We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  BLACK RANDY: I once shat right in the middle of the dance floor at an X show because I’d spent the whole day with X and they were really patronizing me because they didn’t want me to do anything bad. They were buying me beers and driving me around, being best buddies. They even followed me into the bathroom at the hall to make sure I didn’t do anything with the toilets. So I took a shit in a Dixie cup and went out on the floor when everybody was jumping around and dropped it. The hall was owned by some New Age Sufisubcult. After the show there were all these Sufiladies in white robes and turbans standing around and there was this thin layer of shit all around their club and they’re going, “This our church. This our church. What are we gonna do?” I have a tape of that show. You can hear Billy Zoom going, “What’s that?” and you can hear Exene go, “It’s shit!” Then I had the balls to make John and Exene drive me home after I passed out in their car waiting for them.

  GEZA X: Black Randy and I spent a good year raging on speed. It was one of the most colorful, interesting, creepy, brilliantly bizarre periods of my whole life. Randy was one of the most intelligent but borderline dangerous people I’ve ever known. I met his dad, who was this battered old hot-rod biker dog, and I eyeballed him shooting his son up with morphine. He had these spectacles with this little chain around his neck and Randy was blubbering like a baby, something he would do every single time he shot up, without fail. It was the most bizarre, ritualistic reenactment of some deep psychological thing. His girlfriend would tell him to go in the other room and shut up. He had tracks as thick as inner tubes. His dad had these square glasses and he’d say, “Now, son, just hold still.”

  GORILLA ROSE: He made a couple of records. Did his day jobs. Then years later he married this girl and they both died of AIDS from shooting drugs. I saw him two months before he died. I hadn’t seen him for a year or two and he was real thin. He told me about this horrible toe surgery that he had had where he had his toes cut off because they were getting infected. He was still drinking like a fish. It was just real sad to see him like that. I don’t want to say that all his sins had caught up with him. It was just unfortunate that he had this AIDS that came along and seemed to punish everybody for doing what they’d been doing for ten years and managing to survive. It was a tragedy.

  JOHN DOE: Despite the growing number of bands, there was no live music scene in L.A. The Whisky was closed and the Starwood was for cover bands. If you were lucky, Cheap Trick was playing there. And there was Quiet Riot, this weird Slade tribute band, three years after glam, or something. It was all so terrible that it demanded we create a new scene of our own.

  STAN RIDGWAY: I used to go to the Whisky and talk to the owner, Elmer Valentine and say, “Please let our band play here!” And he’d say, “Oh, well, I don’t know.”

  KIM FOWLEY: One day in the summer of ’77, Elmer Valentine said to me, “We need a gimmick to get tickets sold. What do you have?” And I said, “Well, punk rock,” and he said, “What’s that?” “English stuff,” I said. “Oh, yeah, well, put punk rock in here—whatever it is.” I said, “Okay.” So I called up Rodney and said, “Rodney, you gotta put me on the air, so we can invite all the garage bands to show up at the Whisky. We’ll call it punk rock no matter what it is, okay?” So I went on Rodney’s show and said, “Attention, unsigned new bands in garages! Guys and girls who are playing the weird underground music. Whoever shows up at the Whisky this coming Friday will automatically be guaranteed a spot. In other words, if you show up, you get to go onstage, even if you’re horrible. I don’t care. English punk is horrible and they get to go onstage—so if you’re horrible, you get to go onstage, too. English punk and American punk can’t be that much different.” So KROQ pounded this thing for the whole week. We put a sign on the Whisky that read KIM FOWLEY PRESENTS NEW WAVE NIGHTS.

  GREG SHAW: Fowley made a deal with Peer Music [song publishers] to pay to record the whole Fowley-promoted Whisky show on remote 8-track with the idea that if anything historic happened, it would be documented, and Fowley/Peer would own the publishing. I was to cover the record-releasing side of the deal, and all the bands signed recording/publishing contracts. There are still unreleased tapes by a lot of good bands, including the Weirdos; somehow it was only the Germs session that got released. I don’t have the tapes.

  GUS HUDSON: Rodney introduced the Germs and was mercilessly heckled by the crowd of kids from Uni High, Newbury High, and from God knows where else. They weren’t diggin’ on the new wave hype or the fact that many of the bands were these funny, beaten-up old bar bands that had about as much to do with punk as Donny Osmond or Led Zeppelin.

  KIM FOWLEY: It was a crowd of displaced persons, refugees from the suburbs. It was urine-stained, safety-pin-wearing, shit-ass motherfucker out-of-control fuckboys, fuckgirls… pissing, puking, shitting, farting… it was anger angst madness… white dopes on punk. It was like Kosovo meets Auschwitz.

  PAT SMEAR: You should see some of the scums we attract.

  GUS HUDSON: One of the songs the Germs were gonna do was “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies. The old bubblegum pop hit. I was to hand Bobby the bag of sugar on cue so he could dump it all over the room. Rodney was backstage and threatened Bobby, “If I get any peanut butter on me, or any of that whipped cream crap gets on my clothes, you guys are banned from the Strip forever. I mean that.” During the rest of the Germs’ set we were opening up condiment packs and throwing them at the audience. Afterward they made me clean up all the mess. I think Belinda was helping out, too.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: At the time, Belinda was fat and ugly with really short hair.

  GUS HUDSON: Then on the second new wave night the Dils played. They were this group who flirted with Marxist imagery and played in front of a red-and-yellow hammer-and-sickle banner. But it just seemed like it was a subject they really might have not known very much about. It just sounded cool.

  TONY KINMAN: I’d gone to UC San Diego and I think every one of my college professors were Maoists. I remember reading an awful lot of that stuff. When we moved to L.A., we met a guy named Peter Urban who became a buddy, and back then your buddy would end up becoming your manager, and it happened our manager was a hardcore communist. We’d sit around and talk about it and we started writing songs with more aggressive themes. It was never as important to us as some people thought, but at the time it seemed that trying to create some sort of change was a good thing. I considered myself a communist for about a year.

  KIM FOWLEY: The Dils were these two shit-assed rich kid Marxist clown brothers, the Kinman brothers. Chip and Tony. This double-headed commie punk act from San Diego County who pouted and were obsessively anal about everything.

  TONY KINMAN: The Dils hated Kim Fowley and his sidekick Harvey Kubernik. I thought people like them and Rodney Bingenheimer were repulsive and only on the punk scene to get laid. To them it was “Here’s another little scene we can strut around in.” I remember Fowley and Kubernik walking around with that leering look on their faces, and the rest of us were just so young. This was our punk rock revolution, and here you’ve got the same old stupid people stumbling around in their stupid old glam clothes. I don’t know how they saw their roles in this, but I know other people saw them as liaisons from the old scene to help them get into the regular clubs. When Peter called us and said, “Do you wanna do Kim Fowley’s night?” our first response was “Fuck, no. Fuck those assholes.” But of course we did it, ’cause it was the only way we were ever going to get to play the Whisky.

  GUS HUDSON: The Dils slagged Kim from the stage, calling him a trendy-assed exploiter. Afterwards they said that he demanded an apology or else he’d ensure bad press, no recordings, and no club bookings.

  TONY KINMAN: We were into a punk rock revolution to destroy the way things were, to destroy the status quo, and to me people like Kim and Rodney were the status quo. However they saw themselves, I saw them as part of the problem, ’cause to me it wasn’t about a career, or self-promotion, or chasing girls. It wasn’t about g
etting a record deal. It wasn’t about being on television.

  KIM FOWLEY: Venom was everywhere that night!

  CHRIS ASHFORD: Later Kim Fowley and the Dils almost had a fight. Kim was doing his usual bizarre posturing, and Peter Urban wasn’t gonna take any of that bullshit and got up in his face. I don’t remember how it cooled off, but they were like pecking red roosters in front of each other for a while. Kim and the Dils had openly despised each other ever since Kim’s big new wave fest at the Whisky.

  TONY KINMAN: A bit later on the Dils were at the Whisky. We’re there watching the Zeros, and Rodney was sitting there with his clique of people, and he walked by us and he had his shag hairdo and it had some altitude on it with hair spray and of course back then you could smoke in nightclubs and I walked by with a little Bic lighter and set his hair on fire. And one of Rodney’s friends, this goony guy, was beating on Rodney’s head going, “Rodney, man, the Dils set your hair on fire, the Dils set your hair on fire.” We would do stuff like that. “What’s Rodney doing here? Set his hair on fire. Punk rock!”

  KIM FOWLEY: So this went from the garage, through the radio, onto the stage, and into the L.A. Times and Time magazine. And of course, L.A. being a media center, everybody else soon picked up on it, and soon the rest of America was told about punk rock. Californian punk rockers, these throwing-up, open-sore, suburban callow youths, were suddenly the new cock-swaggering shit-asses after one gig apiece. Which is remarkable when you think of the Beatles and the Stones, who actually toured horrible night-after-night gigs over a period of years to get a record deal, you know? And here these fuckers were going right into Time magazine.

  HAL NEGRO: Time magazine ran this totally lame punk article which carried a single unidentified photo of the Weirdos backstage at the Whisky and a bunch of shots of punks in all these different cities like London, New York, Boston, and Chicago. What was going on in L.A. wasn’t even mentioned, Kim’s show sure wasn’t, and the caption never even identified the Weirdos as an L.A. band, but lumped them in under “bands with bizarre names like [sic] Clash, Stranglers, Damned, Weirdos.” The writer focused entirely on the scenes at the Roxy in London, CB’s in New York City, and the Rat in Boston… L.A. was shit out of luck.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: Although the indigenous Los Angeles punk scene was fast expanding during the summer of ’77, Slash still continued to look toward the Sex Pistols and their London-burning ilk for inspiration. Look at the third issue. Who’s on the cover? Johnny Rotten.

  LEONARD PHILLIPS: There used to be a magazine TV show in the ’70s called Weekend hosted by this pock-faced guy. One weekend, probably around June of ’77, he did a show about the punk rock phenomenon in England. The show concentrated primarily on the Sex Pistols ’cause it was the queen’s Jubilee and “God Save the Queen” had just come out. The weekend after that show aired snippets of early pogoing with kids doing all that mock violence, dressed up with safety pins in their heads, strangling each other on the dance floor… boom, the very next weekend the L.A. kids were doing it at the Starwood club.

  BIBBE HANSEN: New York punk was all about these lower-middle-class white kids suddenly becoming smart-asses. There were always more garage bands here in L.A. because we have more garages.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: I had moved to New York for a while but had decided I didn’t want to stay there after all. L.A. was much more exciting than New York. It seemed like the scene out here was just being born. When I traveled to New York during the summer of ’77, Patti Smith and Television and the Ramones had already been the big thing for a while. It just didn’t seem as much of an exciting, new, growing thing, it had already happened, all the bands were already signed and all their record companies and publicists were just gearing up to try and sell a ton of records to us new kids, record business as usual. The people going to CB’s were much older people, but we were all really young. We were just teenagers. It was a new thing for us. We felt like everybody else was kind of jaded.

  HAL NEGRO: If there was a media schism between New York and L.A., the Ramones became the only untouchable New York band on a level unbound by provincial limitations, and the entire L.A. new underground rock scene bowed down, enthralled by a series of shows they did at the Whisky in the spring and summer of ’77, all of them unforgettable. The timing for this band was exquisite. L.A. gave the Ramones an audience at least as big and enthusiastic as they got in England.

  EXENE CERVENKA: Joey Ramone was much more than a symbol of punk rock. There was something about him. He was the leader.

  JOEY RAMONE: Los Angeles was great. We blew their minds. We were an instant hit. They totally related to us. A sick bunch. The L.A. kids were really wild and insane, much more like the English audiences than the hip New York crowd.

  DON WALLER: Look how long it took X to get that deal with Elektra! Does anyone really think it would’ve taken them that long to get a major deal if they’d been in New York all those years?

  GERALD CASALE: I think X suffered reverse prejudice from coming from here. Had X been from Indiana, all the top A&R people would have been salivating to sign them.

  DON WALLER: The whole CBGB scene hogged all the media attention and those acts got bigger-budget major-label deals and access to proper recording studios and engineers—mostly because of Sire Records chief Seymour Stein—but most of ’em didn’t have careers. Here in L.A., the punk bands got no national media, and certainly fewer major record deals. It made the L.A. bands more willing to do things themselves, to start their own labels.

  EXENE CERVENKA: It definitely helped the scene that there was no major label involvement early on. I think an artist working in a vacuum has got to be the healthiest thing.

  HAL NEGRO: The near total lack of major label attention produced an indie label boom. It’s a natural extension of the punk ethic. Anybody can make a record. Fuck it. Anybody can sell that record. Some people waited for the majors to come around. But most bands didn’t wanna wait. And some of their enterprising friends didn’t want to wait either. There was too much excitement about what was being created.

  CHRIS ASHFORD: The first single on my label, What? Records, was “Forming” by the Germs. It came out at the end of July in ’77. When they recorded “Forming,” they just got a roll of tape and they set up in Pat Smear’s garage and recorded three versions and some other song. We used the version with the most echo on the voice. The echo was an accident. Somebody hit a button by mistake. It was just a two-track recorder. The voice was on one side and the music was on the other. We were gonna put mono on it, but we realized it’s just real crude stereo. The first batch was a thousand. And they all had the labels on the wrong side. Reversed. The A-side, “Forming,” was listed on the B-side, and the plain black “Sex Boy” live label on the A-side. There’s only a few of those around ’cause they threw about six hundred of them at this one house. It’s the ultimate Germs record geek collectible.

  PAT SMEAR: We recorded “Forming” for a single. The only reason there weren’t many indie records then was because it was down to how were we gonna sell them. Out of our homes? But Chris Ash-ford worked at a record store and made a deal with the Peaches record store chain. We’d been listening to Rodney whose show started up the year before punk happened. He was the first to play punk out of England. So when our single came out we called him and asked him to play it. We were like brats. We called him all night, every night, and he finally just got mad and said “Look, I’ll play your record if you’ll stop calling me.” So we made this deal and stuck to it and he played our single, and it started selling.

  NICKEY BEAT: This terrible little Germs record made it onto Rodney’s show. It was a novelty. It was played because it was so horrible! It was real slow and boring and wimpy-sounding compared to what they became.

  CLAUDE BESSY: Beyond music… mind-boggling… inexplicably brilliant in bringing monotony to new heights.

  PAT SMEAR: At the time Billboard had this new wave chart, and the single made it onto the new wave top ten. Which was
hilarious, of course, since there were only 1,000 pressed. This chart must be pretty fuckin’ weak if we’re charting on it, you know it had the top five—Blondie, the Ramones, whatever—and it had this bottom five which was these dumb little nobody bands like us… but we got shows from it.

  TONY KINMAN: Chris Ashford was putting out the Germs record and he wanted to put out our record, too. The Zeros were our buddies. They lived near us in Chula Vista. They’d already put out the “Don’t Push Me Around” single on Bomp, which they’d recorded in this cheap little studio down there. So we went there and recorded “I Hate the Rich.”

  K.K. BARRETT: Dangerhouse Records became one of the most important indie labels of the day, but it started up under somewhat strange circumstances. There were emotional boyfriend/lover things going on in the Screamers between David Brown and Tomata, and Tommy Gear disapproved. Something happened, and all of a sudden David was out of the band. They just told me. I didn’t have a say in it. I was like, “Fuck, there’s not enough musicality going on to carry it without him.” The entire rhythm section was me playing floor toms and rack toms and sixteenth notes on the bass drum pedal with David playing the bass and the melody on the distorted Rhodes. The whiny synth on top of that was a single note at a time, a lead guitar part played by Tommy. With David gone, I thought, “Fuck, now what are we gonna do?” But David soon hooked up with my friends from Oklahoma and started up the Dangerhouse record label to do stuff with Black Randy and the other new bands.

  EXENE CERVENKA: I was busy drinking and fucking around and goofing off, when John came up to me and said, “I met this guy David Brown. He says he’ll put this record out.” And I said, “Oh, good.” I didn’t really negotiate much back then.