www.jonsavage.com/punk

When did you move from France to LA?

The first time was in ’63 I was there for a year, as a foreign exchange student in New Jersey. I went back to France in ’64, theoretically to start ‘regular life’. I did two years at the Sorbonne, in “theatrical studies”. The first year went alright, I passed, though I hardly went to any classes. The second year didn’t go so good. I’d become an assistant director of softcore films, and started drinking very heavily. I totally failed the exams, and I thought about it for a few minutes in June, either studying very hard all summer to pass the exam the second time, and my heart wasn’t in it at all. I was thinking of what a whale of a time I’d had in New Jersey, and I grabbed what money I could from selling all kinds of stuff, and went to New York, that was May or June 1967. Stayed in new York for the summer, then I’d run out of money, and hitch-hiked with my last five dollars to the West Coast. I was hearing all kinds of things. I arrived there in September ’67. Venice Beach. With a two year interruption, I stayed there until 1980. The two years was when I went back to France in ’69 with an American girlfriend, I was a switchboard operator at the Hilton, then I applied for an got a transfer to the Hilton in Istambul, so arrived there, and I never went to the Hilton, I went to the nearest pharmacy, bought a crate of amphetamines, maxitone or some French shit, and headed with a bunch of American surfers, to Afghanistan, where I lived for a year and totally fried my brains. Around that time I discovered I was a deserter from the French army and I eventually I went back through Calcutta, Nepal, Indonesia and all that. Back to the States for about two months, freaked out, back to France and the army. lasted about a day in the army, was put in a loony bin where I was scheduled for electric shocks. Got out of that cos I had a friend who was an intern, and went off to the states.

What did you do in the States?

Everything. I used more than I sold. I sold a lot of grass in the early days to high school kids. I hustled. I did a lot of nasty numbers with guns, robbing other people of their stash, and a lot of serious jobs, dishwashing which I did for years on and off, I was a waiter, a short order cook, on the pier. I was a bus boy. Never had anything going. I got married but it didn’t last very long. I was street scum.

I was scum, right til I met Philomena, my girlfriend. I’d just kicked a bad speed habit when I met her. I’d become an alcoholic. I met her in ’73, and I was a waiter. It went on until about ’77. She was working in animation, so there was regular money coming in. Then the end of ’77 this punk thing started.

What was your first contact with it?

I’d read something in the paper. I wasn’t interested in pop culture at all. I was into music, cos I was a druggie. I was heavily into the music in the late 60s. I saw a great New York Dolls show at Santa Monica Civic, that really turned me on. I saw a half-attended Ziggy Stardust show, I was impressed by that. A couple of Roxy shows, then by mid 70s I was fed up with all that shit. Philomena turned me on to reggae, which I knew nothing about. She told me about this film, The Harder They Come. You started getting Wailers stuff. So by the mid 70s I was listening to reggae and not much of anything else. By then I was annoyed with how ridiculous how all this white shit was. Some of it I still liked, but heavy metal was all over the place. Reggae was so badly recorded, and the image was bizarre, weird mystique behind it. It was the same feeling as people discovering rhythm’n'blues in the 50s.

A friend called me and told me to check this punk thing out, which I did. I got a couple of records, one was the first Damned LP, and at first I really hated it, but it wouldn’t get out of my head

This friend was working as a layout artist on hardcore mags and he had access to a printer, and we thought we should start a punk magazine. I was putting out a two page reggae newsletter in those days, called Angelino Dread, sending it to friends. He was going to call it Sedition, and I thought that was terrible. I don’t know how the name Slash came up.

So there was no way of finding out about this stuff unless you bought the English music press?

No. Just at the time we were preparing the first issue, and not knowing what to write about except to review the few records we had, and give out own interpretation of what was going on, then we heard about these kids living in Hollywood, who were walking around with their hair sticking up. So we contacted them, and they were the Screamers. I don’t know how they found about it. So we did a centrefold of the Screamers posing, and right around that time the Damned played their first gig, so we got an interview with the Damned, which was horrible cos they were total morons, but it was fine. The gig was great. We’d never seen anything like it. About ten percent of the crowd had worked really hard at looking like punks, the whole Screamers entourage and some surfers, and then the usual Whiskey crowd. It went down a storm. The small contingent who dressed punk made sure they behaved like they thought they were supposed to. Then in May ’77 the first issue of Slash came out. It cost $400 to produce, and we basically waited. In about two weeks we started getting a response.

Did you call yourself Kick Boy in the first issue?

I suppose I did, cos I didn’t want to write under my own name. Everybody in England was writing under freaky names. I got it from an old Prince Jazzbo record, where he raves on and on against the Catholic Church. I loved the name Kick Boy Face.

By issue number two we decided on something that went on. Since we were having a hard time financially, we had a benefit concert. Whatever money we made at the concert went into the next issue. The first one was The Screamers, in Steve’s loft. They were very minimal, but great. It became just an art party.

Around that time the mask opened, by an ex-pat Scot called Brendan Mullen, downstairs below a skin show on Hollywood Boulevard. No fire regulations, totally illegal place to run anything. Later it got raided so often it had to close, it was a daily, weekly confrontation with the LAPD.

You must have got pretty intense reactions?

Yeah, the media totally ignored it. People on the street would be extremely aggressive. Stoned out hippies would physically attack you. The record companies and media were all hippies who had made it, and they were very hostile.

When did it really take hold?

Right around the time we left. It suddenly got totally accepted. Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys became enormous.

Slash started its own record label. We put out the Germs, then X. X sold really well and got played on the radio a lot. Bob Biggs ran the label, he was involved with the mag.

There was a snowball effect, suddenly there were more bands than we knew what to do with. It started as a bluff, we were pretending there was an LA scene when there was no scene whatsoever. The magazine was it. Then all these disaffected loonies focused on the mag and decided we can be in it too.

For the first time I could say whatever came into my head, I was having a whale of a time.

You’d write totally first take?

Yeah, on speed, a lot of it, or totally drunk. At the end of the magazine it got ridiculous cos I had all these 45s to review, and I’d play the record and by the time the record was finished, so was the review.

The disaffection in Los Angeles was a lot more enormous than I imagined it would be, there was a closet of closet art weirdos out there. They had an incredible sense of humour. They were really proud of looking like shit on the streets. While people were walking around with shorts and tans, they were wearing pale make up and long raincoats. The Canterbury was a lot of what should have been condemned apartments, appalling conditions, that was a big hang out. There was a lot of real violence, but it was just a long insane party.

Was there a point when groups realised that they weren’t actually going to make it, that they really were being shut out?

I think that’s when it got really good, actually. We decided it was our party, nobody else was interested, so lets just go wild. It definitely seemed that we were going to be rejects forever. The end of it was when it did get accepted. Differences between what was punk and what was New Wave. All the shit invented by Greg Short just to legitimise bands like the Plimsouls and mod shit…

• Biography of Claude’s band, Catholic Discipline at Artifix Records.

Posted on September 16, 2008 at 1:38 pm