We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  BRETT GUREWITZ: In the fall of 1980, I dropped out of El Camino Real High ’cause I couldn’t get along with anybody and formed Bad Religion with this drummer named Jay Ziskraut and two 15-year-old kids, also from Camino, Jay Bentley and Greg Graffin, who wanted to be a lyricist. Graffin thought Darby’s lyrics were the shit.

  GREG GRAFFIN: I was greatly inspired as a lyricist by the writings of Darby Crash. I think his writing is severely underrated as poetry… even when I was a kid, I immediately thought his work was something that my father, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin, would find interesting. Darby was hugely important in helping me find a literary voice, my own identity. There is no doubt in my mind that had he lived he would’ve surpassed his early writings many, many times over.

  BRETT GUREWITZ: We were just suburban teen musician wannabes from the Valley trying to mix Dickies-style pop punk with the dark lyrics of Darby Crash and the intensity of Black Flag. Later on, we started calling it “melodic hardcore”—that’s the signature Epitaph-Westbeach sound. Greg Ginn was totally my role model in every way. Here was this radical dude who was a musician and a songwriter who rocked his own band and who had his own label and took shit from no one. I was turning 18. That was it. I wanted to be like him from that point on. It was the first time I’d heard the term “DIY” applied to music. We began honing our live chops at the Vex in East L.A., Bards Apollo in the West Adams district, and at Godzilla’s in Sun Valley. We launched Epitaph Records in 1980 with a Bad Religion EP… six songs that Graffin and I cowrote. We sold out 1,500 copies straight away because Rodney played it right away, and it went over well.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The timing was excellent—the field was wide open for a new set of players.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The major labels never wanted to touch this new stuff, let alone distribute it. The Go-Go’s had to go to England to make their first single on Stiff.

  MARGOT OLAVERRA: We got a gig opening for Madness and they really liked us as a band. Belinda was dating Suggs, that was the connection, and through that we got a tour to open for them in the U.K., then we were offered the Specials, who were in the same scene in England.

  CHARLOTTE CAFFEY: England was spit-drenched. We were eating Madness’ leftovers. We’d get off the stage every night and cry.

  GINGER CANZONERI: Nobody knew who they were, everybody was throwing stuff at them, but by the end of the tour, they’d won over a substantial part of the audience, a ska audience. When they came back to L.A., they were an incredibly tight band who saw things totally differently. Punk was on its way out fashionwise and there was a whole new look coming in. They brought back new clothes and things influenced by the Belle Stars and the Modettes. Punk wasn’t a force in England anymore, the younger kids were more into the mod ska look.

  MARGOT OLAVERRA: There was the Go-Go’s diet, imposed to fit a certain image, yeah. The Go-Go’s diet was, we were on a stipend of forty dollars a week, which nobody can live on, and we would get a bonus if we lost ten pounds or something like that. I don’t remember if Ginger weighed us, but it made borderline anorexics of us, including me. I remember Jane got really pimply ’cause she was doing crystal meth to lose weight. I would throw steamed vegetables in a blender and call it soup—I had no money anyway, the twenty-five-cent box of macaroni and cheese was affordable but too fattening.

  GINGER CANZONERI: When we came back from London, everybody had really put on the pounds. The British heavy-starch diet.

  JANE WIEDLIN: The whole L.A. scene had changed by the time we got back from England in early 1980, it had been taken over by all these real angry, young white boys, Black Flag. We were like, “What’s this all about? It’s really gross.” We were lumped in with all those stupid bands, but we never even knew those guys. What had started as a scene of girls and gays and stuff was nearly all gone.

  KEITH MORRIS: The Go-Go’s were playing pop music. They were never really a punk band to begin with. They were a female vocal harmony group with rock guitars and drums. Of course they’re gonna be taken aback playing a show where it’s 95 percent sweaty guys jumpin’ around and a little blood action flowin’.

  MARGOT OLAVERRA: I went to jail again. Somebody asked me to buy them coke and Ginger had a connection. We were at the Starwood and Ginger told me to get a drink on her CBS Records tab but the bartender wasn’t buying it and I’d already drank half of it so I just walked away with it and they called the cops, the same sheriffs who’d arrested me previously. I’d dumped what was left of the coke into a bush and they pulled out the coke and whatever was left blew away. They took me in, I was in jail overnight. Don Bone-brake from X bailed me out. Two lab reports came back, one for 2.5 grams… no way! It was totally bogus… so anyway, we hired a lawyer and I got something like probation, first felony offense. But one of the stories when they fired me was, “Oh, you have a record and we want to go to Japan and you won’t be able to come.” But the real reason was because I wasn’t a pop songwriter. In the same way we’d heard about Gina, they’d heard about Kathy Valentine and they wanted her in the band because she was a pop songwriter. Plus I was a really wild punk rocker and they wanted to be a girl pop band and they knew I’d resist that transition and in fact was already doing so… so maybe it was a contradiction in themselves, what they were doing in punk to begin with.

  GINGER CANZONERI: Margot gradually was hanging out with different people and had different interests and maybe took different drugs. She became ill, type A hepatitis, and we all had to go get shots… she was feeling run-down, and I think that what happened was that the band was feeling kind of fed up with her.

  MARGOT OLAVERRA: Another reason why they fired me, they said, was that I got hepatitis. I was sick. The Go-Go’s diet, you know. I was living on celery soup and then we’d go to a club and have an open tab because now we were the Go-Go’s, back from England with “We Got the Beat” in the charts. So everyone would give me free drinks, you know. I’d get quite drunk. Basically I fucked up my liver. I did a myriad of drugs—I wasn’t a junkie, it was part of the scene, part of everybody’s life. It wasn’t that… if it was that and it was used as an excuse, it was a real cop-out—that was pushed in my face ’cause Charlotte had gone back in the closet as far as her drug taking. Later, when I moved to New York and was living in the East Village, I remember seeing her a couple of times walking east.

  GINGER CANZONERI: We all had to get shots, I know it’s contagious, and the feeling in the band was that she was letting them down. We had six shows that were already sold out at the Whisky… the attitude was, “We better start looking around fast ’cause this girl is not gonna be in any physical condition to play, the strenuousness of the show is gonna be too much.” So they started auditioning bass players. Kathy Valentine filled in for those dates… I’m not quite sure, but the band made this decision: “We think Kathy should replace Margot.” I remember being told that because I was the manager, I had to tell Margot, and I found that really distasteful. It was upsetting for me and upsetting for Margot. I’m not good at doing those kind of things and I don’t really want to talk about it.

  TERRY GRAHAM: Margot was always a fun girl. She was great. Always laughing and smiling. She endeared herself to a lot of people. So when they kicked her out of the Go-Go’s it offended many. Many people in the community felt she had been brutally violated. Any naïve ideology we might have had, that was the end of it. The end of the innocence and the beginning of the end of the scene for me.

  EXENE CERVENKA: Margot was devastated when she got kicked out of the Go-Go’s. I felt very sad and angry about that. I had a band mentality; you just stood by each other. You didn’t replace someone like Margot. She was my closest friend in the band. I don’t know why they fired her. I heard rumors. I never could figure out why. Seemed to be no reason whatsoever.

  GINGER CANZONERI: I was introduced to Miles Copeland and I told him about the band and he became interested after he started hearing things back about the band. We signed a deal with IRS Records and
went to New York to record Beauty and the Beat.

  CHARLOTTE CAFFEY: We got an extremely tiny budget from Miles Copeland of IRS Records to do an album. We went to New York and stayed at the Wellington during the recording.

  KATHY VALENTINE: I used to get FedEx packages of drugs sent to me.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: We’d be at the kitchen table choppin’ that coke out and talking about what we were gonna do that night.

  CHARLOTTE CAFFEY: It’s amazing we got the record done.

  RAY MANZAREK: Jim would have loved X.

  JOHN DOE: X and the Germs played at this place called Hope Street Hall, which was right near Morrison Hotel, the fleabag fucking hotel where they shot the Doors album cover. Exene and I immediately went down to Morrison Hotel. They still had the same stenciled window.

  RAY MANZAREK: My involvement with X came about from reading the lyrics for “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline.” It absolutely reminded me of Jim. I thought, “I can’t wait to hear this band.” After catching them at the Whisky, I went back to the dressing room and said, “Holy shit, you guys are incredible.” I said, “Listen, I’m Ray Man-zarek from the Doors and I would love to help you guys out in the recording studio. Make records with you guys.” John said, “Do you think we can get a deal with a big record company?” And I said, “Well… I doubt it, with this kind of music, man, but surely somebody out there will take a chance on it.”

  D.J. BONEBRAKE: Jay Jenkins was our manager. He had a rough time getting us a deal. He wrote letters to most of the companies. A&M wrote us a rejection letter saying, “Sorry, we’re just not interested at this time.” I can understand from a business point of view them not wanting to sign the bands. There was no indication that any of them would be a big hit on the radio.

  JOHN DOE: It was impossible to get signed at first ’cause we didn’t have the knowledge or the connections to make proper introductions. We never sent around demo tapes, we didn’t understand how all that worked. I think Slash was already interested before Ray became involved. They were really new as a label. They were recording the Germs’ GI album when we agreed to sign. Having Ray attached to it was an incredible break. Here was a bona fide rock icon digging our shit and I thought for sure that we’re doing something right. I couldn’t believe our good luck in having this person understand the impact X was having.

  D.J. BONEBRAKE: We got a deal with Slash and Ray agreed to do the record for a very low budget with his producer fee deferred. We did Los Angeles in early 1980. We got no advance—it cost $10,000, the basic budget, it all went into making the best recording possible. We were made to feel we were just lucky to get a record out. It was pretty straightforward, not a lot of overdubs. We didn’t have the time or the budget, but we had all the songs for Los Angeles and Wild Gift well rehearsed. We’d been playing them for more than two years straight. We just chose nine that we thought would fit good on the first record, including the title song, which has become a sort of anthem by now.

  RAY MANZAREK: Slash signed them and we went into the studio to do the first album with ten thousand dollars. Fuck, make a record for ten thousand dollars? That’s not a lot of money! “Well, it’ll only work if nobody gets paid,” I said. So nobody got paid. We paid the pro technicians. Other than that, everybody in X got one union scale gig. As far as the union was concerned, we recorded the whole album in one three-hour session. The atmosphere was incredible. They didn’t fuck around. They’d been playing these songs for two years straight. They knew them inside and out. They didn’t have any money. Exene would bring in a bag of baking potatoes and we’d make them in the microwave oven and everyone’d be sitting around having baked potatoes with margarine and salt and pepper and drinking beer.

  JOHN DOE: We’d done two years of prepping, learning how to play the songs, and Ray was smart enough not to change anything, just like the Doors did it. We did the vocals separately… we did some overdubs… it was a ten-thousand-dollar budget… beginning to end, it was probably about three weeks, maybe a month at the most. We didn’t have any illusions about wanting to do it lo-fi or antiestablishment… we wanted to go in there and make the best record that we could.

  BILLY ZOOM: I liked Ray Manzarek [as a producer], but I could have done better.

  RAY MANZAREK: Billy was a very highly strung and volatile guy. Exene was always seeking psychic dominance, and John would be caught in the middle between his love for Exene and his friendship with Billy. He’d be the mediator, the peacemaker, with help from D.J., who was always a rock of consistency in reasoning. Billy, John, and Exene lived together in this dingy little apartment full of crazy little voodoo dolls.

  JUDITH BELL: Muriel Cervenka, Exene’s sister, came to L.A. with her husband and was staying at my house. They were selling their own jewelry line to customers like Madonna before she got famous. Madonna totally copped Exene’s sister’s look. She was wearing all Muriel’s clothes and jewelry when she started. Muriel came to L.A. with her husband and they showed this movie, Ecstatic Stigmatic. In the opening shot, Muriel is in a coffin, which is really eerie in retrospect.

  CHRIS D.: Muriel and her husband, Gordon, were in town for a screening of their Ecstatic Stigmatic movie, and they were staying at the Tropicana and they kind of went their separate ways during the week. Muriel was having all these affairs.

  JUDITH BELL: She was seeing all these guys at the same time, and all these ex-boyfriends were coming after her again, and her husband was there. She was having a real crisis over men. She was staying with me because her husband was being a bastard who was so cheap he wanted to sleep on Chris D.’s floor. She was crying a lot and talking to all these guys on the phone. Muriel was fucking this guy Johnny O’Caine, Farrah’s brother, too. Farrah bought this Volkswagen the morning of the night they drove to the Whisky when the terrible crash happened that killed Muriel.

  CHRIS D.: We were waiting for Steve and Farrah and Muriel to call us ’cause we were all going to see X at the Whisky, and they never did.

  JUDITH BELL: Farrah was driving. Steve Naive from Elvis Costello’s band got thrown out of the car and Farrah broke her jaw. Muriel was in the backseat. The impact snapped her spine. Muriel just said, “Oh, shit.” And that was the end of her. I was at the Whisky waiting for them. Johnny O’Caine showed up at the club escorted by four cops to tell Exene. Johnny told Exene, and she screamed and went in the back with John. We thought they were gonna cancel their show, but they said, “No, we’re gonna play.” They went out there and destroyed all their equipment and screamed and yelled and a lot of people who didn’t know what happened thought it was the best show they’d ever seen.

  CHRIS D.: I saw cops come in and walk backstage down that long hall and I didn’t know what they were saying to her but she just dropped to the floor and everybody watching just knew something really heavy had happened. They were on their way to Judith’s house. They were coming down Willoughby when the accident happened, and they never made it.

  TOP JIMMY: I was at the Whisky the night Exene’s sister was killed. It was in between shows, and Exene asked Ray Manzarek, “You’re so fucking cosmic, what do I do now?” So Ray went and got like a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s and he came back to the dressing room ’cause he didn’t have anything to say. When she went back out onto the stage, I took her out there and held her up for a while… she was real broken up. I think she would have gone on, because you know, tickets were sold, blah blah blah, the show must go on. I remember walking her down the steps and taking her out on the stage and holding her ’cause I didn’t want her to fall down.

  CHRIS D.: They were completely drunk out of their minds and crying during the songs. It was great and noble that they went on, but it was really difficult to watch. Judith and I left early to buy up as much liquor as we could and we headed over to their place on Genessee and there was this long drunken wake at their apartment.

  JUDITH BELL: Afterward we went over to Exene’s house and started drinking. Then the neighbors surrounded the house and pretended to be cops
. When we realized they weren’t cops this huge fight broke out and I spent the next day downtown bailing everybody out.

  TOP JIMMY: After the show we went over to John and Exene’s. We stayed up talking all night, not much to do really, just sit there and kind of look off in a daze… what do you do when somebody dies, there’s nothing to say. It’s just a bummer.

  D.J. BONEBRAKE: In 1980 we went to London, the critics didn’t like us at all. In New York it wasn’t a triumphant premiere of this L.A. band, it was like we could have been anyone. We didn’t make a giant splash. At least it made people aware that there was something going on in L.A.

  JEFFREY LEE PIERCE: I was raised by a Mexican mother in El Monte and had spent my entire life in her family environment. I was even briefly in a gang at Velle Lindo Junior High School. I understood Spanish and spoke a little. I have a penchant for black-haired girls and can deliver a fearsome street rap. It’s all part of my Mexican upbringing. The girls of my youth were all either Mexican, Korean, Japanese, or Black. The Mexican girls were often inaccessible—property of the cholos. But the Asian girls were excellent students, and often lonely and as inexperienced as I was. Among Latinos or Asians, I always felt quite at home. I even experienced some militancy when my family moved to the San Fernando Valley… being unable to get along with the wealthy Anglo kids. I was always reading Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton, supporting the Viet Cong, who were my idols. Needless to say, I didn’t have very many friends.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: Jeffrey Lee totally was into like any old blues people that were like shit-faced or doing heroin or getting beaten down by a bad woman. He was always a real drama queen about that.

  PHAST PHREDDIE: After Back Door Man folded, I started writing a column for Slash, but I didn’t want to focus exclusively on the punk scene because it would have been redundant. Who would’ve cared if I waxed poetic on X, when all of the Slash writers already did that? So I thought my column, “Faster than You,” should be unique and attempt to open minds. It was a drag going to a punk rock party at the time, and the only records the host would have (or at least have on display) were from last week… I wanted folks to know that there was music with honest expression all over the place, not just in the best punk rock.