Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs

By Brendan Mullen, with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

Feral House; 312 pp.; $16.95

Reviewed by Crispin Sartwell

The career of Darby Crash lasted only a couple of years. He made one album that didn't sell very well, and then committed suicide by heroin overdose in 1980, when he was 22. You might wonder how that life could support a biography, but this book is about as compellingly readable a portrait of a personality and a culture as anything you're likely to set eyes on.

During his life, Crash (Paul Beahm) was a little bitty legend, and since his death that legend has grown, for a couple of reasons. First, rock stars, even minor ones, grow in death. And second, Crash's band the Germs turned out to be more influential than anyone could have dreamed at the time. Many folks consider the Germs to be the first example of hardcore punk, the genre that has given us Black Flag, the Dicks, Minor Threat, and from there directly influenced much American rock music of the last fifteen years: Fugazi, Nirvana, Foo Fighters (who include Germs guitarist Pat Smear). And in fact, hardcore thrashes on now as hard or harder than ever, even on the pop charts, where you can hear imitations by P.O.D. or Linkin Park.

Lexicon Devil is a work of oral history, a collective biography told in the voices of over a hundred people who participated in the Los Angeles punk scene and the life of Darby Crash in the late seventies. This approach makes for some inconsistencies and redundancies. But it also allows you to approach its subject from all sorts of angles at once and hence to see him whole.

One gets the vibe as one begins that this will be a hagiography. Instead, it emerges as the mesmerizing portrait of a small monster. Paul Beahm came from a more or less typical broken and alcoholic family. He was a miserably unhappy adolescent. He ended up at a public high school whose curriculum was based on Scientology and EST, something could only happen in southern California, and which represents perhaps the worst idea in the history of education.

Now there are two possible ways of rebelling against education by authoritarian cult. You could become an extreme anti-authoritarian, an anarchist. Or you could aspire to personal autocracy: never to answer to anyone else in virtue of the fact that everyone else would be answering to you. Eventually, this is the route Crash took, combining an immature though not completely uninteresting philosophical/poetic vision with a mild though definite personal magnetism.

He called his little group "Circle One," and he initiated people into it by giving them severe cigarette burns on the wrist, so that they would be able to recognize each other by the scar. Then he used them mercilessly, mooching everything they had and more, particularly money and drugs.

He was one of the most relentless drug addicts of whom I've ever heard, and there is a description in Lexicon Devil from his last year in which, though Crash is too high to open his mouth, "Germettes" are still feeding him pills.

On the other hand, Crash is described by many people as extremely intelligent, and occasionally even caring. He charmed as well as constrained people into following him around and doing what he told them to do.

Furthermore, the monster Darby Crash was nursed in an extraordinarily pathological environment. I started out the book prepared in retrospect to like the LA punk scene, which after all produced music as diverse as that made by X, the GoGos, the Blasters, and Joan Jett. The kids of SoCal were out having fun as an act of rebellion, squatting in old Hollywood apartment buildings and gigging at the legendary Masque.

Most of the participants describe the whole thing as a scene of carefree fun and hilarious hijinks. But the pain, desperation, and degradation could not be more palpable. Male prostitution is central, and at one point Crash's roommate is pictured servicing the Hollywood Square Paul Lynde the night before the latter's death, which is attributed to amyl nitrate.

Indeed, one of the innumerable problems that led to Crash's suicide was that he was deeply closeted, a fact wehich had long been suspected which is shown definitively here for the first time. This is particularly sad given the rhetoric of sexual liberation that went with LA punk. But in his own way he was a mini-sex symbol, and coming out would have compromised his ability to mooch rides from girls.

Everyone is drunk and stoned at all times. One charming central figure is Gerber, a woman who calls herself a "jizz bucket" and was famous for squirting vodka into the mouths of people who had passed out, making them hurl. One of the GoGos is pictured having anal sex with a man with a fourteen-inch penis (of which there is an actual photo in the book!) while urinating on herself and barking like a dog. The Masque scenester Geza X licks a trail of urine across the floor. Black Randy takes dumps on people who are laying on the floor drooling. Darby and friends light a pinwheel and toss it at a homeless guy. It sticks to his chest, explodes, and burns. They laugh their heads off.

And so forth, and on, and on, until by sheer accumulation it dawns on you that this just could not have been a very good thing. All the surviving participants seem nostalgic, though, and to regret the dissolution of the scene as it segued from a Hollywood ho-down to the true hardcore of the suburbs: bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, and TSOL. The Germs were pivotal in the transition, and were the only band accepted by both scenes.

Indeed, there was much to regret about the shift, and the hardcore scene was directly violent rather than merely decadent and excluded women almost entirely. Nevertheless, in my opinion there were some positive aspects to the change. The music got infinitely better. The Germs made one pretty good and extremely influential album: G.I., produced by Joan Jett. X was one of the most critically overrated bands in the history of rock. The Blasters were a reasonably good roots band. The GoGos were funny, fluffy little cheerleader girls. The best artist to emerge from the scene in my view was Jett, who both showed a new way to be a female guitar-slinger and just rocked and rocks like a motherfucker.

But however you end up passing judgment, or even if, unlike me, you can avoid passing judgment, you read this book for its incredible quotient of titillation, but also for its real insight into the edges of human capacity. But it also shows you something about the center, because there's something oddly typical about Darby: he's a putz trying to be a God. Finally, aren't we all?