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.

Lou Reed

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I never got into Lou Reed’s solo stuff much, don’t even think I ever had an album he did past the Velvet Underground’s Loaded. I loved that one, and still do, especially Rock’n’Roll–which I remember hearing on the AM radio, Head Held High, with the terrific drum break announcing the change, and Sweet Jane, one of my favorite songs ever. I remember even quoting that somehow in a bit I wrote on Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter in the LA Weekly. About how those were different times, the poets studied rules of verse and the ladies, they rolled their eyes. I hate calling anything poetry–some of the worst crap in the English language is called poetry, it’s an insult almost–but that is poetry, that rules of verse, rolling their eyes bit. Rock’n’roll poetry. I hear jazz purists tell me no one has written a decent lyric since the Great American Songbook and I think to myself yeah, fuck you, those guys never wrote a Sweet Jane. They wouldn’t even know how.

That first Velvets album sure had an enormous impact on me. Huge. I actually had a used copy I found in O.C., of all counties, complete with the peelable banana intact. Considering how few copies were sold (Brian Eno said it was thirty thousand in five years), it’s weird I found a copy in some used record store in Tustin way back when. I was in high school or maybe junior college. I just had to have a copy so I could listen to Heroin whenever I wanted. Which I did, with headphones, Lou’s jabbering words against John Cale’s searing viola….the tension building, building, Maureen beating almost ametrically back there, like a heart gone crazy with that first flush of the narcotic, and Sterling Morrison and Lou explode in frazzled, frenzied guitar. Damn. God damn. There was nothing, absolutely nothing like it at the time. Not even Hendrix had gone that far over the edge, and Hendrix inevitably gave in to virtuosity. You couldn’t hang that on the Velvets. They couldn’t play worth shit compared to the other stuff coming out in 1967.  As if it mattered.

All us early punks were vastly influenced by that album. Our music’s lyrics pretty much came from that. The MC5 were rowdy and crazy and loud as hell, but were basically Detroit hippies. Free love and rock’n’roll and inchoate revolution. Awesome band, the MC5, but they weren’t us. Nor were the Stooges, mostly, because mostly the Stooges were a Stones in hell rock’n’roll band. Iggy even did a bad Jagger impression singing. It was rock’n’roll, some of the best ever, but it wasn’t us in 1977.  Lou’s Velvet Underground, though…well, intellectually they set the scene for NYC’s CBGB’s and Max’s scene in the 70’s, from which our music sprang. And like I said, they couldn’t play, and neither could we. But it didn’t matter. That was the point. The brilliant Beat story telling, the dissonance and scraping scratchy guitar noise, the berzerk rave ups, that demented viola, the total fuck you hippie about it all…that first Velvet Underground album kinda created us. It’s still one of my favorite records ever. And to top it off Nico’s take on Femme Fatale is one of the most gorgeous ballads you’ve ever heard.  Something I wish I hadn’t said, because it means I have should explain the whole album, and how different the tunes are, and perfect, and still spooky and evocative and rocking and thoroughly sad and depressing. But I won’t.

But he Citizen Kane’d himself with that one, Lou did, and didn’t help anything with the ferociously noisy follow up White Light White Heat. A zillion minutes of Sister Ray, all colossal noise. And the absolute rock out freedom of I Heard Her Call My Name. I felt my mind split open. Poor Lou would never again create anything that could possibly top those two. It was so right place, wrong time. That’s how we felt about ourselves, stuck in the demoralizing misery of the 1970’s. We wanted to be back then with Lou, in the wild and free sixties, money everywhere. We formed crazy bands and played terrible renditions of Heroin. I remember it was the encore of my first show ever, and my arms nearly fell off laying down that bup bup, bup bup beat on the rack and floor toms, the guitar player losing his mind in a ferocious rave up. When that heroin is in my blood, and that blood is in my brain….. I never did heroin. That song helped that, I’m sure.

Heroin fucked Lou up. Heroin and alcohol and you name it. I wonder when he quit. He looked like death warmed over years ago. They gave him a new liver but something went wrong. It happens. Lou died. It was October 27. And today Facebook is overflowing with heartfelt paeans to Lou Reed, hero, saint, beautiful artist, beautiful man. Tragedy. So sad. Depressed, you mope around this cloudy day, lighting candles, wallowing in self-absorbed pity. Poor Lou, you say, poor Lou. You tell your little stories. But come on, the dude was a prick. He was famous for it. Which is all well and good, as far as I’m concerned, as there were no nice people in his songs either. They came from the mean, sleazy streets of New York, dark and greasy and rank with wino piss. The people are fuck ups, doomed, scuzzy. There’s nothing nice about his music at all. At least not back then. He wrote about ugly people in ugly places, about people utterly wasting their lives. His songs took place in New York, grey and dirty and in black in white, and full of death. So today Lou joins them. Becomes one of his own characters.  Let’s not make him out to be nice. Let’s not insult the man with gushing praise. Lets not make him pretty, label him a poet, write florid rock critic prose, somber and badly metaphor’d. The hell with that. The world sucks. People die. Heroes aren’t heroes, not in their own eyes. They just want to write songs and be left alone. It’s hard enough to get a cab in that damn town. You can score smack easier quicker than you can hail a cab. Just ask Lou, or ask the people he wrote about.  They’d tell you that beatifying a New York Bowery bum is a joke. That the world is out to get them, all grey and heartless and cold, ugly old brownstones and dances with men in dresses, loud rock’n’roll feedbacked through a horrible P.A., and the wasted, the fucked up, and the dead. Yeah, people die. Lou died. He probably wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course it wasn’t up to him. That’s the last laugh. People cackle in the alleyways.  The Factory is off there somewhere, full of queens and freaks and degenerates. Flash forward half a century and most of that crowd is dead. Those that aren’t tell everybody they fucked Lou Reed, but it wasn’t very meaningful.

Meaningful. Like all the stuff I’m seeing on Facebook today, so heartfelt and meaningful. As if that meant anything in Lou’s dank, dark creations. As if he’d care what you think. Like you could possibly know. Lou Reed didn’t care about you. He didn’t care about your world at all. It wasn’t his. His had no time for you and your emotions and poetic turns of phrase. And if you don’t get that, you don’t get it any of it. So just fuck off. Just fuck off and die. He did.

But just the same, Lou Reed, rest in peace.

Jello Biafra

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 [unsent letter, 1980, apparently transcribed and annotated in the 90’s ]

Since that last phone call was a killer costwise, I’ll be sure simply to write this time. Especially since this friend of mine gave me this allegedly “mild” speed to cope with today, and I ate a whole tab, and am now buzzing along [at work in a staid old office in Beverly Hills] and maintaining a sober is-it-really-Monday already disguise only with difficulty.

Actually why I was to have trouble coping with today is because I did not get home until purt near 5:30 am last night—or this morning, rather—since I was out carousing—or creating, if you may be so generous—without mind about getting up at 6:00 am to catch the bus to get me to work by 8:00 (and then traffic court by 8:30). I might as well tell you what happened last night, with the dual object of a) boring you to tears with the trivialities of my day to day existence and b) try to work off some of this dexedrine rush coursing through my veins.

Well, seems me and Fyl were still in bed finishing up a final round in a bout with Old Mr. Sandman when the phone should ring and our good mad friend Christian Lunch, presently in attendance at the much vaunted Pasadena Art Center, makes himself audible on the other end, informing us that we’ve been invited to a party featuring the Dead Kennedys—premier and most notorious punk band (of “California Über Alles” fame), way the hell over in Malibu, right on Pacific Coast Highway. Unfortunately, Christian had a) no gas and b) no cash, and as we had c) no car to get there ourselves, some sort of arrangement had to be made. So we arranged to have me hop a bus out to Pasadena, put gas in his car, and then both of us would go on back to H-weird [Hollywood] and retrieve Fyl (and incidentally, some dinner)—which, after a few minor but time-wasting mishaps on my part, I did, taking a bus from Hollywood, over the hills past Griffith Park, out through Glendale, back through Eagle Rock and finally, an hour plus later, into downtown Pasadena, a few blocks from Christian’s Art-Trasho designed pad. Don’t ever let me hear you  complain about BART. I mean, L.A.’s a wonderful place and I love it—but having a car here is as important as overcoming one’s fear of queers is to living in San Francisco. The rapid transit system is still in the pre-Cambrian stages in this city.

Speaking of which, I am reminded of an incident that occurred Saturday night—Fyl and I were going to downtown Hollywood to meet some friends of ours’ at the record swap meet [the legendary Capitol Records Parking Lot swap meet], and carless yet, we were compelled to hop a bus, which, as if to rub salt into the wound of being reliant on public transportation, was twenty minutes late. While we were waiting, feet tapping exasperatedly, this couple sits down next to us, and the guy asks me if I know if this bus will take him down to the nightclub action. He wanted to show his wife (or whoever the quite attractive Asian woman he was escorting happened to be—”old lady” will serve) the “action”, the “hot spots” in town. He was middle aged and obviously, by accent, from Boston or thereabouts; a pleasant enough fellow as Bostonians go, in that coarse, Irish cop manner all Bostonians seem to have. Anyway, I told him just to follow this bus down Sunset and get off at “the Strip”—a name he obviously enjoyed, for I heard him say it at least a dozen times afterward, using it in an “in the know” elbow-nudging way; and he thanked me, and we talked a bit. Then the bus finally comes up and as we board, this guy has the gall to tell me that this is the “fun of Los Angeles—taking buses.” Like he’s a tourist visiting a semi-civilized land and taking pleasure in the quaint, backward ways of the natives. “Yeah” he goes on, “all over back East the cities got subways and El’s and trains and they’re a lot faster but not as much fun as these” and pats the gnarled aluminum side of the bus. I wanted to punch his face in, of course.

It’s also depressing when you’re punked out—I was wearing a ragged, biker-looking sleeveless camouflage jacket with “MC5” painted on the back; and Fyl had a Harley Davidson jacket and a chain for a belt—trying to be coolly repugnant on a Saturday night, and I’m the one, of all the people n the bench, that the guy asks directions of. It happened again later. I guess despite my bulk, I’m pretty tame looking (sigh)….

So—where were we before that little excursion there—oh yes…. So we drive all the way out to Malibu and can’t find the party. We look up and down the street, wondering if it really was 20202 PCH, or actually 20222, or 22202, checking them all out, convincing ourselves that maybe it didn’t even begin with a 2, when lo and behold there are some odd types, looking bewildered out in front of 20202 PCH. We stop—sure enough, they’re looking for the party—in fact they have come all the way out from fucking Covina for it. And they’ve also got 20202, and had gotten it from main man Jello Biafra (singer of the Kennedys) himself. Then someone comes out and asks us if we’re looking for the Dead Kennedys party and we say yes, and he leads us a few doors down, apologizing that the Dead Kennedys had left rather quickly as soon as they’d arrived. Too bad we said, and then, upon entrance to the party, we soon understood. The ominous reek of marijuana that greeted our noses as we entered gave us a good clue about the kind of party we’d been snared into—not that the smell of pot itself necessarily portends a bad party—but when not accompanied by other, sharper odors (like that of amyl nitrate) or grating, excessively loud music from the stereo means this is a mellow party. Sure enough—upon entering the darkened room, a dozen or so pair of glazed eyes stared blankly out at us through the wafting haze, uncomprehending; each pair of which was encased in a creamy tanned body clad scantily in de rigueur beach shorts and/or summer dresses, straw hats and thongs. The immediate reaction was almost a physical sense of alienation and feelings of being hopelessly out of place—that we weren’t wanted here, and somehow we’d been invited to the wrong party. The eight of us fled to the back of the room, threading gingerly through the almost comatose sprawled or sitting Indian style on great floor cushions—not that they all were reduced to a THC-induced, but those that were not acted as if they were. It was that kind of party.

Not since Santa Barbara had I been witness to such a stagnant pool of wasted youth, and I was not used to it. Once the initial shock wore off, and I realized the soft forms scattered across the floor were not threatening, I began to get aggressive, wanted to spill beer, talk loud, throw things off the balcony onto the beach below—but nobody I was with wanted to do—not even Fyl, who in any such situations likes to get insulting. Frustrated and a little bewildered, I shuffled about uncomfortably on the balcony, commenting in low tones to Christian that we should make an exit to anywhere, just out of here.

The question running through our heads was where had Jello and the Kennedys run off to. I’m sure upon arrival they had been just as taken aback at the planned nature of the evening’s entertainment as were we, and fled like rabbits from a burning forest—probably back into Hollywood. I mean this wasn’t even one of those thin-tied new wave parties—I mean I’m used to those (from the Isla Vista “scene”) and can adapt quickly and enjoyably into an ominous looking hulk of a punk drummer: drinking and spilling prodigious amounts of beer and liquor (straight or in bizarre and repulsive “mixed drinks”); talking loud, throwing things off the balcony, ripping the Elvis Costello off the turntable and putting on the loudest, rawest punk (or most alienating, dissonant weird stuff) I can find. Anything to cow the [left blank, but fuckers would be appropriate] in their mod get-ups, and scare them into thinking that this is what will become of them if they keep listening to Elvis Costello or the Ramones. [By this time I considered the Ramones wimpy. This was before the great Ramones Revival of the mid-’80’s.] Just for the sheer obnoxious hell of it you understand.

But this party didn’t invite this kind of behavior. These people were a whole other species, acting like assholes to them would either leave them thinking we were acting out our favorite scenes from the last Cheech and Chong movie, or else they’d call the LAPD who’d knock us senseless with some new stun gun and drag us off to jail on some strange charge, beating us all the way. We had to get out.

After a few moments some of us remembered we had some phone numbers, one of which might tell us where Jello had retreated to. While they were out at the phone booth out front, we stayed inside, out of the light. The music, which had been some brain-gelling Kenny Loggins/John Klemmer mellow fusion refuse, now became a heavy, syrupy classical piece; meant to show, I suppose, the sophistication of the host. Looking at the decor in the room, I noticed it consisted mainly, besides the pillows and low tables, of driftwood and seashell knick knacks and ornaments, little potted plants placed carefully about, and on the walls were strung fish nets and a giant, grotesque replica (at least I think it was a replica) of a sailfish. I remarked earlier about the affair’s resemblance to Santa Barbara parties—but in Santa Barbara there is a stale hippie pyramid power/holistic healing feel to everything; but this was straight Santa Monica beach party/seafood restaurant. These people were [figuratively speaking] the models used in those Pepsi and Sunkist orange soda ads with the tanned kids playing volleyball and football on the beach, drinking soda, to the funked up version of “Good Vibrations”.

Meanwhile, the evening’s entertainment came on—an old silent movie about the evils of marijuana and cocaine. The audience laughed wastedly, interjecting comments in the likes of the name of their favorite drug (either “Yeah pot!” or “Yeah coke!”) or simply let loose a “Smoke it!”. Things were getting desperate.

Then—rescued. Someone came back and said he found Jello’s number and we all filed out as quickly as possible, to the confusion, I imagine, of the people sitting on the floor. Party Hearty! we said, leaving a string of exploding firecrackers on their front porch as a calling card, and took off for where Jello had told us he’d relocated the party.

We went in separate cars and after a round about trip through Santa Monica to drop off the guy who had to be at work at 4:00 AM (and who wants me to drum for him for some upcoming gig in a throw-together band) we made it into Hollywood; on Highland at the foot of the Hills, where the incredibly loud punk music blasting forth from the open windows of a room in a motel around which punks were staggering out of the door or hanging from the balcony above gave us a clue that it might be the place.

It was, and up the stairs we went, into a rather large room almost devoid of furniture save a few folding chairs and the cushions of a couch. The punks—and it was an almost completely punk party—had been rather restrained: the walls were not written on or punched in, and except for the mounds of paper plates, styrofoam cups and beer cans about the floor, it was in fairly good shape. We were late and there was only some red and white wine left—a half bottle of each. The barbecued chicken was gone, but somebody sliced up a watermelon and it was real cold and good—although it had a slight trace of a chemical taste to it—which was nothing after all but for a moment I suspected it had been dosed with LSD [I had been dosed with PCP or something like it in Santa Barbara not long before]; I waited half-hoping for the tell-tale rush sensations at the base of the brain but nothing happened. It was just a peculiar watermelon, that’s all. None-the-less, I managed to scare some people telling them it might have been dosed, and though I told them I was jokingly they laughed uncertainly. You can never tell….

The party was OK, but we got there too late—the people there were obviously enjoying themselves, as the myriad of empty liquor bottles and the guy traipsing around the living room floor with a saw horse over his shoulders trying to save everyone from hellfire and damnation, would attest. Also, I didn’t know too many people there—in fact, aside from the people we’d just run into outside the party in Malibu and Jello, I only knew these two guys (Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski) from one of my favorite bands, Black Flag, with whom my band Keene White had played in Santa Barbara a few months back. And then there was the gorgeous little Asian lady with wild hair, wearing a body fitting shiny black spandex outfit with shiny boots who kept staring at me and who I would just love to—well, fidelity and all that, you know. Love has its price…

Anyway, Jello collected the seven of us who had been out at Malibu plus his girlfriend all together, and after we told him what a hot party he’d missed out there in Malibu, he wanted to go somewhere else. So we all went outside, and after an abortive attempt to run into a supermarket, grab all the frozen pizzas and fling them into the air and then run out (there were only three pizzas in the freezer); we decided to go to a punk rock eatery downtown called the Atomic Cafe; first splitting into two parties (there being two cars): one of which, including myself, was to travel directly to the Atomic, the other would mark its way hurling strings of firecrackers at targets the likes of which I never found out.

On the way, we discovered that—and isn’t it a small world?—the people we met, members and friends of a band called Silver Chalice, were old acquaintances of the guitarist in Keene White (Ron. E. Fast) when they had lived in Santa Maria, and had been in the San Luis Obispo-Pismo Beach-Santa Maria scene in its early days. So we had a lot to talk about—as you can imagine, having all kinds of mutual friends, etc. [It ends here, which is a shame as I don’t think we ever went to sleep at all but hung out all night at Christian Lunch’s pad in Pasadena making a weird recording with Jello Biafra. But since I didn’t write about it, I can’t remember any details.]

Jello Biafra and friends

Jello Biafra and friends

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Music Conferences

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Another evite.

CBGB Festival: Music Conference

Good Lord, is nothing not sacred? I mean, I can’t figure out the trajectory from the Ramones and Johnny Thunders to the head of Viacom Music. Maybe I missed something.

It’s funny that the music industry will pay more attention to CBGB’s as a brand than they ever did to the bands that played there. But a brand is something their lawyers can understand. Music? That’s a little iffy.

Anyway, fuck music conferences, all of them. I never attended one. I’m not gonna go hear some shyster babble about how he made his millions off other people’s music. I’ll just go hear the music.

Ya know, they reduce music to a business model, and they wonder where the sales went. Well, people don’t feel a business model. But they feel the real. Alas, real doesn’t fit into the business model. A conundrum. We’ll discuss it at the next conference. And can you turn down that damn music? I’m trying to think here.

The new happens only once

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Watching The Foreigner again on TCM Underground. Yeah I know it’s awful, but so punk, so punk. God those were the days. I see these crazy asshole punk rock kids and I think damn, I was just like that. There’s a scene where the main guy’s watching a news report on the English punk rock scene and the horrified newsman describes in his broadcast voice what a bunch of destructive worthless scary incoherent morons we all were. All we want to do is wreck everything. We’re artless and nasty and a menace to society. The Damned are playing, the music is raw, hard and fast and the electricity shot through me. again, just like it did the first time. You’ll never hear that again. Never feel that again. The new happens only once, and after that it’s all history and nostalgia. So sad. You spend the rest of your life watching people who don’t realize what they’re missing when they don’t try to change everything. Sometimes everything is so fucked and compromised all you can do is tear it down and start all over. I’m useless to society and society is useless, the lead character says. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

You can’t be a rebel at 56, but you still don’t have to collaborate. Sometimes all you can do is tell the world to fuck off and get on with your lives. I beat the hell out of an old drum kit then, but now all I can do is write. So I write for me.

I’ll post this now before I have safe, middle aged second thoughts. Ha!

Oh yeah, Deborah Harry was gorgeous. Stunning. And not like Joni Mitchell at all.

Henry Rollins

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Just got an email from Concord Records about the Claremont Folk Festival. Henry Rollins is one of the headliners. Now I’ve seen Henry Rollins in some unexpected places….in particular a Miles Davis tribute party telling the MTV cameras that he we was SO influenced by Miles’ MUSIC and sounding like a steroidal eruption (the reporters ate it up), but no matter how hard I try I can’t see how he fits in at a folk festival. Maybe he was SO influenced by Pete Seeger’s MUSIC. Maybe he plays the ukulele. Maybe he’s added a twang to his spoken word. Whatever.

Actually I like Henry. He’s done really well and done it all himself. He’s got that great radio show on KCRW, and I like his column in the LA Weekly. I remember him from the Black Flag daze, way back in the last century. He even used to live in Silver Lake, right behind me, he on Maltman, we on Edgecliffe. His solo career was just underway, and he was already a bit of a rock star. We had a nice chat on the sidewalk once which he wouldn’t remember but I do (rock stars never remember). I saw him once coming out of Big Mac’s liquor store on Sunset with a bevy of punk rock babes and was impressed. But I especially remember him at the local market, where I loutishly grabbed tomatoes like they were tennis balls but he gingerly squeezed each, looking for perfection. I felt shame. I saw Glenn Danzig do the same at a different market not long after. Both had a lot of tattoos, I had none. And both knew a lot more about squeezing tomatoes than I did, tho’ now, when I carefully pick through a pile at Super King, I ought to thank Henry at least. Henry, incidentally, was a lot taller than Danzig,  Danzig was more tatted. I was always hoping to run into Lemmy squeezing tomatoes, or all of Metallica or even Pat Boone during his heavy metal stage. Nope. There was Henry and there was Danzig. I’d seen Danzig at Al’s Bar with the Misfits. We talked about that over the tomatoes. I can’t remember what I said to Henry over those tomatoes. Maybe nothing, maybe I was too jarred by the sight of the way gnarly dude from Black Flag who’d smashed that mirror on the cover of Damaged and was here with that very same fist–well, same hand anyway–handling tomatoes like they were baby sparrows, just fragile little things, so easy to bruise.

And now he’s one of the headliners at the Claremont Folk Festival. One never knows, does one.

Al’s Bar

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Going to a PopDefect gig at Al’s Bar on a Friday night in July, before the smoking ban and the house is packed, beyond packed even…you came home, threw all your clothes in the washer and washed your face, as if that would help. Woke up past noon smelling like Perth Amboy. Jump in the shower and then likely do it all over again on Saturday night if the line-up looked good. It usually did. What a glorious hell hole Al’s Bar was. All of us will die early from the air in there. Plus the bathroom fixtures were sticky. And the Pope getting everyone way too high on the back patio. How did they put their band sticker way up there? I saw your name in the men’s room. It says you rock. You put your cigarette out in my beer. What a stupid band name. There’s somebody fucking in the photo booth. My car got broken into again, and I gave the homeless guy a dollar to watch it. No, the bartender’s boyfriend is in the band. No, not the drummer. We’re not on the guest list? Jackson Brown, here, really? It was better before they earthquaked it. Art fag! Damn, if my wife wasn’t here I could get so laid right now. Can we get anything in the monitors? Wow, Seattle. God that art sucks. Are the smoke machines really necessary? You live upstairs? Uh oh, I owe her money. I go to Raji’s now but I drank too much. I was way up front and that blonde’s ass was rubbing against me the whole time. Dude, you gotta lay off the junk. Tip or die! Shit, took so long to find a parking space I missed the first band. Who were they? They don’t serve food in here? Yeah, I know, but I’m clapping because they put me on their guest list. I used to walk here from the Brave Dog. It was cool then. Spoken word? In here? It’s five bucks for the single but it’s colored vinyl. Cliff said no way. I saw a dead guy out on the sidewalk once. My band is here next month. Can I get a martini? No? We’re kind of a Stooges meets Velvets meets Exile on Main Street era Stones thing, but all original. Just talk to the bouncer, he always gets me in. How come there’s never any toilet paper in the ladies room? Wow, another Flipside guy. The beer is warm. I couldn’t hear a fucking thing up there. Yup, I smoked a joint with Kurt Cobain where that pile of boxes is now. I didn’t know you played the saxophone. I met Angie Bowie here once.  I met my ex-boyfriend here. I thought I met Robert DeNiro here once but it was just some guy. Either I’m way too stoned or that band is way too weird. After party? Where? Can I come? Their seven inch is worth big money now. She’s a performance artist, but be nice. We got reviewed in Maximum Rock’n’roll, but I couldn’t tell if they liked us or not. Yeah, but he’s an asshole now. We wanna shoot our video here. Under the table at rock’n’rolI Denny’s? Really? I dunno, some shitty band from Boston or Austin or something. They’ll be done soon. I can’t find my shit. She’s naked. Completely. We got banned from no talent nite ’cause we were too talented. Here’s a flyer. Who didn’t you sleep with? We need gas money. A naked guy jumped into the drum kit when I closed my eyes. This is a drinking song! My feet are killing me. It’s on compact disc, but all I have is a cassette player. I liked ’em better when they couldn’t play. Wiener Gotcha. Hey, that’s George Herms. The band wasn’t much, but the chick on bass was hot. Whose getting laid on top of the volkswagen? No, outside. I played pool with Jerry Brown but my girlfriend danced with Linda Ronstadt. Dude that’s way too many piercings. Would you guys mind, we’re trying to conduct an interview here. Sounds like he blew an amp. Yeah, the hot little bartender is a writer, I always tip her extra. El Duce pissed on me once. You should have seen the encore. We were getting high in the soundbooth..we know the guy.Those assholes can’t play pool worth shit. The singer showed me her boob job. TURN DOWN!!!! I hate this place. Wait, I’ll go to Bloom’s for more rolling papers. That guy’s been hitting on me all night, I think he’s from Orange County. I never liked this punk metal shit. There is no industry list. The dominatrix at the bar teaches at my kid’s school. Art damage, they still call it that? Oh, that smells good. They’re trying to find the drummer now. What does a fluffer do? Whose beer did I just sit in? There’s glass all over the floor there. I think I got her phone number. Remember when these guys were good? The toilet overflowed. She’s one of those Brat Pack chicks, ignore her. It’s a fanzine, there’s a xerox machine at work. I think of them as art films, actually. She hated the band so much she threw the money at them and told them to get off the stage. Look across the street, a yuppie. Let’s fuck with him. Meet ya at the Chinese Denny’s, you can sober up there. Sonic Youth, here? Or just somebody from New York? Jack Brewer weirded me out. He always does. You get a flyer? Puppet shows never work in here. Sex Bomb! Not rockabilly, swampabilly. This is the greatest place in the world if you’re fucked up.  There’s not enough graffiti in the bathroom. She thinks she’s Siouxsie Sioux. He’s drinking all the half empty beers. I know all the backstreets. Oh god, another yuppie. There goes the neighborhood.

How the world goes round

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Danzig (he replies to Greg Burk), twenty-five years a rock star already… I remember seeing him with the Misfits at Al’s Bar (I think Saccharine Trust went on before them, can’t remember who else.) Must have been, what 1983? ’84? I remember being minorly disappointed that they didn’t play “Attitude”, of which a terrific live version existed on some I think Flipside comp I lost track of decades ago, but they did a great “Astrozombies”. Funny how things that bug you then wouldn’t bother you at all later, not one bit. Saccharine Trust kind of blew them off the stage in a weird LA way tho’. Or whoever it was that opened did. At the time LA punk rock, some of it, was heading outward while NYC’s was so conservative…which is what became the legacy, actually. Ramones/Misfits. All that explosive creativity reduced to a simple formula. But I think I’ve lost my way here. I was going to mention that I opened once–or was that twice?–for Corrosion of Conformity, back before they were a three piece. They weren’t metal yet, just scary intense. I remember their singer–who onstage was  completely insane, the skinheads backed off, intimidated–was the son of their road manager, who was an old hippie Mom and nice enough but she beat some guy up soon afterwards at a show and he had to be hospitalized and both she and her son–who had pitched in–were jailed for a spell. Hence both he and she were outta the band.  I was impressed. I believe the beat up dude was a promoter in the process of ripping off the band. You can guess where my sympathies lie. Anyway, I was in this completely mad power trio then. The leader Charles Joseph Renfield III (whose real name was Charlie Berger until watching Dracula on acid) actually went clinically mad towards the end of the band, the voices, unrestrained by a weekend of angel dust, kind of took hold and he joined a local offshoot of an offshoot of a splinter group of somebody’s Nazi Party. The other member of the party later committed suicide by motorcycle in one of Orange County’s trickier canyons. We found that out much later. Charlie–well Chuck, as we all called him, when he was not in the his band persona, which was increasingly not that often–was a rather zen nazi, self-admitted, which I could never figure out but it rendered him sweet in a nazi kind of way. He could have been Reichblumenfuhrer. He soon got strung out on smack which broke a lot of hearts but settled him down. Certainly it quieted the evil little nazi voice in his head. He moved to Tacoma to live near Mom, bounced in and out of mental hospitals and on and off smack, apparently got married somewhere and bore a son, and died of an overdose of heroin in a Tacoma parking garage on an Easter Sunday. I think that was fifteen or twenty years ago. How time flies when you’re dead.

He’d been writing a rock opera, I remember, writing it for years. I’ve forgotten the title. He couldn’t write music but he used to strum bits of it for us, sing us passages, hum the string parts he dreamed up. No idea if he ever sung or strummed or hummed any of it into a cassette recorder. I doubt it.  It’s just gone. I sometimes wonder how many things like that are just gone. Throughout the history of the world, I mean, there are always dreamers, always have been. They dream up rock operas and novels and revolutions, movies and towering skyscrapers and flying machines. I wonder what enormous cathedrals never left some monk’s fevered brain. I know of at least four vast novels that never left mine. One was about a Russian, another about a guy in the trenches in WW1. One was about a guy in Connecticut, and one was about a detective in Cairo, Illinois. There’s nothing but scraps now. You can’t do much with scraps but wonder.

But  what’s the point. They would have lousy novels, all of them. And Chuck’s rock opera no work for the ages. And the cathedral in my monk’s fevered brain would have soared too high and tumbled down, smashing workmen and monk alike. People would come ever after to the heap of granite blocks and look up and wonder just how far it was supposed to go. Some of them, the damn fools, would dream up their own doomed cathedrals. And that is how the world goes round.

A shame about Chuck, though. He’d been such a sweet, funny kid, even brilliant in his own odd way until the madness took hold. I never had as much fun bashing a drum kit as I did with Chuck, not even before in that thrill of being in my first rock band, or later, playing to audiences who didn’t stare bewildered or angry even. Madness changes everything. The voices. Who knows why they take command. Maybe the drugs, there are drugs everywhere when you join a band in the bowels of the big city. Some of us avoid them, some of us can’t help themselves. Or maybe it’s just growing up. The brain is huge then, you know, in your young twenties, bigger than it will ever be*. A huge mess of neurons and synapses and there’s so much room for things to go wrong in all that, it doesn’t take that many neurons connecting the wrong way to turn someone into a raving lunatic. But no one knew that then. Well they did, a lot of it, but they didn’t know what to do about it. They just locked you up, gave you all kinds of pills or big zaps of electricity. It was a bad time to be nuts. It’s so much better now. People functioning, living normal lives who once might have been standing on street corners arguing with someone no one else could see. I might still be hanging with Chuck now, laughing, remembering the crazy bands we were in. But it’s best not to dwell on these things. People with HIV live forever now too. People with cancer. Or ghastly head wounds from Iraq. Some people keep living even if they don’t want to. The miracle of modern medicine. My wife died once but she is still here like she’d never been dead at all. I think about that every day. Funny thing, life.

Funny how that power trio wound up, too. The bassist moved to Nashville and sold used Cadillacs. Later he came out as gay. Chuck came out a junkie. Me, I came out a jazz critic. Maybe that’s how the world goes round, too.

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* The brain is huge then, you know, in your young twenties, bigger than it will ever be…. In volume, that is. You actually have more neurons at birth but the pruning process has already begun even in the womb. I have no idea why that is. Perhaps some are transformed into other kinds of cells during fetal development. And perhaps it’s this fetal surfeit of neurons that has made the increase in brain size possible, because there are so many neurons available for use. I’m guessing here.

No Future

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There were three or four new hires in the department one day, geeky little types happy as hell to be working. We were in the kitchenette, a couple of us, and one of them wandered in, a kinda smarmy little hipster with a plaid shirt opened to reveal a hip tee shirt. I asked what the shirt said. It was a picture of English bobbies—you know, cops—in riot gear running through the street chasing people. I knew the picture, it’s an iconic photo from the Brixton riots in 1977. It was also the cover of the first Clash album. Above this picture the shirt had the caption “England’s Dreaming”. It was obvious the kid had no idea what it meant, it just looked cool and would make him look baaaaad the first day in the office.

But I knew what it meant. “Yeah, ‘Englands Dreaming’…the line from ‘God Save the Queen’, you know, the Sex Pistols tune. You know the Sex Pistols?” Surprised, he nodded yeah, but looked kinda confused, this big geezer in business outfit talking about the Sex Pistols of all things. I filled my coffee cup. “That was our song , man” I said, and casually recited “Because when there’s no future/ how can there be sin/ we’re the flowers in the dustbin/ we’re the poison in the human machine/ we’re the future/ your future/ God save the queen/ we mean it man/There is no future/ and England’s dreaming”.

He stared, flabbergasted, then scurried off as fast as he could. I started laughing.

(2009)

God Save the Queen (1977)

punk rock bbq

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(email that wound up on Liquid Kitty website, 2004)

H ey y’all: Very cool gig happening Sunday afternoon [that is, back in 2004] at the Liquid Kitty in Santa freaking Monica. Ex-Cruel Frederick plays about a dozen varied reeds in the CD Sextet, btw, for you Noize and free jazz freaks, while Chuck answers your questions on the more arcane aspects of biology. And also a rare appearance by FishCamp, who play in the old skool Pedro stylee. And Backbiter are now two thirds married but I have no idea if that has changed their sound (it hasn’t). Meet Don Bolles and ask him about his chapeau. (But be wary of Dave Jones, punk rock sociologist). And Saccharine Trust are either playing all of Pagan Icons or Surviving You Always, I can’t remember which, and their rhythm section will draw carloads of those crazy Cal Arts chicks. These things are a lot of fun. Free hot dogs. Weirdly colored martinis. Cheap beer. Clean air. Martin Sheen and a busload of homeless people. Whole herds of Hummers passing by. That male cat smell of Club 88 wafting nostalgically up Pico. And the party’ll be loose and casual and they keep the music industry types away with a can of Raid and a bunch of Shell No-Pest Strips.

OK, maybe you thought a punk rock BBQ meant Rancid. I’m sorry. Dave Childs lied. It’s punk because all the bald guys used to have mohawks where now there’s pate. It’s punk because of all the old people and buses. And all the fuckin’ pent up shit. And getting arrested the other night at Blackies for playing punk rock music. Calling them nuisance in publics or something like that. We’re from Frisco. I don’t have any ones. You always beat on guys smaller than you? Somebody give him a fleabath. Quick. Brick

You started the fight, Van Gogh

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(2012)

Harley Flanagan Arrested: Founder Of Cro-Mags Charged With Assault For NYC CBGB Fest Fight
NEW YORK — Authorities say a two people were stabbed and one was also bitten before a show at the New York City music venue Webster Hall. Harley Flanagan, a founder of the hard-core punk band the Cro-Mags, was arrested on assault charges. Published reports say the victims were current members of the group.

No information on an attorney for Flanagan was immediately available.

The violence happened Friday night during the CBGB Festival. CBGB representatives say in a statement that the disturbance shouldn’t overshadow the events, which included free concerts in Times Square and Central Park.

CBGB was once a famed Manhattan rock venue where bands like The Talking Heads performed in the early 1980s. The venue closed in 2006. The festival is an attempt to revive the CBGB brand.

The “CBGB brand”? Are you kidding me? Rock music is so fucked up anymore, just another bullshit business. I’m glad somebody got bit. At least that’s punk rock. Hell, back then if you didn’t get bit or beaten or jailed or wailed on somehow, you weren’t doing the shit right. When you can brand CBGB’s, it’s time to destroy everything and start all over. No shit. That should’ve happened along time ago already. I can’t believe there’s a whole generation of kids who think what we did back then was cool. I mean you simpering little fucks, you’re supposed to hate what we did. We did. Shit, we lived to harass hippies. Always hate what came before you. How do you think music changes? I suppose this is not part of the music appreciation course curriculum, however. You don’t study it when earning that MBA in music industry administration. Sigh…..Would’ve loved to have seen that idiot bite those guys. My guitar player bit a guy’s ear off back in the 80’s. OK, it was just an earlobe. But you shoulda the dude crawling around the floor of the Anti-Club looking for his earlobe like a lost contact lens. Like here ya go, Doc, sew it back on. Yeah, sure. You started the fight, Van Gogh. He was a rich kid anyway. He could buy another. Ya know, I’m supposed to be a hot shit jazz journalist now, but sometimes I miss punk rock.

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