by Marc Spitz
JEFFREY LEE PIERCE: When we put out that Fire of Love record, it got really popular in Boston and New York, so there was enough demand there for us to tour. The record was doing well there and everybody was waiting for somebody to do something different. We weren’t New Romantic and we weren’t like Echo and the Bunnymen or something, and we weren’t like some punk band. We were doing this weird thing. And everybody on the East Coast was just ready for that. We went on this ridiulous and horrendous two-month tour of America. It was almost like volunteering for Vietnam. I remember driving through Texas thinking, “I’m just too far gone now. I’m just too far.” Like going up the river in Apocalypse Now or something.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: Jeffrey was into this sick combo of looking like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis at the same time. Part of the Marilyn thing came from Debbie Harry, who looked like a punk rock version of Marilyn. He came over one night, it was Halloween, and they were gonna play at Otis art college downtown. He was wearing this loungey looking jacket, kind of a smoking jacket, and his hair was bleached white and it was getting kind of long and he wanted me to put this fifties kind of Marilyn Monroe outfit on him.
JEFFREY LEE PIERCE: Kid and I were always looking for some excuse to put on women’s clothing.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: We all got really drunk and went down to Otis in the middle of the set, Jeff crawled under the stage and he was just lying under the stage with the microphone, screaming. Billy Person, who was playing bass, had to go under the stage and drag him out. Jeffrey’s problems weren’t nearly as glaring as they would have been now. Everybody was fucked-up all the time. Nobody was in a twelve-step program. Alcoholics Anonymous was for fucking fat old men on Skid Row.
WAYZATA DE CAMERONE: I knew this struggling actor named John Pochna, an Eastern-educated, near Ivy league type. Pochna, like a lot of the straight non-punker types back then wanted to hang with the cool crowd and the cool crowd was going to see the local punk bands. Bands like the Germs, X, and the Screamers. I used to run into Pochna backstage at the Whisky or Club 88. We shared drinks and had some other common interests: women and marijuana. After closing at 2 A.M. everyone wanted to know where the party was. I remember telling Pochna we should rent a hole-in-the-wall dump, buy a couple of cheap refrigerators, stock ’em with cheap beer, and tell all our friends, bands and groupie types where they could go. We could charge ’em five bucks a piece and make a little money. Pochna would always say what a great idea it was and that we should do it. I kept at him pretty steadily through the last half of ’79 and into 1980 to front the cash. We finally found this storefront at 1955 Cahuenga Boulevard. The joint fronted Cahuenga underneath a seedy hotel across the street from the Hollywood Freeway southbound on-ramp. The front room was small, maybe 400 square feet, with bay windows long ago boarded up and painted over. We decorated the rear room with what would become the essential look of coffeehouse chic in the early 90’s: old ratty couches, spindly throwaway tables, and mis-matched lamps.
JOHN POCHNA: The Zero opened the first weekend of 1980, and it was an immediate hit. Basically, the idea came about a month or two before that. I was over at Disgraceland and we were all talking about how we needed a place where we could all hang out, because after these gigs, these guys were like, wide awake, so was I. Nobody wanted to go to sleep after the regular clubs closed, but someone was always calling the cops at the house parties, and I thought, “Well, I always wanted to open an art gallery, and we could do this at night at an art gallery.” It took two months for any art to show up on the walls because it was a mail art show, where people mailed in erotic postcards and crap that they made, and it just took us so long to get all the mail in. The mail art show was a big hit.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: The way the Zero Zero operated was, you’d come from another nightspot which closed at 2:00 A.M., you’d pay your five bucks to become a “member” of this “private club,” then join the seventy or eighty other scenesters inside, getting trashed until the wee hours. Since the whole thing wasn’t legal anyway, there were no ID checks or door searches, and all the patrons’ pockets would be clanking with smuggled booze bottles, plus whatever joints, pills, and powders they had access to. Everyone was fucked up beyond belief—that was the point! But this was no callow underage crowd: The Zero Zero attracted a boho elite of artists, photographers, actors, models, writers, filmmakers, club bookers, Eurotrash intellectuals, and, of course, musicians. There was even a board of directors, though it’s doubtful they ever met anywhere besides the club itself. On the board were John Doe and Exene from X and Tito Larriva from the Plugz, plus members of Los Lobos and the Blasters. Regulars included ex–Warhol superstar Mary Woronov, among others. David Lee Roth in particular took a shine to the Zero, and it was rumored that he was an “investor.” Whatever the case, he’d always be found holding court in the notorious back room. You had access to that place only if you were super-duper hip or had a lot of blow to share.
JOHN POCHNA: David Lee Roth showed up at the Zero one night very early on and just loved it. He showed up the first time in a limo, and he had these two chicks with him and Eddie Anderson, his personal security guy. The chicks thought that they were going to some fancy place… one of those classy, high-end rock places that Rod Stewart would hang out at. They completely freaked out when they saw the look of the place and this raw, totally fucked-up downscale crowd. The chicks were so bummed that David just sent them back out into the limo and then he’d continue to hang out and pick up other chicks… and then he’d send those chicks back and so it would go on and on until the limo was eventually stuffed to the roof with them. David wasn’t covering the rent in the beginning. He didn’t do that until later. Every once in a while, somebody would really look at the art and buy a membership card… I think Roth still has his Zero Zero membership card in his wallet.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: I remember El Duce, of the most politically incorrect band on earth, the Mentors, and Top Jimmy (the namesake of the Van Halen song “Top Jimmy”) were the janitors, cleaning up for free so they could imbibe all the “high school” beers set down by the drunken revelers, and maybe, if they were lucky, find someone’s stash on the floor.
JOHN POCHNA: El Duce’s real name was Eldon Wayne Hoake. I saw his license or maybe it was an ID card. It had his picture on it from the state of Washington. He had a pear-shaped, classic beer belly look. Watching Duce’s body language while he swept a broom across the floor was just a sidesplitting crack-up because it was something he obviously didn’t do too often.
BLACK RANDY: The Mentors were three gross trailer park farmboys in black executioner hoods who said they played rape rock, and of course we had to have them for our opening act. Their leader was El Duce, who had two dildoes for drumsticks. They did sick songs about butt-fucking whores, Peeping Toms, and one about goin’ through a girl’s purse, a song about bringing a girl home and robbing her. We loved it because it was so raw and it was going to be so unfashionable and utterly incorrect. The people who found X and Slash magazine palatable would hate the Mentors, so we had to get them in there, and they outdid themselves. It was monstrous. Duce pissed into a glass jar onstage then pulled out a bloody tampon from some stripper’s pussy, dipped it in and started sucking it dry. All these chicks were losing it… throwing things and screaming sexism. They hated it. Duce was singing the Four F’s—“Find Her, Feel Her, Fuck Her, Forget Her”—and calling out “You coke pigs! Little coke whores! Bow down to your master! On your knees!” And so on. He really got into it like one of those bad guy wrestlers. He’d growl and rasp like a wrestler. “This is a song about an Indian girl who eats a skinhead in Seattle! She got thrown out of the teepee because she fucked Darby and not me.” Stuff so off the wall. It was a great show.
TOP JIMMY: The Mentors would wear their hoods all the time. I finally got El Duce to de-hood and he says, “Man, if you looked like this, you’d wear a fuckin’ hood too.” I took one look at him and I says, “Motherfucker, you put that hood back on, right now!”
TONY CADENA:
Fullerton, California, is the home of Fender guitars, which was certainly a badge of honor for the musicians who lived there.
MIKE NESS: I think there was a Fullerton sound. We had a lot of the same influences. The Adolescents and Agent Orange and my band, Social Distortion… we found a sound we all liked, pop punk—we were listening to a lot of Generation X and Buzzcocks. Those guys grew up with Chuck Berry and the Stones and the Beatles—that’s why that first wave of punk, whether it’s Johnny Thunders or the Ramones, the very blues-based rock and roll with pop melodies but done punk style, is what I listen to. But we played it differently because we’re American. I love the British stuff so much but at the same time I realized, “Well, fuck, man, I’m not fucking English! I don’t know anything about the fucking queen! I don’t know anything about the working class over there. But I do know what’s happening here.” So it was very important to establish our own identity as being American, and part of being American was digging into our roots, everything from the old black blues and the old big bands and the old country and rockabilly and doo-wop and primitive rock and roll—everything—and that’s what I really liked about X so much, they felt the same way… Woody Guthrie… I’ve done intros to songs where I’ve said, “Johnny Cash was just as important as Johnny Rotten was.”
TONY CADENA: If you look at a map of Orange County, it’s a huge area. If you go west, there’s this affluent beach community, but Fuller-ton was more of a working-class environment. Some of us came from very stable families, but there was also a lot of turmoil, a lot of divorce, a lot of kids literally running their households.
MIKE PATTON: The Fullerton scene had its own vibe, separate from the rest of Orange County, separate from Hollywood, separate from the South Bay and the Church scene, with no beach scene affiliation whatsoever.
JEFF MCDONALD: The Fullerton bands got lumped into the beach hardcore scene just because they weren’t from Hollywood, but they were totally different. The Adolescents, Agent Orange, and Social Distortion—bands like that were more eccentric and arty. They were from Orange County, but it wasn’t a fascist thing.
MIKE NESS: Some of the Hollywood punks were like, “Oh, Orange County.” There was this misconception that it was plush. I remember this tall skinny Adam Ant wanna-be—he’d been to London and got this look and brought it back to Hollywood. He’d say to me, “You guys are from Orange County. You don’t know what’s fucking happening.” And I bet the guy had like—I bet his family was still together and paying his rent, you know? I just remember I told him I’d stick a Les Paul up his ass. Just because we live in a suburban setting, what? There isn’t alcoholism in the home? There isn’t child abuse? There isn’t fucking abandonment? There isn’t fucking addiction? You’re fucking confused, man.
MIKE PATTON: The Black Hole was this crash pad that the Fullerton kids hung out in. Some of them would come to Eddie Joseph’s place to practice because Eddie had a PA and all this cool gear and amps, but I never really hung out at the Black Hole. It was Mike Ness’s apartment and you’d hear stories about how they thrashed it all the time… it was a disaster area where they all hung out and partied. I think it was probably Tony Adolescent who named it. The Black Hole was more pure than Eddie’s place ’cause there weren’t any older degenerates orbiting around. Eddie would just buy bags of pot, sheets of acid, tons of speed, and we’d all just go over there to jam and do free drugs. He just went though this incredible amount of inheritance money in a very short time. It was a very interesting spiral to participate in.
MIKE NESS: This guy Robert Omlit was my roommate at the Black Hole. He was an odd fellow and we used to take his Throbbing Gristle records and throw them across the street. I had a little phonograph that folded out. Dennis Danell and I used to listen to the Hersham Boys and Sham 69. It was my first apartment, and to help out with the rent I got Robert and this guy Kirby to move in. We spray-painted all the walls. It still amazes me that the neighbors weren’t more aggressive in getting us out sooner ’cause it seemed like it lasted forever. The night of the downfall was the night I almost cut off my index finger and had to be rushed to emergency handcuffed to some girl and they kept me overnight for psychiatric evaluation. After I left, everyone just decided that that night was the night it should end, so they trashed the place and somebody stole my two-tone cowboy boots. It was called the Black Hole because there was fungus growing on the windows and shit. A real classy dump.
TONY CADENA: I was a sixteen-year-old high school kid when I met Eddie Joseph, leader of the Tubaflex Brothers and Brine, a rock oldies cover band who was playing a gig at Cypress College, and we became friends. Eddie single-handedly helped nurture a punk band scene in Fullerton. His generosity in loaning out professional amps and PA equipment to penniless high school fledgling bands like us [the Adolescents] earned him patron saint status of the Fullerton punk scene, which would eventually create its own Big Three: the Adolescents, Social Distortion, and Agent Orange.
MIKE ATTA: Fullerton bands like Agent Orange and the Adolescents started producing these great punk singles like “Blood Stains” and “Amoeba,” which nobody could really deny them.
LISA FANCHER: “Amoeba” by the Adolescents is the song. Definitely was a phenomenon. “Amoeba” is a masterpiece of a single from any era of rock music.
TONY CADENA: I think bands like us and Social Distortion and Agent Orange were able to put out stuff that stood out from the hardcore scene because we had these diverse influences. I grew up listening to oldies radio. AM stations that played stuff like “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. So when you start learning to write songs, you gravitate toward what you’re familiar with. We gave Rodney a tape and he started playing it on his show, which was really encouraging for us. Then it became a huge local hit. It made our scene explode. KROQ even had an “Amoeba” contest.
DARRELL WAYNE: Listeners were supposed to send in their interpretation of an amoeba. We got naked pictures, Barbie dolls in vats of Jell-O, and a box of human feces. The human feces was delivered with the morning mail and sat on the receptionist’s desk until I came in at noon. All in all we received several hundred entries, some of them not smelling as bad as others.
TONY CADENA: We had radio hits because the songs were structured like fast pop music with a melody but a lot of anger, too. Another thing about Fullerton is its proximity to Disneyland. You couldn’t walk down the street without getting called a faggot or getting beat up, but you’re right next to the “Happiest Place on Earth.” And they wouldn’t let us in. Mike Ness and Dennis Danell and a bunch of people from Fullerton tried to go one day because Dennis’s brother worked there and, they were like, “We’re sorry, you can’t come in.”
MIKE NESS: I was fighting a lot ’cause I’d be walking down the streets of Fullerton with vermilion red hair and a leather jacket and a carload of construction workers would drive by and say, “Faggot.” And you’d flip ’em off and then they’d turn around and you gotta box! You gotta fight!
TONY CADENA: It was a beautiful irony when they opened up the House of Blues at Disneyland last year and Social Distortion was one of the first bands to play it. And sold it out. You can’t imagine how vindicating that was. I haven’t talked to Mike in a long time, but I hope he had the same smile on his face that I had when I opened up the paper and saw the ad for the show!
CLAUDE BESSY: In late 1979 or early 1980, I approached Penelope and said, “Let’s make a fucking film of the scene.” I came up with the title The Decline of Western Civilization, and Philomena talked to the bands and got them on, my idea totally.
PHILOMENA WINSTANLEY: We thought she did an excellent job.
CLAUDE BESSY: Yes, fantastic, 150 percent fantastic. The only problem I have is that she shoots them and leaves them no money.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS: This guy Ron told me that he had some buddies, a couple of insurance salesmen from the Valley who had a few extra bucks, that wanted to do a porno movie and would I be interested in directing it. I said, “No, absolut
ely not, but how about a punk rock movie?” So they wanted to look-see, and I brought them to the Starwood. We saw Darby and I said, “Is this crazy or what? It’s fuckin’ nuts here,” and they said they wanted to do the movie. Initially it was only going to cost around fifteen grand because I was shooting in Super 8, but after we looked at some of the footage we agreed that the subject was more important, that it had to be shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. I told them that I thought the cost would go up to about eighty grand and they said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” It ended up costing about $120,000 altogether.
JENNY LENS: The Decline was an interesting but unfortunate view of the scene that was nothing like the one I knew. Most of the kids that Penelope interviewed were not central in my book… they were mostly a bunch of slobbering chauvinistic idiots and psychos from Orange County. They were no people I knew or had been photographing for the past four or five years. Penelope’s movie focused on the homeless, aimless, self-destructive aspects as opposed to the creative, educated, even self-educated, fun people that I knew.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS: We went along and shot more and more shows, these guys would come out there, Jeff Goodman and Gordon Brown were their names, to see what was going on—and I remember the night we shot the Germs, they were scared that they were going to get sued because people were getting thrown around and stuff, it felt like utter mayhem. It was in this really little soundstage, Cherrywood Studios, they were really nervous because that was the craziest night of the shoot. And this wasn’t even the last performance I had to shoot, so I was afraid they were going to pull the plug on me, but they didn’t, they hung in there. Besides, nobody really got hurt there or at any of the shows; I think Darby got hurt more than anybody else.