The liquor’s run out and so have the bar’s good graces. We gather our jackets and get ready to leave. “I know it sounds simple, says Strummer, but I believe in naivete. It’s a good breeding idea for rebellion. It’s a bit like believing in survival, you know—I mean, surviving is the toughest test, and we had to find out the hard way. I had to find that out. But in the end, I realized it’s the only rebellion that counts—not giving up.
“It’s like I said: We ain’t dead yet, for fuck’s sake. If you ain’t got hope, you should get where there is some. There’s as much hope for the world as you find for yourself.”
punk: twenty years after
Though none of us knew it at the time, when the Clash finished their Combat Rock tour in 1982, they were very near their own end. The band split in 1983, with Mick Jones going on to form Big Audio Dynamite (also known as B.A.D., which turned out to be an unfortunately clairvoyant nickname), and Strummer going on to something less than a solo career. Still, the Clash’s trek had been glorious—they made a larger and more meaningful volume of great punk music than any band before or since (that is, unless you count Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra as punks—which perhaps you should), and compared to most late 1970s punk acts, their seven-year career seemed downright protracted.
In the last twenty years, there was no single movement in popular (or in this case, semipopular, even unpopular) music that I cared or argued more about than punk, no movement I tracked more closely. But to be a fan of punk was to resign oneself to many uneasy realities—including dealing with a great deal of derision. It also meant accepting that many of punk’s best artists and best music would pass you by faster than a bullet-train. Remember the Au Pairs, the Vibrators, the Avengers, Magazine, X-Ray Spex, Wire, the Adverts, Young Marble Giants, Marine Girls, Liliput, the Raincoats, Kleenex, ESG, Gang of Four, the Germs, Y Pants, Penetration? If you do, you know they all made great music, and then they were gone almost before you knew it. It was as if a troop of ghosts had laid mines across the field of modern-day pop. If you were lucky, you stepped on those mines, and their explosion could be epiphanies that might change your life.
Though I wrote about punk more than any other theme since 1977 (especially during my years as pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner), the subject receives only a limited amount of space in this present volume. In part, that’s because there are other writers who have done wonderful and thoughtful jobs of delineating punk’s history and meaning (see Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces and ranters & crowd pleasers—the latter published in the United Kingdom as In the Fascist Bathroom). It’s also because there were ways in which I became disillusioned with how punk eventually was received, and how some of its best meanings were robbed. I remember a film from a few years back, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The title referred to the commercial and generational breakthrough represented by the success of Nirvana—which indeed was a wonderful (though for the band, horribly costly) event. But the truth is, anybody paying attention had heard that same claim—that punk had broken through, been accepted by a hidebound American audience—for at least a decade, ever since the Clash hit big with London Calling in 1979. It was heartening, of course, that music like the Clash’s and Nirvana’s reached many people, for these victories meant far more than commercial success; they also gave hope, voice, courage, and fun to many people whom the traditional pop world was reluctant to accommodate, or even to recognize. At the same time, I’m afraid that—at least in the mid-1980s—what many people meant when they claimed that punk (also known by the more generic, “acceptable” designation of “new wave”) had broken through in America was that the music—and even parts of the punk movement itself—had finally been incorporated into a thriving commodity form. As far back as 1983, certain elements of punk style were already ubiquitous: quirky music, tough-posing fashions, and sharp, insouciant stances permeated much of American radio (on stations such as Los Angeles’ trend-setting KROQ-FM) and television (the horrible Square Pegs series and, of course, MTV) and international film (Diva, Star Struck, Liquid Sky, and others), as if the whole creative expression of domestic pop culture suddenly had realigned itself. It was as if punk and postpunk had finally won the pop wars only to surrender its ideals.
Which is to say, it was as if nothing had changed: Yesterday’s pop—which new wave set out to upend—was largely a music of relentless sameness, kneejerk sexism, and social unconcern. But new wave pop quickly became a music of exotic sameness, cloying sexiness, and, to some degree, social denial. There was nothing meaningful or revealing in the success of such glitz-and-sex acts as Berlin, Missing Persons, or Duran Duran, even though they blazoned a “new” sound that personified modern trends and attitudes.
What went wrong? How did a music of such unruly origins end up so trivial and diffused? It helps to remember that punk began as a genre born of attitude and circumstance: In the airlessness of British society and aridity of American rock music in the late ’70s, outrage or desecration seemed the only animating, even rational, course—a way of staking distance from all the sameness of those scenes, and also affronting, provoking them. Sedition-minded acts like the Sex Pistols and Clash played their music as if the corruption of British values had forced the noise from them, while their early American counterparts—Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, and Television—didn’t comment on social forces so much as make new claims for the way vital modern music must sound. To the media, much of this brutal, apocalypse-informed modernism seemed merely silly or incomprehensible, while to radio—which stood to break or make punk with a large audience—the music and its style-makers loomed mainly as a loathsome, noncommercial force. What hits radio allowed—the B52s, Cars, Blondie, the Vapors, the Police—seemed elected mainly to quell the music’s insurgency.
Maybe this was a reasonable action, because the best new wave, punk, and postpunk records were actively fierce, profane stuff. Consider the evidence: “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Bodies” (by the Sex Pistols), “White Riot” and “Guns on the Roof” (the Clash), Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (the Adverts), “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” (X-Ray Spex), “Don’t Dictate” (Penetration), “At Home He’s a Tourist” (Gang of Four), “Shot by Both Sides” (Magazine), Fear of Music (Talking Heads), “Discovering Japan” (Graham Parker), “She’s Lost Control” (Joy Division), Broken English (Marianne Faithfull), “Ghost Town” (Specials), Metal Box (Public Image, Ltd.), This Year’s Model (Elvis Costello).
All of these songs or albums were attempts to force popular culture—and a young, developing segment of pop at that—to accommodate visions of social horror, private dissolution, and plain old willful rancor. That they were among the most truthful and important music of their day was largely a missed fact; that they were virtually unheard outside of a community of (anti-) pop activists was certainly a disservice, though to radio’s way of (non-) thinking, more a necessity than choice. This was music that meant to rend the pop world in half—and that’s an ambition that radio (which has since divided the real world into unnecessary black and white factions) figured it could never survive.
But punk always had a built-in defeat factor, and that was basically the way the music would be enervated as it was adopted by a gradually larger audience. Many fans presumed that to adhere to new wave music and its fabricated fashions was to become a part of its culture. In fact, British art and social theorist Dick Hebdige devoted the better part of a book (Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen, 1979) to the idea that this adherence to a collective style gave British punks and mods a “genuinely expressive artifice”—a sense of “Otherness” that set them apart from the beliefs and values of the dominant society. To a degree, this is true: To crop one’s hair into a bright-dyed, spiky cut, or dress in vivid vinyl colors, is to make a choice that sets one apart in new social alignments. Of course, like the initial uniqueness of long hair or short hair, it’s a short-lived difference. One doesn’t necessarily become a punk by fashi
on and musical choices alone.
In America in the 1980s, the whole new wave shebang amounted to even less than a change in weather—more like a change in flavor. That’s because in America, new wave was largely a music of surfaces and faddism—a sound that became as increasingly self-conscious as a chic dance-floor pose. What this meant was that the emerging dominant American new wave audience didn’t necessarily share social or even aesthetic values in the same way that the initial art-informed New York and street-bred London punks and postpunk crowd did. Instead, the MTV and KROQ audiences—which were smack dab in the middle of new wave’s rise—simply shared a fondness for the immediate look and feel of the music, without much driving concern over the ideas or responsibilites implicit in their musical choices. (How else might a thinking audience embrace, on the same bill, bands as diametrically opposed as the Clash and Men at Work?)
What this also meant was that both punk music and its culture could now contain as many political and aesthetic incongruities as the dominant society around them.
IN THE EARLY and mid-1980s, if punk meant or proved anything vital in America, then it was in Los Angeles, more than anywhere else. In the sprawling webwork of riches and dread that was Los Angeles in those days, few people lived out their caprices more colorfully or more fiercely than the punks—as if they were hell-bent on defacing the city’s pacific gloss, or simply underscoring its balled-up artistic and ethical climate. In a sense, punk in California was always something of a paradox: The city’s self-possessed stylishness and cold-blooded opulence are so steady, so pervasive, that anyone who attempts to assert rage or ugliness as aesthetic values can’t help seeming a bit misplaced, if not just plain pretentious. But there was an inescapable rightness about what the punks were doing in Southern California: In a place where one of the most widely held ambitions is leisure, and the most commonly respected product of art is prosperity, some of the few voices that made much moral difference at all were the ones that blazoned hostility.
In any case, punk—as a digression in culture or community, more than an adventure in music or art—flourished in Los Angeles as it had in no other place outside of London. In fact, Los Angeles was the one place where punk has come closest to living up to its name—the one place where, as David Byrne noted, “you find punks who really are punks: mean as Hell, and not just the creators of an interesting persona.” It was as if all the spike-haired, skin-headed, self-styled guttersnipes you saw haunting the streets and clubs in L.A. were devoted to carrying out what they perceived as punk’s first and foremost possibilities: namely, artful nihilism and studied primitivism.
It’s that fondness for the ignoble that helped give L.A. punk its nasty streak. In his essay about British punk in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Greil Marcus noted: “By far the most violent in appearance and rhetoric of any musical movement, punk was probably the least violent in fact—though by far the most violence was directed against it.” Los Angeles was the place where the punks evened the score.
For the most part, L.A.’s punk violence was confined to a thuggish little ritual called, quite aptly, slam dancing: dancers gathered into kinetic clusters and collided off one another like pool balls caroming around a snookers table. To most observers, it resembled a microcosmic version of pandemonium. (The music for these melees—a rabid, samely version of early monorhythmic, nonmelodic punk, usually dispensed by Fear, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks—was both prompting and incidental: merely a relentless agitating soundtrack or backdrop for the real performers, the audience.)
Sometimes the dancing turned into communal violence. What might begin as a shoving or jeering match between some punks or punks and outsiders could turn hurriedly into a mob action, with half a dozen or so partisans leaping into the fracas, drubbing their hapless target into a bloodied, enraged wreck. Often, scrambles swept across the whole breadth of a club or ballroom floor, touching off eruptions of chaos like a chain-blaze in a dry timberland.
Some observers I know described these flare-ups as essentially the celebrative rites of a community defining itself; others charged that the media hyperbolized the whole scene. I don’t think either of those claims is entirely true: Punk violence was far from being the most troubling form of violence in Los Angeles—a place where the police force was almost never censured for its shootings of citizens and suspects—but what went on in the clubs here wasn’t anything particularly festive or transcendent. It was simply a demonstration of would-be miscreants trying to make a shared style out of accepted notions of alienation and despair.
So what is it about the promised land that inspired so much enmity among its children? Craig Lee (a late Los Angeles-based journalist who played drums and guitar for Catholic Discipline and the Alice Bag Band) did a nice succinct job of summing up the partisan’s point of view in an article about surf punks for L.A. Weekly: “The English press has often snidely alluded to punk in L.A. being a farce, not like the London scene that grew from a revolt against a life of lower class drudgery. But facing a sterile, anonymous life in suburbia is as depressing to some kids as facing a life of dull labor and low wages is to the English punks.”
I have my own view of the subject, which is simply that when you’re trying to act out dreams of desperateness in a place where those dreams aren’t intrinsic, then you just have to act a little harder and a little tougher. After all, it’s a great kick, a great fancy of revolt, to feign hopelessness in a place just drowning with hope. When the passion and the moment faded, the punks could always kick back and settle into the subliminal, lulling rhythm of the city—and many of them did. That cadence of insensibility has been what’s always kept time here: it even, in its own way, gave the punks their momentum, and eventually it outlasted them. Undoubtedly, that made some of the scene’s detractors fairly happy. But for the rest of us, those few voices of outrage that startled this vast, unconcerned cityscape are something we miss terrifically.
ALONG THE WAY, the L.A. punk scene produced a handful of bands that were seen by some as great hopes—including X and the Go-Go’s (I know it’s hard to believe, but the Go-Go’s really were a punk band once upon a time, until A & M Records signed them and fixed that problem for good). Of those two groups, clearly X was the more considerable (though vastly less popular) force. Indeed, X made definitional, high-reaching, great punk records (especially Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun) and also played definitional, high-reaching, great live shows. In concert, guitarist Billy Zoom, drummer Don Bonebrake, bassist John Doe, and vocalist Exene Cervenka took songs like “Sex and Dying in High Society,” “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” “The Once Over Twice,” and “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, but You’re Not” and pushed them to their limit, as if they wanted to punish the structures of the songs in order to strengthen their meanings. At the same time, the group never abandoned its sense of essential unity. X was, after all, a band about community—for that matter, a band that asserted the ideal of family as a loving but practical-minded alternative to personal dissolution and fashionable nihilism—and for all the tension and frantic propulsion in their music, the individual elements of the sound hung together like firm, interconnected patterns.
But by 1985, X’s sense of family—and perhaps a bit of their spirit—began to fray. John Doe and Exene Cervenka not only sang the best team vocals in punk’s history, they had also been a real team—husband and wife. But then that marriage suffered a breakup, and though the pair’s creative partnership remained intact, the romantic disunion took its emotional toll.
In most ways that count, the album that came from that rupture, Ain’t Love Grand, was an album about how fiery love comes to rugged and embittered ends, and how, after the ruin, it can sometimes forge new bonds of esteem and comradeship. Of course, before one can arrive at any such understanding, one has to cut through the remembrances of romantic hell: all the charges and admissions of infidelity (“My Goodness” and “Little Honey”), all the mourning of a lost, ideal union (“All or Nothi
ng” and “Watch the Sun Go Down”). At one point, in “Supercharged,” Exene delivers a taunting account of the feverish and relentless sex she enjoys with a new lover, and John Doe sings along with her, like a grim witness to his own exclusion. One can’t help but wonder, what must Doe have been thinking at such a moment?
Perhaps he was simply thinking that this is what one must do to get past the bad truths. After all, the band survived this rupture, and somehow emerged with one of its bravest works yet. It’s as if, in the place of children, Doe and Cervenka spawned a certain artistry that demanded a continued fellowship; they worked and sang together not merely for the sake of their music, but because of the knowledge that they could make music this grand and fulfilling and revealing no place else but in this band, with each other. The two no longer shared the same home or same love, but they certainly shared the same harmonies—an affinity they could find only in each other—and that’s worth whatever the cost of their continued alliance. Of course, this time it meant something far different for the two to sing together, and not surprisingly, they pulled off their most memorable performances in a trio of songs (“All or Nothing,” “Watch the Sun Go Down,” and “I’ll Stand Up for You”) where they stepped away from recriminations and faced the challenge of their abiding friendship and partnership. “When my friends put you down, I’ll stand up for you,” Doe sings to Exene in the album’s most heartening and generous moment. “I’ll stand up for you, and you’ll stand up for me.”
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