West Coast Punk Diary, 1978
I went to Los Angeles and San Francisco in late summer 1978 and was bowled over by the West Coast Punk scene. Groups like the Weirdos, the Dils, the Avengers and the Zeros were easily the equal of any British punk groups, but were shut out of the media. Find their records if you can, they’re great.
This diary style piece was first published in the first issue of Phil Smee’s fanzine, “Strange Things”, in early 1988, and has been reprinted in the discography of the second edition of “England’s Dreaming”. Some 45′s by the Weirdos, the Dils etc are included in the Trikont cd, “England’s Dreaming”.
25.8.78: Laurie O’Donnell and two of the men from W.Im.P (World Imitation Products) pick me up in the Hollywood Hills. W.Im.P are an outpost of the mid seventies Mail Art/ Neo Dada scene: the introduction has come through Genesis P. Orridge, whose friend Skot Armst worked with them on a tiny montage magazine, Science Holiday. W.Im.P don’t quite have Armst’s skewered brilliance, but they shower me with their zines, exquisite playthings in editions of 50 with titles like “Computer Buddy”, “Teslarama”, “I Hate This Trip” and my favourite, “Alien Roundup”. They produce about one a month. I get it immediately: they don’t have Linder’s viciousness or pain, but their sheer playfulness is liberating. Not for the last time, I feel part of a dialogue that is being carried on over 5000 miles.
I accept W.Im.P’s deadpan aesthetic as one way of dealing with the extreme peculiarity of Los Angeles. This is my first visit to the US, let alone the West Coast, and I know that I’m on another planet, especially when, at the Griffith Park Observatory, the blood red moon bathes an endless strip of freeways with an apocalyptic, killing glow. Laurie has spent the day in driving me round a succession of thrift stores, where we load up on Martin Denny albums and tab-collared shirts – impossible to find in the UK. We hit Sunset to the strains of the Sonics’ “Boss Hoss”: abrasive kitsch seems like a good place to start making sense of this parallel world.
Our destination is the Azteca, a Chicano club not used to punk, situated deep in the Valley about forty minutes drive from Hollywood. When we arrive, there already is a group of people on the pavement – an extreme rarity in Los Angeles, and in itself tantamount to provocation. Inside, the switch from the deserted streets is startling: clusters of men and women in the US equivalent of punk dress – 50’s clothes from the thrift store profusion matched with the regulation black – rotate urgently, swimming in the Azteca’s gold and glitter. All the local faces are there. It’s all very similar to what I’ve just (thankfully) left behind in London; as I pass around a pillar, the distance between Los Angeles and London is completely wiped out as Mick Jones comes into vision, sitting at a table.
We say hello, with a certain restraint. In the winter of 1976, when I was hanging around the Portobello and Ladbroke Grove, MJ and I fell in with each other; we’d meet in Mick’s caff and discuss matters punk, artistic and political – J.G.Ballard’s “High Rise” and Tom Wicker’s book on the Attica jail riot. This all evaporated as soon as our roles became defined: MJ as rock star and me as rock journalist. I’d already found out that the two cannot be friends unless there is a great degree of mutual tolerance – not a great 1978 attribute. Anyway by now I can no longer lie and say how fabulous the Clash are: “Clash City Rockers” was a poor 45 and all the laddish behaviour they encourage in their entourage has turned me right off. We regard each other, therefore, with mutual suspicion: I don’t what I’m doing here and I don’t know what he’s doing here. The winter of 1976 might as well be a lifetime ago, so much has happened.
The first band walk out on the long, low stage and plug in. The Middle Class, with three young brothers from Santa Ana, with similar long noses, pissed off expressions, and tousled black hair. They’re dressed down in sixties jackets, jeans, nondescript shirts. They play punk sped up to what, in 1978, sounds like the limits of intelligibility: words, melodies and instrumentation telescoped into a queasy blare. ‘1!2!3!4!’ they yell regularly, as if their very own creed; ‘Out ! A! Vogue!’ they bark before the blur restarts. Their sheer velocity makes tangible the desperate urge to communicate – something, anything, before….what? – that is a hallmark of these times. There is also a stuttering self-critique, a harbinger of the moment when Punk will finally fall in on itself: ‘Growing tired of the s-s-s-situations/ that you created /in your own mind’.
27.8.78: Claude Bessy’s apartment right on the beach at Venice. I look at the sea and spin out: there are only a few islands between here and Japan. A few fanatics perform complicated yoga postures at this world’s edge. Lunch with Claude, his wife Philomena, and a young woman called Debbie Dub, who has badgered me transatlantic to write something for her fanzine, called “Starting Fires”: my response is an ill-tempered, apocalyptic blast that says more about my mental state than any objective reality. Punk talk. Debbie is very enthusiastic about the UK, raving about the new hype, Tom Robinson. I am not, so we are at cross purposes. It’s not her fault, but things go from bad to worse. Over lunch, Debbie punctuates her polite-ical discussion with several pauses where, toying with a boiled potato, she loads her knife with amphetamine sulphate and sniffs lustily. ‘Do you want some?’ she asks brightly. I suddenly realise how tired I am.
25.8.78: By the time the next band – Negative Trend: more blokeish, lumpy, key song “Mercenaries” – have finished, the club is much livelier and my headache has settled in well. Laurie makes several introductions on my behalf; I reciprocate by taking her over to MJ who – settled into the rock star mode he will never shake – is polite but noncommital. This total congruity of familiarity and strangenss deepens as the evening continues: the next band on, the Dils, are at first sight complete Clash clones – Russian iconography, angry stance, barked slogan lyrics. Their two singles – “I Hate The Rich” and “Class War” – are at once exciting and unsettling, but live their individuality is subject to the same old breakneck thrash.
Two brothers share the frontline: although both have the same white trash face – lean, bad skin – singer/ guitarist Chip Kinman is blond and passionate as bassist Tony is saturnine. They cover a lot of space, filling the stage with jacknife jerks and souped up fury. Less desperate than the Middle Class, the Dils are more established, if such a thing is possible in this tiny enclave of about 150 people in Los Angeles’ millions. Their lyrics are exhortatory instructions to the community they have been elected to represent. The crowd start to pogo enthusiastically, just like they do in the UK – which does not surprise me after seeing a replicant punk on Melrose the previous day, with a suntan for god’s sake. MJ and I allow each other a little smirk: we have seen this before, haven’t we?
Except that we haven’t. The wild card in this situation is the presence of two Rent-A -Cops, hired by the Azteca’s owners to present nihilist damage to their glittering decor. They’re big and beefy – very much the standard US shape – and look askance at the skinny punks, almost all to a person drugged or starved in an approximation of that wasted, as though rationing had never gone away English look. By the look of disgust on their faces, they no doubt think we’re all gay: well some of us are. As the crowd hots up during the Dils’ set, the cops look itchy: what to the punks is fun – pogoing and slamming – is to them something approaching a riot situation. They wear helmets, truncheons, and some dangerous looking object that resembles a machine gun. In fact, as Laurie explains, it’s a Mace gun, which does not make me feel a whole lot better.
Jonh Ingham’s group, the Weirdos, take the stage last. They’re like a mixture of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols with a unique Angeleno spin: their striking lead singer, John Denney, walks the tightrope between ludicrousness and mania with great aplomb. He’s to be seen wandering around Hollywood late at night, a monkish figure in his destroyed Op Art costume of contrasting stripes. The crowd go berserk at their local heroes and, three numbers in, the Rent-A-Cops lose it. They take the stage and start blustering – ‘OK, that’s it: no more’ – which infuriates the punks, who begin to chant ‘White riot ! White riot!’ . I think this is a little ill mannered in a Chicano club and glance at the person who wrote that song, who, like myself and the W.Im.P crowd, is beginning to melt into the middle distance, having decided that discretion is the better part of valour. They can have their riot without us.
As so often happens, however, voyeurism beats fear, and we hover near the exit. Within an instant, the tension escalates and things look very ugly. For a few minutes, there is a stand-off, with both sides locked into their respective postures: the punks play-acting for real, the Rent-A-Cops taking as reality the authority they have been paid to assume for the night. They dominate the stage with their brandished Mace guns, gross physical manifestations of the (state) authoritarianism that the punks think they wish to provoke. Behind them, the Weirdos look very frail in their smart collaged costume, like children forced to stop their games by bullying adults. When the moment passes and they’re allowed to resume, it’s hard for them to recapture the suspension of belief – or statement of faith – that this event is convened to achieve.
The Weirdos wind up quickly and we’re herded into the night by the Rent-A-Cops with a minimum of grace; they’re disappointed at not being able to vent their adrenalin. The rumour that has been passed around inside is shown to be true, as the black and white cruisers of the LA Metro Squad circle the punks like sharks circling a raft. The very existence of more than five people on the sidewalk seems to constitute an illegal gathering, if not in law then in practice. The cops get out and start harassing the crowd – for drinking in public, among other misdemeanours – and again, there is this possibility of instant, dangerous escalation. Despite its low-density and the late 60’s freedom rhetoric puring out of its airwaves, Los Angeles is very tightly parcelled up, with less free space than on London’s packed tube stations. For all their manifest lack of power, the local punks have succeeded in making this very clear.
3.9.78: I’m in San Francisco to stay with Vale, the editor of Search and Destroy – the best magazine in the world at this point. I pick up some interviews with the Screamers (irritatingly smartass, by degrees charming) and the Dils. We sit in a White Castle and discuss tactics over cheeseburgers. The group and their manager, Peter Urban, have a lot to say about politics – basically orthodox Marxism with some boho workerism thrown in – and talk coherently and cogently. Until it comes to the music industry: when asked the basic questions that any British group would brush away like an errant fly, the Dils flounder. What will you do when you get a record deal? How far are you prepared to compromise? What will you do when you appear on TV? I’m bemused until I grasp a profound difference: what most Brits take for granted – ie: immediate media and music industry interest – is so far away from the experience and expectations of these guys that they haven’t even considered the possibilities.
Here on the West Coast, the hippies – or their mediated versions – won with no contest. The whole Los Angeles ethic – which dominates the US music industry – is still stuck in 1970: all you seem to hear on the FM dial is a locked groove of Cream, Led Zeppelin, Creedence, the Beatles. This stasis is comfortable, and suits the vast majority; despite the transcendent trappings, it can be policed – like the event at the Azteca, by a numbingly simple display of pure power. The LA punks rail against this in a succession of more extreme postures – current records include the Deadbeats’ ‘Kill The Hippies’ and the Rotters’ ‘Sit On My Face, Stevie Nicks’ – that if anything, reemphasise their powerlessness. There is absolutely no chance that the American music and media industry will let them in. If they do not exist commercially, can they exist at all?