by Marc Spitz
KEITH MORRIS: We had a sprinkling of female fans. When the hardcore thing really took off, it became more of a macho testosterone overdrive thing, the stage diving and the slam pits. Most girls didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I was never a womanizer; I was just happy to be playing music. I figured, hell, the punk rock princess will come along and the punk rock Prince Valiant, being myself, would ride off with her into the punk sunset.
D.J. BONEBRAKE: John and Exene stopped shows all the time… the weird thing was that it was kind of a yes-no thing—if the audience wasn’t excited enough, we’d try to get them going, but if it got too crazy, it was like, “Come on, you’re gonna get hurt”—it was trying to balance those two.
EXENE CERVENKA: A lot of the beach people were like the surfers and skaters who really hated punk rock when it first started, but now they were embracing it. It was a part of society that I had no knowledge of. Tony Alva, the skater, had us play for his birthday party in Malibu, and we had to stop playing ’cause everybody was throwing rocks and stuff. Tony felt bad ’cause he really loved X and he really loved the Germs, he really loved the whole Hollywood scene, but those surfer guys weren’t really ready for it. When the South Bay scene first started happening, I really liked the new bands like Black Flag… then there became this divide between Hollywood and the beach scene. Greg Ginn said they wouldn’t let those bands play in Hollywood so they had to create their own scene and it kind of became anti-Hollywood. I would reject this because everybody I knew wanted to see those bands play. “Fuck Hollywood” was what we were saying, too! That’s why we were having shows down in a basement off Hollywood Boulevard, because we couldn’t play the regular clubs, either. Somehow the South Bay scene got opposed to the Hollywood scene and the audiences started becoming anti-rock-star, anti-whatever, and if you were signed to Slash, then you were a rock star traitor and the South Bay girls didn’t like me very much. So I stopped going to the hardcore shows because I was threatened too much. They’d shove me and push me and tell me they hated me, they’d tell me I thought I was a rock star. They’d spit and hiss, “Fuck you, Exene, you suck”… really vicious kind of stuff. I couldn’t go in the bathroom at those shows, so I’d go see Black Flag in San Francisco or something. A lot of kids believed the media accounts of spitting and fighting, that punk was really mean.
STAN RIDGWAY: Black Flag would play and not take any responsibility for what was going on in the crowd, and they frequently even went out of their way to stir things up. Pogoing became slamming. Beating each other up… and loving it. Digging on the violence. Man, this was some wiggy scene… so I headed way north of it, too.
EXENE CERVENKA: The greatest thing about punk for me originally was that it was all about creating a new art and culture, replacing something shitty with something great, and having a community, which none of us had because everybody was from bad families, so this was like the first family that some people had. Now it was all dumbing down into this mob mentality where we couldn’t play a show because the audience hated us so much they wouldn’t even let us finish.
MIKE PATTON: The Huntington Beach scene killed off the original open interpretation of punk concept… no rules, no dogma, no stereotyping, no stars, anybody just do it. The original DIY ideology, as we saw it, was that it was all about free-association creativity—punk was this terrific grassroots thing which could be about anything any individual wanted it to be. Punk rock was always a serious cultural frame of reference to us, not a high school fashion thing. Once hardcore kicked in, there were very strict ways of dressing and weird codes of social behavior.
LISA FANCHER: Jack Grisham is one of the greatest characters in any era. They broke the mold when they made that kid!
JACK GRISHAM: I was always in trouble at school. I’d been getting arrested since I was like thirteen. I was just a fuck-up. I’m just misunderstood, that’s the deal. I was a surfer fuck-up, even before I was a punk. All the early surfers were like punks… fuck-holes who were always getting in trouble, making bombs, that kind of shit, and so I was doing stuff like that and somebody said, “Hey, I know these guys that are just like you. You should meet ’em.” And so I went over and it happened to be Todd Barnes, who became the drummer for Vicious Circle. That same day that we met at this girl’s house, we said, “Let’s make a band.” And then we ripped her off. We took her guitar and her amp and started a band. We didn’t know what we were doing. We only had two strings on the guitar and we’d go around stealing instruments and ripping stuff off and learnin’ how to play and that’s what Vicious Circle started as, just troublemaking surfer punk kids. Our drummer was only in seventh grade. It was two of us from Huntington, two from Long Beach.
MIKE PATTON: There was a big rock club called the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach, concrete floors, real austere, and that was where Vicious Circle first played and Jack was wearing a straitjacket and I remember going, “This is fucking stupid.” But with Jack and his crew came all these surfers, these brain-damaged thugs from wealthy families. We played there with them and I remember seeing people getting beaten and bloodied. We were just appalled… it was like, “Somebody’s gonna throw a bottle at me? Shit!” That’s when Middle Class said, “We’re not part of this,” and we scurried off into our Echo and the Bunnymen period.
JACK GRISHAM: There were a lot of fuck-holes from Edison in Hunting-ton. A ton of them came from that high school. A lot of it had to do with surfers. If you look at early surfer history, like a lot of those guys from La Jolla, they were really like Nazi punks who just happened to be surfers… there’s always been this punk subculture in surfing… you think of surfing and you think of some blond-haired guy with pukka shells, but there’s always been a bunch of fuck-heads like us around the surf scene, and now we were getting into punk rock… a lot of surfers lived on the beach and they just spread it.
EUGENE: Vicious Circle were the most ruthless fucking people I had ever seen.
MIKE WATT: I remember Vicious Circle before they became TSOL, these big, good-looking guys coming into the punk scene. I couldn’t understand it… “Why are you guys here?” Jack Grisham is really into this bellig style, he wore war paint—he was trying to be provocative at gigs, you know? TSOL got famous really quick—they wanted to rise to the top of that scene… they had a big posse around them… just before they were TSOL they had this thing called Vicious Circle, which wasn’t even a band yet. VC just rounded up all these psychos and guys they grew up with and then punk became a gang thing that everybody went with, the whole neighborhood went with it. I saw the same thing later with Sublime… before that, punk was for people who didn’t have friends. Nowadays these big-assed wigga punk posses grow up around some of these big-time punk bands.
JACK GRISHAM: Our first gig as Vicious Circle was at the Fleetwood with the Germs and Middle Class, that’s a fuckin’ good first show. Our band was basically all about a bunch of fucked guys fightin’ back. There were a lot of punkers already hangin’ around the South Bay, a bunch of ’em hung around the Black Flag guys, but they weren’t fight club dudes at all, they were real nice, real swell guys… they were those peaceful SST types, intellectual punkers who read books and had good political ideas… they were artistic pencil necks to the max. To them it was all about the music and recording and building up their little followings with cool flyers and puttin’ their logo out everywhere. Not like us fuck-ups. We weren’t nice guys, man, we were like nobody you’d wanna know, know what I mean? We were the first punks on the block to say, “Yeah, go on, laugh at my hair, motherfucker, and I’ll fuckin’ stab ya.” That kind of in-your-face, bring-it-on thing. We basically went around beating up on hippies, but it was the longhairs who started it, and they picked us… dude, the worst possible thing they coulda done, ’cause the guys I hung out with were already way fucked to begin with. There weren’t very many times when I was a victim… it was more of the opposite way around. If somebody would drive by and yell, “Hey, fuckin’ Devo,” we’d chase ’em down and nail ’em
. Vicious Circle was more like a gang than a band, a brotherhood that just looked out for each other. Beyond that, there was no thought to the name Vicious Circle, there was no thought to anything we did.
MIKE WATT: You’d be at a punk gig and there’d be some guy watching the band and because he had long hair he’d be attacked. I think it was because on the streets the longhairs came after the punkers and stomped them first… and the only time the punks ever had the numbers to hit back was at a show.
MIKE PATTON: Jack Grisham had the persona, he had his crowd that followed him, but he just wasn’t very credible. He had a ton of charisma, and I think he’s talented, too, but he lived in an upper-class suburb. Jack was well-to-do compared to Watt or Ness or us… he was upper middle class. You know? He had a nice life and the super rad punk thing was his comedy shtick, and his crowd were nearly all have-it-all kids who lived in nice houses and they would go to punk shows just to act tough, you know? Jack could have easily beaten up Darby Crash—he was a big guy—but Darby had way more street cred.
JACK GRISHAM: We buzzed on constant ultraviolence in the pit while we played—that’s what VC was all about, and I loved it, I fuckin’ loved it, thrived on it… there was nothing better than torturing or stomping the fuck out of somebody, either watching it or doing it yourself. It was basically Clockwork fuckin’ Orange County, that was the fuckin’ deal. We were SoCal droogs who’d go around stealing cars, torturing people, ripping people off. This therapist finally said I was a sociopath and told me, “You don’t know right from wrong.” Fuck, man, it was true, and—even worse—it wasn’t like we even had any cool political cause to justify it. We were inexcusable, it was just bare-assed FSU, as in “fuck stuff up.” Another motto was “Rape, pillage, and destroy.” We’d drive around at night and shoot the windows out of banks, stuff like that. We had records for auto thievin’, burglary, robbery… we were fuck-holes who were not gonna make it any other way, whether it was gonna be punk rock or heavy metal or ska or rockabilly or whatever. We were totally fucked up in the head, it just happened we found punk first. We’d been getting our asses kicked by parents, by the schools, and the police, and now it was like, “Fuck you, we’re monsters now, and you’re fuckin’ gonna pay for it!” I was eighteen years old, six foot three, and two hundred pounds, skinheaded, and pissed off.
MIKE PATTON: Grisham talks like a psycho… and I’m sure he probably is somewhat. Jack had this personality where people would let him do outrageous things to them. Jack’s this really charismatic guy who always had these really weak-willed people hanging around him. He’s got this element of the insane about him, this dangerous aura… you suspect it’s a put-on, but if he really gets off on violence, like he says, then he’s gotta be nuts. Jack would humiliate these people, he’d abuse them constantly, and the amazing thing was they’d come back for more.
JACK GRISHAM: I was torturing this guy in the garage of my mom’s house in this nice suburban neighborhood with my whole family inside eating Easter dinner… and I’d got this guy tied up in the rafters with a rope around his legs and I’m beating him with a two-by-four. I said, “Hang on a minute,” and put the two-by-four down and walked into the house and kissed my aunt and said like, “Oh, hi, how you doing?” I grabbed a deviled egg, told them I’d be back in a minute, and I went back out, grabbed the two-by-four, and kept workin’ on the guy. I finally had to get out of Vicious Circle ’cause of the violence. There were constant stabbings and beatings and people cruising by my house at night, shooting up the neighborhood. And the cops hated me, too, and the hippies hated me, and now the punks were pissed at me, too… fuck, it was a nightmare, a mess. A lot of people did stupid shit like pulling knives on me, so I ended up splittin’. I did something pretty bad to somebody and they retaliated with guns. It was a big deal, I had to split to Alaska for a while, they cut the lines on my car, blew up my car… fuck… I don’t wanna say who they were, but they weren’t punks… boy, they were pissed off.
KEITH MORRIS: Stirring up all the aggro was easy for Vicious Circle to do, being from where they were from, coming up here, messing things up for everybody, then running back home to their big swell homes in Huntington. Black Flag was new to this, a lot of stuff was going by us.
JACK GRISHAM: The other guys in my band weren’t considered as violent as me or the people I hung out with, like this guy Pat Brown, our drummer Todd, my friend Bill Wilson, or Scott Burson, a lot of guys who ended up drug overdoses or in prison. We fucked up that X-Head guy… that little sicko in the Decline. He wasn’t shit in our world. A lot of people say Vicious Circle had a lot to do with the Fleetwood becoming the birthplace of hardcore, ’cause it got so out of control every time we played there… we had to break up for a while for everything to cool off, and we had to jettison the Vicious Circle name for personal safety reasons. Then we came right back with a bang as TSOL, the True Sons of Liberty.
JOHN DOE: Once X was playing at the Starwood, when that really fucked-up kid in the Decline movie with the X shaved into his head, Mike the Marine, was swinging a big chain, the kind of chain you would hook a vicious dog up to in a yard. He was swinging ten or twelve feet of steel chain around his head in a really crowded floor in front of the stage area, and I was thinking, “This is really fucked up. This guy is the wrong kind of misfit. This guy is a psychopath and it’s really sad that the scene is attracting this kind of aberrant.” If I had to put a point on it, mark a day, that would be it… seeing that kind of person being attracted to something that was artistic and literary and creative was the end of it for me.
JEFF MCDONALD: Greg Ginn immediately saw the emergence of the Huntington Beach hardcore scene as an opportunity to expand, since Black Flag didn’t have much of a following of their own yet and they needed the numbers to have this rock band career, and so they actively pandered to that crowd. That’s where it split off for me.
KEITH MORRIS: It got progressively harder to play. A lot of the clubs didn’t have the proper paperwork for gatherings or dancing so they’d get shut down, and we were getting banned from clubs and shows faster than we played ’em.
MIKE NESS: I didn’t understand punks fighting punks at the Fleet-wood. I was always like, “Hey, if you wanna fucking fight, let’s fucking go there, motherfucker… your call.” I fought with them all. All the Huntington Beach punks. These fucked-up skinheads from rich homes. I never backed away. It went on for years. Most of the kids who were into the hardcore scene at the beaches were very cool, but there was always just a handful where we just didn’t get along. They didn’t like me. I didn’t like them. I don’t think it had anything to do with where they were from. They could have been from the beach or they could have been from La Mirada, you know? An asshole is an asshole. We had assholes in our circle, too. As for Orange County being blamed for all the violence, that ain’t right. The Fullerton punk scene was never about putting that shit out, not for one fucking minute.
JACK GRISHAM: The one measly ethic we were able to scrape up between the four of us in Vicious Circle was that we didn’t believe in punk-on-punk violence. We thought, “These guys are our team.” We just believed in punk-on-everybody-else violence! I always respected the old Hollywood punkers. They were real sweet people who went through a lot to make it happen for us fuck-holes in Orange County. TSOL identified more with the Hollywood scene than with the beach scene ’cause that’s what we admired when we were kids. I was really into the first-wave Hollywood bands. I fuckin’ loved the Weirdos and the Germs, those were my favorites. I dug the Go-Go’s, too.
KEITH MORRIS: Eventually Black Flag stopped being fun; it became more of a regimented business. We were starting to argue more, and I was constantly losing. They were getting fed up with my drunken partying behavior, and so everything started to become a little bit more tense. I just one day got fed up and walked.
The forming of my next band, the Circle Jerks, was like this natural flow that just happened. There wasn’t a lot of premeditation or brainstorming. Redd Kross was audi
tioning drummers in the basement of the Church to replace Ron Reyes, who’d just quit, and Lucky Lehrer was trying out. Greg Hetson loved Lucky’s playing but the McDonald brothers didn’t. They thought Lucky was a little bit too proficient, a little too tight, a little too professional for their needs. And Greg was fed up with this attitude, so he bailed on Redd Kross. I had just quit Black Flag and all of a sudden it seemed very convenient—here’s Hetson, who’s getting really good, here’s Lucky, this amazing drummer, and—too good to be true, almost—me on lead vocals! Raymond Pettibon had an American slang dictionary and Hetson and I came across Circle Jerks and we both looked at each other and a lightbulb lit over our heads. With the Circle Jerks, we didn’t want anybody getting hurt, we wanted all the gang shit kept out in the parking lot. Let security and cops deal with that crap. The Jerks were more into creating an intense rockin’ party atmosphere. For us it was all about everybody jumpin’ around and havin’ a good time. We thought punk should be about making new friends here, not more enemies.
We were saying, “We have enough enemies and bad situations confronting us once we leave the venue as it is… why poop the party and drive all the babes away with this stupid violence shit?” I stopped shows all the time. I’d tell ’em to cut that shit out. That was one of the main differences between the Circle Jerks and Black Flag. Flag liked to stir shit up without regard for crowd safety.
GREG HETSON: The difference between Black Flag and the Circle Jerks was a sense of humor. Flag’s music was very, very heavy. It was this Neanderthal approach to manic downstroke punk thrashin’ guitar. One night these guys approached me in the parking lot at Okie Dog’s after a Circle Jerks gig… I think it was Greg Graffin who said: “Hi, we’re Bad Religion, we’re a band from the Valley… would you listen to our tape?” I said, “Sure, I will… and if I like it I’ll take it with me to Rodney when we go to be interviewed the next night.