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: 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: Please Kill Me

Please Kill Me:

The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

According to Ed Sanders, lead singer of The Fugs and author of books on the Manson Family murders, a counter-current existed in the hippy subculture of the 1960s. While most hippies were middle or upper class kids who could afford the luxury of turning on, tuning, and dropping out due to the financial security they could return to if they left the scene, there was another growing faction of hippies that came from a blue collar background. Some of these people suffered from abusive parenting or strict religious upbringings. This underbelly of the hippy underclass were more negative and nihilistic in their outlook, being hard drinkers and hard drug users, prone to carrying switchblades or chains, and not afraid to use them. Some of these people drifted into motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels or other biker gangs of the counter-culture while some began morphing into a hard-edged scene of their own. Those latter people were the seeds of what came to be known as Punks. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain is an oral history of the proto-punk and first wave of the punk music scene, mostly centered in New York City’s Lower East Side, gradually spreading across America and eventually into Europe.

In the early 1970s, Legs McNeil and some friends saw a cultural trend emerging in the downtown music scene of Manhattan. It was a reclamation of primal rock and roll, a return to three minute songs, fast paced with high energy and high volume, confrontational lyrics, animalistic wildness, and a tough, streetwise attitude that could only have emerged from the scumpits of New York in its most decadent and crime ridden decade. McNeil and company put together a magazine dedicated to this new trend and called it Punk. The magazine caught on, the name stuck, and the rest is history. Maybe it is a history that some cultural critics wish we could forget, but staying true to its defiant nature, it, hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be as for a long time, just like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t be forgotten either. This book chronicles those origins and early days of the scene, piecemeal in a collage of quotes from articles and interviews involving people who were clear-headed enough to be able to speak about what they saw.

Obviously the story doesn’t start in 1975 with the first publication of Punk which had a drawing of Lou Reed on its cover. It starts in the 1960s with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory and the scene started to attract rough trade, the types of people who didn’t, or didn’t want to, fit in with the hippies. Andy Warhol became the manager for The Velvet Underground and they became the band that inspired thousands of others to become musicians despite their unpopularity during their short career.

Then came band manager Danny Fields, the man who signed The Doors to Elektra Records. He discovered MC5 and The Stooges, brought them to New York, and found himself on the wrong side of the record industry’s executives as those bands were a bit untame, too dangerous, unmarketable, and unable to make millions of dollars for the investors. But The Stooges’ front man Iggy Pop caught the attention of David Bowie and his band found a lifeline in the music industry. Meanwhile, while glam grew bigger in England, its glitter rock counterpart in New York took off with the New York Dolls, a band that performed in drag even though they weren’t gay. They weren’t just ordinary transvestites; they looked like the kind of street walkers that would haul you down an alley and stomp your head in with their platform shoes, not even bothering to steal your wallet. Their brand of rock picked up where Chuck Berry left off with Johnny Thunders playing guitar in a way that made you feel like you were standing under a jet airplane as it flew ten feet over your head and a freight train went by five feet off to your side.. Lead singer David Johanson’s advice to young musicians was “don’t worry if you can play well or not. Don’t worry about how good your equipment is. Just get up on stage and play.” This embodies the approach to punk rock. It was never about technical perfection. It prioritized feeling and energy over talent and the feeling conveyed was gritty, violent, mean, dirty, and aggressive. And it was always exhilarating.

By the mid-1970s, the venues of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s had become the world’s epicenters of punk. Bands like Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Dictators, and the Patti Smith Group were reaching national stardom. Then Malcolm McLaren arrived in New York and envisioned marketing punk rock in England. He brought some bands over to London and a scene around the Sex Pistols took off. When McLaren brought the Sex Pistols to tour in America, they became a media sensation, punk became a fad and a commodity, and when the Sex Pistols broke up along with most other American punk bands, the first wave of punk was more or less over.

In this narrative, the timeline of punk history is actually pushed into the background so that most of the discussions are about the people and events happening in the scene. Some of the people quoted or interviewed may not carry name recognition for people unfamiliar with the territory. There is an extensive glossary at the back for those who need it. Some of the major stars of punk don’t make any direct contributions to the narrative while their friends, girlfriends, groupies, managers, roadies, and various others do. The effect is like being at a party and hearing all these people reminiscing about those bad old/good old days.

And the kinds of things they talk about could be seriously disturbing to people who aren’t ready for it. The early New York punk scene would have been a goldmine for psychologists who study social dysfunction. The scene was loaded with violence, heroin addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, prostitution, and all around bad behavior. Some passages might make you feel grimy or nauseous. MC5, the band that played at the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago 1968, find themselves in a riot when they try to play at the Fillmore East. Iggy Pop gets beat up continuously, loaded on drugs, sometimes falling off the stage, throwing bottles, raw meat and peanut butter at the audience, and going so far as to slice himself up with broken glass. The Ramones find each other because they are a bunch of complete weirdos. Johnny Thunders becomes the most notorious junky in rock history. Wayne County bludgeons Handsome Dick Manitoba with a microphone stand after some misunderstood friendly banter, breaking the Dictators’ lead singer’s collar bone and putting him in a wheel chair. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys almost dies after a brutal stabbing. James Chance assaults members of the audience during a concert and then cuts his face with a broken bottle when the bouncers try to throw him out. Stiv Bators one-ups Alice Cooper’s stage show by hanging himself with a noose, no props involved, during a Dead Boys show at CBGB’s. Nancy Spungen gets killed allegedly by Sid Vicious who soon after dies of a heroin overdose. Some luminaries of the scene, namely Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed don’t appear in such a favorable light by the end of the book either. Punk rock was a musical genre started by and for fuck ups. Like the porn industry, it attracted a lot of unstable people. But we’re still feeling the effects of it now.

Having said that, there is a lot of gallows humor in these pages as well. The Stooges use a picture of Elvis Presley as a target when they feel like shooting holes in the walls of their house. Sid Vicious uses water from a toilet full of vomit to shoot up amphetamines. Iggy Pop gets arrested while wearing a dress and then tells the guy who picks up at jail that it isn’t a woman’s dress, it is a man’s dress while the police laugh at him. Cheetah Chrome gets arrested after throwing an air conditioner out of a hotel room window, hitting a police car, and the police tell him to put his pants on not realizing that his flesh colored leotards actually are pants. A studio engineer gives Johnny Thunders a shirt because he feels sorry for him, thinking his ripped t-shirt means he is too poor to afford nice clothes. Sid Vicious meets a friend on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel; the friend says he is going to pick up a vacuum cleaner at a friend’s apartment and Sid Vicious thinks “vacuum cleaner” is New York slang for a bag of heroin and insists he wants to get a vacuum cleaner too. And so it goes on.

This book only scratches the surface though. McNeil and McCain select the most outrageous stories and elements of early punk. There are a lot of bands that go unmentioned and the second wave of hardcore punk is never brought up, nor is the corporate commercialization of punk in the 1990s, the pretentious and dull grunge scene and crappy MTV punk. Parallel scenes like new wave, no wave, post punk, and underground metal get almost no space here either.

Please Kill Me is a great book and a must read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the most dangerous and influential musical movement in history. I have heard a lot of talk these days about transgressive literature and art, but punks in the beginning were living a transgressive lifestyle, one that put their lives in danger on a daily basis. It was reckless abandonment and rock and roll excess taken to its extreme limits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of these people died before the age of thirty, and yet Iggy Pop, the biggest stooge of all Stooges, is still alive and thriving. I guess whatever didn’t kill him really did make hims stronger. And I still think it’s odd that he became a professional golfer. All of the bands mentioned in this book provided the soundtrack to my high school years and reading about the people who made the early punk scene a reality is truly mind-blowing for me. I can’t praise this book enough.

 

Book Review

 

The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

Back in the 1970s, there were three nightclubs in Manhattan keeping the underground music and art scene alive. One was Max’s Kansas City, a hangout for Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, CBGB’s where punk rock grew and thrived, and then there was the less famous but equally important Mudd Club. That was a venue where the punk, new wave, no wave, and post punk music scenes grew alongside the works of underground filmmakers, painters, sculptors, fashion designers, spoken word and performance artists and others, finding the right balance between being exclusive and inclusive while maintaining an ever-changing atmosphere of innovation and excitement. Richard Boch, author of The Mudd Club, worked as a doorman there for about two years in 1979 and 1980. This book is his memoirs about that job and the lifestyle that went along with it.

As might be expected, Boch is an artist. He indulges in promiscuous sex and drugs. He loves rock and roll, brushing shoulders with celebrities, and the sense of power he gets from deciding who can and can’t enter the club. He is also a bit insecure. Boch starts off the whole book describing his anxieties and his desire to fit in, often worrying about whether he is right for the job of doorman to begin with. His self-consciousness is understandable at first, but after he keeps bringing it up throughout the course of the book, he starts to sound a little shallow and neurotic. He often worries about whether the clothes he wears are fashionable and when winter comes, he starts wearing a long tweed overcoat, something he is proud of and empowered by. It becomes a small nagging obsession as if wearing the coat is symbolic of his ability to fit in as a bona fide member of the underground music scene. This book will never be remembered as a quality bildungsroman.

Then again, it wasn’t intended to be. The writing is primarily about the people in The Mudd Club itself. It was originally the brainchild of Anya Phillips, artist and girlfriend of James Chance, filmmaker Diego Cortez, and Peter Mass. That latter man envisioned the club as a place with an anything goes ethic, the more outrageous the better. Such an ethic clashed with the practice of crowd control and that is where Richard Bloch comes in. As doorman, he has to use a variable, ambiguous, and ever changing metric of subjectivity to keep the crowd lively, exciting, and creative. Some nights it is a matter of how people are dressed or how they cut their hair, other nights it matters who you know or don’t know, then sometimes it matters if you have or haven’t been there previously. Sometimes tourists and visitors from the outer boroughs of New York City are welcome, some nights they aren’t. Celebrities are almost always allowed in, but not always. Meat Loaf gets turned away for being overweight and sweaty, Paul Simon gets rejected for acting like a jerk, and The Knack are considered unwelcome because Boch hates their hit single “My Sharona”. You can imagine the thrill the riff raff gets when being allowed entrance after seeing some big-name celebrity being rejected. It must also be a thrill when someone spends a few nights trying and failing to get in and then one night Boch clears the way and lets them through. That is the doorman’s art, making the club look exclusive even though eventually everybody gets a chance to be inside.

There is no shortage of name dropping in these pages. Big stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Talking Heads, John McEnroe (who went there to snort cocaine), and the cast of Saturday Night Live are frequent guests. Even Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis shows up one night with a friend, has one drink, and then leaves. That is interesting enough, but the highlights of this book, for me at least, are the passages about some of the more underground bands that rarely, if ever, get written about in other places. Bands like 8 Eyed Spy, Bush Tetras, and The Brides of Funkenstein get written up so we get an idea of what their few shows were like. There is even one passage about Nico giving a performance on her harmonium while singing in her droning, dour voice while a disoriented audience looks on not knowing what to make of her. There are also some interesting art shows and theme nights that are politically incorrect. One of them is a dead rock star tribute that has a shrine to Janis Joplin with a mannequin lying face down with a bunch of hypodermic needles stuck in its arm. The shrine to Mama Cass is covered with ham sandwiches and the one for Jim Morrison is a pair of leather pants with a four foot rubber snake coming out of its unzipped fly. Unfortunately, most of these events are described with very little detail and are a bit disappointing.

Richard Boch himself takes so many drugs that his life turns into turmoil and results in an existential meltdown. This crisis makes him question the direction of his life and he ends up quitting The Mudd Club even though it has become a prominent part of his identity.

But this book is not always a thrilling read. Aside from the afore mentioned shortcomings in description, a lot of what happens is simply about who the author allows to enter and who he rejects. There aren’t a lot of great stories about the celebrities who show up, or anyone else, and most of what takes place in the club is simply drugs, sex, drinking, and dancing. Richard Boch does equal amounts of Quaaludes and cocaine and I would say if one of those drugs is dominant in influencing his writing, it is the Quaaludes as the tone tends to be downbeat and slow. Without getting too technical about grammar, I will say that Boch’s sentence structures don’t vary enough to make the prose anything other than repetitive. Reading this feels like running up a hill with a bad of bricks slung over your shoulder.

So The Mudd Club isn’t a great work of literature. But for those fascinated with Manhattan’s downtown underground scene in the 1970s, this may be the best account of this celebrated nightclub that exists. The Mudd Club frequently gets mentioned in other books and interviews. It even shows up in some films, but nothing as complete as Richard Boch’s work exists anywhere else as far as I know. So if you’re interested, be willing to take the bad with the good in this book and go with it. People from that scene are getting old, losing their memories, and dying off so we probably won’t get a better Mudd Club chronicle than this.

Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.