Los Angeles Punk & Hardcore
Hollywood art-damage flips into beach-city hardcore: faster, shorter, louder, and documented on camera the whole way.
What you're really asking
Two scenes wearing one name. First the Hollywood crowd — art students, drag, poetry, the Masque basement, records on Dangerhouse and Slash.
Then the suburbs came in from Hermosa Beach, Lawndale and Venice, cut the songs to ninety seconds, and turned the audience into a weapon.
Where it sits
Brendan Mullen opened the Masque under Hollywood Boulevard in 1977; Dangerhouse and Slash started pressing the bands that played it. Bob Biggs formed Slash in 1978, launching with a Germs seven-inch, a Germs album the next year, and X's Los Angeles in 1980.
By 1979 Greg Ginn's SST in Lawndale and Black Flag's rehearsal space in a Hermosa Beach church were pulling the centre south to the beach towns. Lisa Fancher, a former Bomp!
, Adolescents and Suicidal Tendencies. Penelope Spheeris filmed The Decline of Western Civilization in 1979–80; it hit screens in 1981 and gave LAPD a lineup card.
Mike Watt and D. Boon ran New Alliance out of San Pedro.
By 1983 the speed had bled into thrash metal, and skate culture took the rest.
The scene
Who: Darby Crash and Pat Smear, Exene and John Doe, Greg Ginn, Keith Morris, Lee Ving, Mike Muir, Milo Aukerman. Rooms: the Masque, the Starwood, the Hong Kong Café, Oki Dog at 3am, the Fleetwood in Redondo, Vex in East LA.
Ed Colver shot the covers. What: downstroke guitar, no solos, songs under two minutes, vocals shouted flat against the beat — Hollywood kept the art-school weirdness, the South Bay bands stripped it out.
How a record gets in: self-released or on a local indie, recorded cheap and fast, sleeve designed by someone in the band or their friend with a camera.
The leading records
Black Flag
Damaged
1981
Rollins' first album with them; MCA refused to distribute it, calling it anti-parent, and the dispute with Unicorn put Ginn in court for years.
X
Los Angeles
1980
Ray Manzarek of the Doors produced and played organ — rockabilly bass, two voices in deliberate dissonance, the Hollywood side at its most literate.
Germs
(GI)
1979
Joan Jett produced it; the band could barely hold a tempo live, so this is the only clean document of Darby Crash, dead a year later.
Circle Jerks
Group Sex
1980
Fourteen songs in fifteen minutes, carrying two numbers Morris wrote in Black Flag and one Hetson brought from Redd Kross.