color, because that was a little bit harder to get it to come out right. There’s a wider range of error in black and white. That girl, Debbie, was going to summer school at the junior college, so I would hitch a ride with her and take photo classes there to process the film and make prints.
I took photos at some shows, but mostly just local shows with Oxnard bands. For a while, we had really great bands coming through Oxnard, so I got to shoot the Adicts, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, and Suicidal Tendencies in our little club that was a quonset hut. The club held maybe 200 people, but they were able to get these bands that would play at the Olympic Auditorium in literally the next day.
This guy put out a little fanzine called 60 Miles North and he started processing my film for me. He would use the photos in the fanzine. I never wrote any articles for them, but he would do band interviews and use my photos. Then the band Ill Repute used four of my photos. I was pretty excited to have my photos published on their album. I ended up shooting for their second album, too.
I had a gallery show years later when I moved to San Francisco, and I had to come up with an artist statement. I found a cool questionnaire that made me think about how I got from point A to point B. I figured out my shooting style came from having a lack of film and actually premeditating my shots, which I really wasn’t aware of before. This is because I was given a roll of film and maybe there were five or six bands to shoot. I would sit there and wait. I didn’t really realize I was doing that consciously.
The other thing was considering the medium that I’m using. I would say it backfired on me. I started bringing my camera to shows to keep people away. I thought if I was there to take pictures, I didn’t have to socialize and I didn’t have to have that pressure, because that made me very uncomfortable. I had a few friends and I was happy with that. But it didn’t work, because bands would ask, “Oh, did you just take pictures of us? Did you just shoot our show?” It actually did the opposite. I thought it was my barrier between me and society or at least the people at the show. It ended up not being that way. I did end up socializing with these bands, because a lot of them wanted pictures.
With punk rock, after I got into it, I realized that it was pretty much the same as any other group of people, but I had an idealistic thought about what it would be like. You thought you weren’t going to be judged by how you looked, but it ended up being that way. The music was different and the uniform was different, but it was still the same as the geeky group of people and the hip group of people. There was still a hierarchy. There were still the people that were popular. There were still the girls that were considered the good-looking ones.
Before I got into it, I felt that it wasn’t going to be that way, because of the lyrics and what people were singing about. I felt like it was a place that would be more comfortable for me. It ended up not being that, and that could also have been my own issues of being insecure, which I now know about. I didn’t know then it was social anxiety.
In the ’90s, I started a magazine and I got really involved with more indie stuff. The magazine was called Mute on the Floor. Once my magazine got published, I would distribute it in L.A. I didn’t really know anything about PR people and things like that. Record labels started sending me stuff. They would pick the magazine up and I started getting all this stuff in the mail. I got pre-released cassettes of new bands.
I did the magazine for about three years. At first I had all these pen names, because I didn’t want people to know that there was one person doing everything. I had five or six different pen names. They were all different personalities. People would follow one of them for their record reviews. There was one character called the Neophyte. I had people that would literally say that they would buy everything the Neophyte approved of. That was funny. I never told them otherwise that it was the same person.
Mute on the Floor enabled me to interview some awesome and unheard-of bands, like Rage Against the Machine. I got the cassette and it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. I was very, very impressed that they were able to mix rap and rock and roll. Even if you took the vocals out of it, Tom Morello is super talented. I was like, “Wow!” I can remember putting that tape in and just thinking, “What the hell is this?” I got a phone call from a really cool PR guy. I found out later why he was so awesome and why he was so supportive of my magazine. He had originally worked at Slash Records. He was an old punk, but now had a wife and kids and needed to pay the bills, but still had that ethic. He asked me, “Do you want to interview these guys?” I said, “Yeah, this is like nothing I’ve ever heard.” He said, “There have been some mainstream magazines clamoring to interview them and Zack only wants to do independent publications.” This was around ’91 or ’92.
I think I went down to Warner Brothers. I don’t know if they were on Warner, but Warner owned a lot of other labels, so it was just literally one big building of floors of different labels. It was just an interview with Zack. No one else was in it. We sat on the floor in a conference room. I started asking him questions. He started telling me about growing up in a bad neighborhood and that his father was schizophrenic. At one point, he started talking down to me like I was a little rich white girl and that I didn’t understand. Something interrupted us, so I turned the tape recorder off and he left the room. Someone knocked on the door and needed him for something. He walked out. Then he apologized and came back in. I didn’t turn the tape recorder back on. I basically said, “You’re talking down to me and I really don’t appreciate that. You’re speaking to me like I grew up with everything handed to me with a silver spoon in my mouth and I just want to correct you on that.” I told him where I grew up and that my dad was often unemployed and we would eat government cheese and government peanut butter. The rest of the interview definitely changed when I straightened him out. After the interview ended, we just started randomly talking like two people.
The second interview I ever did was pretty amazing and it totally freaked me out. It was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I interviewed him at his house in the Valley. When I went to interview him, oddly enough, he had put out a new record. He hadn’t released a record in twenty years. It was really the punk community that was there in support of him. It wasn’t the blues community.
Some people I interviewed stand out. One of the things I didn’t like about meeting bands is that your attitude could change one way or the other towards the music after you met them and you discovered that they were assholes. Or, the opposite would happen. I would walk away going, “Wow! That’s actually really good.”
The Stahl Brothers stand out. They’re from the band Scream, which was Dave Grohl’s punk rock band. I interviewed them and they were really, really cool.
Another person that stands out that I have high regard for is John Doe. I put him as one of the nicest musicians I’ve ever met. I’ve learned a lot about the music industry from him. He’s really humble and appreciative. I think he’s grateful he’s been able to do what he likes to do, regardless of making a lot of money at it.
The other band that stands out as one of the nicest bands I ever met was the Deftones. I had a great conversation with them before they were famous and got huge. I interviewed them and we went to a two-dollar show in Berkeley. We had conversations about what would it be like if they got rich.
Mute on the Floor interviewed Nirvana when they were just a little punk rock band. We interviewed Kurt on the phone and he was going through withdrawals. He wasn’t very talkative, and it was really boring. I found out through the assistant to the PR person, who was an old friend of mine working at Geffen, that the call was from Montana. He couldn’t find drugs in Montana. He was going through withdrawals against his own wishes.
I think punk maybe reinforced that it’s okay to not fit in. Maybe, if I had been part of a different group, it would be different. Even as a teenager, I knew that I didn’t want children. I knew that was not the path that was going to be right for me. I have pretty strong thoughts on marriage and relationships and what that meant to me and what that was about.
Punk rock influenced me. It’s in the decision I made, probably against my parents’ wishes, to go off to art school and pursue things that probably weren’t going to make me a lot of money. The same with photography. I think it influenced me to do a lot of things. I lived in London when I was seventeen. I don’t think I would have done that if it wasn’t for punk rock. I think it influenced me to do whatever I wanted to do. I was already thinking on my own. It was definitely the beginning of a change in my personality to go from a very, very quiet kid. After listening to punk rock, I started to understand about the bite and bark thing. I understood that I needed to start speaking up for myself and defending myself.
My junior high was known as the worst junior high in the area. It was more violent than the high school, so I really needed to buck up or I was going to get eaten alive. I started learning the process of basically telling someone to fuck off and get the fuck away from me. It always worked.
I still feel a connection to the scene. A lot of the bands are playing again, which is cool. I could probably go more in-depth on a whole bunch of stuff. It’s kind of sad on some levels that I get to become a statistic of all those songs that I listened to back then. I’ve gotten more involved with the way our government runs. It’s gotten worse and worse and worse and I’m a byproduct of our bad healthcare. I had to fly to India for surgery. My government refuses to help me and I don’t qualify for any care, because they claim I made too much money the year before. I do feel outspoken. It’s interesting that a lot has been very troubling in my life over the last six years, and that the last three years I’ve been getting back into punk more.
There are good aspects to it and bad aspects to my involvement in the scene. I would say there’s more good than bad, due to the fact that I still have some of the friends that I made, even though I moved away for fifteen years and lived in San Francisco, Tahoe, L.A., and Seattle. After I moved back, they’re still my friends.
I suppose that’s possible in any other culture, but I think one of the things that makes people gravitate towards punk rock is coming from a very dysfunctional family. You try to get rid of that. You find a different family in this community.