We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  CHRIS ASHFORD: When the Germs first started they had a sense of humor to it that made it fun. They were huge Bowie and Iggy fans who first started in the garage with the name Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens. You couldn’t get much more vulgar glam than that. They were the Revlon Spam Queens for at least four or five months during late ’76, early ’77. They were still in school, and originally they didn’t play at all, they just had matching T-shirts.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: I was the original drummer for the Germs. The drummer that never played because I came down with mono-nucleosis.

  PAT SMEAR: Belinda wanted to be responsible when she quit. When we said we wanted to buy our own instruments she brought in her friend Becky to replace her.

  GUS HUDSON: Becky Thatcher, who was sometimes also known as Becky Barton, became Donna Rhia. She was a theater arts student I was dating who told me she was getting involved with this band and asked me to help her come up with a name for it. They were already called Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens and they wanted a shorter name. They were practicing a lot. Becky and I went to Bobby Pyn’s mom’s house in West L.A. He had Bowie memorabilia all over the wall. Pleasant was in the room and they were sitting in front of a turntable listening to a Sex Pistols seven-inch. Bobby treated me like crap ’cause I was already over the hill. I was twenty-one. It was like, “You’re not one of us.” He had contempt for people. I never had a conversation with him besides “Oh, can you do this for me.” Bobby and Pat were using Becky to get access to things ’cause she had a credit card. She could rent all the equipment they needed. I’d drive them out to Pasadena to rent everything and we’d crate it into Hollywood. Becky was willing ’cause she so badly wanted to be part of it. Becky could barely keep a beat. They knew she was terrible but I think they sort of liked that.

  PAT SMEAR: When we came up with the name the Germs the girls were disappointed. They said they thought we were more creative. It was supposed to be like the germ of an idea, so you’d know we were there at the start.

  PETER CASE: Back in ’75, I was a street busker in San Francisco and I was thinking, “Where the fuck is my generation? Where the fuck is everybody?” I was playing on the street every night from 1973, ’74, ’75, on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. I met up with Jack Lee and we put a band together and we played Animal House–style frat parties where people were going, “Kill the band. Kill the band.” We finally got really pissed off with San Francisco. We bought an L.A. newspaper and thought maybe something was going on. Even hell would be better than the rock scene in the Bay Area at that time, so in ’76 we loaded up our shit and drove down and moved into the Vine Lodge, this skeezy whorehouse on Vine Street. I went to the Whisky the second night I was in town and Van Halen was playing there for fifty people and I was like, “This dinosaur shit is still going on? It’s so stupid. I thought this was L.A.” We wanted to play the Whisky, too, but when we called their attitude was like “Fuck you.” We couldn’t get a gig anywhere. We gave our self-produced single to Peter Leeds, the guy who managed Blondie, and he told us it was the worst shit he’d ever heard. The Nerves became so desperate, we were getting into some shaky business shit, always bad news, but when I got down here, I was like, “I don’t wanna do that shit. I wanna be a musician. I wanna play my music outside some concrete bunker.” We had the last of the loot from some smart money deal. So we said, “We’re gonna take this money and rent out some hall and we’ll put on any bands we can find. Punk rock’s happening, we’ll call it the Hollywood Punk Palace.” But we couldn’t find any bands.

  TONY KINMAN: The Nerves weren’t punk rock, but my brother Chip and I had read about them in Rock Scene magazine, they’d already put out that first EP, which had some really neat songs on it, Beatle-y poppy stuff. Word got around fast that they were doing this independent promotion thing.

  PETER CASE: First we worked the Screamers, who lived next door… we tried to talk them into playing a gig that we’d promote, but they were too overcontrolled about everything. We didn’t know anybody else. One day we were out on our daily punk hunt and we were driving by Denny’s on Sunset and we’re like, “Hey, there’s Kim Fowley with that little short guy—what’s his name?—out front.” We jumped out of the car and told ’em, “We’re having these punk rock shows, man.” The first show in the basement of the Columbia lot was with Zolar X, this crack-up band in space suits… leftovers from glitter… but they were the only band we could get who were that desperate for a gig they’d do anything, even our show. We easily got them to take part in the Nerves’ big punk rock cash-in scam to cover our hotel rooms and make a little! They were hilarious, but we wanted to meet some real punk rock bands. Then we finally met the real deal: the Weirdos. But they didn’t have a drummer, so at first they were saying, “We can’t do it.” Then we said, “Fuck it, man, just go play and you’ll get a drummer. You don’t need a fucking drummer. Just show up, you guys are like the greatest group in the world.” The Weirdos were fucking great. Those songs like “Life of Crime,” “Idle Life,” “Hitman”—those are still great tunes.

  JOHN DENNEY: The Weirdos formed in February 1977. We were rehearsing at this cheap hole-in-the-wall rehearsal space called the Dress Revue at Hollywood and Western. We were students from Cal Arts [California Institute for the Arts]. The band was for our own amusement really, sort of like some fantasy group for fun with a bit of art damage thrown in, at least that was my take on it. One day this guy Peter Case, who had a band called the Nerves that we’d vaguely heard of, came into our room and asked us if we’d play a gig with his band at some space they were renting in the basement of the old Columbia lot. We said we were stoked to be asked but we really weren’t ready to play in public yet; specifically, we didn’t even have a drummer. But Peter was such a convincing talker, backed up by the other two, that they talked us into doing it.

  PETER CASE: The second show the Nerves promoted was called Punk Rock Invasion, a much better name. We had the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zippers, and this band called Short Ice from New York. We didn’t have any place to put it on, so I called SIR Studios and rented one of those huge rooms with a soundstage. We took the rest of our dough and put up posters. The show was a big bust. The Dils came out and they were really too weird. They were way out there. This guy Jeff Scott was the spazziest lead singer in the world. On the first song he freaked out and hit himself in the face with a mic, hurt himself and broke the mic.

  TONY KINMAN: I really didn’t like the whole hippie thing, the whole long-haired rock thing. That rubbed me the wrong way.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: The Dils had really long hair before punk came in.

  JOHN DENNEY: We thought the Dils were playing old-fashioned rock like Led Zeppelin, with a slight Ramones touch to it to make it seem contemporary.

  PETER CASE: Equipment was wrecked, shit disappeared, people puked all over the gear. Afterward we called up the Whisky again and said, “Are you ever gonna fucking book this music?” And the owner Elmer Valentine said, “Fuck, no.” And so we said, “Fuck you, then, we’re gonna play at the Orpheum, right across the street.” We got in the Orpheum with the very fucking last of our cash.

  JOHN DENNEY: Peter Case discovered the Weirdos. Who knows, maybe we would have stayed in our own private little world if he hadn’t been so aggressive in talking us into playing out before we even had a completed lineup. We had a blast—we loved playing the gig so much they asked us to play another a week or so later. I think we did two or three of these shows with the Nerves, and then Cliff took over when it was obvious people were coming to see us rather than the Nerves.

  HAL NEGRO: By the second Orpheum show the Nerves had given up on promoting gigs, they weren’t being paid attention to. They had matching suits like the Beatles and they were a continuation of music that was familiar, with cutesy vocal harmonies and all that, whereas the Weirdos were something phenomenally new. It felt different. It looked different. It smelled different. Your body moved to it differently. Even without a drummer, I co
uldn’t stand still when they were playing.

  PETER CASE: Right before the Nerves broke up, we got these really stupid matching suits. I was drunk out of my mind and we got into a big fight in the dressing room at the Masque and we just told each other to fuck off and basically that was it for the Nerves.

  K.K. BARRETT: The Screamers had already begun buckling down to serious practicing when the Orpheum shows with the Weirdos were happening. Everybody already knew who the Screamers were ’cause we were always out at any show that had any relation to new music. We made the scene and hung out. We saw the Nerves at the Orpheum and thought, “Oh, this is music of the past.” But we thought the Weirdos were genius… guitar, guitar, voice, and bass. No drums—that was genius.

  GREG SHAW: To me, the Weirdos were the most significant band of the early L.A. scene. This, following the theory that if New York punk was about art, and London punk about politics, L.A. punk was about pop culture, TV, and absurdity. The Weirdos had great songs, a great image, and a very good singer. The look was the most extreme of any band around.

  JOHN DENNEY: We crashed the Damned’s in-store at Bomp Records, Greg Shaw’s record outlet in North Hollywood to try and call some attention to ourselves and this gig the Weirdos were promoting at the Orpheum.

  DAVE VANIAN: It was the Damned’s very first trip to L.A. I remember getting out of the car, standing on the sidewalk, and seeing the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. It was evening and still warm compared with the chill of Britain. It all seemed very exotic riding in a car with Debbie Harry sitting on my knee on the way to a radio station to do interviews with the Damned and Blondie. “Hotel California” by the Eagles was on the radio every five minutes whether you wanted to hear it or not. I was in awe that I was in Hollywood and was thinking: “This is where James Dean revved up his motorcycle outside the church at Pier Angeli’s wedding.” I remember seeing Bela Lugosi’s chateaulike home off the Strip. Music had very little to do with my first impressions. I was a twenty-year-old English kid who had a passion for the Golden Age of Hollywood and its history. The Bomp shop had cool ’60s American garage band records by the Shadows of Night and the Seeds that I had listened to on pirate radio stations in England. Bands like that were unknown in the U.K.

  NICKEY BEAT: There were all these unruly little punky kids at the Damned in-store. It was Darby, who was still Bobby Pyn, and Pat Smear and Lorna Doom and Donna Rhia.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: I convinced the Germs that they should be ready to play when we were at Bomp Records for the Damned, which is also the first time I saw Angelyne. She was in a baby blue corset with blue maribou trim. She was at least in her mid-to-late thirties then. She was like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in the sunlight.

  BOBBY PYN: When we first started, we couldn’t really play and neither could anybody else so you have to do something to draw more attention to your band… so that was an easy way.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: After I recovered from my mono condition, I became Bobby Pyn’s prop girl. I’d hand him salad dressing and peanut butter when he was on stage.

  PAT SMEAR: We went to Bomp Records where the Damned were doing an in-store. We were drunk out of our minds causing trouble. We kept bragging about how we were a band, and someone said if we were a band, why didn’t we play at the Weirdos’ show tonight? We had no songs or anything. It was a dare.

  JOHN DENNEY: Bobby Pyn and Pat were at the Damned in-store when Bobby came up to us and said in quite a timid small-boy’s voice, “We have a band. Can we play?” We thought it was the perfect setup for us. A band of young kids who could barely play at all wouldn’t threaten us because we’d been gigging without a drummer.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: On the way to the Orpheum, we were fucking gone, we had bottles and bottles of cold duck and we were screaming out the window at people.

  GUS HUDSON: I was Becky’s [Donna Rhia’s] date. When we were driving to the show, Bobby was sticking his head out the window screaming randomly, “You fucking fag! You fucking fag!” He wanted to make a scene.

  PAT SMEAR: Lorna wore her pants inside out, and Darby covered himself in red licorice that melted into a sticky goo.

  ROBERT LOPEZ: It was cool to be sixteen and playing on Sunset Boulevard. The crowd was really into it. There were a lot of people with longish hair, jeans, and T-shirts. Nobody was as fashionable as you might think. Except the Weirdos. They were from art school, so they all had spray-painted pants and plastic wrappers wrapped around their legs. Shirts made of trash bags. The Germs were wearing tight jeans and homemade white T-shirts that were stenciled with THE GERMS in front and stuff like COMIN’ AT YOU! on the back. Kind of like a Kim Fowley–esque, rock-and-roll Runaways kind of thing

  JOHN DENNEY: When the Germs went on, it was obvious very fast they had no music at all. They were just kids literally playing feedback and banging around and smearing mayonnaise and peanut butter all over themselves and the PA. It was very amusing and really entertaining, but the gag wore out fast… it became tedious and unfunny after about ten or fifteen minutes. I hate to bust a few myths, but what really happened was that Dave Trout, Cliff and Hal Negro, our roadie, and myself looked at each other and we all agreed it was time to move on with the next band. They’d made their statement and we thought it very cool and gutsy. We escorted them offstage; the truth was it was a lot more low-key than the folkloric version, which has them being pelted and forcefully dragged off.

  PAT SMEAR: We made noise. Darby stuck the mic in a jar of peanut butter. We made noise for five minutes until they threw us off.

  NICKEY BEAT: The Germs were absolutely fucking terrible! They came onstage, tuned up for ten or fifteen minutes, then got through maybe one-third of their first song and stopped and started over again. Bobby Pyn was inciting people to throw shit. Bobby took the mic and stuck it in a jar of peanut butter. The sound man screamed, “That’s fucking it!” and pulled the plug on them. Shut down the electricity. The roadies went onstage and threw them off. When I say threw them offstage, I mean picking up the bass drum with the foot pedal and tom-tom attached and throwing it eight feet into the corner. The Germs weren’t to be taken seriously after that night… for a while.

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: Yeah, the peanut butter was a big tribute to Iggy, but he turned it into something different.

  PAT SMEAR: We’d read the stories about Iggy and the peanut butter and cutting himself up and stuff, putting cigarettes out on himself. Darby said: “Oh, I’m gonna take that to the extreme.” There’s the real version of what Iggy may have been doing and there’s the teenage exaggerated version, and Darby was going for that one.

  GUS HUDSON: After the Orpheum, all you heard about was peanut butter this and Iggy Pop that. Really, Bobby only did the peanut butter thing one time, yet people talked about it for the next couple of years. They still talk about it!

  GREG SHAW: The Zeros went on next. They were probably the most sincere band on the scene. They were real midteens from near San Diego who worshiped the Ramones and the New York Dolls.

  ROBERT LOPEZ: Right after our gig at the Orpheum, Greg Shaw of Bomp offered to do the Zeros’ first single. It was pretty magical for a sixteen-year-old San Diego kid to have someone say, “You guys were great. I want to put out your first record.”

  HAL NEGRO: The Weirdos went on last. Once they got Nickey Beat, it elevated two more steps up. What had been great now just became unbelievable.

  JOHN DENNEY: We knew the Damned were in town, and we called over to the Screamers’ house, where they were crashing on the floor because Tom Verlaine from Television had kicked them off the bill at the Whisky. So we were really stoked when their bass player, Captain Sensible, showed up and jammed with us. I think we did a trashed-out version of the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” or something like that… it was fun.

  ROBERT LOPEZ: We didn’t know it at the time, because we were from San Diego, but it was one of the key shows that gelled the scene.

  ALICE BAG: The first local punk show I saw was the Weirdos, the Zeros, and the G
erms at the Orpheum. When I saw the Germs, I was surprised and outraged and excited all at once. I didn’t think very much of what they were doing, but I thought, “Wow, if they can do that, surely I can do something better.”

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: The Germs had four practices or less by the time they played. The Germs and the Zeros were probably the first teen bands to bypass the whole Kim Fowley thing by creating themselves. I don’t think Kim liked it very much that the Germs and the other new bands were already well beyond his control.

  CHRIS ASHFORD: The Germs and the Zeros and F-Word were the first teen groups that broke away, that weren’t casted and controlled by Kim. They’d invented themselves.

  KIM FOWLEY: You get a donkey and you get a baboon and you feed ’em a diet of chili and custard for thirty days and then you get ’em to fuck. Their children would be the Germs.

  DAVE VANIAN: Television’s Tom Verlaine, on hearing accounts of the Damned’s other shows across the U.S., decided he didn’t want us playing on the same bill at the Whisky. This is how we ended up enjoying the hospitality of Tomata du Plenty and the Screamers in Hollywood, who put us up at their house, the Wilton Hilton. We slept on their floor because we were so broke after spending all our money on the flights to Hollywood for the Television shows. Without any money from playing any shows, we were seriously stranded.

  X-8: Jerking the Damned from the Whisky gig earned the stuffy old New York new wavers a bad street rap as these prissy old literary wimps—they seemed like tired people from another era.

  HAL NEGRO: Stan Lee of the Dickies got the Damned a last-minute booking at the Starwood. Indirectly, this gig made them the first bona fide U.K. punk rock band to play Los Angeles, and I can tell you, there was mutual awe all around.