We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  MIKE PATTON: Most of the new kids from the beach areas thought the Germs were cool ’cause they were so extreme… they had this mysterioso of being so dissolute, they had to be cool. Live they were a complete mess, but they had this mystique, so when the new kids showed up, the Germs were always cooler than the crowd. I don’t know if they even liked the music, if they even cared… but it didn’t matter, they were the Germs, you know? He was Darby Crash!

  RAYMOND PETTIBON: Most punks from the original Masque scene in Hollywood were turned off by hardcore, and that’s understandable, ’cause a lot of these new kids from various high schools in Orange County had their own bands that they followed.

  KEITH MORRIS: I’m from Hermosa Beach, which is about twenty-five miles south of Hollywood. My dad owned a fishing tackle business. I was being groomed to be the future heir, but I just wasn’t into it. My musical thing, if you can call Black Flag musical, was basically my protest against being geared toward this nine-to-five existence. I had no musical ability whatsoever. I could play a little drums. I just loved music. When Black Flag started, we looked like we were roadies for Peter Frampton. We were wearing flannel shirts and deck shoes. We looked more like Deadheads than punk rockers, and Greg Ginn was actually a big fan of the Dead.

  JEFF MCDONALD: Black Flag’s first advertised show was at the Moose Lodge in Redondo with the Alley Cats and Rhino 39 in January ’79. There was probably only fifty people there, and that’s how we met the other bands.

  MIKE WATT: The Reactionaries were the first version of the Minute-men. D. Boon and I were inspired by the old Hollywood bands, but it took a while to get the nerve up to start our own. By early ’79 we finally tried with the Reactionaries, a four-piece with a lead singer. We mostly played sped-up Blue Oyster Cult stuff. We were pretty tepid and unoriginal, but Ginn took us to play with Flag anyway at some show in Pedro which turned into a nightmare. It was in a heavy part of town at the Teen Post Center and people were writing on the walls and tagging the outside with spray paint… the cops locked everybody inside to save them because all the big dudes from the neighborhood were all riled up wanting to kill ’em all! It was us with the Plugz and the Alley Cats from Hollywood and Black Flag… it was Flag’s second or third gig, and the Descendants’ first… they were like fifteen-year-old kids. Our singer, Martin, had tagged a wall with “Reactionaries”… now the whole town wanted to kill the Reactionaries, which prompted us very quickly to change the name to the Minutemen! Very soon we dumped the BOC shtick and became a three-piece. D. Boon took over as lead singer and began pushing hard for us to be more bold in coming up with our own sound, doing our own thing.

  KEITH MORRIS: When we formed Black Flag, we’d rehearse in Greg’s living room, or in this office space. We had no goals. We had no idea what we wanted to do. We just wanted to play. We’d play for whoever would let us play. We played backyard parties. We played in basements. People’s living rooms. Teen parties. Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. Anyplace.

  JEFF MCDONALD: Redd Kross got Black Flag their second show, a sixth-grade graduation party in Hawthorne playing in somebody’s living room. That was Redd Kross’s first show before Janet Housden played with us. We were all pre-to-mid teen—one was twelve and one was eleven. It was definitely real teen music by and for other teens. We were inspired by the Runaways and the Ramones. The Runaways looked kind of tough, like you didn’t screw with them ’cause they could probably beat you up. They were only sixteen when they started and they were playing their asses off, and that really inspired us to think we could get up and play, too. Black Flag was an inspiration, too, of course, but every band I can think of, even if they said they hated the Runaways, it was because of the Runaways they actually got up the nerve to start playing in a rock band with no musical training. In that respect the Runaways were much more influential on punk than most people care to admit.

  KEITH MORRIS: Greg Ginn moved into this place in Hermosa Beach called the Church in February ’79. It was an abandoned church in Hermosa that they’d turned into an arts and crafts center with hippie, sandal-wearing pottery makers wandering around.

  JOE NOLTE: The Church got started round about the time the second Masque closed. Greg and Chuck had rooms there. The basement of the Church was the perfect place for parties… it was huge, it was soundproof. Anybody who was into things in the South Bay was hanging out at the Church because it was the only place to go.

  KEITH MORRIS: Our bass player, Chuck Dukowski, sold pool tables out of the front offices while Ginn ran an electronics supply business from the back. I worked for Greg when I wasn’t working for my dad.

  JEFF MCDONALD: Greg Ginn was really into getting a scene going outside of Hollywood, and he was there for anyone who needed help—he was an adult with a job, and he had money, which he made from his own electronics company. Us and the Descendants were like little kids literally. If we needed to borrow equipment, Greg would loan it to us. Once Black Flag established themselves outside of the South Bay, playing gigs at the Hong Kong and stuff, they brought us along.

  MUGGER: Ginn had an electronics company that made tuners, and I was a cheap laborer who would work for food. I didn’t have any money and my parents were poor, but the band started growing—they put up flyers everywhere—and then the electronics thing kind of fizzled, and so that’s when we really focused on the band.

  MIKE WATT: The SST logo came from one of those guys… SST stands for Solid State Transmitter… Greg had a ham radio thing, one of the biggest ham radio magazines in the country. Him and Chuck were good at networking—they really got me and D. Boon thinking that maybe the world was two categories, just gigs and flyers. They had a huge influence on us, especially with the nonstop work ethic applied to music.

  MUGGER: Greg was the leader of the tribe, he was the captain of the ship. Musically, artistically, and the business side… it was all Greg. Greg Ginn is a leader and everyone else sort of followed. He was really intense and he had a lot of faithful people. It was like a religion for us, and we were really into it. Straightedge, we didn’t do a lot of drugs or anything. Drugs are what destroyed everything, when people started smoking pot and drinking. He had people who were like his lieutenants, his sergeants, who drilled out and got people going. Chuck was an intelligence officer. I was the motivator. I was the pusher, I would do basically whatever Greg said.

  MIKE WATT: Greg Ginn is kind of internal—he doesn’t say a lot. When I first played with Flag, I thought Keith wrote those songs, but when I got to know them a bit, I knew it was all Greg’s band.

  JOE NOLTE: The Church scene wasn’t really as big a reaction against Hollywood as Greg Ginn has said. Once the Church was happening, it was like we could go to Hollywood or we could stay and do our own thing right there in Hermosa. But there were always so many great shows up in Hollywood, or at the Hong Kong in downtown, so the tendency was to go up there and then come back and party at the Church all night.

  DON BOLLES: Greg Ginn said he never heard the term “hardcore” until ’82, which is total bullshit. The Germs started Southern Californ-ian “hardcore” and Black Flag codified it, and Greg knows it, but old BF had this brutal paleolithic quasi-Calvinist work ethic thing happenin’… they worked their asses off, night and day, twenty-four/seven, as opposed to the Germs, who barely even liked getting up in the morning. Fair enough, but working your buns off is still not a license for blatant revisionism, although nobody will deny that Black Flag took it to wider circles nationally.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: I think many key people from the Hollywood scene embraced Black Flag and were totally supportive, even went out on a limb for them.

  JOE NOLTE: Punk started to get going in Hermosa Beach in early ’79, and kids from there started coming up to the Church pretty soon after that. We invited them to come up around the summer of ’79, and it was weird because then there were only like fifteen punk rockers in the entire South Bay and I knew every one of them… then this new crowd from Huntington Beach started hanging around the Church. Yea
h, it was the party place, all right, all the time, it was great, but nothing seriously violent ever happened. I think the worst thing was a window got broken one time. There was a kindred spirit because we were geographically distant from Hollywood. Hollywood to us seemed like Mecca. There were skinheads back then, but it wasn’t like what it would become.

  KEITH MORRIS: Black Flag wanted to make a record for Bomp, but we got so fed up with being put off by Greg Shaw. When he eventually submitted an offer it was hilarious and pathetic at the same time. We were gonna pay for everything, and he was gonna put it out and own the masters and the publishing. So Ginn, acting out of sheer disgust, finally financed the EP with his own money. That’s where SST Records came from. We recorded the seven-inch Nervous Breakdown EP above a bar in Hermosa. Everything changed for Black Flag once the Nervous Breakdown EP finally came out and people started to know what we were about. Our first real gig was at the Moose Lodge in Redondo in January ’79. We rented the hall and had the Alley Cats and Rhino 39… the review for that show thought Rhino 39 was okay, and thought the Alley Cats were excellent, but my all-time favorite quote describing Black Flag came from that article: “Black Flag doesn’t play their songs, they annihilate them.” Rodney Bingenheimer was there and we handed him the EP and he started playing it. Kickboy from Slash loved it. Other things that helped us out a lot was Chris D. and “Ranking Jeffrey Lee” Pierce writing about us in Slash and it got us rolling.

  JOE NOLTE: Mugger, who was around the South Bay from the beginning, ended up hooking up with Black Flag as a roadie, and later he became a key person at SST who worked as hard as Greg and Chuck to make the company grow into the most important grassroots U.S. indie punk label of the pre-alterna-nation of the early ’80s.

  MUGGER: Greg Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon was behind the Black Flag logo—you know, the famous four black bars… and he drew all the artwork for every one of their flyers.

  RAYMOND PETTIBON: My first drawings were editorial, I was doing political cartoons for the opinion section of the UCLA Bruin. I was going to UCLA on the cusp of the punk thing in ’77, the year I graduated. By 1979 I was doing flyers for Black Flag, my brother’s band. For better or worse, my work was displaced historically. I wasn’t attempting any journalistic treatment of what was going on at the time. These drawings just represented what I was thinking. Except for a few instances, the flyers weren’t done as commercial art or advertising. You could have stuck anything on a photocopy machine and put the band name and made an advertising flyer, but these weren’t done like that. I was vehement about that as much as my personality allowed. I didn’t need suggestions, although there were a few cases where Black Flag members had some great idea that was so good I had to draw it, but I never could do it according to assignment—that would have been the equivalent of going into commercial art or illustration. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and punk was, of course, an influence on my art. To me my work was the equivalent of a band like Black Flag or any other band who was righteously self-protective of their recordings. I would give them original art and it would come back to me scrawled upon and taped over or whited out, and I’d always ask nicely, “Could you please make a copy of this first and then do that?” Their master tapes were deemed sacrosanct, while my work was seen as completely disposable, but I’m not venting or complaining, just stating fact.

  GARY PANTER: Pettibon’s stuff was astounding. It was just astounding.

  KEITH MORRIS: We were riled up and protesting against what was going on socially and musically. We were all basically nice guys. We were like Straw Dogs people. You’ve got Dustin Hoffman, this mild pacifist guy who gets pissed off and ends up killin’ ’em all after his wife gets raped. You get somebody like this passive little guy and you get him mad enough, this is how he’ll react. We reacted in a very aggressive, energetic, hateful, spiteful manner. Because we’re from SoCal and we’ve grown up surfing and skating and skiing, we have a bit of aggressiveness to us. If you look at the slam dance itself, if you look at the configuration, it’s basically a kid riding a skateboard.

  MUGGER: Pogoing, which started a few years earlier, was kids just jumping up and down, and if you fell, somebody picked you up. Slamming, which started around the hardcore scene, was kids smashing into each other full-on football style with nobody picking you up anymore. I think it’s human nature, you always wanna take something to the next extreme. Everyone’s just trying to get a little more radical. There was a gradual evolution from pogo to slam. A football-playing friend of mine said he would just go to the Fleetwood ’cause it was all a football game to him. He didn’t even care about how the bands sounded or if the music was any good. He’d go just to show people who’s tougher. I don’t know when they stopped calling it the “slam pit” and it started to be called the “mosh pit.” That term came about after I got out of the scene. I think it came from heavy metal. It’s not punk. It never came from Flag or any of the early Orange County hardcore bands that I remember.

  GREG GRAFFIN: My theory about the origin of stage diving is that kids always liked to get up onstage, but then Mugger was always there ready to chase ’em off, so they had to jump off super fast to get away from him!

  JOE NOLTE: The South Bay remained this fascist long-haired scene that felt totally threatened by punk. I was lucky if I only got ten catcalls walking down the street… I didn’t look outrageous or anything, I had short hair that maybe wasn’t combed nice and I wore a black T-shirt and straight-leg pants. By adopting this punk rock musical ethos, we deliberately disenfranchised ourselves—it was almost as if we’d turned black overnight. We deliberately placed ourselves outside of society; we had a choice, but we put targets on our shirts for the police by daring to look different.

  MUGGER: The cops were picking on us, we were just having a good time. They were picking on the artistic revolution as opposed to the killers and the other criminal shitheads.

  KEITH MORRIS: The LAPD didn’t get it and they never will.

  JOHN DOE: A couple of years into the scene, around ’79, heroin started coming around. It had an obvious negative impact, especially for the people that died.

  BELINDA CARLISLE: When heroin came into the scene, that was the great divide. Either you did it or you didn’t. In the beginning they were my friends. I like drugs, but the heroin thing scared me. At the Canterbury, there was pills and lots of booze, there were these girls bringing in Demerol. That got really icky. Everybody nodding out.

  CHARLOTTE CAFFEY: I was a total junkie but I thought I kept it hidden well.

  JANE WIEDLIN: We totally knew.

  GINGER CANZONERI: I wasn’t aware of Charlotte’s drug problem to that extent. She did hide it, but Jane would always come up to me and say, “Ginger, go talk to Charlotte, her eyes are dilated.” Or “Ginger, go talk to Charlotte, her eyes are pinpoints.” And I’m like, “Well, what are they? Are they dilated or pinpoints?”

  ELISSA BELLO: Charlotte was doing heroin and I didn’t even know. She used to call up rehearsal all the time and say she had food poisoning from the Mongolian barbecue and I kept saying, “Gosh, she should stop eating there. She’s really getting sick.”

  TRUDIE ARGUELLES: One of my worst memories of those days was walking into this party and seeing Darby sitting with these people going, “Trudie, Trudie… come over here. Come do some heroin.” It was like a new thing on the scene. It was new for me and new for him, that’s why he was bragging. “Come, do some heroin with us.” And I was like, “No, I don’t think so. Heroin is way too creepy.” This was around ’79. Darby always was trying to get people to do the same thing that he was doing. I don’t know if it was a control thing or he just wanted this big surrogate family around him.

  MAGGIE EHRIG: People were selfish and wouldn’t give a fuck about the people around them and would hoard their drugs for themselves, but even those folks were sharing freely with Darby. Know what I’m talking about? Friends of mine who were into drugs would hog it for themselves, but for Darby they’d be like, “
Hey, Darby, look what we got for you.”

  GERBER: Things started getting really physically violent between Darby and I. He was strung out, and I’ll say one thing—I hate fucking Amber. I don’t hold Amber responsible for his addiction, but I hold her responsible for not caring whether he lived or died. She had ulterior motives, man! She wanted to be the sugar mama. She wanted fuckin’ Nicole Panter’s seat. I think she lusted for his idol status, and putting enough dope in him got it for her. It’s like someone’s strung out, hand them five hundred dollars’ worth of dope, “Fuck, yeah, suck my dick, I don’t care.” I mean I think that’s what it was, totally, he used her. Like he used all those girls, you know?

  AMBER: I put my foot down and told Darby if he wanted to get high to get a hotel room or get his friends together and have a party, but don’t take it in the street because he was going to pass out in front of the wrong person and wind up in jail and get fucked. So we agreed that when he would do drugs it would be under thinking conditions. I knew just about every dealer of heroin and hard drugs in that area and would go with Darby to score.

  HELLIN KILLER: Amber was a creepy monster person who wanted Darby around her, and she could afford to pay for whatever he wanted, and she would pay for him to get as fucked up as possible.

  DARBY CRASH: I’m not into making records… not really. Only as a medium to get something else done.

  ***

  BOB BIGGS: Around 1978, Samiof left Slash to do a magazine called Stuff and I was stuck with the magazine, which was not making a lot of money, so I decided to do a record label. You spend a couple of thousand dollars making a record but it was better in the long run than trying to put a magazine on the stands that got yellow in two weeks.