Book Review: Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs by Brendan Mullen

Lexicon Devil:

The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs

by Brendan Mullen with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

      Punk rock took longer to catch on in Los Angeles than it did in the movement’s other major epicenters of New York and London. It’s not that Los Angeles wasn’t primed for it; glam rock was big there in the early 1970s and records from the east cost and the U.K. had found their way out West . For whatever reason, it just took a while to catch hold. But when it did, it exploded. The Runaways could be credited for being the first major band to catalyze the LA scene, but one band moved the whole thing forward by acting as a transition point from early punk to the hardcore punk of the 1980s. That band was the Germs with their singer Darby Crash. Brendan Mullen’s Lexicon Devil tells the story of the brief but seminal career of the band that took punk excess and degeneracy to a whole new level.

Like so many other books out there on the history of punk, Lexicon Devil is an oral history wherein quotes from interviews and articles are carefully pieced together to make a multi-voiced narrative about its subject matter. Scottish immigrant Brendan Mullen was a promoter and early club manager in Los Angeles and helped to get the scene moving. He works well as the compiler and editor of the story since he both observed and participated in the scene. Some of this information, and even some exactly matching quotes, appear in his other collaborative project on the Los Angeles punk movement We Got the Neutron Bomb. Some nitpickers might complain about that, but it works well especially when the re-used quotes fill in missing information, making the whole narrative hang together. If it works, you might as well do it.

Jan Paul Beahm was born into a broken family. His father was absent soon after the early years of his childhood and his mother was overbearing, manic, and histrionic. He went to an alternative high school based on the practices of Scientology and est. Only in California, right? Beahm considered L. Ron Hubbard to be a major influence on his thinking for the few short years he had left to live. It was at that high school where he made friends with George Ruthenberg, the kid who later became Pat Smear, the guitarist for the Germs (and Nirvana and Foo Fighters after that). (Damn, Pat Smear played in two legendary bands whose lead singers both killed themselves. How’s that for rotten luck?)

Beahm, who took the stage name Bobby Pyn, threw together a band of no-talent musicians and called themselves the Germs. Their concerts were little more than pranks where the band made noise and Bobby Pyn did Iggy Pop impressions, cutting his chest with broken glass and throwing food into the audience. They got a well-deserved reputation for being the worst band in L.A. But they weren’t taking themselves seriously and other people weren’t either. They developed a following, especially because Bobby Pyn, who changed his stage name again to Darby Crash, had a strange kind of charisma. He wasn’t a good looking kid, but he had an interesting face and a look of menace about him that was attractive to other punks. He was especially attractive with women and he always had a clique of female groupies around. He actually aspired to be a cult leader and Germs fans began wearing black armbands with blue circles on them. They also burned their wrists with cigarettes to mark themselves out as different from those who weren’t followers. But naive teenager with a philosophy cobbled together from the ideas of other cult leaders could only be limited in scope.

The overall context is not ignored. The growth of the West Hollywood punk scene is well-documented including a wide cast of people like The Go Gos, Rodney Bingenheimer, Joan Jett, the publishers of Slash fanzine, members of X, and all kinds of other people who participated in the scene. Stories about the legendary underground nightclub The Masque are told and the early punk lifestyle, heavy on the drugs and alcohol, is well detailed. Also of important detail is the rise of hardcore punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s after the Germs released their only album GI. The hardcore scene grew rapidly and attracted a lot of kids who didn’t fit in with the early punk scene. The new punks were more violent, more macho, and attracted a lot of negative attention from the police and local rednecks who became notorious for their violence against punks.

The narrative makes it look as though the transition of punk from a fun, ironic nihilism infused with gallows humor to slam dancing, gang fights, and hyper-aggresive adrenaline binges contributed to the downfall of Darby Crash. The singer just couldn’t adapt to the punk movement’s growth that he instigated with his band. The scene appeared to be leaving him behind. Darby Crash struggled with other issues too. He had gotten hooked on heroin and felt as though he had to keep his identity as a gay man secret, especially because the second wave of punk was decidedly more masculine in its presentation. He had also been talking about 86ing himself long before he put the Germs together.

The tragic ending and eulogizing isn’t overdone. Darby Crash’s suicide was ugly and depressing; it probably angered people more than it surprised them. The narrative says what it has to say and then ends. But the last paragraph is a quote from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Temple ov Psychick Youth fame. You can agree or disagree with what Genesis says about the meaning of Darby Crash’s life, one that hit the LA punk scene like a lightning bolt, but you can’t deny that the quote packs a powerful punch to finish this biography off.

There isn’t much to criticize in Lexicon Devil. It’s a thoroughly researched and detailed portrait of a young man, a time, a place, and a counter-cultural music scene. In the end, your appreciation will simply rest on how you feel about Darby Crash and punk in general. If this music and lifestyle are too abrasive for you, you will probably hate this book no matter how perfectly executed Brendan Mullen’s project is. And if you really must know what the inner life of Darby Crash felt like, and the reason so many punks were drawn to the Germs, I recommend you get a copy of their album GI and play the song “We Must Blled”. Play it at high volume. Play it over and over and over again. It’s an absolute nightmare and when Darby Crash, with his raspy snarling voice, sings over and over again “I want out now” you’ll know what kind of pain he was feeling.

 

Book Review: We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz & Brendan Mullen

We Got the Neutron Bomb:

The Untold Story of L.A. Punk

by Marc Spitz & Brendan Mullen

      One thing to understand about the punk counter culture is that it was a scene just as much as a musical movement. The shows and the records weren’t all there was; punk broke through the theatrical fourth wall so that the audience and the people you associated with were as much a part of the movement as anything else. Being in a scene meant being part of a community and punk communities were localized even though they tended to expand and merge with other scenes as bands toured and punks traveled from city to city in order to see whoever wasn’t passing through their hometowns. The self publication of zines and cassette mixtapes were an effective way of holding punk scenes together and communicating with punks farther afield. None of this would have happened if punk didn’t have epicenters to radiate outwards from. New York City and London were the original epicenters, but cities like Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and, most importantly, Los Angeles became secondary epicenters to smaller satellite scenes revolving around them. This isn’t meant to diminish the importance or the quality of those latter scenes; it is just to point out that punk had a timeline and in a pre-internet culture, information didn’t travel so quickly and it took time to build something like a punk community. The advantage is that if it takes more than a decade to establish a new musical style and movement, it takes on its own local flavors and idiosyncrasies and that results in diversity which makes the counter cultural movement richer and deeper than it would have been if everybody else were just imitating each other. We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen gives a broad overview of the development of the SoCal scene and gives indications of how it related to the punk movement as a whole.

The story of Los Angeles punk is told using the oral history technique popularized by Legs McNeil in his monumental Please Kill Me about the growth of punk in New York and The Other Hollywood which chronicles the rise of the porn industry from the 1960s on. It’s a roughly edited montage of wordage from interviews and articles, pasted together to make a coherent story about everything that took place. Some people might criticize this editorial system for being sloppy and rough, but those people don’t realize how it reflects the spirit of punk as a whole. Punk was never about technical perfection and it emphasized raw emotion over production values. People who want perfection can listen to crappy commercial rock like Styx, Rush, or Phil Collins. In fact this book makes it clear that the original L.A. punks were under-stimulated by the wimp rock of the early 1970s. They were hungry for something more real and exciting than Jackson Browne or James Taylor. They wanted a rock and roll experienced that reflected their indulgences in wild sex, alcohol, and amphetamines. So they turned to Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and British glitter rock in general. The writing style of this book reflects the rough and out of control lifestyle that made punk so alluring in its first two phases. Besides, punk scenes tended towards egalitarianism which meant everybody had a voice in some way and what they contributed to the scene was how they chose to express themselves be it through music or otherwise. That is why the oral history method works so well for a book on this subject since so many people give their own side of the story.

If I jump ahead here to the middle, it becomes clear that there is a hinge that joins L.A.’s first and second waves of punk. The hinge is the Germs sole lp GI, produced by Joan Jett no less, who was barely out of her teens at the time. This was the record that transitioned the style of first wave punk into the second wave of hardcore and thrash. Without the Germs and Darby Crash, it is possible that punk rock would have faded away into obscurity. But then again, maybe not since Bad Brains and the Dead Kenndys were going in a similar musical direction at almost the same time.

Having said that, there were really three people who catalyzed the whole L.A. scene. One was the band promoter Kim Fowley who put together The Runaways with Joan Jett and Lita Ford in 1975. Another was nightclub owner and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. The third was Iggy Pop who carried Jim Morrison’s bad attitude over into the proto punk and glam rock movements. David Bowie might have been more popular, but Iggy Pop had a more direct influence on the earliest of L.A. punk pioneers. You can say what you want about these three men in your self-righteous 21^st century virtue signalling; after all they were creeps who preyed on underage girls just like everybody else in the entertainment industry at that time. But they were really the ones who got the whole thing moving. The 1970s were the peak of the Sexual Revolution and moral codes of conduct were loosening so much that that kind of predation was an unfortunate consequence. But if you know anything about groupies, you can’t say those girls were entirely innocent. Groupies lived their lives to seek out sexual experiences with rock stars and that is what they got. That doesn’t justify it but it does contextualize it so understand the difference before you go proclaiming yourself better than everybody else.

Anyhow, after some fights and small riots at music venues, punks in Hollywood took control and opened their own clubs. The Masque was one of the most prominent ones. Along with that came squatting, low life living in cheap apartment blocks, and the rise of punk houses. Hard drugs and alcohol were a big part of all this. So was sexual promiscuity and the aggressively intimidating clothing and hair styles of punk. Misfits and bohemians of all kinds were admitted as were artists, ethnic minorities, homeless people, runaways, the mentally ill, and LGBTQ people. Bands like the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, and the Germs grew in stature. Zines like Slash began circulating. Violence was not uncommon, especially in encounters with people outside the scene and the police. One punk female from Hollywood even got murdered by the Hillside Stranglers. From personal experience, I’d say you might not realize how unified a scene is until you attend a punk’s funeral, some of which can attract the same sized crowds as you would see at a show. It is times like that when you realize how extensive a social network a counter cultural scene can be and how valued every member of that scene is. Hell, I’ve been to funerals where some of the attendees didn’t even like the guy who died but they showed up to lend emotional support to the punk community in their time of emotional distress.

And the music industry wanted nothing to do with L.A. punk. Major record labels tried to market punk from New York and London. When the Sex Pistols broke up, Sid Vicoous and Nancy Spungen died, and very few records aside from the Ramones and The Clash ever sold, the record companies wrote punk off as just another passing fad. They did sign an L.A. band called The Dickies but they weren’t taken seriously in the punk community. In all honesty, for some poseurs punk was nothing but a fad, but the real punks with dedication soldiered on and kept the scenes going despite the snooty attitudes of the businessmen running the music industry. Independent record labels like Slash and SST came along to fill the void and release music that people wanted to hear, free from the rotten commercial values and bad production values that came along with major label contracts. A true musical underground scene was born.

Then the Germs released GI and their singer Darby Crash committed suicide. GI was a pivotal album because it took punk in a new, faster, angrier, dirtier direction that was more aggressive, more self-destructive, and more anti-establishment. The hyperactive crash and burn violence of hardcore and thrash were a middle finger stuck in the face of the mainstream music industry and mainstream American society as a whole.

Something else began happening in L.A. too. Los Angeles is a giant sprawling megalopolis with suburbs and sub-districts with sub-districts inside the sub-districts. There was a lot more to it than the Hollywood Boulevard punk house death trip. Rather than traveling long distances to see shows, punks played gigs in their local areas and developed colloquial styles that reflected those respective scenes. Eventually there were subgroups of surf punks, skateboarders, racist and anti-racist skinheads, straight edge and positive punks, anarchist punks, gangbanger punks, and whatever else you can imagine. Different styles emerged too like roots rock, rockabilly, synth punk, crossover/thrash metal, goth, horror rock, and Chicano punk. Punks flocked in to East L.A. when an art gallery began hosting shows for rent parties, crossing even more social boundaries and building more bridges than had ever been crossed or built before.

The end of this book was a little disappointing though. Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks complained because punk bands didn’t break into the mainstream with bigger crowds in bigger venues. I thought that was what was great about punk. Smaller shows in smaller clubs and halls meant more intimacy between the band and the audience. I got to see the Circle Jerks in a bar that probably held less than 1000 people. It wouldn’t have worked in an arena with 20,0000. Besides, if you wanted to see cock rock like Van Halen or Motley Crue back then there was plenty of it around. There was no social scene for that type of music though. Besides, being in an underground music scene meant anybody with the guts to get up on stage with an instrument was at least given a fair chance. You can’t say that about the corporate MTV rock that produced shitty bands like Pearl Jam or the Stone Temple Pilots.

But the thing that bothered me most about the later chapters, the ones about hardcore punk and punk adjacent styles, was that it goes so wide but not so deep. Those chapters are interesting and informative, but the authors were more concerned with covering and including the whole scope of the L.A. underground scene and not so concerned with giving extensive details about it. They could have extended the book by a hundred pages and taken a deeper dive into everything that was going on.

Overall, We Got the Neutron Bomb is a good, if incomplete, account of its subject matter. If you’re interested in the punk counter culture, rock music history, or even just the culture of Los Angeles, there is enough here to give you a good idea of what it was all about. For those of us who lived through punk in the 1980s, this is a reminder of how great a subculture can be when enough people who care get together and make an effort to make it work. For younger people who feel bored, alienated, lonely, or on the margins of society, maybe take a look at what the punks did and get the whole youth counter culture thing rolling again. It’s time for a new generation to rise and shake uo the world all over again. American culture has been stagnant and dead for the last thirty years. A new, viable counter culture is badly needed to renew the spirit of our society.