CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY (Huntington Beach has no real center, no real city; the kids have nowhere to go. There are the malls at night, which are mostly deserted except for one or two stores that are open late. Gangs of kids roam the malls because there simply is nothing else for them to do. There’s no main drag in Huntington. H.B. is a place to become isolated, alienated, dislocated.) “ The parents in Huntington—it was the beginning of the ‘look out for number one’ movement. The parents weren’t going to do a whole lot of self-sacrificing for the kids beyond buying baby food and diapers,” as one skinhead explained. “ No personal sacrifices—the kids get everything they want except real attention or concern. If you come home late at night, it wasn’t ‘Where were you?’ It was ‘Did you have fun?’ ” Which was just fine with Jimmy Trash and company. They began having big parties in their houses, taking out the furniture and cramming 250 people in a room while the band would play as fast and as loud as they could. When Jimmy’s brother heard one song he liked he would dive into the middle of the floor and start squirming and wiggle like an epileptic on the floor. Thus was born the dance called “ The Worm.” Jimmy can recall the Crowd playing at a club called the Woodsound and seeing dozens of kids imitating his brother, worming all over the floor. At the same time as the Huntington scene was beginning, pockets of teenage resistance were building throughout Orange County, considered one of the more politically conservative areas in the country. Kids in Fullerton, Anaheim, Garden Grove were listening to their first Sex Pistols records, and though they were unaware of clubs like the Masque, they knew that something new was happening, something raw, vital, intense. But whenever kids came back from Hollywood they would report what they saw, and other followers, quick to pick up on the trend, would interpret it in their own way. Even in the early punk days, the kids from the suburbs were the ones most into trashing. If you’re living in Hollywood, and you’re basically a street survivor, you’re not going to be greatly interested in breaking a toilet. If you’re from Irvine or Garden Grove, live in a nice middle-class, sterile home and you hear about people destroying things in the name of punk rock, the immediate reaction is that you can be as bad as them, go to a Hollywood show and smash a window or two. Soon the Huntington punks had become more interested in other things than dayglo. They had seen pictures of Sid Vicious wearing a swastika and responded to the form, if not the content. For the English punks, wearing a swastika was part of the spectrum of acts to shock and horrify the staid conformist attitudes of the middle class. It was not to imply anti-Semitism, even though a founding punk like Siouxsie Sioux got her face punched in for wearing a swastika in a Parisian bistro. (Ironically, this year Siouxsi’s new record is called Israel and features a Star of David on the sleeve.) For the kids in Huntington, twice removed from any philosophical ramifications of punk, a swastika did mean fascism. After all, they had grown up around such groups as the Surf Nazis as well as parents espousing the wisdom of the John Birch Society. And so they found it easy to play with antisemitic form. They painted swastikas because they were “ cool.” They talked about “ fucking Jews” in part because, way before the punk movement, they had heard their parents make more than one antisemitic crack. It was not an actual racial hatred, more a conditioned social bigotry. But the harassment of Jewish families became enough of a problem in Huntington Beach that mayor Ruth Bailey began talking about it. And Police Chief Robitaille echoed her concern: “ There have been a number of reports of anti-Semitism and many arrests,” he said recently, though Detective Fick, the punk expert of the same department, said the anti-Semitism “ was blown out of proportion” and that one of the women who complained was “ excitable.” Still, the swastika is the symbol of the most severe form of facism, and it only took one kid—probably thinking he was cool—with a can of spray paint, putting swastikas on the outside of the Pan-Andreas Theatre in Hollywood when it was showing a play called I t ’s Hard to Be a Jew to produce the same gut-level reaction in Hollywood that occurred in Huntington Beach. These same kids began frequenting Hollywood shows and their bands began getting more Hollywood gigs. These kids from the suburbs were more naive, less hip to what the fashion was—they did not conform to the Hollywood punk social structure. They had no qualms about smashing into people on the dance floor or jumping off the stage into a convulsive worm dance. They were the new generation, and whereas the Hollywood punks were somewhat stylized, more a parody, these kids were the real thing. If two Hollywood punks would knock into each other they’d laugh and help each other up. If two kids from H.B. did it, they’d often wind up slugging the crap out of each other. Where a Hollywood punk would spray-paint a band’s name on the bathroom wall, the kids from Redondo would pull the sink out of the wall and throw it on the toilet. What was once a pantomime had become a reality. IT’S a Tuesday night at the Starwood in 1979. Inside the club, the Adolescents from Fullerton are playing. Outside, a large group of people are running en masse, then stopping, forming a huddle, then widening into a circle. Inside the circle is a longhair lying face down. A few girl punks walk on his back and head, jump up and down on him. Someone turns Illustration by Michael Curry
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