By Lisa Francher
New York Rocker, September 1981
Summer always brings the tourist onslaught to L.A. I notice them in Hollywood haunts like the Whiskey or the Starwood, thinking they're right in the swing of things. A sadistic smile crosses my face when I think of these hipsters exposed to what's really happening in Southern California - the New Beaches. I could tell 'em about it but, nah, they'd never believe it....
Thirty miles down the coast south of Los Angeles is an area known as the South Bay: Hermosa Beach Redondo Beach, and Torrance/San Pedro. About thirty miles past that is Orange County, and the most hard-core and original neo-punk scene around: Huntington Beach.
What's creating this shakeup is honest-to-god KIDS, from grade schoolers to ancients (early twenties). They're mostly white and have lots of cash to throw around on entertainment. Even though they're far south of Los Angeles, for about three years now this audience has basically kept the Hollywood scene afloat. THEY always paid to get in while we other scum did the guest list hustle. THEY paid for their locally-released records instead of begging them off the bands. THEY religiously bought all the new imports, thereby making it economically viable for local stores to continue stocking them. And now that the depression's hit, what they want is going to assume even greater importance.
What they want, these Beach punks, is deafening, 90 mph, unintelligible punk rock - the same stuff '77 Bit-punks stole/adapted from the Ramones. The beach kids got sick of driving to L.A.; what with the gas crisis and worse, no Masque (the premier punk club) anymore, there was little reason to drive 60 miles to see L.A. bands playing the kind of pop or Low Art music so stylish these days.
The beach scene just didn't happen overnight, of course. In the Fall of '78 all their grievances imploded in Huntington Beach (H.B.), where there was no particular music scene to speak of - the coolest thing around was to throw a big party while your parents were in Las Vegas. A cover band was hired (for beer) but there was nary a "Louie Louie" or "Summer Breeze" in sight. Instead, any suburbanite within twelve blocks of these bombsights could be baffled by strains of "New Rose," "Suspect Device" and the Pistols songbook. A successful party was judged by the dollar damage to the house and how many police were needed to disperse the fracas and crowds usually hit the 3-500 mark!
In early '79, with every kid in Orange County heavily into punk, a band called The Crowd (graduates of the "party" circuit) played a lunchtime concert at Edison High, one of the area's four main high schools. Their appearance blew the punk scene up to the overground, making the Crowd into the H.B. Beatles and Edison High punk headquarters.
The Crowd's music was primitive then by any standards - a brain-plundering concoction of Buzzcocks/Dickies/Pistols riffs- but music was hardly what the scene was about. It was everything surrounding the music, spearheaded by bands like The Crowd who were absolutely OF their peers. Lead singer Jim Decker could easily have been on the varsity football team, and likewise the Beach punks were no way into wasted-chick. These kids were annoyingly healthy and well-adjusted; most remained surfers identifiable only by their florescent boards and swim trunks. The sickest thing about them was their mass-cult worship of Sid vicious. And there was the little matter of their hair....
At home or uptown, Beach punks are instantly recognizable by their Marine-short hair. Half an inch is plenty long and time for a new crew cut. The most popular style of dress is a sort of Yachting Look left to ferment. Guys can be seen in bright striped knit sport shirts of the Jan and Dean style with short sleeves; golf pants cut baggy and straight, preferably colored LOUD; and canvas deck shoes or high top basketball shoes. Girls are left to their own devices but usually look tougher than the guys! (A subdivision is very big on army fatigues and black leather but still YOU GOTTA HAVE NO HAIR!) I try to imagine these kids, especially the pre-teens, roaming the halls of their schools.... and what their teachers must think after finally accepting long hair after 15 years!
What was flourishing nicely in '79 down in H.B. was also happening independently in the South Bay with bands like Black Flag and The Gears. By the summer of '79, the straight media and local newspapers had begun to pick up on the sonic boom. Inflammatory articles detailing certain incidents involving punk bands and their fans began cropping up. Reporters indicted H.B. bands like the Klan, The Crowd, and The Slashes for inciting the trendy ultra-violence and corrupting what were now legions of punk fans - much like the British press did with the Sex Pistols in their day. What was a little over-the-top fun became a frightening denial of the kids' basic rights once the police became involved. Squads randomly raided the (then) chief punk club, the Cuckoo's Nest, arresting and/or beating anyone who didn't look quite right. Cops stopped punks on the street photographed them and showed these mug shots to complainants whenever a crime report was filed. (Of course this would never be tolerated today. In fact, I think it is a civil rights violation, but of course in 1980, kids didn't have a right to claim civil rights violations. This type of harassment also happened in Glendale. The cops would harass local punks by stopping them and filling out a "field card" on them. - Michele) Shades of Northern Ireland, just to please the arch-conservative residents who believed everything they read.
The Cuckoo's Nest would really be in for a raid when the cops caught sight of "the Worm"! Although pretty much passe by now, for the record, it's a little dance step you do when the music is sufficiently loud and fast. Forget the pogo: just fall on the floor and flail and wiggle around in mock-epilepsy. To the untrained eye it could have looked injurious, but it was just another extreme in a scene determined to show just how far it would go to deny anything resembling polite musical appreciation.
The band playing the Dave Clark 5 to The Crowd's Beatles in Orange County was Red Cross comprised of four kids whose average age was about 15. I used to go see 'em at the Hong Kong Cafe in Chinatown. Their fans were virtual children, walking around with white armbands with the real "Red Cross" logo, and it was there I first saw the kids doing the hippest step around: diving off the stage.
First the floor would be a writhing mass of wormers, then a Beach punk would leap onto the stage, crab dance across it (body bent about 40 degrees and sort of swimming out of water) and dive into the biggest dogpile of bodies. This would be repeated endlessly during Red Cross' epic 14-minute sets. Of course, sometimes the poor kids would get stranded onstage: Red Cross' songs were so short that in the time it took to make the entire dive the song would be over!
The police harassment and community outrage let up by fall when everyone realized that the kids were basically harmless (though admittedly the H.B. bands did have their hard nuts, who used the punk scene as an excuse to beat up other kids and paint the ever-popular swastika on every available surface).
With all this free publicity and a mass audience just begging for Beach vinyl, it was only a matter of time before someone came along to record all this. Bands like Black Flag handled their own best-selling singles by themselves, but it was an L.A. entrepreneur- a repatriated American with a posh British accent, Robbie Fields (aka Posh Boy) - who put the New Beaches on the map with Beach Boulevard. Along with the Simpletones (sort of a male Shangri-Las with funny lyrics) Rik L. Rik (good Iggy circa Raw Power) were Crowd hits like "She's a Modern Machine" and "Trix Are For Kids," all recorded in an effectively simple mode (at Mediart, of course, the Sun Studio of the beach) to pack the max wallop. The album STILL sells 50 copies a week in H.B.!
Following on its heels came "The Siren, also on Posh Boy Records. The album's salvation is Red Cross' songs: "Annette's Got the Hits" surprisingly reveals that they can actually play and proves once again my pet theory that to be really ACE the punk band in question must be (A) Funny. Intentionally or not. (B) A hair's width away from Heavy Metal. Take my word they're funny; then listen to "Annette's" bass line and tell me it wouldn't do Def Leppard proud!
Five years from now, when Planet Records or some other hip "new wave" label picks up on the beaches, it's gonna be no-go. Robbie's already committed the hard-core, the authentic and the relevant to tape NOW. No local radio stations - college or commercial - will touch this stuff in its primeval state. What you get is Rodney for a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday on KROQ, spinning platters at the Starwood on punk nights. Otherwise, forget it. Beach punks will still drive up to Hollywood for the combination of Rodney and a hard-core bill. A recent X-Fear bill gave twelve kids concussions, diving off the Starwood stage, while one Mike Marine went about chaining anyone with long hair. Bad Vibes? Let's venture down to their territory....
The Fleetwood is the new punk headquarters. It's in Redondo Beach, directly across the street from the water. What a bill tonight: Fear, Bags, the Gears (soon to release their own LP), Circle Jerks, Gun Club and the Urinals. All for a heavy five bucks. The garbage can is already on fire and the parking lot is a swamp of broken glass with punks grouped in clumps between cars. The Fleetwood is a re-designed roller rink with lousy sound that holds about 500 people (legally). Next door is the Sweetwater, a far-out hippie nightclub that's haven to the real danger; long hairs who will consider it a very good night if they put a few punks away with any available weapons and yes they do have guns in their trunks. (Hippies with guns in their trunks? Common, this doesn't sound right. I was at a number of these shows and you were not taking your life in your hands to go to the Fleetwood - there might have been one or two skirmishes - and I never witnessed any myself- but to basically cast hippies from the Sweetwater as no better than gun-toting thugs akin to South Central gang members, I think is over the top. She's basically saying we took our lives in our hands every time we went to a Fleetwood show! - Michele)
But tonight everyone is hoping the bruising will occur on the dance floor and not in the parking lot. This seems reasonable as the Urinals open the show, sounding a lot like Wire's first album meets Half Japanese. Slash is filming the proceedings and I'm just glad I'm not on a precarious platform in the midst of the pogoing/worming/diving masses. Gun Club are next; they don't play fast enough and are hastily gobbed of the stage. (Isn't it nice how spitting can be a complement or a mortal insult?)
I should admit the Circle Jerks are my fave local band before getting too carried away. They feature the diminutive Tasmanian Devil, Black Flag's Keith Morris on "vocals" and guitarist Greg from Red Cross, making them the first Beach supergroup. Keith immediately ruins the film screen behind the band by spray-painting CIRCLE JERKS on it in huge black letters. He gestures wildly with a Budweiser Baptizing the punks in beer, tangling himself up in other Jerks' cords and legs. It's one chaotic, teetering mess of a band and it's hilarious.
In between C. Jerks and Fear the punks flatten soft drink cans (absolutely no alcohol is served her) into the hardest, flattest discs possible and shoot them off the balcony at the kids below. Of course the downstairs crowd won't take this lying down and returns the volley. Twenty minutes in this shooting gallery plasters the uninvolved to the walls. Someone throws an M-80 into the toilet.
Fear's next. They're my second fave local band and their songs really go by FAST. "1-2'3'4" and it's over - all you have time to do is say, "Those are the weirdest-looking bunch of geeks I even saw..." Philo and Durf look like a couple of Appalachian refugees; singer Lee Ving is a muscular bit of beefcake who rips the audience mercilessly between songs in Brooklyn cabbie dialect. But not being a Beach band, the kids aren't going for Fear tonight. Nary a punk dives off the stage - a real insult.
Midway through their set, a kid rushes upfront and says something that causes virtually the entire audience to exist en masse, leaving Fear in perplexed silence. Cops are suddenly inside rousting people and the parking lot is full of squad cars parked helter-skelter, as a Hippie vs. Punk free-for-all is in full swing. Girls cry. Punks are covered with blood. I think I've seen enough for one night. But I'll come back. Slap six or seven punk bands together and it's going to be combustible. Long may it stay that way.
What's really exciting about the new Beaches is fans creating their own entertainment, starting something new and original (to them) instead of lapsing into complacency like most bored teenagers. Their enthusiasm can save a totally boring concert like Public Image's L.A. show just by insisting that they get off the stage no matter how many security guards there are. If the Buzzcocks refuse to move around at the Santa Monica Civic - well, the Beach punks will get up on stage and dance for them in throngs.
The best part about all this is that, though it may have taken three years, these California kids have finally broken away from British apery and come up with something so crazy and incomprehensible it could only be American. Nobody will be able to commercialize this Beach scene and practically no one will be able to fathom it. Amen!
THE END
(The article is an endorsement of the beach scene; citing its originality but after giving a positive overview of the (possible) origins of the beach scenes - South Bay (which is hardly mentioned) and Huntington Beach, it dissolves into a harrowing account of one Fleetwood show (which I don't think I was at - I would have remembered soda cans being thrown as assault weapons). I don't take issue with her observations on the violence, and she isn't even finding fault with it. But my issue is whether or not the violence can all be attributed to the "the beach punks." She's not really condemning the violence, in fact she seems to think the energy level is a positive force and she credits the beach punks for saving the Hollywood punk scene. However, I wonder if a more accurate characterization of what happened is that "the beach punks" drove the Hollywood scene into extinction. But I'm getting off track....
This is written six months before the Craig Lee NY Rocker interview in which Craig Lee insinuates that all the troublemakers came from the beach (or in his analysis came from everywhere but Hollywood, since all the suburbs were lumped together as being the same scenes). So now we've got TWO articles basically pinning the entire hard-core audience on Huntington Beach. Please, can we stop with the geographic blame-game? I have no evidence to retort this too-often-heard claim, but my feeling is that a lot of the troublemakers were in fact foreign elements ("jocks gone wild," weekend punks, whatever you want to call them).
My husband, Mike of VOA, (Glendale scene) tells me that he remembers the summer of 1981. He says he was at the January 6th Black Flag/Starwood gigs and many other hardcore gigs during that year and remembers the violence. But he says he remembers seeing jocks from HIS OWN HIGH SCHOOL at the January Black Flag Starwood gig - which sort of lends support to my theory that it was just a lot of jock thugs at large. - I'm not saying HB didn't contribute to this - I'm saying probably jocks from every Los Angeles satellite suburb probably contributed to it.
I invite your theories, firsthand observations, etc. Did you see jocks from your high school at these shows? I know we can't definitively resolve the issue of where all the assholes came from, but we can perhaps provide evidence that they came from a much wider geographical area, other than just Huntington Beach (which has now gone down in history shouldering all the blame). Of course Lisa's profile of the Huntington Beach punks is just pulled out of the air (eg. they have lots of money, they buy all these records, etc - I mean, was a scientific study conducted to determine if any of this is true? Or were just a couple people interviewed. So you have to take this with a grain of salt, but it does make for entertaining reading and it is one of the few published articles focusing on the HB scene that is written by a "Hollywood" punk insider.
As for the veracity of her "origins of Huntington Beach punk" (1978-1979), I can't verify whether or not that's how it happened. Maybe some HB original scenesters can write us and tell us how accurate this tale is. I wasn't introduced to the Huntington scene until 1979, when it was already in full-swing and by then my focus was not on uncovering the roots of the scene, but on having a great time. However, in Flipside #14, published in April 1979, Noelle was the HB scene reporter and this is what she had to say - Michele):
Huntington Beach Scene Report, Flipside #14, April 1979:
(HB) here there is a new variety of people, a fast merging group of kids. These impressionable people started as a small clique and now is a group larger than any other, they followed older friends who were involved with the beginnings of punk - and there wasn't much here no clubs, no bands, just magazines, radio and records. The older people were slow to catch on but the few who wee labeled as punk were hit the hardest by all the stuck up assholes at school but they didn't change and then they grew and grew and within a year there was a band: "the new" which became The Crowd. At last a band for people to identify with to draw them into LA into a new scene. Then it became real "in" to be punk and it is mostly all surfer guys because the other groups at school had went disco or something else. High school became a warground, the school vs. the punks. Well the punks rule there now and the Crowd has lasted 10 months and after them came Isolation (now the Klan) then other bands of which some lasted and some didn't. Now we have The Crowd, The Klan, The Press (precursor of The Skrewz - Michele) The Presidents, and The Outsiders, to name a few. I never thought that in two years this would happen and now it's really happening in Huntington and so what if we live by the beach! - Noelle
(In the Jan/Feb. Issue of Slash, the Crowd were interviewed and in the interview they briefly touch on HB/violence issue - Michele):
Excerpts from The Crowd Interview, Slash Jan/Feb. 1980:
Slash: Did you read the stuff in the Times and the other papers? Was that just hysteria?
Crowd: That was all police propaganda. Parents wouldn't their little fifteen year old kids dress and cut their hair the way they want. We talked to one of the local papers and they put what we said on their front page. It's just a few assholes screwing everything up. Everyone was trying to make that every punk kid was an asshole. Some of those papers would put that there were 30 punks beating on old ladies. It's just not like that. 1 or 2 blow it for everyone. The punks were scapegoats for the newspaper for a couple of weeks, for anything that happened. The police made a lot of it up. You know, a little kid carves a swaztika in his arm, his mother sees it, and he tells her, "Some big guys held me down and did it!" That's what I don't like about Huntington, there's too many Nazis still around. They think it's cool to fight all the time. It takes everyone a while to progress. Some of them are our fans. A lot of different kinds of people like us.
Crowd: There's people who go to gigs with no other objective in mind except to beat people up. The stupidest thing I've ever seen is punks beating up other punks. There's people who think that's cool.
Crowd: Muscle-heads. And it's always the big guys trying to beat on the little guys. We've got a song about this guy who thinks he's the coolest in town and he beats everyone up. It's called "Tough Like you." Someone'll get him though.