by Marc Spitz
LEONARD PHILLIPS: The Damned played for twenty minutes and by the time they were done, I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. I was so used to seeing bands play for an hour and judging them by those boring old ’70s standards. Like, “Wow, that guy did a great solo… or gee, I wish I had his equipment.” Instead, a fight broke out, the drummer had more attitude than the singer—the Dracula guy—and the bass player took off all his clothes. The club manager was threatening to call the cops on them. They were fabulous.
DAVE VANIAN: At the Starwood I remember people who seemed left over from the ’50s and ’60s whoopin’ around in the front row. They’d come just to see what the hubbub was all about. We were well received. We asked the crowd from the stage to throw money so we could get home, and many of them obliged.
SANDY WEST: We were backstage at the Starwood in L.A. and Rat Scabies from the Damned was yelling at Joan Jett and wanting to punch her and shit, so I moved in fast and smacked him one upside the head. Hard. Cold-cocked him. Calmed that motherfucker’s ass right down. I had to do the same thing in England with that drummer for 999. He was bugging me at my hotel door and I was like, “Dude, I’m going to sleep,” but he kept getting pushy with the door, and I was like, “I don’t think so.” So I hit him. Knocked him out. The next day at breakfast, they were all applauding. I’m a real sweet, nice gal, y’know, but you don’t let people take advantage of you. The Runaways called me the Rock, ’cause I looked after everybody… and I was steady, always ready.
ROBERT LOPEZ: After the Orpheum shows and the Damned at the Star-wood it seemed like everybody in the audience started their own band.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: The Damned was the first night that I stayed out all night and said, “Fuck it, I’m not going home.” That was my turning point.
JUDITH BELL: I already knew Claude Bessy from Venice Beach when he was a short-order chef at the Feed Bag. I went there with this gay guy and we both fell for Claude and we were fighting over him. We sent Claude a card behind the counter where he was chopping veggies. We invited him to our house. We decorated, we got some opium, we bought flowers, we set the house up, all so that Claude would pick which one of us he was gonna be with, but he never showed up, so we smoked the opium and we both fell asleep. Suddenly I woke up to this clanging noise and it was Claude riding his bicycle at four in the morning. He was a speed guy in those days. I had no idea he was a writer or anything till much later on.
STEPHEN RANDALL: Before Slash, Claude’s notoriety derived mostly from being a terrible waiter at Al’s Kitchen on Santa Monica Pier circa 1973, cigarette hanging from his lips, ashes flicking into your food. He was semivigilant, grabbing the empty plate in front of you, even though you were just taking the first bite of your burger. Of course, because it was Claude, it all seemed like great fun. That was the best thing about hanging out with Claude and Philomena—everything became great fun. He could turn any event—even having a cup of coffee at 3 A.M. at Zucky’s—into some sort of picaresque adventure. He was never boring and he never got bored, which made it easier to overlook ash in your chow.
PHILOMENA WINSTANLEY: I would go down to the beach every day and eat in this little restaurant called Al’s Kitchen, and Claude was the waiter. I met him when he came up to me and told me that he was reading the same book that I was. It was a book of scientific explanations for stories from the Bible, like the parting of the Red Sea. I went back to his flat and discovered that we had a lot of records in common. A lot of reggae.
JUDITH BELL: Claude, Philomena, and I coattailed a birthday party for some TV casting heavyweight. It was all Brooks Brothers guys, faux Marlboro Men in long western dusters with two-thousand-dollar Tony Lama cowboy boots, and beige linen Armani dudes from William Morris cruising for new SAG whores. When the candles were lit on the cake and everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” somebody handed an uncorked bottle of ’65 DP to the birthday boy. Claude walked over, grabbed it right out of the guy’s hand, and started chugging on it nonstop like a baby that was late for its feeding—he snoggled away on it until the entire bottle was empty. The room went dead, and we ran for it and went off to see the Germs, laughing all the way. Come Monday morning, birthday boy and his partner at William Morris wanted to do lunch with Claude. With verbal assurance there would be no violence, Claude went to read for a part in some remake of The Hardy Boys. With no previous acting experience whatsoever, Claude got a contract for six episodes and a SAG card to play Frenchy, a transient bohemian rock star. The agents just loved the whole bad-boy thing, his inimitable dark dangerous beauty, his catlike grace, and of course the lurid cussing in that heavy accent.
TOMATA DU PLENTY: Philly was sweet, demure, and considerate, everything that Claude wasn’t. They were the perfect match. Kickboy was loud, rude, and bombastic, French accent included, and I wouldn’t have wanted him any other way. The late ’70s were drowning in a sea of mellowness and complacency. Claude was the voice of beautiful rage crying out of the wilderness.
PHILOMENA WINSTANLEY: Claude was doing this little reggae fanzine called Angeleno Dread, writing under the Kickboy Face. Then our friend Steve Samiof came back from England and said that we had to start a punk movement, that there were all these people there with spiky hair. We had seen the Screamers around Los Angeles, so it seemed like a smart idea. And Steve was kind of a professional. And Claude was a writer. And Melanie Nissen was a photographer. When we started Slash, I was the only nonprofessional, so I transcribed everything.
STEVE SAMIOF: In the spring of ’77 Claude was working as a waiter in Venice when he began putting out Angeleno Dread, which was very likely the first ever reggae fanzine in L.A. County. Angeleno Dread was basically a few hand-stapled mimeographed sheets which featured reviews and features on Lee “Scratch” Perry, Burning Spear, U-Roy, Dillinger, Prince Far I. Also around this time I was working days doing pasteups for the Watts Star-Review and the Herald Dispatch. I had worked as a flower shop proprietor, a chef, a blues bar manager (Rick’s Blues Bar in Venice), a fabric wholesaler, a graphic designer, a rug dealer, an Art Deco shop owner, a plumber’s apprentice, a stage designer, a house painter, a purchasing agent, a warehouseman, an interior designer, an importer… basically a scam artist. I read an article in the L.A. Times in March ’77 about the Sex Pistols throwing up on someone at Heathrow Airport, and that really appealed to me, because it was so absurd. I knew something was happening, and I wanted to write an article—not to be a writer, but as self-therapy. Since I had experience in pasteup I knew the basic mechanics of putting together a magazine, and I knew Claude was a writer. So we started Slash. We got advertising from the record companies and then we turned around and said, “Fuck you in the mouth” to them. Our primary goal was not to get co-opted by anybody—except by ourselves.
DON WALLER: Slash was successful ’cause it was a bunch of people writing about their friends and running their pictures in the zine. It was all about the new thing. Back Door Man was a little more ecumenical. Localism is always a sound political principle, isn’t it?
BOB BIGGS: I had a studio loft on Pico near La Brea back in ’76. Two guys moved in next to me; one of them, Steve Samiof, started Slash magazine with Philomena Winstanley and Claude Bessy. They would have people over with purple hair and shit. I had money, so I eventually gave them about a thousand dollars and I began to invest incrementally starting with like 10 percent, then I bought them out. Claude did most of the writing, and he was a total contrarian iconoclast. He was fiercely antimainstream.
CLAUDE BESSY: At Slash during the very very very beginning we were not very choosy about who we were going to put in the fucking magazine. Issue number one featured a band which had never even played live, the Screamers. We just liked their hairstyles!
TOMMY GEAR: We were seen as visual figures before anyone had heard us.
BOB BIGGS: We had a foundation at Slash in terms of what we were doing because we were older and came from the art scene rather than coming into it with any street rock-and-roll background. It made
it easier. I didn’t want the burden of knowing these people so closely that I was gonna have to change how I did things. And they wanted it that way, too. My stake in punk was always more financial.
MATT GROENING: Slash was the focus. It sort of pinned down the scene and made it real.
EXENE CERVENKA: Slash was so good that it legitimized the scene quite a bit. New York had the New York Rocker and great writers and great bands like the Velvet Underground… and the new band scene at CBGB was continuing that legacy there, whereas in L.A. we were starting from scratch, we had all these horrible bands like the Eagles, when all of a sudden this new scene seemed to come out of nowhere when it was actually a long time comin’. They said we didn’t have the Velvets and the Ramones and like who did we think we were.
DAVID ALLEN: I got the first issue of Slash in May and thought Claude (Kickboy) Bessy’s editorial “So This Is War?” was brilliant. I called the Slash office and offered my services, which the core collective Steve Samiof, Melanie Nissen, Claude Bessy, and Philomena Winstanley readily accepted. I designed abstracted typefaces, logos, and illustrations, and drove Samiof to the printers.
EDITORIAL, “SO THIS IS WAR, EH?” (SLASH MAGAZINE
ISSUE 1, JULY 77): This decade’s biggest musical fad has been the dreadful dripping sounds of disco music. Up to now. Because lately there’ve been rumors of strange goings-on on the fringes of the music world. Violence at concerts both on the part of the performers and of the audience, outraged editorials in daily newspapers, foul-mouthed interviews on live TV and frightened record companies dropping contracts faster than a chimp would a hot potato, oddball fashions of slashed clothing, repulsive make-up and bondage paraphernalia, and of course music, dirty primitive music that has little to do with the stuff music stations have been pouring in our ears for what seems to be an eternity. Today this madness is mostly an English phenomenon, but there are signs that it will not stop there. This publication was born out of curiosity and out of hope. Curiosity regarding what looks like a possible rebirth of true rebel music, hope in its eventual victory over the bland products professional pop stars have been feeding us. May the punks set this rat infested industry on fire. It sure could use a little brightness. So there will be no objective reviewing in these pages, and definitely no unnecessary dwelling upon the bastards who’ve been boring the living shit out of us for years with their concept albums, their cosmic discoveries and their pseudo philosophical inanities. Enough is enough, partner! About time we squeezed the pus out and sent the filthy rich old farts of rock ’n’ roll to retirement homes in Florida where they belong. Let them play at Saturday night dances for the mink and Geritol crowd at the Sheraton hotels, let them remember the old days when they’d rather die than be seen with socialite creeps and being heard talking trash and let them shit in their pants with envy. As The Clash say, NO ELVIS, BEATLES OR ROLLING STONES IN 1977!
CHRIS D.: I was a teacher at the time Slash first came out. A lot of the kids had long hair and I’d just gotten my hair cut and a lot of the kids in my class were calling me “fag” ’cause I had short hair. I got fired ’cause I was too strict. I actually wasn’t that strict. I just didn’t like them to be rolling joints in class. I sent in a review of “I Got a Right” by Iggy and the Stooges and that was the first thing I got published in Slash. I went as Chris D. at first but then Claude had me write so many record reviews that I would use pseudonyms like Half-Cocked and Bob Clone and Mr. OK. Nobody was getting paid, but whatever records we reviewed we got to keep. It’s pretty amazing that the issues came out on a fairly regular basis. Everybody was so drunk. There was a lot of time spent at clubs at night getting really fucked up and listening to music and partying afterwards, plus a lot of tumultuous interpersonal relationships. The deadlines were pretty loose but everybody pretty much met them.
MATT GROENING: Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face, was fantastic. He and Steve Samiof did a great service because of their humor and because they published Gary Panter, who was the best artist to come out of the punk scene, which originally had a great deal of wit and humor to it. That’s where I met and became best friends with Gary.
GARY PANTER: I saw the first issue of Slash at the big newsstand on Cahuenga and I said, “Wow, either they’re really scary people or they’re gonna be friends.” It looked really aggressive. An illustration agent I knew said, “They’re not punks, they’re just designers and artists.” So I just called them up. My scratchy kind of crap cartoons were not hippie-themed, so I’d never sent them to any of the hippie mags. My stuff was really young and negative, and it came out of painting ideas, as did a lot of punk—out of the ’60s art school thing. A lot of the early punks were well-educated art school people with a good sense of humor about it, like, “Let’s scare everybody’s mommy.” I think I met Steve and Melanie first and Claude in turn. My picture of Slash is Claude at his desk with his head buried in piles of material, yelling, “Listen to thees!” Or “Thees ees sheet.” And he would steer me to certain stuff that he thought I’d like.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: I went to the Slash offices to meet the people behind this cool new magazine and was horrified that Steve Samiof had a beard. I thought Claude and Philly and Steve and Melanie were really nice but they were all really old! They were in their late twenties, early thirties. I kept trying to get Samiof to shave.
GARY PANTER: They were really well organized. Claude was a powerhouse, and Steve was dedicated to it. His art, as he describes it, is always about scams and business projects—he has a sarcastic facade—but he’s a real solid, generous, wonderful person. He always had a big beard and an Alfred E. Neumann shirt. It was a time when everybody was trying to look mean and vicious, and there’d be Steve and Melanie Nissen with her big poufy hair jumping around… you realized there wasn’t going to be some strict dress code.
JOHN DOE: If it wasn’t for Slash and the other zines, or Kristine McKenna writing for the L.A. Times, the scene would never have become what it became. More people eventually came to the shows so you could get paid better, play bigger places. Gradually it created a local music scene because it was being publicized. It was being verified. Value was now being attached to it. If it’s written about in the L.A. Times, then it’s real. Slash was a music paper that predated the L.A. Weekly. A whole magazine about this underground thing. People saw it and said, “Shit, maybe I’m missing something.” Later on it got a little gossipy, like high school, like “Who’s on the cover?”
HAL NEGRO: Bomp, Back Door Man, Slash, Flipside, Lobotomy, Generation X were all different, they were all great sources of information, but I lived to read Flipside to see if I was mentioned. Flipside was like the Bible. You looked in it and it had the shows you missed—“Damn, why wasn’t I there”—plus coverage of the shows you went to. Best were the record reviews. The style of turning on a tape recorder with a bunch of people talking about the record. Flipside had their finger on it. Slash was a real kind of magazine but it became very new wave and trendy, very arty, but Flipside was more folkish, more about the grassroots DIY side of punk. They covered the art-damaged bands less and championed the Germs as much as Slash did, if not more, but I think they hated X for some reason. The other mags were about other people looking at the scene. But Flip-side was the scene. They reported on the social side as well as the music… what Trixie and Trudie and Hellin and Gerber and Dix were doing was just as important as the music and the bands… it strengthened this sense of community, even if some of the more sophisto art punks dismissed it as trivial, like the trashy gossip of Flipside was beneath them.
X-8: I was going to Whittier High School from ’74 till ’77. People from Whittier that liked the New York Dolls started hanging out. We were all reading the same rock zines—Creem, Rock Scene, Craw-daddy, Back Door Man, Bomp, and Circus—and we formed a little union in suburbia. We used to ride the bus from Whittier to Hollywood. We’d pick up flyers from Licorice Pizza and Peaches and that’s how we found out about the Germs. Al and Tory, Larry Lash and me. We used t
o hang out and get drunk on NyQuil together. I was editor of the school newspaper, so Flipside was a way to hone journalistic skills and write about stuff that I liked. For some of us it became a free ticket to get into clubs.
POOCH (PAT DI PUCCIO): Some of the early Flipsides were literally handwritten or typed on a manual typewriter. We were a group of Whittier High School students, an integrated group of blue-collar Hispanic and Euro-American kids from the South Bay. There was Al Kowalski, myself, Sam Diaz (X-8), Steve Schumacher (Larry Lash), and George Torrez. We were basically loner music geeks who couldn’t get dates.
X-8: Flipside was about trying to share things we were experiencing, things we thought were important to youth and society and culture, even on such a low level. Flipside was already well into its concept phase, but Slash made it to the newsstand first. They were twenty-five cents. Four Xerox sides initially. For the first issue we interviewed the Germs in Pat’s parents’ garage. Darby was talking about taking acid on the Santa Monica Pier. I couldn’t help zeroing in on the Germs ’cause they were so nontraditional. Al was into Bowie and stuff. I was into more trashy types of rock. The Germs captured that expressionistic trash aesthetic well onstage. Musically it was just “What the fuck?” Most of the early Flipsides were just transcriptions of us getting drunk in somebody’s living room… we’d just tape ourselves saying what was crap and what we did and didn’t like. We came across like a bunch of real snotty, adolescent brats.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: The Lobotomy zine was a lot of work. We’d go to every show and write reviews, we’d interview people and get them really fucked up. Slash interviews would have stuff about politics and art, but Lobotomy’s trademark was that the interviews would be about sex and drug experiences. I’d sell it at Licorice Pizza and Bomp and Peaches and Rhino or at gigs. We’d sell it to them on consignment, five or ten copies, then get our fifty cents or whatever and bring them more.
