Lexicon Devil

On Thursday night, I went to the Music Box, bought a box of Snowcaps, and then settled in to watch “What We Do Is Secret”, the new Germs biopic, on the final night of its one-week stint there. I left the theatre a little stunned, I’m sure partly because I don’t get out much nowadays and am easily impressed, but mostly because I’ve never seen such an accurate fictional portrayal that touched on events in my own life. “What We Do Is Secret” is obviously a labor of love, but it is also ruthlessly clear-eyed in its mythologizing, to the point where I’m surprised that the film ever got made at all, because it makes few compromises to any Hollywood notion of how to create empathy or tell a story so that the uninitiated will understand. The reviews of the film reflect this, as they seem to be looking in askance for some sort of exposition on the band’s supposed genius and have been somewhat incredulous when a conventionally acceptable portrait was not provided.

The movie begins with a teaser of a concert scene, followed by the opening credits and then a series of documentary-style monologues by some of the characters in the film, notably Darby Crash, the singer of the Germs, waxing on about the appeal of fascism and how he likes to antagonize “the Jews.” From there, the movie flashes back to tell the story of Paul Beahm and Georg Ruthenberg, aka Crash and Pat Smear, their forming of the Germs as teenagers, and their consumption of copious amounts of drugs, interspersed with segments where the band flails away on their instruments behind Darby’s cockeyed ramblings. I can see how some folks might wonder why in the world they are watching a movie about these guys.

While the Germs are an acquired taste, they are also an unrepeatable phenomena, Smear’s impressionistic guitar thrash, Darby’s surreal invective, and Bolles’ frenetic drums sounding like the Shaggs and the Stooges got together and made a record with Captain Beefheart sitting behind the mixing board. Watching the movie, I for one was struck at the timelessness of the Germs’ sound, at what a rush it was to take in the concert scenes.

Critics have also complained about the hackneyed storyline, relating “What We Do Is Secret” to a cartful of other biopics, ranging from “Dewey Cox” to “Sid and Nancy.” I’ll just note that, from what I can tell, the filmmakers of “What We Do Is Secret” were relentless in their pursuit of being factually accurate, and that if the story line is a bit hackneyed, well that’s the way things went down, and if Darby expounds on some things in a less-than-enlightened way, it’s probably because the filmmakers weren’t out to doctor the original source material to touch up the blemishes. This lies in stark contrast to most celluloid fantasies. For example, by all accounts, Sid Vicious most likely murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, and then intentionally O.D’d on heroin shortly thereafter, whereas the film version features some far-fetched fantasy where the two of them are star-crossed lovers, taking a mystical cab ride through New York City and getting down with the natives before heading off to what one presumes is heaven. In “What We Do Is Secret”, it’s just the facts ma’am, and I presume if Darby says some cornball line to the members of his entourage after their last show, then there is a reliable source that said it actually happened that way.

There are several scenes in the movie that actually raised the hair on the back of my neck, so exact was the reliving of detail from my own memory, from the band interviews on Rodney on the ROQ to the scenes at Oki-Dog and other Hollywood locations. In particular, I remember being a sophomore in the dorms and getting a phone call from a friend, who told me that Darby Crash had died from a heroin overdose. Having seen Darby hanging out in front of a club just the week before, I was stunned by the news. While I was still on the phone, a girl from down the hall knocked fairly frantically on my door to tell me they just announced on “Monday Night Football” that John Lennon had been shot. I said, “Wow, that’s really weird, because I just found out that Darby Crash has died.” The dorm crier then proceeded to tell everyone on the remainder of her rounds that “You’ll never guess what: John Lennon has been shot and Darby Crash died.” The phone call in the movie captured both the facts and the feelings of that moment.

So, the question remains: Why would anyone to whom the Germs were not a direct part of their life be interested in this movie? First, the Germs, albeit the playing-out of clichéd late-adolescent fantasy, were a band like no other, before or since. While riots were a common occurrence at punk shows, it was like a bad moon followed the Germs around. They were banned from virtually every place they ever played, and these “riots” were by all accounts serious deals where people got hurt. I personally never saw the Germs, although I did catch the Darby Crash Band at the Starwood shortly after Darby’s return from England. While the movie accurately conveyed the stagnancy of that show, even here, I remember a wild night, the bouncers having shut the gate into the small Starwood parking lot before I got there, dozens of us waiting and looking through the fence at the bloodied faces of guys getting pulled out of the club during the opening set, a bunch of us rushing past the fence when the bouncers opened it to let in an ambulance to cart off the injured.

As the movie makes clear, Darby was in hot pursuit of his own myth, quoting Nietzsche and making a 5-year plan at age 17 that concluded with the taking of his own life. The plan may have been both sophomoric and egotistical, but Darby had the intellectual chops to pull at least some of it off. Lyrically, two of my favorite Germs songs are “Manimal” (I came into this world / Like a puzzled panther / Waiting to be caged / But something stood in the way / I was never quite tamed), and “Richie Dagger’s Crime” (I’m Richie Dagger / I’m young and I’m haggard / The boy that nobody owns). However, Darby’s attempt to become an Ubermensch, to lead the crowd into some type of evolved hysteria, is perhaps best conveyed in “Lexicon Devil”:

I’m a lexicon devil with a battered brain
And I’m looking for a future – the world’s my aim
So gimme gimme your hands
Gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme this
Gimme gimme that

I want toy tin soldiers that can push and shove
I want gunboy rovers that’ll wreck this club
I’ll build you up and level your head
We’ll run it my way, cold men and politics dead

I’ll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let’s give this established joke a shove
We’re gonna wreak havoc on the rancid mill
I’m searching for something, even if I’m killed

Empty out your pockets – you don’t need your change
I’m giving you the power to rearrange
Together we’ll run to the highest prop
Tear it down and let it drop…. away
So gimme gimme your hands
Gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme this
Gimme gimme that

A lot of bands have aimed to turn their live shows into that kind of mini-Apocalypse, but the Germs came closer than most to achieving it.

As an impressionable 19 year old, lacking a direction or a cause, I sought a charismatic figure, a leader among peers, who would show me how it’s done, kind of like the Sting character did for all the Mod kids in “Quadrophenia”. There were five guys who I tried to at least briefly put in that role: Johnny Rotten, Darby Crash, Mike Ness, Jack from TSOL, and Wattie from the Exploited, the basic requirement being a personal magnetism, defiant and strong, and someone who wasn’t afraid of a little blood, if that’s what the situation required. But there was always something that quickly disabused me of this nascent hero worship. In Darby’s case, it’s hard to admire someone who’s typically so strung-out that whenever you see him he can hardly stand.

Being a man is a bloodsport. Sometimes, in our comfortable middle class lives, it is easy to forget that, but it’s the genetic justification for why men got to run around and kill things for the past 25,000 years while women did all the work. One of the things that the passing of my father last year sunk into my head is that there’s no point in buying into that safe kind of middle class life; you’re going to end up dead soon enough in any case, and in the meantime you might as well have done something meaningful. Not that raising kids and contributing to the national GDP isn’t something, but I believe that most American males are totally ill-served by all of these schools and jobs they make us endure in order to get a piece of the pie.

But while being a man is bloodsport, macho behavior tends to be reactive, stupid, a waste of energy. The blood oath that all thinking men need to take is the one where we look to drag civilization forward. Most of the time, we can ignore the stupid, the corrupt, and the obvious among us; we have other fish to fry. But I think there are also times where, for our own mental hygiene if nothing else, we need to show some balls.

Darby certainly understood this idea of the greater cause, although he found his cause where you’d expect a sideswiped adolescent would, looking to drugs and the cult of totalitarian personality to be his saviors, his bridge to the other side. But one look at today’s pop charts, which remain peppered by “cute” Disney creations such as the Jonas Brothers or paint-within-the-lines rock acts like Linkin Park, and it is clear that the number of this beast continues to ride high, and to which Darby’s twisted, faux fascist view of the world still serves as a welcome tonic.

How do you confront the rich, the powerful, and their minions who perpetuate this dull, material, and obvious culture? I believe in an oligarchy of the passionate and the purposeful, and that through tools like the internet, we just might begin to find one another and rearrange the world. Look, the fact is that the great mass of humanity has always needed to be told what to think, how to vote, what to buy. That’s why advertising works. But that’s also why the original thinkers throughout history have always had at least a puncher’s chance of changing things.

Talk to folks and there is, despite our generally comfortable lives, a deep discontent in the air. This past weekend, my kindly, low-key father-in-law, a former Navy man who taught high school math for almost 30 years, was talking about how the French had it right back in the day and that maybe it was time for a real revolution in this country. Folks see the government and the legion of lobbyists who too often dictate policy as being increasingly distant and working against the people’s will; they see the media offering bland pabulum, turning the lights out on anything interesting, anything honorable. Not to be paranoid, but there may come a time when the future of our homes, our culture, our neighborhoods, or even our country as we know it may be at stake.

In the short term, that means getting ready, because women and the men who act like them will be of little use if that next curtain drops. And when I’m at the shooting range, I’ll dedicate the first round that I pop off with my new Ruger to Darby Crash.

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In a related vein, Tuesday is the Mommy Matinee at the local movie theatre. Today, Melissa, Milo, and I met Melissa’s sister and nephew at a showing of “Mama Mia!”, the Abba vehicle which I believe is now the highest grossing musical in the history of American cinema (a stat that admittedly is a bit deceptive, because it doesn’t factor in inflation, and I’m sure that movies like “The Sound of Music” and “Singing in the Rain” had a bigger audience back in their day; nonetheless, the box office totals for “Mama Mia!” have been impressive, and at least a bit surprising).

Much like a lot of my favorite punk bands, Abba toiled in relative American obscurity when they were around, being primarily a European phenomenon. With each album, there were the whispers in “the industry” about whether, finally, this would be their big breakthrough, but it never really happened for them in the States.

Now, some thirty years later, Abba finally have their big American hit, with a smash movie and a corresponding soundtrack that reached number one on the Billboard charts, with a bullet. I guess our country’s musical tastes have finally caught up to them. I, for one, have always liked Abba. I liked their perfect pop tunes, which seemed so much more hummable, so much more fun, than most American hits of their era, the Foreigners, Kenny Loggins, and their ilk.

I normally hate movie musicals because the music is almost consistently awful. I always wondered why a real band couldn’t do the music for a musical, why the industry always had to settle for the 2nd team, for Andrew Lloyd Webber and his cohorts. “Mama Mia!” is proof that good music makes up for a lot of boners, up to and including Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice. The hits just kept coming: “Super Trouper”, “S.O.S.”, “Dancing Queen”, “Take A Chance on Me”, and probably close to a dozen more. It was awesome. I don’t think there was a dud in the bunch. I tell you, Ulvaeus and Andersson were two muthas who could really pen a tune. And the movie didn’t take itself too seriously, which meant that Meryl Streep didn’t take herself too seriously (I think it might be, at least for me, her most watchable performace). In short, I really enjoyed myself at the Mommy Matinee.

For those keeping score at home, as of 8/24, Yahoo Box Office reports that “Mamma Mia!” has grossed $124,469,900 in 6 weeks of theatrical release, while “What We Do Is Secret”, in its 3rd week, has grossed $28,419. I personally recommend both films.