Going Underground

American Punk 1979–1989

George Hurchalla

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781629632421
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Punk Music

The product of decades of work and multiple self-published editions, Going Underground, written by 1980s scene veteran George Hurchalla, is the most comprehensive look yet at America's nationwide underground punk scene.

Despite the mainstream press declarations that "punk died with Sid Vicious" or that "punk was reborn with Nirvana, " author Hurchalla followed the DIY spirit of punk underground, where it not only survived but thrived nationally as a self-sustaining grassroots movement rooted in seedy clubs, rented fire halls, Xeroxed zines, and indie record shops.

Rather than dwell solely on well-documented scenes from Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC, Hurchalla delves deep into the counterculture, rooting out stories from Chicago, Philadelphia, Austin, Cincinnati, Miami, and elsewhere. The author seamlessly mixes his personal experiences with the oral history of dozens of band members, promoters, artists, zinesters, and scenesters. Some of the countless bands covered include Articles of Faith, Big Boys, Necros, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, Government Issue, and Minutemen, as well as many of the essential zines of the time such as Big Takeover, Maximum RocknRoll, Flipside, and Forced Exposure.

Going Underground features over a hundred unique photos from Marie Kanger-Born of Chicago, Dixon Coulbourn of Austin, Brian Trudell of LA, Malcolm Riviera of DC, Justina Davies of New York, Ed Arnaud of Arizona, and many others, along with flyers from across the nation.

Germfree Adolescents

Something’s happening here today,

A show of strength with the boy’s brigade

And I’m so happy and you’re so kind

You want more money, of course I don’t mind

To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes

And the public wants what the public gets

But I want nothing this society’s got

I’m going underground …

(The Jam, “Going Underground,” 1980)

LIKE COUNTLESS OTHERS, PUNK ROCK CAME to me via the Sex Pistols. In 1980, I was in my sophomore year of high school. One of my brothers, Bob, had gone off to college on the west coast of Florida that year and was being exposed to music that didn’t make it into places like my hometown. I was in the classic fourteen-year-old throes of dinosaur rock mania. I listened to Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, and classic older rock like Hendrix, Cream, King Crimson, even Jethro Tull, and I went to my first concert that year to see Nazareth and Ozzy Osbourne.

My oldest brother drove a little rusty Datsun 210 called the HoneyBee with a loud stereo that blared Journey, REO Speedwagon, Molly Hatchet, Foghat, Boston, KISS, and Kansas everywhere he went. While my musical choices were far from enlightened for the time, his were nothing less than a gruesome assault on the senses. Brother Bob was sold on the Sex Pistols from the first listen, and as soon as I heard them I was too. I ordered Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols through a local record store and spent weeks waiting for it to arrive. When my store-ordered copy finally did arrive, it turned out to be a mispressing with the Sex Pistols on the A-side and a jazz band on the B-side, possibly George Benson. Luckily, I found a normal copy somewhere else in the meantime, thus saving me from total bewilderment.

I couldn’t take it off the record player. Looking back at the Sex Pistols in hindsight, it’s hard to believe the album was a shocking revelation, but it was a sorely needed slap in the face to 1970s rock indulgence. We’d never heard anything like it, and we couldn’t get enough. My oldest brother, faithful to his dinosaur rock, hated it with a passion to equal our love. Rock and roll was abominably stagnant, I thought, and the Sex Pistols scared the hell out of the mainstream. Many felt the emperor had no clothes, so megastars like Mick Jagger, Eric Burdon, Phil Collins, and others huffed that the Pistols were talentless.

As legendary as Sex Pistols gigs got to be due to their sloppiness, mainly after the replacement of Glen Matlock on bass with Sid Vicious in April of 1977, Never Mind the Bollocks … is a tight album. From the beginning, I heard my oldest brother endlessly lambast the non-musical garbage of the Sex Pistols. This criticism was a recurring theme I endured throughout my love of punk rock. People fawned over Neil Peart’s drumming, or some metal maestro’s guitar work, but to me none of that mattered. Bands like Rush were as dull as dirt, so who cared what musical geniuses they were? Even Frank Zappa dismissed punk rock as one of the worst things ever to happen to music. All these people were absorbed in their own navels and had lost sight of the vibrancy rock needed most. Chris Spedding, a world-renowned session guitarist, got to the heart of the matter in an interview in Sounds in October 1976.

“The Sex Pistols looked and sounded good,” he said, talking about the London scene that year. “Most groups were boring; they weren’t. I find it very weird, all that about them not playing music. If they are notable for one thing, it’s that. They’re always in time and in tune. I can’t understand why some people have chosen to attack them on the very thing which is their strength. Obviously they’ve got cloth ears.”¹

People are lucky if they ever have one band or album that could change their life so much. I have never played any other album so many hundreds of times in such a short period. Granted, I did eventually overplay it so much that I scarcely listened to it ever again, but I had a wealth of other punk rock to take its place. Most punks will tell you the same thing: one album blew apart their lives and led them into a brave new world of music. For the earliest punks, it was often an Iggy and the Stooges album, the New York Dolls, or the Ramones, whereas for those coming on the scene around 1978 it was often one of the English bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, or the Damned. Karen Allman of the Arizona band Conflict related her first exposure to punk rock, which is typical of how many of us reacted.

My friend Deb and I had driven out to see our friend Cortina Bandolero, an artist who was studying fashion design in LA. She played the Sex Pistols—I said, “That’s horrible! Play it again!”—Boomtown Rats and other stuff for us. She moved back to Phoenix and worked in a record store and kindly lent me all kinds of things, like early Ultravox with John Foxx, the Jam, the first X single and much more. The records trickled in to our indie record stores and we bought them, taped them, traded them …

The Sex Pistols’ brief shambles of an American tour in January of 1978, ending at the awful Winterland show in San Francisco, garnered far more media attention than a band playing venues of that size has probably ever earned. The Winterland show included about five and a half thousand people, larger than any others the Pistols played in the States. Local bands the Nuns and the Avengers opened, and Penelope Houston of the Avengers was appalled at the conduct of her heroes. The Sex Pistols did their show workmanlike—with Sid’s bass amp turned off much of the time—acted like rock stars, did a cover of Iggy’s “No Fun” to punctuate how fucking bored they were of everything, and closed the show by Johnny saying, “Ha ha ha, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” At this point, as disgusted as the Pistols were with each other and the whole spectacle, most of the crowd that attended, like Gary Floyd of the Dicks, came away electrified by such little-exposed music. After all, the Sex Pistols at their worst were still better than 99 percent of other bands that played Winterland.

Penelope Houston recalls the entire event as somewhat surreal and alienating for those already deeply involved in the local punk scene:

They didn’t mingle with any of us. They had a dressing room that was in a whole other part of the building. We were the support and the Nuns were the opener, and we had a dressing room near the backstage. Negative Trend had been brought in by Malcolm [McLaren], who had asked someone who the worst punk band in San Francisco was and they said, “Oh, it’s Negative Trend,” so he brought them in to play after the Sex Pistols. And Bill Graham shut everything down, so they were hanging out with us. There were a lot of reporters hanging out. The Sex Pistols were kind of whisked off and didn’t really mingle with us, so that gave us the impression they were kind of standoffish. Though they did show up at the crowded party on Haight St. at some apartment that was just wall-to-wall bodies, and Sid ended up at the Haight Ashbury Clinic with an overdose. Lovely.

I think I saw them when they came in for sound check, and Sid greeted me by pretending to vomit. We ended up working with Steve Jones later. Their tour manager wanted to manage us, which is how we got on the bill. They just weren’t really there. My disgust that evening was more for playing this gigantic rock show, I’m sure that five hundred was the largest we’d ever played to and that was like six thousand people. Who are these people? I thought I knew all the punks in LA, and a lot of people came from LA, and they were all pissed off the Sex Pistols had skipped their town, being the big city. But even if I added up all the punks I knew in LA and San Francisco, it didn’t add up to six thousand. It was kind of like people came to see the animals, came to the punk rock zoo. The stage was completely covered in spit by the time the Nuns got off. I was really kind of frightened.

The usual connection with the audience I had wasn’t there. Occasionally I’d see the head of someone I knew, and within a second that person would disappear into a sea of heads. When the Pistols played, I went out into the crowd to see how close I could get, and it was so hot and you were immediately covered in sweat, and it was someone else’s sweat. I got as close as I could and I was still six feet from the barrier. I could’ve easily lifted my feet off the ground. People were passing out and getting handed over … I’d never been to a big rock concert and was like, “What does this have to do with our scene and punk as I’ve known it?” It felt really foreign to me. It wasn’t anything I recognized.

Another strangely disgusting thing was after the show was over we were standing around trying to drink as much of the beer and eat as much of the food as we could backstage that was there for us and the media, before Bill Graham’s henchmen threw us out, which happened shortly. The media saw us and the Nuns and a couple of our friends we’d gotten backstage and started snapping away. Someone was throwing beer and popcorn and the floor was all wet and everyone was sliding around and it turned into this bizarre thing where all these photographers were on one side with flashbulbs and we were trying to act as punk as possible within a thirty-second period. It was really weird, and there were some photos from that that have ended up out in the world. They were just taking pictures of us because the Sex Pistols hadn’t appeared and weren’t going to appear and we were the punkest things around and everyone started acting really silly. It was bizarre. We’d only been together six months, and I guess that was my first exposure to paparazzi feeding frenzy. The whole night had a pretty strange feel for me.

San Francisco was outgrowing the hippie era and had developed one of the first thriving punk scenes in the country. Bands like the Avengers, Crime, the Nuns, the Mutants, and Negative Trend all were playing the legendary Mabuhay Gardens—known to locals as the Mab—by the end of 1977. A seminal fanzine called Search and Destroy was launched that year, run by the charismatic V. Vale.

Far more inspiring than the Sex Pistols’ belated arrival was the Damned playing the Mab in April of ’77. While the Pistols stirred up controversy and garnered fame, the Damned often beat them to the punch in winning over punk audiences. The Damned released the first punk single in England with “New Rose” in October of 1976, beating the release of “Anarchy in the UK” by six weeks. They beat the Pistols to America by eight months, helping kick start the fledgling scenes in LA and San Francisco with their mad theatricality and manic intensity. They also played four nights at CBGB in New York and two nights in Boston. Vocalist Dave Vanian told journalist Caroline Coon at the time:

I think we really surprised them. They didn’t realize there was so much energy in our music. Watching their bands … well, when you’re in England you think that New York must be really jumping. But when you’re there it’s not. The bands are much more laid back than you’d imagine. At first our audiences weren’t sure what was happening, but then it was like this. Everybody started gathering round congratulating us all the time.²

In LA, the Damned did an in-store at Bomp Records, played the Starwood, hung out with Blondie, and crashed at the home of the Screamers, showing that they didn’t think themselves above mingling with their American brethren. While the Pistols were the initial inspiration for a lot of punks (including the Damned themselves), the music of the Damned probably had the most influence on California punks at the time. Soon American bands would be playing at speeds that the English bands couldn’t hope to match, and the Damned were one of the bands who opened that door for them on tunes like “Love Song.” The freight train intensity of their music was something not found in the power chord barrage of the Pistols or the sophisticated compositions of the Clash.

The Avengers were one of the best of the Mabuhay-era San Francisco bands, though their Pistols-like sound didn’t immediately win them over to the more avant-garde SF scene. Still, Penelope Houston had a powerful voice and a bad-girl sneer hiding what was later revealed as a fine folk-singing voice. The Avengers managed one 7″ on the Dangerhouse label in 1978 but were frustrated by the difficulties in putting out a full-length album. They only finally managed a 12″ EP after they broke up in 1979 and an album’s worth of collected material four years later.

“There were only a couple of bands when we started,” Houston recalls. “There were the Nuns, and Crime, and the Mutants. In the beginning, it was really diverse, and that’s one of the things I liked about it. In general, my favorite bands from that time were the Dils, the Sleepers, and the Screamers.”

I liked the fact that there were a lot of women involved, but I don’t know that I thought it was that different than anywhere else. Down in LA you had Exene, Suburban Lawns, and a number of bands. I sort of thought of myself as a punk first. I dressed after the first couple of shows pretty androgynously, the classic super-short haired punk, little leather jacket, vinyl jacket actually. It didn’t seem unusual to me, though since then a lot of women have said to me I was their inspiration to start a band, which is good to hear.

The Dils moved up to San Francisco from LA in 1977 and were one of the first bands to play at the Mab, though they credited the Nuns and Crime as the primary bands to inspire the San Francisco scene. With homegrown communist beliefs and a commitment to playing low-priced shows and maintaining a strong integrity, the Dils ruffled feathers in LA and a lot of places they went. Ironically, swastikas were a common shock icon among the LA punks, but Tony Kinman wearing a hammer and sickle shirt seemed to cause more controversy. Not a lot of bands at that point were dedicated to retaining complete control of every aspect of their lives, and the Dils were one of the strongest champions of the independent approach. In a 1977 interview with Alejandro Escovedo of the Nuns and Jean Caffeine in her zine New Dezezes, Tony Kinman of the Dils offered his hopes for punk rock: “If fused with the right things punk could become the new movement, sort of like the late ’60s, but more forceful and sincere. All rock bands have to realize that they can make a transition from being outrageous to being threatening, from being a joke to being an alternative.”

Punk was still highly regionalized, so most punks virtually had no idea what was going on in other scenes. The Dils made some of the first forays up the West Coast in 1978 to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver a month after Negative Trend had pioneered the route, and the Avengers and the Screamers quickly followed. In 1979, the Dils became one of the first underground bands to tour across the country, playing Vancouver, Houston, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

The early scene in Los Angeles was everything one would expect of punk rock in the epic sprawl of violence and chaos that city e...