We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  KID CONGO POWERS: I liked the rockabilly thing for a while… I liked wearing the flashy suits. It was all new to me, but it was important knowing about it. There was the constant search for the new fresh thing, so when anything new would come along there was a group of people who’d just grab onto it. So when Levi and the Rockats showed up, we were into them. Plus they were cute and sexy and fun… and they had great parties at the Tropicana, where the whole band was sacked out in one room.

  LEEE “BLACK” CHILDERS: First Brendan Mullen, then Michelle Myers and Doug Weston really helped it explode in L.A.…. they really got behind the band. L.A. was just ready for it… we used to go to this place called Oscar’s on the Strip for breakfast… we’d just played the Troubadour the night before and the mobs had just been so big trying to get in, and this CBS film crew were there and it stopped traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard! At Oscar’s the next morning I ran straight into Peter Brown, who used to manage the Beatles, and without even thinking of what I was saying, I said, “Peter, if only you could have been there… it was so wonderful! It was just like Rockat mania!” And he said, “Hmm, where have I heard that expression before?”

  LEVI DEXTER: There were groupies and female fans everywhere we turned, but for me, that wasn’t the cause… rockabilly was the cause. For our bassist Smutty, sex was the cause, and that little pup did everybody. They don’t call him Smut for nothing. He was up for it, mad for it, all the time, but I was the serious one. I was more into hanging out with rockin’ people and playing music, and discussing it, whereas Smut wanted to get his rocks off day and night, and many of the local chicks threw themselves at him and so he was kept busy. And Smut is hung like a horse.

  HAL NEGRO: If the Plunger Pit and Joan’s apartment was party central for the old Masque punks, the rockabilly house was definitely Dis-graceland, where Pleasant, Marcy Blaustein, Iris Berry, and Kid Congo lived, among many, many others.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: For over a decade, I lived in one of Hollywood’s most famous punk flophouses, Disgraceland. It was a buff-colored, stucco, ’20s-era fourplex standing in the shadow of Frederick’s of Hollywood, right around the corner from the Masque. By the time I moved in with my pals Kid Congo and Marcy Blaustein, the building—hell, the entire neighborhood—had seen better days.

  KID CONGO POWERS: One time while I was living at Disgraceland we almost killed Kim Fowley when we were tripping on acid. We almost knifed him. Kari Krome was over and she said, “I just called Kim Fowley and told him to come over.” And we were, “Oh, no, now you’ve done it! Now you’ve done it! Now what are we gonna do? Kim Fowley’s coming over, what can be absolutely worse than that?” I don’t know why we thought that was so terrible. Maybe just the thought of looking at him while we were tripping. Me and Pleasant used to collect knives and switchblades. He came over and we opened the door with the chain on the door and we stuck some knives out and he’s like, “Okay, I’ll leave.”

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: Billy Persons dubbed it “Disgraceland” because we had a Tijuana plaster bust of Elvis (with Alice Cooper makeup that I added) on the mantelpiece, surrounded by empty fifths of booze. DG Land was within stumbling distance of lots of major Hollywood nightspots, the Masque, Cathay de Grande, after-hours club the Zero Zero, Club Lingerie, and about five dive bars that all opened at 6 A.M., including some that are no longer there—the Firefly, the Frolic Room, and the Sideshow. My brother Chuckles called this Bermuda Triangle–like setup the “Circle of Death.”

  HAL NEGRO: Pleasant met Levi and they quickly became the “it” rockabilly couple of the 1979 scene. Well, one of many “it” couples. Soon after that, they got married and Levi moved into Disgraceland.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: I basically married Levi so he would not get kicked out of the country, but I was in love with him, too.

  LEVI DEXTER: Everybody always asks me if I married her for a green card, but it’s not true—I loved her. I was convinced that she was the one, the rockin’est chick of all time. I expected once we got married for things to change, but they got worse.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: The minute we got married he turned into an English working-class asshole.

  LEVI DEXTER: The place had even more people in it all the time. The mess doubled, and I wanted basically to have my life in order, to have less of a constantly trashed-out, beaten-up crash pad. I wanted to fix the place up and have a cool crib, but it was impossible, there was a whole bunch of slobby drunks and junkies living like white trash, and eventually it just got overwhelming. Right about the time we got married, Pleasant joined the Screamin’ Sirens, an all-girl rockabilly band which had some real raunchy out-of-control members who outdid the guys with outrageous behavior. Some of their sexual exploits would put Led Zeppelin’s roadies to shame, but it just seemed a bad influence on her and it was bugging me.

  PLEASANT GEHMAN: There was always crushed empty beer cans and broken bottles and smashed glasses with cigarette butts all over the floor and on the coffee table, and Levi was a neatness freak.

  LEVI DEXTER: It was outrageous. I’d catch Pleasant and Buster from the Blasters in the shower when I’d go to take a piss and I’d ask, “Is this really happening?” I was like, “Hey, wait a minute… I’m supposed to be the husband here!” It got to the point where it was, “Look, you either get it together or I’m out of here.”

  DARRELL WAYNE: The rockabilly thing was kind of fun. Lots of guys running around with big country hair, but it didn’t last long. Two-tone ska—bands like Madness, the Specials, and the Beat—were right around the corner. By late ’79 that had become the next big thing.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: One day you’d see someone walking around in their Elvis quiff and the next, they were hanging around outside the O.N. Klub on Vespa scooters with the star spangled banner on the back panier instead of the Union Jack. Steppin’ out in their mod clothes, trying to look like the rude boy caricature on the cover of the Specials’ “Gangsters” single.

  LEVI DEXTER: Merv Griffin and the Midnight Special were broadcast nationwide. Everybody in the industry had seen us, and it really looked like we were gonna get signed, then the L.A. Times fucked everything up. They printed that we were holding out for a million-dollar record deal. I asked Leee about it and he said he didn’t tell them that, they just put it in there, and it kind of killed us. All the labels just backed off overnight. There was very little interest after that. We were dead in the water, murdered by overhype.

  LEEE “BLACK” CHILDERS: The rumor that we didn’t get a deal because I was asking for a million dollars was not true. That’s not why we didn’t get a deal. Levi says a lot of peculiar things like that lately. Here’s a good example… one night after a really good gig at the Troub, some guy came up from like the Flamingo Hotel and said, “Listen, I’ll offer you a deal now to play one of the lounges, a six-week deal, we’ll pay all expenses, ten thousand dollars a week. Will you come and do it?” And I thought, Oh my God, that means after six weeks, we would have sixty thousand dollars! It would change everything! We’d be able to eat! We could pay our bill at the Tropicana, but instead Levi said, “I’m not going to Vegas until I can walk in like Elvis!” And I said, “Are you crazy?!”

  The Rockats broke up and three years later the Stray Cats turned into one of the biggest bands in the world. What’s to say about that? You just can’t harbor grudges. I stayed with Levi after the breakup and before he was in the Stray Cats, we actually got Brian Setzer out to Hollywood to be one of the new Rockats! He lived with us at the Tropicana Motel and they learned rockabilly from Levi, who really did know his rockabilly history. Levi would play him records and say, “What did you think of that.” And Brian would say, “Oh, that was really cool” And Levi would say “No, that wasn’t cool. That was really stupid. That was Pat Boone!” Not taking away from Brian’s great guitar ability. The guy is a great guitarist, but he didn’t really know his rockabilly history. Years later Smutty called me and said, “I’m looking at a copy of the NME with Brian Setzer on the cover wearing my clothes!”
And he was, ’cause I’d given him a bunch of Smutty’s old rockabilly clothes to make him look cool! But that’s just show business. That’s just the way it goes.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The Saint Paddy’s Day Massacre, March 17, 1979, the Elks Lodge police riot. Another ominous shadow cast itself in March 1979 when law student Paul Sanoian and some friends promoted a punk concert at the Elks Lodge at MacArthur Park. It was St. Patrick’s Day. The lineup was the Go-Go’s, the Plugz, the Alley Cats, the Zeros. X never even got to play at all.

  JANE WIEDLIN: There was no riot. The cops just came in slamming. They just started beating everybody up.

  CHARLOTTE CAFFEY: The Go-Go’s played the big Elks Lodge show on St. Patrick’s Day at MacArthur Park. After us the Plugz played, and that was when the cops came in and tore the place up all right… and I was holding, too. I had drugs on me and now the riot squad comes stormin’ in, I was flipping out. I was so scared. That was a frightening night.

  KEITH MORRIS: I looked outside and saw all these battlin’ SWAT pigs—otherwise known as the special SS branch of the LAPD—they’re all lining up on the sidewalk, and I said, “This is not good.”

  EXENE CERVENKA: The Elks Lodge was so insane. There’s the front doors and there’s a big lobby area and this big stairway with this old rose carpet on it, wide enough that twelve people could walk across it in a row. I was sitting on the stairs with a bunch of other people and those doors flew open and all of a sudden there were these cops in riot gear, I mean helmets, shields, sticks, and everything, and they just came marching in. It was so odd ’cause I was just sitting there going, “I don’t believe I’m seeing this.” And then, of course, they just kept coming and coming and hitting people with the sticks. Everyone started running and yelling and screaming.

  BARBARA JAMES: I was arrested at the Elks Lodge riot because I was so freaked out that cops had clubbed my sister Dorothy and Jeff, the two people I loved the most, and I just lost it. I picked up a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign and threw it at them and they cuffed me and hog-tied me but I broke the cuffs, and they hog-tied me and riot-cuffed me again. John Doe bailed me out from Sybil Brand because my dad wouldn’t. He hung up on me, so I was locked up there for three days. Dad said, whatever mess I had gotten myself into, I’d have to get myself out. The cops beat me up and I was in the infirmary for three days. We never sued the LAPD like Rodney King or anything because we didn’t know how. We didn’t think that we could. Our parents were not really supportive that way, they never helped us figure out how to do something like that. It was so overwhelming, they thought it was just easier to put it behind them. I still don’t understand what happened. It was X and the Go-Go’s headlining. It wasn’t like a bunch of those hardcore superaggressive guy bands that came later that made everyone wanna fight.

  KEITH MORRIS: Suddenly cops flew through the front doors in full riot gear with shields and batons swingin’. They were cracking heads. Cracking skulls. Swinging at anybody who was in their way. Three or four dozen people got hurt, half a dozen seriously. I ended up hiding in the men’s room. All of a sudden this guy Donnie Rose comes flying through the door, bleeding from the head, and he said, “Just stay where you are.” It was really ugly. Really out of hand.

  MARGOT OLAVERRA: We all went outside and watched these police choppers flying overhead. We were so used to this lifestyle and knowing it as so nonthreatening, ’cause it was such an isolated small community, but to all these city bureaucrats and to the repressive police force, it was very strange, all these freaks congregating near MacArthur Park. Who ordered this absolutely unprovoked assault and why is still a mystery.

  MARK STERN: It was at the press conference held at the Masque after the St. Patrick’s Day riot in ’79 that I had the idea that we needed to start something to promote the positive things about this music, because all the media seemed to focus on was negativity and crazy kids with safety pins in their cheeks, starting riots, blah blah blah. That’s when I started BYO, meaning Better Youth Organization.

  SHAWN STERN: My brother Mark and I were teens among guys like the Screamers people and the people at Slash who were already in their late twenties and early thirties. Most of them were art school people and the music had a lot of different styles, but for us punk rock was everything, it wasn’t just an excuse for a bunch of art groovers to party and get naked. It was like a religion to us.

  MARK STERN: We began meeting other kids our age and we put out this two-page newsletter-comic thing saying “Join the BYO.” We also had this big house in Hollywood, nicknamed Skinhead Manor, and that became the focal point for meeting people for a short time. We moved in during the fall of ’79… we were just sort of hanging out listening to music, and we had a rehearsal studio, a Coke machine filled with beer, we were gonna do a lot of things… we were gonna have a pirate radio station and a recording studio. By 1980, kids would drive in from Oxnard… from Ventura, San Diego, Orange, Riverside Counties for the Tuesday hardcore night at the Starwood and they’d hang out with us before heading over to the gig.

  SHAWN STERN: Skinhead Manor was on Leland Way, west of Highland, south of Sunset, but we weren’t white power, anti-Semitic, or anything racist at all, we were nearly all Jews at the beginning of Skinhead Manor. Adam Small, who made the documentary movie Another State of Mind, lived there. Robert Lopez, too. To us the word “skinhead” had more of a cool “oi!” soccer chant reference. 2-Tone was starting to get popular in England during ’79. I had a skinhead but in those days skins and punks hung out together, there were no political or racist connotations, we didn’t know about the National Front and all that British neo-Nazi shit at first, because we’d never have supported any crap like that.

  MIKE WATT: The cops in Torrance figured we weren’t really about gigging and making records, that it was all about moving drugs. Robo [Flag’s drummer] would just drop off records at a store, and they’d think it was a heroin shipment or something! I was at the door when the entire Torrance PD waltzed into the SST HQ. They were so sure there was something else going on. We got thrown out of several towns—Hermosa Beach, Long Beach. The Black Flag thing with the cops was unreal—they were pigs who were totally into harassment. They had mug shots of kids just for having funny haircuts. As the scene expanded with more and more younger kids, people started to worry about this “lifestyle.” Parents worried, but being working-class, the Minutemen never took on our parents—what the fuck was there to fight with them over, that they had too much?

  EUGENE: In 1979, I was living in the Holly-West building [on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western] where the Chiefs and a bunch of other bands rehearsed. I got my first apartment there with my friend Dana, who was in a lot of heat with the cops and whatnot in Huntington Beach. Around that time there were a lot of kids from the beaches who were getting seriously fucked up by these long-haired redneck hicks in their 4×4 vehicles, real Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of guys. They were going to punk shows and hiding out in the parking lot and ambushing us, and I think a couple of people died, a couple got put in wheelchairs fucking forever, and nobody was doing anything about it. No disrespect against the Hollywood party punks who’d been around longer, but they just weren’t prepared to defend us out in the ’burbs where kids were gettin’ beaten on all the time. So Dana came up with this idea: “How about making a fight-back skinhead army?” And so we made this insular group of like maybe twenty to twenty-five guys. We were called the Wayward Caines—that was the inside inner circle, the fucking SS of the Skinhead Army, and Dana controlled the whole thing. One night he called up a war party. He called up all these guys from Huntington and Long Beach and just hammered out the big “Skinhead Army” plan. Originally, it comprised of skins, crewcuts, flattops, and we decided we were just gonna eradicate this fucking hippie threat by any means necessary. And within a couple of weeks, Dana had control of, fuck, maybe a hundred guys. Most of them went to Edison High, and then there was an extra amount of people that just wanted to associate with it… and that’s where the hardcore shit
really started. It was just a self-defense thing at the beginning and then we totally fucking took over.

  JEFF MCDONALD: I know exactly how and where hardcore started. I remember the day! I was a teen with a couple of friends around my age who were all into punk rock. Somebody told me about this school in Huntington Beach where there was supposed to be over a hundred punk rockers. That was unbelievable to us, completely unheard of. One afternoon we went by that school, Edison High, looking forward to meeting all these cool new hip people. We were shocked and bummed instead when it turned out it was the same kids who’d previously been hassling us for liking punk and now they’re all red-hot punkers emulating how the media portrayed punk rock, as really violent and fucked up. The Edison High punks all seemed to worship Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. All their bands sang with English accents, whatever was coming over from England, stuff that had nothing to do with their lifestyle in southern California. The entire New York punk scene just wasn’t a factor.

  MUGGER: Edison High is just this one school. There were a lot of schools in the Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa area that attracted the sort of kids whose families didn’t care about them or whatever, and they just got crazy. Huntington Beach was the term the people used, but it was all over Orange County… it was basically a full-on white suburbanite rebellion. People were saying “fuck you” not only to these people that were trying to tell us what to do but to the establishment in general… the hippies did their thing and now the punkers were doing their things.