LA Punk (Early 80s)

It begins in 1973, at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco on the Sunset Strip. Not quite punk yet, but already something else—David Bowie disciples in platform boots, a revolt dressed in glitter. Rodney himself, barely five feet tall, had befriended everyone from Sonny and Cher to the New York Dolls. He ran the club as a cathedral for misfits. When the Ramones played their first LA show in August 1976, witnessed by Greg Ginn and Keith Morris (who'd form Black Flag within months), the congregation was already waiting. The Runaways—five teenage girls managed by the notorious Kim Fowley—had released 'Cherry Bomb' that same year, one of the first records anywhere that could be called punk. Proto-punk bands like the Flyboys and Atomic Kid had been making noise since '74. Black Flag's first show as Panic came in December 1977, at a Redondo Beach hall. LA had a lineage.

What emerged by '78 was a split personality. Hollywood had the Germs, X, the Screamers, the Weirdos—art punks who drew from poetry, film, performance. Darby Crash of the Germs, born Jan Paul Beahm, had been expelled from University High for alleged psychological manipulation of classmates. As Kira Roessler remembers it, 'I was always influenced by my older brother...He had friends from high school who had started a punk rock band and we started to go to shows.' X's John Doe and Exene Cervenka wrote lyrics like Raymond Chandler fever dreams. These bands played the Masque, a basement club on Hollywood Boulevard—illegal, dripping, perfect. The ceiling sweated, the floor was concrete, the sound was mud. The Masque ran from 1977 to 1979, just long enough to establish Hollywood as punk's intellectual center.