We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  K.K. BARRETT: The Screamers were totally photo-op whores from the very beginning. Before we’d even played, they ran this photo shoot of us in Slash. Nobody had even heard us play, so everyone was like “Who’re the Screamers?” They had a coming-out party for Slash and we were invited to play at this storefront loft space. We’d been rehearsing pretty solidly for a few months, we’d also done a four-track demo, and so we were pretty tight. The place was packed, there’s attention, there’s desire, there’s a hubbub going on. Nick Lowe was there, Jake Riviera of Stiff Records was there, and everybody was drunk. That’s when I met Trudie again. She had a target shirt on that said KILL ME. She’d been to New York, where she’d been called “L.A.’s favorite punk rocker” in a photo caption, and she’d been drinking red wine, so the target was covered with red.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Pat Smear spilled it on me. Plus I had a big black eye from crashing Hellin’s mom’s Nova on my eighteenth birthday.

  HELLIN KILLER: I was there on crutches.

  TOMMY GEAR: We played for about 500 in a space meant for a lot fewer. The stage was about the size of a small dinner table. It was truly a crunch.

  ANDY SEVEN: Before they went on I only saw two little keyboards and a small drum kit, and I thought, “Oh, I guess the band’s not gonna play tonight, ’cause there’s no amps, no guitars set up.” Then they came on and it was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard before. In 1977, outside of Kraftwerk and maybe Suicide, you never saw a band with no guitars, and this one had just two small keyboards and a drummer backing up a lead singer. This was radical, it was completely new to everybody.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: When we started playing we just didn’t think we needed a guitar. It wasn’t a political thing, it just evolved that way. And then all the writers made something else out of it. That we were antiguitar because it was a phallic symbol, and absurd Freudian things like that. Or that we were the sons and daughters of Kraftwerk and all this bullshit.

  K.K. BARRETT: That night the Screamers were kind of baptized, legitimized by the growing new punk scene makers of Bowie club kids barely out of high school and the older, mid-to-late twenties art swingers from Venice. We actually could play, so people gave us credence, and then the race was on. Now it was us and the Zeros and the Weirdos and the Germs.

  GARY PANTER: The Screamers played the Slash party, and it pissed me off that Tommy Gear threw a music stand into the audience as a spear. But they looked fantastic! A really fantastic look, and they sounded great. When Tommy and Tomata entered a room, it was really electrifying. They just came in like exploding heads!

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I didn’t know how to sing. I just yelled. I am tone-deaf. I took a voice lesson once and they threw me out!

  K.K. BARRETT: Tommy was like Kim Fowley, the guy with the big master plan. The personal dynamic between Tommy and Tomata was good cop/bad cop. Tommy was the meanie to Tomata’s likeable clown. It was this lighthearted thing and then this boot stomp at the same time; this pop sensibility and then this dramatic drill mentality. Tommy could be one of the funniest people you’ve ever met, then he could turn around and be the coldest. He wrote most of the songs. Tomata wrote the songs that are lighthearted. Tommy would write “Punish or Be Damned” and “Violent World,” while Tomata would write “I’m Going Steady with Twiggy.” If it was all Tomata’s thing, we would have been much too light and wimpy, and if it was all Tommy’s thing, we would have been… Ramm-stein. We were right down the center between the two of them.

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: I was scared of Tommy. He was very stern. When you got to know him, when you were partying with him, he’d get real goofy and start dancing around and be much more faggy and funny and laughing, then an hour later, he’d freeze and go back into this teeth-gnashing Nazi pose where he just wanted to be in charge of everything.

  K.K. BARRETT: David Brown [also a Screamer] is a genius abstract piano player from the Berklee College of Music who invented the core Screamers sound, the wonderfully corrupted timbre of a Fender Rhodes electric piano fed through a distortion box. David just rammed it through a Big Muff distortion box.

  GARY PANTER: I don’t remember if the Screamers asked me to do their logo or if it was me who asked them. Every once in a while I’ll see a version of it over the years. There have been tattoos of it. ACT UP, the AIDS organization, uses it as a giant banner, so I’ve seen it on CNN. On a tiny scale it’s like “Keep on Truckin’,” or the happy face, or the fish with feet… an image that just got away and took on its own life.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: Oh, they use it all the time. I see it used to advertise the Insult Line, the phone number you can call to be insulted. 976-INSULT. I once called it up and said, “That’s a portrait of me, please stop using it.” And the guy says “Oh, no, that’s our boss Irving. That’s Irving’s picture.” Irving!

  K.K. BARRETT: In 1977 I moved into the Villa Elaine, this wonderfully run-down apartment building on Vine Street where Man Ray once lived. I didn’t really have anything going on. I was a huge music fan, but there were no good shows. I’d go to Music Plus, and all that existed of English or New York punk music was one little box of 45’s on the counter, and if you were lucky, you’d find a Buzz-cocks or a Ramones single. We’d go to any show at the Starwood or Whisky that had some connection to the early ’70s, the glam scene, John Cale, or whatever. We’d go to these shows and we’d start to find each other by dress or whatever. Tommy Gear and Tomata du Plenty were at this show at the Whisky. I think it was Johnny Cougar in a jumpsuit or something. They were both wearing black wraparound sunglasses that old ladies wear in Miami Beach and their hair was spiked up and I just decided I had to meet them. I said, “What are you doing?” and they said, “We’ve got this band.” But it wasn’t a band yet, they were kind of collecting people. David Brown was already in. They hadn’t played and they hadn’t rehearsed. I told them I’d played in bands in Oklahoma. We exchanged phone numbers. Tommy and Tomata lived at 1845 Wilton at Franklin, which got named the Wilton Hilton.

  KID CONGO POWERS: I lived at the Wilton Hilton. I had a closet made into a room and I used to do the Screamers’ fanzine newsletter on a manual typewriter. The Wilton Hilton was great. The interior was all black… they had parties all the time… they would listen to Nico all day, Kraftwerk and Neu! and Goblin. They knew all about Krautrock and gay underground art.

  PHIL S. TEEN: Tommy would read How to Win by Intimidation religiously. He would read it every night. Maybe that’s why all these other bands were desperate to play, but the Screamers didn’t do very many shows. It made it more of a big event.

  KITTRA ALLEN: K.K. played drums behind Tomata, Tommy Gear was on synthesizer, and David Brown played electric piano. Tomata had a uniquely shaped head with a beautiful high crown and with his cowlick hairdo he looked like a Gerber baby. Tomata walked back and forth with the microphone in his hand grinning from ear to ear looking like a mad little duck quacking around.

  PHIL S. TEEN: Another thing that might have contributed to their early mystique is that Tommy is totally nearsighted. And the reason for all his attitude was that he couldn’t see anybody. He couldn’t tell who people were. He’d lose his contact lenses and couldn’t replace them because he was very poor… but he wouldn’t wear glasses.

  GERALD CASALE: Devo loved the Screamers. We thought the Screamers and Tomata du Plenty were fucking unbelievable. You see a band that you’re creatively and intellectually inspired by and envious of and we were like, “Why didn’t we think of it?” They were so way ahead of their time. It was almost as if what they were thinking about, what they were after was like “Firestarter” by Prodigy, but this was the summer of ’77. They were using rudimentary synths and sequencers but with punk energy and aggressive lyrics and theatrical staging with German expressionist lighting.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: I was so involved in the stage act. You know, every show was so much work. It was my only focus, the performance, it really was. I didn’t do very much of the business, and I have to give credit to Tommy Gear. He
did most of that work. I was free of that responsibility so that I could devote all of my time to going out there and making a total fool of myself, which was actually a lot of hard work.

  GERALD CASALE: The hardcore punkoisie never accepted Devo and always said we were transplants, but we transformed in a much more intense way by coming to L.A. We were pissed-off Spuds with a plan and had a lot to say, but L.A. really organized the way we could say it. It made us super-dedicated and committed to being the best Devo we could be. Our sense of how we connected with a culture and an audience completely came into being here. We were infants until we came to L.A., and this was our coming-of-age experience.

  MATT GROENING: Devo was probably my favorite band at the time. They went way out of their way to have fun with it with films and costumes and their own language, and I thought it was a hoot.

  JED THE FISH: I became obsessed by everything about this band.

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: People were trying to figure out what the fuck Devo was, so they lumped us in with the punks. We enjoyed camaraderie with punks. Some people thought of us as an art band, but if the Tubes were considered an art band, I didn’t want to be an art band. We had more things in common with the punks. We were angry with the system.

  GERALD CASALE: Back home in Ohio, Devo were considered the biggest asshole losers ’cause none of us had long hair, none of us drove around in vans, none of us were managers of McDonald’s. We had menial jobs and we spent our free time writing and recording in the basement of a rented house. We did the graphics and writings on the philosophy of deevolution and people were like, “Oh, these poor fucks. What losers. They’re out of their minds.”

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: We’d lie to clubs and say we were a Top 40 band. It was rare if we got to play through the whole night. It incited people to want to get in fights with us. We’d go, “Here’s another song by Foghat, it’s called ‘Mongoloid’!” These were people who just got off work at the tire factory and they’re like, “I don’t need this shit!” There’d be stuff flying at the stage, and these long-haired gnarlers coming at us going, “You callin’ me a monkey? That what you’re sayin’?”

  JOHN DOE: People knew Devo for some reason, so that’s what hicks would yell out of their pickups to slag you: “De-e-e-v-o!” or “F-a-a-g!” You could elicit that response just by wearing tight black jeans and a leather jacket with a regular haircut. Here we were in Hollywood, where you’re supposed to be able to do anything and not faze people, and the general public was offended by this style. Everyone I knew just scratched their head, wondering what it was that pissed people off so much, but it gave you the feeling that you were fighting the good fight.

  GERALD CASALE: Many punks have told me that they got sneered at, chased, or beaten up and called “Devo!” And Devo didn’t even wear Ramones-style leather jackets and ripped jeans or any of the English safety-pin stuff. Onstage we had a distinct graphic presence of our own which had nothing to do with classic Brit punk style, and offstage we were typical anonymous-looking white lower-middle-class nerds from the Midwest. So it’s really strange to us that anybody who dyed their hair or wore personalized clothing got screamed at and called “Devo” from passing trucks. Devo became synonymous with being different. We became this iconic new wave/punk identity the general public could grab on to that didn’t have the faintest idea of what was going on, so everything got lumped under Devo if it was different or “weird.”

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: So many people got their asses kicked and called Devo for dressing punk. The lightning rod for hostility that we were in Ohio kind of continued on all our fans, even people who weren’t fans. All they had to be was different from the norm and that became some kind of badge: Devo. It was accusatorial. And when they said it, they usually meant it as a condemnation. We were shocked by it, but we were like, “It happens to us, too. We understand.”

  EXENE CERVENKA: I was living in Tallahassee and I wanted to get out of Florida ’cause I’d never lived in the big city. It was around August ’76, and a friend who was moving to California asked me if I wanted to ride with them to share gas costs. My friend Fay already lived there in a one-room apartment in Santa Monica with four other people, so I became the fifth person. I slept in the kitchen. I was just glad to be out of Florida for the first time. It was exciting to be in a city. I didn’t have any plans about what I was gonna do when I got there. I was just looking for fun, I guess.

  JOHN DOE: The earliest stage of my relationship with Los Angeles was through books, writers like James M. Cain and Bukowski. I grew up in Baltimore. I wanted a big change. The New York punk scene was pretty set by the time I was ready to make a move. I saw a few bands there. I saw Talking Heads and Blondie, and the Heartbreakers. This was ’75 or ’76. From looking at the flyers and seeing those gigs it was pretty obviously locked down, and I didn’t wanna try to weasel my way into something that was already set up. There was a community there, but I didn’t know if I could fit in. I’d been writing my own songs for five or six years and I was looking for a change. Baltimore’s a lot like New York in terms of architecture and overall vibe. It’s East Coast. I left there on Halloween of ’76.

  BILLY ZOOM: I took up guitar in 1954, at the age of six, after studying piano, violin, and accordion, although my main instruments were sax and clarinet. My father was a jazz musician, and I was trained to be a musician almost from birth. I had years and years of lessons on sax, clarinet, and flute, as well as music theory and arranging on everything except guitar because my mother didn’t consider it a legitimate instrument. My dad taught me the basic chords, and I took it from there. When Elvis came out, things got more interesting.

  TOP JIMMY: I met Billy Zoom about thirty years ago. Around 1971. Thirty fuckin’ years ago! He played a lot with a band called Art Wheeler and the Brothers Love. He was one of the Brothers Love. They’d play down on Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard. It was a black group, and he was the token white boy guitar player. He had hair down to his ass and little Benjamin Franklin spectacles and drove a ’53 Ford truck. We got friendly. He liked rock and roll and country. He was from the Midwest and stuff, so he was my type of people.

  BILLY ZOOM: I started playing in surf/instrumental bands in the early ’60s, went through the Beatle thing in the mid-’60s, and ended up touring with black R&B bands in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I played around Watts with groups like the Brothers Love and backed up everybody from Etta James to Johnny “Guitar” Watson while doing whatever session work I could find. For a while I played with a bar band called the Alligators. Some of their demos were released a while back on a CD called Pre-X Zoom. I had also finished electronics school and had a little amp repair shop just off Sunset and Vista.

  TOP JIMMY: Billy met Kittra Allen not long after I did. I think he picked her up hitchhiking or something.

  KITTRA ALLEN: I met Billy Zoom in 1971. I had already been living in Hollywood for a year in my own apartment.

  TOP JIMMY: Billy had an apartment at Afton and Gower. He lived in the basement. Then he and Kittra lived in the truck for a while—they used to park outside my mom’s apartment and she’d tell me to go down and get them and bring them up so they could take a shower and eat something ’cause she felt bad for ’em. She got Kittra a job where she worked, a coffee shop next to the Chinese Theater owned by Eddie Nash, the gangster’s brother. Billy was doing the best he could. He actually tried working at the taco stand where I worked for a little while.

  BILLY ZOOM: When R&B turned into funk, I lost interest and looked for something else to play. I couldn’t stand Elton or Frampton, so in desperation I started doing rockabilly, which I had always been into. But rockabilly had gone nowhere, and I was looking for the next big thing that I could stand.

  TOP JIMMY: Me and Billy went to see the Ramones and Van Halen in March of ’77 out in Norwalk. I’d heard of punk rock, but the Ramones just seemed like a funny rock-and-roll band; they were kinda cartoonish. I liked them, they had great energy. The Ramones show inspired Billy.
Got him all excited. Billy was a real good guitar player. Sometimes that’s a detriment. He said, “Punk is really cool. You could be real good and nobody would notice.” The next week he put an ad in the Recycler and Johnny Doe answered it.

  BILLY ZOOM: I put an ad in the Recycler for a drummer and bass player, and John Doe was the first to answer. He was the second to show up and audition, but he seemed better than the first guy. John also had an ad in the same Recycler. He was looking for a guitar player and drummer. I can’t remember what the ads said, but they were very similar.

  TOP JIMMY: They’d rehearse out in the garage, and then John Doe started bringing his girlfriend by.

  EXENE CERVENKA: I dropped out of high school when I was sixteen. My friend Fay helped me get into this program. I was eligible for some kinda women-who-don’t-have-nothin’-going-on program, and I found out about Beyond Baroque, the literary center, and it sounded like a good thing, so I applied to work there, and the state paid for it. They’d teach you stuff like typesetting or something, and then the state paid you. I rented the apartment right above the poetry workshop. I worked there and got to read all these really rare poetry books, from the beatniks and all these chapbooks people had made, all this Bukowski stuff. Up till then, my sister was my only influence as far as writing and art. As far as the poetry scene, there were people reading, hanging out… people of all ages and all backgrounds. The very first night I went to the Venice Poetry Workshop was the first time I met John. It was his first night, too. We ended up accidentally sitting next to each other.

  JOHN DOE: She was the youngest, most interesting other person there, besides myself, of course. She was immediately attractive in her eccentricities, wearing jeans. I thought, “Wow, who’s this?”