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: 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.