We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  RENE DAALDER: I raised the money to build Rhapsody Studios on Mel-rose, a soundstage facility which included a state-of-the-art recording studio, from the father of Joe Kaufman, who was one of the producers on John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. My friend Carel Struycken, who’s since become famous as a character actor, built the studio with his own hands. It was a unique opportunity for everyone. Everybody could use the studio for whatever they wanted, but nobody ever booked a recording session. Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, the Blasters, Chris D.’s Flesh Eaters, and others recorded there, but not the Screamers, unless I proposed a video-or film-related context. It was not clear exactly where this lack of initiative came from, but it certainly was not for lack of encouragement on our part. We had built the Screamers their own multimedia studio, but they didn’t seem much inclined to take advantage of it to do something together.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: When the Screamers got together with Rene, they thought, “Maybe we’ll be movie stars as well.” And during the production of this Population One film, things started to break down between them. Tomata was the star, Tommy was doing the music, and K.K. was doing the art direction. Soon they realized this guy wanted things done his way, and then he wanted this, and then he wanted that, and suddenly it wasn’t the Screamers anymore.

  RENE DAALDER: One of the reasons the Screamers didn’t do anything together was the fact that Tommy and Tomata hardly talked to each other anymore and had had a falling-out, the exact nature of which none of us ever figured out. Even though Tommy was trying to come up with new material, without his muse Tomata, very little came out of him.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I haven’t seen Tommy in over twenty years. And I don’t foresee seeing him in the next twenty. It’s just not a part of my life anymore.

  K.K. BARRETT: Tommy left in the middle of filming the Population One movie. Who knows what happens—when bands have a lot of creative energy in the beginning, then when the focus is on them and they’re trying to crank something out, it may not be as good. At one point, there was only two of us left, me and Tomata. We did a show at the Roxy called the Palace of Variety… we were trying to use canned video, canned music, and a script. It was the worst thing we ever did—bad all around. The music was poor, the performance was poor, it was a complete technical failure. Nothing was in sync.

  RENE DAALDER: The Palace of Variety was a combination of old material and recent songs, some of them featuring Sheila as Tomata’s female counterpart. Instead of an opening act there was a video show with highlights of the stuff we had done at Rhapsody. We played the Whisky and the Roxy, and Hurrah’s in New York. Some evenings were spectacular, on others things didn’t quite ignite. A few weeks before the first performance Tomata worried that he wouldn’t have the energy to go through with the shows. His occasional lapses into exhaustion had definitely become more obvious by this time. Later on, he told me and my wife, Bianca, that he was HIV positive.

  GEZA X: When Rene became involved, the artistic vision of the band got derailed. Rene brought in an acoustic piano and all this high-falutin monkey bullshit. He had them playing to loops, run off of a tape recorder—an extremely interesting idea, granted, kind of an early industrial techno twist to that—but it really wasn’t the Screamers anymore. The Screamers’ magic when they rocked out with those Tinkertoy synths slowly turned into this low-budget multimedia nonextravaganza which wasn’t really that good, and the band started withering behind it. Rene became drunk on power, and I remember getting into bloodcurdling arguments with him behind the mixing board at the Roxy. He’d come up to the console during shows and break my concentration… he’d push faders up and down at random while I was mixing for the house… and he really didn’t have a clue about audio—he had no idea what the hell he was doing—yet he’d insist on doing crazed, irrational things like that all the time. I saw the band going under, and I sometimes looked at myself as the only buffer zone to keeping some of it the way it was… I’ll lament for the rest of my life that I never got to record the definitive Screamers album during their prime. I have some tapes, but they’re almost unlistenable.

  K.K. BARRETT: There was no plot to Population One. It was a lot of proselytizing, very dull, and in between there were music videos tying it together.

  PAUL ROESSLER: Rene was from Holland and he was trying to do some great statement about “what is America.” That typical European art school perspective on the American experience. They’re still trying to do it, as if Melville and Twain didn’t already get it.

  K.K. BARRETT: We wanted to do something new and we stuck our necks out; otherwise we were just another band. We were enamored with the potential of rock fame and film stardom at the same time, but Trudie knew right away it wasn’t spontaneous, it was corrupt, it was gold digging.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I could tell you all the stupid things we didn’t do. Devo offered us a tour, and for some stupid reason we turned it down! Robert Fripp asked me to sing on his album, and I had to turn that down… oh please! I mean, these are just things… I was not in my right mind… but I was working damn hard, so it’s not that I have regrets. People say, “Well, you should have done a record.” I don’t have regrets about it. Maybe a record will come out. I don’t own the music. Tommy Gear wrote the music. It’s up to him.

  JEFF MCDONALD: There’s a park in Manhattan Beach called Polliwog Park, and the city was putting on these family entertainment shows during the summer of ’79 and they’d booked Black Flag by mistake. Through Black Flag my band, Redd Kross, also got on the bill. We went over okay ’cause we were just little kids, no one hassled us, but when Black Flag played, people were throwing watermelon and picnic lunches. People in the South Bay were really hostile. If you weren’t a surfer or a hippie, people would throw bricks at you. Keith Morris was really drunk and Black Flag was playing this noisy, art-damaged thrashed-out punk rock, and they’d never heard anything like it before, so people started heckling. When Keith responded with foul-mouthed lingo, it became a free-for-all. It was actually very funny, it was fun for both parties. The families were tossing food at Black Flag, and Keith was just being funny and obnoxious and drunk. There wasn’t a thousand rock fans like one newspaper report said. It was a small outdoor amphitheater. It was families who lived in the neighborhood and old heshers and it really wasn’t as much of a big hairy experience as the legend would have it. I saw much worse situations later on, like real full-on riots with insane cops and SWAT teams, but all the local newspapers in the area wrote up these oversensational-ized accounts like there had been a major riot anyway.

  KEITH MORRIS: When Black Flag played Polliwog Park, ’cause the Air Force marching band or whatever couldn’t make it, and they needed a replacement, Greg told them we were a Fleetwood Mac cover band. Polliwog was a Sunday afternoon hang with little ducks swimming in the pond and palm trees and families picnicking and everybody being mellow, and all of a sudden there’s three hundred people in the bandshell and we started rockin’ the fuck out and the whole place turned into this big giant party, everybody jumping around dancing, and the people that were picnicking were throwing food at us. It was just raining food… utensils and soaking napkins. Our drummer, Robo, got pelted in the face by half-eaten pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Chuck, myself, and Greg could see things flying through the air and were able to duck, but Robo had no place to go sitting behind his drums. The promoter stopped us maybe ten minutes into the set and had a janitor sweep up all the onstage garbage and scolded me for foul language. I just came out and said, “Hey, you guys, we’re fuckin’ real loud and we’re here to make a bunch of noise, and if you’re not into it, you should just go home and watch Disney.” The newspapers thought we were anarchists and terrorists who came to town to ruin things. From that point on we came under police scrutiny.

  JEFFREY LEE PIERCE: Black Flag at Polliwog Park was a turning point for me. The gig was wild with families throwing picnic food at them which only got them more excited. Keith shouted abuse. Chuck Dukowski was all over t
he stage sliding on baloney, cheese, Wonder bread, jam, peanut butter or whatever. It was great punk rock at a time when I thought I had seen it all. I wrote Black Flag up immediately for Slash and later went down to Hermosa Beach to watch them rehearse which was nearly as wild. I hung out at the old abandoned church which everyone lived in where I discovered Red Cross [Redd Kross] and the Descendants.

  X-8: The Church bands were all great… Redd Kross, the Descendants, the Last… the Hermosa scene, which Black Flag came out of, was originally all about partying and having fun with a bunch of radical rockin’ bands. But it was at the Fleetwood in Redondo where everything turned creepy around 1980. You’d be sitting upstairs watching all these zit-faced kids from Huntington approaching each other and slugging each other right in the face for no reason. Too far out… and it was too far of a drive just to see people fight, so I just said fuck it.

  RIK L. RIK: Everyone on the scene would show up to whoever was playing, but some of the older people would shun Germs shows because they weren’t that musical, although they always drew pretty well from the younger end of the scene. So the Germs started playing Orange County, and because they were so hardcore and extreme, all these surf punk and skater kids would go to the shows.

  TONY ALVA: Once I was exposed to punk and started going to shows, it was just really exciting. The independent attitude toward their music, producing their own sounds and saying “Fuck everything, we’re gonna do it our way,” that really was the same independent spirit I related to being a surfer and a skateboarder. I felt like I had something in common with these people. Even though they were pretty freaky looking.

  GERBER: I would go to Marina Skate Park ’cause my friend Rob Henley would skate there. Tony Alva would skate by me all the time, and I had blue hair, so he’d scream at me, “Punk rock sucks. Nugent rules!” So we got into this big thing and I was always getting up on him and telling him, “Alva sucks, you’re a piece of shit. You’re a fucking hippie.” Of course he loved that. Later I saw him at a party and I decided I was going to fuck him, so I got in the car and went with him to Malibu under the pretense of interviewing him for Flipside. Yeah, right. What happened instead is I fucked him and chopped his hair off and Krazy Kolored it. Tony took off surfing and left his little brother there unguarded and alone with me, and so the little kid got the same treatment. Alva was fucking Kira Roessler for a while, too. Then he wanted all the really fine punk rock chicks. I was going with Alva to skate competitions, and then he met Steve Olson.

  STEVE OLSON: I started in the mid-’70s, ’74, ’75, ’76… the Dogtown guys were deep into it already… they grew up in a different setting than we did… they grew up in the Venice–Santa Monica area… they were predominantly white although their crew included some blacks and Latins… it was probably the first interracial gang in SoCal…. it didn’t matter though, as long as you skate-boarded… there was always the territorial thing, the same bullshit in every aspect of life… Dogtown brought some danger to it… I can’t sit there and go, “Yeah, they were the first to skateboard in pools” ’cause there were dudes doing that in 1963, but they definitely took it to a different place… there were guys in Huntington Beach that were doing it… the Dogtown dudes just rode in their own style and the media picked up on it… they had a couple of dudes up there who were artists and photographers and a little more profound in the world of art and it gave them a mystique, still they had so many good guys in their area, it’s not like I’m talking shit about them or anything… just a lot of other people were doing it as well, but they got a lot of the attention… they would come into any place and destroy the place, they ripped, they were really fucking aggressive… they had the attitude of the whole punk thing, the whole street-hood attitude about it… Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Bob Biniac, all the Dogtown dudes were huge… the Santa Monica–Venice Z-boys. The Dogtown crew were listening to Nugent, Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Sabbath, maybe a little Black Oak Arkansas … Toys in the Attic, Physical Graffiti, Cat Scratch Fever, the list goes on.

  GERBER: I convinced the fucking skateboard park owner to let me have this party—that was basically what changed the whole thing, that party. Everybody played. I told every person I knew who had a band. Once you got there, you sign the list and that’s when you’re playing right. The pigs were there, too, it was a big fucking thing. And from that point on, every skate competition I went to, whether I went with Alva or Olson, all these guys started skatin’ to punk rock. Duane Peters, another cool skater boy, skated to the Germs first, and I loved him for it. He was so fucked up, he would do face plants and his whole nose would be bleeding. His face was trashed, but he’d just get back up… and he was skating to the Germs.

  STEVE OLSON: You know what I thought was a fucking big thing was at the skateboarder awards thing, Tony got second and he had some funky glasses and some clothes and he still had his hair and he threw his trophy in the trash like “Fuck you, I should have won.” And I got first and they were like “Speech” and I was like “Fuck you, this is a bunch of bullshit. This is jive.” And I just spit at the cameras and picked my nose and flicked boogers at them and that was it and then the kids were freaking… our reaction was “Fuck you and your bullshit”; and the skateboard industry was like “Oh my God, these are our top dudes in the reader polls,” and now this is what they’re saying back to us? They were against us and didn’t like the fact that we were what was representing their little wholesome sport, and the next thing you know, the popularity was just growing huge and then it all started from there… Seeing the Deadboys walking on Sunset Boulevard, five strong, ghost white with all-black clothes on and dark sunglasses, I liked that… there was a lot of shit going on long before the Marina skate park shit.

  RIK L. RIK: Around this time, the crowds had gotten really violent. The Hollywood people wouldn’t go down to Orange County or the South Bay anymore. It became such an ugly thing, like a really bad acid trip in hell. All these idiots and all this mindless violence fucked everything up. I think that this had an effect on Darby, it depressed him.

  EUGENE: Darby wasn’t part of a hard-assed gang like us—his posse was pretty soft, nearly all girls—but we knew him and we would back him up ’cause he was like a living god to some of these kids.

  JOHN DOE: The scene changing and becoming more violent and Darby not understanding the new suburban audience and them wanting something else from him that he didn’t think he could deliver, and his uncertainty of the future of his band… I would give as much credit to that for him committing suicide as I would to his apparent sexual confusion. I don’t think he could see himself as being the leader of that audience… he was really threatened by the people coming to the shows, and alienated by the extreme violence—he didn’t like it and it kind of scared him. That was just my take on it. I thought the attitude of the new audience was all wrong. When we saw somebody getting hurt, we’d stop playing—maybe that’s why some of those people thought we were a bunch of hippies, but that’s fine—and I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to see anyone getting hurt at a gig I’m playing. I didn’t want this random violence… and my bandmates in X all felt the same way.

  MIKE WATT: Darby had nothing against Orange County. The Germs would play the Fleetwood and other places down there. Darby, as leader of the Germs, was really influential, he was the head cheese of this weird punk subgroup, but they couldn’t handle him as an individual. He was too scary. He wasn’t de rigueur enough.

  MIKE PATTON: We played with the Germs several times at the Fleet-wood, always an intense night, with SWAT teams and helicopters becoming the norm… people running from cops with billy clubs and visors was commonplace. One night outside the venue these riot cops showed up and we’d gotten there late and we were outside and the punks were on one side of the street, the cops were on the other, and then somebody threw a bottle at them and they charged at us head-on.

  EUGENE: Why was everyone so violent? I can’t speak for those guys, but I didn’t like the ’70s or the ’80s.

&n
bsp; DON BOLLES: Darby did not like seeing where all the violence and subversion was going with all the hardcore kids. You didn’t know where it was going until you found yourself playing at the Fleet-wood and turned around and realized it was like being at a Nuremburg rally with all these football jocks.

  BILLY ZOOM: I thought the suburban beach hardcore thing ruined a good scene that we had all worked so hard to create.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: Female attendance plummeted.

  D.J. BONEBRAKE: I had mixed feelings about the Orange County thing. When I saw the new beach kids I thought, “Well, it’s fast… pretty impressive,” and I could appreciate the athleticism of the audience, really incredible stage diving, but some of the klutzy ones I didn’t like ’cause they would destroy things. On the one hand it added some vitality, some people thought, “Here’s this new high-energy audience and they’re really digging punk rock,” but the other half was like, “They’re too violent.” You didn’t see a lot of women in the slam pit—they’d get beat up, it was a bit rough for them. In the Masque days the sexes were much more integrated, but it was kind of wimpy, too, people pretending that they were violent but they were only playacting… when that happens you’re eventually gonna have someone who comes along and says, “Gee, guess what, I’m really violent. I’ll show you how to really beat up someone.”