by Marc Spitz
RICK WILDER: The Berlin Brats was one of the first bands to move into the Masque rehearsal playground, then we broke up in early ’78. I thought I was gonna form another Brats until I met Rod Donahue, who convinced me that the Brats’ legacy was too glam-damaged for the new punk scene, and so we formed a band called the Mau Maus instead.
BRENDAN MULLEN: All the early gigs were no-cover, open-door BYO parties until the Weirdos demanded, “Why do we have to play for free?” And I said, “I really don’t know… hadn’t really thought about it.” Cliff Roman told me, “Well, the Weirdos need to be paid if we’re going to play here,” and I said, “Well, shit… I guess we better start charging money, then. How much do I charge?” We charged $2.50 for four bands, but hardly anybody paid to get in, because everybody was a musician or in a band or running a fanzine, so they all wound up being free gigs anyway. Even though Paul Collins from the Nerves was a pretty tough doorman, it was like getting blood out of stone. We were lucky if there was a hundred bucks in the kitty at the end of a busy night, a hundred fifty max. Everybody was on somebody’s list somehow. At the end of the Weirdos’ night I triumphantly handed Cliff about a hundred thirty-five dollars, or something, thinking he’d be stoked, yet all he did was to whine about how little it was… and he never even said thanks.
JOHN DOE: The real turning point was Brendan Mullen opening the Masque during summer of ’77. At first there were only fifty people there. Then there were seventy-five. Then a hundred. By the end of ’77, when the Whisky had ten people at their club and there were two hundred people at the Masque, our bands started getting booked at the Whisky. Then the L.A. Times got behind it.
BLACK RANDY: The Masque became the focal point for everything. Everybody I knew started going there on weekends, and all these people were getting drunk and getting high and fucking in the bathrooms and the practice rooms… they were pogoing and literally bouncing off the walls and it was just insane. The cops didn’t know about it for a long time, it was so underground. And they did keep it pretty quiet.
EXENE CERVENKA: You got a sense of something really big going on and you’d go, “How come I’m one of these people?” There was an overwhelming sense of awe that it was even happening… mingling with those people from many different backgrounds was great. Claude Bessy was so completely different from Belinda Carlisle, and there they were.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: All the people who were well read in art or pop culture didn’t have Internet resources. We’d find weird art movies at the Nuart, or hear a Lou Reed or Bowie song and there’d be some literary reference, so we’d think, “Oh, Bowie was reading this book.” By the time we all met each other, and not just me, Darby, and Pat, but all of us in punk, we all had this similar frame of reference that we’d stumbled upon completely independently of each other, something that definitely helped unify all the diverse elements of the early scene into the one L.A. punk unit when it started to really come together as this weird little community at the Masque.
HELLIN KILLER: The Masque was like heaven and hell all rolled into one… it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. You could always go there… it was like the clubhouse. It was like a bomb shelter, a basement, all these weird rooms, stairways going up to a cement ceiling… it was so amazing, such a dive, but it was our dive.
X-8: I remember falling asleep on the Masque toilet quite a bit and getting my picture taken. Partying too much for a little boy. I wasn’t into high school garage parties, so just going to Hollywood was a whole new world. But the early Hollywood punk scene definitely had its own identity. We were well aware of New York and London, but most people made a concerted effort to make it our own. A lot of the people who hung out side by side with the new punk kids were middle-aged and from suburbia… all of us brought together by true boredom with the shit on FM radio.
BLANK FRANK: The Masque was like no other place ever was or is ever likely to be. Some of the early punks were the smartest people I ever met in my life. Inside was the best graffiti in the world. It had to be seen to be believed—every square inch, including the floor and ceilings, top to bottom, was covered. Once I saw a band that the crowd didn’t like, so they started tearing their clothes, breaking their instruments, then Bobby Pyn, or maybe it was Kickboy, got a fire extinguisher and hosed them down. Amazingly, no one was electrocuted, especially Bobby himself, ’cause there were bare live wires everywhere. It was insanity like that all the time.
HAL NEGRO: Sometimes the Masque went on all night on weekends, with bands showing up on the doorstep unannounced wanting to play at four in the morning. There might be three or four shows a week. On the nights where there wasn’t a show, that was an excuse to have a party anyway, and there wasn’t a single soul from the music industry or any of the major record companies within miles, unless you count Kim Fowley, I guess.
EXENE CERVENKA: Soon there was enough people who would pay to get in and that’s all the club owners cared about, so they started booking bands into other venues.
GERBER: It was just about gigs, every night… wherever, whoever, however, whatever—the Weirdos, Germs, the Bags, didn’t matter. Just gigs.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: The hallmark of every punk rock show or party would be Philomena Winstanley from Slash standing there at the end of the night with Claude passed out cold on the floor or dumping a pot of spaghetti all over the house or pissing in the punch, and she’d just be wringing her hands and going, “Oh, Claude.” One time cops were raiding the Masque and Claude was out front jumping from the roof of a car to the hood of a car, seven or eight cars in a row, screaming “Feck all you peegs! Feck all you peegs!” Whenever he said fuck it was like f-e-c-k. “Oh, Claude!” She was like his nanny.
PHILOMENA WINSTANLEY: The punks had no money to buy drinks at clubs and would drink anything from paper bags outside in the parking lot. We’d just lie on top of cars and whoever got drunk would slide down the roof of the car and lie under the car. Everybody was very drunk. That’s how I remember the beginning of the whole punk thing… drinking on the pavement outside the Whisky and stumbling around the Masque.
STAN RIDGWAY: More importantly, from my point of view, many great musicians came to the Masque eagerly looking for the opportunity to play original music for a crowd that seemed to want it no matter how loose or inexperienced the band was.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: Around the time the Masque was starting to happen, I got this place with Hellin Killer and our friend Mary Rat. Kid Congo was supposed to move in, but that didn’t happen. Then we met Trixie at the Tropicana with some other girls she was hanging out with and we wound up inviting her to move in.
TRIXIE: I think I was complaining about my father, or the distance from my home in Norwalk to all the fun, and one of them said, “You should stay here.” The three of them were already living there at the apartment on La Jolla. So the next time I got into a tiff with dear old Dad, that was it. I took my records, my clothes, and makeup, complete with three-way mirror, and moved into the infamous Plunger Pit.
TRUDIE ARGUELLES: One day when we were bored Hellin and Mary and I tried to dress up as weird as we could. Collars up, ’60s sunglasses, and I was holding a plunger in the picture just to be really stupid, and we were like, “We look like a band. How about we call ourselves the Plungers?” I was learning how to play the guitar, but it never went too far. We were never disciplined enough to really become a band.
HELLIN KILLER: We were a band that never played ’cause we couldn’t be bothered to learn to play anything, but we lived together and had the biggest party house… the Plunger Pit.
TRIXIE: The Plunger Pit was paradise for a short while. We slept in one bed like four peas in a pod. It was Hellin, Trudie, Mary Rat, and me who paid the rent. There was a constant stream of people and hardly anyone was ever turned away.
MARY RAT: People were always crashing. You never had many moments to yourself. The police raided us one night. I guess they thought we were selling drugs because people were always coming and going.
HELLIN KILLER: There was constantly people there, sleeping everywhere. Food was like spaghetti or instant mashed potatoes or whatever you could get. We’d wake up at three in the afternoon when somebody would show up at the door, and we’d say, “Go buy a bottle of alcohol and bring it back here and let’s start the party now.” And people would do it. Bands would come to town and they’d be playing at the Starwood and we’d go, “Party at the Plunger Pit!”
MARY RAT: We had no money. We couldn’t afford drugs. I don’t know how we lived. I remember Leonard from the Dickies baked us a turkey for Thanksgiving, which was really nice.
X-8: I lost my virginity on the roof of the Plunger Pit. All I remember is that the girl helped show me where it went. The Plunger sisters were Mary, Trudie, Hellin, and Trixie, they all slept in the same bed. They were the center of the world, they were fabulous, they were the cutest girls on the scene, and everybody wanted to be seen with them and to hang out with them because they knew everybody and they knew everything about new music and they dressed sexy and partied every night.
TRIXIE: The Plungers were just a group of fun-loving girls with an aura of chic that people gravitated toward, and we were carefree enough to do as we liked.
BRENDAN MULLEN: The Masque was temporarily closed down by cops for no entertainment/cabaret license early on. I was trapped in doublespeak because of recent creepy close encounters with the landlord, City Hall officials, and cops where I’d consciously avoided usage of the word club fearing a rejection of permit applications because legally converting a space from one usage to another is a majorly expensive bureaucratically controlled project. I’d told several police inspectors and referred to it in bureaucratic paperwork as a “cabaret” and as a “theater” to try to lower the profile as much as possible. So I called it the Masque Theater right at the very beginning… but it never caught on, and I never used it on any of the early Masque flyers, which I designed by hand myself. The best thing ever written on the wall of the Masque? TO ESCAPE HELL YOU MUST FIRST BURY YOURSELF IN IT. Taken from Genet. The descent below was well on its way.
CLAUDE BESSY (SLASH, SEPTEMBER 1977): Thank God there ain’t no spokesman or leaders yet.
DARBY CRASH: Well, basically I’m bored with all these people, so in order to make them how I want them. Right? Look. When you have people for friends and they’re not the kind of people you want, what do you do? You make some better ones. So I’m going to take all these idiots out here and make them into better ones.
BRENDAN MULLEN: A big landmark event was the Labor Day weekend party in ’77 when the Germs headlined their own gig at the Masque with the Alley Cats, the Skulls, and Needles and Pins playing also. It was the biggest turnout so far. I was shocked… I had totally underestimated how much pull the Germs actually had, since they’d been written off as a bad joke who couldn’t play for toffee. Their notoriety from the Orpheum show preceded them.
GEZA X: It was the Masque that put the Germs smack in the middle of what was happening at precisely the right moment, but it was the buzz on the Germs as a social force more than a musical one that caused a line to form outside the Masque for the first time, so it was a two-way symbiosis. Many people, myself included, began to take the Germs more seriously rather than viewing them as a talentless mess of punk rock wanna-bes. The Germs that night were Bobby Pyn, Pat Smear, Lorna Doom, and Cliff Hanger on drums… I remember Bobby or Pat christening Kim Fowley “Penis Face” and they sent him and his entourage packing.
BRENDAN MULLEN: I was flabbergasted by the Germs at the Labor Day gig… with a few Guinnesses in my belt I thought they were absolutely hilarious… rock and roll could never be serious again for the rest of my life… Cliff Hanger’s drums collapsed and were rolling all over the stage and there was feathers and confetti everywhere. I defy anyone who could’ve been present that night not to have fallen in love with them.
NICKEY BEAT: After Donna Rhia left, Cliff Hanger was working out as a pretty good drummer for the Germs, and then he either quit or got kicked out after the first Masque show. I had become a friend and a bit of a Germs fan, so I filled in for three or four months. I never committed full time because I thought the Weirdos were the band for me. I thought the Germs were a bad career choice. I thought, “They’re never going to do anything. Their stuff just isn’t marketable.”
PLEASANT GEHMAN: [On September 23, 1977,] the Hollywood Palladium hosted the Punk Rock Fashion Show. They billed it as “A new wave of sound and style.” Blondie played. Devo played, the Weirdos played, and the Avengers from San Francisco. It was an ill-conceived, underattended fiasco where Bobby Pyn came out onstage wearing only a leopard fur jockstrap and announced to the crowd that his new name was Darby Crash, but nobody paid heed at first.
RIK L. RIK: He started off as Bobby Pyn before I knew him. Everyone needed a punk rock name, and that was his. After a while, he recognized the limitations of Bobby Pyn, that it was too cute, not heavy enough. And so he came up with Darby Crash. He never told me about the derivation of it or anything. Darby was one of the most outrageous-looking people I’d ever seen. He had six safety pins in his ear. He was really into the whole look. His hair was bleached blond and cut really severely. That look is pretty much universal at every high school nowadays, but at the time it was way out on the edge, even compared to some of the other kids who had the punk look back then. I remember thinking he sounded like the biggest on-fire fairy I’d ever heard in my life. I would go to a club and afterward we’d go to his mom’s house in West L.A., where he lived. We’d stay up till like five in the morning, then we’d get up around one in the afternoon. Darby had foil covering his windows, so it was pitch black all day. We’d get up late and talk on the phone all afternoon, listen to records, then somebody would come by in the evening to pick us up and we’d go out all over again. He never had a straight job.
DARBY CRASH: I completely control a number of people’s lives. Look around for the little girls wearing CRASH-TRASH T-shirts and people like that.
RIK L. RIK: Darby Crash completely resocialized me. He taught me to question everything and how to make up my own mind by evaluating reality and drawing my own conclusions, rather than just accepting the way society wants you to see it. He did this for everybody he came in contact with. It was a whole retraining program. And it wasn’t some malevolent Charles Manson thing, either, although Darby’s clique, the Germs’ Circle One people, were seen as being like a Manson family type of situation. Darby was so intelligent. I was overwhelmed by the way his mind worked, and the way he would design the conversations you were having with him, or with whatever group of people you happened to be with.
DARBY CRASH: What we’re going to do is get lots of… what do you call them… allies in key positions and, um, if you get somebody that works for the post office, I mean somebody that’s just even a mail clerk, you can really screw the post office up bad… or the newspapers. If you go to the newspapers and they have those big machines that print them and you shoot a rubber band into it, it rips the paper; it ruins the whole day’s edition. So if you can get enough people to do that, one day you can go to the government and say, “Look how much control I have. You’ve got the armies, but we can just stop this country from working.” I don’t know which country we’ll start with. It’s just as easy when you go to Japan and they can’t understand what you’re saying. I mean, it makes it a lot easier. You bring them in ten at a time and teach them English, you know? We’re trying to get Reverend Moon to back us to go to China… because we want to play on the Great Wall and you have to have special permits and stuff to even go up there, unless you’re a tourist. Yeah, well, as far as I know, as far as the government’s concerned, and as far as Moonies are and whatever, he’ll just say, “I’ll show them how decadent America is, we’ll put these people up here to play on this wall and they’ll make fools out of themselves.” And after that we’re going to play the Berlin Wall, right? Is that the next one? Any more walls we can play? Marianas Trench? We used to go there in high school
.
MATT GROENING: The punks that came into Licorice Pizza, the record store where I worked, were a combination. There were very idealistic kids who were totally into the scene. And then there were these kids who would create a ruckus in order to distract us so they could shoplift. Most of those kids were associated with the Germs.
RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: One day Darby came on my show and he was giving out satellite numbers over the air so people could make free long distance calls.
PAT SMEAR: Darby was intrigued by the concept of fascism. He was such a leader that people would follow him around and do what he asked. Whatever it is people like that have in them that enables them to attract a following, he had it in him. I’m not talking about the hate part, I’m talking about some guy coming from a log cabin and ending up being president of the USA.
K.K. BARRETT: I had a lot of one-on-one conversations with Darby about religion as a business, the whole idea that you could start your own religion and make money off of it, which was an obvious L. Ron Hubbard reference Darby had picked up on… he brought me books on Scientology and he also talked about how religion was just basically a funnel for lost souls. But his songs kept getting better and better. The Screamers even did a cover of the Germs’ “Sex Boy” at our shows, which was the equivalent of the Stones doing “I Wanna Be Your Man,” written by the Beatles.
JOHN DOE: The Germs became scary after Bobby became Darby. They began to fuck stuff up. Their audience fucked stuff up. Their music and, in particular, Darby’s stage persona was very different than his private personality. The stage was where he could do whatever he wanted. Onstage, he was much more violent. The music made people feel that way. It was incredibly dark. The Germs were much darker than most of the other bands. Darby’s writing is nothing like the kind of person he was. He was much more of a kind of Valley kid, a goofy, California kid, but obviously there was something behind him that was very secret and weird. You didn’t know the words because it was all like “Warrrrrrrwarrrwarr” when Darby sang them live. So everyone was just astounded later on when they got that first Slash record and actually read the lyrics. They were great! I know that he cheated a lot. He used a thesaurus! He’d take Nietzsche books and pick stuff out that sounded cool, and reflected his feelings, and he was able to put those words together really well. He’d never use words like he’d write in regular conversation.
