WE GOT THE NEUTRON BOMB
The Untold Story of L.A. Punk
By Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen
Three Rivers Press: 296 pp, $13.00
DANCE OF DAYS
Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital
By Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins
Soft Skull Press: 421 pp, $20.00
Whereas the rock of the sixties has been described and appreciated literally to death, the history of the punk of the seventies and eighties is still open. This is in part because the history of punk is not over. And it is in part because the people who were there are still finding their literary voices. These two books intend to remedy the lack of punk history, but without nailing down a definitive interpretation of a form that is still underappreciated both as a musical style and as a social situation.
Each book is written by a participant in the scene with the aid of a professional writer, and each is fundamentally a collage of quotes rather than a linear narrative. "We Got the Neutron Bomb" and "Dance of Days" are ideal anthropologies: they help us understand a subculture as its participants understand themselves.
In many ways, punk was a reaction against the sixties; certainly punks defined themselves as anti-hippies. When the Beatles transformed themselves from pale purveyors of r&b to Important Artistes, they brought a generation of fans with them. By 1967, under the influence of hallucinogens, they were singing surrealist poetry over swelling orchestrations.
Where rock had been a dance music that swept people up into a communal experience, it was by the early seventies with bands like Yes being experienced by proto-yuppies applauding politely in concert halls. Rock had mutated into bad classical music.
As both these books make clear, the galvanizing agents of revival were the Ramones, who emerged from New York in 1976. Their style was pointedly simplistic, but it also displayed a knowledge of the tradition in which they were working, and was full of references to girl groups, surf music, bubblegum, and other styles. Inside the rock form they found the fundamental particle, the one thing out of which everything else was made.
After the Ramones toured England, the Sex Pistols, Clash and others created a British punk scene. Young people all over the world latched onto the signifiers - leather jackets, mohawks, safety pins - and started bands before they could even play instruments.
By 1979 the New York and London scenes had begun to peter out creatively. And around that time a new, more uncompromising, and more problematic style developed, known as "hardcore" punk. Its were Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Hardcore was the most direct possible embodiment of rage and alienation, perhaps the best artistic style ever devised for the expression of those states. Songs were howled or bellowed over rhythm sections that bit like chainsaws.
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"We Got the Neutron Bomb" traces the LA scene through the late seventies and into the hardcore era: it is framed entirely as a dialogue among LA punks of the era, though the dialogues are assembled quotations and not actual conversations. This method initially irritates but ultimately beguiles: it crystallizes the collective voice of a diverse subculture.
The story starts with glam rock: David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, and the LA misfits such as Kim Fowley and Zory Zenith who worshiped them in the early seventies and gravitated to Hollywood. It proceeds through the formation of bands such as Fowley's creation the Runaways (which gave us the great Joan Jett) and then into the ascension of LA punk in bands as diverse as X, the Motels, and the Go Gos. One epiphanic moment is the advent of the Germs in 1979. The Germs were arguably the first hardcore band (though the DC band Bad Brains was emerging at around the same time). Led by the intentionally insane Darby Crash, they rejected musical proficiency or even music, and tried simply to perform a spectacle of rage and ecstasy, including self-mutilation and the destruction of the clubs in which they played. Joan Jett produced the only Germs album, which remains unlistenable, but which also is an essential document of teenage angst.
"We Got the Neutron Bomb" leaves us as the scene shifts from Hollywood and a fairly small and tight-knit community of musicians, to what one participant calls "Clockwork Orange County: such suburban zones as Huntington and Long Beach, where truly screwed-up kids invented the slam dance, stage-diving and the hardcore music . Soon the great LA hardcore bands such as Black Flag, Agent Orange, and Circle Jerks were making focused and extremist music.
One thing you've got to give LA punks: they had the best names ever: Hellin Killer, Cliff Hanger, Jane Drano (Jane Wiedlin of the Go Gos) Lee Ving (of the great faux-fascist band Fear), Tomata du Plenty, Phil S. Teen, Farrah Faucet-Minor, Billy Club, Spazz Attack.
Drugs and alcohol are at the center of the story told in "We Got the Neutron Bomb." Everyone seems to be high all the time. Drugs unified the kids, but finally also destroyed the unity. Artist/addicts didn't seem to get anywhere musically. In a fairly typical moment in "We Got the Neutron Bomb," Bob Biggs reports that Darby Crash would shoot up gutter water when he couldn't get heroin. Crash committed suicide by drug overdose. It was a truly decadent scene in every possible way, and by the mid-eighties there was little left but the stench.
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That makes the DC story all the more moving. As Jenkins and Andersen show in detail in "Dance of Days," harDCore (as the style was called) emerged with a philosophy called "straight edge": don't smoke; don't drink; don't fuck. The movement was named after a song by Minor Threat, and centered around its singer Ian MacKaye. Straight edge is perhaps the first and only authentic ascetic youth movement in recent American history, and it emerged in part because the kids at Wilson High saw their older siblings (that would be me, briefly a member of the class of 1976 before my expulsion) damaging or killing themselves.
Minor Threat and like-minded bands such as the Faith and Youth Brigade enacted the philosophy: the music was blistering and pure. Before long, there were straight edge kids all over the country. The Boston straight edge was particularly extreme: they would invade bars and parties and knock beers and cigarettes out of people's hands.
But the originators of straight edge were more interested in making and elucidating their own choices rather than imposing his views on anyone. Minor Threat's bass player Brian Baker puts it like this in "Dance of Days": "[Straight edge] is an outlook on life. In the sense that you want to control your body and yourself; you want to have a clear view of what's going on. We will never, never tell you what to do."
And as the musicians matured from teenagers into artists, the straight edge philosophy developed into a left-anarchist activism. This was put into practice at the Dischord record label, which issued important music inexpensively outside of the mainstream music industry. MacKaye's band Fugazi manages itself, books itself, and records itself.
As "Dance of Days" demonstrates elaborately, the DC scene has flourished for twenty years and still exists. Even as the bands fell apart and re-formed they grew artistically, so that a mid-eighties outfit like Rites of Spring is a coherent development out of Minor Threat-style hardcore.
DC was central to the emo and Riot Grrrlz movements of the nineties, including Bikini Jkill and Bratmobile. "Alternative rock" and the grunge bands - Nirvana and Pearl Jam, for example - were closely connected to DC punk, as they acknowledged. In fact, Nirvana's drummer Dave Grohl, who now fronts Foo Fighters, played the eighties in DC punk bands.
And the phrase "straight edge" has entered the collective consciousness. If you search the phrase today on the internet, you will find that it is used especially by girls who are seeking control over their own sexuality; it amounts to a kind of declaration of physical independence.
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Punk, it turns out, has triumphed, not only in grunge but in today's top pop rock bands such as Blink 182 , No Doubt, and Limp Bizkit. And though that has entailed its dilution into something almost entirely non-threatening, it is also a vindication of the vision of Ian MacKaye and Darby Crash. More to the point, there is a thriving punk world of good bands - the Methadones, Bigwig - on independent labels, and they are making some of the best current rock music.
And punk has become a permanent fundamental vocabulary, like the blues. As did the blues, punk emerged among members of a particular group to transform pain and rage into art. But like the blues, punk has become a vocabulary available to anyone who seeks access to their own intensity.
