We Got the Neutron Bomb

by Marc Spitz

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS: I was there for the transfer of Slash from Samiof to Bob Biggs. It was all very palsy-walsy. After Samiof gave Bob Slash, they moved Slash out of the Santa Monica and Fairfax offices to the Beverly Boulevard offices and I moved in there to make my Decline movie. Bob always just rolled over everybody with his megalomaniac power trips. All that he was ever after was the money. He was still figuring out whether the magazine or the label was going to make more.

  NICOLE PANTER: Rumor had it Biggs was a coke dealer. He did know all the Saturday Night Live people. I never knew. He’d tried being a performance artist.

  BOB BIGGS: Anyone in a position of some power is gonna be vulnerable to people talking about stuff like that, but I was never a drug dealer and I defy anyone to find some proof. It was in a party context! There was never any wholesale dealing going on. I wasn’t any more deeply involved in cocaine than anyone else. It was the ’70s! At Slash we were just dealing with those kinds of people. I mean I once saw Darby shoot up with gutter water!

  JUDITH BELL: Bob Biggs was an all-American UCLA guy who was… always very good at making money. He had a lot of cash that he had to put in something, ’cause you know if you have all that cash, the bank has to inform the IRS and then they become aware that something’s fishy, so he wanted to invest in a business and that’s when he invested in Slash and took over the business side of the thing. Bob was a very good-looking guy and had been approached by a lot of modeling agencies. He actually did one modeling gig but the gay guys freaked him out too much.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS: Claude would have much rather had the money put into the magazine than into recording because that’s what he did, Claude was a writer, he got nothing out of the records.

  NICKEY BEAT: When this Don Bolles guy came around to drum for the Germs, I started giving him lessons. Teaching him how the songs went. I stopped giving him lessons when he said, “Punk rock is supposed to be sloppy. It’s supposed to have a certain amount of mistakes.” I was trying to teach him to be like Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols or Jerry Nolan from the Dolls.

  JOHN DOE: Don Bolles was known as Cactus Head ’cause he came from Arizona. He was just a wide-eyed, “What kind of trouble I can get into?” guy.

  BOB BIGGS: I knew a lot of the bands, but I didn’t have any experience running a label. I didn’t think I needed any experience. The magazine had a following and all the mom-and-pop-variety record stores had already been carrying it. I knew of the Germs, so I thought it’d be a good thing to do them first. I said, “Hey, do you wanna do a single?” and they said okay. So they recorded “No God,” “Circle One,” and another song for six hundred bucks. Darby was a little standoffish and sarcastic. He was like a wise-ass teenager. Pat was more willing to engage you and to talk about something straight without making fun of you, so I dealt with him more than Darby. The very first thing that Darby did whenever he saw me was ask for money. I’d say, “Darby, would you cool it, you idiot? I’m not giving you any money.”

  DON BOLLES: We just wanted to do the stupid album and not get completely fucked. We sort of trusted Nicole. We trusted our friends. We were laissez-faire about all the business stuff. That’s why we had Nicole. She was a really smart girl with a little legal acumen, a little knowledge of the music industry.

  NICOLE PANTER: A friend manager scores drugs for the band, which I never did. I was a real manager, and I may have learned on the job, but I think I did a pretty decent job in what was a difficult situation at best.

  BOB BIGGS: Nicole Panter was the Germs’ management and she knew absolutely nothing about business. When people don’t know what they’re doing, they overcompensate by getting hysterical and they overstate with passion over some two-cent issue. The band would say that everyone was stealing from them, but no one was stealing from them because they didn’t have anything to steal.

  NICOLE PANTER: Darby and I discussed the fact that it would be a selling point to have a celebrity credited as producer. Darby’s first choice was Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders. I couldn’t even begin to guess why Darby wanted him. We told Biggs, and Bob got back to us saying that Mark Lindsay had asked for ten thousand dollars, which made it out of the question because the budget for the entire thing was only five thousand dollars. It occurred to me then and now that Biggs might have been humoring us and never even bothered contacting Lindsay. Knowing our options were pretty limited by finances, Darby and I sat down to figure out other possibilities, and so we got Joan Jett.

  DON BOLLES: Mark Lindsay was my idol when I was a kid. I used to buy copies of Tiger Beat magazine just to see pictures of Mark Lindsay and copy his hair if my mom would let me.

  JOAN JETT: When they were ready to record, the Germs asked me if I would produce, and I took it real seriously. I really wanted to do a good job. Except we partied a lot. At one point I passed out, and Darby wrote about it in one of the songs, “Shut Down.” He mentioned that I was passed out on the couch and I was, but only for that one song. They had been playing around L.A. for a few years by then, so they’d worked up their songs. They were really tight. The album was basically their set list. I just had them set up and I told Darby to sing like he was onstage, except right into the mic, rather than separating him and having him sing to a track… and then Pat Burnette rolled tape.

  DON BOLLES: Joan is a rock goddess. She knew rock ’n’ roll. She understood it. It was her lifestyle.

  BOB BIGGS: The Germs cut the GI record at a place called Quad Tech on Sixth and Western. It took about three weeks and cost six thousand dollars. I was a glorified baby-sitter, trying to get the sessions going. Giving them a ride there. Giving them a ride home.

  JOAN JETT: I think the record captures the energy really well. It was really pretty straightforward—there wasn’t the time or the budget or the technology for it to be anything else other than the way it came out. Sure, I doubled tracks here and there and had them do things they’d never done before. I had Darby doing harmonies. Darby took it pretty seriously. We didn’t have to do a lot of takes. He was certainly not out of control in the studio. He respected me. Did what I asked him to do. They were trying to get something done and they were very serious about it. It was a controlled nutti-ness at that point.

  DON BOLLES: Quad-Tech on 6th and Western was a very utilitarian studio that had all the good workhorse analog shit. Pat Burnett the engineer was a young guy. He was a descendant of the famous musical Burnett family. He was like only about 30, but he seemed really old to us. Although he was really into the Germs as a band he wasn’t into wearing spiked wrist bands or wanting to get drunk with us or any of that punk shit stuff. I was the only person in the band who knew about sound and recording and I communicated with Pat Burnett and Joan. Pat [Burnett] was more than just the engineer, he was really the uncredited co-producer with Joan, although Pat [Smear] knew exactly what he wanted his guitar to sound like. So everybody was pitching in at one point… and Joan was very cool and open to all suggestions. Joan is a rock goddess because she understood rock ’n’ roll. Darby knew he could never capture what he had onstage. We all drank a little but we stayed incredibly focused. We were a hard-working little unit determined not to fuck it up. I’m sure it must’ve been quite touching to watch the Germs toiling away with such dedication to do the best we possibly could. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. The result was pretty much what we were trying to do—just getting down on tape who we thought we were with some professional guidance from Joan and Pat Burnett.

  NICOLE PANTER: I came up with the design for the album cover. Biggs wanted to spell out Germs in rotten meat and jelly beans and I told him I wanted it to look different from any other punk record, I told him that I wanted it to look like a Pablo jazz release, understated and classy: Darby’s blue circle on black, with simple type.

  PENELOPE HOUSTON: It wasn’t until their record came out and I actually saw Darby’s lyrics on paper that I realized he was thinking some interesting thoughts.

  RICHARD MELTZER (REVIEW OF GI
IN L.A. TIMES): [Darby Crash] didn’t miss a beat in out-Iggying the Ig… lyrically Darby left Lou Reed and Jim Morrison so far behind they resembled coffee table poets… the album of 1979… the most staggering recorded statement so far from the American branch of new wave.

  RIK L. RIK: Darby Crash made the cover of the L.A. Weekly in this big feature story on the boho-punk scene… they called the article “Who Is Darby Crash Anyway?”

  NICOLE PANTER: The band never went on tour in support of GI because Darby didn’t want to. He knew they wouldn’t travel well.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: Around the time GI came out, Danny’s Oki Dog on Santa Monica Boulevard became the hot postgig gathering place for the new suburban hardcore kids who were coming up in droves to Hollywood all the time for shows at the Starwood and the Whisky. Oki Dog became the big Tuesday night hotspot, the consolidated gathering of the intercounty SoCal teen punk tribes during the summer and fall of ’80. Many of these new kids would hang around Oki Dog and try to emulate Darby with his pre-Mohawk look… a single footlong braided ponytail hanging from the back of the neck with chains and bandanas wrapped around the ankles of U.S. Army combat boots. Oki Dog was the newest, coolest place yet to get your Germs burn and to watch Darby hold court with his minions squatting openmouthed on the ground around him while he practiced his “Gimme, gimme this… Gimme, gimme that” mantra. I’d hear him say, “Hi, I’m Darby Crash and that shirt would look real cool on me. Give it to me, please.” It was a litany of gimmes. Gimme your shirt. Gimme that button. Gimme that bracelet. Gimme a beer. Gimme two dollars. Gimme a ride to Whisky. Gimme a ride to the party. Gimme a ride home. Jesus wept!

  RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: My favorite Germs song to play was “My Tunnel” from the Cruising soundtrack. I played it all the time.

  BOB BIGGS: The Cruising soundtrack sessions were a difficult thing. Jack Nitzsche was music supervisor for the movie and he was very into using the Germs on the soundtrack. I thought it would be interesting to see what a producer like Jack, who is not a typical producer producer, would do with the Germs. So they went in with Nitzsche and I don’t know how they felt about it, whether they felt good about it or it was a bad thing. I felt it was generally a good thing for the maturation of the band. It was fine to create GI, but the next one had to have a progression. I knew that Jack’s demand for new material was going to stress Darby out to some extent, but I thought that that was a good thing because Darby had to go somewhere, he couldn’t be GI forever. So even though I heard about him stressing I wasn’t really that concerned about it. In fairness to Darby, first of all, any band that’s been on the street for two or three years, you gotta figure their first record is going to be the best one for a while because they’ve got all this material tight as a drum ’cause they’ve had all that time to work it out live. Maybe Jack’s a junkie, maybe he’s this or that, but he’d produced and arranged things with the Rolling Stones, he’d worked with Phil Spector, he’d produced this and that, a lot of different classic stuff, a big history—the guy was kind of a real musical genius in many ways, but I don’t know if Darby completely understood that. I thought this was a good thing because Jack was someone that Darby wanted to be like in some ways, an outlaw bad boy. I was over the moon. Here was the perfect way to ease Darby back into creative work mode without pressuring him for the follow-up to the GI album. I knew they didn’t have any more stuff, so I was thrilled to see them go into the studio with such a wild-card iconoclast like Jack who probably had the ability as much as anybody to pull stuff out of them.

  DON BOLLES: Nitzsche was an idiot. He didn’t understand shit about what we were doing. He didn’t live in the same world we did. We rehearsed in the studio for a couple of days with him, and it sucked.

  NICOLE PANTER: William Friedkin, who directed Cruising, was very aware of the punk scene and what was going on. He came to the studio a few nights and pogoed around the room.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: The late Donnie Rose, who was close to Darby and was around the studio during some of the Cruising sessions, once told me he thought it was a major turning point in Darby’s downward spiral into alcohol, hard narcotics, and depression. Donnie told me his theory was up to that point Darby had been creative at his own nonprolific pace; now the heat was on to deliver new material instantaneously. Nitzsche was demanding five new original songs, not just cover songs or remakes of older tunes. Donnie said it was the most creative pressure he’d ever seen Darby sweating under. Darby was blanking badly on lyrics, and to the alarm of the band, he disappeared for several days and took a ton of booze and drugs before returning to complete the sessions, pretty much on schedule, but the strain had taken its toll.

  NICOLE PANTER: I even tried to find them professional management after Cruising. I’d married Gary Panter and he was after me to quit. I asked Jack Nitzsche for advice, but he thought Darby didn’t take it all seriously enough for a “real” management company to be interested.

  BRENDAN MULLEN: Gay organizations called for a boycott of Billy Fried-kin’s Cruising. They felt the film negatively depicted gay male culture as nothing more than a bunch of crazed fist-fucking S&M freaks performing violent sex in the darkened back rooms of creepy leather stud bars across America. Darby went around town telling everybody not to see the movie because it was shit.

  TOMMY GEAR: The Screamers greatest downfall was that we were easily bored.

  K.K. BARRETT: Following a nine-month hiatus the Screamers returned to the Whisky in May ’79 for six sold-out shows over three nights. We augmented the regular lineup, which now included Paul Roessler on keyboards, with two violinists and a backup singer named Sheila Edwards, sometimes known as Sheila Drusela.

  RENE DAALDER: Sheila Edwards was an amazing wailing punk diva right off the L.A. streets.

  PAUL ROESSLER: We’d hooked up with Rene Daalder, a very tasteless and talentless guy who could raise money and talk them into doing stuff but was unable to create anything that had any impact or was at least decent art. Rene played the members of the band against each other, and he finally just isolated Tomata from everybody, making Tomata the star of a terrible movie, Population One. I’ve seen it. It’s retarded.

  TOMATA DU PLENTY: It’s a story about the last person left on the planet after a nuclear holocaust.

  RENE DAALDER: Tommy and Tomata were thinking about where to take their act next. They didn’t feel much like performing in the future. I had this strong conviction that music videos were going to be big in the near future, and I was still thinking a lot about the Pistols/Russ Meyer misadventure, wondering how a marriage between the drama of punk rock and film could work. I had gotten ever deeper involved with the punk scene, which among other things seemed highly cinematic. The Screamers had already solved one of the main problems of rock-and-roll movies, which invariably corrupt the raw energy of the musical talent by the inevitable stylization a fictional film imposes on them. The Screamers had already taken care of that stylization themselves.

  PAUL ROESSLER: I was the new guy, and they were fairly secretive with me. The Screamers’ image and mystique was something they had really carefully cultivated. Tommy and Tomata had been in all these theater troupes, doing avant-garde and gay theater. I was just a kid, a trained musician who’d had my head twisted by hanging around Darby Crash and the early Germs scene at Uni High.

  RENE DAALDER: We decided to build a studio to make music videos to replace the opening acts at club performances. We also planned to record music for the soundtrack to a low-budget musical movie. But for something like that to work, everybody has to be respectful of each other’s creativity. The Screamers were organized a little different. For one, Tommy was accustomed to being a rather authoritarian and autocratic taskmaster. The Screamers were ultimately a much more important concept to him than they were to Tomata, who—even though we didn’t realize it at the time—had become kind of exhausted of the whole experience. All the screaming had been taxing his voice to the point that it became increasingly difficult to put out the inordinate amoun
t of energy it took to project the raw energy everyone expected from his stage persona. Apart from having no real control over his voice, it was even more difficult at times to put out that energy because, as opposed to say Johnny Rotten’s conviction, the Screamers really was an art project for him. He certainly didn’t carry an ounce of the same aggression he expressed onstage.

  K.K. BARRETT: We were trying to make music videos. If we’d just stayed with the music, I think we would have been right on course, but getting stars in our eyes sunk the boat.

  PAUL ROESSLER: They thought they’d never really be able to capture the experience of the Screamers just with recordings. They wanted to do film and video years before MTV. They hooked up with Rene Daalder, but in the process it broke up the group, after he tried to turn it into something that was no longer a rock band.

  RENE DAALDER: We were assembling a sort of repertory company that would become the cast for the movie Mensch, which would take place in a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari–like German expressionist setting. Musically it was going to be a reinterpretation of the original Screamers material. The cast would be the Screamers, Penelope Houston of the Avengers, and many other stalwarts of the punk scene, as well as Beck’s grandfather, Fluxus artist Al Hansen. As we were waiting for everything to come together I directed a bunch of videos art-directed with great economic resourcefulness by K.K. We didn’t have the financing for the movie, so we were reduced to shooting scenes on and off. It seemed high time to do some live shows again after a nine-month hiatus.

  GEZA X: Rene Daalder utterly destroyed the Screamers. Butchered ’em. That’s a fact. Rene came in and filled their head with these notions. They already had a lot of problems with grandiosity, and how that band maintained equilibrium was a very delicate equation to begin with, where Tommy played leather bitch to Tomata’s puppet, and the two of them had worked really hard at creating this image. I was just their employee, their sound guy and roadie. I admired Tommy and Tomata for working so hard and becoming so successful, but Tommy was the ruler with an iron fist, and when he did, things worked. That was the implicit agreement between Tommy and Tomata—they had this deal going, that was the way the band would work. When Rene came along, he gradually eroded Tommy’s control and first got Tomata into his orbit, and then Tommy also came under his spell based on his premise that they were gonna make rock videos, before there were rock videos… he was gonna get them a “video record” deal, but you have to understand we’re talking nearly two years before MTV.