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Overview
As a teenager, Dewar MacLeod witnessed firsthand the emergence of the punk subculture in Southern California. As a scholar, he here reveals the origins of an as-yet-uncharted revolution. Having combed countless fanzines and interviewed key participants, he shows how a marginal scene became a "mass subculture" that democratized performance art, and he captures the excitement and creativity of a neglected episode in rock history.
Kids of the Black Hole tells how L.A. punk developed, fueled by youth unemployment and alienation, social conservatism, and the spare landscape of suburban sprawl communities; how it responded to the wider cultural influences of Southern California life, from freeways to architecture to getting high; and how L.A. punks borrowed from their New York and London forebears to create their own distinctive subculture. Along the way, MacLeod not only teases out the differences between the New York and L.A. scenes but also distinguishes between local styles, from Hollywood's avant-garde to Orange County's hardcore.
With an intimate knowledge of bands, venues, and zines, MacLeod cuts to the heart of L.A. punk as no one has before. Told in lively prose that will satisfy fans, Kids of the Black Hole will also enlighten historians of American suburbia and of youth and popular culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806183428 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/09/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 636,841 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Dewar MacLeod is Associate Professor of History at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.
Read an Excerpt
Kids of the Black Hole
Punk Rock in Postsuburban California
By Dewar MacLeod
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8342-8
CHAPTER 1
the UNHEARD MUSIC
Punk Rock Comes to Los Angeles
There was nothing going on. If you were young and looking for something to do, looking for stimulation or adventure, you might as well have been in Kansas as Los Angeles in 1977. But the young people who lived in L.A., natives and others who came from all over the country, expected something we might call culture, even in this town. "Culture" is a word notoriously hard to define, but what better word would you choose? Young people came to L.A. because it seemed like a place where they could do something, be something, create themselves anew amid a whirl of ideas, images, myths, and other culture seekers, other culture creators. Maybe it was the end of the line; maybe it was the beginning of the fulfill-ment of dreams. They came for the same reason people had been coming since Nathanael West and Budd Schulberg described the place in the 1930s and even before: because there was still, in the 1970s, nowhere else to go. They were like the people who had come during the Depression, leaving nothing behind, coming to find something, or so they thought, but finding nothing there. But this time they did not come believing in the Hollywood dream-factory dream. Whether they came to chase their ambitions or to end their worlds, they arrived in a twisted Technicolor noir world, and when they searched their memories for images or ideas to explain what they saw, Raymond Chandler made some sense, but so did the Monkees. But none of it made enough sense. There was nothing going on. And the younger among them were foolish enough to think that something should be going on.
"You really don't care what you do when you get there. You figure you're gonna get a job and meet some interesting people, and you'll get involved with artists and poets and things, and maybe you'll get famous being an artist, or make a living at it," remembered Exene Cervenka, founding member of the punk band X. Her future husband and bandmate recalled: "I got to Los Angeles on Halloween of 1976. On New Year's Eve of '76, I thought, well, I think I'll go down and see this pretty girl I know, Exene. I was walking down the street in Venice and got jumped. I beat the crap out of these two kids, but not before they had pulled their belts off and whanged me over the head about thirty times. So I walked into this bar, and there were all these old people with party hats on, really loaded. The blood was running down my face, and I walked into the bathroom and washed my face off. Then I went to this other party and saw this whore woman, and she climbed up a pine tree and started humping one of the stumps. It was just hideous, gruesome. And I just thought ... this is California." Or, at least, this was the California of Charles Bukowski or Joan Didion, the seamy, desiccated underside of the sunshine and swimming pool dream.
Los Angeles did have its cultural traditions, including the thriving R&B scenes of the forties and fifties and the Sunset Boulevard psychedelic sound of the sixties. But by the mid-1970s nothing was left that anyone could see from street level. Hollywood existed only in the imagination, or behind the closed doors of the culture factories and in dissociated and surreal images dotted throughout the landscape. You might catch a glimpse of the set for Hello, Dolly! or countless westerns if you peeked over the walls at Twentieth Century Fox or Paramount. You might drive by the Beverly Hillbillies' mansion in Bel Air or stately Wayne Manor in Hancock Park, but all they revealed was how much bigger things looked on television.
Music? You want music? Forget the radio, unless you are willing to settle for the laid-back sounds of posthippie, studio-professional cool. In the clubs were folkies like Batdorf & Rodney and Joni Mitchell. On the charts the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt blended folk, country, and the easy-listening rock 'n' roll of faceless, session musicians. This is what the sixties rebellion had produced? Sure, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan are geniuses, but, jeez, I wanna rock! I don't need my music with footnotes, man.
Or, at least, that is how a disconnected minority of young people in the L.A. area—and across the country—was beginning to feel by the mid-seventies.
I was not one of them, at least not initially. I was barely a teenager at the time, living in a fairly affluent neighborhood near Hollywood. I ate Wonder Bread, watched The Brady Bunch, and listened to rock radio. Raised on the Allman Brothers, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull (all thanks to an older brother), I spent a lot of time listening to rock. One of my earliest memories is of rocking on my hands and knees to the Beatles on 45-rpm singles. The first album I bought with my own money was the Who's Tommy. At my first concert, at age twelve, by the encore I was jumping up and down on my chair—out of my mind—as Lynyrd Skynyrd played "Free Bird."
In December of 1977, my friend Rob and I went to see the Ramones at the Whisky a Go-Go on the Sunset Strip. I was only fifteen, so Rob drove. I don't recall whose idea it was—maybe mine, because I would prove to be the one who was most interested in new music. We had been hearing about punk, occasionally passing on the dismissive comments we heard about it, but we hadn't heard the music itself, as far as I can remember. And we weren't the type to go to clubs, where you had to go to hear punk music. We were rockers. A few months before, Rob and I saw Led Zeppelin at the L.A. Forum, a sporting arena that could seat 20,000-plus. From my seat in the third-to-last row, I peered down at the band, tiny dots on a far-off stage barely visible through the haze of pot. I watched stoned-out fans tumble down the stairs while Jimmy Page and John Bonham performed endless guitar and drum solos. I was bored.
We stepped into the Whisky and found ourselves standing right in front, leaning on the stage. I couldn't believe it was possible to get so close. Then the Ramones hit the stage. 1-2-3-4, and the sound just exploded against my face as Johnny Ramone thwacked his guitar not five feet from my head. I turned to the right and saw the crowd burst into a frenzy of pogo dancing—up and down, up and down, pinging upright into each other and then going down in a heap, writhing on the floor until they picked each other up and pogoed and pogoed and pogoed some more. The girls screamed for Dee Dee Ramone; the crowd flicked cigarette butts onto the stage—apparently the local punk gesture, a replacement for the spitting that punks did in England. They all seemed to be having a lot of fun, but I wasn't sure what to make of them.
I wasn't sure what to make of the whole scene. I liked the Ramones, but I spent most of the show eyeing the smoldering cigarette butts on the stage, gauging how close they were to wires and amps. Rob and I agreed afterward that we really liked the opening band, Moon Martin, because they had three guitarists—now, that was rock 'n' roll I could understand. I knew something was going on here, but I didn't quite know what it was. And I didn't think that it was for me. These people were from a different world, or so I thought. Over the next couple of years, I occasionally listened to punk music. I was the one among my friends who bought albums by Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, the Clash, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols. My best buddies would occasionally humor me by allowing me to play a song or two on the record player while we were hanging out. But then it was back to Yes, Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Foreigner, et al. I couldn't agree yet with punks that Zeppelin was "dinosaur rock," but I did, tentatively, explore their music.
I bought my first records by local punk bands—the Dickies' ten-inch EP; the compilation album Tooth and Nail; albums by the Germs and the Flesh Eaters—at the Licorice Pizza record store on Sunset. And, most importantly, I bought every issue of the local punk magazine Slash that I could find, along with occasional copies of national rock mags like Trouser Press, Creem, and Circus at Music Plus on Cahuenga Boulevard. Slash messed with my mind. I read every word, from cover to cover, because I had no frames of reference for distinguishing between different types of content. Who were these old blues artists they were writing about? What was this thing called reggae? All these incredibly strange-looking people, anarchic graphics, and prose the likes of which no teacher had ever exposed me to.
One photograph sticks in my mind to this day. It showed the top of a head, shaved into a reverse Mohawk, with hair on the sides and a buzz line down the middle. Lying on the shaved part was a slab of liver. What the fuck was that? Beyond the music, I was being introduced to an attitude, an aesthetic sense, and a subculture, although I didn't know it at the time.
In the spring of '79 my friend Steve pulled me toward the scene. His older friend Paul had recently taken him to see X and the Dead Kennedys. We saw a few shows at the Whisky—the Go Gos, the Plugz (the coolest), and Black Randy and the Metrosquad doing the Village People's "Macho Man" (with Randy looking like an accountant at the start of the set, then stripping to his bikini briefs and holster for the encore). On St. Patrick's Day, Steve and I drove to Encino to pick up Paul. He walked out of his family's suburban bungalow dressed head to toe in leather, a pint of Bacardi 151 in his pocket—now, that was punk rock! I was in my jeans and flannel shirt. We drove to downtown L.A., across from MacArthur Park, to see a punk rock show at the Elks Lodge.
But you will have to read the rest of the book to find out what happened there. I tell my story not to establish my bona fides but to get back to how I missed it. How could I miss it? Not until a couple of years later, in college and in the Bay Area, did I start to really absorb what was going on. And then I didn't miss it. I saw amazing bands doing amazing things time and time again. Flipper, Dead Kennedys, Toiling Midgets, Crucifix, Fang, and all the bands that came through. Mabuhay Gardens, 10th St. Hall, the Elite Club, On Broadway, IBeam, and Sound of Music. I saw plenty of lousy, amateurish bands, too, but often enjoyed them just as much.
But why did I miss it earlier? Well, I was young and I couldn't drive. But also I didn't think it was mine. These people were older, cooler, realer than me. I wasn't like them, and could never be. They came from somewhere else.
Of course, I was wrong. They came from places just like mine, and from the vast range of the broad middle class of postsuburban Southern California.
"Blank Generation"
While Detroit and Cleveland merit recognition for their proto-punk scenes with bands like the Stooges, the MC5, Electric Eels, and Rocket from the Tombs, and while other bands such as the Modern Lovers and Velvet Underground deserve their status as forefathers of punk, it was in 1974 in New York, at a bar on the Bowery called CBGB, that punk came into existence as a musical form at the center of a social scene. In the context of the mellow, countrified sounds of the Eagles and the highly textured, expansively produced sounds of disco and rock—the music that dominated the charts, clubs, and radio playlists—bands like the Ramones sounded revolutionary. And with song titles like "Beat on the Brat," "Gimme Shock Treatment," and "Blitzkrieg Bop," the Ramones created a cartoonish thug persona in direct defiance of the reigning lyrical conventions of love and fantasy. While there was a fairly wide range of noises emanating from CBGB on the Bowery—from the avant-garde to subcultural populist—the New York bands shared an urban sensibility, an urbanism defined by rust, graffiti, and fiscal bankruptcy. Situated in New York, the punk scene garnered its share of attention and commentary, but the music did not make a dent in the pop music charts.
When the Ramones toured England in 1976, they received the attention they lacked in the United States, and they left in their wake a slew of new bands throughout London (and then in the northern industrial cities of England): the Sex Pistols, created and managed by Malcolm McLaren, who previously managed the proto-punk band the New York Dolls and then owned the boutique Sex on Kings Road; the Clash, former pub-rockers turned punks; The Damned, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Subway Sect, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Adverts, X-Ray Spex, the Buzzcocks, and more. But the impact of the Ramones was felt far beyond the world of rock 'n' roll.
Musically, many British punk bands embraced the stripped-down-to-the-basics power chords and minimalist beat of the punk rock of the Ramones. In this way, British punk was, first of all, a return of rock 'n' roll to its roots—not just the roots in the bayous, swamps, and hill country of the American South, but the roots in the basement or garage. Punk rock was three or four guys and gals pounding away on their electrified instruments with a minimum of skill and a maximum of enthusiasm. Punk rock was to be played live, with little technological and professional intervention, not in the studio to be manipulated by technicians. Anyone could do it.
As a musical form, punk linked a return to musical roots with a rejection of the self-importance of the overblown production styles and ideologies of the established rock stars of the sixties. When, in the mid-sixties, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead competed for musical seriousness, rock 'n' roll was rechristened as Rock, a sound and a movement with artistic and social importance. Punks discarded the claims that rock was art and the basis of a youth movement. As the punk journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons argued in their 1978 obituary of rock 'n' roll, "Rock had bartered its purity and vulgarity for raising of consciousness and respectability." Punks subverted the optimism espoused by both the marketers and the rockers of the sixties generation. As New York's Richard Hell and the Voidoids sang, "I belong to the blank generation / I can take it or leave it each time." The "blank generation" was as yet undefined, as in "fill in the blank." Indeed, the "blank generation" was indefinable: "blank" meant "I don't care," "No Feelings," "No Values," "I Wanna Be Sedated," as the punk song titles put it, not a generation at all, but an aggregation of individuals saying no to everything. "Please Kill Me" announced Richard Hell's T-shirt, and Johnny Rotten scrawled "I hate" above the Pink Floyd logo on his T-shirt.
The politics of punk rock was more complex than a simple negation. It was the apotheosis of the postwar "revolt through style." Punk combined the music and fashion of postwar Britain, then deconstructed and recombined them in a postmodern "bricolage," a random assemblage of the best and detritus of society, thereby calling attention to the very constructedness of society and society's truths. As numerous critics have shown, punk drew on the ideology of the Situationists of the 1960s to critique the social order. Punk attempted "a negation of all social facts," in pursuit of a "detournement" to overturn the accepted meanings of the artifacts of the dominant ideology. Unlike in New York, where punk made little impact on, say, the bicentennial celebration of 1976, London punks explicitly politicized their social situation, especially the events designed to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, a celebration that seemed to punks a mockery in a period of decline.
More and more people throughout the world adopted punk as their own and shaped its sound, style, and ideology to their own purposes. In the United States, punk remained a marginal music and a small subculture throughout the seventies and eighties—failing to reach mainstream ears until Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind—but it expressed a variety of dissatisfactions that young people felt. When punk arrived in Los Angeles in the late seventies, some people were ready to embrace its musical form and its expression of their sense of the world. For those whose eyes and ears were open, who were waiting for something to happen in a world where nothing was happening, punk rock offered an alternative, as music, as vision, as culture. From 1977 through the 1980s, punk rock spoke to more and more young people throughout Southern California, embodying their experiences, shaping their identities. They craved a personal connection to their music and a music that could express their sense of the world.
Although L.A. punk descended from New York and London punk, the local scene did not simply materialize. There were a number of local pioneers and forerunners who paved the way. Among them were several people who had already been trying to make a go of it musically outside the set channels of the music biz.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kids of the Black Hole by Dewar MacLeod. Copyright © 2010 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Introduction,
1. "The Unheard Music": Punk Rock Comes to Los Angeles,
2. "Destroy All Music": L.A. Punk and the End of Youth Culture,
3. "Message from the Underworld": Punk, Power Pop, and New Wave,
4. "Damaged": Hardcore Punk, Consumerism, and the Family,
5. "Brats in Battalions": Hardcore Punk Rock, Violence, and the Politics of the Local,
Conclusion. "Punk Rock Changed Our Lives": Punk Identity and the Creation of Mass,
Subculture,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,