We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: It went from fuck music to fuck-you music.

  RON ASHETON: I’d made contact in L.A. with Dennis Thompson of the MC5 and we put New Order together. I found a backer and guys started filtering in and we found a place to practice. The downside was the trend of music was changing so dramatically that we got caught in the middle of a shit storm. It was disco time, and people weren’t going for the hard-rock shit anymore, so it was like, “Uh-oh, screwed again.” Plus, we’d play gigs in front of my big swastika flag. I wasn’t a Nazi, the flag was just part of my collection… I had Jewish girlfriends and black buddies. It had nothing to do with promoting Nazism or condoning it. I just enjoyed the flash uniforms. But other people freaked—they were like, “It’s fascist.” New Order didn’t mean to put out a Nazi vibe at all. I knew it was probably a bad idea… how not to get a record deal in an industry run by Jewish people. “New Order? Let’s sign ’em up right now.”

  HARVEY KUBERNIK: You couldn’t read about bands like New Order in the mainstream rock press, of course. Even the English press wasn’t writing about a band like New Order, but if you went looking, you’d come across a bunch of small fanzines that were starting up in the early-to-mid ’70s. Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp, later just Bomp, was the first, then there was Back Door Man.

  GREG SHAW: I had published a rock mag earlier, in ’66–’67, because I loved music. Then I got the urge to try it again with Who Put the Bomp. At first the readership [circa 1969–71] was former subscribers of my old zine, sci-fifans I knew, and other rock critics, who used the zine as a sort of forum for things they didn’t feel they could say elsewhere, about the state of music and the rock press in general.

  LISA FANCHER: I started my fanzine called Records/Street Life, probably because of my leftover Roxy Music obsession, while I was in high school in 1973, but nothing held a candle to Back Door Man. Who would even try? They had a whole staff of cool people! And the best parties at Phast Phreddie’s house.

  PHAST PHREDDIE (FRED PATTERSON): Back Door Man began mainly out of frustration with the mainstream music press. My friends and I were listening to records that were not getting reviewed, and we cared about artists who were not getting the coverage that we felt they deserved. The Patti Smith show at the Whisky in November ’74 was the catalyst. Don Waller dragged me there.

  DON WALLER: Paul Therrio, the guitar player in my band, the Imperial Dogs, and I, plus a couple of other people, were living in Hermosa Beach in late ’72, early ’73, when Fred Patterson came over and we all just skronked around and talked about music and played records till two, three o’clock in the morning. It was Fred who brought the “Piss Factory”/“Hey Joe” single over one afternoon. We knew of Patti’s writing from reading Creem. And it just blew the room into silence. We played “Piss Factory” about three times in a row. Everybody in the room was working shitty jobs—Paul and I worked at Armco Steel. Those sentiments were very real to us.

  PHAST PHREDDIE: The Roxy was empty at the Patti Smith show. There was hardly anybody there, but to me and my friends this was a major event unheralded by the public. By January 1975 I was asking friends to write articles for this magazine I was planning. All of us cared deeply about the music. If we heard Aerosmith, the Sweet, or Mott the Hoople on the radio, it was a good day. We covered the local scene, the South Bay first, because that’s where we’re all from, then Hollywood, because that’s where the action was.

  DON WALLER: Phreddie said, “I’m going to start a magazine and it’s gonna be called Back Door Man and I want you to write for it.” This was 1975. I said yeah—I’d written since I was in high school and college—and I said let’s get D.D. Faye (my girlfriend at the time) and Thom Gardner (who I’d met through Phreddie in 1973) and Bob Meyers, a neighbor from when I was a kid in Torrance, and Don Underwood (who we met when Phreddie and I taught a rock-and-roll class at a UCLA extension program) ’cause they’re all real good writers and let’s do it. That, plus Underwood’s wife, Liz, who was a photographer, was the original staff. A few dropped out, a few more came on over the years. We put out fifteen issues in three and a half years. Everybody worked. Record stores. Machine shops. I think we all pooled a hundred bucks each when we became more of a collective after deposing Phreddie as editor.

  PHAST PHREDDIE: The premier issue of Back Door Man came out in March ’75. It had a warning on the cover: “For hardcore rock ’n’ rollers only.” Iggy was our first cover star. We included a feature on the South Bay scene and reviewed records by Roxy Music and Brian Eno. All this set the information-starved hard-rock fan back thirty-five cents.

  DON WALLER: Our concept for Back Door Man was to make a magazine that we would want to read ourselves. To cover the kinds of music we liked. From blues to garage rock to Eno. To write about local bands. To tell the truth. To be funny. To get up people’s noses. Bomp had gone dormant, or at least infrequent. And it was mostly about cataloguing older records—I still have the English Invasion issue—but we saw ourselves as more broad-based than Bomp. We wrote about Howlin’ Wolf and Pere Ubu.

  D.D. FAYE: We crashed this house party in Carson for a bunch of Montgomery Ward department store employees soon after the first issue of Back Door Man came out, and Phreddie took over the turntable and blasted “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges as loudly as possible… the hostess freaked and had us all turfed out. Phreddie had consumed an uncanny amount of alcohol and wasn’t about to leave without a struggle. Two of the guests kept saying: “We’re peaceful people, man.” They were trying to calm Phreddie down. All we could hear was him yelling, “No, I won’t be cool! I’m not cool! I’ve never been mellow! Play some Stooges, goddammit!”

  KID CONGO POWERS: Phast Phreddie and Don Waller and D.D. Faye, yeah. There was a little bit of a scene surrounding these people that was my first exposure to punk. Back Door Man was where I first read about Pere Ubu, and they’d print essays on rebelliousness and other things. Back Door Man was seedy but smart. I felt lucky that I’d discovered it.

  RON ASHETON: New Order got a lot of support in Back Door Man. They were ahead of their time, knowing the music scene, and they weren’t afraid to say, “This sucks!” “This is cool.” They were nearly always right, and they covered the kind of music that I liked. I had a box of Stooges promo discs from Elektra, a bunch of 45’s for “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and so I had my brother Scott autograph a bunch of them, and got Iggy to autograph some, and told Back Door Man that they could give them away with subscriptions. Nowadays they’re worth a few bucks—autographed “I Wanna Be Your Dog” singles with the song on both sides—but that’s how much I enjoyed and believed in those guys. Back Door Man was a really cool bunch of guys and gals.

  MICHAEL DES BARRES: Of course, L.A. retained the glamour after glam died, because L.A. is glamour… it’s gLAmour. Cherie Currie was as glamorous as anybody with that little shag.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Toward the end of the English Disco some of the kids who would go on to become the punks started coming around. Maybe they were too young when we first opened. Because everybody had names like Chuck E. Starr or Sabel Star, Lori Lightning… these new kids all eventually changed their names too.

  CHRIS ASHFORD: I was working as a clerk at Licorice Pizza in West L.A. when Paul Beahm and George Ruthenberg [who later became Darby Crash and Pat Smear] came in one day and we started talking about Raw Power and Iggy. I said, “I know where Iggy lives.” And we all jumped in my car and went to this apartment where Iggy was staying with James Williamson, right next to the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset. The first time we went nobody answered. Then they went back themselves later and Iggy let them in and they talked for a while, but if James was there by himself, he wouldn’t let us in and he’d tell Iggy, “Your little hippie hoodlum friends came by.” This was around 1976. Iggy and James had just finished up doing the Kill City record with the Sales Brothers for Bomp Records. That was like the beginning of our becoming friends… trying to go see Iggy. They were still Paul and George then. To u
s, going to see Iggy was what it would be like for someone from the previous generation going to see Elvis.

  PAT SMEAR: We would look through the cut-out bins and look at records and buy them for the cover and that’s how we discovered Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. The cover had this horror style dripping letters and showed Iggy with his shirt off with makeup and platinum hair. The record was cool, but it didn’t even matter, the cover made it, it wouldn’t have mattered what it sounded like.

  CHRIS ASHFORD: Raw Power was discovered and became the godhead album for these new post-glitter kids.

  JOAN JETT: A defining moment for any teen misfit is finding others like yourself, even if the only thing you share is the feeling of not belonging anywhere else.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: I was born and raised in southern California. Growing up, I listened to schlocky radio—Doobie Brothers and Chicago, pop music. One day I walked into a record store and I saw the cover of Raw Power. And I said, “Who’s that?” And I bought the album and it opened up a whole new world that I didn’t know existed. Discovering Iggy led to discovering the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. I started going into L.A. to see bands. Post-glitter bands.

  JANE WIEDLIN: I’d go to Rodney’s with my girlfriends, and we’d all try to get laid. We were all virgins. It was a lot of fantasy. But then we’d go back to school and in gym class, we’d talk really loud about how we fucked Mick Jagger, and we fucked Bowie, and we fucked so-and-so, and how great they were in bed.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: My friend Helen, who later became Hellin Killer, and I were a duo at school in Palos Verdes. We wore platforms. People thought we were a bit strange.

  MARY RAT: I was always kind of a loner person. I remember people throwing things at me for wearing a Queen T-shirt. I had a pair of silver boots but I only wore them to school once because I got totally ridiculed. But I was always friends with Trudie. We’d known each other since the sixth grade. Then Trudie met this other kind of weird girl, Hellin, and we all started hanging out. They started to go to Rodney’s Disco, but I never went. My parents weren’t as lenient as theirs.

  HELLIN KILLER: High school was bad. I didn’t have any friends. In eleventh grade I made friends with Trudie. We were both into the same music, the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. We started going out together to Rodney’s. …

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: We used Hellin’s mom’s car to drive to Rodney’s, about forty-five miles away. We got all decked out… I wore Mary Rat’s grandmother’s beaded dress from the twenties. We put glitter on our hair… and we walked in, made our grand entrance, and Chuck E. Starr rolled his eyes and glared at us and said, “Gawd, I thought glitter was dead.” We knew it wasn’t the heyday,… ’cause we didn’t see Iggy or Bowie anywhere. Then we met Rodney and Kim Fowley—any girl that walked in there met them immediately. We also met all these trashy Hollywood kids from broken families, runaways or kids from abused homes… a real sleazy kind of a scene… some of them were really young… and we fit in somehow. Everybody looked really glamorous, but it turned out that they were all wounded kids inside.

  NICKEY BEAT: I heard about Rodney’s disco when I lived in San Pedro, but I never went there. I was basically this yokel from the sticks, so I thought, “Hmmm, I can’t go there. Out of my league. You have to be some big star like Rod Stewart or Elton John.” You had to be in Led Zeppelin, or in Bad Company at least, and I was useless at faking an English accent.

  ALICE BAG: I went to Sacred Heart of Mary, an all-girl Catholic school in Montebello. I was really into Elton John, so I had huge rhinestone glasses. I’d cut my hair in the girls’ bathroom. It was a few inches long, dyed red. I’d wear platform tennis shoes with my uniform. I was reading a lot of Creem and Circus. It was during the tail end of the glitter rock period that I started to read about early New York protopunk. I’d missed Rodney’s club during its heyday when it was really happening. I remember seeing Trudie at a Kiss concert at Long Beach Arena. We looked at each other long enough to say hi. I ran across many different people like that on the same wavelength who’d reappear later on in the early Hollywood punk scene.

  CHUCK E. STARR: Rodney hated the funkier new music I was bringing in, straight off the bat. I’ll never forget him saying: “No wah-wah pedals in my club.” There wasn’t enough good dance stuff yet, so I was playing both… the glam hits mixed with some funky new R&B. Disco, as it became known at the height of the big hype, hadn’t happened yet. Everybody at Rodney’s was going for this new funky stuff. The response was immediate, it was exactly what the newer crowds wanted to hear. I never force-fed it to anyone. I was only a club DJ doing my job: working the dance floor. The end finally came one night while Rodney was playing and nobody was dancing. “Suffragette City” and “Rebel, Rebel” just weren’t happening anymore. These tunes had been so completely beaten to death it was embarrassing. We’d had like three years of “Suffragette City” and “Ballroom Blitz,” and the whole crowd was just chanting, “Let Chuck E. play the records.” And that was it. Rodney quit. He walked out.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: We closed in ’75 after Chuck E. Starr, our DJ, started slipping in disco. I didn’t want any part of disco. I hated it. So Chuck E. ended up going off to the Sugar Shack to do the disco thing. I didn’t want to hear Donna Summer and “Rock the Boat.”

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Sometime after Rodney’s closed I remember Hellin saying we’re going to this place, the Sugar Shack in North Hollywood, which is only for underage kids because they didn’t serve alcohol. Of course there were all these big bouncer guys at the door. Upstairs there were guys tottering around on platforms fucked up on Quaaludes getting it on with each other. Nobody had told them that glitter was over, I guess. There was this one guy we used to hang out with who looked exactly like Ziggy Stardust.

  HELLIN KILLER: After Rodney’s there were these weird gay discos where all the glitter kids hung out for about a year… there was nowhere else to go.

  CHUCK E. STARR: The Sugar Shack became the new hot place for the underage crowd to go. The Sugar Shack had been a stripper/biker club. Before that it had been a gay bar called the Outer Limits. It had an upstairs with a big round fireplace. “More More More” and “Love to Love You Baby” always packed the floor. We also played a rock-and-roll set. We started playing “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show there… the actual formation dance was born at the Shack. This DJ named Michael Angelo, who’s now dead, who worked there with me actually got kids to do lineups to “The Time Warp,” “Suffragette City,” and “Ballroom Blitz.” The major songs from Rodney’s became a set that we’d play twice a night.

  HELLIN KILLER: We went there ’cause Chuck E. Starr, the DJ from Rodney’s, played there, and we sort of followed him there. Most of the people who’d gone to Rodney’s old disco went there, even Rodney himself, of course… and then there was a short while where there wasn’t anything going on.

  CHUCK E. STARR: The Shack didn’t have any alcohol and it was open till five in the morning. Everybody went there. It wasn’t gay or straight, it was a good mix. Then the Shack started to produce its own scene, its own little star system. And of course Kim Fowley and Rodney drifted over to the Sugar ’cause the Shack was where the white teenage thing was happening.

  MARY RAT: We all thought Kim Fowley was kind of weird. Kind of an old man. But when you’re fifteen, you don’t think too much about stuff like that.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Kim would call my house and talk to my mom for hours! He talked to everyone he just wanted to know what everyone thinks about everyone. One night we had a party and we were like, “Let’s invite Kim Fowley and Rodney.” They came all the way out to the South Bay. Kim Fowley would hit all these high school parties. We thought he was just this famous guy because he did that song, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” which we’d heard on Dr. Demento’s radio show. So he’d come out and he’d hold court and everybody would be sitting around and he’d be spouting, “I know what you’re like. And I know what you do.” And if he pointed at you it was ki
nd of scary, so you’d try to hide. He was trying to intimidate everyone and make everyone think he was brilliant.

  KID CONGO POWERS: In 1975 I was still in high school. There was a network of weekend suburbanites going to town and people in Hollywood welcoming the suburbanites. In the days before e-mail and the Internet we’d handwrite letters to each other about what was happening and what shows were going on. Me and Trudie used to write to each other all the time. It was about a lust for music and what was going on and not wanting to miss out on anything. We were spread out all over L.A. County and we’d meet up and get drunk at parties and see bands and it was really very underground.

  CHERIE CURRIE: I’d seen the Diamond Dogs concert at the Universal Amphitheater back in ’74 and realized that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be onstage. I wanted to perform. I cut my hair Bowie style and went from surfer girl to glam queen overnight. My twin sister, Marie, painted a lightning bolt across my face. I went to school that way. People began throwing food at me and calling me names. After only a few months the hip crowd started painting lightning bolts on their cheeks, too, and gradually my whole school turned into this makeup freak fest.

  PAT SMEAR: I was into rock and roll, the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the Ziggy Stardust album, and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. Paul was only into oldies, ’50s rock and roll. He hated Bowie at first. His sister had a Mexican lowrider boyfriend, who was into lowrider music, and lowriders only like ’50s doo-wop. Paul originally thought Bowie and hard rock were crap. He said it was all screaming and noise, but when I came back to L.A. [after an absence of a year] he was into Bowie big-time. He said he liked the lyrics.

  GERBER (AKA MICHELLE BELL): I was a surfer chick and a drug addict already. I had run away from home in Manhattan Beach and was heading for Hollywood. I was in this Taco Bell in Westwood and there was this guy with a red Bowie haircut with like a Bowie T-shirt, a Bowie belt buckle—basically it looked like he thought he was Bowie, except it was like a couple of years too late or something. So this Bowie guy was sitting at a table eating tacos. I walked up to him and said, “So I take it you’re into Bowie.” He told me to fuck off and started cussing at me. I told him to fuck off, too, picked up my tacos, and went and sat down at his table. Shortly afterward we were taking LSD in his mom’s bedroom.