by Marc Spitz
RENE DAALDER: Bill Graham thought it was some weird violent rehash of his ’60s shows, and Russ thought the Pistols were the British version of the Strawberry Alarm Clock or the Carrie Nations. Personally, I thought they were the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
PENELOPE HOUSTON: We saw somebody get beat up. Richard Meltzer, the MC, this really obnoxious guy, he was out there swearing and trying to get the audience riled up after introducing the Nuns, and after he came off, Bill Graham had some of his goons start pounding on him. Wow, getting thrashed at a Sex Pistols concert, how weird was that? That was kind of disturbing. It was a weird show. It was kind of like supposed to be this real high point for punk, but… I mean punk went on after that, but we felt dirtied… we felt somehow the purity was gone.
RENE DAALDER: I remember one conversation at my house with Malcolm and some of the others, just before San Francisco, about how everybody in the Pistols camp was completely at odds, how the band had managed to outlive its usefulness in such a short amount of time. Even before Winterland there was talk about breaking up. The relationships were totally fucked up, especially between John and Malcolm, and Sid was completely strung out. There was a lot of creative competition and jealousy between Lydon and McLaren. I think John Lydon was much smarter and much more developed as an artist than Malcolm recognized or bargained for… I think he may have thought of John as a malleable puppet like the others who’d passively go along with anything.
PENELOPE HOUSTON: I think they were burned out. They were partying hard and getting into all kinds of trouble. But I didn’t see any indication that this was going to be their last show.
HELLIN KILLER: In San Francisco, Sid was a wreck. All he wanted to do was get drugs, and all we wanted to do was keep him from getting drugs at all costs, and at this girl’s house after the show, someone brought him heroin and he OD’d. We were at the party after the show and Sid just went flat out in the bathtub.
LAMAR SAINT JOHN: After the Winterland show, the Warner Brothers’ muscle men who were taking care of Sid just let him go and said, “Fuck it. Let him party.” Sid wanted to get high and they let me take care of him. I knew where to get drugs. I took him there. He got high, I wasn’t into it then. We got to my house. Hellin Killer was there holding his hand. He was just drinkin’ and drinkin’. He was gone. The next day, Johnny calls Sid, and they get into a big argument. After this, Sid wants to get high. Hellin says, “Yeah, I got money.” I am like going, “Don’t do that to him” because he hadn’t eaten and he was drinking like a fish. So I called Malcolm and Rory and I tell them to get over here, because the guy is going to get loaded and he is going to go out you know, you got to stop this. The connection comes over. Him, Sid and Hellin go into the bathroom. The connection leaves, Sid turns blue. He just went out. I lived a block from the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, so I run over there and said, “Sid Vicious is in my house and he OD’d.” They came over and hit him up with Narco, or whatever it’s called. After this Malcolm and Rory finally came and got him, and that was the last time I saw him.
RENE DAALDER: After Winterland Sid stopped by the house to say goodbye to everybody. He was in great spirits, saying things like, “It was nice working with you,” and only the next morning did we learn what had caused his cheery demeanor—he OD’d again on the plane to New York and upon arrival he was rushed to the hospital. Malcolm had nothing left but the loyalty of Cook and Jones. They took off for Rio, and by the time Malcolm made it back to London, receivers had taken over his Glitterbest company.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: Richard Branson called me up in Akron in the winter of 1978 and said, “Hey, you wanna come down to Jamaica?” And I looked out the window and said to myself, “Well it’s snowing about thirty inches here. Sure, I’ll come down to Jamaica.” So he flew Bob Casale and I down there to meet him and Ken Berry. We were all just sitting around in the Kingston Holiday Inn and he brought out this big stash of pot and Branson is rolling these gigantic joints on a newspaper and we’re used to being in Akron where you get enough to make a pencil-thin joint. We were talking to him about playing Mabuhay Gardens the night after the Sex Pistols’ last show at Winterland and how we were staying over at Search and Destroy magazine, we were using Search and Destroys for mattresses. And we talked about how the Sex Pistols came over to the office, Sid and Nancy, and we were hanging out. And Branson said, “What do you think of them?” And we said, “They were all nice guys. You know. It was fun meeting them. It’s too bad that they broke up.” And Branson said, “I’ll tell you why you’re here. Johnny Rotten is down here at the hotel. He’s in the next room, and there are reporters downstairs from the New Musical Express, Sounds, and Melody Maker. I’d like to go down to the beach right now, if you’re into this, because Johnny Rotten wants to join your band… and I want to announce to them that Johnny Rotten is the new lead singer for Devo.” And I’m going, “Oh my God, I’m really high right now.” Regrettably, I didn’t just go, “Yeah, sounds great. Send him to Akron. He can do it for a week or two, just for the hell of it.” It was a weird time for us.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Things got off to a bad start when the Bags played at the Troubadour. It was the first punk show ever at this once jolly country rock cowboy club in West Hollywood, which was the birth spot for post-Burritos/CSN&Y country vocal groups and the new Hoot Night Asylum artists hawked by a cute, fresh-faced future renowned multinational corporate power broker named David Geffen. This seedy roach-infested joint had recently been knocked out of the water after a long run as the premier industry haunt when Lou Adler opened the Roxy. Now the club was desperate for business, so desperate they were reduced to booking punk! The Troubadour was owned and hands-on operated by Doug Weston, this fabulously outlandish cocaine-addled old hippie queen, a lumbering giant who was six foot six and stormed around in caftans, beads, and bells over open-toed leather sandals in 1978. Knowing or caring naught for this club’s revered folk and country rock history, punks arriving for the first time balked at the two-drink minimum and responded by upending all the tables and chairs to create a pogo dance floor in front of the stage! When [Tom] Waits allegedly tried to pick up on Alice [Bag] by asking what a beauty like her was doing with an asshole like Nickey Beat when she could enjoy the thrill of being with him instead, things only got worse.
ALICE BAG: A group of us were standing in the entrance of Canter’s Deli, ogling the pastries we couldn’t afford. Tom Waits came in and started talking to my friend Lauren, who introduced us. We made small talk. Then I said goodbye and left Lauren talking to him. I didn’t know that he was supposedly a celebrity, so the whole meeting seemed perfectly ordinary. The next time I saw Lauren, she told me that Waits asked what I did. When she said I was a singer, he asked when and where my band was playing and he told her he would go see us. He also asked Lauren who the “dipshit” was that I was with. That “dipshit” would be my then boyfriend, Nickey Beat. Nickey was furious when he heard about it, but it seemed that we had forgotten it. It had blown over by the night of the Troubadour show. That night, we were in the dressing room getting ready when one of our friends told us that Waits was sitting at a table right in front of the stage. Then Nickey went up to the mic and verbally abused Mr. Waits. I believe he called him “a fucking asshole.” Tom sat coolly at his table during the entire set. Punks were throwing chairs into a pile at the back of the club so that they could pogo in front of the stage. The whole area at the front had been cleared, except for one table. Tom was on one side, sitting with a very serious look on his face, and on the other side was this unruly rabble who every now and then shoved his chair or threw a table over his head. But what was really weird was that he didn’t even move the entire time. He sat there until the show was over, and he was still there when everyone left. Meanwhile, we were up in the dressing room thinking, “What a great show.” But when we start trying to load up our equipment these brawny guys told us that we couldn’t. Tom and Nickey started arguing. Members of our band tried to break it up, but the brawny guys were sho
ving us out of the way, saying they wanted to let them fight, and so Tom and Nickey started sluggin’ it out like Neanderthals. And no, I didn’t cover my eyes. Eventually the brawny dudes decided they’d had enough entertainment and broke it up. Tom was taken to another part of the club and we were allowed to leave, vowing never to play the Troubadour again.
CHUCK E. WEISS: I was in Canter’s Deli the night before the trashing of the Troubadour episode, sitting with Waits when this chick Alice from the Bags came up to our table and was flirting with us and then she invited us to come and see her band the next night. I didn’t know what she was doing exactly, but I knew something was wrong. So we get there the next night anyway and she calls out Waits from the stage and said, “Tom Waits is down here trying to pick me up.” She tried to embarrass Waits in front of the crowd. She stopped her show specially to say this. Afterward that Nickey Beat guy called Waits out to further embarrass him—he called him an asshole from the stage, as I recall—but you know, the guys at the Troubadour were all pretty tight, so we just said, “Okay, if that’s what you want.” So we shut the door and locked it after all the punks had gone outside so’s Waits and Nickey Beat could have it out one on one. They had their little scuffle… it was pretty soft-handed… it was like watching two girls fight, pulling hair and open-hand slapping. I’d say it was pretty much a draw. Outside the club the punks kept trying to get back in, and John Sanborn, one of the doormen, was poking them in the face to keep them away from pushing the door open. It was like the movie Night of the Living Dead except with angry punks trying to kick the door down. Nickey disrespected Waits, but Alice did it first. She invited us to come down; we would have never come to see her otherwise. The place got trashed, all right, but the place used to get trashed nearly every other night anyway.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The next day the entire Troubadour staff signed a petition threatening to quit if punk wasn’t banned. The petition referred to punks as “vermin” and the bands as “anti-artists.” Weston deferred to his employees’ demands, and so a show featuring the Zeros, X, and the Flesh Eaters set for the following week was canned.
CHUCK E. WEISS: Man, I seen things happen when country and western bands would play there and brawls would break out—a huge slugfest broke out when Willie Nelson played there, with glasses flyin’, tables and chairs upended, the whole nine yards. I saw Doug Weston do more damage to that club than any punk rocker did that night. Once Doug came out onstage brandishing a shotgun directly at the audience; another time he was kicking things over. I saw Phil Ochs kick shit all over that joint, and I saw a duke-out between Bennett Glotzer, Albert Grossman’s partner, and Dr. John at the front bar. Things like that happened all the time, so the punks kicking over tables and chairs wasn’t more radical than Doug Weston getting onstage and pointing a gun at the audience. Later that same night there was the legendary food fight at Canter’s between the punks and the Troubadour guys… I got into a verbal exchange with Brendan Mullen at the cash register with matzoh balls flying in the background.
***
LEE VING: By the time I’d put my band Fear together, I’d already gone down to the Masque to see what was up with this new punk scene, and what I saw didn’t look like shit at first. I thought: “Aw, man, this punk rock shit sucks, man.”
BRENDAN MULLEN: During early 1978 another hilarious band came out of the Van Nuys area of the Valley. This was one was named Fear, who played their first show in Hollywood with the Skulls, the Deadbeats, and F-Word at a show I promoted at Larchmont Hall. But Fear was a different kind of punk band. Not influenced by Bowie or the Pistols, Fear fused an aggressive, revved-up take on punk with unapologetic out-and-out heavy metal riffs pulled from the Unholy Book of Sabbath and Motorhead, and there’s no doubt they helped to prime SoCal audiences for speed-metal, speedcore, or speed thrash nearly a decade before Metallica, Slayer, and their post-Venom ilk generated hundreds of millions of dollars in record and concert ticket sales.
LEE VING: The second time I went to the Masque, it was even worse, but then on my third try I saw Black Randy and the Controllers and I immediately thought, “This is way closer to what I’m thinking.” Good, strong rhythms is what I wanted to bring to it. A total all-out metal assault. You can thrash and still be in tune, musically speaking. Why not? Part of the Fear concept was to put the fear of God into the punks. We made a lot of enemies in San Francisco. They were surprisingly ready to fight up there, I had to put more than one uppity Clown Alley joker in his place… at the edge of the curb. Mostly it would be juiced-up jar heads trying to stir up beefs because of my hair color, but rankling people wasn’t strange to us, it was definitely a part of what Fear wanted to do as a band. And we weren’t just looking to wig out bank workers and straight people only; we were looking directly at the punk audience as a prime target as well.
BRENDAN MULLEN: I once witnessed Lee Ving in a pink hair rinse staring down three drunk marines in San Francisco, saying, “Yeah, it’s my real color, d’ya like it?” Watching these fuckers back off was the finale to one night on the town! Although most Hollywood punks were amused by Fear, many curled their lips and rolled their mascaraed eyes in horror, and I was slagged for booking an “uncool” band of macho metalhead dicks that weren’t “one of us.”
DARRELL WAYNE: Lee came off as a tough, street-fighting New Yorker type, but was actually a very kind and respectful man. He became a good friend and we hung out a lot at Barney’s Beanery, trying to drink every kind of beer they had.
LEE VING: We had enemies everywhere we went. A lot of promoters got shit for booking us. We didn’t physically ruin the place we worked in; it was because the music was just too weird and aggressive for some. So we went looking for bands we could talk into opening shows for… not necessarily because we admired their musical direction, just that we thought it was close enough that we could pick up new fans of our own if we could just get out and play for them. And X supplied that many, many times, as did the Dils, the Plugz, and the Bags, and we were real happy to be involved.
CHRIS D.: I remember there was kind of a backlash in Hollywood, not in terms of the music, because a lot of people appreciated how aggressive they were, but it just got so much more violent. Some people embraced it and some people really hated it.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Fear’s blatant heavy metal leaning with angry punk lyrics (early Metallica member Cliff Burton had a Fear sticker on his bass) was equally as controversial as their gay-baiting, between-song banter. Fear alienated some among the mostly closeted but considerably large don’t-ask-don’t-tell homo constituency within the old Hollywood/Masque scene, which was probably as much as 30–35 percent gay, maybe even more.
LEE VING: We did the fag shtick ’cause we thought we’d found a source of humor. I thought everybody would get the joke pretty easy, ’cause there was Philo Cramer, our guitar player, wearing a dress onstage. It was strictly a joke, a confrontational tack to get these big boneheaded jocks all riled up. We decided it was our job to throw these bozos into states of mass homosexual panic. The more “mature” punk sophisticates found us “vulgar,” “too heavy metal,” “too macho”… oh, and “puerile” was another one, I think. Okay, whatever, but what we were doing was never mean-spirited, it was not meant to be taken personally by anyone, we were never putting out any hate messages against gay people at all. How could anyone be offended by a band whose guitar player is in a dress offering people in the audience a dollar to be his friend? He’d say in this little pleading voice: “We just want you guys to like us …” We were goofs, cutups, and we were willing to delve into any area for a laugh. Philo is a great musician who had a real twisted sense of humor and we happened to think he was very funny. I don’t know what image people had of us. I was going to the gym and my arms were big, but we weren’t into beating anybody or having people be physically intimidated by us. The idea of Fear was that it was something we all knew about and everybody would be able to relate to it in some way. We just wanted to be entertaining and to play this music a
nd maybe sell some fuckin’ records. It wasn’t about fag bashing or hurting anybody, for fuck’s sake.
RIK L. RIK: It just wasn’t acceptable to be gay in the early L.A. punk rock scene. Even though it was obvious in his manner that he was such a raving queen, with the way he talked and everything, Darby’s party line was that he was asexual, and we pretty much believed that. But then I’d be alone with him at night and he’d try to get me loaded so he could have an easier time taking advantage of me.
JOHN DOE: There was an undercurrent of not accepting the gay lifestyle with bands like Fear.
PHRANC: I was always out as a lesbian. I can’t remember any other out queers at that time. There were the Screamers, but nobody ever really talked or sang about being queer. The punk scene was the only time I felt I had a peer group. All the dykes I’d hung out with before were about ten years older than me. I was young and angry and political. It was the first time, maybe the only time I ever felt I fit in.
GORILLA ROSE: All these young California kids were coming out of their folks’ houses to view this wild music scene that was happening in alleys and ripped-up clubs and funky old places. You’d leave home and find out there’s more than what your parents had told you. You can either be an asshole and stay Beach Boys, “California Rules” and “babes, babes, babes” and “I’m a guy, I just drink beer and play guitar,” or you can start exploring alternative ideas. Start taking drugs. Start experimenting sexually.