Born in 1953 in Dayton, Ohio. Lived in Los Angeles, California, in the 1970s and ’80s, attended shows at various venues throughout Los Angeles County, and worked as a journalist covering the punk rock scene for the Los Angeles Times and other publications. Currently works as a self-employed writer in California.
I WAS BORN IN DAYTON, OHIO, and I lived there until I was three or four. I’m the middle of three children, and I have an older sister and a younger brother. My father was a violent alcoholic who left when I was about four, and my mother raised us by herself. We moved to Los Angeles around 1958. I think my mother wanted to become independent of her family, who were controlling, so she came out here.
I went to art school at Cal State Fullerton and got a degree as a painter. At that point, most of the painters at that school were taught to be photorealist painters, so that’s how I was trained. When I got out of school in 1976, I couldn’t get a job, and I had a graphic designer friend named Eric Munson who’d moved to Los Angeles. He said, “Why don’t you come up and you can be my roommate?” So I moved in with him in this horrible storefront in a frightening neighborhood for seventy-five dollars a month. The day I got to L.A., I looked in the want ads and got a full-time job at Capitol Records filing royalty statements, which was the most boring job on earth.
Through my roommate, I heard about the Masque and started going to all the shows there, and I immediately loved it. The Masque was a filthy subterranean dungeon in a basement off an alley off of Hollywood Boulevard. You’d go down the stairs and you’d be in this basement. There was graffiti everywhere, and there were bathrooms that were completely trashed and disgusting that you’d never want to go to the bathroom in. The whole thing was a little scary. It was a small, crowded place, and in the summer it was hot in there. You were right up on the band, because there wasn’t really a stage, so the audience and the band were almost completely intermingled. Everybody was excited, because they knew they had something new.
My favorite band right from the start was X. They were just amazing. The Screamers were very theatrical, like a performance art group, and they were really good, too. I loved the Plugz, and Dred Scott, and the Zeros, and Black Randy and the Metrosquad, because he was completely insane and a great showman. There were other bands that I didn’t love, but they were all interesting.
I started writing letters to Robert Hilburn at the Los Angeles Times, saying, “You’re not writing about this stuff. You should let me write about these shows, because the paper isn’t covering them.” I also started writing to Rolling Stone. I was very motivated and just struck out on my own. I guess you could say I was a feminist in that it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do as a writer, and I wrote to lots of different publications. Robert Hilburn let me start covering punk rock for the Los Angeles Times, and it just all grew from there. I think I learned to write from growing up reading The New Yorker. I always loved reading magazines, and journalism went through a golden period in the late ’60s and ’70s. What you could do within the format of a magazine article really exploded then, and it was inspiring. In L.A., we had Slash magazine and all these underground magazines, and I started writing for a lot of them.
I felt like I could help serve this stuff up to the public, because very few people knew about it then. I also wrote for New York Rocker, which came out in New York. I was the West Coast editor for New Musical Express, which was an alternative music publication in London. I wrote for lots of different places, and many of them were underground publications. I realized that if you’re determined enough and you’re interested in something, you can find a place to write about it.
People in the punk scene found out fairly quickly that I was writing about punk for the L.A. Times, because I wrote a piece on the Masque and interviewed Brendan Mullen. I was always treated with respect, and I totally felt part of that community because it was a small community and I was really committed. I was at shows four nights a week and I saw the same people all the time. Anybody who was committed enough to show up all the time was a respected member of the community.
I was always interested in alternative culture. All of my friends always took drugs. I didn’t, but I was always around people on drugs, and I always stood outside the norm and never had conventional goals. I think this was partly because of the family structure I grew up in, and not having a father. How to build a conventional family wasn’t modeled for me, and I never had that plan of, “I’m going to get married and have children” or “I’m going to get a PhD.” I was really wandering aimlessly for the first twenty-five years of my life.
I think I’ve led a feminist life in that I’ve been really independent and certainly never depended on a man. None of my goals have ever revolved around that. I haven’t had children, I’ve never been married, and I’ve led an unconventional life. A lot of the people who came out of that scene went on to lead unconventional lives. A lot of them died young, too. I felt conservative in that scene. In the eyes of the people there, I probably seemed that way. I’m really not conservative, but I didn’t dress like a punk or try to blend in, and never felt like I had to look like everybody else there.
One of the things that was great about the early punk scene was that it had very peculiar sexual politics. Women were really on an equal footing with men, and gender wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t like, “Oh, a woman singer.” It was just a person, and those issues really weren’t on the table. I always found that early punk scene very non-sexual. It was about something else. It was about people being individuals, and I don’t think women presented themselves in traditional ways to please men. It was very different in that way. There were really amazing women musicians in the scene that weren’t categorized as women musicians. They were just musicians.
When it first started out, punk had a very bad reputation. Shows happened all over town, and it moved around all over the city, and people were always looking for new places where they could do shows. There’d be a punk show at a venue, and everybody would trash the place, and there would never be another punk show there. This happened at the Stardust Ballroom, the Larchmont Hall, the Ukrainian Culture Center—punk tore through lots of places. The clubs that ended up being staples were Club 88 on Pico, the Whisky, and the Hong Kong Café. The Masque was always the most important, though, and it was closed down repeatedly by the fire marshals. There was briefly a place called the Second Masque, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine, and there were a few shows there. Brendan’s shows were always huge. There’d be five bands on the bill, and the show would last forever.
For the first six months of my writing life I just covered punk, but I love all kinds of music and I quickly started moving into other kinds. I always specialized in the weird underground stuff, though. I was a champion of Nick Cave, and I wrote about Tom Waits early on in their careers, when people weren’t really into them yet. I started doing interviews almost right away, and my first substantial piece in the Times was the interview with Brendan Mullen. In 1978, I conducted my first lengthy interview when I spoke with Iggy Pop for WET Magazine. I subsequently published two collections of interviews, Book of Changes in 2001, and Talk to Her in 2004.
I was really shy and withdrawn when I was growing up, so I always identified with the weirdos that didn’t fit in, because that’s how I felt I was. The early punk rock community was a haven for those kinds of people. I totally felt like it was my tribe, but I was a little shy in that scene, too. In doing interviews, my curiosity superseded my shyness, though, and I was able to do it. I’ve done thousands of interviews. The ones in my two books are culled from a really long list. They all meant something to me.
A few of the people I interviewed made me nervous, but you never know who’s going to. Some really famous people made it very easy and were lovely, while other people made it hard. In the punk scene, Exene and X were just so great. I was impressed with them and I really admired them. Exene is an extraordinary and really unique person, and it was exciting getting to know her. I got to know Craig Lee from the Bags, and we became friends—he was very smart and funny. I interviewed Black Randy once, briefly, and he was scary. I loved interviewing Brendan Mullen because Brendan was a fantastic person. He had so much energy and passion and he really could make things happen.
A couple of people I interviewed I really revere. Leonard Cohen would be first on that list, because talking to him is like medicine. He’s very wise and he has a really light touch and he’s funny. I’ve interviewed him a few times, and it meant a lot to me. Interviewing Jacques Derrida was pretty mind-blowing, particularly since I feel like I know very little about philosophy. I crammed for that, of course. The interview I did with Nina Simone isn’t particularly good, but it was amazing getting to talk to her.
I interviewed people in different kinds of places: Jacques Derrida in his crummy office at U.C. Irvine; Exene in my tiny apartment in the Los Altos on Wilshire Boulevard; Iggy Pop at the Tropicana Motel, which doesn’t exist anymore. I did lots of interviews in hotels, quite a few backstage at concerts, and I occasionally met with people in their homes. I interviewed Nico in the apartment of Paul Morrissey, who was part of the Warhol crowd with Nico. I did lots of interviews at the Chateau Marmont when it used to be shabby and charming.
Making a living as a freelance journalist was possible back then when I started, but it’s barely possible now because of the way journalism has changed. It took me a while to be able to make a living at it, though, and for the first seven years that I was writing, I had to have other jobs, too. I quit the horrible job at Capitol Records after a year, and after that I was an assistant to an artist, and I worked in a couple of galleries. Beginning in 1984, and up through 1998, I made a decent living as a journalist. Then a very sad thing happened to journalism with the Internet, and papers started dying. I left the L.A. Times in 1998, after twenty-two years, and at approximately the same time, things started drying up for freelance journalists. I realized I had to reinvent my career and started working on books.
When I left the Times, I started working on a biography of the artist Wallace Berman, and I ended up collaborating with art historian Michael Duncan. We co-curated Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, a huge exhibition featuring fifty artists that traveled to five museums in the country between 2005 and 2007. We produced a beautiful catalogue for the show. When I was studying to be a painter, I curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976. Then I didn’t curate another show until 2005. Since then, I’ve organized approximately a dozen shows, including two exhibitions of Exene’s collages. I love her and her work. Organizing an exhibition has to be a labor of love, because you don’t get paid much to do it.
I also worked on a book with photographer Ann Summa called The Beautiful and the Damned. She’s a very dear friend who I met in the punk scene, and she took tons of photos back in the day. I always wanted to go through her contact sheets and pick out images I loved, and she let me do that, which was really nice of her, and we made that book. She very kindly allowed me to include some pictures she wasn’t crazy about, and I really appreciate that. I think the book we made together is very beautiful. I’ve also made ten other books—countercultural histories, photography monographs, and so forth.
I fell away from punk in 1982 when hardcore took over, because there wasn’t a place for women in that scene. There were a lot of movements in the ’80s, like the new romantics and new wave music, but I didn’t care about any of that. I definitely still feel a connection to punk, though, and I still love the music. Punk is clearly what galvanized me as a writer, because I wasn’t writing before I encountered that music. I’ve never taken a writing class, and I don’t know what made me think I could write about this stuff, but I could. It came easily, maybe because I wanted to share it, and I wanted the bands to get credit for how wonderful they were. I feel really lucky and grateful that I got to be part of that world and that moment in time, because it had genuine meaning.