We Are The One

The Adolescents were playing with Black Flag that night in an obscure hall on the rundown outskirts of Hollywood. Both bands were near the top of the LAPD’s “Do Not Play” list, which the police had distributed to all the major clubs in town, with the understanding that the cops would come and shut down any place that dared give these groups a gig. I had witnessed this in person when Black Flag played the Whiskey A Go Go a few weeks earlier, looking down from the backstage room upstairs between sets as the L.A. County sheriffs, who had jurisdiction at the time in this unincorporated part of West Hollywood, pulled up en masse to shut down the place. At first, it was exhilarating to watch as some of the kids who had tickets for the late show began fighting back. I looked down to see a cop take a fist to the face, and at one point it looked like the sheriff department had bit off a little more than it could chew. That was until a couple of cops took shotguns out of their squad cars and aimed them right at the wall where the crowd was pinned. A handful of arrests later, the skirmish was over, and we all were quickly ushered out of the club.

When I got to the unmarked hall in Hollywood where the Adolescents and Black Flag were playing that night, the show was already sold out, and a couple hundred kids were hanging outside hoping to get in. Getting in to see that show had taken on a moral imperative. I was not going to lay down meekly that night, although the powers I was immediately trying to overcome were no grander than a couple of overtaxed bouncers and the Asian club owner, who had become frightened at the burgeoning crowd.

The hall owner’s mistake was to leave the front doors open, because those two bouncers were no match for a couple hundred angry kids.The bouncers were letting one person in for each one that left the hall, but soon the limited patience of the crowd snapped. Everyone began pushing towards the door, and pretty soon the bouncers fell back, letting a few dozen race past. I was almost at the entrance when the bouncers pulled out their mace. I ducked just in time, letting the crowd help drive me past them into the hall. A bunch of kids got maced, and then the bouncers were able to shut and lock the front doors.

It was too late. The crowd rushing in through the door caused a sense of panic among the rest of the staff, which consisted mostly of Asian guys who spoke just halting English. They beat a hasty retreat, eventually giving up the bar on the right side of the hall that had been separated from the main floor by a curtain. The kids took over, dispensing their 18-year old idea of anarchy, as cans of beer flew across the room, some into waiting hands, while others burst open on the cement floor, leaving much of the hall sticky and wet.

By this point, the cops had arrived in force outside the club. They issued an ultimatum from their megaphones that the concert was over and that we would have to leave the hall. But it had passed the point of being about going out for a night. We broke a few tables, wrenched a few two by fours against the doors, and dared the cops to do their best.

The Adolescents sang,“Pushing all the limits to a point of no return/Trashed beyond belief to show the kids don’t wanna learn”.

We were ready.

So the LAPD let the bands play that night, although Black Flag only got in about 20 minutes before someone pulled the plug. When the show was over, we at first quietly filed out of the club. But there were several hundred of us on one side of the street, and a wall of cops on the other, and so the obvious happened: some kid threw a bottle, then there were a few more in the air, the cops charged us, and we scattered.

A lot of ink has been spilt expounding on the violence, the antagonistic politics, and the modern primitivism of Southern California hardcore in the early 80’s, but virtually all of these folks miss the point. Yes, Huntington Beach was the home of the HBers and their Skank, and this was the immediate progenitor of “slam dancing” (which, BTW, was a term coined by a 2nd rate journalist for the LA Times looking to meet a deadline). It’s also true that Huntington Beach was the first town on the continent, if not the planet, where the punk gangs were bad enough and large enough to live out the Clash’s fantasy to take the world’s aggression and give it two times back. And I must admit that for awhile there in the early 80’s, live punk rock had essentially become the soundtrack for a bunch of boys eager to practice a new form of aerobics.

The dynamo that no one talks about is how So Cal punk was the fruition of a culture, of a particular stripe of middle class America. It was no accident that the echoes of that first wave of British punk found resonance in the hearts of all these beach kids. Being 18 in 1979 and growing up just on the other side of the Santa Ana River from these H.B.ers, I also felt the pull. Sure, the music was energetic, and they tended to sing about angry things. But the bands that I liked best, namely X Ray Spex, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, and the Sex Pistols, had all these great melodies. It was music that compelled you to action precisely because it was beautiful, and perfect, and true.

The first, best wave of O.C. punk bands, headlined by Social Distortion and the Adolescents but including a dozen other bands, like the Crowd and all the groups on the Beach Blvd. comp, captured the barr chords of English punk within the resin of the Beach Boys. Even the less melodic of this first wave of O.C. punk, like TSOL and Middle Class, were not just loud and noisy, but also a lot of fun.

Then these these long-haired jocks, “fucking hippies” we used to call them, would hassle us on the beach and in the street. And the cops would shut down our parties and our shows, pontificating in the local newspapers about us like we were some kind of alien invasion, and not the home grown kids of O.C. suburbia.

Suburban life had been designed for us, for our generation to grow up in. It was like the energy that all of our ancestors exerted in rolling this ball up the hill, in scratching out a hard scrabble life on the Plains back at the turn of the century, and then our parents or grandparents moving another 2000 miles to the end of the continent to make their toe hold in the sand, had been made manifest in us, spoiled suburban kids growing up in the Southern California sun. We had all this kinetic energy, and when we saw our friends and neighbors making this great music, we knew that it was a flowering, this amazing, organic thing that was a reflection of our home.

We were willing to fight for that. I was a skinny 18 year old, and my mouth was a lot bigger than my biceps, so when a car full of jocks rolled down their windows and began yelling at me, which happened more than once, of course I had to yell back, and then I’d try to puff and swagger when they first got out of their car, but once they got close, I was out of there.

But some of my newfound friends had different ideas. I knew this one guy, Dan, who went to the beach in West Newport, which was ground zero for a lot of these fights, with plastic devil’s horns glued into his canary yellow hair, a big swastika on his surfboard, just daring someone to fuck with him. I also remember the talk about how Brent Walker, a star athlete one year younger than me, had cropped his hair short, started wearing an earring, and got in a fist fight on the beach with the football star from the class two years ahead of me. It didn’t matter who won that fight, just that things were changing.

By 1985 or so, it had become safe to be a punk rocker on the beach of West Newport, although out of habit I was still a little skittish about hanging out there on my own. Eventually, West Newport became the home of Dennis Rodman, and all the beach bums loved him, yellow hair, tattoos, and all. Whenever I go back there, I feel a little homesick, at least in part because the music of my youth has become an integral part of the fabric of Orange County, from the stickers on the skateboards and the patches on the beach wear to the music playing at the Van’s store when I try on shoes. We had to fight those fucking hippies some 25 years ago, and it’s a good thing that we won.

The Avengers were always one of my favorite punk bands, with their classic Pistols-era barr chords and their catchy riffs. Penelope Houston was a pin-up girl for the disenfranchised, a teenage dream of my fevered brain, up their with Poly Styrene and Joan Jett, a flesh and blood Pussycat. And “Thin White Line” is one of the greatest punk rock songs ever penned, essentially copping the riff to “God Save the Queen” as an intro but then following it up with other, equally hooky power chord progressions before punching you in the gut with the syncopated chorus, “You said, Don’t go, Don’t go, Don’t go to Babylon, But hey Joe, I’m already there”, daring to rip off Jimi and the Pistols in one swoop yet still create a song that is memorably their own.

By all rights, the Avengers should have gone platinum, and Penelope should have been bigger than Debbie Harry or Madonna (she’s hotter than both, she’s badder than either, and she can sing at least as well). But unfortunately, 1980’s America shrugged its shoulders at punk rock, being fed an odd mixture of British synth pop, watered down R&B, and tuneless hair bands for much of the decade. As good as the Avengers were, there is no way that mainstream radio was going to anoint a young woman with spiky blond hair singing “It’s the American in me that thinks it’s an order to die in a war that is a politicians lie” as the next superstar (It’s also unfortunate that the band is best remembered for that song, which was propelled by one of their weaker riffs but benefitted from the instinct of most college DJ’s to opt for the obvious). So we got a decade where gold records were doled out to the like of Ratt, Survivor, and Night Ranger, while the great and the memorable toiled in relative obscurity.

But the truth will win out. And so, just like the Sex Pistols played in front of 50,000 fans in the middle of the California desert and Joe Strummer is now in the rock ‘n hall of fame, while Night Ranger plays at the county fair in Des Moines, I believe as a matter of faith that the Avengers will have their moment in the sun.

For me, that moment came this past summer, when I saw them play the Beat Kitchen in Chicago. The Avengers were in their final throws by the time I got turned on to punk in 1979; original guitarist Ingraham had left the band, and I never got a chance to see them. It ranked as one of my few musical regrets, these little tragedies of an incomplete life, joining the likes of Joy Division (who never made it to the U.S.) and the Specials (who I unfortunately boycotted when they played the Whiskey on their 1st American tour as my protest to being fed the latest English trend).

This past summer featured a host of punk nostalgia tours coming through town, including the Buzzcocks, X, the Adolescents, and Naked Raygun, just to name a few. While the Avengers were my one must see on this list, I remained apprehensive about how much I should expect from a 25-year old retread, and when a reunited Effigies opened up that night with a well meaning but uninspired set, looking like they could still do well winning a fight in the alley behind the club, which was always one of their selling points, but lacking the riffs or enthusiasm to propel any but their most die hard fans, my expectations were further lowered. I found an out-of-the-way spot against the wall before the Avengers went on where I could talk with my buddy Paul, who was an out-an-out disbeliever in any sort of revival nostalgia, looking askance at the entire spate of musical Lazuruses, as if to say, “Now what?”

But that all changed when those first barr chords rang out from Ingraham’s Marshall, that meaty sound a clarion, letting you know right off that here is a band that knows what it is doing. Something welled up in me, and I yelled, “Sorry Paul, but I’m into this”, and I melded into the pogoing crowd, only to find him right behind me. After the Avengers blasted through “We Are the One” and “Thin White Line”, which are my two favorite songs of theirs, I wondered what could be next, worried that they blew their wad too soon. But the band kept rocking, ripping off one great song after another: “Car Crash”, “Open Your Eyes”, White Nigger”, all of which sounded so much better live than on record, as the energy of their young, tight rhythm section combined with Ingraham’s thick Marshall sound. Houston stood at the edge of the stage, pumping her fist, staring out at the crowd, a real front person, a star, thrilled to show everyone in the room how it was done.

Even the songs that were a little awkward on record, like “Uh-uh”, made perfect sense as live music, as the crowd chanted along with Houston, “Uouh-oh-oooh-a-ohh...na, na, na, na, no, na,no.” “Second to None” and “Desperation” were both revelations, songs that I sort of skipped over on album but were revealed live as pure rock ‘n roll brilliance. “Second to None” features a Steve Jones, Professionals-era guitar riff combined with Penelope’s defiant vocals and the punctuacted chorus, a mini-rock ‘n roll lesson in itself, with its: “Well that’s one, I’m second to none, and that’s two, I don’t know what to do, and that’s three, you’re telling me, I’m still your baby”, those seemingly silly lines become resonant by their syncopation, the pause after each number, and then the slowed down final line that takes twice the time to sing as the other parts of the chorus. There was a similar use of fist-pumping rhythms to even greater effect in “Desperation”, the crowd chanting the chorus, “We’re running out of ... time/ We’re running out of... breath/ We’re running out of ... desperation,” with Penelope’s growl in full flower.

Back in the early 80’s, after fighting the rednecks, the jocks, the hippies, and the cops on the streets, making it clear that we weren’t going away, the mass of beach punks were chomping at the bit to take the next step, to do something grander than trashing a club or kicking in some heads. We knew that we had power, at least enough to force the bouncers off the dance floor at will, to drive the cops crazy, and to make our own scene. Like any mob, we awaited a leader, for someone to tell us what to do next. And that’s where things fell apart. For awhile, Black Flag had the bully pulpit, but they seemed intent to separate their stage show, which was what it quickly became with Henry in charge, from any kind of wider purpose. Jack from TSOL had the presence and the desire to lead but no greater vision than you’d expect from a sociopathic party animal; even if their first EP featured songs like “Property is Theft” and he once convinced an entire hall full of kids to sit down in quiet protest as the cops were trying to shut down a show, Jack was really just doing it on a lark.

Black Flag laid it on the line: “Standing here like a loaded gun, waiting to go off, I’ve got nothing to do but shoot my mouth off.” But you could only watch their stage antics so many times before you realized that there was to be no 2nd act, unless you count the slow devolution from misanthropy to misogyny. So they bequeathed the stage to the nascent hard core movement, whose frantic guitars could only partly hide a paucity of vision, ideas, or even melody. It seemed every other hardcore band had their obligatory anti-Reagan tirade, as they must have sensed that there was a political component to be tapped in all this energy but were too blinkered to envision what that could be. The fanzines were littered with wandering diatribes and 2nd hand ideologies, and most obsessively there were the extended, petty arguments about who was fucking up the scene.

Melody is the musical manifestation of beauty, and if beauty isn’t tautologically bound with truth, they’re at least on a similar continuum of the soul, one nobility of mind and the other of body, so when in doubt, I go back to melody to guide the way. And what more beautiful melody than when Penelope sang that night at the Beat Kitchen in sync with the pounding rhythms and the warm Marshall chords:
we are the leaders of tomorrow
we are the ones to have the fun
we want control, we want the power
not gonna stop until it comes

In some alternative universe, all us California beach kids heard the song on KROQ that week, have filled the Palladium, and are now chanting the chorus: “We are not Jesus ... Christ, we are not fascist... pigs, we are not capitalists... industrialists, we are not communists, we are the one.”

Penelope is there to lead us to the promised land, singing “I am the one who shows you the future, I am the one who buries the past, a new species rise up from the ruins, I am the one that was made to last.”

And you know, in that alternative universe, I would have listened to her.