We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: We broadcast out of the Pasadena Hilton Hotel on AM and FM simultaneously so everyone in Los Angeles County could hear it.

  JED THE FISH: There weren’t many others in America apart from Rodney playing punk rock on commercial radio at the time. Apart from KROQ, there was WLIR in New York that used to play punk. There was WHFS, which served Washington, D.C. There was KSAN in San Francisco that Tom Donahue started, and there was a station right before KSAN. To what extent they played punk rock, I don’t know, but Rodney was the sole lightning rod and focus for punk at KROQ.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Whatever it was, KROQ was a station that didn’t play the Eagles, didn’t play Jackson Browne. There was the Young Marquis and Stanley, also the Insane Darrell Wayne. There was the Hollywood Night Shift. Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theater and Michael C. Guinn, a great actor. There was free-form improv comedy for an hour a day, none of that godawful Loveline going on there. Spoken word on the radio. Radical comedy. Dusty Street was there, too. No country rock, no prog, and no disco. You could also get a DJ on the phone then. You’d give requests, you’d suggest the set list for an hour. It didn’t have the clout of MTV’s Total Request Live that it’s since become.

  DARRELL WAYNE: The industry wasn’t paying attention to Rodney at that point, but he developed a great audience and a wonderful following with local musicians because he was the only one really listening. If he liked their tapes, he’d play them on the radio.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: If you went backstage at a cool show in the early ’70s, there’d be these guys in these carefully dandified suits and shag haircuts and bangs and they’d have little buttons on their suits… they were called the Pop. Those were the people who really struggled, the Radio Free Hollywood people like the Pop, the Dogs, Max Laser, and the Motels. They were a little older, but God, I have to hand it to them.

  MARTHA DAVIS: I moved down to L.A. with the original Motels in ’75. Before that we were the Warfield Foxes. We came here with the notion that we were gonna be signed overnight, like every band who comes to L.A. believes, but local FM radio was dominated by that slick California sound and there was no place for anyone to play. The only way you could get booked was if you had a record deal. I’d moved here with my kids and I was like, “Oh my God. We can’t even play. How are we supposed to get signed if nobody can even hear us?” We didn’t have any money for showcases. Then we met up with other bands like the Pop and the Dogs. We bonded as a sort of grassroots movement who stood up to say, “Fuck this shit, we’ve got to play somehow.”

  GENE SCULATTI: In the summer of ’76 Dean Chamberlin, the guitar player in the original Motels, told me about a show his band and a bunch of other bands, the Dogs and the Pop, were promoting themselves. I suggested they call it Radio Free Hollywood, and Dean loved the name—so, apparently, did the others. I also proposed to KROQ that they broadcast it as a regular live radio show, but never heard back. The show was promoted by flyers and a newsletter.

  MARTHA DAVIS: We pooled all our money to rent a place called Troupers Hall, which used to be on La Brea Avenue, and we bought kegs of beer and hired a security guard, I think the whole thing cost eight or nine hundred dollars, which was all we had. The hall was packed. We only lost like ninety dollars, which was good considering how many free passes we gave away. Troupers Hall was a turning point. Some of those guys showed up and we started getting a little action, we started getting played on KROQ. A few weeks after that, clubs like the Starwood and Whisky started calling us.

  MARY KAY: As soon as Radio Free Hollywood began to take off, Kim Fowley came around acting buddy-buddy with us and the other bands that he wouldn’t even give the time of day to a few months ago. But Kim openly hated the idea of strong women, especially the likes of a self-powered Martha Davis. That was anathema to him. He preferred naive teenage girls that he could easily control. He told me so to my face. Now he wanted us to put the Runaways on the bill at one of our shows and we refused… what gall.

  RICK WILDER: I always thought Kim Fowley was Mr. Johnny-Come-Lately. We’re already there. We’re already doing stuff. We’re already putting on our own shows… all of a sudden he shows up with the Runaways and wants to get credit for starting everything.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: Fowley was on the heels of Radio Free Hollywood, but he was an older guy who had better access to the media.

  MARTHA DAVIS: After punk hit, Kim announced that he was starting Venus and the Razorblades, a punk rock band, and he called to see if I wanted to be in it. I said, “Well, I’m really serious about my music.” And he said, “Oh, okay.” And he hung up. That says it all about Kim.

  MARY KAY: Before Radio Free Hollywood, Rodney and Kim had this town sewn up if you were an unsigned band. Without their endorsement you were cut out from airplay on KROQ and from playing the Whisky. You couldn’t even get written up in certain rock magazines. The Whisky and the Roxy, whose owners always claim what big supporters of the local rock scene they were, never did for a minute during those times until the time came to cash in on the new scene created by other people. The local prepunk “street band” scene didn’t count, it didn’t even exist unless you went through Kim and Rodney. When punk started to happen, Kim put out the word that he was looking for a new, more extreme punk rock version of the Runaways to capitalize on the new thing, and Dyan Diamond, a fourteen-year-old girl from Huntington Beach, was made lead singer.

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: KROQ started to promote punk shows. The first big one was at the Bel Air Sands Hotel, also that August, with Venus and the Razorblades, and the Quick… another one from Kim’s stable.

  DARRELL WAYNE: After Radio Free Hollywood, KROQ started promoting shows with local street bands. They called it the KROQ Cabaret. They were usually held at fairly seedy halls but people would come. It generated cash at the door, which was great ’cause it helped to make payroll.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: The Bel Air Sands Hotel was a strange situation where we got a call in the afternoon saying KROQ was doing a free show there. The Quick went down and there were three thousand people there. It was insanely crowded. I think that was when many people first realized, “Wow, there really could be a new thing here.” Something that could be exploited. There was also a definite connection between that night and the new wave thing and the point where KROQ became the model for radio music all across the country.

  LISA FANCHER: The Quick was Steven Hufsteter, Danny Benair, Ian Ainsworth, Billy Bizeau, and Danny Wilde. Great songs, great live band. Whether it was my age or my hormones, I loved them to death, but their sense of humor and arrogance rubbed some the wrong way. They just carved their own path, using other great rockin’ bands like the Who and Idle Race as mentors. They appealed to the girl and the record collector in me. Others on the scene would rather have their eyes gouged out than hear a note of them.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: The Runaways were getting a lot of attention, so Kim Fowley had the juice to pitch Denny Rosencrantz at Mercury on a boy band, a teen boy band with original songs. I already knew how impossible it was to get a record deal, since we were neither country rockers or a disco band, and so the concept seemed appealing. At that point you had your Shaun Cassidys and your Leif Garretts, but all those people were from TV shows… and so their whole concepts were doomed to failure from the beginning.

  LISA FANCHER: When Steve Hufsteter made it clear he wasn’t a Kim puppet (much like the Runaways), Kim moved on rather quickly. When Mercury dropped the Quick, they made those demos for Elektra with David Campbell, whose six-year-old son, Beck Hansen, ran around the studio making us nutty.

  BIBBE HANSEN: Beck loved the Quick.

  LISA FANCHER: Those demos are amazing—I hope they get released someday. Every A&R guy checked them out, but somehow it just didn’t happen.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: Unfortunately, Kim, who was managing us, was not interested in the follow-through. He’s great at getting you a record deal, but as soon as he gets the cash from getting you signed, he immediately goes on to his next thing. As h
e’d put it, “What’s the next urine-stained piece of rock-and-roll street trash that I can get signed to a label?” Unfortunately there was nobody else at the time to pick up the ball. The shame about the first Quick record was that within six months to a year later, we really became the band we were supposed to be, but the record catches us at the time when I really wanted to sound like Sparks.

  RUSSELL MAEL: I really didn’t have any sympathy for any of the Sparks rip-off groups. I don’t like groups who borrow some of the eccentricities of what we do but smooth off the edges so it will be more palatable for A&R men and the public.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: It was so stupid of me… of all bands to copy. If I’d decided to copy Led Zeppelin, we would have been huge, but I was such a huge fan of Sparks… and Sparks’ most recent albums had changed… and I just didn’t like where their music was going anymore… and I badly wanted to do something that brought the sound of their first few records back… it was just a misunderstood carried-away fan thing.

  PHIL S. TEEN (AKA PHIL MILLER): The Screamers began life in Seattle as the Tupperwares with Tomata du Plenty, Tommy Gear, and Rio de Janeiro all fronting the band with a fifteen-year-old drummer named Eldon Hoake, who’d go on to notoriety as El Duce of the Mentors, the X-rated king of porno metal.

  FAYETTE HAUSER: After a spell with the Cockettes Troupe in San Francisco, a bunch John Waters called “the first drag queens to make transvestism and transsexuality hip on the street,” Tomata du Plenty became a wheel in an early-’70s Seattle-based cabaret act known as Ze Whiz Kids who performed regular gigs at the Exotic Paradise Room in the basement of the Smith Tower in Seattle.

  PHIL S. TEEN (AKA PHIL MILLER): The Exotic Room was in the basement of this fabulous old building from the ’30s. Nobody was using it so we would have events there. That was the first place I ever saw Tommy Gear. He wasn’t Tommy Gear yet, of course. He was Melba Toast. He was wearing a Mylar suit and his hair was standing up off his head about three inches, but it wasn’t punk rock. It was just frizz.

  PENELOPE HOUSTON: In Seattle I was hanging out with the Screamers when they were the Tupperwares. It was really a tiny, just-forming scene. Guys with skirts, beards, and glitter eye makeup. Kind of a post-glam, Whiz Kids/Angels of Lights gay scene, but there were also these garage rock bands forming around the same time, bands like the Telepaths, the Meyce, and the two scenes kind of converged. It was really quite a bizarre conglomeration in Seattle at the time. Before they formed the Tupperwares, Tomata and Tommy were in Ze Whiz Kids. They put on plays and musicals. Wacky gay theater. There were real women in Ze Whiz Kids as well. It was performance art, theater, and music all rolled into one… and they lived it as well. There were three of them sort of fronting the band, Tommy, Tomata, and another guy named Rio de Janeiro. They were backed up by musicians on loan from the Telepaths. Their personas in the Tupperwares were already similar to what they’d become in the Screamers, except maybe they were a little more new wave and not quite so intense.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I wound up in Seattle after I left New York in 1975. And I got involved in doing the Tupperwares. It was a lark. At the time there were only three bands in the whole town. Three bands that you wanted to listen to. One of them was Heart! The Tupperwares were like a bubblegum band. We did these really silly songs like “Going Steady with Twiggy.” These cute, little bubblegum rhymes. Later we turned some of them into Screamers songs. In the Tupperwares version, I said “Dear Twiggy, I look at your picture every day. I love you.” When we turned it into a Screamers song it became, “I look at your picture every day, Twiggy! I want to stab it!” Once we became the Screamers, Tommy Gear said, “Let’s go to L.A. and see how far we can take this.” You know, so we took it… somewhere.

  TOMMY GEAR: Seattle was generally a pretty boring place. There wasn’t much happening and we were trying to amuse ourselves and everyone else. Finally it wasn’t enough to stay in Seattle to do these quirky performances. We wanted to challenge ourselves. We also thought if we could be successful [in Seattle] maybe we should take it a step further and see what happens somewhere else. We had nothing to lose.

  PENELOPE HOUSTON: Tommy and Tomata relocated to L.A. without Rio, who wanted to stay in Seattle, and the make-over into the Screamers came together pretty quickly as soon as they hooked David Brown and K.K. into it.

  BLACK RANDY: Somebody I knew went to England in 1976 and brought back a Sunday Times that showed the punks in London. I took a copy of that article to my friends in the Screamers, who were one of the first punk bands around town. I said, “This is going to be what happens next.”

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I knew this girl in England who kept sending me fanzines about the Sex Pistols. Before that, I had a bowl haircut. I looked like Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits.

  TOMMY GEAR: When the Screamers came to Los Angeles from Seattle, the punk thing was happening in England, and we decided in a conscientious way to have a sense of solidarity with it.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: On December 6, the Los Angeles Times London correspondent, Tom Lambert, published a piece that focused on the antics of the Sex Pistols, who’d recently cussed out U.K. talk show host Bill Grundy with a string of obscenities on live prime-time national TV after he egged them on to “say something outrageous.”

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: When the Sex Pistols really made it big after cursing on that TV show, it was all over for the Quick. It was impossible to compete. They were front-page news.

  HAL NEGRO: It was the big bang. And we felt it here.

  TOM LAMBERT (L.A. TIMES, DECEMBER 6, 1976): The reaction was instantaneous. Viewers screamed in protest. Some threatened to boycott advertisers. The Daily Mirror said it was “the filthiest language ever used on British television.” This alleged form of music played by the Sex Pistols… and other groups around London with names like The Damned, The Clash and The Vibrators… is being attacked by detractors as “violent, obscene, anarchic and insolent.” Punk has been labeled as “appalling” by musical experts. One said it is a “cynical, blatant progression in outrage.” Critics began eyeing the “punk rock” outfits not as musicians but as social phenomena—when several of their appearances climaxed in screeching, chaotic brawls. Their pounding, generally rubbishy performances on conventional guitars and drums won few plaudits, but their [lyrical] themes—anti-love, anti-peace, contempt, defiance of everything—galvanized many of their young listeners into violent pandemonium. The “punk” rockers profess to despise anyone over 20. Their “performers” favor tight, paint-daubed jeans, swastika armbands, leather jackets, occasional rubber masks, and soiled T-shirts adorned with designs emphasizing sex. The musicians chop their hair short, tint swathes of it green, pink or purple, sometimes all three, and spike it upright with oil. Some of them wear safety pins through their faces. Sex Pistoleer [sic] Johnny Rotten fastens two through his right ear lobe.

  BLACK RANDY: At that time, the Screamers were trying to imitate Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, doing some sort of elegant synthesizer thing. As soon as they read that article, the first thing they did was to shred their clothes and chop their hair.

  JANE WIEDLIN: After punk got really big, it was all about taking speed and staying up all night and talking about the great band you were gonna have, then never doing it.

  HAL NEGRO: You also had to have a punk name, like Johnny Rotten. You couldn’t just be John whatever. John Lydon. It had to be the perfect punk name.

  KID CONGO POWERS: Hellin Killer has the best punk name ever.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: As I remember it, my mom named Hellin Killer. And she named Cliff Hanger.

  HELLIN KILLER: I changed my name to Hellin Killer when we came back from New York in 1976. I was always the hitting-everyone type. The punch-you-in-the-arm tough guy. A friend used to always call me Killer, and that’s where it came from.

  HAL NEGRO: I don’t know when Paul Beahm became Bobby Pyn. I’m sure it was sometime in early ’77 when everyone started changing their names. Bobby Pyn, it’s very British.

  GERBER
: One day I went over to school and I bumped into Paul Beahm and he’d had his hair permed like Peter Frampton, it was real long. And it was blue! He had safety-pinned cigarette butts all over his jeans and he told me, “Glitter is fuckin’ over and punk rock is what’s happening.” I said, “Wow, you finally noticed.” He told me that he and George were starting a band. I know they were fucking around in George’s garage, but a lot of that was just all of us getting really drunk, and certainly Paul and I were doing drugs and then Lorna Doom got recruited… and then Donna Rhia.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: Terri Ryan, who later renamed herself Lorna Doom, was my best friend in high school in Thousand Oaks, California. We didn’t go to any of the glitter clubs, but we’d go to the Rainbow on weekends and say we fucked Ted Nugent. Lorna and I met Darby and Pat at the Beverly Hilton, waiting for Queen. We were all trying to get Freddie Mercury’s autograph. We actually knocked on his door, which was really obnoxious. A no-no. It’s the most annoying thing when a fan knocks on the door, and there were four of us knocking on Freddie’s door. But he never came out. Darby and Pat thought we were bizarre. These two girls with little hairdos from Thousand Oaks, California, who smoked colored Shermans.

  PAT SMEAR: Queen was staying at the Beverly Hilton, and we’d met them in the lobby the day before. The next day we went back and we were hanging around the pool watching Freddie on his balcony. We met these two girls from the Valley, total twins, with matching poodle haircuts. We snuck into the room below Freddie’s and [Darby] tried to climb the balcony to get into his room, but couldn’t. They gave us a ride home, we didn’t exchange numbers or anything, and we thought we’d never see them again. We put up flyers looking to form a band with “two untalented girls.” We put one up at Licorice Pizza and they called and asked: “Are you those Queen guys?” That’s when we started hanging out and we formed the band. We made T-shirts with iron-on letters that said THE GERMS in the front, and AFTER YOU on the back. We were a band long before Lorna even had a bass. We’d make posters and put them around town, not for gigs, just to advertise the band.