by Marc Spitz
MIKE ATTA: We came up before there was any bad feelings about bands from Orange County. That would happen a bit later. But they liked us when we first came out, the Hollywood crowd. I think they respected that it was more about music than fashion to us. I thought the whole bondage pants thing looked cool, but I also thought that it would look really stupid on me.
POISON IVY RORSCHACH: The Cramps weren’t thinking of this weird subgenre when we coined the term “psychobilly” in 1976 to describe what we were doing. To us all the ’50s rockabillies were psycho to begin with; it just came with the turf as a given, like a crazed, sped-up hillbilly boogie version of country. We hadn’t meant playing everything superloud at superheavy hardcore punk tempos with a whole style and look, which is what “psychobilly” came to mean later in the ’80s. We also used the term “rockabilly voodoo” on our early flyers.
JEFFREY LEE PIERCE: The arrival of the Cramps in L.A. convinced us that there was plenty of American culture out there that needed to be destroyed. I highlighted this period by smashing a hundred-dollar Ersel Hickey single on Sunset Boulevard and shouting “Fuck rockabilly!” According to Phast Phreddie, I then promptly hid in the brush beside the Cinerama Dome at the sound of police helicopters, convinced that I was a Viet Cong cadre escaping the Americans.
KID CONGO POWERS: I nearly dropped dead when I saw the Cramps… it seemed like they were from outer space or something… there was no comparison. I’d never seen anything like it. Jeffrey and I thought they were the shit… they were the only band that was really reconfiguring what was going on with the old and the new, all the way from the ’50s to present-day punk rock.
POISON IVY RORSCHACH: Roky Erickson, Suicide, the Ramones, and a bunch of old ’50s rockabillies were our biggest musical influences, but we never really fit in with the New York punk scene as such. We were always able to get good gigs at all the best punk clubs, we’d sell out multiple nights, and kids loved us, so we’re not complaining, but the rock writers hated us, and we were written off as some sort of clown act. Once we even did a benefit for Punk magazine, and they never even bothered to list us as playing, nor did anyone even say, “Hey, thanks, you guys” after the gig, in print or on the phone, or whatever. Mediawise, it was like we didn’t even exist in New York, yet we’d sell out everywhere we went just by word of mouth.
MILES COPELAND: People definitely took to them here. Walking down the street in the hot Los Angeles sunshine with Lux and Ivy and Bryan Gregory in their vinyl suits and white was something else. People looked at them like they were from another planet.
POISON IVY RORSCHACH: The New York punk scene was in its death throes. It was all over, it had been for a while, whereas in L.A. it seemed like it was just getting going. We decided to move here for a number of reasons: the climate, and we had friends here like Pleasant Gehman and Kid Congo Powers. What clinched it was when we discovered we could live twice as well out here ’cause everything, especially rents, was becoming so expensive in New York. We weren’t particularly trying to align ourselves with the scene out here or to become an “L.A. band” or anything because we travel so much, nationally and internationally… we just saw L.A. as the most practical place to be based. Our friends were here, so was our label, and we’ve been based here ever since. Moving here just made everything easier.
BUNKY KIRCHENHEIMER: The punk scene started to slowly move beyond Hollywood toward downtown L.A. because of the Atomic Café, this grimy old noodle café with a cool still-functioning neon sign on East First Street in Little Tokyo. This joint originally opened in the ’40s… now it was becoming the after-hours focal point of the scene after Tomata du Plenty from the Screamers told everybody that it was his favorite place to go to wind down after shows.
PAUL GREENSTEIN: Nancy, the daughter of the owner of the place, targeted the punks with a full page in Slash after she told me that her family’s business was facing closure because the landlord had just jacked the rent 300 percent. I told her if she’d put up for expenses, I’d design ads for placement in Slash and reprogram the jukebox. Nancy and her family were eagerly amenable. Soon after you’d see punkers and new wavers rubbing elbows with cops, insomniac hyper Japanese restaurant workers, cab drivers, and other graveyard workers. Nancy encouraged bands to put up flyers and posters for their gigs, and we programmed the jukebox with local 45’s.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The place served chow till 4 A.M. Nancy reinvented herself as Atomic Nancy and courted more members of the punk scene at the urging of Paul Greenstein, who had previously worked at Pasadena Arts Center as a nude model for budding artists.
PAUL GREENSTEIN: I liked the bar at Madame Wong’s in Chinatown, an area which was adjacent to the Atomic Café in downtown L.A. I used to go there at three or four in the afternoon during my rounds downtown and have a beer. I’d just hang around and talk to George Wong about China. I told George I had a great idea and he said he’d have to talk to his wife, Esther. She of course said no.
NICKEY BEAT: When the Bags played with X at Madame Wong’s, this kooky little Chinese restaurant downtown, the place got trashed—not as bad as when the Troubadour got trashed, but tables and chairs got knocked about to create a pogo space, and the Bags were like kinda hardcore before there was hardcore. Paul Greenstein gets on the mic and says: “The Whisky and Starwood are fucked, and if you don’t behave, we’ll close you up, too.” The Bags got the plug pulled on them, and Greenstein blamed me and my girlfriend Barbara James for starting shit and had us thrown out, but it was Craig Lee who kept trying to incite a riot. Chairs were thrown, a few glasses got broken… I got into it with Paul in defense of Barb… he was trying to physically restrain her from throwing things.
PAUL GREENSTEIN: The next week the Alley Cats played and somebody banged into the cigarette machine and Esther went off on me again. Then this wimpy power pop group from Oklahama called 20/20 was bugging me to play a residency, but I wouldn’t let ’em do it, so they snuck around my back to Esther. After about three months I’d had it with Esther’s tantrums, and since she’d never really hired me in the first place, I was ready to quit. One of her classics was “No girl singers. All time girl singer make people too crazy… no good.” This came a week after a show with the Bags and X where we had a minor insurrection during the Bags’ set. That and the night two birds duked it out while Dianne from the Alley Cats was singing convinced her of the infinite wisdom of this edict. Of course, the dear, sweet Motels were a whole different story.
MARTHA DAVIS: The new wave thing came along and the Motels fit in somehow. We were too raucous to be like the regular California sound, we were way too weird for that, but we weren’t playing three-chord punk rock, either. We gigged at Madame Wong’s constantly.
BRENDAN MULLEN: In June of 1979 the Hong Kong Café, another Chinese restaurant in a tight business jam, approximately the same size as Wong’s, opened up to punk right across the same courtyard, and the bookers began ruthlessly pirating Wong’s bands. Esther quickly declared that any band who dared play the Hong Kong would never play her room again. The two clubs were in the same mall, within sight of each other. Wong’s ad slogan was: “Home of the Motels, the Knack, 20/20, the Naughty Sweeties, Sumner, Bates Motel, Great Buildings, Bugs Tomorrow, Shandi, Sensible Shoes”… and at least two dozen third-rate bar bands trying to catch the new wave with bland pop rock songs, Blondie and the Cars being their protos. Thus the punk rock which-side-are-you-on dichotomy was even more intensified: Are you punk (self-taught, self-contained DIY) or new wave (musically comprised of shitty theoretical pop songs drenched with three-part harmony la-la’s supported by major-label hype)? Somebody ran a piece in the L.A. Times called “The Chinatown Punk Wars.”
GREG SHAW: At some point back in ’77, Warner Brothers acquired distribution of Sire, with all of Seymour’s new bands, and was signing the Pistols as well, so they’d already made a corporate decision to get into punk. I was invited to give an orientation talk to Warner’s creative people. I went over the ways this “new wave” m
usic differed from the “album rock” they were more familiar with and discussed the politics. They went on to market “punk” under the name “new wave” and quietly forced Sire to drop the rest of its punk roster.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Seymour Stein followed his punk ethnic-cleansing operation with an open letter he circulated to the nation’s FM program directors…. Sy, or maybe it was Shaw who hacked it for him, wrote, “One of the most significant trends in recent years has been ‘new wave’ rock, all-too-often wrongly referred to as ‘punk’ rock.” The term “punk” is as offensive as “race” and “hillbilly” were when they were used to describe “rhythm and blues” and “country and western” music thirty years ago.
DARRELL WAYNE: Both Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Elvis Costello were considered punk rockers before they sold a bunch of records. After they signed to major labels, all of a sudden they were new wave. Same with local bands like Devo and Oingo Boingo.
D.J. BONEBRAKE: Some hardline punks even said X was too poppish for the old Hollywood scene. Somebody once said, “You guys are like Elvis Costello.” That was a big put-down. It meant you were candy-ass new wave opportunists rather than true punk. I didn’t care, I just wanted to play music that I liked.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Then Greg Shaw’s Bomp magazine put out their famous issue, touting power pop as the next big thing. There may have been no Beatles or Stones in ’77, but in ’78 it was back to suits and three-part harmonies according to Uncle Greg.
DON WALLER: I liked some classic power pop records—the early Who, Raspberries, Small Faces, the Jam, the Buzzcocks, all the usual suspects—but that music’s been basically just a cult jam for almost thirty years. A good song in any style is a good song, but that’s a real limited style and you’re competing with Pete Townsend and Ray Davies and even Big Star and Paul Weller, and you have to do something more original than just imitating the records you love. The pop groups of L.A. in the ’70s were a little bit older and so were their fans. I think Greg was doin’ more than his share of wishful thinking ’cos you know rock ’n’ roll theory is one thing and actual events may vary. …
PETER CASE: I hated that power pop versus punk shit. I didn’t want to have anything to do with power pop. When Shaw came up with that power pop cover of Bomp, I hated it. I liked punk ’cause it was a much better word with a much wider scope for interpretation and he was talking up its “built-in obsolescence”… its limitations, for fuck’s sake. As if “power pop” or new wave weren’t even more incredibly stunted and limiting terms bound for surefire overnight disappearance. I’d been around these things that took off as fads that didn’t include me before, and once again I didn’t fit in. I felt a lot closer in spirit to bands like Black Randy, the Weirdos, X, the Germs… and the records Geza X was producing for Dangerhouse. All those things were much more important to me than any power pop. I just liked rock and roll. The punk versus power pop was hype, but it was fun to have a battle and everybody had a club or a side to be on. Greg wanted to push that angle so he could be the boss of it, I guess, but I think he’s really basically a good guy.
DOUG FIEGER: The Knack had the idea to do band uniforms, which nobody was doing at that time, so everybody had a white shirt and black pants. Bruce’s girlfriend worked in the clothing trade and she got us these skinny black ties. When we got successful, it became something that people copied, but it wasn’t a conscious thought to say, “We’re gonna create some kind of look.” It was to differentiate us from the bands who dressed punk, and the L.A. casual bands who wore Hawaiian shirts.
PAUL GREENSTEIN: Esther Wong declared that any band who dared to play the Hong Kong Café would never play her room again. The two clubs were in the same mall, within sight of each other. Wong’s ad slogan was: “Home of the Motels, the Knack, 20/20, the Naughty Sweeties, Sumner, Bates Motel, Great Buildings, Bugs Tomorrow… and a host of other loser bar bands trying to catch the new wave” …
TITO LARRIVA: I don’t know why, but we were the only band who could play both the Hong Kong and Wong’s. I guess it was because we had a slow song. We had “Electrify Me.” It was a ballad. Maybe that was it. I don’t know. Beats me.
SLASH MAGAZINE, “LOCAL SHIT” COLUMN, “WONG VS. KONG” (SEPTEMBER 1979): Ever since the Hong Kong Café opened its upstairs room and bar to punk we’ve heard rumors that the neighboring club across the plaza, Madame Wong’s, has been pressuring bands with ultimatums: “Either you never even try to be booked at the Hong Kong, or my doors will forever be closed to you and your music.” Of course most of the bands playing the Hong Kong regularly these days were already banned ages ago from the Wong place, but apparently the old lady never tires of adding new names to her prestigious black book.
PAUL GREENSTEIN: Yeah, Esther’s edict made no sense at all since most of the acts who played the Hong Kong were harder-edged anyway and she had already banned all punk shows long before the Hong Kong even opened.
GREG SHAW: There were pop bands alongside the most extreme punks in every music scene in the ’70s. The two mixed as easily as Blondie and the Dead Boys sharing the stage at CBGB.
MARTHA DAVIS: The Knack single-handedly started a feeding frenzy in Los Angeles during the summer of ’79. When “My Sharona” happened, the industry went, “Oh my God, they’re here!” Once the record companies decided that they didn’t have to go to New York to sign new wave bands, they came in and signed every band in L.A.…. every little bar band that played Madame Wong’s. Anybody who had a skinny tie got a record deal. You could be walking down the street in a skinny tie and you’re getting signed. Six months later, most of them were dropped.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The Knack hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the summer of ’79 with “My Sharona.” With an amazing Bruce Gary drum hook, a knockoff of a Zeppelin riff, the insufferably smarmy thing was the triumph of the “skinny tie” power pop simp faction over the messy true grit of the Masque type of bands.
DOUG FIEGER: Get the Knack went gold in thirteen days. It was the fastest debut platinum album in history. “My Sharona” went to number one within a month. It was a true happening all over the world.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The Knack’s success was a crushing blow to bands like X, the Weirdos, the Screamers, the Go-Go’s, and the Germs, all of whom had designs or dreams of going big time.
HARVEY KUBERNIK: Remember the Nuke the Knack campaigns? When you start selling two, three, four million records and everybody else collectively sold forty thousand, there’s no camaraderie, nothing but hatred and anger and division… but the Knack were too busy touring Japan.
DOUG FIEGER: The Chipmunks did three of our songs on Chipmunk Punk.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Just as the scene was being split into harder-driving, superadrenalized extreme power metal-punk on one side and simpy new wave power pop on the other, the first L.A. punk compilation album, the one-sided Yes L.A., was released by Danger-house, featuring X, the Alley Cats, the Bags, the Germs, the Eyes, and Black Randy.
NICKEY BEAT: There was this record called No New York, so we did Yes L.A.
RIK L. RIK: The Beach Boulevard compilation came out on Posh Boy Records like in the fall of ’79 just as the suburban hardcore attitude was beginning to kick in. It had an accessible poppiness to it and a great sound, but the packaging didn’t fit the sound; it was weird, like all the Posh Boy releases. Only one band on it was actually from the beach—the Crowd from Huntington. The Simple-tones were from Rosemead, I was from Covina, and Negative Trend that I recorded with was even from the Bay Area! But sonically it’s a great record, and it sort of documented the rise of suburban punk.
ROBBIE FIELDS: I got serious with the Posh Boy label after I began working with David Hines, a top-class engineer whose expertise enabled me to produce the Rodney on the ROQ series. The label also allowed me the luxury of cherry-picking the best songs from a slew of spanking new second-generation suburban California punk groups. Originally I had badly wanted to do a compilation of all the top in-crowd Hollywood bands, like the
Screamers, the Weirdos, X, the Germs, the Bags, and so on, but couldn’t get anybody to agree—they all thought they were holding out for major deals—so I went out deep into the suburbs scouring for younger, fresher talent. Rik L. Rik, Negative Trend, the Simpletones from Rose-mead, and Huntington Beach’s the Crowd had already recorded tracks for me, so I threw together the Beach Boulevard compilation instead. In a time of New York black leather and London safety pins, I thought the beach remained a cultural icon that suburban teens could relate to.
BRENDAN MULLEN: In January 1979, following their sensational L.A. debut at the Other Masque, aka the New Masque, aka the Second Masque, the club I opened after the fire marshalls shut down the original Masque for live shows, Levi and the Rockats, managed by Leee “Black” Childers, former MainMan publicist and ex-manager of Johnny Thunders, became the toast of the town.
LEVI DEXTER: We came out to L.A. in early ’79 and were an instant sensation at the Other Masque on Vine Street.
HAL NEGRO: For a while there, rockabilly was the it thing. Levi and the Rockats hit Hollywood like a mini British invasion. Rockabilly was going to be the next big thing, and a lot of the trendy-type punks completely jumped on it.
LEVI DEXTER: We were on the cover of the Sunday Times Calendar and the L.A. Weekly, too. We were on the Midnight Special. All first-time-evers for an unsigned band. It was all flukey. After the Merv Griffin Show the buzz on rockabilly was really strong.
LEEE “BLACK” CHILDERS: The press was waiting for the next big thing… it was rockabilly’s moment. We did Midnight Special without a record deal. We kept the rock and roll philosophy that we’d play anywhere. So one night we were playing out in West L.A., at some crummy little joint called Club 88, and the Rockats were headlining and the Go-Go’s were the support group, so the place was packed. David Byrne was there, all these people were there… it had become like “the thing” to go to, and so this guy came up afterward and said, “I’m from Merv Griffin” And we went, “Oh right, sure you are,” and he said, “Will you come on the show?” And we said, “Well, what do we have to do?” He said, “Nothing. All you have to do is say yes.” So the next thing we knew we were in the green room with Betty White and Barbara Cartland!