by John Beckman
The Z-Boys were twelve Asian-American, white, and mixed-race youths, many of them “discarded kids” from low-income, single-parent households. One of their most talented members, Peggy Oki, was a girl. The Zephyr shop was their “clubhouse,” and their den-mothers-of-iniquity were the owners, Skip Engblom, who organized their time and pushed them, in his words, to act like “pirates”; Jeff Ho, a professional surfer who shaped and painted surfboards to mimic graffiti and low-rider street styles; and Craig Stecyk, also a surfboard shaper, as well as a budding journalist and sports photographer whose articles in the mid-seventies for Skateboarder magazine made the Z-Boys national celebrities.
For the Z-Boys didn’t earn their fame on the waves—they earned it on the pavement. In the afternoons, when the surf at P.O.P. was flat, they imported their hell-for-leather style to the wavy asphalt basins of local elementary schools. With the recent invention of polyurethane wheels, skateboarding, a trend that had vanished in the early sixties, was enjoying a rebirth with American kids. The Z-Boys took cues from Ho and Stecyk and crafted performance skateboards of their own from chunks of lumber and old furniture. Like B-boys and B-girls mimicking Bruce Lee, the Z-Boys aped their surfing idol, the shortboarder Larry Bertlemann. Riding low to the ground, fluid, and fast; dragging and planting their hands for leverage (like Bertlemann did on the waves), the Z-Boys reinvented skateboarding for extreme velocity, danger, and style.
The Z-Boys were children of a DIY culture; their mentors, and the rogue sport of surfing in general, demanded quick-thinking ingenuity. Their own guerrilla moment came in 1976, when California suffered from an historic drought and L.A.’s ubiquitous swimming pools were drained. The Z-Boys combed streets and surveyed canyons with binoculars, searching for empty pools to ride. When they found one, they would unload pool-draining equipment from their trunks and post high lookouts for cops—who often came and ran them out. “Part of the thrill was knowing the police could come at any time.” The rest of the thrill, of course, was skating—carving high-speed, surflike turns in the cavernous deep ends of forbidden pools. Under these intense new conditions, each skater ground out an inimitable style (risk and style being the highest achievements), but the Z-Boys’ searing competition, combined with their ganglike group cohesion, kept them raising their collective standards—for individual performance, for rebel pride. Their practice had the conviction of politics. “Skaters,” Stecyk wrote that year, “are by their very nature urban guerrillas: they … employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways the original architects could never have dreamed of.” The Z-Boys’ example of the guerrilla skater enthralled the nation’s kids, who followed their story, who imitated their Vans and skater hairstyles, and who scoped their hometowns for auspicious pavement. Skateboarding, like break dancing, inspired America’s youth to flaunt their skills in full public view. It showed them reinhabiting the failing public sphere in creative, daring, and exciting style. “Skateboarding is not a crime” became a common tagline, a postmodern echo of the Declaration of Independence, which dared to declare a higher law. But in 1977, Skateboarder reported a weird new twist on the timeless feud between cops and punks: in response to a mouthy young skater’s taunt (“Bet you can’t ride it, pig!”), an L.A. cop shed his sidearm, took the punk’s deck, borrowed Adidas from one of the “rowdies,” and turned out some “highly technical freestyle routing,” topping it off “with a stylish crossover dismount.” He told the kid “to tighten his mounts as well as his act.”
Some of the Z-Boys achieved international fame. Tony Alva bucked corporate sponsorship and, at age nineteen, started his own popular line of skateboards. Stacy Peralta used the proceeds from his co-owned skate-equipment company to found the Bones Brigade, a Zephyr-style team for the next generation of radical skaters. The Z-Boys’ personal achievements aside, their greatest contributions were to the future of sports. In the fall of 1977, when Tony Alva shot up over the lip of a swimming pool and magically sculpted a turn in the air, he broke into an aerial frontier from which the sport has never returned. With the advent of makeshift half-pipes—and then with publicly sponsored skateparks—the guerrilla efforts of these L.A. daredevils blazed trails for an awe-inspiring realm of sports. From the Z-Boys’ innovations came the aerial-based X Games in which skaters, snowboarders, BMXers, skysurfers, and others still push the limits of soaring midair.
Of course, with the professionalization of such sports, as was the common complaint in the 1880s, a good part of their original fun drops out. Like professional football, baseball, and basketball, the X Games are now big business, subject to the limits of corporate sponsorship and intense regulation. It is fitting, then, that Jay Adams, the wildest Z-Boy with the most original style, the group’s surefire punk, should have lost interest when the others went pro—when, in his words, “guys didn’t seem like they were having as much fun” and skating became “more of a job.” At the same time, however, the urban-guerrilla side of skating—and of BMXing and break dancing and newer activities like European parkour (PK), which turns urban landscapes into aerobatic playgrounds—has inspired kids ever since with its fun of exploration and rebellion. For all the skate parks cropping up across America, the nation’s parking ramps, sidewalks, and staircases still smack and growl under polyurethane wheels.
Z-Boy Shogo Kubo goes vertical in the Dogbowl, Santa Monica, 1977. (Photograph © Glen E. Friedman.)
DIY WAS A PUNK TERM. DIY was a punk ethic. DIY was the punk rocker’s exuberant raspberry at a corrupt, bankrupt, and fucked-up system—a wholesale rejection of the commercial dream. Punks, in the tradition of American pragmatism, shitcanned ideals; they scuffed the cleats of their steel-toed Doc Martens on hippie-dippie idealism. To punks, real punks, even the authorities (cops, presidents, whatever) weren’t considered a worthwhile menace—they were just a lurid joke. And if you didn’t get the joke, you weren’t punk. You were just a poser, a weekend warrior in safety-pinned jeans. And the only thing worse than a poser (who was never punk to begin with) was the sell-out, the punk who becomes a joke.
In December 1970, writing for Creem, the rock critic Lester Bangs bemoaned the decadence of rock in his article “Of Pop and Pies and Fun.” Designing “A Program for Mass Liberation,” he scorned the new wave of self-important commercial rock in favor of the half-naked, howling Iggy Pop and his loud, simple, ridiculous, and generally offensive band, the Stooges. Bangs praises the Stooges for their “crazed quaking uncertainty” and “an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times.” A grim message? Certainly. A warning? Not really. In 1970 Americans were tired of warnings. Instead, in the Stooges, America’s third proto-punk band (alongside the Velvet Underground and MC5), Bangs also observed “a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity.” Bangs’s prospective “Program” involves audiences throwing pies “in the faces of performers who they thought were coming on with a load of bullshit.” It also praises the Stooges for their self-mocking “courage” to admit to fans that their show was a “sham” and “the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing.” Obliteration of the sacred stage had a long American history: in the Jackson Age, b’hoys and g’hals behaved as if they owned their celebrities; in Buddy Bolden’s Jazz Age, musicians and dancers kept a hot rapport; and for a few minutes in the West, in the early sixties, the Mime Troupe and the Charlatans rose to meet their crowds in edgy showdowns of shared satire. The “rock revolution” reclaimed the stage, but Bangs wanted both sides to crush it, both the prankster crowd and the puckish rockers. All he requested was a shared sense of “fun”—the joy of smashing the Gilded Age myth of celebrity-centered enjoyment. His “Program,” in a word, was punk.
In the early seventies, Andy Shernoff, a mouthy adolescent from Queens, started a disorderly fanzine, Teenage Wasteland Gazette, while studying music at SUNY New Paltz. Not given to the usual fanzine fawning, the Gazette took a cheeky Mad Magazine stand on the sex, drugs, and gener
al damage of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle—which is to say, it reveled in it. It invented fake bands. It reviewed fake shows. So true was it to the dangerous fun of rock that it received the unprintable castoffs of major rock critics like, yes, Lester Bangs and the gleefully anarchistic Richard Meltzer, who reported in its pages on a blow-out party where furniture, records, and art were destroyed; where sex was had right out in the open; where Meltzer scrawled obscenities on the walls; and where the host, “Handsome Dick Manitoba” (this was his parents’ house), met the cops at the door wearing “a jock strap with red lipstick swastikas drawn all over [his] body.” Out of such orgies and the wasteland revelry of the Gazette, America’s first bona fide punk band was born. Disgusted by the decadent softening of rock by noodlers like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; tickled by the New York Dolls’ rude camp theater; enthralled by the raw-boned, three-chord assaults of MC5 and the Stooges, as well as by the equipment-wrecking spectacles of the Who, Shernoff and Manitoba and some friends from Queens and the Bronx—the genuine teenage wasteland where hip-hop was born—formed the brash, hilarious, reckless, gross, and supremely adolescent Dictators. Asked how they settled on that name, Shernoff said it was the “funniest.”
They had been practicing for half a year in a farmhouse in the Catskills when, thanks to Meltzer’s connections, some producers from Epic Records took their DIY rock ’n’ roll parody seriously. The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, released in 1975, struck a sweet harmony between insult and irony. The album’s signature track, “Master Race Rock,” reads like Manitoba’s lipstick swastikas—or Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler”: if you didn’t catch the wisecrack from a song that precedes it (“We knocked ’em dead in Dallas / They didn’t know we were Jews”), you might think they were Nazis, but that tension is the point, and the offense is the joke. Stepping on toes was the Dictators’ stock-in-trade; they devoured sensitive types like White Castle cheeseburgers. “Hippies,” after all, as this song opines, “are squares with long hair, they don’t wear no underwear.” The band’s comedy roars in their mock-macho choruses, ripples in Ross Funicello’s lead guitar, and rides on vocalist Shernoff’s comic timing. Only a loser wouldn’t get the joke. Still, not to be underdone by losers, they giddily, idiotically, spell it out: “We tell jokes to make you laugh, we play sports so we don’t get fat.”
The most auspiciously punk gesture on The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! may be its two cover tunes—blistering guitar tributes to Sonny and Cher’s number-one 1965 hit, “I Got You Babe,” and the Riviera’s number-five 1964 hit, “California Sun.” These covers poke fun at the seventies’ American Graffiti nostalgia and refine rock ’n’ roll’s essential nonchalance. In the tradition of Thomas Morton’s satires nailed to the Maypole, or of Alfred Doten’s correspondence about Wild West bacchanalia in the pages of the Plymouth Rock, the Dictators’ Benzedrine-pitched pop-rock tributes revel in their unwelcome intimacy with an audience that they have every intention of offending. Such rankling punk parodies send an all-American message: We’re in this together, like it or not. All of us are tapping the same cultural keg, so we may as well enjoy our differences. The Dictators’ most obvious musical inspiration was the bubblegum surf-pop of the early 1960s. Like the Z-Boys, however, they gleefully rubbed their feet on early surfing’s beach-blanket innocence. The album’s closing number, “(I Live for) Cars and Girls,” rips off the Beach Boys’ trademark “Ooooo-wheee-aaah-ooooo” and relocates the party to teenage wasteland. It opens, “I’m the type of guy / who likes to get high / on a Friday afternoon.” The lifestyle this song equally razzes and celebrates entails pretty much the same reckless hedonism that nearly killed Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, but the Dictators mock and embrace its anarchy: “Cars-girls-surfing-beer / Nothing else matters here!” It’s California fun by way of the outer boroughs, where kids were never promised anything, and its tongue-in-cheek patriotism looks ahead to the anti-neotraditionalism of Reagan-era hardcore: “It’s the hippest scene, it’s the American dream, and for that I’ll always fight!”
Kids were slow to catch on. The Dictators went right over their heads. Critics dismissed them as novelty rock, which of course they were, but four guys from Forest Hills, who attended their shows and imitated their streetwise dress (leather jackets, T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers), understood their subversive force. Posing as a dysfunctional family called the Ramones, they turned surf-punk shtick into performance art, and by 1976 they were dominating the art-rock scene that had coalesced around a lower Manhattan bar called CBGB-OMFUG. The Ramones tempered their humor with gormless cool and punched it out in one- to three-minute anthems: “Blitzkrieg Bop” (“Master Race Rock” redux), “Beat on the Brat” (drubbing rich kids), “Let’s Dance” (punk tribute), “Judy Is a Punk.” If the Dictators gave the lie to their chuckleheaded rock with smarting swipes at the oil industry, the Ramones, despite the aggressive idiocy of songs like “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” mocked their own political and historical educations with smartass polemics like “Havana Affair”: “Now I’m a guide for the CIA / Hooray for the USA!”
Early New York punks—often suburban social dropouts who adapted the modern-primitive looks of their working-class (and largely unemployed) English brethren—embraced these bands’ overeducated stupidity as the antidote to so much bullshit: hippie earnestness, disco excess, government corruption, bourgeois materialism. In the tradition of 1960s undergrounds and the Teenage Wasteland Gazette, with a contact buzz from the English Sniffin’ Glue, they published and distributed handwritten fanzines that flouted all taste, decorum, and polish. Transatlantic/transcontinental zines like New York Rocker, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Ripped and Torn, and Legs McNeil’s superlative Punk were aggressively childish and obscene publications. Interviewers insulted bands (and vice versa). Editors insulted readers. Badly written articles and badly drawn cartoons espoused nihilism, drinking, insolence, vandalism. But even as they promulgated the anarchic lifestyle that (ironically) brought punks closer together, zines also functioned like Sons of Liberty screeds in defining the punks’ civil society. As the historian Tricia Henry has shown, zines intervened as a sort of conduct manual between unruly bands and their audiences, whose most creative response to angry acts like the Sex Pistols could be to spit or throw beer bottles. While the mainstream press liked to sensationalize punks’ garish public fury, making them a caricature of society’s decay, the zines, which knew better, showed readers “that there was a line between good-natured, high-spirited fun and senseless, destructive violence.” The enemy wasn’t the bands or other punks. The enemy was boredom. Even, especially, Johnny Rotten—the “I is anarchy” porte parole of violent 1970s punk—stressed the carefree pleasure of his profession: “Rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be fun. You remember fun, don’tcha?”
And yet, in the late 1970s, while the Dictators and the Ramones were remembering fun and Sid Vicious, late of New York, broke any and all rules and laws, there remained a skittish disconnect between the surly, stylish fans and the bands and zines making all the noise. In England, it was popular for punks to “pogo,” a thuggish, jostling, hopping dance that matched the music’s 4/4 time. Stateside, however, at CBGB and elsewhere, arty crowds would stand by in toleration while a shrill, pounding, and screaming ensemble like Cleveland’s excoriating Dead Boys—which Nicholas Rombes calls “one of the first punk bands to drive off the cliff”—showered them in abuse. Lester Bangs’s “Program for Mass Liberation” had not yet come into its own.
But then sometime around 1980, rather appropriately in San Francisco and Los Angeles, American punks remembered their California education and the crowds themselves got in on the act. As a new breed of “hardcore” punk bands (the Dead Kennedys, Germs, Circle Jerks, Black Flag) hit the gas and sped the music up to 8/4, 8/8, and faster (and gnarlier), a furious synergy gushed up from the crowd and rose to meet the action onstage. With the birth of the mosh pit—that sloshing mass of unchecked youth that chewed like a blender in front of the band—punk became a full-contact
sport. Suddenly punk was American fun. This rude and sweaty new California fun lacked the skill of the B-boys’ cypher, lacked the soaring elegance of the Z-Boys’ aerials, but what it shared with both of them—and with the 1850s miners’ ball that J. D. Borthwick saw at Angels Camp—was a raw, reckless, rebellious pleasure that pulled the outcast crowd together. What all of these revelers shared, throughout history, was respect for radical civility: a rough balance of individual and communal pleasures. Mosh-pit fun pushed civility to its limits. Lifesaving rules were honored in the pit (they would pick you up if you fell to the ground), but mostly (and this was the point) all bets were off. If you joined the mosh pit, you were in it for pushing, thrashing, kicking, head-butting—whatever. Buddy Bolden invented early jazz by reading the crowd. Punk musicians dove right in—riding, surfing, often fighting the crowd.
