We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  JOHN DOE: David and Pat Garrett would set up recording stuff in hotel rooms. There was one Black Randy Dangerhouse session that we did that was in two empty hotel rooms. Sort of like Robert Johnson—put the recording unit in one room and the band in another, then fight with the hotel manager because we were making too much noise.

  HAL NEGRO: These indie records were starting to get played on KROQ, and Cheech and Chong’s producer, Lou Adler, saw these new punk bands as an opportunity to drum up extras for a Battle of the Bands scene for their movie Up in Smoke, which was shooting in Hollywood in August of ’77. Adler put out a Fowley-style open cattle call for punk bands.

  EXENE CERVENKA: Bobby Pyn and I were both extras on the Cheech and Chong movie… that’s where I met him. It was fifty dollars, an open call… fifty bucks for a couple of hours, so it was a big score for me. It was boring as hell, and they didn’t even feed us.

  ANDY SEVEN: It was so boring, sitting and waiting around, so Bobby started throwing stuff around, screaming, and tearing shit up. Maybe he knew that the joke was on them, but that was the way the Germs played shows anyway. They always trashed stuff. As soon as Bobby started singing he was kicking stuff over. The stagehands freaked out ’cause they realized it wasn’t a joke, it was the real thing. I’m not sure they even finished one song before they turned off the PA and threw the Germs out of the club while the audience was booing the stagehands big-time ’cause they came to see these bands at the Roxy for free.

  GERBER: The whole Up in Smoke thing turned into one of those take-the-walls-down moments. I just remember being very fucked up and roarin’ out, “O-o-o-kay, it’s time to fight!”

  RICK WILDER: Oh, God, that thing with Lou Adler. The Cheech and Chong movie. I was drinking Jack Daniel’s early in the morning, and by the middle of the day I was sick of these people throwing water and trying to be punk, so I started throwing the water at the cameras and breaking shit, so Uncle Lou got mad and threw me off the set.

  TONY KINMAN: I never liked Cheech and Chong.

  HAL NEGRO: The Dickies, the only L.A. punk band to get signed to a major label, A&M Records, about a year later, was formed by Iggy Pop’s drug dealer. They were great, but they were a novelty act.

  TONY KINMAN: The major labels decided that the one band on the West Coast that was really gonna be huge, the best punk rock band in America, was the Dickies. That was the only band that got signed to a major record deal. That was the corporate music business’s idea of what was good and vital and totally cool. A band that sings songs like “Gigantor.”

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: Stan Lee of the Dickies was a wheeler-dealer. Not just in drugs, but in all kinds of contraband. He was a legendary person on the local rock scene and he’d been working it for a while. Iggy used to show up at Stan’s window at his parents’ house in the Valley, stumbling about on the front lawn in his bikini underwear moaning, “Stan Lee! Stan Lee!” Iggy was trying to get off heroin and was always trying to get Quaaludes from Stan.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: One day Stan Lee suddenly decided that he wanted to play guitar. I was giving him lessons. He wanted to have a band like Bad Company. He wanted to be like Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple. I told him, “Stan, you can’t play that stuff. You gotta be punk rock. You’re not good enough… it’ll take too long for you to be that good. Why don’t you just play punk rock?” He was real skeptical. At first he thought I was insulting him, but then he listened to the Ramones and that’s when he decided to form a punk band. I kept reassuring him, “Stan, it’s okay, it’s very cool to be a punk rocker.” I said the same thing to Leonard Phillips, who later became their lead singer. He is an incredibly gifted keyboard player who wanted to be Keith Emerson to Stan’s Ritchie Blackmore. Leonard even had a Keith Emerson haircut and stuff, and he’d been in the Quick… he used to crack us up during rehearsals with his weird comedy sketches and parodies of singers in other bands. So I’d already seen the whole Leonard show, but he didn’t think of himself as a real singer. So when Stan decided to form this punk band, I told Leonard, “You should be a punk rock singer.” I put the two of them together. And that was the core of the Dickies.

  LEONARD PHILLIPS: I idolized Steve Hufsteter as a serious musician because in the ’70s if you were a young wanna-be rock musician, you practiced your ax. You didn’t spend as much time writing songs as you did running up and down silly scales trying to get faster and hotter on the old frets at the expense of honing any compositional or writing skills. You just wanted to be hot with the licks so you could jam and get girls, but Hufsteter was one of these rare guys who was a superb player who paid more attention to just getting three or four musicians together, irrespective of their ability, so he could show them actual songs—not just showing off scales—things he’d write and arrange himself, and he was real good at it and I was totally impressed.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: I was pretty domineering with the writing in the Quick and the rest of the guys were dying to get their songs done by the band, so it was only a matter of time before there was a big outburst of frustrated creativity… and the formation of the Dickies was real timely. Here was finally an outlet for their songwriting talents, and the early Dickies became like a side writing project for the Quick. The earliest Dickies’ rehearsals were with Danny Wilde singing. The Dickies were a spin-off of this little Valley scene where the Quick coalesced first and the Dickies second. Danny and Ian and Billy Bizeau and our roadie Scott Goddard all wrote for the early Dickies.

  LEONARD PHILLIPS: I knew Hufsteter in junior high as this weird, goofy, different-looking kid. He had these very, very large lips and very weak eyes that he had horn-rimmed glasses for and he kind of had bad acne, too, but I saw him turn his weaknesses into strengths at school. He grew a shag haircut and started wearing these effeminate low-cut skinny knit shirts. Steve very much had this rock-and-roll affectation, and had this rep for being quite the rock-and-roll wizard on guitar. So I eventually approached him and we got together. He’d give guitar lessons to Stan Lee. He didn’t have a car, so he’d come over to my house and we’d work on songs, then he’d have Stan pick him up from my place, go over to Stan’s, where he’d give him a quick guitar lesson and get a steak dinner out of him and then a ride home to his part of the Valley.

  STEVEN HUFSTETER: The Dickies never really thought of themselves as punks even though they were completely embraced by that scene. The Dickies were a spoof of punk rock. Not so much making fun of it, but using it as an opportunity. Embracing the silliness of the form ever since the Ramones had made it deliberately silly. Karlos Kaballero, the drummer, came up with the name the Dickies, and he also came up with the song “Doggie Doo.” The Dickies did the same routine as the Quick, with every song having a different prop: “This song has the monkey mask. This song has the dog puppet.” We wrote “If Stewart Could Talk,” which had the dick puppet. That came from the Tubes and the Sensational Alice Harvey Band… but also Wallace and Labmo. There was a kiddie show broadcast out of Arizona called the Wallace and Labmo Show. And every kid watched the Wallace and Labmo Show. These guys were very hip kind of bohemian types. And all the members of Alice Cooper and the Tubes grew up watching them. I grew up watching it, too, and the humor of bands like the Dickies and the Quick is all directly attributed to Wallace and Labmo. They would do parodies of everything that was out. They had various kids’ shows broadcast out of L.A., too. I remember one called Shrimpenstein.

  STAN LEE: Our only goal was to make a single. John Hewlett came to one of our early shows and told me he thought we were the best band he’d ever seen. I laughed, but then he told me he managed Sparks. I really liked the Kimono My House LP. I thought, “Well, what did you have in mind?” He asked if we had a manager. It didn’t hurt that he was short, British, and charming. He had an instant plan to take us in the studio to cut some tracks for a single on a label he was starting. Soon we were recording at Brothers Studio (the Beach Boys haunt in Santa Monica with Earl Mankey). When we were done he looked at me and said, “This is far bigger
than I had imagined… I’m gonna take this tape to England and get you a major deal.” I thought, “Okay, what can it hurt?” Island Records was interested, and he had an appointment with Derek Green, president of A&M Records U.K., who’d just kicked the Sex Pistols off the label and was looking for another punk band, preferably one that wouldn’t throw up on them. After hearing the tape, he flew to L.A. with John to see if we were for real and to meet us.

  GERBER: I loved the Dickies’ goofy punk rock and I liked to party with Karlos and Billy Club. I shot a lot of Desoxin with Karlos and had a big affair with him. I never really was too connected with Leonard and Stan Lee. They lived with their fucking parents, you know? They lived with their fucking parents in the Valley. I think they still do.

  STAN LEE: Meanwhile a local TV writer who saw us at the Whisky wrote us into an episode of CPO Sharkey, a nationally syndicated sitcom starring Don Rickles. The timing was perfect. The plane landed at 7 P.M. Hewlett ushered Mr. Green over to NBC by eight o’clock and into the live audience just in time for the taping of the show. Afterward we met, but the checkbook didn’t come out yet. He wanted to see the band live doing a full-length show with a real club audience. We set up a showcase at the Whisky. He showed up with Jerry Moss (the M in A&M). I put them in a booth and told them in my most puffed-up posture, “You have no business in the record business if you don’t sign this band.”

  HAL NEGRO: Punk was ridiculed nationwide in the Don Rickles sitcom CPO Sharkey when the Dickies appeared surrounded by some punks from the Masque mingling with movie punk extras. It was just like in those ’50s-style teen exploitation quickies where actors are obviously way too old to be real kids… the “punk” extras were in Alice Cooper makeup, leather motorcycle jackets, ballet leotards, and tennis shoes! It was totally hokey, but the show gave the nation’s kids ideas on how to dress punk.

  STAN LEE: The Incredible Shrinking Dickies album came after they put out the demo tape as a ten-inch white vinyl EP with three tunes, “Hideous,” “You Drive Me Ape,” and “Paranoid.” The Dickies also covered a lot of ’60s songs punk rock style, as an affectionate piss-take of hippies and the old culture. Critics dissed us as an air-headed novelty act, but we were the first L.A. punk band to sign with a major.

  LEONARD PHILLIPS: The adventure of the Dickies, as well as the detriment of the Dickies, was that it all happened too fast. We went from rehearsing in someone’s garage to selling out the Whisky and the Starwood in about two months. Two months after that we had a hundred-thousand-dollar major label deal. Within a year we had a Top 10 hit in England. A few months after that heroin raised its ugly head. Stan and Billy had already dabbled with it, but we all started using it as a band on that first trip to London. It just seemed like the hip rock-and-roll thing to do. I was just a drug addict waiting to happen, and as soon as it hit me, it proceeded to fuck up the next twenty years of my life.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: I moved officially-unofficially into a ten-thousand-square-foot basement in mid-June ’77, the Hollywood Center Building at 1655 North Cherokee Avenue, off Hollywood Boulevard, and agreed to take it as is—thrashed to hell—and got a free month’s rent to clear out fifteen years of debris from this multi-roomed labyrinth whose last known occupant had been the Don Martin School of Radio and Broadcasting in the ’40s. This architecturally wonderful big-little building had gone up circa 1923 bankrolled by Hollywood’s first important mega mogul, Cecil B. de Mille, now flush enough to build his own five-story headquarters right on Hollywood Boulevard. The real Hollywood is one square mile, and everything else is the aftermath of movie gold rush madness. If you took a pin and stuck it dead center of Hollywood, it would be Cecil’s Hollywood Center Building. We were literally dead center in the bowels of Hollywood. I had been trying quite hard to find a place to beat on drums and percussion anytime, any kind of drums, any kind of percussives, night or day. Punk rock, British, American, or otherwise, was not the main agenda. I recruited various runaways, musicians, welfare people, artists, and other street people from the boulevard like Mark Hazlewood (son of Lee), Don Bonner, Pat Flaherty, and others to help me open a rehearsal room rental business, which quickly morphed into probably the first illegal club space (excluding those “ethnic” all-male hoo-bangin’ storefront card joints) since Prohibition. The Boulevard of the ’70s was a whole other underdog downscale nonentity to the Strip, which worked its own sick street magic.

  BIBBE HANSEN: My father, Al Hansen, came out to L.A. at the end of ’75, beginning of ’76. Al had that extraordinary knack for being right on the edge of everything, and a little beyond, a little ahead of everybody, without even trying. My husband at the time, David Campbell, Beck’s dad, was working with all these people like Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, J.D. Souther, Rita Coolidge, Andrew Gold, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, you name it… the quintessential California singer-songwriter stuff, but I just didn’t relate to that music at all. The only thing from the early-to-mid ’70s that touched me musically was Iggy and Bowie. I had completely tuned out from commercial radio. My father and I started going to clubs after he moved to L.A. to check out bands, but the scene wasn’t really punk yet. It was that weird indeterminate ’75–’76 area after glam had totally fallen out. We’d see the Runaways, the Quick, Cheap Trick. Soon Al told us about meeting this guy carrying lumber down an alley and he followed him. And it was Brendan Mullen, this Scottish guy who was setting up this huge practice facility in some basement with all these different rooms where six or seven bands could rehearse at the same time, and wasn’t that fantastic? This Brendan guy also knew who John Cage was. It was just several blocks from where we lived on Lanewood Avenue.

  SEAN CARRILLO: The fact that Al Hansen arrived on the scene at that precise moment when Brendan was trying to come up with a name for the place was the genius of Al.

  BIBBE HANSEN: While Al was there with Brendan, the Controllers came and rented their room, and I think they were one of the first people in, and that’s how Al met the Controllers and they all became fast friends. Al became the center of their little clique and ended up managing them.

  STAN RIDGWAY: I don’t want to speak for him, but Brendan had something else entirely different in mind for the Masque. He was a drummer, and it was also a place for him to play if I’m not mistaken.

  JOHNNY STINGRAY: The Controllers needed a place to play loud, so we found a rehearsal studio in the heart of Hollywood (under the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard) for $2.00 an hour, provided we didn’t mind practicing in the middle of the night. We didn’t. The place was run by a disheveled Scotsman named Brendan Mullen who was impressed enough by our tenacity and cash flow to rent us a tiny room on a monthly basis. By the Fall of ’77, Brendan was hosting regular shows and we were trying our best to be the house band by weaseling our way on to as many shows as we could.

  GEZA X: I’d slept on the floor of a recording studio and had learned a little from second-engineering jobs at Artists Recording Studio on Cherokee. I offered to do sound at the Masque and I also had some PA gear, so I traded my equipment and services for a room at the Masque and Brendan quickly agreed.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The Masque space began literally as somewhere for me and my cronies to experiment with beating on drums and anything else that showed up, undisturbed by neighbors or cops, 24/7.

  BIBBE HANSEN: We all started going to the Masque almost immediately. I took Beck one afternoon. The Masque probably wasn’t a suitable place for a seven-year-old kid on a wild Friday or Saturday night, but it was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and we’d go there to watch the Controllers rehearse. I don’t know if Beck liked their music or not; I think he just liked watching them practice.

  GEZA X: The rates were so dirt cheap, a bunch of poverty-stricken unsigned local underground bands were able to move in as well as all these bikers, freaks, runaways, early gutter punks, record collectors, and a slew of other barflies and bizarre street characters from the Boulevard that Brendan liked to hang out with. The Masque was the catalyst for
L.A. punk rock to make a break from the past and to explode with its own music and its own social identity.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: I advertised cheap band rehearsal facilities in the Recycler, and the Berlin Brats, Backstage Pass, and the Motels were my first customers. I filed the dba paperwork and the bank account under New Era Productions but rechristened the space the Masque after a few open-door parties following a drunken argument with the ever-contentious Al Hansen, the New York Fluxus “happening” artist who was currently on the outs with Andy Warhol in New York.

  BIBBE HANSEN: Al always thought the name the Masque was fruity. He hated it because it didn’t sound punk. He said it sounded like a Victorian private sex club for homosexuals, the haunt of a bunch of old British queens with poodles and too much time. But then again, Al was the first to admit he didn’t always call these things correctly. Back in New York in the ’60s Lou Reed had a copy of this book about Victorian bondage called The Velvet Underground. At the time he was looking for a name for his band. He asked Al what he thought of calling it the Velvet Underground, and Al told him, “The Velvet Underground? That sucks! That’s a terrible name!”

  BRENDAN MULLEN: We were in my office with guys from the Skulls and the Controllers getting plastered and trying to come up with a name. I was compiling a list of insane names that people were coming up with… like the Pit and the Pendulum, the Toilet, Wankers Disco, the Hellhole, Slime-O-Rama, the Puke Bowl, and God knows what else… the Masque was on the list, too, and I wasn’t even that gung-ho on it until Al kept on about how bad it was, and since I have a major contrarian reaction to authority, any authority, like some psychological allergy (to do with my father), Al saying this was like waving a red flag. The more he bad-rapped the name, the more contrarian I’d react. I said the dictionary definition of masque was a form of “cheap, amateur, histrionic medieval entertainment.” Finally Al stormed out in disgust, saying, “Where the fuck is the punk meaning in that?” And so Masque it was, literally because an older man (in his early fifties) seemed to be telling me what to do, and as fate would have it, I never saw Al the Jewish art leprechaun again.