by Marc Spitz
HAL NEGRO: Germs burns were inflicted with a lit cigarette. You were supposed to get one from somebody else who had one. It was like pledging allegiance to Darby Crash.
PHRANC: Darby gave me my Germs’ burn himself.
TRIXIE: No Germs burns on me. We Plungers preferred razor slashes.
PAT SMEAR: I didn’t know what the circle meant. He had some little speech at the time, but I can’t recall. I always thought the blue circle was like his blue eyes, but I might be wrong. The burn was the circle. It was his idea of something permanent, so that in ten years you’d be at the supermarket, and some lady would give you change, and you’d see the burn and make a connection. It was a circular thing. I gave the first one to a fifteen-year-old girl. The rule was once you got yours, you could give it to other people.
DARBY CRASH: Everything works in circles. You know, like something you’ve done maybe eight years ago, but all of a sudden it feels like you’re at exactly the same place doing the same thing. You may not be doing the same thing, but, you know, it’s just that feeling. Well, that’s circles. So everything works in circles. I think we should make a new shape for flags. Round flags.
KIM FOWLEY: California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt… “flaming schoolgirls” describes the look and age group of the most desirable female. Most of them were over eighteen, but they all seemed to want to remain eternally junior high. Even twenty-somethings were trying for that perennial high school teen popularity crap, and that’s why the Germs were able to flourish as local celebrities in that community.
PAT SMEAR: I never knew whether Darby was gay or not. All I remember is that all the girls wanted to sleep with him and didn’t get to.
GERBER: I fell in love with Hellin Killer, how about that? She was horned in trying to be Darby’s girlfriend, and I was really close to her, so I didn’t really want to tell her, “Don’t even, you’re wasting your time.”
KIM FOWLEY: And I must talk about that filthy goddess Gerber, who was the Germs’ sexual poodle girl that they drug around. Gerber was Sandra Dee meets Leslie Caron on a French poodle porno level. To attract girls of her bacterial beauty I thought was really important. I said, “These guys are gonna be big—they have dirty pussy around them, dirty pussy is worshiping their cock stink and their slime.” I always like bands that have dirty women, like with the Germs. They pulled pudgy white girls from the Valley, from the suburbs, from the beaches, from the South Bay, from Orange County, affluent porker chicks who didn’t want to marry the doctors and the lawyers—the future farmers of America, or the future schoolteachers. They wanted to go get pissed on and shit on and beat up and shot up and desecrated in Hollywood. And there were the Germs to do it for them. That was their appeal. You’d hear Germs records at a party or on Rodney’s show, or you’d go into punk shops or weird jewelry stores and there’d be their music all around. It was the sound track to getting dirty pussy, and if that’s what you wanted, you had to put up with the Germs’ music. Sex with the Germs playing in the background was like, “Hey, are you finished puking? Okay? Now I’m going to fuck you in the ass and then your girlfriend can puke on me and then we can have a three-way and then I’ll flog you and bleed you a little and then I’ll jizz all over your dirty little hole a second time.” Then it goes like this: “Oh, no, that’s okay, my mom’s waiting for me.” Then it would be like, “Oh, okay, how about your dog? Can I fuck your dog?” “Would you like to?” You know, for that kind of ambience the Germs’ music was essential. Toilet sex. Toilet culture. Toilet rock culture has its own Elvis—Darby Crash.
RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Darby was always really nice. He was a gentleman. He was really sincere.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Right when Darby Crash’s star was rising, his original inspirational heroines, the Runaways, were falling apart. That fall they played the Whisky, debuting their new image, the ill-timed heavy-metal style: black leather, studded chrome, Judas Priest look. The Weirdos were on the bill in order to bring in the new punks. Acrimony between the band and Kim Fowley sparked rumors that Kim was looking to sell off their contract.
JACKIE FOX: Kim only wanted us to do songs that he’d written ’cause he’d own all the publishing. The second choice was for us to do songs by people whose publishing he controlled. If you look at all our albums, Kim has written most of the songs and the others are either written by us or by other songwriters whose publishing Kim controls, like Marc Anthony and Billy Bizeau. Kim owned their publishing. We started fighting with Kim so much that he turned everything over to Scott Anderson. Bill Aucoin, who managed Kiss, was interested, but he said, “You have to get out of your contract with Kim because I’m not gonna front fifty grand to get you out and then another fifty to work on you. You guys get rid of Kim Fowley and I’ll manage you.” I was probably the only one who paid any attention to what was going on on the business side, but I was still just a sixteen-year-old girl. I knew we needed to get someone high-powered and I couldn’t get the band to do anything about it.
CHERIE CURRIE: After Queens of Noise, we went to Japan. There was a lot of problems in the band. Jackie couldn’t take it anymore.
JACKIE FOX: We got to Japan and found out that nothing had been taken care of. My bass was really valuable, even back then. It was a Gibson T-Bird from the ’60s, one of the rare white ones, a magnificent instrument. I was about to go onstage and the roadie told me that my bass was broken. And it was kind of like, that was the last straw. Nobody was looking out for us.
CHERIE CURRIE: Jackie took pieces of glass and hacked her arms up ’cause she wanted out. We ended up doing the Tokyo Music Festival without her.
JACKIE FOX: The rumor got out when I came back that I’d tried to commit suicide. Every time I went out I’d see people staring at me or coming over and grabbing my hands to look at my wrists. I got so fed up with it, I stopped going out for a while. Darby Crash dedicated a song to me for trying to commit suicide in Japan. It’s on the Germs’ live album. Which is a great irony because I didn’t and he did.
CHERIE CURRIE: We replaced Jackie with Vicki Blue. By this time I was miserable. The band members didn’t like each other, and Kim was playing one member against the other. We were doing a photo session and I told the photographer up front that I needed to leave on time immediately after the session ’cause my sister and I shared a car and she needed it to go to acting class. Lita blew in a couple of hours late and the photographer threw a fit ’cause I had to leave and he hadn’t gotten the pictures he wanted. He threw his camera down in frustration and broke it and Lita went berserk. I went into the dressing room to get ready to leave, and Lita kicked the door down right off its hinges and pointed at me, saying, “You have to choose between the Runaways and your family. We’ve chosen the band.” And I said, “Forget it, man. I choose my family. Bye.” Kim called and asked “Are you really quitting?” And I said, “Yeah.”
LITA FORD: Joan took over lead singing and she did a great job. I didn’t miss Cherie at all when she left. But it just got more and more druggy, we were just getting so stoned… and more and more people in our lives were pulling us in different directions.
TOBY MAMIS: Joan’s passion for the new punk scene was dominating the band’s direction, while Sandy and Lita were more passionate about hard rock and heavy metal and suspicious of punk. This sowed the seeds for the final destruction of the Runaways.
KIM FOWLEY: I didn’t go on the Japanese tour and the group broke up because mean old daddy bear wasn’t there controlling everything. I was only told, “The group broke up tonight.” I was like, “Oh, okay.”
BRENDAN MULLEN: The Hillside Strangler embarked on this lunatic murder binge of kidnapping, torturing, raping, and strangling ten girls around Halloween ’77 and continued until February ’78. During Thanksgiving weekend five more bodies turned up. The cops didn’t know till later there were two of these dumb shits whose mommies didn’t like ’em, but the carnage hit close to home when they got Jane King, a friend of Berlin Brat Rick
Wilder and a regular at the Masque.
RICK WILDER: I first met Jane King when she was still Matt Campbell’s girlfriend. There’s stupid things you do, that you regret, and going off with your best friend’s girl is one of them. The last time I saw her was at the Masque on Halloween night 1977. She died the next day. Her mother called me and said she was missing and she thought she was dead ’cause the police had called. At that time, that wasn’t a common thing to have happen, a serial killer out there on the loose. Jane King was my first love… I can’t talk about it… I can’t even read the book on the killers… what they did to her, oh my God. Why? I’ll wonder for the rest of my days.
BILLY BONES (STEVE FORTUNA): My band the Skulls played the Whisky with Sorcery, some sick acid metal band from ’72 who promised special appearances by the Black Wizard and Satan on their flyers! After the show two cops from LAPD Homicide investigating the Hillside Strangler murders followed us back to the Masque posing as art dealers who said they were interested in investing in a punk band. I’d been screaming at the audience Jim Morrison style during the intro to the song “Victims,” a song we’d written about the Hillside Strangler… I was yelling silly, crazy-assed shit like “You’re a victim, baby, and you’re gonna die.” That was their big clue that we were some weird punk cult in league with the killer. But Brendan had them sussed right away. He took them into his office and told them that going undercover was pointless. He told them you better believe it that if a single person from the Masque knew anything, one tiny shard that could help them, they’d be calling the cops in a hot second. The killing was too sickening for words. They seemed satisfied that he wasn’t harboring a killer, although they said they knew the Hillside Strangler went carousing punk gigs looking for girls. They left LAPD business cards for him to call them direct if any of the punks heard anything.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The killers pretended to be cops and picked Jane King up at a bus stop outside that creepy Scientology Celebrity Center Building on Franklin Avenue at Bronson.
RICK WILDER: She wasn’t a prostitute. She may have been, but she wasn’t when she was with me, and who cares? You shouldn’t take somebody’s life like that. Jane thought she was the greatest actress in the world. She was taking singing lessons.
HAL NEGRO: After that Brendan hired a security guard for the Masque. The crowds had been getting bigger anyway, and I think he realized that he had no idea who some of these people coming and going were, and there was no way to tell, either.
BRENDAN MULLEN: I hired a 350-pound, six-foot-four uniformed security guard named Tiny Rosen after it occurred to me, in a moment of panic, how would anybody be able to hear anything, a girl’s screams, if somebody was strangling her in one of the many dark corners of the Masque? Nobody would hear a thing if the Skulls were thrashing away at 130 decibels… the horror of Jane King weighed heavily on me… even though they’d picked her up elsewhere, it occurred to me, what if I found a girl dead on the floor after a night of revelry? It was a major turning point for me… the idea of the utopian punk playpen of endless mad fun was over, violated forever by the arrival of pure evil in our midst. The bogeyman had come early. Cops knew he cruised Hollywood Boulevard… it was a wake-up call. I decided maybe I should party a little less, that I should take on some responsibility for the goings-on in the basement, after all, rather than just hanging out like everyone else. I had badly wanted the space to be inclusionist of everyone, but how do you account for malevolence on that scale? Tiny patrolled around and sort of became a mascot for the club, he became a bit of a celebrity on the scene himself because of his girth. He kept an eye open when everybody was all fucked up, and I’d have him walk girls to their cars… plus he was good at talking to cops.
TITO LARRIVA: I’d pick Blank Frank up for rehearsals with the early Plugz while he was turning tricks on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica Boulevard. That was how he got his junk. He’d just suck a few cocks and then go out and get high. I’d pick him up there ’cause I knew that’s where he was. I’d pull up to the corner and say, “Hey, Frank, you wanna rehearse?”
HAL NEGRO: The Gold Cup was this sleazy coffee shop a block away from the Masque and the Canterbury on Hollywood Boulevard, and Arthur J.’s was another big chicken hawk hangout on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland. Male hustler hot spots. A few Masque scenesters like Blank Frank, Bruce Barf, and Tony the Hustler turned tricks there. So Arthur J. and the Gold Cups became the name of the Masque house band, made up of people that worked there, it was a Hollywood in-joke if you knew what was really going on with the street.
TITO LARRIVA: Danielle’s coffee shop was another one. It was primarily a transvestite hang out. For a while, I worked there… fed the Plugz there. They’d come in at night and I’d get them free dinners or steal steaks from the fridge. I worked the night shift and I saw someone die at my station one night. This pimp staged a fake fight in the back, and while they were throwing shit, he shot this transvestite under the table with a .22. And she was so high on Tuinols that she didn’t even know she was shot. We thought she was asleep.
BLACK RANDY: My record “Trouble at the Cup” is about this fantasy I had that all the male prostitutes in Hollywood would become punks and overthrow the LAPD. It went, “They say the Boulevard is no place for me / Pinball and coffee is all right with me / I can’t live at home / I gotta be free / I hate my parents more than they hate me / Schools and factories make me sick / I’d rather just stand here and sell my dick / Trouble at the Cup, trouble at the Cup.” The Gold Cup was a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard at Las Palmas where all these male prostitutes hung out, who I admired and fraternized with. I was closer to them than most of the punk rockers walking around in their punk army suits.
ANDY SEVEN: When I saw the bulletin at the Masque for Arthur J. and the Gold Cups, everything that was listed in that ad was right up my alley, and I said, “This is the band of my dreams,” ’cause it mentioned Ornette, Sun Ra, James Brown, the Soft Machine, T. Rex, the Dolls, the Pistols, all in the same band! I couldn’t believe it!. This in some bombed-out punk rock basement? A pretty sick concept. Then I found out it was Brendan and Spazz and Geza and a bunch of other people that worked at the Masque who jammed there all the time for fun, so I rushed home to get my horn.
HAL NEGRO: Brendan got Spazz Attack, this skinny guy with spiky hair who crashed at the Plunger Pit and who was famous for being able to land flat on his back without hurting himself after throwing 360-degree back flips, to be the lead singer of Arthur J. and the Gold Cups.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: That’s Spazz Attack doing 360s in our video for “Satisfaction.” How he didn’t kill himself or break his spine doing that, I’ll never know.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Spazz Attack was coached by legendary street dance coach Toni Basil, and he later moved to New York to design clothes. He also danced with David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour in 1987.
HAL NEGRO: Geza X played guitar and Brendan played drums in Arthur J. and the Gold Cups. I played trumpet, and the rest of the lineup shifted. It was a punk rock big band, with a three-piece horn section, a keyboard, and backup singers. We’d play covers by Little Richard, James Brown, and George Clinton; we’d do surf instrumentals, TV jingles like Green Acres and the “Cal Worthington and His Dog Spot” theme, but we’d also play Ornette Coleman’s “Theme from a Symphony.” There were very many different musical ideas in the band. It was really out there for the time, but nobody wanted to commit the time to writing original material. Arthur J. and the Gold Cups was never taken seriously, unfortunately, but it had a few moments where we hauled ass live at the Masque and the Whisky. An Arthur J. and the Gold Cups show had been booked with X and the Deadbeats at Larchmont Hall and nobody wanted to do it, so Brendan and I and Kelly Quinn, the piano player, decided, “Fuck ’em, we wanna play… we’ll do the gig without ’em.” And we renamed ourselves Hal Negro and the Satin Tones and showed up at the hall ready to play instead of Arthur J. to show we could pull off the gig without them. Satin T
one was the name of a can of paint. We were gonna do this suave Sinatra/Dino/Darin saloon thing one time only, but it was such a blast, we had such a good time doing it, we stuck around just for the hell of it. Our gigs were always messy but fun, and girls seemed to like it. We had matching tuxes, and some girlfriend of Brendan’s stitched fake zebra fur onto the lapels and all of a sudden we had this identity. And we had the hot girls, the Punk Bunnies, Allison Buckles and Shannon Wilhelm, who were the first really cute punk girls.
HELLIN KILLER: I was brutally shy, so I didn’t talk much. I’d stand around with a bottle in one hand and just stare at people, just leaning against a wall, so I developed this reputation for being scary, like, “Don’t go up to her!” It became part of my whole thing. I was really fearless, never got scared of nothin’. I used to go around kicking in windows and stuff. That’s where my reputation comes from. I’d just kick in windows on the street… put my fist through them… and carry switchblades. I was the silent deadly type, I was always the one: “Hellin will do it—if nobody else will, she will.”
HAL NEGRO: One thing about punk rock, it wasn’t the greatest look for some girls. The girls that we started out with were pretty homely types. Trudie, of course, was the goddess of punk rock, but Hellin was very tough-looking. Hellin and Trixie. The look was very hard and antipretty in the beginning. Some of the punk rock girls weren’t sexy with the short spiky hair and fucked-up makeup, but Shannon and Allison were curvy, sexy girls. Allison had long red hair. We started calling them the Punk Bunnies after they came onstage with the Satin Tones as part of our Vegas lounge act, dressed up like deranged parodies of Playboy bunnies. At first there weren’t as many girls, then they started coming around ’cause it became cool to hang out with punks. This girl named Paula—we called her Stripes—was this feather-haired rock chick, but she came out and started fucking all the punk guys and she’d say, “I can’t stand the music, but the guys are hot.”