V. Vale
(Editor and publisher of Search & Destroy, San Francisco punk magazine which, from 1977 on, expanded the idea of what the culture could be. Scholarly and dedicated, interviewed at his office / home in San Francisco.)
Was punk rock something that came out of the blue for you? Had you seen any signs coming?
In terms of youth culture there was this huge barren media landscape in the 70s, in terms of manufactured white youth culture, which was communicated in America through Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy magazines. And in England through NME, Melody Maker and Sounds which oddly enough I used to read. In ’74 there was a centrefold in Sounds or NME, one of the two, which was all about what was to become known as punk rock in New York City.
It mentioned the Ramones, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Television, Richard Hell. I was already interested in poetry and literature, I found out about Patti Smith quite early on, and that subculture which Malcolm McLaren was later to observe and then take an idea, I suppose, based roughly on Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls, and to start the Sex Pistols. But that’s a bit later.
How did punk reach San Francisco?
There was a little low rent club called the Savoy, and in August ’76 the Ramones played. There were about twenty people there, of which I was one. They played two nights, I went both nights and I was astounded. I could see that these lyrics were not 60s lyrics, they’re a total critique of society, and this was not music.
Minimalist structure: two minute songs, fifteen minute set – a lot of anger and vituperation coming from the band, pure negative energy. And the blur. But it was very disciplined. Then there was a totally different look that we hadn’t seen before – black leather motorcycle jackets, ripped up t-shirts that were too small, saying things like, Let god kill em all – unpleasant messages. Ripped up jeans, and the cheapest tennis shoes you could get. Fury.
It was an incredible contrast. It made all the rock music of the time seem florid and baroque with all its self-indulgent excesses. It came in the context of these huge super-spectacles like Led Zeppelin, which were alienating, and it made it possible that ten thousand kids could start garage bands all over again, and do it yourself instead of being a passive consumer of television.
The only other people in the audience were these interestingly dressed people who had been living in New York through this period, and they were the Nuns, who started the first punk band in San Francisco. Dietrich, Jeff Olener – practically the whole band were in the audience with me. They were all very striking looking, it was easy to remember them.
The next thing I knew, at the end of ’76 I went to the first Nuns show. And that was all there was, for about three months. There were all these Heavy Metal bands playing the Mabuhay Gardens, soft rock, glam rock bands. Then the Damned came from England.
What about Crime? Had they started?
They were starting. The Ramones were August ’76. The Nuns first played in December ’76 I believe, then Crime played after that, but not much after.
When did you first become aware of the Sex Pistols?
I would say 1976. I read the music press, unlike most people I knew. I was interested cos I liked what I thought was the idea of anarchy. I was amazed to see that politics and pop music were being mixed. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation I knew of in such a thorough way.
When did you put the first Search & Destroy out?
I started working on it in January ’77 but it didn’t actually come out until March. Our approach was really minimalist, we felt that that was the new philosophy.
Minimalism oriented to function on several levels. It wasn’t just going to be a documentation, it was going to be a catalyst and inspiration. We felt that the music was the fun, social part but that it was an entire lifestyle, you don’t spend your entire life playing music on a stage, so we gave book lists, we tried to encourage people to read, we listed films like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freaks, that weren’t really in the common person’s aesthetic of cinema.
It was a developing new aesthetic. We had the Devo interviews in issues 2 and 3, that I think were pretty brilliant at the time. It was a free-form climate in which people could meet, communicate and encourage each other. Somehow barely eke out a living. The 70s was the last era of low rent. My rent at the time was $37.50 a month. I worked twelve hours a week at City Lights for a minimum wage, and I still felt I had everything I wanted.
When did you start noticing that something was happening in LA?
Right away. We went down to Los Angeles. There was an early club called The Masque, which was similar to the Mabuhay here, but it was communally managed by Brendan Mullen. The Masque was the club, and we felt that there was a difference between the LA and the San Francisco scene, cos the first two bands here were older and deeper people, I felt.
The Nuns had lyrics like World War Three, and you felt that the cultural scene there in LA was more social and style, and it was more political in San Francisco. You had the Dils coming along pretty soon after, and they were expressly political. Class War, and I Hate The Rich. A lot of the people were just born rebels, I guess. I went to LA and it was much younger. Crime were thirty.
Who were the LA bands?
There weren’t that many. The Weirdos and the Germs. Black Randy was early too, but he never got it together on record.
What sort of reaction did you get from the musicians?
I think people realised I was trying for something more than doing a poor version of NME. In so many of the interviews they just talk about their tour, their instruments. I wanted what they thought when they woke up in the morning, how they lived. I didn’t really give a damn about their careers, or their music.
I did care about their lyrical content, but there were a lot of forbidden aspects of culture and history that were to come up in the Industrial Culture movement, the seeds of that were there in punk. The history of fascist states, the concentration camp atrocities, interest in real criminals such as Manson, the interesting ones. The interest in forensic pathology, pornography. A lot of the posters borrowed graphics out of porno magazines.
Finger magazine was a great inspiration to me with Search & Destroy. It was an incredible, reader-written magazine on newsprint, stapled, a classic. All these people sent in their photos and the kinkiest stories. The most incredible, accidental poetic language. They did a parody of Patty Hearst, with a slavey-looking girl posing as Patty with a fake Symbionese Liberation Army banner.
They showed things like sex with amputees, animal sex, everything that was taboo, they presented it. That was the aesthetic.
One of the correlations of the fact that punk was very media aware, people like the Dils, although they were media aware in theory, they weren’t in practice, to the extent that the people in England were. In England it’s easier to get media practice because you can get access fairly quickly.
That’s true, and they also didn’t have any tutelage, the way the Sex Pistols had with McLaren. There was no media coverage until a couple of years later, it slowly started to happen.
You got no write ups in the SF Chronicle.
No, in this country there is no NME or Sounds to give you fairly thorough documentation of the Clash say, or Generation X. It simply doesn’t exist over here. You certainly wouldn’t expect Rolling Stone to give it any coverage, because they wouldn’t.
What we were doing with Search & Destroy, and Slash, we had an open field. It was very unselfconscious. Self-consciousness was one of the big killers. That’s what media brings in. People mugging for cameras, and that didn’t happen much in San Francisco, it was allowed to develop in an extremely pure way, which was harder in London, and even in Los Angeles, for that matter.
So what were the qualities of what was happening here?
People were older. They’d been rebellious and nurtured their lifestyle of rebellion for a much longer period, it was more complex as a result, there weren’t any role models. Most of the people in the early Mabuhay you could easily get to know personally, cos there was such a small number. They were all dissident artists, refusing to use a canvas and oil paints. Inventing the punk collage posters, with much hard core imagery.
Who did those posters?
A lot of people started doing them for the first time in their lives. Every major band did their own, too. It was something anyone could do, it was democratisation of art, as started by Duchamp and those people who did the first collages.
It was very much a feature here, wasn’t it, the handbills?
Yeah, I’ve got hundreds, and some of the stuff endures, some that strikes deep at the psycho-sexual-pathological roots of society. It was a very small, intelligent scene in San Francisco, and there was a certain shock interest that fuelled everybody, you had political figures, erect genitals and things like that, as well as the subject matter. Punk was a resurgence of something between Dada and Surrealism. Everything was satire, operating on another level.
Society is grist for your mill. Anyway you could attack it in a humorous way. Religion too, UXA really tackled religion, that was their speciality.
Tell me about UXA.
The mentor of UXA was Michael Kowalski, who was a college dropout, I think from Stanford. I know he came from Palo Alto before he moved here. He did collages and poems, and he was the person who turned me on to medical texts as a fecund source of shocking imagery. He was the philosopher behind it. He and his girlfriend Dee Dee, who was also very bright, and a quick learner.
Kowalski was into reggae, which was one of the sources for punk’s musical inspiration, providing a parallel source of rebel subcultural inspiration. He had a collection of really rare reggae records, which we listed some of. He’d been into that and satire and notebooks and collages. He was really an unconscious performance artist, always putting you into these scenarios, to see how you’d react.
UXA never made it on record, did they?
They made a really bad record that came out a couple of years later. Typical. There was no media here, there were no record companies. This was nowhere. The scene here had a weird naivety and purity for such a long time. Everyone was forced to do it all themselves. Steal or scrape together the money to put out their own records. All they could ever afford was singles.
With Search & Destroy, you widened your coverage pretty early, you started getting stuff with John Waters.
I think basically it was there right at the beginning, in the first few months. Everyone I knew liked John Waters, we’d all seen Pink Flamingoes and the short films. It was only a matter of time before we interviewed him. Ballard, obviously. Everyone I knew was familiar with Ballard and Burroughs, so it was a matter of time until you could do the interviews. The same with Russ Meyer. No way was he a mainstream film maker, and that’s why we got him.
The politics: we were trying to connect the punk movement to its precedents, because so many facets were borrowed from earlier progenitors. In a sense society tries to improve itself, improve human relations, and one’s personal quality of life. If you let everybody else do things for you, if you let the entertainment industry entertain you, you are going to be bored.
Was there much interchange with LA, after a while?
Not really. The people I knew, including me, had no money. All the bands from LA slept on my floor, and they would have very little money, even to buy a hamburger. This is America, this isn’t Holland. It’s expensive to get between places, it isn’t as if there are trains you can take for twelve dollars. It’s over four hundred miles, it’s a twelve hour drive and everyone had such old, junky cars that you could never make the drive in a car. If they had any cars at all, they would be sixties and early seventies, which are now called ‘classics’. Heap is a merciful term.
Was there any connection with the beatniks?
Oh yeah, Richard Hell’s Blank Generation was directly stolen from Rod McKuen’s song, Beat Generation, which was a rip-off too, in a sense, because Rod McKuen was really not part of the Beat Generation. People had read Jack Kerouac, they were familiar with Allen Ginsberg.
Ginsberg gave me the first hundred dollars to start Search & Destroy. There would have been no Search & Destroy, had there been no Allen Ginsberg, and then Lawrence Ferlinghetti chipped in some money after I told him that Allen had. So in that sense there is a direct lineage.
What happened to the original scene? Did it remain static? Did the venues change?
The Mabuhay was the scene almost to the end of ’78. Despite reports from other people, I think it was a very supportive environment. They were very tolerant there. It was a great place to go to. Late ’78, there was definitely more mainstream media attention, and all the kids from the suburbs started coming in. Bad money drives out good.
You had a lot of people playing from out of town: you had Nico, you had Devo…
Yeah, there was a steady stream. It was a nice environment, stripped down brick, a reasonable good PA, very minimal lighting. Everything breakable had been broken and taken out, so it was a damage-proof environment. It’s about fifty feet from here on Broadway. Last time I went by it was for rent or something.
As for the decline, it was inevitable. S&D set out to be a fairly minimalist catalytic documentary, but it was specifically devoted to what I would term punk rock. As my personal involvement in the scene diminished, mainly we were driven out by the invasion from the suburbs, these much younger kids, it wasn’t a hospitable place to congregate, and we all started staying at home more.
It happened so fast that’s why Burroughs was so important, the speed at which everything happened was ridiculous. What took hippy about ten years happened to punk in eighteen months.
I think we had a little bit longer, the high of the experience. We got a good two years out of it.
When did you stop Search & Destroy?
I wasn’t interested in interviewing bands anymore, the editorial policy had been outgrown and it was time to forge a new set of cultural parameters, which of course, the next step was Industrial Culture.
The only other group that we haven’t mentioned of that time was the Sleepers.
The Sleepers were a great example of idiots-savant. There’s a random factor association in the articulation, the way Ricky Williams’ mind worked. It was beyond logic. It was so funny trying to have a straight, logical interviewer trying to tackle him because it would be an impossible project. He was living Dada, a kind of Pere Ubu spirit. He seemed to have an extraordinary tap into his unconscious, and he would come up with all this imagery that he wasn’t in control of, but somehow it struck these really deep resonances.
Catch up with Vale’s current activities at researchpubs.com