Category Archives: All punk and the punkoid

I was a punk rocker. I married a punk rocker. Even when I was a jazz critic I was a punk rocker. And if you don’t like it you can fuck off.

315

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I was just at a party this weekend on the 4th of July out here in LA.  It was at our old friend Edwin’s place, up in Lincoln Heights, with a spectacular view of downtown LA and Dodger Stadium, Hollywood and the East Side, and on a clear day all the way crosstown to the Pacific.  On July 4th it’s an ideal spot to watch the city erupt in pyrotechnic frenzy.  Edwin and I go back quite aways; I’ve known him since the early punk days back in Santa Barbara, from ’78 through ’80.

The party began a little slow but grew incredibly crowded and then wound up absolutely surreal. What a maelstrom of fireworks. They were coming from everywhere.  It was wild. Even wilder was the fire started by an errant rocket in the empty lot on the steep slope in front of Edwin’s; the brush and trees went up like mad. Neighbors watered down their roofs as mothers hustled their broods to safety. And hipsters were fleeing in high-heeled panic. Car horns, yells, cackling laughter, sirens, flashing red lights, swooping helicopters. The first load of water they dropped missed the flames but soaked Tracy of the local weirdo band the Hindenburg Ground Crew.  He retreated, sopping wet.  There was a big Wurlitzer organ on Edwin’s lawn and someone was playing “Light My Fire”. And the Roman Candles and screaming Fizzbusters and bottle rockets and cherry bombs and M-80’s and M-40’s and machine gun strings of firecrackers never let up for a moment. In the middle of all the giddy madness I began joking aloud, and another older guy there made a wisecrack back, and suddenly we realized that we knew each other from a long time ago.  It was George, aka Al Poe, a long lost friend from the Santa Barbara daze a quarter century before…. We sat and drank beer and smoked weed and shouted about old times over the din of the helicopters. We laughed a lot and then went over the list of folks no longer around….Chuck aka Kid Basterd, Dan DeManne, Eric Pace.  George said 315 was dead.  I looked stunned.  He said it was in the Santa Barbara News-Press.  Someone had told him over the phone.  We both grew pensive just for a moment.

Back in those heady and heedless days, when punk was brand new and funny and scary and unbelievably radical, Santa Barbara had a small but frenzied scene that matched, for a fleeting moment, the madness and invention of any scene anywhere, whether London, New York, the Masque in Hollywood.  I plunged into it a little late, but there was already a legendary figure–315.  I knew his sisters, but Three was just this crazy quilt of stories and tall tales and jokes (such as the acid trip that wound up with his sister Nancy renamed Verandah and Bill rechristened as 315)  .  My then-girlfriend, now wife, Fyl knew him well, as did George, and, well, everyone.  I can’t remember where he had gone to.  A few months later the scene in Santa Barbara suddenly went limp everyone split for New York or Frisco or Hollywood (and eventually Silver Lake, where we wound up). 315 showed a few months later in LA.  This was 1980-81.  I can’t remember where he was staying, but he was with his vivacious and completely mad young girlfriend Mary Toole.  There’d be these parties at yet another Wells sister Mary’s house down in Culver City.  Everybody high, and everybody talking at once.  Crazy crazy music on the stereo.  And what a character he was, dominating parties already packed full of crazed personalities.  He was older than us, by several years, and that age difference seemed to give his particular form of craziness a sense of authenticity.  An electricity or magnetism that comes from sheer iconoclastic orneriness, I guess. I remember Billy Zoom would come by, with his peculiar sense of solemnity.  It was all punk and rockabilly and wild conversation and the rarified air of pure inspiration. 315 and I got the drunkest I have ever been in my life at those bashes.  Then a bit later he and Mary Toole up and split for Atlanta.  We called them a couple times; you could reach them at some noisy watering hole the name of which escapes me now.  I remember he was picking up a southern twang. Then we lost touch, and 315 passed into legend.  We became completely enmeshed in the evolving LA music underground.  And then jazz.  Where we remain.  But whenever the survivors of that old Santa Barbara scene would gather, 315’s name always came up.  And no one ever knew what he was up to anymore, except that it could not possibly have been ordinary.  No one had his phone number, or an email address. We just all hoped to see him again.  Then, finally, I run into George and he tells me 315 is dead.

It’s hard to grieve much with helicopters circling a hundred feet overhead.  All around was anarchy, glorious anarchy–panic on the one side, party on the other. The Eastside sky was lit with pyrotechnics from every stadium and seemingly every backyard as far as you could see.  Across the lane Fyl watched the advancing fire, fascinated. Edwin was by turns hosting and trying to get a bucket brigade organized.  I watched as a friend was pressed into symbolic service, pointing a waterless hose in the direction of the flames.  It’s the thought that counts, I guess.  An addled woman parked her car in the middle of the street and then disappeared.  A fire truck arrived and pleaded for a parking space.  Enormous mega-cherry bombs resounded from somewhere, echoing everywhere.  Roman candles burst overhead in red and green.  When someone turned and asked me if we should evacuate too and I said “What? And miss all this?” It was “Apocalypse Now” for aging punk rockers. Best 4th of July ever.

The Fire Department got there just in time.  No one was hurt, no structures damaged. That Edwin sure knows how to throw a party.

I’m sure 315 would have dug it.  Rest in Peace, man.  Rest in fucking peace.

(2007)

The Anti-Mogul (aka Long Gone John of SFTRI)

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(Written for Noise Works, a Washington D.C. music zine, 1992)

The Headquarters of Sympathy For The Record Industry–perhaps the world’s pre-eminent truly independent label–is in Long Beach, California in a smallish house crammed to the eaves with record boxes and artwork and tapes; but also with paintings and wacky looking statues and ghoulish dolls and odd photos and little figurines and beggar’s bowls carved from human skulls. Everything. The office, far in the back, is the most crammed room of all–spikey death bronze pagan ritualistic voodoo punk rock’n’roll souvenir shit from floor to ceiling so that it’s almost sacred in some tattooed way–lots of weird funny cartoon art on display or in piles–Sympathy records and discs and paraphernalia everywhere…oh, and a desk, a little clutter of papers, a calendar and Long Gone John, self-proclaimed Anti-Mogul.  “Where’s your files?”  Dumb question.  “What files?  Here’s the receipts, here’s some mail.  There’s a couple of boxes in the garage….”

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Jon

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(Preface for a collection of my brother Jon’s lyrics put that came out in Europe in 2010. It’s a remarkable book, incidentally, Jon’s very literary songs and his matching introductory essays. Good luck finding one though.)

We pick Jon up. He’s in one of those little pads that clings to a lane that’s tucked against the side of a hill. Right near Spaceland. Cool spot if you don’t mind the yuppie bohos moving in from the Westside, thinking a cool ‘hood will make them cooler. It doesn’t. You can paint yourself black in tattoos with Sanskrit that reads fuck me in the ass but they told you was something deep and meaningful. You can grow the tiniest, hippest beard. Drink wine at the local wine shop and listen to KCRW till you pass out but you’re still a nothing. Just Westside rich kid garbage that washed in with the 90’s boomtide. Now your life sucks, that mortgage is killing you and no one gives a flying fuck about your exotica collection. You’re just an aging little hipster fuck.

So that’s Silverlake.

We pick Jon up. He’s hanging out front of his little pad watching a stray pigeon in his dirt yard. Nothing grows there, not at ground level. Not enough sun. There’s bushes and shade trees and vines spindling up walls into the sunlight, there’s crabgrass by the curb, snatches of Bermuda grass left over from the sixties, when they thought it looked nice (maybe it does in Bermuda), there’s trails for skunks and raccoons and possums and coyotes and cats for coyotes to eat. There’s babes coming back from dog park, and the men who want to mate with them. There’s a lot of mating in Silverlake anymore.  Goddamn breeders colonized the place after the queers did all the work raising property levels. The gay bars turned straight. The gay bars book rock bands with Facebook pages for you to like. The gay bars turned into restaurants that would die for a visit by Jonathan Gold. Once heavy leather scenes now make delicate cups of coffee, and you can’t even tell where they’d hung the sling. And those who slung are dead. AIDS, baby. Fear. That dry cough and the look of death. Estate sales with all kinds of cool stuff. Gays always had the best taste. We’d pick and choose. Straight people houses full of the things of the dead.

We pick Jon up. He likes our car. He melts into the back seat and listens to me babble on relentlessly, or sits up front and watches Silverlake go by and I flip through the satellite radio relentlessly. An old hippie tune. Steve Winwood singing about Mr. Fantasy. Jon knows to be quiet when that second solo starts in. Older brothers have a lot of hippie in them, deep down. Jon never laughs at it. We go to clubs, to parties, to things with the family down in Orange County. There are six Wahls—me, a sis, Jon, Lex, another sis, another brother, the baby of the bunch, with all the kids. Mom died just a bit ago. Jon was there in the room with her, playing bits of Mozart on the piano. She shuddered and was gone. We’d had a family party the night before. Lots of goofing around and joking as always, a small feast, Mom laughed and joked and even ate. She was so thrilled we’d all made it out. The priest came by and delivered Final Unction. She was ready. We had a smallish wake that day, in the Irish way. A bigger one after the internment. It was beautiful. Jon and Lex and baby brother Jim jammed. They are all such great musicians. Dad died decades ago. Hit Jon hard. I can scarcely remember him. Jon fills me in. He remembers everything. Details you can’t believe, he doesn’t remember like you and me remember, doesn’t see things in dull washes of black and white, faded pictures, colors long gone. Jon sees the past like he’s there now. Say we picked Jon up fifteen years ago. Jon could tell you the car, the color, the weather, the party, the jokes we told. He can tell you how he felt, what bugged him, what scared him, who he longed after, why his neighbor was an asshole and not to forget we’re going to Mom’s next week and can you pick me up?  He remembers all that. His short term memory is long term memory. His emotional memory retains its vividness for years. He can tell you about some ancient painful moment and you can tell he still feels it likes it’s happening today, right now, as we’re picking him up. My memory has slowly been destroyed by epilepsy, huge chunks have vanished. I don’t miss them especially. And I’ve learned that having no memories is much easier than having too many. Jon has too many. You can see them in this book. Vivid details. He remembers the feeling of long ago fog on his skin. Who remembers that?

We pick Jon up. Turn onto Silverlake. Spaceland’s on the left. We saw Jon there a zillion times in the Clawhammer days. Most of the words in this book are from those days. When Clawhammer played the place was packed with intellectuals and freaks and hipsters and stoners and musicians and record collectors. The music was unbelievably, gloriously loud. Awesome rock’n’roll. You could light up the whole city with the energy they expended. The songs were so rocking, so smart, so weird. Jon’s passion was palpable. No wonder. Read these lyrics here. See how close to the bone he wrote. When I pass by Spaceland I always remember those days. The drunken forays to the 7-11 across the street for more money. Hanging out on a porch behind with Pope and Dean and Bomb and getting way stoned. Loving everything. Loving life. Wishing it could go on forever.

That was so long ago. I’m getting lost in the past. Jon’s an Amadan now, and plays sax for people. I write about jazz and get in places for free. We still throw huge crazy parties. Jon’s always there. Thanks, Jon, for being my brother.

No recess

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(2011)

Just saw that  it’s been 20 years since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Great record. Too bad it wrecked everything.

Ya see, there was this underground scene before that, hopelessly uncommercial, a global thing of all these crazy little bands struggling along from gig to gig, record to record, party to party, and it was a blast and innocent and all our own and no one paid attention to us. That was the 80’s scene…amazing shows every weekend, almost every night, all these brilliant bands. It was all about creativity and attitude. It was glorious.

Then Nirvana broke big, bigger than big. They broke huge, enormous, they turned our entire world upside down and suddenly there was money everywhere and it was so fucked. The music got duller and duller and safer and safer, all the clubs and labels and tours got taken over by business. Things just got safer and safer. Predictable. Boring. All that underground music (the labels called it “alternative” and now “indie”) just disappeared.

I lost interest. Started buying jazz records. Now look at me. I’ve become distinguished, despite myself.

Nevermind was a good record, that’s for sure. But Kurt knew what he had done. Hence the shotgun. On my birthday, no less.

That was my 37th. My 40th was a total manic blow out at Al’s Bar. Absolute craziness. Like the last gasp of my punk rock life. It went out in style, though:

Fearless Leader had spent an hour putting on make-up and diapers full of chili and creamed corn and chocolate pudding and when they hit the stage the packed house was in a frenzy but they had what seemed like the worst drummer in LA and were so incredibly awful it was hysterical, Sarge’s amp all fucked up going on and off and on and off irregularly, the drummer beating away ametrically in the background, insults flying. As the band started the second song Sarge was in a fury packing up, a guy in a diaper and clown make-up, in the middle of the stage putting his guitar away in its case. Finally I sat in on drums and things tightened up somewhat but this only seemed to work up the audience even more and the food starting flying thick and fast and within seconds a large slice of birthday cake slammed into my arm and slid off slowly and grotesquely. (Bob Lee later took credit for that—”It was your birthday” he explained…) Then came more cake, beer, cups—meanwhile the contents of the various diapers came loose and poured all over the stage and the three clowns before me were sliding and falling about, Sarge—guitarless now—screamed into two mikes and began to slither across the stage like an evil serpent and bit the others on the leg. Basically it was punk as fuck—raunchy and rockin’ and fierce and funny and stoopid and scary with maximum audience participation. Finally—I looked up, trying to concentrate on these songs I had not played in a decade (if at all) and there was Alien Rock butt naked (well not completely—I’m told that he was wearing a rubber) and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t play and just sat there being pelted as they ranted and slid and danced and screamed and oozed and then I got back under control and launched into the toon again (it was their drawn out classic “Sunshine Superstar” with the classic chant “Peace / Love / War / Hate” and the chorus “it’s the way you are (x4) you’re a super star (x2) you’re a sunshine superstar, Baby”) and it ended in a huge finale when suddenly Alien Rock, nude and covered with slime and crud threw his skinny nekkid body into the drums and the kit flew apart all over me and the stage.

That was my send off to the pre-Nevermind era, I guess. Though I didn’t realize it at the time. That was the end of anarchy for me. It’s such an orderly world now.  I hate it.

Fuck you, Kurt Cobain the dead guy. I liked you way better as a live guy. No hagiography. Just a fucked up punk wondering what the hell happened. Well, it’s your fault. You wrote the goddamn song. That goddamn great song. Smells Like Teen Spirit. Did anyone even get that? No. They just got that killer riff. A whole industry was built on that riff. People started selling out in droves. Kurt Cobain the live guy sure noticed. I’ve seen you on your hands and knees, unable to walk. It was awful and sad and so punk rock. The real punk rock. I saw that fight too, in the movie. You braining some security asshole with your guitar, then that big stage melee. I loved that. Anarchy. But  now you’re dead, and all business. 100% business. How many Neverminds shifted at Christmas? A zillion? You don’t know? Maybe they aren’t keeping Kurt Cobain the dead guy in the loop on these things. Oh well. It’s all business now. You can’t even be a millionaire punk rock junkie anymore. No time for heroin in today’s rock’n’roll. Not anymore. It’s business all the time.  Career 24/7. Work work work. No recess, dead guy. No recess.

Punk rock.

Fuck You

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(2011)

A few years ago someone handed me a tape of my first band. It had been recorded at a university radio station in very early 1980.  A live broadcast. Those were my Santa Barbara days and I was all of  22 years old.  The tape was shocking…the band was so ferocious, so funny, so crazy, so scary, so punk. Unbelievably punk. You could hear me, hear Ron E, hear Danny and Chuck. Phyllis cackling savagely in the background. Hearing the dead guys, Danny and Chuck, so spontaneous and alive….wow.  It was midweek that 1980, I remember, about 3 or 4 am, and I was barely awake, held up only by cocaine and weed. To hear Fyl, like a live wire, pure man killing energy. We had fucked on the floor of an empty sound booth earlier. Dust and tile and wires and us. We fucked everywhere all the time back then—got caught fucking in the men’s room of a gay bar off State Street even. Some old queen caught us. You can’t do that in here! she said, this is a gay bar! They kicked us out and we laughed and laughed and laughed and probably went and fucked somewhere else. What a time. So young. I recognize myself in that old tape, that voice, low and flat, I know it’s me….but at the same time it’s completely alien…like it’s not me at all. Every one of those cells in me then has been dead for years….what I am now is many, many cellular generations later. The body has utterly changed, the brain but a fraction of its size then, and full of a lifetime of memories, experience, hardwiring. I could have been hearing my great great grandfather on that tape it felt so remote. No connection at all except a vague memory of having been there. Hearing that tape for the first time since 1980, wow…one of those stunningly profound moments. I could remember childhood then. I can imagine old age now. It was too cool a thing, that tape. Man…to be young during revolutionary times has to be the greatest thing life can offer…you live the rest of your life on that stored up high. The energy never completely disappears, does it?  Somehow it gives us an edge. People feel the electricity still coursing through our beings a zillion years later, they reach out to touch and zap, it  shocks them. Fuck you we tell them. But why? Just because, you boring little prick. Fuck you. And we cackle, slap them on the back and say come on, just kidding. Can’t you take a fucking joke? That’s the revolution talking. That’s us then still, never growing up. Getting older, but never growing up. Fuck you.

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Good drummers are a dime a dozen

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(I have about 500 stories in my draft file. Most are unfinished or just ideas, but occasionally I find something that I just never posted, like this. It’s a few years old.)

I knew I was a lousy drummer the day I popped myself in the eye with my left hand stick. I never lost a beat, however. Nor an eye. I was also never able to quite figure out how I’d done it. But it was punk rock, so no big deal.

I feel a story coming on. My drumming career. I mean good drummers are a dime a dozen, but the true fuck ups are something special.

My favorite drumming injury was when I noticed the crash stand, a big heavy thing, hadn’t been tightened properly and when I reached over to adjust it and the whole thing slipped and tore out a big chunk of my index finger. Blood everywhere. My wife ran up, duct taped my fingers together and I was ready to go before the guitarist was finished tuning.

I hear duct tape is good for severed limbs too.

At some point stuff like this stopped happening. No more injuries. No more screwball pratfalls. I had learned to play. And I got bored. Nothing went wrong anymore. You set up, sat down, played, got up, tore down. No fights, no riots, no naked dudes falling into my kit or naked chicks running across the stage. No crazy bouncers or outraged club owners. No demented mountain men threatening to kill me. No onstage joints laced with PCP. No police. No nothing but nice, safe rock’n’roll. It became tedious. At some point in a drummer’s life he’s cramming his bass drum into the trunk of his car and thinking why am I doing this? The real drummers know why, they’re real drummers. The amateurs know there has to be a better way of not making a living.

So I took up writing. There’s no money in it either, but at least I don’t have to lug a drum kit around.

My music career

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Just listening to some ancient cassettes of an old band of mine, thirty years ago. I was in a lot of bands for a couple crazy decades there–no one you’d ever heard of–but this band was my favorite. It was the apex of it all. I hadn’t listened to us in years, though. Not in forever. I didn’t realize I played so very fast back then. Wow. No high hat, either–I remember picking it up and throwing it in the corner when the linkage broke, kept playing and didn’t bother buying another. I was free baby, all over the place. The music was crazy hard, loose, wild, funny, loud and out of control. What a ball we were having. I think we might have been a wee bit high. And no, you will never hear it.

I’d even forgotten some of the titles. Things like Baby Baby you blow my mind! (“Oh baby, you blow my everloving mind!”). Or I love you oh baby oh yeah! yeah! yeah! (“I love you, oh baby, oh yeah yeah yeah/Will I leave you, oh baby, oh no, no, no”). The classic  “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No” (“every time I wanna say yeah/everybody else wants to say no”). And a version of Mrs. Robinson we did because you could say “yeah” eighteen times in a row. That was important. The singer/guitar leader thought all rock songs should say yeah and baby. All of them. Indeed, that is all they had to say. I remember on one song I couldn’t make out the lyrics between the baby baby chorus, but it was because there weren’t any, the singer was making rock star noises. You don’t need words in rock’n’roll, he said, you just have to make rock star noises. Apparently he’d been listening to Exile on Main Street on acid, and on “Happy” Keith Richards made rock star noises. Those aren’t really words, he said. He had a point, and I wasn’t even tripping. I never did. But he did a lot of tripping. As did the bass player. I was ground control, I guess. We seemed to do a lot of tunes about acid. My favorite was My Balls Feel Fine where a guy goes to a love in and is afraid he got the clap, “but I look them over/ and I feel them over/ but they feel fine/ and I’m feeling fine/ Because my balls feel fine/ I said my balls feel fine/ I took LSD/ but did I also get VD….”. Can’t remember the rest–I lost the notebook with all his lyrics. This would be about the time in the set when I’d look at the crowd and they were sitting there, jaws dropped, bewildered and uncomfortable. Even the ones who hated us. The ones who thought we were the greatest thing ever were singing along. It did have a catchy chorus.

There were a lot of stoner tunes, too. “Let’s Get Naked and Smoke” (“I wanna use your boobs for a roach clip baby!”) was a crowd pleaser, even danceable, not to mention on our very rare button. No one made buttons then, they were so thin tie new wave hokey, so of course we did. There were two, but all I can remember is Let’s Get Naked and Smoke. We also did a million covers, none of which sounded like the originals….we filled them with yeahs and babys and people probably couldn’t recognize half of them. Somebody once told me that our song that goes we’re caught in a trap, we can’t get out really hit him hard, because he was caught in a trap and couldn’t get out either. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was an Elvis song. Thing was he really was caught in a trap, but that’s another story.

I remember playing the Cathay de Grande here in Hollywood and the hardcore kids hated us, one of them–he looked exactly like Ian McKaye–marched back and forth in front of the stage screaming you suck and flipping us off through every song. He was wearing a “make noise not music” tee shirt. Apparently we were too musical. Some proto-grunge long hairs were going nuts like we were the saviors of rock’n’roll. Everyone else just stared, bewildered. That made us feel good. Played again and the same reaction. Pretty much the response we wanted. If 90% of the crowd hates you then you must be doing something right. Every gig, though, we picked up more fanatical fans. This was just before the eighties underground explosion, when hardcore punk rockers rediscovered rock’n’roll and weirdness. We were on the cutting edge, I suppose, though we had no idea. We were just in this crazy band. We were original class of ’77 punk rockers, and had that edge. We didn’t care about politics or causes or ideology, we just wanted to act crazy and bug people and fuck shit up. There were a lot of bizarre onstage antics, anarchy, surrealism, Marx Brothers moments and unbelievably stoned weirdness. We were a power trio. We were incredibly loud. The guitar player–dubbing himself Charles Joseph Renfield III–came off like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Wayne County and that really weird guy in your high school gym class. Totally demented look, and this was 1984, when everyone looked like Ian McKaye and Henry Rollins. The bassist looked like a redneck–he was, actually, from Kentucky–talked and sang in a thick stage drawl and went by the name of Keltic Runes. I looked like a truck driver, a big giant strong as an ox working man–which I was–beating a tiny little jazz kit. I never stopped playing no matter how catastrophic it got on stage. One memorable night the other guys got tangled in each other’s chords during the long instrumental stretch in Let’s Get Naked and Smoke–I think they were copping the Mick Ronson-Trevor Boulder dance routine from Ziggy Stardust–and the bass became unplugged and the guitar amp toppled over with an enormous reverbed bang that echoed over and over. My brother jumped up on stage to helped untangle the mess–it looked like a Gordian knot of cables–and get everyone plugged back in, I’m still playing, the bass player joins in, the guitar player starts tuning up over the groove and finally comes back in like nothing had happened. People applauded with relief, I think they were sure we were just going to end it there, tangled and unplugged and sad. Afterward someone came up and asked if we’d planned all that. I said we had. He said he figured as much.

That was the same night that the guitar player, quite out of his mind–he wound up in a mental hospital soon afterward–tried to get in a fist fight with the Cathay’s doorman, Lawrence Fishburne, who’d have none of it. He just spun him around and I nearly got clocked instead. His fist stopped an inch from my face. He would have knocked me out cold, I’m sure, he was so high on whatever, vibrating, tweeked, quite mad. But he dropped his fist. Sorry Brick, he said. Then he started raving at the kids, trying to start a riot. They just stared. I managed to get him down into the bowels of the club and onto the stage. He’d used about two cans of hair spray and in profile had this incredible alpine pompadour that from the front was maybe two inches wide. Not a hair out of place, though. The rest of his get up included beat up jeans, demented high heeled boots with doll heads attached and a girl’s blouse. A scarf, too. He was a PCP hallucination of Jimi Hendrix. His stage banter was half Elvis, half Hendrix, half cartoons. I know that’s three halves, but then so was he. If you’re gonna be weird, be weird. I remember him once telling somebody we were the greatest band on the planet. They scoffed–on the whole planet? Yeah, he said, just not this planet. It became our slogan.

We never did record. We were supposed to do a session for Mystic Records but I had to cancel it because Charles Joseph Renfield III had been out all night plumbing the depths of downtown L.A. on dust and was a mess. I didn’t even know people were still doing dust. But the end, clearly, was nigh. He’d actually become his stage persona, Charles Joseph Renfield III. Weird thing to watch. We later talked about just recording one of the gigs and calling it Liver Than Living Fuck. But it was too late. He was way out there by that point–it got very strange, strange and disturbing–and I had to break up the band. Shades of Ziggy, I know. We all went our own ways. He got strung out, stayed that way for years, was in and out of mental hospitals and eventually died a sad, messy death. The bass player moved to Nashville to sell used Cadillacs. I wound up a jazz critic. Years later I’m at some club looking sophisticated and some geezer comes up to me and said he saw us at the Cathay and we’d changed his life. I thanked him and edged away….

A couple years after all this we were reviewed somewhere–Flipside?–which surprised the hell out of me. It came out of nowhere, a previous life. The reviewer said we “were either the world’s laziest musicians or light years ahead of everybody else or both”. I was very proud of that quote…. True on both counts. The only other review I ever remember getting was for my first band and Flipside said of us that “they could hold their own with Fear and Black Flag in a hardcore guts contest.” I’m still proud of that one, too. I even had my picture in the ‘zine. That was so long ago, 1979 I believe, and I don’t think I even have a copy of that. Of either. I just remember the quotes. But those two quotes were enough for my music career.

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Claude Van Damme

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I wore one of Claude Van Damme’s jackets for years. A team jacket, a heavy thing, all lined and hip and cool and big shouldered. A friend swiped it from his dressing room. It was an extra, he never missed it (or so she told me.) That was my pre-blazer look. A Claude Van Damme jacket, Italian army boots and, at the time, strong as an ox. Stupid as an ox, too, but we’re talking looks here, not brains. Anyway, there’s a photo of me wading into a brawl, breaking it up. Probably about 1987. Some asshole punks had hauled the longhair soundman down to the floor by his ponytail and were kicking the shit out of him. It was ugly, vicious, cowardly. I started pulling them off of him. It was like tossing dolls across a room. One of them took a swing at me. I went to hit him, realized I could kill him just like that, so I bitch slapped him. Whack, whack. He crumpled, the room went silent, nobody moved.  I went back to the bar, the band started up and it was like nothing had happened.

Violence is a weird thing, man, a weird thing.

The sleeve to the Brother Brick Says single by nmy brother Jon's band, Claw Hammer.

The sleeve to the Brother Brick Says single by my brother Jon’s band, Claw Hammer.  The long haired cat on the left is the prick who started it…he lit out quick and avoided the pounding he deserved. Used to see him slinking around, followed by a bunch of kids who for some reason idolized the guy. He gave off that weird Manson vibe…if you hang around the underground scene long enough you run into types like him. I figure he’s either in prison or a lawyer by now. Maybe a preacher. Maybe dead.

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The Bags

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A great band the Bags were, hard and fast and smart and totally L.A. They didn’t need the English, not the Bags. This was home grown, our own town sound. Actually, there never was an Alice Bag Band as they call them in the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization…legal reasons meant they couldn’t be listed as the Bags (there was  a law suit, ugliness). It’s a shame when a band gets their shot at posterity and finds out they can’t use their own name. Oh well. I still have their lone single, on Dangerhouse, I bought it back then. Its B-side was their best tune, I always thought, Babylonian Gorgon:

Don’t need no false reasons for why I’m out of place,
I don’t goose step for the master race.
I don’t scream and twist just for the fun of it.
I’m poison blood when I’m pissed! *

And oh yeah, Alice was hot. Dangerously hot…

Alice Bag gun

(Great shot, that I believe was sliced from a larger photo. I wish I could credit the photographer but I have no clue.)

This clip of the Bags playing “Gluttony” (see below) is from The Decline of Western Civilization. We even knew back then that it was a classic flick. Director Penelope Spheeris nailed it. If only she could have filmed twenty bands, there were so many great bands in town back then. Spheeris and her camera people really captured the feel, sound, smell, and energy of those shows. The exhilaration and the scariness. It was cool, that music scene, it was happening. We went opening night. You’ve never seen so many cop cars. Hollywood Blvd looked like a black’n’white parking lot. Fuck the pigs we said. Not long afterward like Lee Ving I spent a night in the Wilcox Hotel, aka the Hollywood jail, where I took on eight cops. They won. Later I became a well behaved intellectual.

Everybody had the soundtrack album, I still do, and most of us can recite extended passages from memory. I even quoted this movie a few times while writing all those Brick’s Picks columns, and the jazz fans never knew. I wonder if they wondered who Lee Ving was. One of those session cats, maybe. Or a bebop disc jockey from Hong Kong. I never explained.

Wow, going back,way back…that scene was thirty five years ago almost. A swell time was had by all, though a bunch died. In fact two of the Bags did. It happens. Though listening to this cut, about a minute in, when the tune explodes out of a dirge into pure, electrifying L.A. punk rock, you’d think nobody is gonna die, ever.

Oh yeah, check out Alice Bag’s well crafted memoir, Violence Girl. Saw her do a reading a few months back at a hip hang in Los Feliz. She read a chapter, talked some, and then did a remarkable little take on “Babylonian Gorgon”. Glad I went.

And lastly there’s a memorial page for guitarist Craig Lee, who had become the quintessential LA Weekly music critic. AIDS killed him in 1991. People took it hard. The next day someone spray painted “We Miss You Craig!” all along Hyperion Avenue in big broken hearted punk rock letters.

“Gluttony” by the Alice Bag Band from The Decline of Western Civilization:

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* “Babylonian Gorgon”….I think Craig Lee wrote both song and lyrics. I assume he was talking about what they used to call the Huntington Beach scene in 1979, the year this single was released. Though maybe he was alluding to Darby Crash (of the Germs) as well, who seemed a little fascinated with the dark side. That Bowie thing that people have forgotten about. Neither of them meant it, it just shocked the hippies. That went all the way back to the Velvets, with Lou Reed going on about shiny boots of leather…that weird place where bondage and leather and Nazi look and fashion meet. I think that theme has exhausted itself here in the States, maybe so many of the devotees died during the AIDS epidemic, and most bikers you see now are lawyers and stockbrokers. Europe seems as fascinated as ever, though. Then again they invented both kinky leather bondage and fascism, not to mention nice uniforms. We’re just dumb,sloppy Americans. Even as the Third Reich met its cataclysmic end in fire and ruins and annihilation, you have to admit their soldiers looked better.

But I think Craig Lee was also over reacting to the demographic change then taking place in the L.A. punk scene. By 1979 kids were pouring in from the suburbs. They’d listen to Rodney on the Roq spinning all this amazing music and get their high school outcast buddies and head to the Hong Kong and Madame Wongs and raise holy hell and scare the bejesus out of the jaded old–almost twenty five, some of them–Hollywood scenesters. And the English music press–which is what we all read then, Zig Zag and Sounds–was full of frightening fascist punks and the Rock Against Racism response, and I think Craig saw those white surfer kids here with their close cropped hair from “the Beach” (Huntington to Hermosa, inclusive) and assumed they were all big scary nazis. But this wasn’t England, and these kids weren’t nazis, they were bored surfer kids exploding with testosterone and energy. And as the Hollywood scene sank into heroin the best new stuff began coming out of Fullerton and San Pedro and Hermosa Beach anyway. But that was still in the future a bit. The Bags were part of the first wave of Los Angeles punk bands who played the Masque–that demented bashed up little hole off Hollywood Blvd–and  helped changed rock’n’roll forever. For a couple years there, from 1977 to maybe 1980, the Hollywood punk scene–all the Dangerhouse bands–made some of the best rock music of its time. There was so much creativity in the clubs back then, all this spontaneous brilliance and inspiration, and rock’n’roll–our rock’n’roll, raw and new and uncompromising–seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Now that was a footnote.

Halloween tunes

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(Halloween, 2013)

I used to spin music for the trick or treaters. The Residents, Throbbing Gristle, Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu, Himalayan chants and horn bellowing, voodoo drums, stuff like that. Coltrane’s Meditations, even, which for the uninitiated can be a little unnerving…. Kids would say that is scary music, mister!  Crazy! They got extra candy. Some kids started up the walk sassing and I turned up Throbbing Gristle and they fled. Ha!  Then as the Residents demented take on Satisfaction blasted from the speakers I looked out the door and there was the cutest little thing you ever saw in a Tigger costume. She clung to her mother too terrified to come to the door.  Her  mom looked at me. Your music scared her, she said. Scared her to death. I said I’m sorry. She said well I guess that’s what you’re trying to do and walked off into the night, soothing the little thing with mommy talk.

Wow. I had terrified a two years old with the Residents. That was not supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to make tykes in Tigger costumes cry. It’s just wrong, Halloween or not. I took off the Residents, and put Hamburger Lady away. Played something less scary. Couldn’t tell you what. And here I am still feeling like a creep about the whole thing twenty five years later. Trick or Treat indeed.

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