Punk Spreads

Los Angeles Punk

As historian Dewar McLeod tells it, the mythical founding of LA punk spawned from an April 16, 1977 visit by The Damned—the first English punk band to appear on vinyl—to the Bomp record store on Laurel Canyon. By the end of that event a show had been planned at the Orpheum theater with Cal Arts students the Weirdos, Mexican-American band the Zeros, and the soon-to-be infamous Germs. By the time Germs’ lead singer Bobby Pyn (the future Darby Crash) was wrapped in licorice, smeared in peanut butter, and kicked offstage, punk had its spectacular start in LA. Bomp Records, the KROQ radio show “Rodney on the ROQ," Hollywood clubs like the Masque or the already famous Whiskey-a-Go-Go, and fanzines like Slash quickly established the rag tag infrastructure to filter and fuel the energy of the city’s diverse punk scene with bands like X, the Dickies, and, in their early years, even the Go-Go's.

While early Hollywood punk looked a lot like the art and anarchy of the New York and London scenes—although with a much stronger representation of Latino bands like the Zeros, the Plugz, the Bags, and others—punk also flourished in the suburbs of the LA valleys or the southern coastal areas of San Pedro and Huntington Beach. There, an even faster, louder, and more aggressive sound called “hardcore” arose, first with the Middle Class, and most influentially, with Black Flag. Eventually fronted by the hulking D.C. transplant Henry Rollins, the embodiment and mouthpiece of the driving power generated by guitarist and founder Greg Ginn, Black Flag, and their iconic four bar icon by now renowned artist Raymond Pettibon, spread hardcore throughout the country in a relentless life on the road chronicled in Rollins’s memoir, Get In The Van. Bad Religion (fronted by Cornell PhD and professor Greg Graffin), TSOL, Descendants, the Minutemen, Social Distortion and others helped produce a diverse sound in LA, and with independent record labels like SST and Epitaph these scenes laid the groundwork for punk’s massive popularity with mainstream audiences in the ’90s.

Slash Magazine. Los Angeles, 1977-1980.

Founded by Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen in 1977, Slash was central to the first wave Los Angeles punk scene of the late ‘70s. The magazine featured interviews and reviews, concert photographs, and coverage of local LA bands such as the Screamers, the Germs, the Bags, and X.

The Screamers

Darlings of the Los Angeles Punk Scene, the Screamers were entirely original when they emerged in April 1977: two punk styled former performance artists delivering a shock attack with pounding live drums (thanks to transplanted Nebraskan K.K.Barrett) and a twin synthesiser barrage. Spiky hair and damaged looks, but no guitars and no easy certainties. Hyper media aware, the Screamers were obsessed with image, video and tabloid headlines: it’s no accident that their logo, designed by Gary Panter, is one of the most reproduced and reproducible punk images.

Despite their ambiguous relationship with Punk, the Screamers’ fortunes were tied to the small LA scene which, although vigorous, was shut of the media and ignored by record companies. Although they had an opportunity to release records on local labels, the Screamers’ held out for the big deal that never came. They were both too futuristic and too alarming: key song “122 Hours of Fear” was sung from the point of view of a plane hijacker, while “Peer Pressure” was one of the few songs of the period to mention the existence of gay people.

The Screamers however, were masters of the video form. Two clips shot by Joe Rees’ Target Video in autumn 1978 illustrate the poppy “Vertigo” and the alarming “122 Hours of Fear”, in which front-man Tomata Du Plenty contrives to remain still for the first minute or so, in am absolute mastery of tension and performance. While the group disbanded in the early 80’s without releasing anything, this clip has nearly 400,000 hits on youtube. With a documentary on Tomata Du Plenty in the works, it looks as though the 21st century is the Screamers’ time.

X

The revivalist tendencies of early punk were perfected by the Los Angeles band X, formed in 1977 by guitar virtuoso Billy Zoom and two aspiring poets, John Doe and Exene Cervenka, both of whom were natives of the eastern U.S. but drawn westward by their love of the Doors. X fused 1950s rockabilly solos with Ramones-inspired riffs, bare and dissonant vocal harmonies that recall Appalachian folk music, and dark lyrical visions of Jim Morrison. After seeing X perform at the Whisky a Go Go, the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek signed on to produce X’s first four albums. Their first two albums, Los Angeles (1980) and Wild Gift (1981) were released on the independent label Slash Records, which had evolved from the L.A. punk zine of the same name; the next two albums, Under a Big Black Sun (1982) and More Fun in the New World (1983) were released on Elektra Records--home of the Doors, the MC5, and Iggy Pop, as well as the quintessential So Cal country rockers, the Eagles. Later side projects and collaborations of Doe and Cervenka drifted towards more traditional country and folk sounds, helping to define the “Alt Country” genre—country and singer-songwriter ballads with a musical and lyrical edge of urban punk and indie rock.

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