by Marc Spitz
CASEY COLA: Darby and I had been doing consistent drugs for a month and a half. We’d really been trying to put our lives together. Everything was fucking up with our plan for this great house we were living in. He was supposed to be writing [but] he hadn’t done anything, and he was supposed to be recording in January. We looked around the courtyard of the Hong Kong and said, “Man, fuck it, let’s do it. Fuck this shit, it’s not gonna ever change, it’s not gonna get better. It’s going to go on and on, we’re going to be doing this same shit next year.” We talked about whether we could get enough drugs, and that if he hit me up it would be murder—I can’t do myself, because I have a manual-dexterity problem. We were each asking, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” He didn’t coerce me, and I didn’t talk him into it. We never talked each other into anything. I didn’t make Darby die. I got water and a spoon. He wrote a note, which he didn’t show me, but which I think said, “My life, my leather, my love goes to Bosco.” He hit me up first and said, “Are you okay?” and I said, “Um, yeah.” He put his hand at the small of my back and he said, “Just hold it, just stay there, just wait for me, okay? Just wait for me.” He held me up for a second, then he hit a vein and laid himself against the wall and pulled me to him. It was almost like he forgot what we were doing, and he goes, “Wait a minute.” And then he kissed me and said, “Well, bye.”
GERBER: I think it was maybe about three-thirty in the morning and Pat called me, he said, “Are you sitting down?” I said no, and he said, “Sit down.” He said, “He’s gone.”
NICOLE PANTER: I found out that morning. Someone called me on the phone and woke me up out of a dead sleep. I thought it was those assholes from Dangerhouse playing a phone prank, something they were famous for.
PHAST PHREDDIE: I remember going to the Slash offices on that Monday after Darby OD’d. Everyone was crying. Chris D. and I had a long conversation about death. Little did we know that John Lennon was being shot as we talked.
BELINDA CARLISLE: I was living at Disgraceland, when I got the phone call [that Darby died]. Then John Lennon died. It was a bit of a blur. Really bizarre.
RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: When Darby died, it was the same time that John Lennon died. I did a whole show of Beatles and Germs back and forth. One Beatle song and one Germs song as a tribute to Darby and John. Darby picked the wrong time to die. John Lennon kind of upstaged him.
BOB BIGGS: Darby was ambitious, but not so ambitious that he didn’t kill himself. Darby wanted to be a rock star like Bowie, but he had such disdain for the institutions that would enable him to become that, so he settled for cult hero, and I think that was enough for him. He just didn’t want to go through all the machinery and relentless ego maintenance that it takes to first become a rock star and then to stay one.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS: The night that I found out that Darby died, Bob Biggs and I were sleeping and the phone rang and I answered. I thought it was a joke, that people were fucking with you like they always did, a Germs joke. But no, it was really true that he had died. And then I thought, “Oh, my God, people are going to think that I’m terrible because I just did this movie and I have 5,000 posters sitting on the floor at Slash with him lying on the floor looking like he’s dead.” I felt so bad, but it was just ironic that I had chosen that particular frame as the advertisement for the movie because he looked dead, eyes shut. I felt sort of guilty, because I had done this movie and it was supposed to be all really fun and funny and then somebody that was supposed to be the hero of the whole scene had died. It sort of took the fun out of it. All of a sudden it had a terrible feeling to it. It had this slap-in-the-face kind of reality to it of “Oh, you little bastards, you wanted to play mean and gnarly and bad and be as perverted and as sick as you could be. Okay, slap-in-the-face reality: Well, how’s death for ya?” That was the way it felt. It was kind of fucked. It also felt like the end of an era. That’s what you thought: “Okay, now that the symbol of the whole movement is gone, I guess the movement’s over.”
NICOLE PANTER: If you saw Suburbia, you saw the funeral basically. It was this really sad little punk rock funeral. Darby looked like they’d put green clay on his face and his hair was dyed black.
JUDITH BELL: After Darby died it was really depressing. “This just isn’t fun. It’s not cool, and these people are just a really sorry lot.” When Claude left L.A. for Europe never to return, too, that was it. Claude was the one with the humor and he took a lot of that with him.
BRENDAN MULLEN: By October-November 1981, Beauty and the Beat, the Go-Go’s debut album, hit number one on the Billboard album charts. It would go on to sell millions of copies.
MILES COPELAND: IRS’s target was to sell 100,000 Go-Go’s records. We figured that if we could do that, that was a good starting point, and we’d build from that. It just so happened that the song kinda clicked and the timing was right, momentum was there. It was good solid pop and it was refreshing and it was the summer and it just clicked.
HAL NEGRO: When I saw the Go-Go’s on the cover of Rolling Stone, I was stoked. These were girls I knew. I felt like it enhanced my stature with my little sister’s friends. Fourteen-year-old girls were impressed.
MARGOT OLAVERRA: I had no indication that it would be that successful. My mind wasn’t set on those heights. I was really pissed off. Beauty and the Beat was number one and I was squatting in an East Village apartment full of holes. I was still being recognized in the club scene as a Go-Go. That sucked, it really sucked. I had great resentment and hostility. Of course, when the album came out, all of the songs were songs I’d collaborated on. I was written off of the copyright, just erased from “How Much More”—I couldn’t get a lawyer at first until the record hit number one. Then I had lawyers calling me!
ELISSA BELLO: I was in this mall in Buffalo when I heard “Crazy” playing in a record store. This is a song I’d played for two years and here I was in this mall in Buffalo three thousand miles away listening to it. Then I got an eyeful of this poster with all the girls on it. It was bizarre. It was like somebody hit me on the back of the head. When you move from a place you’re born and raised in, it’s like your history, your past is back there and it’s never brought out, and then when you go back and there’s something you were doing that nobody there knows about, it’s so weird… it brought my two worlds together at that moment. They were playing at Madison Square Garden with the Police and I wanted to go see them and Belinda pretended she didn’t know who I was.
EXENE CERVENKA: What they were doing was so different from what I was doing that it wasn’t like a personal thing when they exploded. We were doing fine with what we were doing—we had all that critical acclaim, which we didn’t know how to process. They had a lot more commercial potential than we did. I was just amazed. I couldn’t believe that that band that used to play at the Masque was suddenly on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was unbelievable. But then a lot of odd things had happened. I’d rather that the Go-Go’s were on the cover of Rolling Stone than Darby commit suicide. I guess it would be in the positive column.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: When it launched in 1981, we thought Music Television, MTV, was gonna change music for the good. Like artists are going to be back in control and there’d be a renaissance period. Instead, MTV helped turn pop culture into some big marketing device. MTV took something that we took as very personal and integral to our art form and, about six months after its inception, made it part of their home market network for the record companies. MTV did a very big disservice to pop music. The pre-MTV days will be remembered as the end of a renaissance period for the arts and pop culture in the West.
GINGER CANZONERI: A lot of the Go-Go’s early success came from MTV. That first video for “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Miles Copeland was shooting a Police video at the time and he borrowed the cameraman and said, “Here, go out with the girls, just go for a few hours.” And the first video was just them driving around in a car. But I think it was a really good call on his part.
MILES COPELAND: Prior to
MTV, the game was all about radio. And TV was actually something you did not do. I remember the manager of ZZ Top saying to me that he’s never going to put his group on TV. Wanna see the group? Gotta buy tickets to the show. And he actually had this philosophy and he did not do TV and ZZ Top did not do TV. They did not do MTV for a long, long time. Most of the progressive rock-era bands refused to support MTV. Everybody who was an established act turned their noses up to MTV. So MTV basically went to whomever they could get—beggars can’t be choosy—and so MTV paid attention to the Police, to the punk bands. And in return, the punk bands paid attention to MTV because they were one of the few people who would play their stuff. And the Go-Go’s totally benefited from this. The Go-Go’s, when you saw them, they were fun and disarming and all that. And you could listen to them at the volume that you wanted to, and you could put forward the visual that you wanted it to be because you were controlling the camera and whatever. So you’re sitting and there’s an audience tuning in and, “Gee, this stuff is actually quite good. I quite like this stuff.” MTV coincided with the new generation, with the punk generation, and the marriage worked. Then everybody woke up in the industry to what the power of MTV was, and then all of a sudden ZZ Top said, “Shit, we’re going to make videos,” and bang, look what happened to them. All of a sudden there was a rebirth of a lot of those bands. The ones who actually got into what MTV was and came up with a kind of a thing. So all of a sudden ZZ, with these long beards, they start selling shitloads of records, because they figured out that this vehicle was a whole new way of selling stuff.
EXENE CERVENKA: In life, no matter what you do, you have to deal with the reality outside the perfect world that you’re trying to create for yourself and your friends and your family, so going to see the Blasters and the Gun Club play and drinking all night and listening to 78’s is a wonderful thing, but then in the morning there is such a thing as MTV. Nobody liked it. Nobody wanted to be part of it. Everybody was dragged kicking and screaming into it. The more noble people, the hardcore bands, could just say “fuck you” ’cause they already had a really strong network of kids who would go see them play and buy their records and follow them and it was more like a huge underground thing, where our underground thing, which was never that big, we were gonna have to play on TV and get people to find out about us… and no, we didn’t really want to do MTV and it would have been really nice if the whole world could have found out about that scene without having to compromise any of it, but it was just a necessary evil and everybody had to do it.
BRENDAN MULLEN: Although obviously nowhere near as commercially successful as the Go-Go’s new wave pop, hardcore kept going somehow. In 1981 Black Flag recruited their fourth lead singer, a former Washington, D.C., Type-A ice cream parlor manager named Henry Rollins.
HENRY ROLLINS: The Go-Go’s never really figured into my thinking. I had nothing against them and thought they were a sturdy pop unit. They were playing pop music and it was a KROQ thing and we were on Mars with what we were doing. I joined Black Flag by showing up at an audition in New York City in the summer of 1981. I sang two sets with them in a small practice place and they gave me the job. The first days were a jolt because they were living hard and low to the ground and I had no experience like that before. It was a bend in the road as they say. I had worked hard all my short life at multiple jobs. I thought I was quite the hardworking taskmaster type. Ginn was ten times this. When I first joined the band, we got into a rehearsal regimen that was quite an undertaking. We were at it hours a day. I thought that a few days in, I was ready. Ginn told me that I was nowhere near ready. I month later, I saw that he was right, of course. By the time we hit the stage for real, there was no real nervousness on my part. I knew my stuff. It was not a warm-up show. We went out there and kicked their asses.
BRENDAN MULLEN: With Rollins in front, Black Flag released Damaged, which consisted mostly of songs written by Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski before Dukowski left the band. To this day, Damaged is still their best-known album, and probably one of the most influential in hardcore. They toured relentlessly in support of it.
HENRY ROLLINS: Black Flag was a committed band of people who wanted to create and perform totally unrestrained musical expression. This is not the kind of thing that got you let in the front door. In fact, there was a struggle. I think that Greg is one of the most unique figures in the indie record world. He had a route he wanted to take and he went for it and a lot of people benefited from his determination. I’m sure that there is a chance that we inspired some bands in other towns by coming through and playing. I think American hardcore probably opened some doors and shook up the record industry a great deal.
JOHN DOE: X survived because we had that larger life experience. Exene had it. And so had Billy and so had I. Billy had played with Gene Vincent. And D.J. [Bonebrake] was a drummer without being a dummy.
RAY MANZAREK: We got ten thousand dollars to make the second record, Wild Gift. Basically it was the same thing. We went to another studio, paid the engineer, and did the second one with Clay Rose. Unfortunately, nobody made any money. I never got paid till the third album, after they went to Elektra Records. By the third album, I was actually able to get a producer’s fee. Then our budget went from ten thousand to a hundred thousand and the record sounded the same! You listen to record one, two, three, four, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s X, man. That’s the X sound.” Whether we made it for ten thousand or a hundred thousand, it didn’t matter. And Elektra was never able to sell any more records than Slash. The only difference between the first two and the last two was that we all got paid.
EXENE CERVENKA: More money [for a record budget] means you can decide to stop and go eat sushi and go drink Irish coffee for four hours and come back and go, “Where were we?” Yeah, we had a little clubhouse thing going on a lot.
D.J. BONEBRAKE: X was the first unsigned band to headline the Greek Theater—that was in ’81. In L.A. we were a phenomenon. We were unsigned… and we headlined the Greek, which had a capacity of 6,500.
RAY MANZAREK: We did the Greek Theater. I played with them. It was like the X All-Star Show and Revue. I came out, Top Jimmy came out, and we closed the whole thing off with “Roadhouse Blues.” I thought, “This is it, man. Punk rock is gonna take over. X headlining the Greek Theater.” Man, it was fucking electrical. I left the stage and took the microphone and said, “Keep the fire burning.” And the audience just screamed, “Yeah.” God, what a fuckin’ night that was.
TOP JIMMY: After playing the Greek I found myself at four-thirty in the morning walking down Vine Street and Fountain and barely having enough for a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the Winchell’s there. But a few hours before, man, I’m king… I’m in front of all these thousands of people at the Greek, and a few hours later, I’m just walking down the street… back to the real world.
GREG HETSON: The Dark Years of Punk were from ’84 to ’90. That was when the audience for punk rock had basically dwindled to nothing. A lot of it had to do with the violence at gigs. In Los Angeles, especially, it was completely outta hand… and it didn’t help when cops overreacted every time… and then the violence fed off the violence and then people were afraid to go. It was also the time when speed metal took over on one side… and the big hair MTV bands were on the other… and so punk rock sort of fell between the cracks… it was written off as extinct since they thought they had already assimilated the entire “punk” culture with all the big New Wave radio pop bands: the Cars, Blondie, the Knack, Devo, the Go-Go’s… and punk was shit out of luck as far as getting any serious commercial airplay outside of Rodney on the ROQ till Nirvana.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The mid-to-late ’80s was a weird no-man’s-land for punk rock… there were very few punk bands still knocking around that meant anything outside of small bars and clubs and a tiny youth center or two. Even Fugazi or No Means No didn’t yet have the medium-sized concert audience they enjoyed later on. The speed metal bands like Slayer and Metallica who roared up
around ’82–’83 may not have tried to emulate the L.A. hardcore bands—they always claim it was the so-called ‘New Wave of British Metal’ musically, but these guys took the independent DIY aspect from the SoCal hardcore punkers—the zines and the tape trading—and ran with it… without giving ’em any credit or props for priming new, young rock audiences to be receptive to super-intense sped-up metalloid punk rock à la Fear, Black Flag, and their ilk. But it was Suicidal Tendencies that really kicked the doors down with their punk/speed-metal hybrid classic “Institutionalized,” which was all over MTV. Slayer eventually did a TSOL cover years later when someone probably told ’em it was a good career move to acknowledge that the L.A. hardcore sped-up punk chord thrash thing existed years before thrash chord metal. Many mistook Metallica for a Punk band during their early days… and that’s my theory—dumbed-down speed metal played with precision chops took away all the kids who would theoretically have latched onto Black Flag and Co.
GREG HETSON: But the Jerks were nose-diving anyway, the Dead Kennedys had peaked, the Adolescents had broken up, Black Flag was in its last gasp… TSOL had gone big-hair bandana rock with a line-up of no original members… SST as a label was evolving away from strict punk and Ginn was really into recording Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, and many other early pre-grunge art bands.