by Marc Spitz
RIK L. RIK: The relationship I had with Darby ended because he had this big crush on me and I wasn’t feeling it back. I knew I was kidding myself that he liked me for me and only wanted to be like my best friend. He finally tried to put a move on me at his house, but he did it in a really elaborate, mind-controlling way. The whole time he was talking about Rimbaud and Verlaine, and how the greatest men in the history of our culture were homosexual. He talked up the Greeks, how they were like the apex of civility and that it was a totally homosexual culture where women were only used for procreation. He’d also read up on a lot of mind control techniques. He would keep the lights off, then turn them on at certain key moments. He had this whole system he was experimenting with, but it didn’t really work on me, although it freaked me out enough that I told my girlfriend about it. She was only fourteen and when she saw Darby at the Masque the next night she said, “Hey, I heard you tried to pick up my boyfriend.” Our relationship died after that; Darby completely cut me out of his life. I was devastated because he was my best friend, and to this day, he is the most important person I’ve ever met.
K.K. BARRETT: It was a time of gay fear and there were a lot gays in the scene like Tomata, Tommy, Darby, Maicol Sinatra, Kid Congo, Craig Lee, but it was all hidden, ’cause there was a lot of homophobia going on.
GERBER: Darby was very freaked out about his own sexuality, and I know this from our early acid trips when we tried to figure out if we were even capable of having sex at all. For many years he just claimed to be abstinent; he just was unable to admit that he was gay—other than to me when we were on acid.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: The only openly gay punks I knew were Maicol Sinatra and Craig Lee. Darby never said, “I’m gay.” We kind of figured it out later, but he was very closeted.
K.K. BARRETT: So was Tomata. You’ve got a scene that’s so close-knit, you’re fearful of judgment. It was descendent from the glam era when Bowie publicly said, “Oh, hi… I’m bi.” Girls could do it both ways, sure, and that was very cool, but guys couldn’t, no way.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Punks were getting away from that whole wimpy glam thing. Now it was supposed to be mean and tough.
K.K. BARRETT: Even though Dee Dee Ramone wrote “53rd and 3rd,” it was tough. He wasn’t announcing that he was a gay hustler. Dee Dee was doing it for money.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Most of my gay drinking pals actually became some of Fear’s biggest fans and shared my perception that Fear’s alleged homophobia was less about hate-driven g-boy bashing; it was more akin to someone yelling “Faggots!” into a roomful of drunken rednecks in a southern cowboy bar at 1 A.M. on a Saturday night and then watching all hell break loose.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: The Canterbury was this amazing old apartment building in Hollywood with the cheapest rents you could find. We were still living at the Plunger Pit when Rod Donahue came over one day and said, “I found this apartment. This place is only a hundred fifty bucks a month and it’s only a block away from the Masque.”
TERRY GRAHAM: The proximity to the Masque was the whole reason the Canterbury flourished as this tiny punk colony.
MARGOT OLAVERRA: The Canterbury was this classic old Hollywood apartment building, but it was so run-down. It was a haven for underclass marginals, especially punk rockers like myself with no regular income. It had a really big hallway with staircases going on both sides, and these rickety elevators that smelled of mildew and petrified soggy mattresses and this red carpet that wasn’t shag and wasn’t flat, in between—perfect to capture dust and dirt. There were Vietnamese refugees living there and you could smell the rice cooking all the time. This crazy girl from Detroit named Sheila was there. We used to get into all kinds of trouble. The Plungers moved in there, too. Hellin had an apartment there. Alice and Nickey Beat had an apartment there. Belinda lived with Lorna Doom from the Germs. Darby used to hang out there all the time.
JANE WIEDLIN: We’d run around from apartment to apartment. It was like a dormitory for punks.
TERRY GRAHAM: I was dating Jane Wiedlin when she was living there. I always had to make sure that she actually stayed in her bed at night. She would get up and sleepwalk nude around the apartment. People would find her walking around the halls either completely nude or with a sheet around her. I’d notice the door open in the middle of the night and go catch her.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: It was 50 percent blacks, then all these criminals, pimps, junkies, and a lot of insane people who talked to themselves and didn’t wear shoes.
K.K. BARRETT: The burned-out glam rockers Zolar X lived there, too. At one time they’d worn silver space suits with antennae, but now they were just burned-out drunks.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: As soon as we moved in, the building manager was arrested for shooting someone, and we got a new manager called the Reverend. He had this weird religion that was called Animalism, which didn’t believe in killing any living things, including bugs, so there were cockroaches all over the place!
K.K. BARRETT: Animalism was some strange, self-invented Islamic sect. We’d signed up to move in, and the week before we were to move, the landlord shot somebody in the lobby and killed him, but we still moved into this place anyway.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: The Reverend was this big black guy, and he brought all his Muslim friends with names like Omar and Mohammed.
K.K. BARRETT: Loaded on PCP.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: They’d call us the “punk rocks.”
K.K. BARRETT: You’d run into them at night in the hallway and they’d be like, “You punk rocks stay away from me. You crazy! You insane! You stay away from me!”
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: And in the daytime, they’d blast Marvin Gaye.
K.K. BARRETT: One time the Rev came up to us while we were playing Coltrane’s Ascension very loud plugged into an amp and it was filling the whole courtyard.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Across the hall from us lived these Okies named Buzzard and Li’l Bit, who’d come out with her gun all the time—“I’m gonna git you.” There were these collisions of culture all the time.
K.K. BARRETT: Buzzard claimed to be the drummer on “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris. Total burnout paranoids. “What are you doin’? What are you doin’? Don’t be loud.”
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: There were Hell’s Angels there, too, and full-on transvestites. Jane had a big war going on with Buzzard and Li’l Bit. Belinda and Lorna had an apartment together. Margot lived there, too.
MARGOT OLAVERRA: I remember Black Randy howling right on the roof of the Canterbury. A girl got raped one night and she was screaming these bloodcurdling screams, and because everybody used to scream all the time, nobody thought there was anything unusual going on. It was that kind of environment. Very crazy.
K.K. BARRETT: The Reverend let us set up a rehearsal room in the basement, so me and Paul Roessler set it up, and all the Reverend’s friends came down and ripped off our instruments. We had to go from apartment to apartment to get them back. That same room was where the Go-Go’s rehearsed. Jane Drano lived down the hall.
SHAWN STERN: Darby Crash was a little wuss. He stole some of my band’s [the Extremes] equipment from the rehearsal room in the basement of the Canterbury, and we confronted him, and he took us to where he hid it real fast ’cause we were gonna kick his ass. It wasn’t the Black Muslims who lived in the building who took our stuff… it was Darby. People thought Darby was tough. He wasn’t tough at all. He was a pussy. The Muslims were pretty cool. I didn’t have any problem with them at all. We’d say to them, “What’s up?” when we saw them.
BELINDA CARLISLE: At least fifty punks were living at the Canterbury. There were a few homeless street people hanging out there, too, but there was music coming from every room. You’d walk into the courtyard and there’d be a dozen different punk songs all playing at the same time. It was an incredible environment.
JENNY LENS: It was an age before Reagan where one week’s work paid for your apartment. Now it’s three weeks’ work. Many people squatted or paid cheap rent at the Canterbury,
where there were several people to an apartment. The people who were really involved with the scene got little part-time jobs here and there, but God knows what some people were doing to make money.
MARGOT OLAVERRA: We were so deeply embroiled in the scene that everybody was really supportive of other bands. The whole thing was such a close-knit community—that’s what I value about those days so much. We were really supportive of each other; it wasn’t competitive at all.
TERRY GRAHAM: You slept all day ’cause you were up all night. Parties were anywhere and everywhere and there was an ever-present search for sex with a different person every night. Jane and John Doe were together on some intimate level, and when I found out I didn’t like it, and I was like, “It’s John’s fault,” but then I thought about it a bit and decided that it’s really not John’s fault because if some gorgeous young girl came up to me, basically offering me her body… those things happen, you know? I recall very little fighting in the early days. Everybody was too busy laughing, drinking, shooting speed and dope, and having some kind of sex.
BRENDAN MULLEN: One night Darby Crash got into a heated argument with Alice Bag outside the Canterbury over the role of the performer, with Darby maintaining on the one hand that a performer is supposed to cultivate a deitylike untouchability, a larger-than-life persona, while Alice took the fundamentalist punk rock line that separation between performer and audience should be eliminated. It came to blows literally. Alice punched Darby’s lights out.
ALICE BAG: Darby and I had been getting into arguments ever since we first met outside the Orpheum Theater on the night of the Germs’ debut. We were both living at home, but we’d talk on the phone. We could talk about anything and disagree about it. Usually the disagreements led to a rousing argument, and sometimes to a good laugh. Both Darby and I were interested in philosophy, so our arguments were frequently inspired by whatever we happened to be reading that day. By the time I was living at the Canterbury, Darby and I had established a love/hate relationship. We could have a lot of fun together as long as we stayed away from discussing anything that meant anything to us. We also drank a lot. We could always agree on having a drink, and if we had that drink we could always count on getting into a fight. That night at the Canterbury we had been sitting inside on the stairs, drinking. It used to really bother me that Darby enjoyed trying to control people. I felt it was demeaning not only to his followers but to himself. It used to bother Darby that I treated my fans as equals. He would lecture me on what people expect in a leader. We had very, very different views on this subject. I think we had both really thought long and hard about the responsibilities that went along with having a bunch of kids look up to you. We were both committed to our beliefs. Anyway, we took ourselves very seriously, and we were very drunk, so we started arguing, then shouting at each other, and finally throwing punches. Although I can’t say for sure, I’m willing to say I probably started the fight. I was quite a hothead in those days. Did he hit back? Of course he did. It was a good scrap! When I was younger I knew a lot of people who thought that most other people were basically stupid and required a benevolent dictatorship to keep them in line. At some point in my life I’m sure I agreed until I realized that in the long-term nothing much good can come from absolving people from thinking and making their own choices. I don’t know if Darby aspired to be a benign dictator—I do know that he felt that people who could be controlled should be controlled. I am sure he would have been flattered if someone had compared him to Manson or Hubbard or Hitler. We got drunk. We got in an argument. We duked it out. And, of course I won!
HAL NEGRO: A bunch of junkies calling themselves the Youth Party began spray-painting swastikas in the lobby and in the basement rehearsal facility in the Canterbury, where the Go-Go’s sometimes rehearsed. The swastikas were countered by a series of Star of David emblems sprayed adjacent to them, since there were several Jewish punkers also in residence, but nobody made anything further of it until “America’s favorite Jewish lesbian folksinger” protested in her song “Punks Take Off Your Swastikas.”
TOMMY GEAR: At that time the use of the swastika had a different significance as far as its application by youth was concerned. It was an interesting transformation. Then it was about the rejection of icons and their meaning. We wanted to subvert or transform accepted meanings or appropriate them for other purposes. In appropriating the swastika we were not trying to be neo-Nazis, but trying to be proactive, challenging the discourse which gave that icon a particular place and meaning in cultural sensibility.
PHRANC: I wrote the song “Take Off Your Swastika” as a response to a lot of people wearing swastikas just to piss people off. That’s when I started introducing myself as “The All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger.” I started performing acoustically so people could hear the words. Some people took off their swastikas.
KIM FOWLEY: The scene at the Masque and the Canterbury got into a lot of decadence and debauchery, and all of the fucking and sucking, and the heroin and the dog fucking and obese shit-assing with the Go-Go’s and their early circle. Somewhere in the vomit, the blood, and the vaginal pus, somewhere among the filthy hypo syringes and the blubber, there probably was poetry. Scene cheerleaders got to have their scabied cunts eaten on dirty roach-infested floors while this loopy music raged and the worms crawled, you know? It was excremental existential sexual shit at death’s door.
GEZA X: Kim Fowley is a great poet. His poem “Hollywood Trash” absolutely brings tears to my eyes.
TERRY GRAHAM: The Canterbury period makes me think of three things: mildew, stale vomit, and soiled panties.
MARGOT OLAVERRA: I had to move out of the Canterbury after a fire when the ceiling collapsed and drenched all my belongings. The whole apartment above burned out and caved into mine. They wanted to renovate the building, and so they started driving out all the punks by starting fires in the hallways near the apartments… I had to move that very night.
BELINDA CARLISLE: There was a vibe there, an energy before the whole drug thing divided the scene.
JOHN DOE: From ’77 to ’79 it was an inclusive scene, and from ’79 onward it became splintered. People went to the kind of shows that they identified with. There became a more defined rockabilly crowd and a more defined hardcore crowd. It used to be inclusive just because it wasn’t Linda Ronstadt, Ted Nugent, and the Eagles.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The first casualty from the original ’77 punks were the Skulls, the sloppiest and most fun of the original Masque bands. Marc “Conehead” Moreland spent the next six months writing songs with Stan Ridgway from the Model Citizens. The collaboration emerged in December ’78 as the electropop Wall of Voodoo.
STAN RIDGWAY: Marc Moreland was the guitar player in the Skulls, one of the thrashier Masque bands who played loud, fast downstroke punk rock. Although Marc was an amazingly accomplished musician behind all the feedback and chaos onstage, I’m not sure most of the punks knew just how much more advanced as a musician Marc actually was. We bonded over similar interests in Kraftwerk and Eno. As musicians, we both knew the three punk rock chords oh too well, but by mid-’78 hale and hearty hi-ho punk rock, fun as it most surely was, just wasn’t enough to keep our interest musically much longer. I began coaxing Marc into playing more experimental styles of music with me. I had a Farfisa organ and a bunch of rhythm machines, Marc had his guitar and a wonderful musical imagination. I didn’t even want to be the singer. I tried out various vocalists, but nobody would sing what I’d written because it wasn’t like Iggy or Johnny Rotten. When Voodoo eventually started playing out in late ’78 we were not well liked by the punk rock crowd. They dismissed us as new wave. I thought, “Gosh, like the French New Wave? Like Jean-Luc Godard? That’s cool, man.” It was their way to discount a music that wasn’t proletarian enough for them, but it was the energy and the take-charge DIY aspect of punk, not the sound or the fashion aspect of it, that informed what we were doing. We were cast as “art punk.”
MILES COPELAND: I never he
ard the term art punk. To me, bands like Voodoo were certainly new wave, because new wave basically meant a new way of looking at things. What Wall of Voodoo did, for example, still strikes me as the most brilliant and creative exciting musical thing that I ever signed. They were very eccentric in their own way, which prevented them from being as big as they could’ve been, but musically, and what they did, the marriage of spaghetti Western and techno, and Stan’s lyrics and singing style—I mean the whole thing is still brilliant. It’s still some of my favorite music ever.
MIKE ATTA: The Middle Class might have been the beginning of the second wave, but it was the same typical story: high school losers find guitars. As far as being an early hardcore band, we’d heard about the Hollywood bands like the Bags and the Skulls. We didn’t consciously try to play faster. I think it was because we had more energy than you can imagine. I had just turned seventeen. Our drummer had just turned fifteen. And we were the straightest people in the world. We were drinking lots of Dr Pepper.
MIKE PATTON: The Middle Class was sort of like the Zeros and F-Word, not musically alike, but because we were really young and from the ’burbs… and because we weren’t art students, either. The Middle Class was just kids from Santa Ana in Orange County, but it didn’t take us long to get shows. When we first showed up at the Masque around mid-’78, we felt like we were from Montana or something, but once we got our first show everybody thought we were cute. We weren’t fashion punks, we didn’t dress the part, and we were openly from Orange County… we were not putting on any sort of image. We were just who we were, and to us that was what punk rock was all about—something honest and pure. We didn’t drink. We drank Dr Pepper and we played really fast and people thought we were unusual, so bands put us on opening up their shows. We didn’t have a hard time getting in. When we first showed up in Hollywood, it was a fairly small group of people who lived at the Canterbury apartments and everybody was very nice. Everybody was cool, there were very few attitudes. The Bags, especially, and the other Hollywood bands were real friendly to us.