We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  JOHN DOE: I didn’t realize Penelope Spheeris had an agenda until later. For better or worse, I think she got a good movie out of it, but she definitely supplied anybody and everybody with whatever kind of drug or alcohol they wanted, and I think she knew that she would get what she wanted by doing that. Get someone fucked up and roll the camera. And one of the biggest mistakes, that would have only added to the movie, was not having a little banner running underneath saying where, when, and under what circumstances the bands were filmed. When they filmed Darby, I heard they got him a bunch of smack and said, “Okay, go.” It was early in the morning, and he never got up in the morning.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS: It’s possible that Darby got extra fucked up for the filming. I don’t really know. But there’s a point where you say, “Oh, he’s fucked up, isn’t this interesting and entertaining?” and then there’s a point where it’s “No, you can’t even do this.” Gary Hirstius, the audio engineer, is back there going, “Darby, the mic! Pick up the mic!” because he couldn’t even pick up the microphone. You know, I didn’t think back then that Darby got fucked up, I just thought that was how he was. I remember thinking, “This is unusable,” because he wouldn’t put his mouth up to the mic—I needed to get the lyrics on tape. I didn’t really realize the impact of that performance until later, when it dawned on me that this says something bigger than the music itself would’ve said even if it had been recorded correctly. This is making a statement that’s more important!

  JOHN DOE: When they filmed X, Penelope’s crew set up in Exene’s and my house while we were out playing. We knew we’d be filming from two in the morning until the sun came up so we were drinking and snorting speed. We were all fucked up as well. Nobody gave a shit. Nobody cared. Nobody was looking at it as a career move. Didn’t really think it would have any impact. Didn’t care.

  EXENE CERVENKA: I think Decline is a really important movie, but I think that the things that aren’t in that movie are more important than the things that are. It makes me sad that you freeze a moment and that’s the whole extent of its reality. That’s what people believe it was. And it was just so limited. Penelope had an idea of what she wanted to portray and she portrayed it. A lot of stuff was left out… certainly a lot of the bands were left out.

  JOHN DOE: The only regret is that the movie didn’t show the true picture of the Los Angeles scene at the time. Penelope was very selective in the bands that she chose. The Screamers and the Weirdos were huge bands then. The Plugz were also very popular. They were much more musical and artistic in a pop art sort of way, but she picked all the really hardcore bands, the element coming out of Huntington Beach, and everybody in the original scene hated that crowd because it was all about uniformity and pointless violence.

  EXENE CERVENKA: We played a show and came back to our house, and there was a film crew there. They had these big lights set up and our house was small, maybe six hundred square feet, little tiny bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. There was a light set up in the backyard, shone into the window of the bathroom, so the bathroom was all lit up… you couldn’t get away… and they brought cases and cases of beer and speed and I think we kind of thought the movie wasn’t gonna come out anyway. It was funny to us that anybody thought we were worth documenting. It got very grueling and they were still filming us at seven o’clock in the morning. I was in a blackout at that point. I had no idea I was even on camera, so I feel like there I was, this wild drunken girl, which I was, mouthy and kind of fucked up all the time, but there was another part of me that didn’t get across and that makes me sad. Penelope was showing the dark side, she wanted to show the real, real dark stuff, and, of course, I was too young (twenty-four? twenty-five?) and naive to realize that I was in control of the situation and I could have asked them to leave or I could have left or I could have shut up. It was just, “Who are all these annoying people in my house when I’m trying to party?”

  EUGENE: I didn’t want to be in the thing, but Penelope kept on bugging me because there were no other skinheads in it. I said, “No” at first, and then finally relented. I said, “This is like some project for somebody’s school, right? Like nobody’s gonna see this thing, right?” She was like “No, nobody’s gonna see it.” Little did I know, a year later, I’d be stopped in the street all the time, there were thousands of posters with my picture…. I’d end up going home with some nice young girl and she’d have a poster of me on her fucking wall.

  LEE VING: Fear played at the Fleetwood, and the footage she shot of our audience was used for all the bands once Penelope cut the movie together.

  EUGENE: When she filmed at the Fleetwood when the fights were going down, I kind of un-directed that. I told everybody, “Okay, they got cameras in here, on tripods.” Those big tripods were standing above the crowd, and I said, “Just drag your fights behind the cameras” ’cause there was some serious fighting in there that she wasn’t even able to show ’cause it was so fucking gnarly.

  DON BOLLES: In 1980 Darby was about to go to London and he decided Rob Henley was in and I was out as the drummer. His excuse was that I was also playing with this band Vox Pop and Darby considered it a joke band.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: In 1980 Darby booted regular drummer Don Bolles from the Germs to create a place for Rob Henley, his most recent regular squeeze. Henley was a sixteen-year-old beach urchin surfer who, like Darby, was a bit of a womanizing gigolo except he worked them with his dick in counterpoint to Darby’s ability to work their minds. Henley became a sort of hetero-lecher version of Darby as he perpetuated the punk-slut-boy-on-drugs archetype left over from the glam era. Rob was Darby’s penis in absentia for all the girls that wanted Darby. I overheard Darby once cussing out Robbie to deadly rival Gerber (who eventually wrenched Robbie away, as she’d done with his previous big romantic affairs with hitherto straight boys). Darby was despairing that his love was “fuckin’ off sluttin’” somewhere in Beverly Hills, again, whereupon the shit-faced Gerb slurred with her drink splashing out of the glass, “How the fuck do you think I feel? I’m fucking him, too!” Henley regaled me on several occasions with numerous sordid tales of his dog-boy toilet sodomy exploits with several young heiresses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Rob was the secular end of Darby’s mystical Circle One orbit. He was an adorable acne-faced kid straight outta one of those Larry Clark–Gus Van Sant chicken hawk fantasies, a real cutie proto–River Phoenix type. Darby announced he was going to London and instructed Lorna and Pat to teach Henley to play drums so the Germs could resume without Bolles on his return. He accused Don of disloyalty and of embarrassing the Germs by frequently appearing in public naked or dressed in women’s clothes and dispatched Bill Bartell to tell Bolles he was out.

  DON BOLLES: Darby was so heavily narcoticized that he was apparently unable to see irony in wanting to be the leader of the world’s most outrageous punk band, yet he is embarrassed by someone’s appearance in his band?

  HAL NEGRO: Darby, it seemed that last year, was not having any fun. Everything about him became so serious and dark. It was like, “Lighten up.” To be that serious ’cause your band wasn’t going where you wanted… nobody’s band was going where they wanted, but it was fun to play anyway.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: There had to be other, deeper personal reasons, and claiming “embarrassment” seems more of a smokescreen for the real reason. It was said by several Germs insiders that Darby simply didn’t much like Bolles’ personality but kept him on for so long because it was less hassle than reprising the rigmarole the band went through during their first year to find a decent permanent drummer. Whatever the reasons, however, the two musicians—Pat and Lorna—who had spent three years honing instrumental chops resented having to revert to their primitive garage-thrash beginnings when they weren’t able to play at all, and after gamely attempting to teach some rudiments, they were dismayed to realize that the situation was hopeless—their student had absolutely no drumming instinct or musical talent whatsoever, not even
by punk emotion-over-technique standards. Lorna quit in disgust first and Pat followed suit, thus ending the Germs as a band.

  HELLIN KILLER: When he came back from London he was all like Mr. Adam and the Ants. I guess Amber introduced them.

  GREG HETSON: Black Flag once showed up at Tower Records and totally disrupted Adam Ant during his big in-store appearance… they bombed the place with thousands of flyers saying BLACK FLAG KILLS ANTS ON CONTACT! This was how Black Flag greeted the New Romantic hype from London. It was great! L.A. punk rock ruled!

  NICOLE PANTER: I couldn’t understand why he was emulating someone as lame as Adam Ant. He came over to visit me in that getup and I was like, “Why?”

  SHAWN STERN: During the summer of ’80, just after he got back from England, Darby hung out at Skinhead Manor. He was rehearsing there with the Darby Crash Band. Darby would come over and party and get fucked up, he was hanging out with this little gay kid. I don’t remember who was in his band… Bosco, and I don’t remember who else. He wanted to start a new thing, but he was just getting fucked up all the time. He was partying a lot, and there were people shooting up speed at the Manor all the time. It was horrible.

  MAGGIE EHRIG: I thought that Casey Cola was Darby’s enabler. It just seemed like that was why they were friends. She enabled him, she got cash all the time, I don’t know if it was from her mom or whatever, and she picked up for everything after Amber was removed from the picture when they got back from London. Casey had hard cash everywhere in her room… in socks, inside clothes, there was just money everywhere, in drawers, under the bed… everywhere you looked there was cash, and we were always rifling through her shit.

  HELLIN KILLER: I barely knew Casey Cola personally, but her rep as a big heroin addict preceded her. That’s always an easy way to get somebody to stick around, it’s like, “Here, I’ll get you dope… hang out with me and get high.” It was all about “Let’s go get a whole bunch of dope and I’m gonna do it all.” He realized that all the people he’d been really close to, people that he’d loved and had loved him, had kind of written him off and moved on and he’d gone in a different direction. Nobody could help him.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The Starwood was an oversold sweatbox mess. It was wall-to-wall newer kids yet again. New recruits to suburban punk were multiplying at such a fast monthly rate, most of them may not have even known this gig was a Germs reunion since there was no public announcement whatsoever [till October ’80, and then only in an obscure fanzine] that the Germs had even disbanded. None of these kids read nor cared about Slash; most of them had probably never even heard of it. Due to the influence of key skateboarder icons like Tony Alva, Duane Peters, Steve Olson, the punk word was spread throughout the outer ’burbs of the entire SoCal basin. Many of them had only just heard about this insane punk band the Germs, and they’d heard all the rumors about the Circle One cult of Darby, which held court at the Temple of Oki Dog. It had been about six months from the time of the trip to London, through the DC Band fallout, and the Cruising sessions, right up until now, early December 1980. This was the first chance many of these new kids had ever had to catch the Germs live. Pat Smear showed up with a spanking new guitar, beaming proudly that it was the first one he’d ever actually owned. The Germs finally rocked the way they were meant to live. This meant that Darby actually went out on a high note blast when he did himself in a few days later, but he really didn’t seem that plastered onstage that night, another reason the show was so damned great.

  DON BOLLES: Our reunion was great in almost every way. Me, Lorna, and Pat were so happy. It was like we were in love and had the best sex in our life. Me and Darby had been so civil to each other in rehearsal. I thought we could be a real band again.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: I DJ’ed the Germs’ last show at the Starwood. They really packed the place. They were great that night.

  JOHN DOE: When the Germs played the Starwood for the last time there were probably six hundred suburban kids and we didn’t know everybody in the audience personally anymore.

  DONNIE ROSE: Darby told people before the show the purpose of the Germs reunion was to demonstrate to the new punks how it was, what it was really all about in the old days. The reunion was a big success, and everybody in the band and the audience thought it was one of the best Germs shows ever. Darby should have taken the cue to quit screwing around, finally, and should have gone back to his writing to come up with a new Germs album… but he’d already insisted on going solo. But instead of doing either he decided to go ahead with this plan to kill himself—literally days after this gig.

  JOHN DOE: If there was a bad audience or an audience he didn’t understand, it would change again, you know? I was trying to give him more life experience ’cause he obviously hadn’t had a lot of that. Darby had never had a day job since he left high school, he never really lived as a regular person. I was trying to tell him how many fucked-up jobs I’d already had and how writing and playing music was really a good job and it could be for him as well. There was no real reason given for why he felt that way, other than everyone at some point in their lives feels that way. We knew he was doing a lot of heroin, but it was before the point where people would consider doing an intervention. We didn’t know about NA or anything like that back then, we knew what alcoholism was, but we didn’t care. He was a gourmand… he became a bit of a gourmet, mostly doing heroin.

  DON BOLLES: Darby was always talking about killing himself. In almost every interview, he always said that he would never be old. He was going to kill himself. When he was done doing what he wanted to do, he wanted to die. He said it so much, people thought he was a crying wolf kind of boy. He actually said at the rehearsal that he was only doing the reunion show to get enough heroin to kill himself.

  GERBER: The last thing I said to him was, “I’m so fucking tired of you threatening to kill yourself! So you know what? Why don’t you just stop fucking with me and stop fucking with everyone else and stop threatening. If you’re gonna fucking do it, why don’t you just go do it and stop trying to take people down with you.” He said it to me all the time. I’m talking all the fucking time, man. He told me for years that he would “check out” by twenty-two.

  CASEY COLA: I’ve been referred to as self-destructive, but, um, it’s really odd because they would get mad at me for like getting too drunk and driving too fast and for them, they can walk into walls and cut up their arms and stuff, and it’s not the same thing. Self-destruction is a means of showing, if you’re cutting up your body and marking or whatever, it’s your own, it’s one thing that you can call completely and totally your own, and so much of people’s identities is being taken away, and even being a punk, a lot of that’s just sameness… you still need a personal identity… and where everybody’s coming from, they’re just seeing the same thing happen to them that’s happening to their parents, the same wasted life, so they claim something as their own… their body is their own, they can always mark on that or cut on that or push up against somebody or shave their heads or color their hair, it’s a mark of “This is my body.”

  PAT SMEAR: We had always talked about suicide and doing it at this certain time, this certain time in your life. So it was not a surprise. When his timetable came up, he was, coincidentally, fucked up enough in the head to want to do it anyway. He had a choice. He could either have been happy and said, “What a stupid idea that was,” and just gone on with his life, or he could go, “Well, since this is the time I was going to kill myself anyway, and since I’m so unhappy, and my life’s so fucked up, I may as well really do it.” I don’t know. That’s sort of my theory.

  CASEY COLA: We both just looked at each other and it was such a bad night we told people we were going to go kill ourselves. We said it and like nobody believed us, you know, but once that had been done, we were just going and we got started and we were doing it. Some people really have doubts about whether we really thought we were gonna die. People will swear to me that Darby didn’t think he was going to di
e, and I know for a fact that he wanted to die. He wrote a suicide note, he knew how much drugs he was doing, and he did think he was going to die, and he did also think that I was going to die.

  JOHN DOE: I’d talked to him a couple of times before that, because he was obviously unhappy, and Lorna had asked me to talk to him to try to keep him from doing this. I remember telling him that he was an amazing person. He just needed to get through it. I tried to encourage him to not be so sad. It obviously didn’t work. I do remember saying that life was worth it even if it didn’t seem like it. I put my arm around him and tried to show him that people really cared for him. He had lost that belief.

  CASEY COLA: Darby and I had the same kind of mood swings. If we were drinking, we’d forget the same things and we’d remember the same things. We’d been kidding around about it—we always talked about how we would kill ourselves and stuff. The time came and, um, we did it, and, um, he died, um… there are a lot more details. He died and I didn’t. I did technically die for about three minutes, two and a half, three minutes—I read the police report. For me it was really hard because a lot of people said that Darby didn’t mean for me to die and that he did it on purpose and stuff like that, which is untrue… he did mean for me to die ’cause I was dead for a few minutes. We’d worked out already that the drugs moved slower through my veins because we’d done drugs before and we knew what was going on… we’d talked about committing suicide together before, but not in a serious way.

  GEZA X: Darby Crash was a premeditated would-be apocalyptic cult leader. He chose to do that, he chose his doomsday, and he did a bang-up job on it, I gotta say. It’s lived on as the stuff of mythology. He flat out said he was gonna do it, and I think he did it exactly when he said he’d do it, according to something he wrote in 1975. He used to say, “I’m gonna kill myself in five years.” He’d put some twisted spin on the Bowie song “Five Years.” That’s how he had all those girls weeping onstage ’cause they knew he was gonna die. He preyed on the female instinct to save things, especially certain types of female who go for guys who seem doomed, where the infatuated female is led into believing she will be the one who saves him from himself, or whatever. Darby was unhappy and he had it planned out that he was gonna get as far as he could and then off himself.