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: Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years by Alex Ogg

Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables:

The Early Years

by Alex Ogg

      “I can’t believe they’d let them name their band something like that.” This was a common parental reaction the first time kids in the 1980s brought home a Dead Kennedys record. I’m not sure who “they” are supposed to be. Is there some committee that decides what band names should be allowed? If there isn’t, I’m sure someone in the Reagan administration tried to set one up in those days of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right pulling the president’s strings. In any case, that aforementioned Dead Kennedys record would either end up on the turntable or in the trash depending on how cool your parents were. Lucky for me, my copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables went straight to the stereo and found its way back there thousands of times since then although I’m sure it was annoying enough to my parents, and my neighbors, that they must have considered tossing it in the garbage quite a few times. This is one band whose music was meant to tear up the world and as rock journalist Lester Bangs said, and I paraphrase, “If it doesn’t bother people, I don’t want to listen to it.” Alex Ogg’s Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years tells the story of how the band got together and what went into their first LP.

It starts off as a band biography. The scheme and layout are predictable. The original band members, Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, and Ted, the drummer later replaced by D.H. Pelligro in later years, get introduced; they mostly didn’t come directly from a punk rock background, but then again in 1978 there wasn’t too much punk around anyways. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that surf music is a huge influence on the DK sound, but it might be more surprising how influential Buddy Holly was in the beginning.

Most of the book is told through interviews with band members and associates so at least a couple points should be obvious from the start. One is that lead singer Jello Biafra is a guy who likes to talk a lot and the other is that conflicting accounts of their history are inevitable. Due to disputes both personal and legal, the band members aren’t talking to each other anymore although East Bay Ray and Klaus Flouride appear to have buddied up in opposition to Jello. Klaus Flouride, by the way, is a great stage name because the guy really does look like a dentist. By the end of the book, you get the sense that Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray are two guys who would be difficult to work with so we’re lucky they got anything accomplished at all.

Maybe it was the friction of the band members that brought out the genius level of punk rockmanship they created. After all, no other punk band in 1978 was creating anything so abrasive, angry, confrontational, fast, loud, aggressive, and calculated for maximum controversy as the Dead Kennedys with the exception maybe of the Germs and Bad Brains. The creative process is a central theme throughout the whole story. While the band members differ in their accounts, it does sound like they did their best work when each members was bringing their own unique style into whatever songs they were working on. That creative, democratic process extended through all aspects of the band including stage performance, artwork, management, and naming the band. And you might be surprised to know that they were not the first band to use the name Dead Kennedys.

The lyrical and artistic themes of DK get a good examination here too. With songs titles like “Kill the Poor”, “California Uber Alles”, and “Holiday in Cambodia” you will easily conclude that this is no ordinary rock band. Jello Biafra’s lyrics are works of satire that prod at the hypocrisy and psychosis of American politics, the pathological greed of capitalism, the bullshit of religion, and the hollowness of American culture. The band members give explanations and analyses of what each song on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is about. This is probably the most useful part of this book for those unfamiliar with the world view and wicked humor of the band.

The anti-commercial stance of the band is looked at also. With the band name, the musical style, and the offensive lyrics, they were almost guaranteed to get no airplay. Dead Kennedys were a calculated attack on the music industry. In the 1970s, DJ’s and record executives were forcing soft rock, over produced riff rock, and disco down the throats of the listening public. Punk rock rose up in defiance of it all, but the record companies couldn’t effectively market it. Even worse, the bands and their audiences were out of control so when Sid Vicious allegedly murdered Nancy Spungen and the Sex Pistols broke up, they gave up and moved on to other genres. This left a huge gap in the music business because the kids wanted something authentic and stimulating. So in starting the music label of Alternative Tentacles, the Dead Kennedys broke ground once again by allowing bands complete artistic freedom, giving them a chance to be heard without being promoted by the commercial music industry. So we got not only the Dead Kennedys and the first two Butthole Surfers releases, but also works of anti-establishment musicianship from bands like The Fartz, Part Time Christians, and The Crucifucks. If you really want something irritating, check out the five song, 12 inch EP by Teddy and The Frat Girls called I Wanna Be a Man. Dead Kennedys would later attack the music industry more in songs like “MTV Get Off the Air”. The suits in the corporate boardrooms have never forgiven Jello Biafra and I’m sure that’s how he wants it.

On a less exciting note, there is a long section of the book that goes into minute details about the recording of DK’s monumental debut album and early singles. The descriptions of studio equipment and techniques is too much to bear. If you don’t know or care about what goes on in the recording studio, this section is a waste of time. A luddite like me can’t understand any of it and in the end, as long as the vinyl sounds good when I play it, I don’t worry about how it was made. But at least you learn the secret of the producer’s identity; he was listed as Norm in the credits of the album. Don’t expect him to produce your album.

Along with the excessive writing about studio techniques, there is a lot of filler in this book. It has a few band photos that vary in quality. There is some collage artwork by Jello Biafra and Winston Smith that also varies in quality. The black and white format and smallish page size detracts from the quality at times. There are also a few too many photos of the sleeves and vinyl pressings of every edition of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and other early singles. Again, they are all in black and white so you can’t really get a feel for how they actually look considering some variants only differ in terms of the colors used. In the end, this project is a little short in content. I don’t know why the author didn’t just make this a full band biography following DK until the time they broke up and a little beyond. The full career of the Dead Kennedys, as well as the artistic output of Jello Biafra and the explosion of the hardcore punk movement didn’t end when Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was released. That was actually the starting point.

A Jungian psychologist might cast the Dead Kennedys as the shadow side of the human psyche. Actually, they fit the trickster archetype a little more closely. The trickster is the mythological figure that brings chaos into the world, only the trickster doesn’t just rip everything up without a purpose. The trickster functions by causing societies to step outside of their conventions in order to re-evaluate their values. The trickster induces a crisis in order to test a society’s ability to sustain itself during times of stress and challenge. Overcoming the trickster’s madness forces a society to progress. In their artistic critique of America, that is exactly what the Dead Kennedys, and other counter culturalists, have done. Look at the legal troubles they had with the PMRC and the inclusion of H.R. Giger’s Penis Landscape poster in their Frankenchrist album. And all of this was set to great music, provocative enough to initiate a turning point and expansion of punk rock as it entered into its second wave, the hardcore years. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables may not be the best punk album ever made, but it is one of the most unique and influential. Alex Ogg captures the spirit of its production along wth the rise of the Dead Kennedys. It probably won’t appeal to people outside the DK fan base, hardcore punk nostalgia junkies and collectors, or music historians. It’s not a great book either, but it does have value as a document of an important LP coming from an important time and place. 

 

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.

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3

by Jerry A. Lang

      Volume one of Jerry A. Lang’s Black Heart Fades Blue tells the story of his less than ideal childhood and teenage years up to the point where he formed his legendary hardcore punk band Poison Idea. Volume two tells the story of Jerry A.’s rise and fall as the band tours around America and Europe. He plummets into the black hole of alcoholism and heroin addiction in what has to be one of the most depressing accounts of the junky lifestyle ever written. Volume three is a much welcomed new chapter in Jerry A. Lang’s life and the final installment of his autobiography.

This volume starts where volume two left off. Jerry A. spends his time at the home of his friend and bandmate Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, the genius guitarist of Poison Idea, whose place has turned into a shooting gallery. Their lives are no longer defined by music and they have sunk into an almost vegetative state that involves little more than scoring and shooting junk. Then the worst happens when Tom gets increasingly more ill and dies in bed. I wish he had written his own memoirs considering his encyclopedic knowledge of music, his odd sense of humor, and the war he fought against his own personal demons. His side of the Poison Idea story would have been just as interesting.

While this isn’t the end of Poison Idea, it is the end of Jerry A.’s nightmare lifestyle. He does what any good man would do at this point; he kicks his habit, cleans up his life, and takes control over his self-destructive habits. Personal responsibility is a large part of it all.

The rest of the book is a collection of odds and ends. Jerry A. writes about touring in Japan and his friendship with Adam Parfrey, the publisher of Feral House books and the man who inspired him to write this autobiography. The rest is mostly thoughts, meditations, reminiscences, regrets, hopes, and attempts at making sense of out of the world and his own life. He really puts the previous two volumes into perspective. These are the thoughts of a man who knows he screwed up and wants to change himself for the better while he still has the chance. Finally he says that this autobiography is meant to be an apology to anyone he has hurt. Then he admits it was also meant as a suicide note. But Jerry A. Lang is still alive today so it all ends on a high note and an optimistic view of the future. While I don’t think love can save the world, and I’m not sure anything can at this point, I do know that love can save an individual person. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

This third volume is really just a coda to the other previous books. It’s mostly just scraps of information more than actual storytelling. It’s not as hard hitting as everything that came previously. But stories of rebirth and redemption rarely ever are. The most exciting book in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is Inferno where the author takes a journey into Hell. Purgatorio is good but less exciting. Paradiso is downright boring. While it is good that Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment redeems himself at the end, it is his senseless crime that is the truly exciting part of the novel. But maybe these comparisons aren’t fair since Jerry A.’s memoirs are not fiction. This shit really happened to him so his renewed passion for life as he gets on in years is all that much more meaningful.

Instead of ending with a final thought on volume three of these memoirs, it makes more sense to end with what I think of Black Heart Fades Blue as a whole. Jerry A. Lang has had a unique life both charmed and cursed. He has taken everything he has done to an extreme and traveled a fine line between ecstatic freedom and hell. He tells his story precisely and this is a work of sharp self-analysis. Most people could not live the life he lived. Most of them would die. I myself know a few too many people who didn’t make it. Of the few who survive, there are few of them who could write such insightful memoirs and then move on to a better life. Even so, a lot of people were attracted to the punk lifestyle because they were maladapted to mainstream society. I’m sure a lot of them will find something to relate to in these books even if they were fortunate enough to avoid the heroin trap. Let’s just hope that Jerry A. puts as much energy into his newfound life as he did into his addictions and his music. If he does he’s got it made. Best of luck to you, Jerry. Poison Idea still reigns as the Kings of Punk. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2

by Jerry A. Lang

      It was the fall of 1990, less than a month after I had caught a Butthole Surfers show at the notorious Lyric Theater on 42^nd St. in Manhattan. (I suppose the Danceteria didn’t invite them back, haha) Poison Idea was playing in a small club with a two foot high stage that was so narrow that the gargantuan band members barely fit on it. These guys were said to collectively weigh over a ton at one point. I stood in the front, two feet away from Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts whose guitar looked tiny in his massive arms. Jerry A. was on his best behavior although his fire breathing act probably singed a few locks off some spiky haired members of the audience. He was giving high fives in the crowd so I reached out and he shook my hand; it was like shaking hands with a grizzly bear. There is no sense in describing the music but a Poison Idea concert was like being in the middle of a cyclone of fire. It was ferocious, nihilistic rage to the extreme and it felt so goddamn good. There is a strand of the punk counter culture that starts with Iggy Pop and The Stooges, connects them to Johnny Thunders and the Dead Boys, The Germs, and GG Allin; Poison Idead sits comfortably in that lineage. I hate to get mystical sounding about it, but there is a transcendental state of ecstasy that can be achieved by abandoning all caution, spinning wildly out of control.

In the first volume of Jerry A. Lang’s autobiography Black Heart Fades Blue he tells us about his troubled childhood and teenage years, the time when he moved to Portland, Oregon and got involved in the punk and underground music scene. He also tells us about his precocious encounters with drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. Volume two picks up where that left off. As Poison Idea’s popularity grew, so did their good and bad times, and so did their reputation as being a problem child of the music industry. But this book isn’t about the band so much as it about Jerry A. It’s not that he denies the importance of the other people in his life; it’s just that he knows their version of events won’t match his and he doesn’t want to speak for them. So he makes sure that we know that this is how he sees his life as only he can and leaves it at that.

The story isn’t anything unique. Most rock bands follow the same path of putting out records, building a following, partying to an excessive degree, and then going into decline as their drug habits take over. The most unique thing about Jerry A.’s story is how high he got and low he sank. Jerry A.’s intentions were to pick up where Darby Crash, lead singer of The Germs, left off. That meant pushing all limitations in terms of lifestyle and music well beyond what anybody had done previously. One of the songs on Poison Idea’s War All the Time LP was called “Romantic Self Destruction.” The catch here is that Jerry A. was not only physically bigger and stronger than most other rock stars, but he was also made of sturdier material than most other people. On top of that he had a complex personality, a strong mind, and a surprising awareness of morality and social justice that helped him navigate through the scummiest of the scum pits in the world. Those finer aspects of his mind included appreciation for art and literature, a wide ranging taste in music, a love of nature, a curiosity about the world and its variety of cultures, a willingness to defend outsiders and misfits, a respect for women’s rights, and an anti-bigotry stance on issues of race and gender issues. Sounds like one great guy.

Not so fast. As Jerry A.’s life spun out of control, mostly because of drugs, alcohol, and violence, those refined attitudes receded into the background. But they never entirely disappeared and that is the key to understanding where this autobiography is going.

As Poison Idea toured America, Europe, and Japan, the band was having a non-stop party. Jerry A. loved drinking; he could chug a whole quart of whisky without taking a breath. But on top of that he, and other band members too, got hooked on heroin. Drugs and alcohol are fun until they aren’t. They went from being a band that used drugs to drug users who had a band to support their habits. Things took a nasty turn for the worse. The combination of drunkenness, heroin withdrawal, and diabetes resulted in some disgusting injuries and illness and a couple near death experiences resulting from overdoses. Jerry A. tried to clean up with Alcoholics Anonymous and methadone and has some interesting things to say about what a sleazy grift those clinics and therapy groups are. To support himself, he got a job as a professional jizz mopper in a porn store. Then just when you think he had hit rock bottom, he sinks even lower as the methadone doesn’t help and he turns to stealing and ripping off drug dealers to get his fixes. Jerry A., along with Pig Champion, end up homeless at one point. As far as stories about junkies go, there isn’t anything too unique about these events. It’s just that the story is told with the same intensity and power that Jerry A. put into his music. This is the kind of harrowing literature that makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the balls with a steel toed boot. As far as accounts of heroin addiction go, this autobiography is in league with William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll. It’s tempting to say it might even surpass the works of those authors in terms of their impact on the reader.

This subject matter may be too much for some to handle. The abrasive details are described in a smooth, easy going writing style though. The writing itself is not challenging although there are some flaws. Jerry A. sometimes repeats information as if he forgot that he has already told us some of his stories before; this is no big deal though because he doesn’t dwell on these details for so long that it ruins the narrative. Some of the sequencing can be a little disordered too. In one chapter he’s homeless, in the next he’s living in an apartment. At the beginning of a chapter he goes to the methadone clinic and then he shoots up heroin a few paragraphs later. It’s like he wrote everything down in the order that he remembered it rather than putting into an organized timeline. Also, his unwillingness to write about people he was close to leaves some huge gaps in the story, but he has his reasons for doing this and as a reader, we have to understand where he’s coming from.

None of those flaws are bad enough to make this unworthy of reading. What Jerry A. does get right is what matters most. This isn’t a work of self-aggrandizement nor is it a work of self-pity. It is neither a work of self-celebration nor is it a work of self-hatred. He obviously regrets a lot of what he did, but he writes in such a calm and detached manner that presents us with nothing but the facts, or at least the facts as he understands them to be. This is a work of self-evaluation, like a surgeon who removed a tumor from his own body and then studies it under a microscope as objectively as he possibly can. This is the kind of book a complete fuck up would write when they decide to turn their life around and make themselves into something better. There is an undercurrent of self-respect here and an attempt to reclaim some sense of dignity after surviving a hurricane of self abuse.

Watching somebody self destruct isn’t pleasant. You shouldn’t expect it to be. You wouldn’t read a book like this for simple entertainment though. Black Heart Fades Blue tell Poison Idea fans a lot of what they need to know if they ever wondered where this band was coming from. Jerry A.’s childhood was nothing to envy. We see how he grew up without parental guidance or restraint, had some intense experiences at a young age, and then spent his life in reckless abandonment, seeking out any experience more intense than the last. Or maybe he was trying to numb the pain with heroin and alcohol then trying to undo the numbness with sex, violence, and music, an eternally repeating cycle that fed addictions of all kinds. You can feel sorry for his bad childhood if you choose, though I don’t think he wants that. One thing is certain: if he hadn’t grown up the way he did we might never have been blessed with one of the greatest hardcore punk bands that ever existed, if not THE best. Poison Idea named their first LP Kings of Punk and they earned their right to that title. And if you think that’s all there is to this story, than remember that hitting rock bottom always offers the opportunity for redemption. Be sure to read volume three of these memoirs for that part of the story if you haven’t already. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1

by Jerry A. Lang

      This review is dedicated to the memory of D.H., the biggest Poison Idea fan I’ve ever known. I miss you, brother.

By the late 1980s, hardcore punk was starting to run out of steam. People were bored with three cord thrash so both bands and audiences began branching out into other styles that were punk adjacent. Punk/metal crossover was growing in popularity especially because thrash metal was making inroads into the mainstream. Around that time Poison Idea released their first full length lp Kings of Punk. The cover had a picture of lead singer Jerry A. after carving the band’s name into his chest with a razor. Poison Idea weren’t a crossover band, but they had a definite metal tinge to their sound that was harder, more brutal, and distinctive due to the better than average musicianship and outright sincerity in their expression of rage. While typical hardcore punk was falling out of favor, Poison Idea took the style to a whole new level. It had enough power to propel the band through more than a decade of touring and recording. The music was an overload of anger and some punks wondered just where exactly these guys were coming from. Now Jerry A. Lang has published a three volume autobiography called Bacl Heart Fades Blue and of course the first volume is all about his childhood.

Jerry A.’s parents were a couple of rednecks who had him when they were seventeen years old. Soon after, they had two more kids, one daughter and a younger brother. Then they split up. Jerry A. was bounced back and forth between the two parents, each taking care of him for about a year at a time. His father lived in Eugene, Oregon and his mother lived in West Bumfuck Montana. Though he had a deep love for the natural surroundings there, especially the rivers and forests, his mother was an alcoholic who went through a long string of loser boyfriends and the local cowboys bullied Jerry A. to no end. Eugene was a little nicer even though his father was a complete asshole. In Eugene Jerry A. discovered rock music, looked up to the local hippies, and started using drugs and alcohol before the age of ten. Back in Montana, he was also involved in troublemaking and that is where he learned how to fight. Rock music had always been an important part of his life, but when he discovered the Ramones and Sex Pistols, he knew he had found a key part of his identity, a part that would stay with him until the end. Throughout his childhood, he suffered from any kind of abuse or neglect imaginable. And yet he had an undying curiosity about the world and a touch of intellectualism that kept him going.

At the start of his teenage years, Jerry A. moved to Portland and got involved with the underground music scene. He sometimes played with the avant gardist noise band Smegma. This was in the transition period between first and second wave punk which combined political anger with nihilism in its lyrics and attitude. Darby Crash had died of a heroin overdose and the music was getting stripped down, more basic, and faster. Bikers like to chop their Harleys, removing all the unnecessary pieces to make them lighter for the sake of going faster; punks did the same thing with rock and roll, eliminating all the extras to emphasize the most basic elements that were played at maximum speed and volume. Portland, at that time, was a shithole of a city, nothing like the gentrified hipster haven it is now. So Jerry A. put together his own hardcore punk combo that took on the guitarist from another band called The Imperialist Pigs. That morbidly obese, record collecting, cocaine dealing guitarist was Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, a man who later proved himself to be the premier genius guitarist of second wave punk rock. Some would say his style and ability surpassed other hardcore legends like East Bay Ray and Greg Ginn. Poison Idea was born and their music was simultaneously rough and smooth, chaotic and neat, and its anger was infectious to any punk who felt like they were being screwed over in life. With their growing popularity, Jerry A. drank heavily, did drugs like speed and cocaine, had lots of sex, and got involved in a lot of street fights. It was just the typical trajectory of an up and coming rock star. But despite his thuggish ways, he always had a taste for Leftist politics and social justice causes. As the band evolved, Jerry A. sank into a whirlwind of self-destruction and it was all so much fun.

This first volume ends around the time that Poison Idea’s classic album Kings of Punk came out. Like the music of punk, the writing is fast paced, direct, and to the point. It isn’t overly descriptive, but it is descriptive enough for the reader to see everything that is going on. Jerry A. tells his story with a clarity of self-perception that is unique. This is the kind of insight you gain when you are older and have looked back over your life with analytical eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Part of what is interesting is how he tells his story with the detached objectivity of a journalist. Despite how rotten his childhood was, he doesn’t indulge in self-pity and he doesn’t even express much anger at the unfairness of the life he was born into. This kind of calm self-reporting is what you get from a mature man who has made peace with that infuriating part of himself. Judging by what happens in the second volume of these memoirs, you can tell he really struggled to make sense of his life. Jerry A. doesn’t sound like he’s full of himself either; he doesn’t brag about being a survivor of a rotten childhood. If it had been up to him he obviously would have chosen a better upbringing, but he had the wits to stay alive and sometimes even benefit from his situation. He just doesn’t stand around shouting about how great he is for not ending up dead or in jail. He saves the shouting for his music.

If there is anything to criticize here, it is that some potentially interesting things were left out. Jerry A. doesn’t say much about how he actually met Tom Roberts and the other band members. He doesn’t say much about his siblings either, but to be fair, he does explain that he doesn’t want to tell other people’s stories for them, especially when they don’t have the opportunity or the desire to share their side of it all with the public. Most significantly, Jerry A. doesn’t say much about Poison Idea’s earlier records. He does talk about the Pick Your Kings ep and says a little about Kings of Punk, but he doesn’t even mention the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes ep. It would have been interesting to hear what it was like to work with Pushead, the artist who did album covers for The Misfits and Metallica and put out Kings of Punk on his own Pusmort record label.

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 is a good, solid start to the autobiography of Jerry A. Lang. It makes Poison Idea less enigmatic and gives good insight into the source of the author’s anger as well as his impish sense of humor. If you think volume one is fascinating enough, you might as well get ready to read volume two. Beware though. What comes next in this series is a nasty and soul crushing story that might leave you with a touch of PTSD if you aren’t ready for it.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

by Lester Bangs

      Punk is an attitude. That is the old refrain. Despite what outsiders might think, punk isn’t a clothing style or any definite way of playing music. It isn’t an ideology or a set of beliefs. Punk is loud, aggressive, raucous, in your face, and, most importantly, sincere. The attitude isn’t limited to music, appearance, or the counter cultural underground music scene. It can extend into any aspect of life. Even writing. And possibly no other writer embodied the punk attitude in the written word the way Lester Bangs did during the short 33 years of his life. Live fast, die young. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is an anthology of his writings assembled to preserve his energetic raging-bull prose for future generations who probably need a wake up kick in the shins these days since it appears counter culture, and American culture along with it, is sleepwalking into oblivion.

Lester Bangs is most famous for his rock journalism, criticism, and record and concert reviews most notably written for Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice back in the 1970s. He may have been the man who coined the term “punk” since he presciently saw a connecting thread between the garage bands of the 1960s, the Velvet Underground, glam rock, the proto-punk scene in Detroit, and the expanding punk scene in New York City from the mid-1970s and beyond. He championed The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and The Dictators when most people were unwilling to tolerate them. He was one of the first critics to point out that rock and roll is all about feeling and raw emotion more than technical perfection. He was also one of the first critics to call out rock stars for being what they mostly are: spoiled, petulant little children whose monster sized egos are nothing but a smokescreen to hide their human shortcomings from public view. “All rock stars are assholes,” said rock promoter Danny Fields. Lester Bangs took that simple idea and ran with it.

The opening articles start in the late 1960s, covering garage bands like The Count Five and Question Mark and The Mysterians, the meaning and significance of the first two Stooges albums, and why Ray Dennis Stekler’s trashy cult classic psychedelic zombie musical film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, is a great work of art. But early on, it is easy to see that Bangs’ writing is about so much more than the stated subject matters. He rarely ever stays on topic, going off on long tangents about sex and drugs while violating standard rules of punctuation and sentence length. He often writes like Arthur Rimbaud after popping a handful of uppers. If psychosis and French Symbolist poetry ever found an appropriate place to liaise with rock journalism it is in the prose of Lester Bangs. Reading this stuff is like being hit in the face with a firehose while riding a bull in a rodeo, not that I would actually know what that feels like. (I did ride a mechanical bull once in a place where there was an Asian woman wearing a fringed leather bikini and shiny knee-high boots wielding a horse whip in her hand. Needless to say, I didn’t last long on the mechanical bull. And now I think I understand what the song “Rawhide” is really about.) But somehow the fast paced insanity of the writing works even if it can be a little exhausting to keep up with at times.

This collection moves on into various articles written for Rolling Stone and Creem in the early 70s. The acts covered range widely from the likes of James Taylor and Barry White to Jethro Tull, Slade, The J. Geils Band, David Bowie, and Kraftwerk. Some of these are favorable and some aren’t. Lester Bangs takes interest in whoever he writes about even when he has no interest in them. His reviews of James Taylor are obviously sarcastic, character assassination pieces while he expresses fascination for Jethro Tull even though he hates their music. The chapter on David Bowie is a little more complex as he considers himself a Bowie fan but can’t stand the man as a performer. The Slade and J. Geils articles are interesting since Slade starts a food fight in Trader Vic’s (yes, that’s the original tiki bar that eventually turned into the Trader Joe’s grocery store chain) and then harasses a dinner party for Freemasons. The J. Geils Band invite Bangs onstage to type an article during a concert for reasons you will have to read on your own. Lester Bangs really captures the atmosphere of free for all fun that was a part of rock concerts back in those days, something that sadly no longer exists in our dismal music industry now.

There are a couple important things to notice in these writings. One is that Bangs frequently refers to a certain class of rock stars as punks. This was a few years before “punk” became an officially designated genre of music. But Bangs wasn’t describing the music. He was describing the obnoxious behavior of people like the MC5 and Iggy Pop. It looks almost obvious that he was instrumental in that words being used to describe the genre. There is some debate over whether it was Bruce Springsteen or Legs McNeil who started using “punk” as a name for the musical style and scene that grew with it.

The other important thing to notice is that these articles are thoroughly unpredictable. You can never tell where they will end up. In example, a review of a John Coltrane album turns into a story about Lester Bangs using screeching, atonal blasts from a saxophone to terrorize his landlady after she complains about him making too much noise. Other than the presence of the saxophone, what does this have to do with the Coltrane album? Who Knows? Who cares? It’s great writing.

The genius of Lester Bangs really shines through in the section on Lou Reed. The two men had a curious relationship. Bangs became famous in New York City for the interviews he did with Reed for the Village Voice. As we see here, they weren’t actual interviews, but more like drunken arguments over nothing important other than one-upmanship in a gladiatorial battle of nastiness. Both Bangs and Reed would later say that these argument/interviews were the best punk journalism ever written. Both of them were in firm agreement on one other thing too: they both thought that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded. In one interview, Reed goes on about how it is a multi-layered symphonic work of avant-garde classical composition. Lester Bangs retorts by saying that Reed only thinks so because he was on amphetamines when he recorded it. In any case, Bangs also waxes poetic about how beautiful its four sides of vinyl containing nothing but droning guitar feedback played through high-end studio equipment are. It is a masterpiece because most people find it impossible to listen to. One thing about Lester Bangs is that he appreciated the noisier, abrasive side of rock and roll more than the finer examples of musicianship that the mainstream goes for. He liked his music a lot more if he knew it would irritate people to the point of anger. I bet he would have loved the Butthole Surfers. I bet he would have hated grunge too.

After the Lou Reed section, we get a variety of articles with an even wider range of topics than came previously. They mostly start as album or concert reviews, but there is also one long-form work of journalism about The Clash. We get insights into all kinds of things like the direction the music industry is heading in the late 1970s, the crass and offensive attitudes of rock’s biggest stars, social observations, critiques of the American lifestyle, and Lester Bangs’ inner torments in dealing with disillusionment, anxiety, depression, insecurity, inadequacy, and drug addiction. This fits harmoniously with an article about Iggy Pop and the underlying negativity of the punk scene in general. In a previous article written about Iggy Pop, he examines how The Stooges embody authenticity in rock music, more so than most other bands. Here he poses the question as to why Iggy Pop is so self-abusive when performing on stage. He drunkenly rolls around in broken glass, cuts his body with razors, and starts a fight with a bar-full of bikers, taunting them with insults and throwing beer bottles at them until he gets beaten close to death. Bangs observes that in the beginning The Stooges reckless abandonment and Iggy Pop’s indulgence in nihilistic self-destruction was ecstatic and liberating, but over time it became more obvious that this freedom from restraint is motivated by a deep sense of self-hatred on Iggy Pop’s part. Bangs also sees this self-hatred as being an underlying attitude of the New York and British punk scenes. If this were so, you might wonder why Iggy Pop never just outright committed suicide (he’s still alive and well today). But there must be something to what Bangs has said considering Pop’s antics. It may not be entirely about self-hatred, but it certainly isn’t self-love either. A singer who brings himself to the edge of death in every performance is not a role model of healthy self-respect. The guy obviously has problems, but the mind of Iggy Pop remains a mystery.

In the latter articles of this collection, you can see Lester Bangs maturing both in writing style and psychologically. He becomes more socially responsible. In what is possible his most famous work of journalism, “The White Noise Supremacists”, he admits to feeling guilty for having used racist language in the past and examines racism in the punk scene despite the presence of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and everything else. When interviewing people at CBGB’s about the subject, one punk dismisses the problem because racism is just as much a part of their scene as anywhere else. Bangs’ comeback is that punks are supposed to be different from everybody else. He ends the article with a plea for punks to stop being racist. He is met with a lukewarm response and his disillusionment with America continues to grow.

And then it goes onwards to the U.K. where he tours with The Clash. He finds them to be likable and unpretentious, thinking he finally found a bunch of rock stars who weren’t assholes, but as events on the tour unfold, he becomes disillusioned with them too. There is a progressively creeping sense of despair as Lester Bangs wrote into the early 1980s before he died of a drug overdose while he had the flu.

What is great about these writings is that Lester Bangs transcends his genre. That may be an odd statement considering that the genre is rock journalism, one that doesn’t lend itself easily to the concept of transcendence to begin with. But this is an author who put so much of himself into what he wrote. He wasn’t just writing to make a living or even just for attention. He was writing to make art and in that he succeeded. Of course, this book is only a sample of what is probably his best work. Not everything about it is great though. There is a fair amount of casually racist language that would have been common in his time, but dates the writing significantly. To be fair, he doesn’t express any ideas about other races that are meant to be insulting or hateful; it’s just that he uses words that are now considered racially offensive in place of terms like “African-American” or “Asian”. By the end of the book, his writing becomes a little tiring too. His long sentences and tortured syntax combines with his moodiness and indulgence in pessimism begin to drag his writing down to the point where you get fatigued from reading it. Otherwise, I’d be interested in the articles that weren’t included here. Lester Bangs was one of the first, if not THE first, to recognize the genius of Lemmy Kilmister and the greatest of punk-metal crossover bands Motorhead. I would love to see what he wrote about them.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is so much more than a collection of articles or a nostalgia trip for aging counter-culturalists. It is a collection of writings marked by energy, passion, authenticity and enough volume (the amp is tuned up to 11) to speak across multiple generations. On the surface, these passages are rough while being true to the punk attitude in their inner core. The old punk clothing style could include leather, spikes, razors, chains, dog collars, combat boots, safety pins through the nose, and self-inflicted wounds while your typical punk, beneath it all, was good natured, humorous, ironic, articulate, intelligent, complex, affectionate, righteously angry, socially aware, and even a bit sensitive. Those later traits are all inherent parts of Lester Bangs’ writing while the former ornamentation is the sharp edges of his language that breaks all rules of good writing and works better than what most teachers would consider to be acceptable by educational standards. Regardless of what you think of Lester Bangs’ ever changing world view, these writing should serve as a boost of rocket fuel for the increasingly dull and shallow society we have in America today. The upcoming generations need writing like this to inspire them with the fires of rebellion. Stop acting like a bunch of old ladies. Smash your mind-rotting cell phones and make some noise. It’s time again for some cage rattling and earth shaking. Let’s make life exciting once again.

 

Book Review

20th Century Boy:

Notebooks Of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah

I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.

Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.

Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.

One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.

One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.

Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.

A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”

This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.

While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.

 

Legendary RE/Search Publications Founder V. Vale Interviewed by Lydia Lunch & Tim Dahl

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