This is an idea that quickly spiralled out of control once I started putting in the research - so much so, that it is going to end up spread over two or three parts!
Who is Pat Smear?
While the name may not be very familiar to most, Pat Smear's face should be recognisable to anyone who was following alternative music in the mid-90s.
Smear was actually born Georg Albert Ruthenberg in Los Angeles, in August 1959, to a German-Jewish father and African-American / native American mother. He started on the piano, before teaching himself the guitar. At thirteen, he left home and joined a commune, before ending up on an alternative high school programme. That is where he met Jan Paul Beahm, whom we will meet again later as Darby Crash - both ended up getting expelled.
He popped up as the second guitarist for Nirvana towards the end, before becoming a key member of Dave Grohl's follow-up band, the fairly successful Foo Fighters. But, on investigation, his story is an interesting one and goes back to the heyday of punk.
So, he seemed the ideal bookend, for want of a better word, to look at the interesting and varied phenomenon that is West Coast punk; from his start in one of L.A.'s seminal punk bands in the late 1970s, through to his live work with Nirvana in the early 1990s - the torch bearers for a grunge movement that seemed, to me at least, to be the natural conclusion to what had started further down the west coast fifteen years earlier.
West coast punk combined a range of experiences and sounds that sprung up, seemingly independently of each other, in various communities across late 1970s California.
It seems that these bands took many of the same influences; the Pistols, the Damned and The Clash from the classic UK first wave; US proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the MC5; plus a bit of left-field glam from the likes of New York Dolls and Bowie - these were all shaken up, with the odd extra ingredient thrown in, resulting in some seriously different outputs from area to area.
Through Pat Smear's timeline and beyond, we will see how the sounds of late 70s west coast punk slowly morphed into the genres we know as grunge, sludge and alt-metal.
1976 and all that
Fresh from their expulsion from a somewhat offbeat West L.A. high school, Georg Ruthenberg and Jan Paul Beahm needed an outlet. Music was the obvious solution (Ruthenberg already played guitar), and with the Runaways as their early influence, a band was formed.
Initially called Sophistif*ck and the Revlon Spam Queens, they needed something shorter, as they couldn't afford to put that many letters on a t-shirt. They settled on the Germs, and Ruthenberg was now Pat Smear, while Beahm became Darby Crash. They recruited Teresa Ryan (Lorna Doom) on bass and a pre-Go-Go's Belinda Carlisle (Dottie Danger) on drums. And while Danger's stint was barely a few weeks before she had to quit with a bout of mononucleosis, they brought in Becky Barton (Donny Rhia) instead - played their first three gigs and cut a single.
Their first live show was at the Orpheum Theater on Sunset Strip, with Smear recalling, "we made noise for five minutes until they threw us off." They were drawing on influence from Iggy Pop, David Bowie and the New York Dolls, and managed to record a two track demo in Smear's garage. First single, Forming, would be released in July 1977 on the What? label.
Germs: Forming (Audio only)
They were characterised by their live performances, which were generally chaotic - marked by excessive drug use, routine taunting of their crowds, but also a degree of theatricality and decent musicality.
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Down the coast a few miles, at Hermosa Beach, the band Panic was being formed, including guitarist Greg Ginn and singer Keith Morris. They also were taking on the simplicity of those Stooges and Ramones influences, but also adding in jazz and metal elements. This meant that the songs they were writing could often be longer and slower than many of their contemporaries.
Chuck Dukowski had joined them on bass, with Brian Migdol on drums. In later 1978 they would become known as Black Flag, and play their first show under that name in Redondo Beach in early 1979. Those early gigs featured often violent scenes, something that seemed to be an issue at many of these west coast punk gigs - with much of the violence being directed at the punks from the LAPD (Chief Daryl Gates was known to hate punk and was happy for his cops to do what they had to do to break gigs up).
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Another completely different take on the scene was also happening right there in LA. This started in 1977 when John Doe (John Duchac) and rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom (Stuart Kindell) began practicing together. Doe brought his girlfriend Exene Cervenka (later his wife between 1980-85) to their sessions, and she became the singer. Donald 'DJ' Bonebrake completed the line-up behind the drum kit (he had also briefly filled in for the Germs).
They became known as X, and released one single, Adult Books backed with We're Desperate, on the local independent Dangerhouse label, in 1978.
X: Adult Books (Audio only - lovely little rock n roll number, with its reference to novelist Jacqueline Susann)
Hardcore and beyond: 1978-1980
The music scene down in Fullerton, on the south east side of L.A. (north side of Orange County) was also developing. In 1978, a sixteen year old Mike Ness, already with a reputation and a love of country, blues and rock n roll, not to mention an interest in gangsters like Bonnie & Clyde, was drifting into the growing local punk scene.
Inspired by the Stones as much as the Pistols, Ness teamed up with others including Casey Royer and Rikk Agnew to form a band. When his high school friend Dennis Darnell joins, who can't play an instrument yet, the others leave instead of waiting for him to improve. But nonetheless, Social Distortion is born.
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These punk rumblings aren't unique to Los Angeles though. Three hundred and fifty miles up the Californian coast, in the San Francisco Bay area, Raymond Pepperall, a young man raised on blues and classic big band jazz, has also entered the world of punk. He places an advert in The Recycler newspaper for prospective bandmates. Geoffrey Lyall, Eric Reed Boucher, Bruce Slesinger and Carlos Cadona, four very un-punk sounding names, answer the call.
They would adopt new monikers though; and instead a band is formed from East Bay Ray (Pepperell), Jello Biafra (Boucher), Klaus Fluoride (Lyall), Ted (Slesinger) and 6025 (Cadona) - naming themselves with a degree of shock value, the Dead Kennedys (the band insisted it was more of a historical comment than an effort to disrespect the Kennedy family). They learnt that they would often have to adapt their name to the DK's (or use a pseudonym) to get gigs, to avoid the controversy and get cancelled. Their first gig was at Mabuhey Gardens on 19 July 1978.
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With very few record labels interested in releasing any punk material, Greg Ginn decided to create his own. He already had some business acumen, having formed a company, Solid State Tuners (SST) at the tender age of twelve, selling surplus radio parts. He just brought it all up to date, and SST Records was born.
He worked out all he had to do was find a record pressing plant and give them a demo to print. First up was the four track Nervous Breakdown EP, the only Black Flag recording to feature original singer Keith Morris. It was released in early 1979, with an initial pressing of two thousand copies.
Black Flag: Nervous Breakdown (Audio only - a high speed thrash)
Brian Migdol left to be replaced behind the kit by the Colombian Robo (Julio Valencia), and then Morris also quit, citing musical differences with Ginn, although drug issues seem to have been involved as well. Despite all this, Black Flag were becoming noted for their speed and ferocity, as critic Ira Robbins said, "[they were] for all intents and purposes, America's first hardcore band."
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Keith Morris was soon back on the scene. The same year he quit Black Flag (1979) he was in a new band, Circle Jerks, with Greg Hetson (formerly of Red Kross) on guitar, Roger Rogerson on bass and Lucky Lehrer on drums. Their added flavour came from Rogerson's classical music background and Lehrer's jazz upbringing. They signed with Frontier Records, with their debut, Group Sex, being released in October 1980.
Circle Jerks: Deny Everything (Audio only - a 30 second thrash, one of 14 songs in 15 minutes of debut album Group Sex)
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Possibly the most well known of the early west coast punk anthems was released in June 1979. California Über Alles was based around Dead Kennedys distinctive early surf rock sound, underneath Jello Biafra's sneering, slightly manic vocal delivery. It was a satire of Californian Governor, Jerry Brown, and weaved in themes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Bergman's film The Serpent's Egg. Like Ginn, Biafra and East Bay Ray decided they needed to take record deals into their own hands, and put it out on their own Alternative Tentacles label.
Dead Kennedys: California Uber Alles (Video - featuring the slower single version)
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Brian Tristan was the teenage editor of a west coast Ramones fanzine. Already more than familiar with debauched lifestyle of the L.A. scene, he found himself living away from home, working crappy jobs, semi-permanently high on drugs and alcohol, and hanging out with many of the players on the scene. He was a regular at Joan Jett's wild parties, and counted Go-Go Jane Wiedlen as a friend.
But it was only when he bumped into Jeffrey Lee Pierce (head honcho of the west coast Blondie fan club) in the queue for a Pere Ubu gig, that not only was a new friendship formed, but also the idea that he could also be in a group too. As it was punk, the fact that he couldn't play an instrument didn't hold him back, Pierce lent him one and taught him how to play simple stuff with open tunings. Creeping Ritual was born, with Don Snowden on bass (also the music critic for the L.A. Times) and Brad Dunning on drums, and while they struggled musically, they were already standing out from some of the other bands, with a heavy blues influence.
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Back in the chaotic world of the Germs, October 1979 saw them release their debut album, GI, another key forerunner of the hardcore scene. L.A. Weekly noted that "this album leaves exit wounds". They also recorded six songs for the Al Pacino film Cruising, with the track Lions Share ending up on the soundtrack.
Germs: Lexicon Devil (Live version - an insight into the crazy world of Darby Crash)
Watch out for Part II in the next few weeks, where we see where the movement went as the 1980s dawned.
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