CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY him over. Blood is streaming down his face, from his nose and mouth, blood caked on his moustache. Two Starwood bouncers push through the crowd and help the hippie to his feet. Stunned, he staggers towards a stranger’s car, any car, any way to get out, but the car pulls off, and the hippie starts running down the street. A group of young skinheads scream, “ Hey, let’s go get him!” With demented looks of glee they chase the longhair down the street. Once the hippies had antagonized them—in Redondo, the longhairs would beat up a punk on sight— now this relic was on their turf and it was their turn. Everything is done in groups, in packs. “ Oh those skinnies are not so tough,” says Jimmy Trash. “ You get one or two of them alone, you can wail on them.” But you don’t find them alone. Jimmy Trash thinks it started happening with the kids going to Hollywood and discovering what they thought were the politics of punk: the world is fucked. Immediately, dayglo died down, and after the summer of ’79 it was boots, bandanas and chains. Though half the kids thought to be “ H.B.ers” were actually from the Valley, the kids from Huntington Beach quickly got a reputation as the baddest punks around. Panicky stories began appearing in the local papers in H.B., reporting horror stories about roving gangs of punk rockers doing things like tying up a 13-year- old and forcing him to carve a swastika on his arm. Or the recent story of a chauffeur in Newport confronted by several punks. They exchanged words, the punks pulled out switchblades, one of the punks grabbed the chauffeur in a bear hug as another stabbed him in the heart. He fell to the ground, bleeding, screaming that he was going to die. The punks laughed, spit at him and poured beer on his head. “ It’s speed and alcohol,” says Tony, lead singer for the Adolescents. Tony is 17, a skinny kid with ears that stick out. He’s seen his friends snort black beauties off the tips of knives, get totally wired on speed and go to school the next day still frying on meth. A lot of kids are shooting crystal meth now, and with the emergence of the Hollywood heroin scene it’s only a matter of time before China White, the powerful synthetic heroin, and Persian appear in the suburbs. Tony is a typical suburban punk. From Fullerton, he lives in a lower- middle-class house with a divorced mother and several brothers and sisters. Like most punks, he got into the scene through listening to the Sex Pistols, and like most suburban punks, he and his friends were ostracized at school for being different. Also, like the majority of punks you’ll talk to, he doesn’t really like to fight, but sometimes he has to—like the night at the Starwood: this guy kept bugging him, so Tony told him to fuck off, and before he knew it POW, in the face, so Tony tried to punch him back but lost his balance. All of a sudden, Tony was suffocating beneath the bottom of a pile of boots, chains and leather jackets. Suddenly, he felt a finger digging at his face—someone was trying to dig his eye out! A friend spotted him in the mass and pulled him out, and when the punks realized who they were ganging up on, they apologized., “ Hey man, didn’t know it was you . . .h e y , sorry.” Tony was badly shaken up; after all, if he hadn’t been in a band, he might have lost an eye. “ Those guys don’t have respect for anybody they don’t know,” he says. Those guys are basically using punk as an excuse. They might be exjocks, they might be ex-lowriders, but as Jimmy Trash says, “ With punk, wild youth can become wilder youth.” If you look at the guest list for a “ beach punks” show, it seems like a list of villains from a Dick Tracy cartoon: Mugger, X-Head, Potato Head—a natural enough extension from Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. Never mind that these kids are three years too late. It’s their turn now, and they mean to take it in full measure. Because the images are meant to be offensive, it’s hard to propose a “ rotten apple” theory for even surf punks —but it’s valid. Awhile back, for example, a group of kids found the door open to the art gallery that is next to an East L.A. concert hall known as Vex. They ran in, threw pictures off the wall, jumped up and down on the pictures, smeared paint on the walls, broke office supplies. But meanwhile, the guy who promotes Vex was onstage asking other kids to be cool— and with considerable success. Such an incident creates a heavy media reinforced stereotype of monster punk-rock children. It takes only five ex-jocks-turned-skinheads fighting in the middle of a crowd at a Black Flag concert to make it appear as if a full gang war is going on. Greg, from Black Flag, remarked, “ 1 saw a small note in the back pages of the newspasper about this Mexican dance where two people were stabbed. And all it merits is a small little section in the back of the paper. If that happened at one of our gigs it would be all over the front page.” THEY said that $20,000 worth of damages was caused at Vex. That’s fucked .. .it was a nice club, I don’t know why they had to wreck i t .” The kid talking is named Louie. He’s 14. He plays bass in a band called Mad Society with two other 14- year-old friends from school, Aaron and Mark, a 17-year-old girl named Cathy, and the group’s lead singer, Louie’s 11-year-old brother Steven. Physically, they don’t look too much different from the average punk, the one who is accused of being violent, destructive, anti-social. But they say they just want to have fun, not destroy. Louie and Steven have their mother’s “ consent.” An extremely youthful-appearing manicurist, she bought Steven his first 'microphone and finds what the kids are doing to be “ interesting.” She sometimes worries when she hears the stories of trashing, drug abuse and violence, but she trusts her children and feels that to restrict them would create the same kind of anxiety that she felt at the hands of her overly strict European father. Steven and Louie represent another side of the new generation of punks—they are innately creative and intelligent. Steven makes all his own bracelets and necklaces, which resemble original American Indian artifacts—and he is only in the fifth grade. He thinks drugs are stupid. JEAN is in the Starwood one night. She is one of those girls who thinks for herself, as Black Flag would have it. She has very large breasts and no qualms about displaying them in one of those push-up bras she got while working at Frederick’s in Hollywood. She likes to display herself and will often shock people by flashing at them. She is an artist, and this is a performance to her. Walking through the Starwood hallway that connects the bar and showroom, a group of neuter-looking girls with their hair shaped in various spiky multi-colored designs become extremely agitated at her presence. “ Slut! Whore!” they scream at her. A skinhead grabs her. She pushes him away. The girls scream, “ Fuck her. Fuck the whore!” Though Jean had been in on the punk scene since its initial Masque days, her physical presence is an object of scorn and hatred. “ Free love” is associated with hippies and all the garbage the girls’ parents once got excited over. The girls will tell you they think sex is stupid, gross; the idea of people bumping their ugly organs in the dark is repellent to them. They don’t know that the founding punk heroes, the Sex Pistols, initially appeared with nude girls on stage. Nudity is disgusting to them; they are appalled by such things as No magazine, which pften features pictures of undressed “ personalities.” These are teenage girls who’ve avoided the problems of impending sexuality by denying the issue altogether. Not that the boys would be above making some girl in a group, but unlike other rebellious movements of the past, like the beatniks or the hippies, the new punks are one of the first anti-social groups that do not use sex as a weapon against “ straight” society. Straight society has already been through its “ sexual revolution” and sex is too commonplace a thing. The punks see gays parading on Santa Monica Boulevard by the Starwood, porn shops in plain sight, black prostitutes lining Sunset Boulevard. And they don’t find sex all that interesting or thrilling. If you are gonna be anti- anti, totally negative, then sex, affiliated with love, is not the cool thing. Love is dead. Everything is dead. Remember, there’s a band called the Castration Squad. DA VE doesn’t care about anything. Why should he? What good would it do him? He doesn’t want to grow up to be a worker at MacDonnell-Douglas. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he sure knows what he doesn’t. He might have once found an outlet fo r his confusion and hostility by skateboarding and surfing, but now i t ’s punk, and i t ’s cool to shoot meth and bash some heads together. The world’s screwed up, except he’s gonna mess it up first. He’s not going to take things like what happened at the Whiskey. Black Flag, scheduled to do a concert there, we buy used records had been told that the Whiskey would let in 400 people fo r each show. But they only let in 200, leaving a mass o f angry, ticket-holding kids outside. Then the cops showed up; instead o f handling the situation calmly, the cops ripped up the tickets o f some o f the kids in line. A bottle was thrown, kids started pushing and shoving, and a riot situation was created that did not have to happen. To hell with the bands, anyway, Dave thinks. I don’t need them. The spirit of the initial punk scene was this: a band would form and in three weeks be on stage, even if they couldn’t play, like the Germs in the early days, or even if they weren’t able to sing at all, a complaint often leveled at Exene or Alice Bag in their initial appearances. But in those days it was totally exciting to see anyone do something different. Fans would outdo themselves screaming for more, more: more intensity, more excitement, more of a demonstration that the old boring rock was dead and the new life was beginning. Now half the kids could care less, and the bands are more a way of passing time than a way of life. The Pistols would sing “ No Feelings,” and the kids are becoming the reality that the original Hollywood punks were a parody of. It doesn’t sound like very much fun, you think to yourself. And maybe it isn’t for a lot of the kids. They sense a right-wing repressive society in the near future. And though the majority will tell you they don’t believe in trashing or fighting, there are still the ex-jocks and lowriders from the nice middle-class homes who have no qualms about smashing into an antique car in front of the Hideaway. Their excuse: “ They should have known better than to park there, anyway. Their club sucked, they were giving us a hard time getting in.” Jimmy Trash is convinced the kids will stop the violence because they want their scene to survive. Mad Society just wants fun, not destruction. But that notion has yet to stop the kids once rejected in high school who are now considered “ in” because they’re punks. It hasn’t stopped the ex-jocks, the ones who see little difference between dancing and football practice. It hasn’t stopped the hostile children who, instead of wrecking their indifferent parents’ TV sets, tear anything they can find off the walls of the rented clubs they go to. The English press has often snidely alluded to punk in L.A. being a farce, not like the scene there that grew from a revolt against a life of lower- class drudgery. But facing a sterile, anonymous life in suburbia is as depressing to some kids as facing a life of dull labor andjow wages is to the English punks. This is their one chance to swing out at a world they want no part of. And kids like Dave are not about to miss the opportunity. ■ ©1980, LA Weekly 42
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