Kids of the Black Hole: A Brief History of Punk in Southern California

Popular Music in the 1970s: The Blank Generation

While there is good music happening in every decade, the 1970s were a pretty dismal decade for American popular music.  In the 1960s, artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones gave voice to a new generation of young people.  The music spoke to the astonishing social change that was happening.  Musicians could write creative songs of protest and change, and their music reached a wide audience.

By the early 1970s, however, things began to change.  The 1970s saw the birth of disco, a genre Mark Mothersbaugh of the band DEVO described as "like a beautiful woman with no brain."  The massive corporatization of the pop music industry saw the birth of "white concert rock," arena bands like Kansas and Toto and Boston, whose message was basically "I'm white, I'm a misogynist, I'm a consumer, and I'm proud of it!"  Punk historian Dewar Macleod writes, "The three sounds that dominated the seventies--country/folk rock, prog(ressive) rock, and disco--too often sounded impersonal to those who sought a sense of identification through music."

Something New and Alive

As the pop music industry lost its artistic edge, increasingly large numbers of young people sought something new, a genre that would speak to their particular problems and outlook on life.  Enter punk rock.  In the book Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California, Dewar Macleod writes, "For those whose eyes and ears were open, who were waiting for something to happen in a world where nothing was happening, punk rock offered an alternative, as music, as vision, as culture.  From 1977 through the 1980s, punk rock spoke to more and more young people throughout Southern California, embodying their experiences, shaping their identities.  They craved a personal connection to the their music and a music that could express their sense of the world."

The Ramones

Punk was not born in Los Angeles, however.  It arrived first from New York (from The Ramones) via London (from The Sex Pistols), but it spread quickly in Southern California.  Early LA bands like The Germs, The Weirdos, and The Dickies adopted the styles and attitudes of British and East Coast punks and quickly created their own scene, though the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos, starting their own record labels (like Bomp!), booking their own shows at divey clubs (like The Masque), and spreading the punk gospel through zines (like Slash).

Darby Crash of The Germs

Punk music was, in part, a reaction to the blandness of the music business in the 70s.  In a 1977 issue of Flipside zine, one of The Weirdos said, "There's so much shit that the industry's produced.  Just listen to the radio and it all sounds pretty much the same.  For me and the guys in the band, it's more a revolt against all this boring shit.  Even with all the stuff that's out, the radio still does the same thing.  There's nothing fresh--nothing new.  All the industry does is take a lot of money and make something real slick--over and over again." 

Unlike the capitalist music industry, the punk scene was inherently democratic.  According to Greg Shaw, founder of Bomp! records, "The best culture is one that involves everybody, it's participatory…You are not a passive consumer."  Punk was created by the people, for the people.  It was raw, sometimes angry, and sincere.  "Punk was like when you first discover folk art as some wonderful thing," KK Barrett of the Screamers remembered, "All of a sudden you like the mistakes, the handicraft of it, the personal naiveté."  Sociologist Stephen Duncombe defines DIY as "at once a critique of the dominant mode of passive consumer culture and something far more important: the active creation of an alternative culture."  

Slash Zine 1978

Punk in Post-Suburban Orange County

Interestingly, punk was not a strictly urban (LA, NY) phenomenon.  In Southern California, it quickly began to infiltrate the suburbs of Orange County cities like Huntington Beach (with bands like Black Flag and The Descendents) and Fullerton (with The Adolescents, Social Distortion, and The Middle Class).  By the 1970s, suburbs that were once "bedroom communities" serving larger metropolitan areas, began to transform into "post-suburbia"--self-sufficient, mixed-use regions of housing, factories, offices, shops, and services.  Macleod writes, "Just as the U.S. census of 1890 declared the western frontier closed, the census of 1970 declared the closing of another frontier: the 'crabgrass frontier'."

Eddie of the OC band Eddie and the Subtitles described Orange County in the 1970s as "an unbelievable, mindless, sexless, funless monster that should be permanently shut down."  The "post-suburban" towns of Orange County began to spawn their own unique brand of punks, who were "now fully 'postmodern youth,' whose alienation resulted from the corporate-controlled media and consumer environments [which] increasingly supplanted the home, family, school, and workplace as sites for socialization." 

Macleod explains, "Young people in post-suburbia were now not simply consumers, but…an active participant in the shopping spectacle.  For these young people, the shopping mall is not merely an economic space where exchanges take place but a symbolic social space for everyone to come alive in and a pervasive metaphor for life.  This condition affected youth throughout society, not merely 'delinquents' or members of subcultures.  All youth--especially in post-suburbia--were increasingly hailed, identified, and self-identified as isolated, fragmented, individual consumers."

In his essay "Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County" sociologist Edward W. Soja describes the region's "creatively erosive postmodern geographies…where everyday life is thematically spin doctored and consciousness itself comes in prepackaged forms."  Macleod explains how "the car, the mall, the office park, and tract home replaced the street as the sites for everyday life.  What was historically new by the 1970s was the destruction of public space, and the accompanying commodification of private space."  Politics came to be dominated by massive faceless development companies like "the Irvine Company, which held almost complete control over the political, economic, and social development of the region in the post-war period."

The Irvine Company

Politically, Orange County was very conservative, spawning such punk-hated politicians as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.   The Lincoln Club, the "good old buys" Republican bankrollers, were firmly entrenched in Orange County, and helped get Reagan elected.  Hand in hand with the conservative politics went mega-churches like Costa Mesa's Crystal Cathedral and the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Because of the economic and social value of real estate in Orange County, the politics in the OC were "increasingly centered around issues of homeowner self-defense."

Given such artificial, "creatively erosive", isolated, conservative, self-centered environments as Orange County cities, is it any wonder that young people would seek to rebel and create their own, creatively vibrant communities?  The band that perhaps best spoke to (and against) the alienated, isolated, fragmented post-suburban condition was Fullerton's own The Middle Class.  

The Middle Class

There is an entire section of the book Kids of the Black Hole devoted to The Middle Class, and I will quote it verbatim, because it's good:

"The Middle Class--three brothers (ages fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-one) and a friend from Santa Ana and Fullerton down in Orange County--had ventured the two-hour drive into the Hollywood scene as early as 1978, when they went to Brendan Mullen hoping for a gig at the Masque and almost got laughed all the way home.  "Having been advised to cut their hair and punk-out their dress, they were summarily dismissed to the suburbs, presumably to pass into a well-deserved obscurity," one zine writer observed.  "However, fate intervened in the form of Hector of the Zeros who booked them as opening support for a show featuring The Controllers and The Germs and, after that, for the next six months, they played support to many of the local Holllywood scene bands.' After their first show at Larchmont Hall in April, where the crowd 'stood in a semi-circle and nobody moved,' they gigged regularly as the token 'suburban' band.  Slash referred to their first show in a column titled "The 'Hey, You Mean They Got Punks in Those Places??' Dept."  Noting the blasé reaction and blank stares The Middle Class received, Slash commented, 'sometimes them scene-making punx are worse than the fuckin' Spanish Inquisition!" and asked the prescient question, 'Will the next New Wave come from the great Wasteland?' (This was at a time when the term 'new wave' had not yet been rejected by punks.)

The Hollywood scene accepted the Middle Class, at least to some extent.  But even when some of their members moved into the Canterbury (apartments in LA--a sort of punk commune), they did not lose their identity as a 'suburban' band, and the insider crowd did not quite know what to do with them.  Taking the stage looking 'like a bunch of rampaging Scientologists,' they defied all fashion and music conventions even at a moment when conventions were not so rigidly set within punk.  By the summer of 1978, they were making converts, as this Slash review attests: 'These guys looked normal.  Like writing a paper in the library normal.  How come they sounded like twisted metal air raids and dynamite fumes?  I was shocked.  If you look like that, you're not supposed to sound like that.  Yet it was obvious: the mob was pogoing with genuine furor, the aggression meter was in the red zone, this was certified punk fever grade triple-A beware of imitations.  I've seen fast bands, but these unknowns run with the best."  The reviewer concluded, "And that curly-haired singer should, according to basic laws of physics, end up with his vocal chords tied in a knot after 5 minutes."  Another Slash reviewer the following month described their shows as "intense, teeth-gritting affairs that leave the participant dazed, stunned, even irritated."  the reviewer noted the 'chaos and confusion' that resulted from 'the incitable nature of their strange, assaulting music coupled with the growing number of their unpredictably rabid fans.'  The cumulative effect was 'not unlike kissing a semi at full speed.'

The Middle Class never brought their own crowd of fans and followers with them to Hollywood, but they never completely left their post-suburban home, either.  Like traditional bohemians, and like other LA punks, they made the trip into the city to enact their art.  But they did not reinvent themselves completely in the process.  They didn't change their names, and they didn't change their dress.  The cover of their record 'Out of Vogue'--a diatribe against mass culture--depicts a mundane Southern California suburban scene: two young girls stand in the middle of a street, surrounded and almost dwarfed by the still life of a housing tract with Big Wheels, a basketball backboard, and a Volkswagen bus in a driveway.  The cover scene depicted not only their roots, but their continuing daily reality as 'the MIddle Class' and they returned to these images throughout their career.  As a post suburban band, the Middle Class redefined the aesthetics of punk, both musically and visually."

Kids of the Black Hole

Members of The Middle Class started booking shows at The Galaxy in Fullerton, a roller rink turned punk venue.  Other Orange County bands followed the lead of these suburban pioneers, formed bands, and started playing a new variety of punk invented by The Middle Class--hardcore.  As the name suggests, the music was especially aggressive form of punk, often raging against the cultural and political wasteland that was 1970s and 80s Orange County.

Out of Hermosa Beach came Black Flag, who helped establish The Church (literally an old church building) as a haven for punks to rehearse, play shows, and live. An early bass player from Black Flag described one of their early practices:

"BANG!! the drummer started smashing out a fast trashy straight 4 pattern and the wiry little singer started bellowing  around wildly and Greg's body lurched forward as he underwent a remarkable transition from Jeckyl to Hyde.  His head shook, eyes flashed and teeth bared maniacally as he began to grind thick chords out of a guitar that in the shadowy light could have been mistaken for a chainsaw.  Within seconds it was over.  Jeckyl calmly stepped out of his Hyde as if stepping out of a routine nightmare."

In true DIY fashion, Black Flag eschewed the record industry and formed their own label, SST Records.

Macleod writes, "New punk bands emerged in droves, and while many of them merely played the 1-2-3-4 sound of the Ramones as fast as they could, others introduced interesting variations, combining diverse influences and sounds.  Over the next couple of years bands from around the South Bay and inland Orange County came to play parties in Huntington Beach--new bands like the Circle Jerks, Red Cross, the Adolescents, Agent Orange, and Social Distortion, in addition to the Middle Class and Black Flag.  Eventually a couple of key clubs began to book hardcore shows in post suburbia: the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa and the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach."

Mike Ness of Social Distortion made his Fullerton apartment into a haven for local punks, which was immortalized by the Adolescents song "KIds of the Black Hole."  

Out of Huntington Beach came The Descencents, whose music offered an ironic commentary on the OC, like the song "Suburban Home":

I want to be stereotyped

I want to be classified

I wanna be a clone

I want a suburban home

I wanna be masochistic

I wanna be a statistic

I don't want no hippie pad

I want a house just like mom and dad

In many ways, the punks succeeded in creating something new and distinct from the cultural norms they had inherited.  Through music, zines, and communal spaces, "punks created a dispersed, yet interconnected mass subculture."

Is Punk Dead?

Is the oft-used phrase "Punk is Dead" true?  Did punk die?  That depends who you talk to.  If you talk to Sean and Lee from Burger Records in Fullerton, they will tell you "Hell no."  If you talk to an old school punk, they might say "Hell yes."  As with all art, punk is in the ear of the beholder.  Certainly punk still exists today.  In the 1990s, punk actually became a successful commercial product, with bands like No Doubt, Green Day, and The Offspring selling platinum records.  Punk purists may argue against the 90s genre "pop punk."  But punk, as it was originally conceived--angry, political, underground--also still exists, though it has largely remained underground.  

Major record companies and popular radio stations, understandably, continue to take little interest in music that is supposed to disturb and rattle the listener.  As in the early days of punk, much of the best punk music today is being recorded and distributed DIY-style, with limited pressings of 45s, LPs, CDs, tapes, and MP3s.  In some ways, computers and the internet have democratized music in a way never before dreamed of by early punks.  Today, anyone can record and distribute their music with a laptop, or even a phone.  In my view, punk is alive and well, still growing and evolving and combining with other styles, still responding to and reacting against mass culture and conformity.

Punk ain't dead.