The original article is way too long to reprint in its entirety. It isn't until about half way through that it even begins to talk about the beach scene and since this is a "Vanguard vs. beach punks" discussion and I'm about to come down with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from typing, I'm cutting to the chase and only retyping the relevant portions. Believe me, even with the relevant portions I'll be lucky if you make it through the entire article. Damage was a S.F. based publication so its long on artful context before you get to the meat. In any case I apologize if this seems to jump a bit as I'm trying to keep this article close to the vest of our discussion. The zine did run a disclaimer.
Welcome to the War Zone: The Suburbs Strike Back
By Jonathan Formula
Damage #11, December 1980
FORWARD & DISCLAIMER
First off is the matter of "credentials." The intent of this article is not to sensationalize or cop attitudes about the "beach punk phenomenon" as has been done in other publications. Rather, it is an attempt to get more of the truth out about the musical/cultural changes that have been taking place in LA for the past few years. So the personal dilemma I have encountered is whether someone like myself, who doesn't live in Southern California and who is at least a decade older than the people I am writing about, is "qualified" to do it. One of the problems implicit in magazines is the limited amount of time available to research something thoroughly. This ain't the Encyclopedia Britannica, droogie. With an unpaid staff and zero budget, this magazine has to put up with writers who actually refuse assignments! And also with truckloads of manuscripts describing Blondie's latest outfits or the burgeoning punk scene in Elk's Face, Wyoming. So, I'm doing it because I feel like it, and if you alert and committed readers, spot gaping holes in my knowledge, or if I forgot to mention your band, or your town, or have anything to say at all on the matter, the editor of this noble stalwart hankrag has assured me repeatedly that your letters of rebuttal amendment, supplementation or basic piss'n'moaning will be printed in the very next issue. So if you don't like it, write it yourself!
(Unfortunately, I don't have Issue #12 so I can't print the letters that most certainly filled the pages of the letters section following this expose'. And at this juncture, let me describe a bit of what I cut out. The writer is discussing the complexities of Los Angeles and the many cities contained within the greater Los Angeles area. He states that due to the diversity of the cities that make up the LA punk scene, the LA media doesn't even attempt to get it right in terms of discussing the cultural nuances of the Los Angeles punk rock scene. The article features a profile of Black Flag's precursor band, SWA, which leads into his dissertation and where we will pick up the story below - Michele)
SWA
What is SWA? SWA is your future... if you have one. The Command Group will instruct you when you are needed.”
Black Flag are an interesting bunch of people. They are truly committed to their philosophy of “no rules,” and ignore pressures from all sides. The recognize no authority other than their own. Formed in 1977 in the South Bay region of L.A., Herosa Beach to be precis, the band has been playing gigs for about one-and-a-half yers and are about to release their second EP, as well as putting out an EP by a band called the Minutemen. In the years they’ve been around the L.A. scene, the members of Black Flag have become all too familiar with the pornography of poer, the details of interpersonal affairs which make up the flow of events.
The amount of sleaze they have encountered boggles the mind, and the way in which they handle it convinces one of their legitimate commitment to personal freedom, rebellion, disruption of the status quo and social change, in whatever form it happens to be manifest... other than fascism, naturally the antithesis of what they’re about. Their songs are personal, and consequently free of rhetoric. They actually live what they profess, and don’t calculate their next pose the way most people do. the music is sheer adrenalin rush - they do not take drugs to play, and they couldn’t care less if anyone else does or doesn’t indulge. The power in their music comes from real anger, real frustration, real excitement. One short burst of Black Flag could conceivably lay to rest the phantoms of a hundred Elvic Costellos bleating away “angrily” in the minds of the undecided.
Their following is far from undecided. Most are under eighteen, in high school and live in the suburbs with their parents. they are part of the crowd of kids who are lumped together, inaccurately, in the category “beach punks.” Most of their current fans are from the Valley and the inland South Bay towns. SWA was bass player Chuck Duke’s and guitarist Greg Ginn’s experiment in social psychology. It was never, perhaps fortunately, carried out to its fullest. Having been exposed so often and intensely to the raw, virulent side of power, they decided it would be of interest to perpetrate a social phenomenon, bring it to a boil and destroy it, in order to educate people to the dangers that lurk constantly. first move, naturally, was to create a rhetoric, and then follow it up with some tailor-made dogma. Then, pursuant to a demonstration or two of power, destroy the whole thing completely.
So we got SWA. SWA was proclaimed at some gigs thereafter, and questions were answered with the line above. Further questioning was discouraged by the SWA Elite, who were let in on the relevant parts of the secret and instructed to give no more information than “The Command Group will instruct you when you are needed.” The SWA Elite were invited to stand on stage behind the band on a couple of occasions, their arms extended in a vaguely familiar salute, the letters SWA written on their knuckles. The dogma included some very basic principles. There are SWA people and places and thinks, and their are non-SWA. Non-SWA were to be rigorously ostracized. Once, during a Black Flag tour of the Northwest, Chuck and BF singer Dez performed an acoustic set as SWA. The lyrics to the songs were about sweetness, love and nice things, up until the chorus, which was “hate, kill, destroy....” The experiment was shelved for more immediate projects, however, but SWA remains as a potential ace in the hole.
They are the ones accused by the queasier writers of the LA Times, LA Weekly etc. of "ruining good shows for the rest of the people," the ones who were the subjects of Patrick Goldstein's infamous Times article playing up the horrid violence and unruliness. Essentially, the beach punks, "Aitch Bee," (for Huntington Beach) are simply the advance guard of a movement that is spreading throughout Southern California high school people and if California is the trendsetter for the nation, will soon be visible among kids in that vast, uncharted marsh of middle-class desolation between the coasts.
Huntington Beach is a traditional surfing town, some 40 miles south of LA, in Orange County, the richest county in the world and a genuine WASP wealth, power and reactionary politics ghetto. What happened is no more complicated than a few kids, in late '76 or '77, picking up on bands like the Sex Pistols, and telling their friends about it. The surf/skateboard culture has always been very much a movement towards freedom, and an escape from repressive or just plain stupid parents, schools, churches and police. People are very physical in that part of the world, and once punk was accepted by the surf/skate crowd, a new form of release was found and it was logically and naturally expressed in very physical terms.
(Wow, this guy is using Eugenics to explain the cultural differences between HB and the rest of LA - this takes the cake! - Michele)
The beach crowd, Huntington specifically, is endowed with a reputation both for fighting and fierce, clique-ish devotion to each other. For awhile, there was almost a gang feeling to their approach. And, naturally, they were made the scapegoats for everything that annoyed the sedate and complacent: They were called naive, illiterate, stuck in 1977 because of their style of dress, ultra-violent. The violence did exist, and continues too, but in recent days there is much less regionalism and what appears to be a riot is simply a crowd of people blowing off their own frustrations. People are bashed around, and occasionally real fights break out, but they are generally non-critical and end with both parties jumping back into the characteristic beach dancing fray: A sort of slow, vulpine prowl, arms pumping, elbows flying back, knees and feet lifted in a kind of rhythmic skip. There is usually a hard core of these dancers in the middle of the floor right in front of the stage, and when things get real wild, a few of them get up on stage and literally dive into the swarm of bouncing, kicking, pummeling bodies, like espontaneos at a bullfight.
No one has bothered to point out that this activity is no more violent than football, which is a noble American sport, and a whole lot less violent than any given heavy metal gig anywhere, any time. Another fact that is omitted from the reports is that a large percentage of the people bashing away in the thick of the ritual are young women, whereas heavy-metal is almost exclusively a working-class male province.
And the class angle is the most telling. Most of these kids are normal, middle-class high school students, almost all white. Many of them are children of Love Generation parents, who either despise their look and attitutdes, or else are tolerant of them, causing the kids to push them even harder. And you did wonder what the hippies' kids would turn out like, didn't you?
But for the most part, they are "normal" teenagers who have embraced punk as the best way to release their anger at the futures that are presented to them. The beach punks are flexing their muscles, and taking the heat from the masses of kids from the Valley, and all the other suburban communities they come from. The beach punks are the risk-takers. They are learning. They are not as stupid as you may think they look, and if the jostling ruins your fun, you're probably non-SWA anyway, so fuck off.
Black Flag is one of the foremost among the bands the young suburban punks follow. Others are the Circle Jerks, the Skrewz, the Adolescents, the Descendents, China White, Social Task, True Sons of Liberty, Middle Class. There are also hardcore punk bands in East L.A. like the Stains, The Undertakers and the Brats. Yes, they are Chicanos, and yes, they play punk rock.
According to some sources, a lot of the bands could be described as playing Black Flag at 45, not to say there isn't a high degree of individualism in the scene. But Black Flag were a seminal influence on Southern California music - the real thing that's happening in the sleazy clubs, at parties- not the bands that are paraded thorugh the pages of the LA weekly and ProFun as the new darlings of new wave.
So there is a huge underground music scene in LA that even the local media can't quite fathom. Slash was one hope but no one knows when the next issue will out, and Flipside is the only other fanzine operating at the moment. Other sporadic rags have come and gone and may come out again, like Panic, No, Oh See (from Orange County), Brendan Mullen's Slush and Youth Party, but coverage for this scene is badly distorted, and justice isn't done to the bands or their fans or the values they claim to stand for.
The first signs of the coming tide were seen at a club in Redondo Beach in the summer of 1980 - the Fleetwood. Mau-Mau's, Red Cross, Fear, X, Skrewz, Dead Kennedys and Middle class as well as Black Flag played the Fleetwood. Other bands that played but were not received as well as the above were Chiefs, Plugz, Agent Orange, the Go-Gos... before the Fleetwood, it was tough for suburban bands to get gigs, so they were snubbed by the hipper-than-thou Hollywood scene.
The main HB club is the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa. The Skrewz, China White and a few others play there, and at parties, and a whole new "scene' exists, out of sight of even supposedly tuned-in observers.
According to Black Flag's Chuck, the HB crowd are "just hectic, not malicious."
Most people regard them as dangerous. Chuck states that his feeling is that pot-smoking jocks are more violence-prone than the skateboard punks of HB. For the most part, excessive violence is perpetrated by security forces at clubs who don't know exactly what's going on, but can sense the lack of any respect for authority and see a whole lot of pushing and shoving and rowdy fun, not like the nice new wave gigs with the meek little Day Glo people who cringe when they're told "Calm down or get out."
A good example is the recent Black Flag/Stiff Little Fingers show at the Stone in SF during the Western Front. The security ran amok when people in the back stood on chairs to see better, and their way of asking them to spare the furniture was to drag people off the chairs by their hair, drag them out the emergency doors into the alleyway and kick the living shit out of them.
Jonathan, a burly black man with a salt-and-pepper beard who worked the front door of the club that night dressed in Ranger Tom Event-Security drag, told us that he works a lot of big arena heavy-metal shows, and that what goes on at punk shows is tame.
The behavior of the security squad that night was enough to seriously mar the evening for most of the crowd, and those who were physically abused by drooling troglodytes in the management's employ may have a serious grudge.
But up to now, information about the beach punks has been secondhand and filtered through any number of biases. Following are excerpts from a taped interview with a group of kids who came up to SF one weekend this summer to see the Circle Jerks and Black Flag at a couple of local gigs. While they were here, they managed to cause mini-riots everywhere they went, got into no end of fights, and gave the locals something new to piss and moan about for weeks. One of the bunch - or his parents - is allegedly suing the Mabuhay Gardens for injuries sustained by a Budweiser-bottle-wielding patron who was not in the least amused by the treatment he was receiving from this youth-cultural vanguard. In any case, here are some beach punks speaking for themselves.
(The next paragraph called “AGE” appears to be the group of people the writer is interviewing. Unfortunately none of the statements are credited to their original source, The writer has separated comments made by different people is with the use of ellipses "...." - and then not stated who made the comment. Michele)
AGE
Drew, seventeen, Mugger, seventeen; Lauren, twenty-two; Mark, seventeen; Chet, seventeen; Michael, eighteen; Mike, seventeen; Lisa, sixteen; Tony, twenty-two; Greg, seventeen; “.... now why don’t you ask how old some of these people really are?” All laugh. “.... I Q or age?...” All: “Duuh!”
On Religion
“... I just believe in the theory of eveolution, so I don’t believe in religions... well, let’s put it this way: If you’re surfing and the ocean tries to kick the shit out of you and you fuckin’ somehow survive, then you have a belief, you may not be believing in God, but you’re believing in something that kept you alive, you know... all our main beliefs here are just mainly survival... and have fun doin’ it...”
On the Definition of Terms and the Scene:
"....we're not surf punks. Surf punks are geeks. There's a band called the Surf Punks from Malibu Beach, and they're all hippies. They're into making money. They're new wave. Surf punks hang out on the pier at Redondo Beach and they never go to shows, they have long hair cut off on the sides, they call it a 'crop,' they wear Bermuda shorts... we don't hang out on the beach.... some people go surfing, and they get done and go back inland or wherever... we go down to the beach and see if we can scam on the hippie chicks sometimes... if you asked me if I was a beach punk, I'd tell you no.... HB, HB, HB... we don't have a 'scene,' the scene is wherever the gigs are.... we just live, we live in Redondo, Huntington Beach... Long Beach... San Pedro... the scene is wherever the bands are that we like.
On Fashion:
"....SHORT HAIR!....HBer boots... lots of bandanas... jackets, jeans, zips, leather.... pimples... cockrings, leather spiked wristbands.... BO.... most of us are just trying to look as ugly and fucked as possible, it's good for shock value... that's why Mike don't wash his face and brush his teeth... I don't think I look ugly... not the chicks, anyway... we want to look different, to everybody else it's ugly. Here we are with our hair all dyed, we got it cut, standing out everywhere, we wear ripped-up clothes, we wear Levi's ugly, dirty boots, bandanas everywhere, chains... I think it's being distinct...it's something that's so tight in the group everyone accepts it, but outside of that group everyone hates it...."
On Hand-to-Hand Combat:
"... you're all out there for survival on the dance floor, you're out there to have a good time, and if somebody is making hassle, you can beat them up just by dancing... that's how fights get started usually, is 'cause we're dancing, not fighting, and they think that we're trying to hurt 'em... Who thinks that? The geeks, people with new wave ties... so all of a sudden someone will jump on one of our friends that's only dancing, and they don't understand..." Question is posed: "Do you go out to gigs looking for fights?" "....When we see someone at a gig we don't like, we fuck 'em up... like we just dance into 'em and motivate 'em into a fight, and they start, and we finish it... last night (Circle Jerks at Mabuhay - ed.) we went out to show everyone what LA is all about, we were in a very radical mood, if we had to fight we had to fight... I like to fight... I'd rather just kick back and hear a good band play than really fight... all of us would!... no, sometimes we go out and look for fights... me, myself, sometimes I go out, I'm a little bit drunk, I'm really rowdy and I'm just waitin' for somebody to give me some shit..."
Defensive Dancing:
"... a lot of people get mad at the way we look, a lot of people get mad at the way we dance... we have basically our own dance... it's not called 'The Slam'... there's a lot of names for the way we dance, they call it the "HB Strut,' we don't call it the 'The Slam'... we get out on the floor and we feel good... our dance is very violent, very radical, and... throwing your elbows, kicking your legs... it's like just going crazy, but you keep your head down and your arms swinging all the time, full power... but you don't just beserko-out , you're going to the music... you don't care who you hit, because you've got so many people around you that your friends, you do what you want... we thrash our friends just as much as anybody else when we dance... (equal-opportunity pummeling - Michele) I know for a fact that I got this black eye from one of us last night 'cause no one else was dancing that rad.... I was seeing stars, I swear.... (am I the only one busting up reading this? This is the funniest shit I've read in a long time - It's so violent that you could get hit by one of your friends by accident, but not even know its your friend or who it was who gave you the black eye - I guess there's no pulling over in the pit and exchanging driver's licenses and insurance cards! - Michele) .... and we're really into dual stage dives... the dance is basically the same, but everyone's got their own steps. Myself, I like Jerry Lewis..."
Incident at the Starwood Featuring Mike Marine:
"The guy hit this girl, and I was standing with this Seal Beach skinhead named Brett Reeves, and we literally attacked the guy. It started out being just me and Brett, and we beat the guy up very badly, and then he hit the ground and ten other people... he spent three months in the hospital, he lost an eye, he got all his ribs broken, two legs broken, two arms broken, four fingers, two toes, his nose was broken in three places, his jaw in five, he lost seventeen teeth...." (This is just beyond belief that human beings could do this to any other human being, no matter the excuse/reason. This is absolutely sick! - Michele)
Statement A:
"All the bands and the people in LA, they put us down, for what we do, about all of our violence, because we've gotten them kicked out of a gig, but if we wouldn't have gotten them kicked out of the gig, the fucking kids, they would have gotten their asses kicked out in the parking lot... Without us, without all the Huntington Beach punks, without all the Redondo Beach punks, all the radicals, the scene would not survive. That's the bottom line... the catch-22."
The Time the Anti-punk Committee Showed up at the party:
"There was this party in Newport Beach... in Westminster, around the inland areas, they have these... oh, man!... this group of hippies that just don't like punks, period, and these are mainly the guys that- football players-that come down to the beach during the summer. They call themselves the Anti-punk Committee, they showed up at a party in Newport Beach. There was all the skinheads there and everything, and it was a really closed party. They crashed the party and three of them were stabbed. They came in with clubs, baseball bats, chains... the punks didn't get their asses beaten all to... and here's these dudes, big jock types, eighteen, twenty of 'em, they came in there... that's what happens in LA all the time..."
Blue Suede Shoes:
"What really makes us mad is we'll go to a gig, and the one place where we can get away from it all, where we can get our aggressions out, on each other, is out on the dance floor. And then we'll turn around and there'll be some hippie asshole standing on our dance floor. And sometimes we'll go up behind someone like that and point them out and everybody will all of a sudden just turn on the dude, or someone will just grab him and start wailin' on him, and he'll get off the dance floor. When we go to a punk gig, the dance floor is ours. We decide who gets on it, if we don't want nobody on it, they ain't gonna get on it..."
The Cause:
"the cause is to be different from everybody else, be ourselves, not be bored, to have things the way we want 'em, not the way society wants us to have 'em... I agree with that... not letting society rule your life... having fun, even if it means violence... the thing that we're fighting for is our freedom, it's like people look at us and say "Hey, why'd you dye your hair? You're not supposed to do that, I think I'll beat you up because society says you're not supposed to do that,' so we say 'fuck you' and beat their ass..."
Word Association Test:
Part I: "Beach punks are only jocks with spiky hair"
All: "jocks?!"... "I don't consider myself a jock at all. I don't like jocks. I don't go out for athletics. The only sport I would like is soccer, myself, and I don't even do that much no more... the only exercise I do is on the dance floor and when I fight... I'm more into having fun, and having sex... I surf and skate and I like it... it's all a label... they get drunk and fight, yeah, but they're devoted to building up their muscles, they devote their whole life to helping out their future. Right now, personally, I don't care about my future, I care about right now. I'm having fun right now and that's what matters to me... I'm 18 years old, I'm young, I'm still having fun, I'm not ready to settle down, and a jock is working on his future constantly from elementary school on up.... I believe that there's a future, but the future is what you make it, what you care about, right now I don't care about the future, I don't care what happens to me, I believe that a person can do anything he wants to do, I got a long time to live, if I die tomorrow, I wanna die having fun...."
Genophobia in the USA
I don’t mind being picked on, I think it’s cool... but we are harassed, very much.... the cops... people in my high school.... society alone... For example, I was tanding out in back of Tony’s house the other day and there’d been talk of this black guy going around and beating up all the punks, just walking up to them and punching the... and there’s little punks there, there’s thirteen-year-old punks there that walk around, they’re not that tough or anything and they get their ass kicked all the time... so this little guy, this black guy walks up to me and I’m standing their and he goes, ‘You got a problem, boy?’ And I instantly recognized him and I went ‘You’ve been beatin’ up on my friends,’ you know, and he pulled a knife on me and said, ‘Now what you gonna do about it, crophead punk-ass motherfucker?’ you know, and I had to defend myself. That’s harassment, right there... we cannot walk down the street without getting pulled over by cops and getting searched, I’ve had cops pull guns on me and tell me to hit the ground just for walking down the street, they search us, they run warrant checks... (a well-documented and very common practice among suburban police consists of pulling over anyone they see walking, biking or skateboarding on the street who looks even vaguely like a punk and taking a Polaroid picture of them for their “punk file,” which must be mostly daughters and sons of the solid burghers the cops are serving and protecting - Ed.).... I’ve gone to jail before for throwing a match on the ground... we have a friend down in Huntington Beach, his name’s Potatohead. He was walking down the street with these two girls two weeks ago and this car just, ‘Hey, punk?’ totally mowed ‘em over. They hit them, threw them on the ground, and apparently one of the guys in the car was his next door neighbor. I don’t know if it was because he was a punk or what, but they just mowed ‘em down... and usually the cops, if something happens in the city, it has to do with punks whether it was their fault or not... they say, ‘You’re punks, you’re not part of society, it’s your fault.’ They know what they’ve read about us and what society makes of us. We don’t usually go out and make trouble... like when I got in a fight with that black guy, the cops were looking for me, and everyone in the tract, the whole housing tract had seen him pull a knife on me and they told the cops that I pulled a knife on hi... yeah, I have a chip on my shoulder. I have a chip on my shoulder about the way we get treated. We’re human beings like anybody else. Just because we’re different from society, we’re outcasts. I like being an outcast, I’ll shave my head just for shock value, but I’m still a human being and I’ve got human rights, American rights, Constitutional rights and everything. And it seems when you turn punk, where we come from, you all of a sudden have no rights. like I’ve gone to jail before and the cop will turn around and tell everyone, ten, fifteen guys, ‘This guy’s a punk rocker, he’s a faggot, he’s into pain, do what you want,’ and they put me in the cell with them. What am I supposed to do? I’m a person, a human being, just the same as you, just the same as the normal working class person. I just have different beliefs...”
It seems that once again we have a movement on our hands which has at least all the Sturm ung Drang (I love these 4-dollar words! - Michele) trappings of foundation-shaking ROCK MILESTONE periods. they do seem to be coming more and more frequently, don’t they? But that is an intrinsic characteristic of the Computer Age.
The side of the story we haven't examined yet is the set of reactions to the suburban punk craze on the part of people who aren't directly involved but are certainly being affected. The overall feeling among some of the Hollywood crowd who are older and more "sophisticated," is slightly ambiguous dismay and disgust.
Some strong opinions and analyses are also voiced by denizens of other cities, who experience the apparent chaos and mob rule at gigs played by the new breed. It's frightening, they say, to see all these kids who basically look like jocks in punk drag taking over the floor. It's boring, they say, to see their vintage London '77 style of dress and their vintage ultra-snot attitudes. Some refuse to go to gigs they know will result in the unruly horde. Possessed by mob mentality, being the main attraction, even more so than the bands themselves. the latest trend, we're told is for as many audience members as can fit to get up on stage and just stand there, eliminating the barrier between performer and audience in a basic, brutal way, and after that, what's the point of having a band at all?
As far as cause and effect, some feel that the fact of recent exposure to punk music, styles and political stances are what have resulted in the fervor displayed by the suburban kids. Another opinion favors a less intellectual motivation, although those factors may be of secondary importance, emphasizing the deeply-implanted love in all American youth of group activity, real or dramatized violence, rebellion, fuck-authority attitudes and wild parties.
My own view - formulamus lifts squinty eyes from espresso grounds and weasel entrails and speaks - is that the new breed of young teenage punks represents a new expression of an all-American, even a universal, human adolescent condition: the condition that was hypothesized by James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause; the condition of youthful alienation, powerlessness, frustration and disgust with oppressive authority that exists among people of that age group in every culture. Anywhere in the world, the most peaceful little villages employ a constabulary to maintain order on weekends when the young lads go out to drink and fight, and a priesthood to enforce guilt systems when the young lasses sneak out to drink and fuck, and in these modern times, the girls fight, too.
The most important point, to my mind, is that if now becomes necessary to face the music: The categories are once again blurring. The motivations of Midwestern youngsters who borrow their parent’s car to go to a Van Halen Gig where they can blow it all off and the motivations of suburban Angelenos and Vancouverinos (Vancouver is another city where middle-class punk is in a state of active growth and ferment, with bands like DOA, Subhumans, Young Canadians, and others, the place where remnants of the Dils have gone to ply their version of folkish rock with prairie-populist Woody Guthrie-on-speed sentiments) are ore congruous than some would care to think. And the most troublesome prediction: if white, suburban teenagers on the West Coast are embracing the spirit and dialectic of punk with such fire, “the fervor and fanaticism of converts,” in the words of a respected colleague, isn’t it conceivable that we can expect the same fire to sweep through the Great Midwest, which is far more dry, conservative and culturally barren than even the most rabidly reactionary Orange County burg?
And one last caveat: I doubt if there is anyone reading this who hasn’t experienced a parent or other similar figure, at some point in your rying but truly colorful life, dear reader, expressing a grossly unfair opinion about whatever crowd you may have been running with, or clothing style you were wearing, or hair, or music, or drugs, or sex, or anything at all they couldn’t have anymore because they were already Authority Figures with Responsibilities and an Example to Set - we won’t discuss middle-aged alcoholism or divorce or crime - an opinion they contrived solely from snatches of mass-media exposure to sensationalized and distorted reports on activities they probably yearn for in their heart of hearts, but piously condemn with fanatical fervor.
So you’re entitled to your opinion, of course. If you think the kids are poseurs, so be it. If you love the bands and their music, but can’t stand the gigs, resign yourself to buying their records. In any case, try, won’t you, not to sound like your parents when you say they’re all mindless thugs. Remember your own stages of growth, whether it was three or seven or twelve years ago. Remember when you knew you weren’t as stupid as you looked, you visionary in barbarian’s clothing. And above all, in the trying times to come, dear friends, cling to the meaning of the good old creepy-crawl.
(I'm going to end it here. since the rest of this continues on for 3 more full-length finely-typed 11x17" pages - and is a blow-by-blow account of the riot at the Hideaway - a club that literally was torn down by hand (I kid you not, according to the Flipside Fanzine account!) and as well as a good account of the DOA/Black Flag "riot" at the Whisky, etc. Go here to read the article. - Michele)