The Germs With Pleasant Gehman

Yasi is joined by artist, author, and musician Pleasant Gehman to discuss the Germs and the chaotic birth of the Los Angeles punk scene, which she witnessed firsthand. They discuss the myth vs. the reality of Darby Crash, the DIY community that formed around the enigmatic singer, and how the Germs became one of the era’s most influential bands despite their short reign. Episode PlaylistListen to the Germs playlist here. CreditsHost: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Pleasant Gehman @princessofhollywoodProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Yasi Salek?

  Hey, guys. Before we get into the episode, I just wanted to let you know that this one contains discussion about suicide. If you or someone you know are struggling, please know there's help out there. You can call or text the suicide prevention hotline at 988.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:33Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about The Germs. My guest today, you guys, what a fucking treat I have for you guys. My guest today is author, musician, artist, coolest woman in all of Los Angeles and potentially the country and world, Pleasant Gaiman. Pleasant, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, now I'm blushing. I'm so excited to have you. I mean, before we dive in to unpacking the story of The Germs, and sadly, a short one, but I just need people to understand that there might only be five people on Earth that are as qualified as you

• 2:18Yasi Salek?

  to be here to help me tell this story. And do you want to tell us why?

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. Well, I knew the Germs before they were the Germs. And I was Pat Smear, before he was Pat Smear's girlfriend for a really long time. And I'm still in touch with him. And he's wonderful and we're friends. But LA was very, very different there than... Would you like me to tell you how I met them?

• 2:52Yasi Salek?

  Yes, please. I love this. I already know this story, but I want everyone to know because it's one of my favorite stories.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  I know, it's good. It's like, it's pretty much my Los Angeles origin story. How it all happened was, I was living on the East Coast. I was going to a boarding school that I got a scholarship to. And I wanted to be there. And then my, my mother told me we were moving. And I got, I was so sad. I was just crushed because I was gonna have to leave school. And she wouldn't tell me where we're moving to. And I thought it was gonna be somewhere stupid. You know, like some Midwestern, like, town that I, as an old lady, would love to probably live in now. But, you know, it wasn't happening. And then she called me back a week later and said, okay, I know where we're moving. We're moving to Los Angeles. And I was like, when are we going?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  And she said, well, we're going in two weeks, but you have to finish out the term. And I was like, why?

• 3:47Yasi Salek?

  Like, I want to come now.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  So as soon as I got there, I had seen that Queen was playing at the Santa Monica Civic. And I took the bus there. And I was wearing my, my old school, in, in nobodies, like, genre finery, which was like, I would wear these like 1940s through, like, the Victorian times, like, gowns I'd find at thrift stores when no one, or not even thrift stores, it was, there wasn't even thrift stores yet. It was like, it was...

• 4:22Yasi Salek?

  Junk shops.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, junk shops or just yard sales. So I was wearing that with like combat boots. And this was very, I guess, fashion forward at the time, but no one looked like that in the 70s.

• 4:33Yasi Salek?

  What did I tell you guys? Coolest woman alive, go on.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  I sat shade down the aisle, wearing that, looking for my ticket. And I sat down. And almost as soon as I sat down, this person that I immediately identified as a hot old man.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Handed a joint to me and it said, would you like some of this mess? And I said, yes, thank you. And then all of a sudden, four days in L.A., I realized I was getting high with Tony Curtis.

• 5:06Yasi Salek?

  Spartacus, babe. If you're familiar.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yes, Spartacus. That was Spartacus when he was a singer of songs, but also some might get hot. He was like my favorite actor and I, my brain was bleeding. I was like, how is this happening?

• 5:20Yasi Salek?

  So cool.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  And he was so nice. And then I was entranced with him and we were talking, but then I got distracted by, by these two guys that were striding down the aisle right before the, the lights went out. And one was really, really tall and lanky and had no shirt on and billowing, black satin, bell bottoms and his hair was kind of like in this, like Sphinx kind of, I don't know if it was on purpose or not on purpose, like it was sort of a pyramid shaped crazy ass Sphinx scenario going on. And the other guy behind him was a little bit shorter, dressed all in white and had

• 6:03Speaker 03

  the most perfect, um, red, like Bowie shag and a Bowie lightning bolt on his face. And so I borrowed, I borrowed a pen from Tony Curtis and wrote on this matchbook that, that I had and it said, Aladdin sane, you cosmic orgasms, call me. And I put my phone number and then I stood up and threw it to where I hoped they were. And the next morning, these two guys called me and one was Paul Beam and the other was George Rutherford and they turned into Darby Crash and Pat Smear.

• 6:41Yasi Salek?

  I just found that child, that's such a cool story. Also, I'm just, for anyone listening who's like, young and is like, I don't know how to meet friends. Take a cue here, babe. Like, you used to just go up to people. You can throw a matchbook at someone. Be brave. Like, look what could happen. This was 1975, is that right?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:00Yasi Salek?

  Okay. And you guys were like 14, 15 years old?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Teenagers, yeah.

• 7:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So cool. So anyways, you guys, the point is that Pleasant was there since day zero, let alone day one. And she played a huge part in. The original punk scene in Los Angeles and honestly, and a lot of the other important musical things that happened in L.A. after, which we'll also talk about because they're very interesting. So, don't ever say I didn't bring you a perfect and exquisite guest.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I know, I'm like slapping that hair. Hey.

• 7:41Yasi Salek?

  You know what? I'm gonna start a little bit from the beginning of Paul's life, but then when we get back to 1975, I have some more questions about just sort of like the pre-punk music scene in L.A., but I want to get these like biographical details out of the way. So Paul Beam was born Jan Paul Beam, or Jan Paul Beam. I think it was Jan. September 26, 1958, Alibra, Los Angeles. His mother was named Faith Reynolds, later Faith Reynolds Baker. She had moved to L.A. from New Jersey with her first husband. She had two children with him, Bobby and Christine. She said that Paul was named after their neighbor's baby that died of a congenital heart defect

• 8:23Yasi Salek?

  before Paul was born and asked her to name their baby, the baby after him. I did not know that this was a thing. It's a very strange.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  I didn't realize that either. That's wild.

• 8:33Yasi Salek?

  It feels like a very cursed, do you know what I mean? Like it's such, I understand the honoring of the child, but it's also like, what, like a kind of a dark namesake to have. It's like a baby that never even got to live.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  That never made it.

• 8:46Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it's just, it's a tragic and dark thing. So I'm not trying to like editorialize, but I'm like, we're beginning with a bit of tragedy. Okay, so when Paul was born, this family lived above a bar in Venice. They moved around a few times near the beach before they ended up in a house, a big one for $125 a month, babe. That was a different time in Los Angeles. And they moved to West L.A. So Paul Beam grew up thinking that his biological father was a man named Harold Beam, who had apparently left the family early in his life. But it turned out actually that his father was... A Swedish sailor named William Bjorklund, which kind of explains the name Yon.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:31Yasi Salek?

  And he found this out, I guess, later in life. Like, one of his sisters let it slip. And this, I thought, was really interesting. A lot of this is all coming from the Lexicon Devil book, so it's an oral history and it's people's reportage of it. But his mother said that he had another sister named Faith Junior that was closer to him in age. And apparently Faith Junior's friend had thrown a rock at her when they were playing in the street, but missed and hit Darby and chipped his tooth. And that's why his tooth was chipped like that. So that's the origin behind his teeth. He was basically raised by Faith's third husband, Bob Baker, who was a Korean War veteran.

• 10:12Yasi Salek?

  When Paul was 11, his older brother Bobby was murdered in Venice at 27. I guess he was, this is what Brendan Mullen said, that he was found dead in a station wagon, reputedly from a hotshot heroin OD passed to him by a burned dope man. So this is like, the drug dealer was mad that he didn't get paid and basically gave him an OD.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:32Yasi Salek?

  That's so crazy.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  I know. Stuff like that happened in those days.

• 10:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  There was a lot of dark stuff going on.

• 10:40Yasi Salek?

  The 70s is such a, we, Alex, my friend Alex Nelson, who's sitting here in the studio right now, but he can't see her, and I were just talking about this off mic, that like, as much as like, whenever I read about this time, I'm so mad that I didn't get to live through it. Like, the LA of the 70s was so cool. I mean, even the LA of the 90s was much cooler than the LA of now. But then there was also stuff like this. So I guess it comes with a heart and personal.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  All sorts of crazy, there was, I was talking about, like, all the criminal stuff that used to happen all the time that was like just wide out in the open.

• 11:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  You know, like, stuff that I was even privy to as like a 15 through 18-year-old person, just knowing stuff and knowing gangsters or hearing stuff at clubs. I'd be like, la, la, la, like.

• 11:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, because famously, the mafia had ties to the whiskey, is that not? Or mobsters. I feel like I read that a couple of times.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  My favorite person that worked there was Jim LaPena.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  He, uh, he always took care of the kids in a really great way. He'd like, he'd let us all in and we, but we'd have to show him our report cards to make sure that we had at least a B average. Otherwise, he wouldn't let us in there.

• 12:01Yasi Salek?

  That's so sweet.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  I know. He was, he was the one that let me do, do shows there when I was a teenager. That's how I started doing shows.

• 12:08Yasi Salek?

  He's like, you guys can party here, but only if you're good at school.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  That's exactly true.

• 12:13Yasi Salek?

  Love that. That should be a rule going forward. That would, that's a way better, um, inspiration for kids to do well in school than whatever college, you know?

• 12:23Speaker 03

  I don't know if they even let like underage people into clubs anymore.

• 12:26Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely not.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  I remember one time at the Whiskey, I'd been working there for ages, right? And at the, I went up and I said to the bartender, um, it's my birthday, um, and it's St. Patrick's Day, it's my birthday, you're gonna give me a free drink? And he said, sure. How old are you turning? And I said, 21. And he said, bullshit, you've been drinking here for ages. And then I shot him my, my ID card and he was horrified.

• 12:58Yasi Salek?

  He was like, you're not even turning.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  You've been serving me for years and you could have gone to jail.

• 13:03Yasi Salek?

  He's like, whoopsie. So Bob Baker, his, uh, sort of surrogate father died very suddenly in 1972 of a heart attack when Darby was 14. And it's kind of around this time or maybe a little bit earlier that he meets George Rithenberg, AKA Pat Smear in junior high, a Leo, which makes total sense, I feel like, given what I know about Patrick Smear, um, August 5th, 1959. So Pleasant, I wanted to ask you this because it's kind of hard to find too much about his background, but from what I understand that his father was like an older German man and his mother was like a mix of African American and Native American and she was an opera singer? Are those facts, right?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know about his father. I think, I think so, but yes, his mom was like that.

• 13:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Everything that you said, that makes. It's total perfect sense.

• 13:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and also Ruthenberg, I guess that could be German.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, it's totally German.

• 13:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So he went, he went to fourth grade with Will Amato. Did you know?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Uh huh, Will.

• 14:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, who would later write for Slash. He's heavily quoted in Lexicon Devil. And Will said in that book that there were maybe only like two other black kids in the school, which must have been an interesting way to grow.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they were going to, uh, to uni high.

• 14:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  And then uni high, they had a thing called the IPS.

• 14:19Yasi Salek?

  I have so many questions about.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 14:21Yasi Salek?

  The IPS for you.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  I used to cut schools, uh, my school to go to their school. And sometimes they would cut their school to go to my school. We did shit like that all the time, too.

• 14:31Yasi Salek?

  I gotta know.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  That you could never do again.

• 14:34Yasi Salek?

  So George collected exotic birds, apparently, and he said that he was 12 when he first met Paul Beam, and then he had a dollar a day for lunch money, and there was a 300-pound girl who sold whites for a dollar. What are whites?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Whites, I mean, they're like little speeds.

• 14:49Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Which, that's what I thought, but I just wanted to confirm.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  I was just telling someone the other day about loads, and they had no idea what loads were.

• 14:57Yasi Salek?

  What are loads?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Loads were like, there was like a, it was like a little drug concoction that was made on the street, and it was with a two and all, and some other kind of, um, you could either do it going up or down, depending on what you did it with, but it was, you purchased it as what was called a load.

• 15:15Yasi Salek?

  A load. It was a combo, a combo pack.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Seventies drugs were wild.

• 15:20Yasi Salek?

  As, as you know, people are obsessed with the myth of quaaludes. And like, they're still trying to hunt them, hunt them down in the world.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  All I have to do is say, "You poor people that never had quaaludes." That's all I'm gonna say.

• 15:32Yasi Salek?

  I hear time and again that people, like, unearth really old ones.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  I, I could believe it and try to take it and see if the chemical compound is still working.

• 15:44Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, that's the, I think that's the most mystical one. But this is very funny. So George, sorry, I'm gonna go back and forth with names a little bit until they fully change them. But just know George is Pat Smear and Paul is Darby Crash.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  I just call him George and Paul a lot and forget that I'm talking to people.

• 16:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, that's how you know them.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:01Yasi Salek?

  He said, George said he remembered laughing about how the speed dealer could weigh so much because speed makes you not eat. And she's actually the one that put them together, according to George, that she knew them both and was like, you guys would be really good friends. And he also said that he felt like he had a lot of sisters. And so he knew how to be friends with women. And he was raised more like a girl. And then he also said that Darby was always friends with girls too, especially girls that were like his mom. Did you know Paul's mom?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Faith, yeah.

• 16:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. What was she like?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Well, um.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  I'm just, uh, uh, uh, from the perspective of someone who was an adult that used to do crazy things.

• 16:48Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Around.

• 16:49Yasi Salek?

  Now you're like, oh, interesting.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  No, I mean, she, she did put up with a lot. I gotta give her that.

• 16:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Cause like one time I was getting held up upside down with paint on the bottom of my sneakers. So I could make footprints walking across the ceiling.

• 17:06Yasi Salek?

  Of their house.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Of their house.

• 17:09Yasi Salek?

  And she like came home and saw that.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Mom, someone's been walking on the ceiling again.

• 17:14Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I mean, shit like that was going on constantly.

• 17:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, I'm very intrigued by her because you read a lot of mixed things about her. She's in the book as well. But what George said, I thought was really interesting was that Paul Darby was always friends with and around women and girls that were very similar to his mom. Big outspoken girls is, these are George's words.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually true.

• 17:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like Michelle Bear and Dinky. These are friends that they met in high school. Yeah. So George was super into the Dolls and Alice Cooper and the Stooges and obviously Ziggy Stardust. Bowie Ziggy Stardust. And he hated, in his own words, anything to do with 50s bass rock. He didn't like those chord changes.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were, I mean, we were all into that stuff. And I think it's worth mentioning to anyone that's listening is that those. People that Yasi just mentioned were not famous in those days.

• 18:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  This was like all undergroundy stuff. They had albums out, but you had to really either search for them if you heard of them, or find them by accident, the way that I did. Because I saw the cover and was like, what is this?

• 18:23Yasi Salek?

  Like for Ziggy Stardust, you were in like a record store and you saw the cover.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:27Yasi Salek?

  And you were like, this looks cool, I need to buy it.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Aladdin Sane and Raw Power and all of those things. I had no idea. I just thought if something was in a record store, those people were famous rock stars. I didn't know what a cutout bin was, because no one was buying it in this country.

• 18:41Yasi Salek?

  Right. And that's what the cutout bin was, basically the discount bin, right?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was the discount bin. And then it was also those records that really inspired punk were kind of marginalized in the same way that punk rock was later.

• 18:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Because in this country, no one gave a fuck about punk rock.

• 18:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  In England, they did. That's how we knew it existed. I remember looking at pictures of Johnny Rotten. It was like the size of a postage stamp going, what is this? This looks like the best thing ever.

• 19:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I feel like people think in today, like in today's time, they think of David Bowie. And they're like, oh, that is, that man has always been famous. That was a pop star.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:17Yasi Salek?

  And it wasn't like that. And especially in the seventies, and again, I'm speaking like I was there, but you can correct me. It's not like there was MTV, right? There, it's not like you had only a few channels for music pop culture, which was the radio and maybe Rolling Stone, but they weren't covering too much.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could watch the midnight special.

• 19:36Yasi Salek?

  The midnight special, it was like a music show.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Or Don Kersner's rock concert, because sometimes they would have obscure English groups.

• 19:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  A lot on there.

• 19:44Yasi Salek?

  So culturally, those things were quite underground. And I thought it was really interesting. So that's what George was into, but Paul wasn't. Paul hated it. He liked lowrider music.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:56Yasi Salek?

  Because his sister was dating a cholo.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Lowrider music was great. I loved all of this music. You know what? There used to be, there was a show on the radio that, you know that movie and that song, Border Radio?

• 20:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  That's what this is about. It was the Mexican radio station that would just blast stuff. And all during punk rock, we would listen to that, because there wasn't anything else decent on the radio, except for Rodney Bingenheimer's show, because he would play punk.

• 20:29Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Like, I could sing you like so many doo-wop, classic doo-wop songs.

• 20:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, they're so great.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  From start to finish, because they were incredible. And then also, in between that, there'd be like, there'd be like, three or five or 10 punks at someone's house, like, just listening to it, because they'd have all the, um, the dedications, like, from, um, you know, to Julio in, in whatever jail he was in, like, "I still love you, baby, it's blah, blah, blah." You know, like, all the dedications, it was incredible.

• 21:03Yasi Salek?

  So wonderful, yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  It was full-on lowrider culture that was going on there, and that really influenced so many people in the punk scene, maybe not by the way the music sounds.

• 21:14Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  But, um, I mean, I'm sure with, like, the bands like The Brat and stuff, when East L.A. started having a punk scene.

• 21:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  You know, like, that, the rest of us already, like, knew a lot about that, it wasn't segregated.

• 21:28Yasi Salek?

  I just, I love that detail so much, just because The Germs are such an L.A. band, and this is such a thing, it's so specific to L.A., right? Well, not L.A., but, you know, California and places around here. So, the idea that, you know, young Darby Crash was like, listening to like, stuff like "Angel Baby" by Rosie and the Originals. Yeah, because of his sister, and he was hanging around with this group of, you know, cholos and cholos. I, I love, I mean, I grew, I grew up going to school with cholos and, and doing my makeup like them, and like, you know, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I really, I really do think, I think that The Germs' burns and stuff came from that cholos culture, because, I mean, not exactly, but I think that's where the idea came from, because of-

• 22:11Yasi Salek?

  Probably the idea of being a gang, like a crew.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Like CS, like, everyone, all the cholos had CS for Con Sappos.

• 22:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  And then that was like, it was located in the same place your Germs' burn would be.

• 22:24Yasi Salek?

  So interesting. I never thought about that, but yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  I thought of that, like, as soon as they started doing it, and everyone's like, people would come up to me and go, "Do you, so do you have a Germs' burn if you're such a punk?" And I was like, "No, I didn't need one."

• 22:36Yasi Salek?

  Right, you were like, "Trust me, I was, and I was gonna ask you, okay, so you don't have one." You were like, um, you were like, "That's, that's nice, Darby, but I don't want that, that looks painful."

• 22:46Yasi Salek?

  This is also another detail that I was obsessed with. George was so into Alice Cooper.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we all were.

• 22:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that he made an actual necklace of flies, like dead and alive flies for the song "Halo Flies" and wore them to school. The dedication, the artistry.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Well, OK, our favorites were, like, in no particular order, it was like Bowie, Alice Cooper, I'm trying to think, pretty much, like, just those two were the top.

• 23:19Yasi Salek?

  Which, and I read this, and I wanted to ask you, that in LA or in America, it was, they called it glitter rock, not glam rock.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yes, we called it glitter rock.

• 23:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and when people, now I just call it glam rock because people call it that, but we called it glitter.

• 23:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  And, and we just glittered the word.

• 23:37Yasi Salek?

  Just glittered.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  If you were in it, you just called it glitter.

• 23:39Yasi Salek?

  That's glitter.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Like, like, for example, Joan Jett was really into glitter.

• 23:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  We all were. And then one time, when, when Joan and I started getting into punk, we went to this bar, The Odyssey, that we all went to. It was only gay bars that played good music that, that, like, punk people were going to before the mask. So there was this place called The Odyssey on Las Yenegas and one of those, one of those streets, a side street on it. And Joan and I, they wouldn't let us in because they said we looked trashy because we both had on leather jackets.

• 24:17Yasi Salek?

  Stop.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, OK, I read about The Odyssey because that was like after Rodney's English Disco closed.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:24Yasi Salek?

  The places that people would go were kind of like gay bars that played disco, but also played glitter.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, Gino's, that was where I had my, that was where I took my first Quaaludes.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  And that's where, for anyone that's listening that knows LA, Gino's was the, the wrestling, the wrestling place that's right above where Three of Clubs is.

• 24:48Yasi Salek?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  On Santa Monica.

• 24:50Yasi Salek?

  And Vine.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Vine, yeah. So that was Gino's, and that, Gino's, they played the best, best music and...

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Took my first Quaaludes there. Was wearing sky high silver glitter platforms. It were two weeks' worth of waitress pay and tips. And then, as soon as I got on the dance floor, I fell on my ass because I was so high on Quaaludes. And these people picked me up and carried me, drag carried me over and I was laying across about five people, just making out with them. That is what the seventies clubs were like.

• 25:23Yasi Salek?

  It's not fair that I didn't get to be there, but we'll

• 25:25Speaker 03

  I know, sorry.

• 25:26Yasi Salek?

  We'll, you're like, I'm sorry.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  But that's also what punk rock came out of. That was just doing shit like that at places like there or at the whiskey, not as much, but pretty much.

• 25:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Just before uni, George and Paul, thick as thieves, really into shoplifting, really into stealing stuff, stole some pot plants from a Mexican gang member. And according to George, they would not mess with Paul because of his sister Faith Junior's boyfriend, but George was getting beaten up every day and chased with knives. And so he, in his words, ran away to a Jesus Freak commune in Northern California.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:05Yasi Salek?

  That his sister Greta was at. This was so interesting to me. And he went there, it was first in Mendocino, then in Eureka, and he lived there for a year, from thirteen to fourteen, came back home.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:16Yasi Salek?

  And then went back and stayed till he was fifteen.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:18Yasi Salek?

  So you met him right after that?

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:21Yasi Salek?

  What, at that point, because he said he was like, when he came back, he was like, kind of really into Christianity. Did he like, talk about it?

• 26:27Speaker 03

  No, he didn't really talk. I mean, I don't remember it really coming up, but he told, he told me about being up there. And you know what the other thing is really fun, too, that George and I used to write each other letters, which now would be like texting each other.

• 26:43Yasi Salek?

  Like from your house and

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:45Yasi Salek?

  Because you were in Beverly Hills and they were in West LA?

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And you were just write, like, in the post, like, put it in the post?

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm dead. And it would come like, what, like, the next day, probably, right? That's so, you guys have no idea. How so romantic? Actually, I can't, I mean, I'll just say it now because I was obsessed with this detail. So, in Lexicon Devil, I think her name was Jenna Cardwell, was that George's girlfriend after you? And she's like, I went to his house for the first time and he had, his wall was covered with photos of Pleasant. It was like a shrine to Pleasant. And I was like, I know, that's right. I know, my bitch. Left an impression. Can you imagine going to your new boyfriend's house and there's just like a wall collage of photos?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  That must have been wild. I mean, sorry Jenna.

• 27:32Yasi Salek?

  Sorry Jenna. First love is first love, man. Okay, so they start going to uni. Now, this is what I'm dying to talk about. So, for those of you that don't know, uni, it's university high, it's still there, it's in mid-city. Actually, my, a lot of my family members went there, like, in the, I was like dying, I was like triangulating, I was like, "Please let my uncle and aunt have been there at the same time." And they were there in the 60s. So I was like, because Kim Fowley also went there in the 50s.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  What? Really?

• 27:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and I was like, "Please, God, let my uncle and aunt have been in school at the same time as the Germs or Kim Fowley." And I was like, "No, they were like a decade off from each of them." So I was like dying laughing, thinking about them like knowing the Germs, but they didn't, because they were later.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Or the administrators of that high school knowing how much rock and roll lineage was going on there.

• 28:17Yasi Salek?

  And also apparently, a lot of famous kids, or famous people's kids would go there.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it was West LA.

• 28:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So everyone's doing acid. Now we need to talk about IPS.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  We were doing acid a lot.

• 28:30Yasi Salek?

  You guys, IPS is one of the craziest things I've ever heard of. You want to talk about something that could only exist in the 70s? It's this, IPS.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  In the 70s, in Los Angeles.

• 28:37Yasi Salek?

  In Los Angeles.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:38Yasi Salek?

  Innovative Program School. So, it was basically, like, we still have continuation schools. I had a continuation school in Torrance. I mean, I didn't go there respectfully, I was a good student, but, but they had continuation school for like, you know, fuck-ups, or people who were not good at school, people got pregnant. But this was almost like not exactly that, because it was still within uni. And it was like based on EST?

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was based on EST.

• 29:05Yasi Salek?

  Which is Erhard Seminars Training and Scientology. And so it was like full woo-woo, full insane. There was no grades. They like-

• 29:14Speaker 03

  This would only happen in LA in the 70s.

• 29:17Yasi Salek?

  It was, they like-

• 29:18Speaker 03

  When they were telling me about their school, I thought they were making it up. And then I started cutting my school to go there all the time.

• 29:24Yasi Salek?

  Because you gotta check it out, right?

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And then they would come over to my school, but I much preferred going over to uni.

• 29:29Yasi Salek?

  Did Beverly already have the pool under the gym back then?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was there for ages, but we never got used. You know what the weirdest shit about Beverly was? When I, when I- We were just in the, in the district of Beverly Hills High.

• 29:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  And I was flabbergasted when I went there, coming from the East Coast. Because no one, even though I was, you know, like, cutting class already, you know, on the East Coast, or like, you know, doing, pretending I was taking notes, but like, writing stories or notes.

• 30:00Yasi Salek?

  Or letters to George.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, or not, yeah. But, um, at, at Beverly High, people blatantly just didn't pay attention to the teacher. And I was shocked, like, like, they were just.

• 30:12Yasi Salek?

  And they're, the teachers are same care.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  They'd be like putting makeup on each other in the middle of class. And also, the teacher wouldn't do anything. And the teacher, um, the teacher parking lot was full of like, fucked up old Datsuns. And the student parking lot was full of like, Benzes and just like.

• 30:28Yasi Salek?

  All the rich kids.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Porsches and, yeah, it was wild.

• 30:31Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  So I know that really went like, off the tangent, but that was, a lot of those kind of people, maybe not exactly the same, were also the people that were going to IPS because of all the rich people that lived in the, in the polisades.

• 30:46Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:48Yasi Salek?

  And.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  And that was a really, like, that rich, like, French t-shirt wearing and, you know, Schumendafer jeans, no one's gonna know what I'm talking about, but this was, these were like, the status symbols for teenagers of the time. And everyone was so normal that when punk rock started, or even started having its little tendrils come out.

• 31:08Yasi Salek?

  It was like shocking.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Those people were horrified.

• 31:11Yasi Salek?

  I'm, I'm obsessed with this. So IPS is like, okay, there's no grades, there's like, self-hypnosis, you can make your own classes, everyone's doing acid, there's a math teacher that's doing acid with Paul Darby.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, cuz he thought he was a genius. And they would like, make their own classes, like, there's actually an amazing story in the book where like, Paul and George are like, we made our own class, it's a sewing class. And the, the rhetoric teacher, Fred Holby, was like.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:42Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so what are you gonna, what are you gonna sew? And they were like, so? And he's like, well, how are you gonna approach this class? And they were like, so? And he was like, I'm not understanding what you're saying, like, what, what's the plan here? And they were like, so? Cuz it was a sewing class.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:58Yasi Salek?

  I know. And you could do stuff like that then. And then guess what? They gave themselves A's and everything was fine. They had a fruit eating class where they would just leave school, go to the grocery store, eat fruit and come back. But actually- It sounds so insane hearing that. It's absurd. No, but I mean, I know this. I know all this stuff was going on. But like, as I'm hearing it, God knows how many years later, like 40 years later and whatever the hell it is. But I do think besides being just absolutely insane, it's really important because Scientology and also specifically this rhetoric teacher, Fred. Also. Yeah. I'm sorry. So Fred Holby was a Scientologist and he was the rhetoric teacher.

• 32:40Yasi Salek?

  And this really shapes kind of what will later be Darby Crash's like, philosophy and creative output. Exactly, yeah. And also the way that so many people like clustered around him. Cause he knew all of that. He knew how to- He was, he had a mastery of rhetoric. He was obsessed with rhetoric and how it could control people, right? Because that was the whole thing of rhetoric. It was like this, if you can control the word, you can control anything. Yeah. It was kind of the message that the teacher was trying to get across. And Paul became very obsessed with that. Paul Rossler, who, what band was Paul Rossler in? He was in a bunch of bands.

• 33:25Yasi Salek?

  A bunch of bands, yeah. Yeah. But he was their friend from this time. And Kira Rossler too. And Kira Rossler famously played a black flag. Both on the beach. Who also- With George and Paul. Once offered to teach me bass and I said no because I was too scared to learn bass from Kira Rossler, who was in Black Flag. But we all have our regrets. So Paul Rossler said, "The teachers either thought Paul was the coolest and some were even in awe of him, or they hated him and were scared of him, didn't want anything to do with him." Fred called him a "rhetorician", which meant he controlled reality with his words. That was a major compliment.

• 34:01Yasi Salek?

  Apparently, once he changed the script for morning announcements to include a little news item that the members of Led Zeppelin had been killed in a horrible plane crash. And according to George, like half the class burst into tears. Yeah, that was crazy. So he was just like into this idea of, of the rhetoric. He also was really in, I think this is a thing that always strikes me is that everyone read books then, but like-

• 34:26Speaker 03

  We all did, really.

• 34:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's not as common anymore.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  I know. It shocks me and I keep thinking of being an old lady about it.

• 34:34Yasi Salek?

  Well, I guess like, I guess it's, they have phones, you know, like.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's not the same.

• 34:39Yasi Salek?

  Totally not the same, but like, we read books because we wanted an escape, right? And it's like, I couldn't escape into, I didn't have a phone. You couldn't really watch TV eight hours a day, like, I mean, my parents wouldn't have let me, you know? So like, but what you could do is sit in your room and read a book or listen to music. Paul Darby was himself very into reading, particularly Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, who was a German nationalist, but not a Nazi, Bertrand Russell.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, he read all the, all of that.

• 35:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, all Brave New World, yeah, Herman Hesse, Machiavelli.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  He incorporated all of that.

• 35:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, into his, into his later lyrics and stuff. He was also really into this book, I just thought this was really interesting if anyone's like a cinephile, called Twins, which was a bestseller at the time by Barry Wood and Jack Geisland. It's about twin gynecologists who go crazy and end up killing each other.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  That was a wild book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:38Yasi Salek?

  And David Cronenberg made it into a movie called Dead Ringers, so if you like that movie. And his mother said that he was also obsessed with the gossip papers, The Star and The Inquirer.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  We all were. Oh, my God. We all were. And then like when I started doing my fancy lobotomy, there was always like cutouts from there.

• 35:56Yasi Salek?

  I bet it was so, those are the coolest places to take the art from.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, The Inquirer or any of those things.

• 36:04Yasi Salek?

  I loved this story. So apparently, the lads, Darby, Paul Rossler and Pat went down to the Scientology Center on Hollywood Boulevard. And Paul Rossler said, Pat scored zero on the personality test and they told him that he was an utterly horrible person. I scored like a regular person. They said, yeah, we can help you for $500. Of course Darby scored perfectly on everything and they asked him to come teach there. Such an insane, the idea of going into the Scientology Center and taking the test and then being like, wow.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  That's like right, that's right in my neighborhood.

• 36:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, it's still there. It's the same one, it's still there. Okay, so this is around the time you met them, we just talked about it. I actually have a diary entry by you from November 18th, 1975. "I went to IPS today, mixed emotions, very mixed. I got feelings like, hell, I should be going here. Why am I submitting myself to Beverly Hills High? And then, god, this place is pretty fucked. One thing that bothered me was the self-righteousness and the self-consciousness. Very self-conscious of being unself-conscious, uninhibited and free. People always spoke in IPS lingo, which goes something like, "I get that you acknowledge me as an asshole, but that doesn't mean you don't have the space to play with me. I want you to get that. By the way, it's okay to be fucked to me."

• 37:21Yasi Salek?

  That seemed uncomfortable. This whole-

• 37:23Speaker 03

  No, that's how people talk there.

• 37:26Yasi Salek?

  It's okay for you to be fucked to me.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, because a lot of things were like, okay, then, like-

• 37:34Yasi Salek?

  So you were there and just being like, this is so crazy.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  I was. I thought it was absolutely nuts. I mean, I wasn't like wild about my school or anything, but this was just like in a different level of craziness.

• 37:46Yasi Salek?

  It's really wild that they let that go on. So apparent, and I want to ask you, since now you know them, I read that they had like a little group of followers at this school that that kind of like-

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, they did.

• 37:58Yasi Salek?

  They had like, yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  They were starting to, you could, you know, in hindsight, I realized that you could see the trajectory that Paul Darby was going on, you know, because he had, he had so many people that were, I mean, starting with like getting germs burns-

• 38:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  For devotion and stuff. And then there was other people that would just like cater to like anything he wanted, pretty much.

• 38:23Yasi Salek?

  Do you feel like it was like that he had like a special charisma? Like, what do you think it was about him that drew people to want to like kind of follow him around?

• 38:32Speaker 03

  He did. He had a, he had a very special charisma. I mean, he and George both did, but they were, they were very different, you know, and um- His was, he really wanted to do it and he really like studied up on how to do it.

• 38:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Like, like what you just mentioned, by reading all those, those things, you know? And like, that was a goal of his and I think he really like hit his goals, you know?

• 39:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, in some ways, yes, and I think in some ways, no, which we're.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Well, in some ways, no, but I mean, that like.

• 39:05Yasi Salek?

  But for that to get the.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  That kind of thing, like, you know, like psychologically influencing people.

• 39:11Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, just getting them to do things for you and to feel like they were, you know, appreciating that they were being noticed.

• 39:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a classic thing of like, someone who's a charismatic leader is like, they always say like, oh, that person made me feel special.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:29Yasi Salek?

  There was something about the way they.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  He got that and then he, he understood like all of those, the nuances of how to be a leader in that way, I really think, you know?

• 39:39Yasi Salek?

  It's.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  But also at the same time, watching all this happen for, for, for me, myself, it was bizarre. I would just be like, you know, seeing someone else that just wanted to like cater to anything he was doing. And I was like, I'm not going to interfere in this, but this is just like.

• 39:56Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Another one bites, it does. It's just wild to watch it happening.

• 40:02Yasi Salek?

  I, I'm very fascinated by it. We're going to talk about, there, there's a lot of people, particularly women, but not just women, that become part of this orbit and, and play an important role, I think, in like what happens with the germs. Um, but it's kind of starts here in high school.

• 40:53Yasi Salek?

  So the music thing comes into play a little bit, like later part of high school, because Pat said that while he was off at the Jesus Commune, Darby then gets super into rock. Because again, he was only listening to lowrider music, and he gets really into David Bowie. When you met him, he had the full haircut and the makeup. He had a Bowie shrine in his room. He called himself Astrid. A child from the stars would write like, poetry and lyrics from that. Willamato said that Paul felt, Paul Darby, felt that Bowie was on to something that wasn't explicit. Bowie could give you surface suggestion, but that wasn't, but what he wasn't saying was what got him.

• 41:36Yasi Salek?

  Paul wanted that magic. He wanted that mojo. He said Bowie was using language to physically affect people, and they didn't know it. Language was a cause, and all these Bowie kids were the effect. If he could learn to use language like that, he could harness the power of language to that degree, then he too could be the cause.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  I think that's exactly true.

• 41:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  In hindsight, I wasn't thinking it as it was happening in exactly those words, but yeah.

• 42:02Yasi Salek?

  It's interesting, right? It's like, kind of like, all the parts are coming together. So he's learning about rhetoric and like, using language to like, sort of have power and like, control. And then he's getting really into Bowie and seeing that in Bowie's art. And then, they had befriended a guy who I'm sure you knew too, called Chris Ashford.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, of course, Chris.

• 42:20Yasi Salek?

  Who worked at a record store on Woolshire that was called Music Odyssey.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:24Yasi Salek?

  It does not exist anymore. He was into Iggy, so they all had that in common. They, George and Paul had gotten into Iggy when they found raw power in the cutout bins, like you said. And they loved the cover. And they read stories about him, the peanut butter, cutting himself up, putting cigarettes out on himself. A lot of DNA of the germs here.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  It came from, it definitely came from Iggy. Actually, one of the first times I went out with George and Paul, this is crazy, because it started me on a whole other trajectory to me, was, want to see where Iggy lives? And so we went to the building that he was living on on Sunset and I'd been here for such a short time that I thought because I had a record of his and he was a rock star that the whole building was his house. And it was this crappy little

• 43:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they were like squatting.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  The small, it was, it was like a, a one-room apartment right next to the parking garage. And we walked into it and he said, does anyone have any drugs? And I was having a surreal moment because I loved the Stooges.

• 43:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  And I just couldn't even believe we were like at his house. And then also I was trying to figure out why he was in this horrible little hovel, you know? And then we wound up becoming friends and I was seeing him for a while, like.

• 43:41Yasi Salek?

  No big deal.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, no, you know, this is my life. It's crazy, but how that, that whole thing happened.

• 43:48Yasi Salek?

  You were like, sorry, George, I have a new boyfriend, he's into Iggy Pop. Um, enjoy your shrine of me, but I've moved on.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  No, I wound up living with him in Malibu for a whole summer. It was crazy.

• 44:02Yasi Salek?

  Pleasant.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:03Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my God.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  There was lots of craziness going on.

• 44:08Yasi Salek?

  Really lived quite a life. It's funny that you said you went over there. So this hovel apartment was next door to the Riot Hyatt, right? Those, that part of Sunset.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was right near there.

• 44:17Yasi Salek?

  And the reason they knew him and were able to go there is I guess Chris Ashford, who wasn't friends with him, just knew where he lived.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:23Yasi Salek?

  And they were like, take us over there. And they just knocked on the door and were like, we're, you know, Paul and George, we want to be friends. And Iggy Pop was like, okay. And I guess when it was, he was living with, um, James Williamson, who was the guitar player of the Stooges. And they said that when they would go there and Iggy wasn't home and it was just James, James would not let them in. He was like, absolutely not, get the fuck out of here. But when Iggy was home, they would come in and just hang out. Um, and then George also said something to echo what you said, which I thought was very interesting, is that they would sit on the couch at the record store reading, you know, import British rock magazines.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we all did.

• 44:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Because none of us could believe the amazing stuff that was happening in the UK.

• 45:02Yasi Salek?

  And learning, learning about, like you said, the Sex Pistols, just by reading about them, right? Not even hearing the music or seeing them play.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  No, just knowing this, you would love this.

• 45:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. And then he said the same thing you did, there was Rodney on the rock. So we would listen to Rodney religiously, which is, which I just love so much because I also grew up listening to Rodney on the rock really just like I would sit and tape his show.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:27Yasi Salek?

  Because he would still, even through the 90s, he still played the best music and the coolest music. He was so ahead, but in the 70s, I mean, he's been credited for like breaking the Ramones and Blondie and stuff in LA.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. He was. He was the only one that would play them, like in this market. I'm saying that with air quotes.

• 45:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Because, you know, no one else was, people weren't like, all the bands that are like so revered now, like we're just not getting played anywhere.

• 45:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Rodney Bingenheimer, an absolute legend and icon, I gotta say.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was.

• 46:00Yasi Salek?

  If you guys, I mean, if you guys are interested, there's a documentary about him called Mayor of the Sunset Strip. That's quite good. And also I'm pretty sure you can still find him at the Cantor's now and again.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sure he's probably there.

• 46:11Yasi Salek?

  He has a plaque. So it's 1976. Rodney's English Disco closed in late 75 and that's where like, he would bring all the British bands to play and play that kind of music and kind of the Runaways started to come up through that. Now you guys were going to Odyssey and Gino's and the Sugar Shack?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Yes, the Sugar Shack all the time. The Sugar Shack was in North Hollywood on Magnolia. And like every Wednesday, we'd go to the Sugar Shack, all of us.

• 46:41Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I wanted to ask you about Gerber. Is this around the time where Gerber, who I think, is her real name, Michelle?

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Michelle Bell.

• 46:48Yasi Salek?

  Michelle Bell comes into the scene. Do you remember meeting her?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I met her on the beach with Paul Rossler and George and Paul.

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  And she sort of becomes

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Patton Derby.

• 46:59Yasi Salek?

  Part of the crew of, around the Germs.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:02Yasi Salek?

  Which are not the Germs yet because they're just two guys. But the Runaways are the Runaways. They had formed in 1975. I read that Pat and Darby were like pretty obsessed with them, like as an idea, like, oh, if they can do it, we can do it. And they like loved their band and would hang out with them.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, they loved the Runaways. And I mean, I used to, I used to cut, cut school to, to wa- watch them like rehearse at SIR.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  So cool.

• 47:29Yasi Salek?

  I can totally see this, though, like, because they were very young. They're teenagers. That's the whole thing about the Runaways.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So. I mean, we were, this is the crazy thing now that people don't realize we really were all teenagers.

• 47:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, literal teenagers. And teenagers that were sort of around. So like, seeing teenagers that you were friends with sort of have this success of like being in a real band and playing real shows and like kind of doing this thing. Okay, now you're like, well, maybe I could do that, too.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:56Yasi Salek?

  Now, by the fall of seventy six, this is a little lesser known Kim Falley project, because the Runaways had severed ties with him for many reasons that we won't go into on this here podcast. But he formed a boy punk band in that same vein called Venus and the Razor Blades.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:13Yasi Salek?

  And they were kind of lame, right?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Vicky Arnold was in them for a while.

• 48:18Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  The singer, she was beautiful.

• 48:20Yasi Salek?

  I didn't hear a lot about.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  She was the bartender at the Sugar Shack and that's who Shari stole her look from.

• 48:27Yasi Salek?

  Shari Curry?

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:29Yasi Salek?

  Woo, teeth! For our purposes, importantly, Nicky Beat played drums in this band and he will come to play into this germ story.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:36Yasi Salek?

  So, the boys, still named Paul and George at this time, form a band in seventy six again. Inspired by the Runaways, they love music, Sex Pistols, the whole thing. Were friends with Iggy.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Wait, do you know how they got the name The Germs?

• 48:48Yasi Salek?

  Well, first their name was Sophistafuck and the Revlon Spam Queens.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:53Yasi Salek?

  Which is a crazy name.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  But do you know why it got changed to The Germs?

• 48:57Yasi Salek?

  No, tell me.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Because in those days, you could get banned t-shirts. I'm saying this in big air quotes. But there was only a few, there was a place in Westwood and I think there might have been one other place that did it. And it was like these, these sort of soft letters that you, that would.

• 49:17Yasi Salek?

  Like, like iron on letters?

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, yeah, iron on or press on letters. So, but they charged by the letter. So Sophistafuck and the Revlon Spam Queens was not working, but The Germs worked.

• 49:29Yasi Salek?

  They were broke and that is not going to work.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:32Yasi Salek?

  Um, I love that. That makes total sense. I also saw. I mean, number one for sure, because they needed the money. And they were like, a short name. And I saw that Darby had some idea of like, the germ of an idea. It's like, the start of everything. They had no instruments at this point, just shirts. Yeah. But gorgeous shirts. They would say, people would say, "Why are you called the Germs?" And Darby would always say, or Paul, as he was called then. At that time, he'd say, "Because we make people sick." That's so good. They recruited their friends, Michelle Bear and Dinky, real name Diana Grant, to play with them. They played no shows, they did no practicing, they wrote no music. Pat said, George Pat, "With the Germs, we went out of our way to say and do things most

• 50:17Yasi Salek?

  people would never say or do. It was a reaction to our disappointment in other rock stars, specifically finding out that Alice Cooper played golf. That really upset us. It really freaked us out. Alice Cooper does what? It was like, we're gonna fucking start a band, and we're gonna change our names, and we're gonna be fucking doing this thing. We're really gonna be like that 24/7. We're not gonna fake it." And we're not gonna be playing golf. Yeah. He said, "Whatever it is we're gonna be, we're gonna be the most. If we're gonna be punk, then we're gonna out punk the Sex Pistols. If we're gonna be the worst band ever, then we're gonna be the fucking worst band ever." So, this is around the time they do change their names, but Darby is first Bobby Pin. Yes. And Pat is Pat Smear. Yeah. Darby said later that the name Bobby Pin was more of a joke.

• 51:02Yasi Salek?

  "I just changed it because it was the easiest way to make people aware that we had changed, that we were doing something different." Now, here's a story that you're a part of. At some point in early 77, Pat and Darby, Bobby, Pin, John, Paul, and Pleasant go to try to meet Queen in the lobby of the hotel at the Beverly Hilton. Yes. Okay. Now, you guys did or did not meet Queen during this time? We didn't meet them during that time. Yeah. But you did meet two girls from the valley. Yes. Named Belinda Carlisle and Terri Ryan. Yeah. Later to be known as Lorna Doom. Do you, what do you remember about meeting them?

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, I, I just, Belinda and I locked the eyes immediately and just, we just loved each other. I mean, we, we're still friends, obviously.

• 51:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  But, like, she, she looked like a 1940s movie star.

• 51:57Yasi Salek?

  Cause she was so beautiful.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  In those days. Yes, and cause she was dressing like that, too.

• 52:01Yasi Salek?

  Oh, right. And they had, they called them the poodle haircuts? What was that about? What did their haircuts look like?

• 52:06Speaker 03

  She didn't, she didn't have a poodle haircut. She had a, it looked like, it looked like if you'd see like a 40s pinup girl. It was kind of bangs, but it was more styled up.

• 52:18Yasi Salek?

  Cute.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  There's, it looked, it looked like, like you'd see it on a, you know, for a, a Visit Tahiti poster.

• 52:25Yasi Salek?

  Right, right, right.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  It was very, sort of, 1940s, like, influence.

• 52:31Yasi Salek?

  Makes sense that maybe a guy like George would not know how to term that. He'd call it poodle haircut.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was nothing like a poodle, a poodle cut.

• 52:40Yasi Salek?

  But they were both blonde and...

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And they were from Thousand Oaks.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yes, from T.O.

• 52:46Yasi Salek?

  T.O.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  That was far away.

• 52:48Yasi Salek?

  It's far, yeah, I know. It's really crazy, the idea that you would just, I mean, first of all, there was much-

• 52:53Speaker 03

  That you'd drive to Hollywood to go to the-

• 52:54Yasi Salek?

  There was much less traffic then. You could do that. There was half the population. Um, but yeah, they would just go all the way to Hollywood to try to meet Queen. Um, so they went to Newbury Park High. That's the high school they went to.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Really? That's like an hour and a half away for people that don't know?

• 53:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's quite far.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  The greater Los Angeles area.

• 53:13Yasi Salek?

  The Queen, that was very powerful, the idea of meeting Queen. They just meet them here. Belinda said in the oral history, "We met Bobby," cause he was going by Bobby at the time, "and Pat in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton. They were like the weirdest guys we'd ever met. They were great." "Bobby had figured out what room Freddie was in, so he went up to his room and knocked on his door. We were pretty annoying." "Bobby and Pat thought we were bizarre." These two little girls, these two girls with little hairdos from Thousand Oaks. They're 40s hairdos. So after this, Pat and Darby started posting flyers around town looking for two untalented girls to play in their band.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:48Yasi Salek?

  And Belinda and Terry saw those, and I think it was also in the- Recycler. And they called and they were like, hey, were you those guys from the Beverly Hilton? This is how small LA was. It makes me crazy to think about this, how that could just happen. Like, you meet some guys. Well, because it was the rock scene was small. Right. LA was still as big as it was. Yeah. No, but the population in LA was half the size as it is now. So even, even the rock scene was small, but all of LA was less people. They get rid of Michelle and Dinky, who I guess were only imaginary in the band because they never played anything. And Terry goes by Lorna Doom, plays bass. Belinda went by Dottie Danger. Yeah. And she was meant to play drums, but never did. She said it's because she got mono. Maybe.

• 54:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't know. Lorna said, she never told me why she decided not to play drums. It seemed she always had something else to do when we had to meet. I read somewhere that she was ill, who knows? But I have my suspicions that Paul and George were just too much for her. What I thought was really interesting is Pat said that actually when they first started the band, Darby was gonna play guitar and Pat was gonna write the lyrics and sing. And Pat said, Paul's mom bought him a little Rickenbacker and we would sit in his backyard and he'd laugh at me and make fun of my words and tell me they were shit. And the opposite happened. I could play guitar and he couldn't. So we decided he'd write lyrics and I'd write music. He could sort of play like two chord ideas and he'd tell me, play like this. And I'd make up progressions around them. Or sometimes I'd write a whole song, tape it and give it to him for the lyrics.

• 55:15Yasi Salek?

  I thought that was really interesting that it was meant to be the other way around. Yeah. It was also very interesting, which was Pat doesn't say because he's, I guess, humble, is that he was just like such a gifted, like a naturally gifted guitar player. He would never say that. Yeah. But I'm like, because he talks about, he's like, oh, I could like really play like any Yes or Queen song. And it's like, those are very complicated. They were so into Yes and Queen. Yeah. They get another drummer to replace. Donnarumma. Yeah, Donnarumma, also known as Becky Barton, her real name. The best punk stage name. Donnarumma is so. So terrible. I'd be so bummed if that, like, everyone has a cool punk name, like, oh, Lorna Doom. And I'm like, they're like, you're Donnarumma. And then Donnarumma.

• 55:59Yasi Salek?

  Don Maria, tough beat for her, honestly, because according to her boyfriend, her main purpose was using her credit card to rent equipment for them and drive it around. And she sucked at drums and could barely keep a beat.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  But you know, I got them that gig at the Orpheum.

• 56:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay, but we're about to talk about this. It's literally right here. So they have this like little group of people around them, which again, Pleasant, just to be clear, is not really part of. Like, you were like an OG friend, but like, you weren't part of this Circle One business.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  No, no. I thought it was, I thought it was kind of stupid.

• 56:32Yasi Salek?

  Well, it was a little culty, right? It was a little...

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was too, they were too, they were too, like, the, the girls were just too, I don't even...

• 56:40Yasi Salek?

  Like devoted?

• 56:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, too devoted.

• 56:42Yasi Salek?

  And, but it was like, okay, so we talked about Gerber, who was also maybe a sort of a different thing, but she was also around Helen Keller, who was your friend as well, and Trudy, who had met Darby and Pat at the Capitol Records swap meet, which can you talk about that a little bit?

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. God, the Capitol, I was telling someone about it the other day.

• 57:03Yasi Salek?

  It was in the middle of the night? I don't understand. Do you go at 3:00 in the morning to buy records? Who's there selling records? What was happening?

• 57:09Speaker 03

  So the Capitol Records swap meet, every time I walk up or down from Hollywood Boulevard, I see the Capitol, like, I see the Capitol Records parking lot and I shed a little tear. The Capitol Records swap meet was so wild. It would happen once a month, and it would open maybe around like midnight or 1:00 or something. Everyone would go there straight from the clubs, because there was no such thing as after-hours clubs. And you could just, you could pick up booze on the way there.

• 57:41Yasi Salek?

  So it was just like a big hangout?

• 57:43Speaker 03

  It was a big hangout, but originally it was just like a swap meet for serious record collectors.

• 57:50Yasi Salek?

  But why did they make it at that time?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  No, the, the real time was 7:00 in the morning. We started, all the punk people started going there at night because they'd be setting stuff up and we could find good weird records early and they, like, they didn't care if you were rifling through, you know, their bins.

• 58:10Yasi Salek?

  Right, okay, I mean, so it was like, it was like the way like, like the Rose Bowl starts setting up at four, but like, you can go early, yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but so, but so it just wound up because it was so near, like, any of the clubs or people's houses that were on and off Hollywood Boulevard or anywhere in Hollywood, you know, because a lot of us didn't have cars, a lot of people were living at the Canterbury or, you know, the other punk houses around actual Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard. And so it was just right there and it was like, we turned it into an open-air after-hours club. It wasn't meant to be like that, but none of the vendors cared. I mean, why would they care seeing like drunk, cute girls in miniskirts, like stumbling around going, "What year is this record from?"

• 58:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, maybe even buying some, like, so dream come true.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  That was really a scene. It was so much fun. It was, it was crazy. Cops never came to it because it was a record swap meet. We'd all be like sitting there drinking our hooch, wandering around.

• 59:09Yasi Salek?

  I was born too late. Um, okay. April 1977. Okay, so The Damned came to town.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:19Yasi Salek?

  They were supposed to open for television, but television kicked them off the shows. So they were taken in by The Screamers, is what I read.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know about that. That seems about right, though, because The Damned were so high-energy and incredible, like, seeing them. And in those days, it was like, I wouldn't want them to be opening for me.

• 59:37Yasi Salek?

  I did read this a couple places, so I think it did happen. And they were like very actually bummed because they had used all their money to fly all the way from England.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they stayed at The Screamers, The Screamers' house, the Wilton Hilton, was always the, my god, they had everybody, all the coolest people from different places that they knew, like, because Tomeda had been in New York, um, he knew a ton of people from New York, he knew all the Blondie people, he knew everyone, you know, that turned into the Ramones, and so did Fayette Hauser, who lived there. KK and Rand McNally, um, you know, who ran Danger House Records, and KK, the drummer of The Screamers as well. They came from Oklahoma. LA punk was like a beacon for everybody.

• 1:00:23Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  You know, it was easier than New York, too.

• 1:00:26Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Because you didn't have to like worry about, you know, paying for heat all winter. And it wasn't as expensive as New York was. So there was just an influx of people coming to LA at that time in the 70s. And they were all geniuses, like almost all of them, like amazing. And also amazing, those of us who are still alive, we're still all friends with each other.

• 1:00:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Yasi Salek?

  So, so you mentioned Tomato and KK and the Screamers. The Screamers kind of predate the Germs. The Weirdos predate the Germs, a little bit. Like, it's not like they had been around for five years or whatever. Although, the Screamers also had a different name and they were in Seattle before.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  In Seattle, yeah. They were called the Wiz Kids and they were doing like shows that weren't necessarily band stuff. It was more like the cockhets.

• 1:01:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they did like drag, drag shows and stuff.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Was in the cockhets. She was one of the forming members and she lived with the Screamers.

• 1:01:23Yasi Salek?

  That's very cool. Well, so there's this in-store at Bomp. You were there. The Jam does doing an in-store. The Screamers are there. There's a show. It was the same night. Yeah. So the Orpheum, you guys, was not like, it was not a venue. It was a black box theater that actually is where Book Soup is right now.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, 99 seat theater.

• 1:01:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. The guy from the Nerves had been setting up shows.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Yasi Salek?

  For the weird, just punk shows. So he had set up this show with the Screamers and the Weirdos. I think there was another band.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  No, the Screamers weren't playing there.

• 1:01:58Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it was just the Weirdos?

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. When the Weirdos walked into Bomp.

• 1:02:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  My jaw just dropped because they were wearing like women's 1960s raincoats with like five weird belts and like just crazy like. Toys and keychains and stuff hanging off of them. And I just immediately went up to them and I was like, hi, my name's Pleasant. What's yours? What band are you in? And they said it and I was like, where are you playing? And they said, tonight at the Orpheum. And then I just said, do you want, do you need another band? And that's how the Germs wound up playing.

• 1:02:35Yasi Salek?

  You were like, I have one. I'm with them right now.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so we, we wound up, they, they said yes. I can't remember if Peter Case was there. I'm sure he was because everyone was at that in store.

• 1:02:45Yasi Salek?

  Peter Case from the Nerves. Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, all of us were.

• 1:02:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Like, everybody went to that. That was like a pilgrimage, you know?

• 1:02:51Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure. I mean, The Damned have come to town. Like, it's such a big deal. I would go.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And even Angeline was there.

• 1:02:58Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. I read that you said that was the first time you saw Angeline. And she was wearing a baby blue corset.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Yasi Salek?

  You guys, Angeline. This is my Los Angeles. This is my Los Angeles, okay? I mean, you can still see Angeline around, honestly, if you're lucky. I always find it to be like a beautiful, like, it's like some, a good omen when I see. It's not as much as I used to, but like when you see her little pink car.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Yasi Salek?

  On the, on the highway, you know, it's gonna be a good day. Fun story about me that I was telling Alex off mic, actually, maybe like a year ago, I was at Bob's Big Boy, which I love, near my house. And I was wearing my Germs t-shirt. And I walk up to like, meet a friend and there was like an older gentleman sitting outside. And he goes, hey, amazing shirt. And I was like, oh my God, thank you. And he was like, I booked their first show. And I was, and it was John Denny from The Weirdos.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:03:46Yasi Salek?

  And I was like, oh my God, this is a really cool moment. I was like so excited. I didn't know what to say. I was like, I love The Weirdos. But The Weirdos were an art school band. So to, to your point about their outfits, like, they were an actual, like, in art school at UCLA.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we didn't know that at the time. I'm just telling you what it looked like.

• 1:04:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm sure you were just like, wow, like, like, because obviously you guys were getting a little weird, but that was like even further than what you had seen.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  This was incredible, you know? And like, I didn't care if it was art school or not art school. I didn't care if they were in a band or not. I was just like, I need to know these people.

• 1:04:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Okay, so what was the show like? Because obviously I've read a lot about it, but I'd love to hear about it from you. And then I can say a couple of the details that I just read about.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so the show at the Orpheum. Um, we left Bomp Records immediately and went up to my mom's house and, um, We had to stop to get licorice whips for Darby. And it was, we were all drinking all afternoon. They were, they were completely drunk. Chris was driving. So we were getting ready. And I had to tie all these licorice whips all over Bobby Darby's body, you know? And that was gnarly and it was sticky and it was.

• 1:04:57Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  And as I said, we were just like, eh, we were like kind of all shitfaced.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  So that was pretty wild. And then going up to the, um, driving up there to the strip, trying to figure, you know, like, like, don't, like, don't wave that bottle of booze around. And I mean, it was, it was, when I think of memories like this, I wonder how we're still alive, all of us. Because it was, it was just like that.

• 1:05:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, some.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  For all the seventies and the eighties.

• 1:05:30Yasi Salek?

  Some of you guys aren't.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  And the early nineties, I know.

• 1:05:31Yasi Salek?

  We'll talk about it. I mean, there's, it was making me really sad going through, like, how many people haven't made it. Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Well, some people didn't make it. I mean, just out of natural causes.

• 1:05:42Yasi Salek?

  No, totally. And there's various, but, okay. So the red licorice whips, the pleasant, um, helpfully costume designed for Darby Crash, uh, AKA at that time Bobby Pin, basically melted into a red goo everywhere. They were, as you said, wasted.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Donneria didn't know how to play anything.

• 1:06:00Yasi Salek?

  Donneria doesn't know how to play. They don't really have songs. They had one song, I think they had forming already.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Yasi Salek?

  They just start playing, according to John Denny, they were snickering massively intoxicated kids who were just, literally just playing random feedback and banging around and smearing mayonnaise and peanut butter all over themselves in the P A.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  This is pretty much true.

• 1:06:21Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so, yes, the, the Germs show is a bit of a disaster. They are escorted offstage within, I think about five minutes.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, within minutes.

• 1:06:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. They did get a write-up in Raw Power Magazine the next, I think it was that month or the next month. And this is what it said. "The Germs came on first and were the biggest joke of the year. None of the Germs could play their instruments whatsoever. They took an hour to get set up and then played for two minutes. The lead singer smeared peanut butter all over his face and everybody in the group, they were all spitting on each other until they were kicked off."

• 1:06:55Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, it sounds kind of amazing. According to Pat, Jack Lee of The Nerves, who had put on the show, called him after and said that they loved the band and wanted to put out a single. And he said, "So we got my mom's little cassette and a bottle of booze and did an awful version of "Forming," just me and Darby out of our minds. We mailed the tape to those guys. We never heard from them again."

• 1:07:17Yasi Salek?

  After that show, they did get rid of Noreya, because she sucked, respectfully. And they got a guy called Cliff Hanger on drums.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  My mom named him that.

• 1:07:26Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Yasi Salek?

  What was his real name?

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  I can't remember right now. But my mom was the one that named him Cliff Hanger. She also named Helen Killer.

• 1:07:35Yasi Salek?

  Your mom was good with these names. Well, I don't want to besmirch Cliff Hanger's name. I just simply read that he was a low-level drug dealer who sold Quaaludes at the whiskey. But, you know, maybe he was just trying to make-

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  But everyone did shit like that in those days. I mean, to put it into perspective, that was like, that was like everyone's side hustle. If you had-

• 1:07:52Yasi Salek?

  Right. So it wasn't like that was his, like, occupation. It was just-

• 1:07:55Speaker 03

  No, and it wasn't looked down on either, because it was a very different time then. We were all just getting fucked up. It was the 70s, you know?

• 1:08:03Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  And if you needed money, you know, you could, and you could get, like, Quaaludes or whatever, you know, Quaaludes or loads, like I was talking about before, just some, you know, it's not like you were selling, like, heroin. It was just everybody was getting high.

• 1:08:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, selling it to friends, totally.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:08:23Yasi Salek?

  Chris Ashford said, "As soon as they got Cliff Hanger, then everything changed. Pat would teach Lorna her basslines. They'd work on it together, then they'd go to practice at Pat's mom's house. They became serious." So they needed a good drummer. Okay, were you at the Cheech and Chong Up in Smoke shoot?

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:37Yasi Salek?

  Can you tell me about this? Because this comes fairly soon after this. I don't have the exact dates, but it was around this time, right? And it's at the Roxy. So this was a film, I think the first Cheech and Chong film called Up in Smoke. And they wanted to have, like, a punk scene. So they got the Dills, the Berlin Brats, and the Germs to play, who are actually ultimately were cut from the movie. But tell me about that experience of being at the whiskey, or the Roxy, sorry.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  It was a Roxy. Everyone that, everyone that we knew, pretty much, was there. And one thing that I do remember-

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Was we were getting, a lot of us by that time were getting jobs as punk rock extras in scenes.

• 1:09:19Yasi Salek?

  Incredible.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  You know, like, like because it's Hollywood and because if people wanted punks, they would pick real punks and not try to.

• 1:09:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because this is nineteen seventy seven. So seventy six is the year where it's like the big sex pistols year. And now like punk is starting to make its way into media because there's so much magazine press and stuff about all these crazy punks. So they, that makes so much sense. So you guys who are like the real punk kids and dress like that, they're like, oh, it's easy. We'll just go pay them X amount of money. I, I think Excine Svirinka from X was also at the show. And she said that they paid you guys fifty dollars.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, all of us went there. But they also, um, since we'd been doing other movies, I was disgusted because their fog was the kind of fog that would leave you with black snot coming out of your nose.

• 1:10:06Yasi Salek?

  That was probably not healthy.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  It wasn't, no, it wasn't the good kind of fog, which is probably equally as unhealthy. But, um, that, everyone from the LA punk scene was there that day for Up in Smoke. It was really, really fun. And there are some pictures, um, I think I posted one, this, this sounds so nowadays. I think I posted one on my Instagram, like a couple of months ago, that we were all sort of posing in front of the Roxy after, after Up in Smoke. And in those days, no one had cameras in their phones. No one had phones.

• 1:10:40Yasi Salek?

  Right, of course.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  So, so it's rare to see those kind of pictures, like someone that was around all the time as a photographer.

• 1:10:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, had a, had a camera and snapped it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:10:52Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I thought it was.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Because people couldn't even afford like Polaroids, you know what I mean? Or something. It was like, get film, buy drugs, or get film, go to the show, or what, you know what I mean?

• 1:11:01Yasi Salek?

  Get film or buy drugs? It's a hard, it's a, it's a hard one. And a lot of people were like, I would prefer the drugs. Thank you. Yeah, you can see the scene in Up in Smoke, but you can't see the Germs because they were upset that they were being told what to do and they went crazy and broke a ton of shit.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did.

• 1:11:20Yasi Salek?

  And then the director and the A.D. were like, "You need to get the fuck out of here." So that summer of 1977, this is when The Whisky starts doing punk shows presented by Kim Fawley, right?

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, or by me. I had all the lobotomy magazine shows there.

• 1:11:34Yasi Salek?

  In 77?

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:35Yasi Salek?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I was the ticket taker there.

• 1:11:38Yasi Salek?

  So cool. Oh, you were?

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was already working there.

• 1:11:42Yasi Salek?

  Kim Fawley said that actually Elmer Valentine, the owner of The Whisky, had come to him and said, "We need a gimmick to sell tickets. What do you have?" And he was like, "Well, punk rock." Who knows if that's true? A lot of, I mean, a lot of these stories are various people trying to take credit for stuff.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Especially Kim Fawley. But you know who was really the unsung hero of The Whisky was Michelle Myers. She booked a lot of shows. She booked them there, but she also booked other places. She was Miss Pamela of the GTO's best friend.

• 1:12:11Yasi Salek?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  She knew everybody in town, everybody. She was the one that when she found out I had a crush on Billy Idol, she got his actual number for me from, from like England and stuff.

• 1:12:23Yasi Salek?

  Did you call him?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Well, I was going to, but then he came on Rodney's and I had sent him a package because I made a Generation X shirt because no one had merch then, not that we called it merch.

• 1:12:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  I was painting, like I painted Germ shirts, like hand painted. And so I made a Generation X one. And I went to Rodney's because he said, "Come here, Billy Idol's gonna be on. You can, you know, you can talk to him when our interview's done and I'm playing music." So he said, "Pleasure wants to, someone wants to talk to you." And I got on and I was like, "Hi, this is Pleasant." And Billy was like, "I got your package last week." And I mean, shit like that was happening in those days all the time. Which was just crazy. Yeah.

• 1:13:07Yasi Salek?

  Something special. Well, I want to ask you about this one show. So in June of 977, The Germs played with the screamers and the zippers at The Whiskey. And this show, A, was actually recorded. They set up a live soundtrack with a portrait studio in the alley and recorded it. So this is The Germs live at The Whiskey. But can you tell me about the food fight? Because I read that. Yeah, I read that Darby asked everyone to bring food from the grocery store to the show. And the whole thing turned into some insane food fight.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  The bouncers, the bouncers, well, that was, that was why he wanted everyone to bring stuff. But the bouncers and Jim Lepena, who was, you know, the one that let all of us in. Yeah, and he was nice, like, that, that worked everyone's last nerve. Because there was, there was just like jars of mayonnaise being flung around. You know what I mean? There was, there was like pieces of hamburgers that someone didn't finish from five days ago on the stage. And it was just going around. And Jim was, he was like, he was walking around with a dustpan and a broom and like scrub marks. And he grabbed someone by the scrub of their neck. You, get your ass up on stage and start cleaning up.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  You, get your ass up on stage and get rid of this shit right now.

• 1:14:31Yasi Salek?

  It must have smelled so disgusting in there.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  Well, it didn't, maybe at that point, it just smelled like a weird salad. But if it would have lasted any longer without like, almost all the patrons of the club cleaning it up, it would have been horrifying.

• 1:14:44Yasi Salek?

  So funny.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was wild.

• 1:14:48Yasi Salek?

  They really were pushing, pushing it with these shows.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  I know, but nothing like that will ever happen again at, at shows. It was like the wild west back then, for real.

• 1:14:59Yasi Salek?

  It's like the true spirit of punk, right? To be like, we don't, we're not here to fucking social climb or climb the ladder of ambition. Like, we don't care if they kick us out. We don't care if they don't book us again, you know?

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, nobody cared. I mean, that was the coolest part of it. No one, no one cared. And everyone just did everything. And anyone that was in it. Like, we were all in it, like, full on out. It was really great.

• 1:15:24Yasi Salek?

  So great. So Chris Ashford, our friend that we talked about before, worked at the record store, put out the Germs' first seven inch.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Yasi Salek?

  It was forming with the B-side being "Sex Boy Live", a song that the Screamers would cover live a bunch. This is still credited to Bobby Penn, because he was still using that name. I liked the story, apparently, that they would call Rodney all night, every night, and be like, "Please play our single. Can you play our single? Please play our single. Can you play our single?" And finally, he was like, "Okay, fine. Just stop calling me." And he played it. And I'm like, "This is a way to get things done. I believe in this dogged tenacity." It was reviewed by Claude Bessie, who at that time went by...

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  Kick Boy Face.

• 1:16:11Yasi Salek?

  Kick Boy Face. By the way, if you guys have a little time, and I implore you to, please go on Claude Bessie's Wikipedia page, because the first paragraph, I'm like, "This is the most interesting Frenchman that's ever lived." But I don't have time to talk about him right now, but just get into it. So he wrote about this single, "Beyond music, mind-boggling, inexplicably brilliant in bringing monotony to new heights." I don't think he liked it. But slash...

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  No, but he was still, he could turn a phrase, man.

• 1:16:35Yasi Salek?

  He could, he was such a great writer and such an interesting person.

• 1:16:47Yasi Salek?

  Okay, in August of 77, and you alluded to this earlier, but Brendan Mullin, a Scotsman, opens The Mask.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Yasi Salek?

  Can you tell me a little about The Mask?

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Oh, my god, The Mask was just, it was amazing.

• 1:16:58Yasi Salek?

  Where was it?

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  It was in the alley, behind the Pussycat Theater.

• 1:17:04Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Which is on, like, Hollywood and Cherokee. But, so, it was in the basement there. We went back there not that long ago. It was about a year ago with Joe Pompeo from Vanity Fair. And it was just incredible, because it's owned by RuPaul's World of Wonder.

• 1:17:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  Preserved so much of the Mask stuff. They didn't paint over any of the graffiti.

• 1:17:32Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just got goosebumps again thinking of it because, I guess, because they're doing drag and drag has its own crazy, long-term, underground life.

• 1:17:43Yasi Salek?

  Sure, of course.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  They didn't want to do anything to mess up a subculture. And then it was wild being down there, like, walking around saying, "I wrote that. I wrote this," or like, "This was written by blah, blah, blah, who's not alive anymore," and just bringing back all these memories. But the, and then the queens were posing with us and that was so fun. And they were just, they were just great. It was, that was a wild thing.

• 1:18:07Yasi Salek?

  So cool. Yeah, this, so it was this iconic, kind of anything goes, art space, nightclub, hangout.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Completely illegal.

• 1:18:16Yasi Salek?

  Completely illegal. Not one single shred of paperwork minted or stamped by the city. No permits.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  And it lasted for a long time.

• 1:18:29Yasi Salek?

  The graffiti was incredible. I think there was like all these walls about like, what it, like, poser stuff. My favorite was that you would call things trendy, which I'm obsessed with now as like a diss. And no one would think to do that anymore. It was like, oh, that's trendy.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it's like, now it's like, people want to be trendy. I don't know. Back then, I sound like a hundred-year-old man. But, okay. So, the Mask is iconic.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  I'm surprised. I'm still shocked that nobody ever tumbled down the cement stairs and died.

• 1:18:57Yasi Salek?

  Maybe they did. We don't know.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  No, they didn't.

• 1:18:59Yasi Salek?

  The angels were protecting.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  We checked many times.

• 1:19:02Yasi Salek?

  The angels were protecting the Mask. Okay, so the Germs play a show there. They have the Alley Cats headlined, a band I've never heard of.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  They were great.

• 1:19:09Yasi Salek?

  They were?

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  They were really great. It was Diane Chai, the bassist, was this beautiful, like, Asian bassist goddess. They had some really good songs. They're unsung of the L.A. punk scene. They never had anything major out.

• 1:19:22Yasi Salek?

  Right. They said that they, they had them play because they had played Gazaris, which was like, in their words, "a real club."

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  It was a real club.

• 1:19:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  I mean, not like the Mask, yeah.

• 1:19:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like, yeah, we had permits from the city. So the Germs opened the show with a trash-out cover of "Rock and Roll All Night" by Kiss. Brendan Mullin said, "Then Pat trashed a Yes song. Sacrilege." They were trying to get through these songs. It didn't matter if they finished them. It didn't matter if they were in key or in time. Nobody cared what they sounded like. Neither did they, but everybody was going nuts anyways. People thought that they were into this avant-garde shit. And what they were really into was David Bowie Queen and Yes. You know?

• 1:20:03Yasi Salek?

  That show is also when Darby officially starts going by Darby Crash, which, by the way, was reported by one Pleasant Gaiman. He wrote it in your column for The New York Rocker that he showed up onstage at a punk rock fashion show at the Palladium.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Oh, my god. I didn't even have these. Where did you get these?

• 1:20:21Yasi Salek?

  It was in the books. And it said that you wrote it up. You announced it. So, very cool. You were there, reporting the news. Kick Boy.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  Claude.

• 1:20:33Yasi Salek?

  Claude.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Yasi Salek?

  He said, "The first day I was down in the mask when The Germs were playing, I knew I was facing Genius. I was amazed. This man Bobby Penn didn't give a shit."

• 1:20:45Yasi Salek?

  Now Darby Crash. Okay, so in October of that year, this is not a long story. So, I'm kind of trying to paint all the beats, because, you know, the story is short, unfortunately. The Germs play their first San Francisco shows. They open for The Weirdos at Mabuhay Gardens. Did you go up with them?

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Yasi Salek?

  I read that everyone just hopped in the car and went.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  We all went up there, yeah.

• 1:21:06Yasi Salek?

  Darby said everyone-

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  We all stayed at Sam Wong's hotel, which was like the worst fucking flop house you could ever think of.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my gosh. What?

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  This is when Broadway up in San Francisco was not in any way glamorous.

• 1:21:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  It was not the tourist part of-

• 1:21:25Yasi Salek?

  It was like dangerous.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:28Yasi Salek?

  Jeff McDonald, who you said you met on the beach, who was famously in Red Cross with his brother, teenage band, great band. He said, "The Germs had all these Dracula's daughters, about 10 or so girls who were devotees. They were kind of like under the spell, and they would do anything their leaders asked them to do."

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:21:44Yasi Salek?

  Again, not pleasant. Um, and they paid for everything, right? Yeah. Because Darby never had a job ever in his life. No. Okay, I wanna, I wanna read these three quotes about this sort of group, this circle one that we're like obsessed with. Mm-hmm. Darby, and then I wanna ask you about it. Okay, first was Helen Keller. She said, "People really liked to be around Darby. Even the people who hated him sort of gravitated to him. Everyone just wanted to be around him. I have no idea why. I really hated him, and then I turned around and became his quote-unquote girlfriend slash surrogate mom. We were really comfortable together. It was cool. There was absolutely no weirdness between us. I really, really loved him." And then Brendan Mullin said, "Whereas Bobby Pin seemed to be much more innocent, goofy, and carefree,

• 1:22:29Yasi Salek?

  Darby Crash became much more demonic, complex, intense, intoxicated, as he gradually began to exude a much darker persona. Once he became Darby Crash, his compulsive manipulation and panhandling seemed to increase. The dreaded 'give me $2, give me a Bia, give me a ride home' was the dreaded sound around the scene, which witnessed a series of socially ostracized, overweight women, many of them easy pickings, mind suggestibles with absent or disapproving father complexes of more or less the same psychological type preyed upon by people like Charlie Manson." That sounds pretty true. "Such women openly competed for the attention of this emotionally unavailable, alcohol-besotted, LSD guru while picking up his tab for booze, drugs, gas, food, and clothing."

• 1:23:15Yasi Salek?

  And the last quote is from Alice Bag, who is also your friend. Still. Still, who is also. "It used to really bother me that Darby enjoyed trying to control people. I felt it was demeaning not only to his followers, but to himself. It used to bother Darby that I treated my fans as equals. He would lecture me on what people expect in a leader. We had very, very different views on the subject." I want to ask you, since you were seeing it too, but it sounds like the people within that circle, like Helen Keller, were like, oh, people just loved him. We were around him. Like, you know, we just wanted to be around him. And the people outside it, like Brendan Mullen, or even maybe Alice Bag, were like, this is weird, you know?

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  It kind of depends what, what exact time period it was. Like, I didn't like it when it was going on with like, all those, all the girls and just all that, like, his, he was changing. He was, he was getting to be very different than he had been.

• 1:24:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  That was what bothered me the most. I didn't care if he had like legions of people serving him or anything, but it all...

• 1:24:16Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that is part of what changes personality, though? Like, that people were catering to him?

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  I think that helped a lot. I think drugs were helping a lot with that.

• 1:24:29Yasi Salek?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  It was, it was just, it was very different. It was, even though you could sort of see the steps leading up to it, when it became full-blown, it just seemed unexpected.

• 1:24:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, you talked a little bit about the Germs-Burns. Darby said about them, it has to do with circles. You've seen our armbands and stuff. Everything works in circles. Sometimes you're doing something and then like, a year later, it seems like you're doing something else, but you're back at that same point. It's really hard to explain. She's really obsessed with like, cycles.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Yasi Salek?

  And also about creating this sort of like, gang, this circle one, like, the Burns, the Arms, the like, having a visual identity, having, like, I thought it was very interesting that the music was important, but almost like, equally as important, if not more important, was what was around the music and what he was kind of sort of trying to create around the music. Pat mentioned it too, that he was intrigued by the concept of fascism. And Darby said, "People associate us too much with the Nazi thing." Obviously, I think they were using some Nazi.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  They, well, I mean, a lot of people were kind of interested in the whole Nazi thing, because when you think about it, it was not that, it was between the Nazis and punk rock.

• 1:25:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  Time, uh, was way less than between now.

• 1:25:53Yasi Salek?

  Was very short, yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was very short and it was hard to comprehend how all that even happened in Europe, how people like joined the Nazis. And I mean, it was, it was really dark, but it was really fascinating, too. Especially for people like us that weren't into any kind of mainstream stuff.

• 1:26:16Yasi Salek?

  Right, and we talk about this a bit in the Joy Division episode, where like, it's hard to like wrap your mind around now, but it's like, A, it was like, the time that had passed was so short.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, yay, that had just happened, pretty much.

• 1:26:29Yasi Salek?

  And we're talking about teenagers, A of all, you know, and we're, and you know, they were, the idea of shock and like, um, subversion was so strong that it's almost like, that was what the thing was. And, and this is what Darby is saying, he's like, "Yeah, we're fascist, but we're not Nazis, there's a difference." This is very interesting. This was so interesting, because I was just having a conversation with a friend about what's happening now in our like, political arena, and especially online, especially with young men, and young men being drawn towards fascist ideals. And I was just like, I was losing my mind, this is, I'm gonna sound so insane now. Some of you are not as heavily online as me, and when I say the word clavicular,

• 1:27:14Yasi Salek?

  you're not gonna know what I'm saying, but it's okay. Clavicular, a looks maxer, we don't need to worry about it. But the point is that I was like, oh my God, I like, I just kept thinking, I was like, if this guy, who is now like, being quoted in the New York Times about like,

• 1:27:30Yasi Salek?

  His philosophy of like wanting to like look the best, but it's a very fascist sort of like narrow ideology. If he had been around the 70s, would he have been a punk? You know, like I really was just like, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Okay, but anyways, back to what Darby was saying. He said, yeah, we're fascist, but we're not Nazis. There's a difference. We don't believe in killing off races. I can respect Hitler for being a genius in doing what he did, but not for killing off innocent people. His genius lies in his speech, what he could do with words. There's films of him giving speeches in Germany. A lot of it is just an emotion, the energy you can get up. Fascism, it's just that we've tried other forms of government and none of them are going to work. The only one that will work is complete fascism, a complete fascist state, but you have to have the right person to lead it.

• 1:28:15Yasi Salek?

  If you get everyone to believe in one person, then it'll work. Communism can never work. There's a few problematic things in there, obviously. I don't think we have to hand it to Hitler, but he, regardless of if there's morality in what he's saying or not, he was intrigued by how powerful Adolf Hitler was with just the power of his words. And then I noticed something that just the year before, David Bowie had been quoted in Playboy saying, "I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right wing,

• 1:28:57Yasi Salek?

  totally dictatorial tyranny and get over it as fast as possible." And then I was like, okay, now things are kind of making sense to me. You know, Darby Crash being so obsessed with Bowie, there's no way he didn't read that, you know?

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  As soon as you said that, I was like, yeah, he read that.

• 1:29:12Yasi Salek?

  And then putting it together with like all his reading. So I just, I found that, and again, that he loved the idea of controlling a crowd, you know?

• 1:29:22Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, I just thought it was, I just, I think when we talk about the Germs, a lot of people might say something to the effect of like, well, the Germs weren't that important, or the Germs music, you know, I mean, they made basically one album. But you gotta take in the big picture here. Like, how important they were in terms of punk culture, in terms of what they were able to accomplish in such a short time. And we're gonna get into it a little bit later, but like, you cannot discredit how big of an impact they had on hardcore. There would be no hardcore without the Germs.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  A lot of what you're saying is exactly true. And when people, when people look at, at, um, like, subcultures and scenes, unless they're a sociologist, or someone that's doing a dissertation or something, they usually don't get all parts of it right. They can't understand what the evolution was from, like, liking or being interested in something, to then letting it influence you, to then you using it to influence others.

• 1:30:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  That type of trajectory, like, people just don't see it.

• 1:30:32Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Like, they're very, very cut and dried about stuff, especially about punk. Like, I've told you, I have people, like, trying to correct me on stuff that I lived through, and they weren't even born yet.

• 1:30:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and they weren't, totally. And I think it's like, punk in particular is like, people have become so obsessed with it. Obviously changed, it changed the course of music. We wouldn't, all of the alternative music we have now is all rooted in punk. And I think, like, it's impossible to understand unless you were there, like, you were, how big of a deal it was, like, how people would throw shit at you guys.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:06Yasi Salek?

  On the streets.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  All the time.

• 1:31:07Yasi Salek?

  It was not like, they didn't have an urban outfit.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  It wasn't, it wasn't easy doing what we did.

• 1:31:13Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. It wasn't easy doing what you did.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  And we were all so into it. I'll, I'll tell you, so, I can't remember if I told this to you earlier, because we've been talking so much, but... I told my mom at one point, I said, Mom, you don't understand. This is like Paris in the 20s. And she rolled her eyes and I said, no, really, it is. And then now, this many years later, I realized it really was. I was true. I nailed it right on. It changed everything in the same way that Paris in the 20s did with all the art movement that was going on.

• 1:31:44Yasi Salek?

  I think you're dead on. And I think it's, again, we just said it, but it's worth underlining. Like, this was not, to be in this scene and to be like this in the world was difficult. You know, like, you really were going against the grain. And it's not really possible to understand now where, like, alternative culture has been co-opted and resold to everyone. And there's no such, like, it's basically impossible to shock people without becoming like a full alt-right.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and everyone's so into like whatever new little subculture pops up. But people are interested in it, not, not like feeling aggressive about it because it's the other.

• 1:32:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  You know, people are just wanting to know where it came from. It was so different in those days.

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• 1:33:28Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so it's 1978 now. We're coming on the homestretch-ish. We're halfway through, I guess. Not through the podcast, but halfway through the story. Okay. So 1978, in January, you mentioned this a little earlier, but I wanted to ask you a bit about it, the Canterbury Apartments. Because this is around the time that people start moving in there. And Lorna lived there with Belinda Carlisle.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Yasi Salek?

  Black Randy lived there.

• 1:33:49Speaker 03

  Jane lived there.

• 1:33:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Jane Weedland, Black Randy of the Metro Squad. So it was just like a cheap apartment building?

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  So many other people lived there, too, that like, the listeners probably wouldn't know who they were.

• 1:34:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  I was actually, last night, I was walking there.

• 1:34:05Yasi Salek?

  Is it still there?

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  With my boyfriend, around the Canterbury and stuff. We were just walking around Hollywood. And like, I didn't know he lived right where the Canterbury was. And I was like, it was crazy.

• 1:34:17Yasi Salek?

  That's so wild. Yeah, because it was right by the mask, and it was cheap. So that's why everyone lived there. What was the scene like there?

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  The Canterbury was great. It had this big courtyard that's no longer open, but it used to be an open courtyard that had, it had windows around each side.

• 1:34:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Speaker 03

  And they were like, sort of like those dormer windows where you can open them up. And I remember walking into the Canterbury before it was gated back in the day. And everyone would be like, just sort of hanging around, drinking a beer with their legs like hanging over the side. And, you know, even the lobby was a party. There was always graffiti on the elevators. And the guy that was the manager, I think he was like some kind of a drug dealer. It was just mayhem in the Canterbury. It was just wild.

• 1:35:09Yasi Salek?

  Such a cool thing to have, like, this space where everyone lived. You can just pop by and like, see all your friends and go to a party. Although Darby said that, so what Darby Crash said was, "I couldn't live there. Too much everything. Lorna lives there, but Pat lives down in my neighborhood. The Canterbury is in a really horrible neighborhood." One of my friends got hit in the head with a champagne bottle thrown by somebody going by on a motorcycle, and someone threw a knife at Belinda.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was knives going on, but I don't think it was probably at Belinda.

• 1:35:37Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  No, because the rebels, the gang of Hollywood, they had West Side Story knife fights in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard in those days was so deserted. That you could literally, and I did this, do cartwheels down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard after just what would be normal rush hour on any street.

• 1:35:58Yasi Salek?

  It was just like dead?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Deserted. There was nothing there until the Kodak Theater.

• 1:36:03Yasi Salek?

  Wow. Because there's no business is what you're saying.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was little tiny, like a pet store on the north side. And then there was a store called The Orient on the south side. That's like kind of right near the Magic Store. And I think only just got closed finally. But there was nothing on there. There wasn't restaurants or anything. Not until the Kodak Theater came. It was a dead zone.

• 1:36:25Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  That's why it was even more insane. Because even a little bit later into the eighties, when I had my punk house, Disgrace Land, it was still like that. You could do whatever the fuck you wanted. There was no surveillance. Cops knew if you lived in the neighborhood. It was crazy.

• 1:36:43Yasi Salek?

  So sad. It's fine. It's really fine. Everything's fine now. We love it. The world is perfect right now. I'm so happy to be here.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Let's put it this way. I saw my, I was leaving the Apple Store on Sunset.

• 1:36:55Yasi Salek?

  See, no good story starts with I was leaving.

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  No, this is good, but it is a good story. But I didn't even realize I was on my old block where my punk house,

• 1:37:04Yasi Salek?

  Where Disgrace Land was.

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Because there was a 15-foot-high privacy wall.

• 1:37:10Yasi Salek?

  That's what I'm saying. It's a bad story. This is a bad story.

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  No, it's just like it was gentrified.

• 1:37:14Yasi Salek?

  It's a sad story.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  Brand new, yeah. But I didn't recognize that it was my street even. And that street was within walking place of all the clubs. I worked at a club called Catheter Grand.

• 1:37:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, very famous. You booked the first Red Hot Chili Peppers show. Was it not there?

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Yasi Salek?

  You guys, no big deal. It's not a big deal.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  I know. I've done a lot of crazy stuff.

• 1:37:35Yasi Salek?

  Closing game and just one of the most, literally the Dos Equis woman, the most interesting woman in the world. Okay, so the Canterbury is popping off. Cliffhanger is out of the band. We don't know why. They get Nicky B to come play. He was drumming for the weirdos. And he was kind of a punk rock session guy. They go back to San Francisco. So cool. So this is the night after the Sex Pistols played their famous last show at Winterland.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:00Yasi Salek?

  And Nicky B said he remembered Sid Vicious walking from the, watching from the wings.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07Yasi Salek?

  And then he just gets on stage. Oh, he's like, Darby gets on stage, grabs Lorna's beer off the amp, walks across the stage, drinks the beer, breaks the glass over his head, carves a gigantic bloody circle on his chest with a broken glass, then comes in right on cue with "I'm Darby Crash," a social blare.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Yasi Salek?

  Scott says, "Chills." I'm not gonna, we're not gonna go into it later because I had to turn it off after 15 minutes because I forgot how fucking bad it is. But there is like a version of that in the What We Do Is Secret movie.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Yasi Salek?

  The wigs in that movie, I can't even talk about it.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  Oh, and?

• 1:38:42Yasi Salek?

  Crime. They're a crime.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  In that movie?

• 1:38:43Yasi Salek?

  They should go to the Hague, the people that made those wigs.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  All the, all the, all the fucking people that were being extras at that movie, like, because I wasn't in it, people that I didn't even know from like Riverside and stuff were calling me up going, "You're not in this movie. Why not? Why not?" I don't even know how they found my phone numbers.

• 1:39:00Yasi Salek?

  You were like, "Because it's a horrible movie."

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  I was glad I wasn't in it after that.

• 1:39:03Yasi Salek?

  You know what? We all, it's, there's something for everyone. Um, and that one is not for me. Okay, so now in February, Don Bowles, babe. Don Bowles has moved to LA. Real name, Jimmy Michael Gersetti.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  I was the first person he met in LA.

• 1:39:16Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  He'll tell that to everybody, yeah.

• 1:39:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, tell, okay, so he's a Leo from Phoenix, Arizona. Now tell me, how did you meet Don Bowles?

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  I was, I was walking down, um, down to Hollywood Boulevard and he was, he was parked in a car just south of Franklin and he looked, he looked cool or he had a cool bumper sticker or something and we just started talking and he gave me these wild sunglasses, like 50's sunglasses. And he said he had just moved to town.

• 1:39:44Yasi Salek?

  That's so cool.

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  And he still tells everyone I'm the first person he met in LA.

• 1:39:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so he had actually moved to LA with his friend, um, Rob Graves, who I think has passed away now. Um,

• 1:39:59Yasi Salek?

  He took his name from an Arizona journalist named Don Bowles, who was killed by a car bomb in 1976, investigating some mafia stuff.

• 1:40:09Yasi Salek?

  He had heard The Germs forming single. And he said, "I was transfixed. This was either the best or worst thing I'd ever heard. Now, this, I thought to myself, is punk. I'd heard that these guys needed a drummer. And even though I'd only been playing drums for about two weeks and didn't even own a pair of sticks, let alone a drum kit, I was their man." So they, like, him and Rob Graves just drove from Arizona, went to a Dill's show at the Whiskey, met you, tried to find The Germs. Everyone called him Cactus Head? Is this true? Yeah. Because he's from Arizona? I forgot about Cactus Head. So good. We called him Cactus Head. Shut up, Cactus Head. So he gets Darby and Pat's phone numbers, maybe from you. And when he gets Pat on the phone, so this is what I was saying earlier. Don tells Pat, "Oh, like, you're all my favorite,

• 1:40:54Yasi Salek?

  like, cool avant-garde and punk bands." And Pat's like, "Oh, yeah, I don't know any of those bands. I like Queen and David Bowie." And Don was like, "I thought he was fucking with me."

• 1:41:06Yasi Salek?

  So Darby's like, "Look, The Germs were playing a benefit for The Mask," because The Mask is not... probably having some troubles, "at the Elks Lodge." And Nikki Beat was gonna be playing drums. So Don goes. And with Rob Graves, and then afterwards, they get rooms at the Canterbury. He's like getting into the whole scene. And Nikki Beat said he gave Don Bowles drum lessons. He's like, "I taught him how to play all the songs. And then I stopped the lessons when he said punk rock is supposed to be sloppy and it's supposed to have mistakes." He's like, "Okay." And they, so The Germs auditioned Don at The Mask in the bathroom. Don said, "I set up my drums in three inches of beer and urine in the overflowing mass toilet and banded out some noise." Lorna, Darby, and Pat watched horrified but amused.

• 1:41:49Yasi Salek?

  Pat politely interrupted, "Can you play, like, a song?" "I played 'Life of Crime,' the weirdo song Nikki Beat had taught me. And they went into the other room out of earshot. 'I don't know, what do you think?'" Well, he did come all the way from Phoenix. A long tense moment later, imagine being turned down to drum for the biggest joke band in LA. Darby came back in the bathroom and said, with a characteristic nod to some vague perceived audience somewhere just above his head, "Well, you're a germ." It's a really cinematic moment. Someone in the book, and I can't remember who, pointed out that, like...

• 1:42:24Yasi Salek?

  It felt like almost overnight, the Germs went from like, really being like this joke band to all of a sudden having like really good songs.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Yasi Salek?

  And they were like, what? Pat said, "The Germs' music changed just because we eventually got better. We couldn't help it. We started out with nothing, so we had no choice but to change."

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just, that's exactly how I saw it. I mean, they weren't, a lot of the other bands that came out here.

• 1:42:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  Or maybe lived here, but not right in LA, and had been playing and like, you know, down near the South Bay or something.

• 1:42:54Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  They, they had a better start off. You know, the Germs' start off was in public.

• 1:43:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, the first show ever, when they didn't know how to play anything, they were just like, "I'm gonna put some peanut butter on my face."

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  That was my fault.

• 1:43:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, all your fault. But it's a thing of legend, you know, they dived in the deep end. Yeah, they weren't like ex, who were like, ex were older.

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Yasi Salek?

  Had been doing it longer and were just like,

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  And they knew, they-

• 1:43:18Yasi Salek?

  They were dead, they were really musicians playing music, you know, it was a bit of a different thing.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, they knew what they were doing.

• 1:43:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So Slash, who loves, you know, loves the Germs, offers to put out their first EP. I wanted to say this also that Darby Sex, I thought it was interesting. I never really did want to shock people, but you have to do something when there's all these bands. When we first started, we couldn't really play and neither could anybody else. So you have to do something to draw more attention to your band, and that was an easy way. But when people said, "Oh, let's go see the Germs, they'll probably bleed a little this time," we stopped doing that. That's when we started to learn how to play better. It wasn't enough to just bleed yourself. Bob Biggs, who was the publisher of Slash, he's also passed away sadly, he said, "I heard some Germs recordings that Steve Samyoff, who was the founder of the magazine, had. It might have been forming, and I wasn't sure whether I liked it at all, but then it stuck in my mind.

• 1:44:07Yasi Salek?

  Then Samyoff said, 'Look, I'll do an EP.' And asked if I'd finance it. So I said, 'Sure, I'll put up,' 'cause $600 didn't sound like such a big risk.'" This was the Lexicon Double EP. They pressed 1,000 copies. May 1978, produced by-

• 1:44:23Yasi Salek?

  I don't know how to pronounce this. Is it Geza X?

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Geza.

• 1:44:26Yasi Salek?

  Geza X. Did you know Geza X?

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:44:28Yasi Salek?

  Of course. So he, he did sound at the mask, right?

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Nikki Beat played drums on this. Um, Geza X said, Pat didn't even have an amp, so I just rigged this chain of pedals and that's why it has this tubular guitar sound. Jeff McDonald of Red Cross said, I think the Lexicon Devil record has one of the most unique guitar sounds I've ever heard. It kinda sounds like a banjo being played through a wah-wah pedal. Darby later said, I think the Lexicon Devil sessions could have been better. Things got screwed up and stuff. Like on Circle One, there's half of the vocals missing and we just had to make it like a lead and turn on the guitar and stuff because we didn't know what had happened and it just disappeared. And Pat couldn't show up and he's the one that knows the most about the music and Lorna had to tell Geza what to do. And you can hardly hear the drums. So it was not up to Darby's standards.

• 1:45:23Yasi Salek?

  I liked what John Doe said about it. He said, you didn't know the words because when you'd see them live, it was all like wah, wah, wah when Darby would sing. So everyone was just astounded when they got the first Slash record and actually read the lyrics.

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  And could read the lyrics. I know. People were absolutely astounded. They were just like, what? They, because they, they didn't, I don't think they knew that the lyrics were gonna sound so good, so like scholarly in a few cases. So impressive. His, his lyrics were off the chain.

• 1:45:55Yasi Salek?

  Really incredible.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  And you couldn't hear any of that because of the shit-ass equipment.

• 1:46:00Yasi Salek?

  Shit-ass equipment. Um, obviously played quite intoxicated.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, shit-ass, shit-faced.

• 1:46:06Yasi Salek?

  Not loving to hold the microphone close to his mouth when he performed. But yeah, I mean, Lexicon Devil, which God tier song really goes so hard.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  It changed a lot when, when that, when that record came out and people could hear.

• 1:46:18Yasi Salek?

  I'm a lexicon devil with a battered brain, searching for a future. The world's my aim is so good. And also, again, lexicon from going back to high school, going back to the rhetoric teacher. Like, it's all really there, you know?

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  I thought that the lyrics are incredible.

• 1:46:31Yasi Salek?

  And then give me this, give me that, very much his, give me a beer.

• 1:46:42Yasi Salek?

  Nikki Beatson stole the opening drum lick for Circle One from the Allman Brothers song In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, which I was like, that's, again, really funny. Like, you would not associate the Allman Brothers with The Germs.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  That's what I'm laughing about is because I only just heard this myself, but shit like that was happening a lot in punk rock that people that weren't there don't know.

• 1:47:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like they wouldn't, again, not-

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  We would just take from wherever you could. Like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like, look at all that, that sounds good.

• 1:47:13Yasi Salek?

  That works if it's in.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  No one will be any the wiser than-

• 1:47:18Yasi Salek?

  So, I mean, it's great, it's perfect. There's a review here in "Lebotomy Number Six." You're a fanzine by yourself. I'll read it for you. "For anyone who dismissed The Germs as crap, wake up. This is one hot record. They not only play at the speed of light, they do it well. Pat Smear's lickety-split guitar work will have you going in two seconds, and Darby Crash practically vomits out the vocals. Lexicon Devil's great, but my fave is Circle One. Musical poison. It'll have you shaking violently from the intro. Ready, aim, fire, down to the last chord. Be careful when you play this record, it may burn right through your turntable."

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  Wow, that's wild.

• 1:47:53Yasi Salek?

  Good job, Pleasant.

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:48:06Yasi Salek?

  You know, journalistic integrity, you were dating the guitar player, but it's fine. I think you're still allowed to give a good review.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  Well, it was a great record.

• 1:48:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, that's undeniable. So, there's this place down in Hermosa Beach called The Church. It was an actual former Baptist church. Kind of got started up just after the masks closed down.

• 1:48:26Yasi Salek?

  Bands would practice there. Black Flag practiced there. Ron Reyes and Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag famously lived there. You can see that in the decline of Western civilization, something we're gonna talk about later. Red Cross would rehearse there, there'd be parties there. Now, here's what X. Seen said about it. "When the South Bay scene first started happening, I really liked the new bands like Black Flag. Then there was this divide between Hollywood and the beach scene. Greg Ginn said they wouldn't let those bands play in Hollywood, so they had to create their own scene, and it kind of became anti-Hollywood. I would reject this because everybody wanted to see those bands play. Fuck Hollywood is what we were saying, too. Somehow, the South Bay punk scene opposed the old Hollywood scene, and the audience started becoming anti-rock star, anti-whatever.

• 1:49:09Yasi Salek?

  And if you were signed to Slash, then you were a rock star traitor. The South Bay girls didn't like me very much, so I stopped going to the hardcore shows because I was threatened. They'd shove me and push me and tell me they hated me." They started calling these people the HB's. I think it was because of Huntington Beach.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Huntington Beach?

• 1:49:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because the epicenter, I guess, according to the books I read, was a high school called Edison High in Huntington Beach.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Huntington Beach was a wild scene.

• 1:49:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  But I think Huntington Beach is different than the

• 1:49:37Yasi Salek?

  It is different than South Bay.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  South Bay scene, it's very different.

• 1:49:39Yasi Salek?

  So

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  You can't just lump it in to get, not you, but like

• 1:49:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally. But I think it sounds like what was happening was like, the South Bay scene was like Black Flag and Red Cross, and it was like, this like, had this punk scene happening.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then there was also Backdoor Man from there with Fast Freddie.

• 1:49:56Yasi Salek?

  Oh, sure, of course.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  And Don Waller and all of those older people.

• 1:50:00Yasi Salek?

  And the Runaways' first show was in Fast Freddie's house.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they were all, they were huge. They were a little bit older than us, but they were, they were like, always at the, you know, at the record swap meet and stuff. I mean, they, they would have been called punk if they had just appeared there, but they were already there doing punk stuff.

• 1:50:22Yasi Salek?

  Stuff, right, but a little bit earlier.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  That wasn't getting called punk.

• 1:50:25Yasi Salek?

  It sounds, like, from what I was piecing together, and I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but this is from everything I read.

• 1:50:32Yasi Salek?

  The Black Flag kind of courted these new hardcore punk kids from hunting, from Orange County, right? Because they needed to up their numbers. This is, I'm, this is not from my own heart and mind. This is something I read, Billy Brendan Mullen said it and a couple of other people said it. And so they, Jeff McDonald, they needed to sort of like increase their audience, kind of the way Darby was increasing his audience through his own methodologies. Black Flag was like, oh, we can get these kids. And these kids were a different kind of punk.

• 1:51:11Yasi Salek?

  These were kind of like, as I think Mike Watt put it, testo-driven jocks, like. Totally. Yeah. That's exactly. They were, this is a whole new thing, right? I could say that, but for Mike Watt to say it. Right? Yeah. And it's like, this was not, this was not what the punk scene in Hollywood was, the punk scene in Hollywood was kind of what we associate with all the early things of punk. It was queer-friendly, right? Or to a certain extent. It was very, very. It was woman-friendly, you know? Like, it was about being weird and it was being subversive, but it was about. Weirdos coming together. Weirdos coming together, whereas this new crop of suburban surf punks. Very homophobic, very anti-women. Very anti-women.

• 1:51:56Yasi Salek?

  It was like horrifying. Anti-Semitic. All parts of it. Extremely violent, like they, they, from what I was reading, they were like intrigued to come to these shows because they heard they were violent. And they were like, oh, we can, we can be violent. We can fucking beat people up. That's what we want to do. So this influx kind of starts to change things, right? What was so interesting about the Germs is that I feel like they straddled both worlds in a way, right? Yeah, they could, they could straddle both worlds. Because while they were from that. Punk world of like weirdos coming together and anything goes.

• 1:52:30Speaker 03

  They also did just crazy shit.

• 1:52:32Yasi Salek?

  They also did.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Darby's stuff was just like you, if you saw someone doing like the stuff that he did on stage, your first thing would be, well, what's he gonna do offstage? Is this a loose cannon? Does he have a gun?

• 1:52:44Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  Is he gonna beat the fuck out of us?

• 1:52:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and then on top of it, actually musically, that Don Bowles's drumming and, and Pat Smear's guitar riffs set the stage for what became hardcore music, you know, like that was something really different. And I think they were in this kind of in-between place, but the crowds got really violent at these shows in Orange County and sometimes in the South Bay. Jane Weedland from The Go-Go's, what was her punk name? Jane O'Drino?

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  Jane O'Drino, yeah.

• 1:53:14Yasi Salek?

  She said the whole scene started to change.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  It was like a lot of us had multiple different names.

• 1:53:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It started as a scene of girls and gays and stuff. It had been taken over by all those really angry young white boys, Black Flag. We were like, what's this all about? It's really gross. We got lumped in with those bands, but we never knew those guys. And then Keith Morris said in the book, The Go-Go's were playing pop music. They weren't a punk band. It was a female vocal harmony group with rock guitars and drums. Of course, they're gonna be taken aback playing a show where it's 95% sweaty guys jumping around and a little blood flowing here and there.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  They absolutely were a punk band, though. They started as a punk band. They couldn't fucking play anything.

• 1:53:55Yasi Salek?

  I think that's.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  The Go-Go's first gig at The Mask had three songs in it, and two of them were the same song. I mean, it doesn't get much more punk than that.

• 1:54:08Yasi Salek?

  That's what's so interesting, right? This, that's sort of the difference between punk as like a countercultural sort of like movement, right? Or like punk as philosophy, right? Or community, which is, under those terms, of course, The Go-Go's were punk. They came from the world, this community of punk. Whereas what Keith Morris seems to be describing is this whole other thing. Punk as anarchy, as violence, as like this like whole new crazy version, which kind of becomes hardcore. And it's like fascinating to me how like around 1979, it's sort of splits, you know? And you have these two branches of what's going on.

• 1:54:52Yasi Salek?

  And I read, I don't remember who said it, but they were like, once this sort of, oh, it was Kickway. He said, once the hardcore scene kind of expanded, the germs kind of disappeared. Like slowly eroded what they had. And everyone did kind of like go in different directions, right? I mean, the Screamers and the Weirdos sort of receded. X did really well, but they kind of went in a bit of a rockabilly direction, like with the Blasters and stuff. It does feel like this kind of splintered everything.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  It kind of, yeah, it kind of splintered stuff, but I mean, it did splinter it, but I don't, I don't know if I, having been in it, would think that it came exactly from that point. I think when people's, like, like X were better at playing than a lot of like teenagers that started up here because they, you know, they had, like John Doe had bar band experience and had played a lot and Billy Zoom had played with, with fucking Gene Vincent, for god's sake. You know, I mean, that, just as an example. And they were incredible. So they moved at a different pace than someone that just decided to pick up, like, a guitar.

• 1:56:09Yasi Salek?

  And a jar of peanut butter and call it a day.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Like three months ago or something, you know? Yeah. But also in those days, anything that people were doing was okay. It wasn't as, it wasn't as formally regimented as, as a lot of people look at it nowadays. Cause things are all genre based now, all the music is. And it wasn't like that. You could be in the suburban lawns and just like tweeting, "Get your goat to hell!" Like that. And that was just as punk as like.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  I don't know, like the Germs or, you know, or some, some other band.

• 1:56:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  You know, just like even that, even that Orpheum gig was, if you look at it, people nowadays would say, that wasn't a punk band because, you know, the Plimsolls or the whatever, you know, they were, they were called that and I'm blanking it out right now. But, I mean, it was, it was a musical scene. So many people knew each other, so many people had very diverse kind of influences and/or mentors, or started off one way and morphed into another scene, but it still is everything that made up the Hollywood punk scene.

• 1:57:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  You know, and that was, that was a, that was a huge scene. But it was also, you know, it, it had many different factors in it.

• 1:57:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  But no one was counting that kind of stuff.

• 1:57:36Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Until people started counting it historically.

• 1:57:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  And there was a lot of also misconception coming from a lot of, of areas. I remember like reading, reading things that people had written in books and be like, that, that wasn't right.

• 1:57:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  And then I'd have to go back and check, was this just my perception of it wasn't right? And then I would start calling people that I knew and say, I just read blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, what?

• 1:58:01Yasi Salek?

  Right, right with you. They were like, no, that's crazy.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  I think a lot of it came from assumptions.

• 1:58:06Yasi Salek?

  Right. And, and the, the need to do a taxonomy after the fact and to look back and start to categorize things. I think you're so right. And even, you can even see it in like that quote I read from McSine. Like she's not saying like, oh, these were like completely different things hardcore and what we were doing, but it, but it does feel like the lived experience at the very least was that like some people in the Hollywood scene were put off by the vibe brought by these new suburban punk.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I was, I was one of them because this, this was like anti everything that punk rock was standing for.

• 1:58:46Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  And then like I remember just thinking like with those, with those people, you know, like they're, they're all probably fucking like. Privileged Orange County boys, you know, like they didn't like just like save all their money to move across the country. They lived in Orange County and now they're thinking like there's such.

• 1:59:07Yasi Salek?

  Right, totally. Rodney on the Rock interviewed Darby on the radio in 1980 and he said, you were there before Black Flag, you started it. And Darby said, someone's got to finish it. That thought was really great.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  Someone's got to finish it.

• 1:59:22Yasi Salek?

  He also said in a different interview with Rodney, records are only a medium to get something else done. I want to die when I'm done. And now it's time to make the first and only full-length record. Slash had shifted into a label. Basically Steve Samioff left to do the magazine's stuff and Bob Biggs was like, okay, well the magazine doesn't really make money anyways, let's really do this label. And they start with the Germs album. Penelope Spears said in the Lexicon Devil book that the way Bob Biggs raised money for this was by dealing coke, although he denies that. He says there was never any wholesale dealing going on. I love that he used the word wholesale. It's so amazing. It's like just a little.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  I just felt it out of my house.

• 2:00:00Yasi Salek?

  Hobby dealing. No wholesale dealing, retail dealing.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  Everybody did shit like that back then though.

• 2:00:06Yasi Salek?

  Well, specifically he said, he was like, I wasn't more deeply involved with cocaine than anyone else. It was the 70s.

• 2:00:11Speaker 03

  No, that's exactly true. I gotta say, I was just talking about this with someone last night.

• 2:00:16Yasi Salek?

  Everyone did a little retail dealing of cocaine.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, or just did it all the time, you know? That really was a 70s thing.

• 2:00:24Yasi Salek?

  So at this point, they had a manager named Nicole.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  Oh, Nicole.

• 2:00:28Yasi Salek?

  So what was the vibe on Nicole? Not a word. Interesting. You get that a lot from what I've gathered.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  She was a little off.

• 2:00:39Yasi Salek?

  She was a little off. You can see her if you want. She's in the Decline documentary. She didn't know a lot about business and I don't feel like I'm doing any slandering here because I don't think she had a business background. The Germs contract with Slash, according to one journalist, was quite draconian, but sounded like she didn't really know what she was doing. So they signed that. But she did set up a publishing company for Darby and Pat called Crash Course Music. So, and I do think his mother, Darby's mother, still makes money from that.

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 2:01:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So they make this first full-length called GI, stood for Germs Incognito, because they're not getting booked.

• 2:01:19Yasi Salek?

  At this time, and it was produced by Joan Judd. Did you ever go by the studio when they were recording the album?

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  I didn't, I don't think. I'm mixing, I may be mixing it up with so many sessions. I was in and out of so many sessions that if I did go in there, it didn't seem like it was like so great and giant and full blown. You know what I mean?

• 2:01:42Yasi Salek?

  What do you remember about this time in general? Like, so I guess we're about a year out from the first show. Like, what was the like, general, like, in the scene? Like, what did people think of the Germs? Were they getting kind of like bigger and bigger? Did they have like a big following?

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  It was starting to get a following for sure. You know, but a lot of, a lot of the bands that started right around that time where we're gay, you know, where at first it was sort of limited to a couple of clubs. And then people started getting interested and then people started touring. Even if it was, you know, not like a giant like corporate sponsored tour, even if it was just driving to different, you know, places like outside of the valley or in San Francisco or, you know, there wasn't like, my band toured a little bit later and it was still very DIY. Like, you had to send stuff yourself to clubs in different towns that you found out about. There wasn't anywhere near the touring network that there is now.

• 2:02:43Yasi Salek?

  You would send your tapes.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  No one had agents, you know? Yeah, you'd have to send like everything, like here's a poster, here's a tape. Here's, here's a, you know, so that just made it different. But people were starting to grow then, you know, it was going slowly.

• 2:02:57Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  But by, you know, by around that time, everyone knew at least sort of a working knowledge of what punk rock was.

• 2:03:05Yasi Salek?

  Sure, yeah, because now we're like, you know, three years in.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it was so early at first. Nobody the fuck knew what was happening. Or where things were happening, you know?

• 2:03:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, and so much has happened, like the Ramones have come out.

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:20Yasi Salek?

  The Talking Heads have come out.

• 2:03:21Speaker 03

  Blondie had come out. Everyone from New York started coming out here. And that, that was wild.

• 2:03:26Yasi Salek?

  Sire had really like marketed, they marketed it as new wave.

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  And we were starting to get English imports too, you know? So it was really, it was exploding. And all of this was like. And, you know, in not that long of a time for it to be going on, like in New York, LA, in the UK and stuff, and there was enough people that were into it, either as consumers or as like band members and booking agents and roadies and stuff to sustain a scene that was obviously going to be there for a little while, you know? Clubs like CBGB's, oh yeah, like if we can get to New York, we could probably play there.

• 2:04:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I just, I wonder so much if they hadn't been able to stick around a little longer, like what would have happened to the Germs? But they make this album. They wanted a big name producer. Randomly Darby wanted Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders, who I had to look up because I'd never heard of them. They were like an Idaho rock band.

• 2:04:27Speaker 03

  Oh, really? You didn't know them?

• 2:04:29Yasi Salek?

  Popular in the 60s.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, they were great.

• 2:04:31Yasi Salek?

  Kind of before my time.

• 2:04:32Speaker 03

  I loved them.

• 2:04:33Yasi Salek?

  But he was too expensive. So Pat said they were like, who's our most famous friend? And they were like Joan Jett. So they got Joan Jett. By several accounts, Joan Jett did a lot of sleeping on the couch and less producing, although she said that she, um, she said, "We were really on the ball most of the time, not drinking and trying not to party while we were doing the record. There was one day I got drunk and probably did pass out. That was the day that records shut down live in the studio." And Darby made that joke about me being passed out or whatever. There's a lyric in Shut Down that's like, "Poor Joan, poor Joan Jett, passed out on the fucking set."

• 2:05:04Speaker 06

  (singing) Poor Joan, Joan Jett, passed out on the fucking set.

• 2:05:14Yasi Salek?

  Well, Penelope Spears did say in the book that she was there and actually Joan Jett was asleep. And Nicole Panter said the same thing. But again, I wasn't there. I'm just reporting what people said. Nicole Panter tried to take a little credit here. I don't know if it's true or not, but she said she was the one saying Darby do this, Darby do that. Pat Smear, who I'm just inclined to trust, said if anyone was the producer, it was Pat Burnett, the engineer. He was really, really good, super nice.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, Pat was great.

• 2:05:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he was great. And he says he just took over the role and didn't really ask for any credit afterwards. They recorded a place called Quad Tech on Sixth and Western. It took about three weeks, cost about six grand. There was a lot of rumors afterwards that Lorna Doom did not play on the album, that Joan or Pat played her parts, which was... Incredibly sexist.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Really? I never heard that.

• 2:06:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, this was, I just read about in the book, I obviously wasn't wrong, but Don Bowles said, "That's absolute nonsense. Her bass sound was huge, like jaw wobble. Lorna's trademark, wall of wump. She was the perfect bassist for this music."

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, she was great.

• 2:06:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And Pat said, "I liked the way Don Bowles played drums. It was the best part of the Germs albums." The drums and the lyrics. I love the lyrics. I always thought they were great. The cover art is, obviously, it's iconic. You can see it behind Pleasant, the blue circle and the black background. Bob Biggs of Slash wanted the cover to be Germs spelled out in rotting meat and jelly beans, which is such a not, like, I just can't imagine that being the artwork. And they were like, "No, we're, we're doing this."

• 2:06:40Speaker 03

  Good. This is so much better. I didn't know that about-

• 2:06:43Yasi Salek?

  I know. Isn't that-

• 2:06:44Speaker 03

  Rotting meat and jelly beans.

• 2:06:45Yasi Salek?

  I think everyone was like, "Mm, we have this, like, I mean, it's like-

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  That sounds like a Tiger Beat type of punk.

• 2:06:51Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And this is like so stark and iconic. Do you have any memories around when this album came out?

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  Well, I remember my, my own thing and this, I didn't only do this with the Germs album, but when I, when I'd get a record that a friend of mine made-

• 2:07:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  I would just look at it and listen to it and just marvel at, wow, it really happened. It really fucking happened.

• 2:07:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  Because it was exciting.

• 2:07:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 03

  Because we were also invested in rock and roll, and especially weird rock and roll and stuff like Bowie, which was like, like we've said many times in this episode that wasn't mainstream, you know? It was incredible that someone you were close to made a record.

• 2:07:33Yasi Salek?

  What did you make of the actual music? Did you love it?

• 2:07:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. I loved it. I was so proud of them.

• 2:07:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's cool. I was listening to it the other day. It's funny. I read this quote from Pat, which I thought was super funny, and it actually stopped me from wearing my Germs t-shirt on this episode, but he was, he said later, he was like, "Some people told me they were inspired by the guitar on the G.I. album, but I always thought of the Germs as a t-shirt band. People have the t-shirts and they say they love the Germs, but they don't listen to the record. Maybe they even have the record, but they don't play it." And I kind of get what he's saying. Like, I, I don't know if that's true. I don't throw on the Germs record all the time. I mean, I'm 43 years old and it's like, kind of honestly, a rough hang. But when I hear Richie Dagger's Crime or Lexicon Devil, I have like so many heartfelt feelings. I have so many memories.

• 2:08:24Yasi Salek?

  Like, I remember DJing at punk nights in LA. And now we're like well past that time. And these are still like classic iconic punk songs that have also a pop sensibility to them and are so catchy and so infectious and so visceral. And like, on one hand, I get what he's saying. Like, this is not Diamond Dogs, you know? Like, this is not The Beatles. Like, people are not probably putting it on their house all the time.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  But to some people, it is.

• 2:08:52Yasi Salek?

  But to some people, it is, yeah.

• 2:08:53Speaker 03

  He doesn't get it because he created it.

• 2:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Because he was in it, yeah.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  He doesn't understand it. Because, I mean, I'm sure there's like parts of Hunky Dory or whatever that Bowie had that he's like, oh, god.

• 2:09:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm so embarrassed. You're right. You know what? You're so right. I think I actually know several people that probably put this album on all the time. And I know friend of the pod Alex Nelson definitely knows people and probably puts it on herself from time to time. Pat Smear said that "We Must Bleed" was his favorite song. He said, "It's the only one that if I were to listen to the record now, I would listen to, or if I was gonna play someone a song, someone who had never heard of The Germs, I would put that on or "Forming", depending on how I wanted them to think."

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  I love "Forming". "Forming", I remember "Forming" when it just came out. I was just blown away. Because you couldn't hear it a lot, the lyrics in their live shows. But you could hear it on the record. And it was, holy fuck, what the hell is this?

• 2:09:54Yasi Salek?

  It's just so important. You know, I was talking to a friend Jen. And he was like, "Oh, I don't like The Germs." And he's young. And I was like, "You can say that, but you like, you don't understand, like, you can't understand how important it was." Like, how so much of what you love now

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  Came from that.

• 2:10:12Yasi Salek?

  Came from that. Wouldn't exist. You might not wanna throw on GI, but like, you cannot discount how important they were. A lot of people did discount this album, though it did not really get much press or reviews. Don Bull said that Nicole should have gotten the booking agent, and she didn't. He also said something really funny, which was, "We just didn't have that brutal Calvinist work attitude anyway." "Black Flag had this Paleolithic work ethic thing happening. They worked their asses off night and day 24/7."

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  No, they really did. That is really true.

• 2:10:43Yasi Salek?

  So The Germs barely even liked getting up in the morning. And I was like, well, that's like the fundamental difference there. They got a write-up in the LA Weekly by Fast-Bready, who we mentioned before, which was very positive. And they were written up in Melody Maker, which was very cool. They called them the cosmic soulmates of Sham 69. But after the record comes out, from what I was reading, and I'd love to hear your take since you were there, The Germs sort of went downhill after the album came out, particularly Darby. So Rick L. Rick said, "The Germs are never the most together band to begin with. They had a couple of months during '79 where they were fairly tight. After the G.I. album, The Germs practiced less and less. It was chaos.

• 2:11:26Yasi Salek?

  Darby was fucked up, out of his mind every show. He wasn't even trying to present himself as an artist. He was just trying to present his pain, and his pain had become this one long scream. One long intoxicated primal scream of despair. It was obvious that nobody was ever gonna get a real record deal. Nobody was gonna be rich and famous, which is what I think everyone wanted, really, if they were honest. And so he got into drugs more and more, and the stage show just became like an Evel Knievel spectacle. Only Darby never made the canyon." Did you kind of experience that, like, in the, you know, late, late period '79?

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  Yes, it was, it was sort of sad, especially with him, you know? Like, I could see him struggling and how hard it was, you know, for, for like whatever, whether it was disillusionment or, you know, just like, just drug stuff. It was, it was very, very difficult to watch.

• 2:12:22Yasi Salek?

  Well, we haven't really talked about it at all yet, but it's, I think it's worth bringing up now. Darby Crash was gay. But he wasn't totally out. Is that right? Or he was?

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  He wasn't, but I don't think he was only totally men.

• 2:12:40Yasi Salek?

  I don't like to speculate on people's sexuality, because I don't think it's like... You know, important or interesting, except that there's a lot of the story of Darby Crash's life that people seem to refer back to that maybe he didn't feel comfortable to be like out and gay, or that he was rejected a lot by men that he was interested in because they weren't gay, and if that played into like, sort of his like, increasing drug use and despair.

• 2:13:10Speaker 03

  That, I mean, that definitely could have happened because he was not what you'd call like, you know, the model gay boy of the time.

• 2:13:20Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  The whole male gay scene, which I was part of, like, just through people I knew.

• 2:13:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Speaker 03

  The ideals for looks and how partners were, or how partners behaved and stuff, were really like, nothing that Darby was like, or would have been like at the time.

• 2:13:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:40Speaker 03

  So, I don't, I can't speculate on what he went through, but it was probably not like, you know, someone that looked like a muscle boy or something, you know?

• 2:13:49Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:13:50Speaker 03

  It was, it was very cut and dried in those days.

• 2:13:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because I was very interested, because obviously there were gay punk men.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  There were.

• 2:14:01Yasi Salek?

  I mean, there was Black Randy and...

• 2:14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like Rick O'Rick.

• 2:14:05Yasi Salek?

  Rick O'Rick.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  Nobody knew until the very end, if they even did know then, you know?

• 2:14:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Yeah, I just thought it was, I thought it was interesting. There's a lot of stories in the book about various, like, love interests that he had, like...

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  Lexicon Devil or something?

• 2:14:20Yasi Salek?

  Lexicon Devil, like, Donny Rose, who I think was a young boy that, this is a whole other side thing about these, and I'm sure you knew them too, but these young, young gutter punk tricks, as they were called, like, these young boys from broken homes who, like, sort of wore male prostitutes, basically, to make money.

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:14:41Yasi Salek?

  And Donny Rose was actually straight, but that was like someone...

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  That was his, that was his money.

• 2:14:47Yasi Salek?

  That was his money, and...

• 2:14:49Speaker 03

  There was a lot of that going on.

• 2:14:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  Not even only in the punk scene.

• 2:14:53Yasi Salek?

  Right, no, I'm sure, like, everywhere. And there was, yeah, so there's, just like, these stories about...

• 2:15:00Yasi Salek?

  Darby sort of thwarted romantic attempts that played, seemed to coincide with his increasing dissolution as a person and his like going deeper into drugs and sort of like, you know, whack waning as a person. So I was just curious if you had had any personal experience with that with him or had talked to him about it or anything.

• 2:15:22Speaker 03

  I didn't really talk to him about it because at that point in his life, he was so sort of surrounded by the coterie of Darby devotees.

• 2:15:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  It was, it was, it was a really, really odd thing to witness, especially when it was someone that you'd been really good friends with.

• 2:15:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:15:43Speaker 03

  You know, it was, it was just such a drastic change and it made me feel a number of emotions everywhere, anything from like annoyance to severe concern for his sanity or his life.

• 2:15:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  Or for me to like feel rejected sometimes or, you know, it was just like, it was like a big melting pot of stuff and it was really hard to watch.

• 2:16:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 2:16:09Speaker 03

  Like him happening on the downhill spiral.

• 2:16:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  You know, it was, it was very sad.

• 2:16:14Yasi Salek?

  So this, this time that we're talking about, tail end of 1979, Darby finally moves out of his mother's house into this guy, Tony the Hustler's house. Tony said that he thought Darby was attracted to him because he was a full-on, walking, talking, in-your-face, leather-clad whore, and I had wealthy celebrity clients who paid me well. Darby lived with me for about four or five months during 1979 at 1775 Orchid Avenue behind Grauman's Chinese Theater.

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. That was the first time he had ever lived away from his mom. Darby seemed pretty happy after he got out, but apparently, according to Tony, he just couldn't stand all the clients coming over. He like didn't want to live in that kind of environment. Tony also had some descriptive words about Darby's body and endowment, but I'm, this is not that kind of podcast, so I'm not going to go into that, but if you want to read about it, it's in Lexicon Devil. This is also around the time, from what I could piece together, there's no, obviously, date stamp in anyone's book, but...

• 2:17:13Yasi Salek?

  Obviously Darby had, I mean, everyone's doing drugs, like you said, but this is when Darby starts doing heroin.

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Yasi Salek?

  Which not everybody was doing.

• 2:17:19Speaker 03

  No, that was a, that for me, that was a huge.

• 2:17:23Yasi Salek?

  A line too far. Yeah.

• 2:17:24Speaker 03

  A hard no.

• 2:17:25Yasi Salek?

  Pat Smears said the same thing. So I think this starts to alienate Pat from Darby. Helen Keller said, once he started doing heroin, he became even more vulnerable than he already was. It became easy as kiddie play for more vampires and vultures to swoop in and circle him. This is when a woman called Amber comes in. Yeah, okay. So it's very interesting, right? Because we, we talked about the original kind of circle around him. And it's like, you were friends with Helen Keller. You were friends with Melissa, maybe, and these, yes.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:54Yasi Salek?

  And these women were like, from all accounts, and again, I'm just piecing together from what I read, but you can tell me, were really loved Darby Crash and were his real friends, you know?

• 2:18:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:18:03Yasi Salek?

  And then they all in the book are like, fuck Amber. So who was this Amber woman?

• 2:18:10Speaker 03

  I, I don't know entirely where she came from, but she was terrible. She just like, she just sort of materialized into the scene, or maybe I just wasn't, you know, she wasn't on my radar enough.

• 2:18:22Yasi Salek?

  But you were the, you were the queen of the scene. So I feel like you would have known if she was already there. I'm just saying.

• 2:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, she just, she just turned up one day and just sort of glommed onto him and she was really strident and really bossy and um.

• 2:18:39Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it's again.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  She looked like a housewife to me.

• 2:18:42Yasi Salek?

  She was a housewife. So interestingly, yeah. It's really fascinating. What you're saying is really fascinating. Cause I do feel like a lot of this, and I totally get it. It's like.

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  I did not know that at all. Wow.

• 2:18:53Yasi Salek?

  She had a husband. So it's very interesting to me because it makes total sense that Darby Crash was this like kind of enigmatic, charismatic, like known figure in the punk scene and, you know, everyone loved him. So if you wanted to kind of have some social clout, yeah, you would glom onto him. Now she's married. She has a husband. Darby moves in with her and her husband. And then eventually the husband's like, what the fuck? And moves out.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  I knew, I knew that he was living with her for a while, but I didn't know there was a husband.

• 2:19:24Yasi Salek?

  According to Helen Keller and Paul Rossler, he would call them up and beg them to come over because he didn't want to be alone with her. With Amber. Yeah, with Amber. Gerber said, "I don't hold Amber responsible for his drug addiction, but I hold her responsible for not caring whether he lived or died. She had ulterior motives, man. She wanted to be the sugar mama. She wanted fucking Nicole's seat, Nicole Pantra, the manager. She lusted for his idol status and putting enough dope in him got it for her." That sounds about right. Brendan Mullins talks about this show, December 22nd, 1979, at the Whiskey, this Germs show. He said, "The final nail in the coffin of LA's punk naive period can be pinpointed to almost that day.

• 2:20:08Yasi Salek?

  The battle lines were drawn. The Hollywood and the new HB hardcore scenes were no longer the same people, could no longer be the same people with the same outlook and perspective. The louder, faster, bonehead thrash aesthetic had arrived, and tonight was its coming out ball. This night, it was a packed house of suburban beach kids we had never seen before. The vibe in the room was seething." This was a crazy night. Apparently, Pac hit a bouncer with his guitar, like, pretty hard, and had to, like, escape the cops. There was just, like, a whole riotous thing that happened. Now, we're in 1980. This is basically the last year of the Germs. This is really important for those of you, I guess for all of us, who are kind of tracking the trajectory of the Germs

• 2:20:51Yasi Salek?

  and maybe what could have been the Cruising film soundtrack. Oh, yeah. So Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller that was written and directed by William Friedkin, starring Al Pacino and Paul Sorvino. It's loosely based on a 1970 novel by a New York Times reporter about a serial killer targeting gay men. And it's, like, kind of set in the seedy underbelly of this, like, gay scene in New York. I thought that was a really good movie when it came out. I haven't seen it since it did, but I was actually just thinking about it not that long ago. It had a lot of controversy, I guess, when it came out because of the way it portrayed, like, I guess, the seedy gay scene or whatever. The quote-unquote seedy gay scene. I kind of knew the seedy gay scene in New York at that time, and that seemed pretty... The producer, Jack Nietzsche, is the one who invited the Germs to be on it.

• 2:21:36Yasi Salek?

  And he was, like, this absolutely iconic musician, songwriter, producer. He had started his career working with Sonny Bono and then with Phil Spector. Yeah, he worked with everyone, Jack Nietzsche. Yeah, put together those Wall of Sound recordings, The Stones, Neil Young. Anyways, did all these incredible soundtracks. So they were like, "Yeah, of course, we'll do this thing with Jack Nietzsche." Nicole Panter said before our very first meeting with Jack even began, he looked around the room and asked, "Anyone got any Percodan?" Darby said he knew that it would be OK because this guy was a real drug addict. That was kind of funny. So they do six new songs with Jack producing. Even William Friedkin comes by one day. They only end up using one song in the film. It's called "Lion's Share." And according to Gerber, Darby was pissed because that's not the one he wanted. The other songs were "My Tunnel," "Throw It Away," "Not All Right,"

• 2:22:21Yasi Salek?

  "Now I Hear the Laughter," and "Going Down." If you listen to these, which you can on YouTube, they're all there. You can kind of imagine what the second Germs album would have been. And it's tighter and like you see the evolution of them as a band. And like also how they benefited from like a fucking real deal world-class producer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it really gives you like a sliding doors moment of like what could have been, you know? Yeah. I just, I just want to point out because it's really interesting. Again, you said this earlier, it's like they started with nothing, you know? They didn't know how to do anything. You thrust them on stage, basically. And of course, they were going to keep getting better, you know? It had only been two minutes. It had been two years. I just, I just thought that was interesting and it's worth giving a listen to.

• 2:23:14Yasi Salek?

  After that, the Fleetwood opens. Did you ever go down there? Yeah, of course. Yeah, in Redonda Beach. Yeah, played down there too a lot. Yeah. Because it stayed open for a while, the Fleetwood. Yeah, that was a great club. This is where the Mike Watko came in. So he said Darby had nothing against the South Bear, the OC. The Germs would play the Fleetwood and stuff. I think Darby was really influential, but they couldn't handle him as an individual. He was too scary. The Fleetwood crowds were young. They had a lot of testo. I could see how people would have a problem with them. Plus, they drove all the chicks away. This is another thing that came up. Women stopped going to the shows because of these like Totally. Kind of meathead.

• 2:23:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:23:49Yasi Salek?

  Jock punks or whatever.

• 2:23:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a time when punk shows were all male.

• 2:23:55Yasi Salek?

  All male, yeah, especially in these kind of hardcore arenas.

• 2:23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what we mean. All of us were just like, fuck this shit.

• 2:24:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Don Bowles called them like all football jocks drooling over each other.

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:05Yasi Salek?

  They were aware that the Germs were thought to be cool, but they didn't know why. It was like being at some Nuremberg rally. It was stupid chaos as opposed to the dementia of a higher order concept of chaos that Jervin envisioned. I thought that was great. Okay, so in April, the Germs shot their segment of the decline of Western civilization. Do you remember that being shot around town at all? Were you at any of the?

• 2:24:27Speaker 03

  I didn't go to any of them.

• 2:24:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You were like, no, thank you. So this film, this is April 1980. The film doesn't come out till July of 1981, but according to Casey Cola, who we're going to talk about obviously later, he did see the film and he came home devastated by how he was portrayed as sloppy and stupid. It is interesting. I mean, it's, it's, it's an incredible document, but like, again, I wasn't there, so I don't know. I have no idea how accurate it was. I know, I do happen to know that like the, they don't even, like the scene that is at Darby's house is not Darby's house. I think it was Tony the Hustler's house. And he got Michelle

• 2:25:12Yasi Salek?

  there to just be with him. They didn't live together and they were kind of like doing this like playing house thing where he's like cooking, but that was again, kind of theater. And then the tarantula that's in there was actually Tony the Hustler's because Darby had bought it for him for his birthday.

• 2:25:28Speaker 03

  Forgot about the tarantula.

• 2:25:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So that, that is filmed then. And then right around here, Darby kicks Don Bowles out of the band. Do you remember this at all?

• 2:25:38Speaker 03

  I don't know if I remember that exactly at the moment.

• 2:25:41Yasi Salek?

  So what happened was Don had started a side project called Vox Pop.

• 2:25:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:25:46Yasi Salek?

  And according to Don Bowles, Darby said he felt betrayed by me being in a joke band. But I think from what I read in general, he didn't get along that well with Don. But even more importantly, according to other people, including Pat, he tries to replace him with this guy, Rob Henley, who was from Huntington Beach, who he had kind of a romantic entanglement with, and who definitely could not play drums. Pat Smear said, "Don Bowles was the perfect drummer for us. With everyone else, even Nikki, who was a great drummer, it felt weird because of the songs. But with Don, it felt normal." Anyways, Darby made Bill Bartel, who is known as Pat Fear, tell Don Bowles that he was out of the band. And then, right after that, him and Amber went to London.

• 2:26:29Yasi Salek?

  So he's in London, and Darby basically tells Pat, like, "I really want Robbie in the band." And while he's in England, Pat has to like have a practice with Lorna and this new drummer who cannot play. And they were just like, "This is not working, babe. Like, we don't want to teach someone to play drums." And Lorna quits. She's like, "You know what? That's enough." And she's out of the band. Meanwhile, Amber and Darby are in London. They stay with Jordan, legendary punk Pamela Rook was her real name, who worked at the sex shop owned by Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaurin in Seaford, which is outside of London. They spent all their time going to shows, seeing their own friends from LA,

• 2:27:12Yasi Salek?

  like X and the Go-Go's and Jo-Jet play in London. Amber said that Darby,

• 2:27:20Yasi Salek?

  this was her experience of it, was kind of depressed in England because no one knew who he was. And he was so used to in LA, like, walking into a record store and everyone being like, "Ooh, Darby Crash."

• 2:27:31Yasi Salek?

  But he got really into Adam Ant while he was there, and he got a Mohawk, which he made sure everyone called a Mohican. So he comes back with his Mohican and his kind of bondage gear, and the germs have dissolved because Lorna quit and the whole thing. So he starts the Darby Crash Band. Do you remember the Darby Crash Band? Yes. So he recruits this bassist named David Bosco-Danford, who I think was his boyfriend, although not many people knew this. I think so. Yeah. And this guy, Rob Garstang, on drums. And he can't find a guitar player, so he goes back to Pat. Pat's just like, he could just never get his shit together with the Darby Crash Band. He was really too into heroin.

• 2:28:13Yasi Salek?

  Two weeks before their first gig, Darby calls me and is like, we have a show at the Starwood and I don't have any new songs and I don't have anyone to play guitar. Can you just do it? And he's like, okay. And then at sound check of this show at the Starwood, they kick out the drummer, because he sucks, and they get Lucky Lehrer from the Circle Jerks to fill in, who just happened to know the Germ songs, because they don't have any new songs. They're just playing Germ songs. Pat said, "We just played Germ songs, except slower and not as good, because it was the wrong drummer and bass player." Jeff McDonald also said he saw them and that it was basically also weird and pathetic, and that Darby was making all these cryptic statements onstage that wouldn't make sense until later, after he'd passed away. So soon after, the Darby Crash Band makes their debut at the Starwood to little fanfare,

• 2:28:57Yasi Salek?

  because everyone thinks it's weird and pathetic. Amber gets a new boyfriend and kicks Darby out. And this is around the time Casey Cola comes in. Did you know Casey Cola? Yes. Yeah. Casey said, "I was neither fat nor had money, and I wasn't some desperate hanger-on. I'd been hanging out on the punk scene for more than two years already when I met Darby. I'd always gone to Germ shows, long before we ever got together." Helen Keller said, "Nobody really wanted to be around him that much when he got back from England." Kind of like what you were saying earlier, because he was so completely fucked up on heroin and booze. He was like this weird mohawk feather guy. It wasn't him anymore. He was trying to be somebody else. And at the same time, all these surf punk kids were coming in. It was all just falling apart.

• 2:29:36Yasi Salek?

  So he's living at Oxford House with Melissa and Maggie Erig, Rob Henley, not Don Henley, Rob Henley, Ella Black and Casey. And then on December 3, 1980, the last ever Germ show happens at the Fleetwood. Were you there? I don't think so. Yeah. Because I was sad about them at that point. Yeah, you were like, kind of over them. Yeah, I can see that. Not over them, but yeah. Yeah, just like it was just- The whole thing had changed. And also, they hadn't, I mean, they hadn't really been a band for a while, and this was this like, big reunion show. It was like a weird death circus to me. Yeah, and when it really did end up happening, Pat said that Darby- They would rehearse for this show, right?

• 2:30:21Yasi Salek?

  And he said Darby was very specific about when and how he was gonna kill himself. When we were rehearsing for the reunion show, he said, "The only reason I'm doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with." He'd said that so many times that I just said, "Oh, right."

• 2:30:33Speaker 03

  I did hear that, too.

• 2:30:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it sounds like he was basically talking all the time about how he was gonna die young, and you're gonna miss me when I'm gone, and I'll be gone this time next year. And I guess he said it so much, and you tell me, that people kind of didn't-

• 2:30:47Speaker 03

  That started discounting it.

• 2:30:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  But he said he talked about it a lot.

• 2:30:51Yasi Salek?

  The boy who cried wolf a little bit. Not cried wolf, because he did do it, but it's like, I mean, what were you guys meant to do, I guess?

• 2:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was, I mean, I don't think anybody had any, any way of dealing with that-

• 2:31:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:31:04Speaker 03

  With that type of behavior with someone, because in those days, we didn't know or have the type of support tools that we do today.

• 2:31:14Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:31:14Speaker 03

  Like, we have no idea like-

• 2:31:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, you guys were almost like 22 years old.

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 2:31:17Yasi Salek?

  You guys are only like 21, 22 years old.

• 2:31:19Speaker 03

  But also, there was like, I mean, now you can see mental health-

• 2:31:23Yasi Salek?

  Right, professionals.

• 2:31:24Speaker 03

  Stuff everywhere, you know? Like, here are the symptoms of blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if someone could be suicidal, if, fill in the blank. That stuff was nonexistent, and it was hard to figure out. If your, you know, if your friend was being like, just talking shit, or really like-

• 2:31:42Yasi Salek?

  Being serious.

• 2:31:42Speaker 03

  Was gonna do something, and-

• 2:31:45Yasi Salek?

  Also, especially someone like Darby Crash, right? It was like such, such like a-

• 2:31:49Speaker 03

  Do theatrical stuff all the time.

• 2:31:51Yasi Salek?

  All the time, and like, was always kind of like, playing with reality, you know? So it's like, anyways. I think, besides the fact that he told Pat that he wanted to get the heroin, the money, do the show to get money to get heroin with, I'm sure, like, and this is just me doing fanfiction, but like, I have to imagine he also wanted to have one last germ show to like, cement his legacy if he knew what he was gonna do, you know?

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  I could think that, too, yes.

• 2:32:19Yasi Salek?

  Right? Like, you don't wanna go out on the embarrassing Darby Crash band show. They got Don Bowles back. Pat said that while they were rehearsing, "It was scary. We had never played so fast, hard and tight. By the day of the show, nothing could touch us." Also, everyone that was there was like, "It was one of the best shows ever." Like, even Pat Smear said, "That was our best show ever. We played our best, we were the most comfortable, the crowd totally loved us, it was sold out." John Doe said-

• 2:32:48Yasi Salek?

  When the Germs played the last time, we didn't know anyone in the audience anymore. The club was filled with these strange characters you'd see in The Decline. Exactly true. That was wild. I remember that. Who weren't in it for the art, but they were these damaged people who felt like this music was speaking to them. But the show was, by all accounts, insane, so good. Pat said, "We thought maybe we should go back. This is really good." But it was one thing for me, or Lorna, or Dawn to go back. None of us had failed. For him, it was like, "Oh, I have to go back and do the Germs again because I failed with my solo band. I don't think I would have been very happy either." After the show, Darby, according to Pat, was begging him to come to the Okie Dog. Like, wanted to have this big after-party at the Okie Dog. Yeah. Which is, people would hang out there, yeah.

• 2:33:32Yasi Salek?

  And Pat said, he was saying, "Please come. It's really important to me." And afterwards, I thought, "Oh, shit. I didn't go to his goodbye party." My god, that was sort of rude. Because Darby and Lorna went, but not very many people went because it was pouring rain. Yeah. And I guess he was so depressed and despondent about that, that Lorna got worried and she hit up John Doe to ask him, like, "Oh, can you please talk to Darby? Like, I'm worried about him." And John Doe said later, like, by the time he got around to doing it, it was too late. Because only four days later, on December 7th of 1980, is when Darby Crash died by heroin overdose. That was on purpose. He left a note.

• 2:34:12Yasi Salek?

  The note was, "My life, my leather, my love goes to Bosco," who was playing bass in the band. I don't want to go into, like, too much sordid detail here, but like, basically, he and Casey Cola, together, according to her, and other people too, because they were talking about it that night, decided, like, "Okay, tonight's the night." Before that, though, I just want to say that there was a couple other things that happened before it happened, which was that he had gone out to see Sexic, which was Gerber's band, at Hong Kong Cafe. And Gerber said she begged him not to bring Robbie Henley, because, again, they had this sort of love triangle. And he came with Rob anyways,

• 2:34:54Yasi Salek?

  and Gerber was furious. She threw a drink in Rob's face, but she missed and she hit Darby in the face. And after the set, she went to meet them. The three of them got into this, like, screaming match, like a physical brawl. And Casey said that Darby was saying to Rob, "Well, are you staying over tonight or not?" And Rob was like, "Just leave me alone, man," and pushed him away. And so him and Casey Cole left, and on the way home, they got boos, and she said that he was just like, "Should we just do it tonight?" Because I guess they had been talking about it. A guy called Elliot Katz was there. Did you know him?

• 2:35:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:27Yasi Salek?

  He apparently said that he knew what they were gonna do, but he didn't know what to do because he didn't know if they were actually gonna do it, and he wanted to call the police, but he didn't want them to get busted with drugs. They weren't actually gonna do it.

• 2:35:40Yasi Salek?

  Darby went and bought $400 of China White, according to Casey. They went to Casey Cole's mom's house, which is on North Fuller. They both wrote their separate notes, and then, according to her, he shot her up and then himself, and then she woke up in his arms, and he didn't. Yeah.

• 2:36:01Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember, like,

• 2:36:04Yasi Salek?

  how you found out?

• 2:36:05Speaker 03

  Well, I remember that night, the night before. I mean, I remember them at the club. That was really tense and crazy.

• 2:36:12Yasi Salek?

  You were there, the sex show, yeah.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, how I found out, I don't, I honestly don't remember the actual moment that I found out someone called me. I'm not even remembering who it was right now, and that's...

• 2:36:27Yasi Salek?

  So that night before was like really tense and crazy. And at this point, is it fair to say like you were just like kind of not close with Darby anymore, like maybe like...

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had pulled away because of all the craziness surrounding him, and that part made me really sad, you know? But I didn't want to be around those type of people or those type of like

• 2:36:51Yasi Salek?

  The energy.

• 2:36:52Speaker 03

  weird social games and energy and stuff like that. It was...

• 2:36:56Yasi Salek?

  Were you still close with Pat?

• 2:36:58Speaker 03

  I was pretty close with him, yeah.

• 2:36:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:00Speaker 03

  I mean, we were always on pretty fine terms, and still are, you know?

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  It was just, it was just such a hard, it was such a hard weird thing to do. It was something that you don't imagine happening, you know? Like a, let alone like any kind of drug suicide or OD or anything. But you don't, you don't imagine your friends in this really good band and the band breaks up. And you know, it's just, it's like a whole hard thing to negotiate emotionally and figure out, what am I doing? Am I sad? Am I angry? Should I let them have their space? Should I eat? It was just, it was just weird. And then I do remember that I was, I was laying on my bed when I heard that, that he died.

• 2:37:50Speaker 03

  That just, that, that was just fucked.

• 2:37:53Yasi Salek?

  Did you feel like it had like an impact like on the punk scene in general? Like, did you feel like things changed in any way after Darby's death?

• 2:38:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like they were starting to change anyway because it was, it was just getting polarized.

• 2:38:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:38:10Speaker 03

  Like polarized.

• 2:38:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:12Speaker 03

  Getting pulled in different directions, you know? And it was like one of those times when you have this little feeling like, oh, things are not going to be the same. And then you're like, am I making a big deal about this? Or is this just weird? Or is this actually really happening? But it was actually really happening. And I think a lot of people felt like that, especially after that show at the Starwood.

• 2:38:32Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:38:32Speaker 03

  That was just one thing. And then like everything else was just, it was just wild. I mean, we were, we were, we were very young then, you know?

• 2:38:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It felt like this like kind of golden thing was dwindling or whatever.

• 2:38:46Speaker 03

  It did. That's what it felt like, you know? Like there was, we were all very wild and very street savvy and stuff, but we were still young, you know? And, and it was just.

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  It was a hard way of dealing with anything, you know? It was just, it was difficult. Any kind of a death is hard. A suicide from, you know, one of your best friends is really difficult. And it's hard to, there's no way you could be prepared for something like that, even if you thought you were.

• 2:39:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It was very sad. There was some, it was a really nice, a couple of people said that the night he died, there was like an incredibly loud clap of thunder that night that was just like really unbelievable. And Paul Rossler in particular was like, what the fuck was that? And then the next day, when he found out Darby had died, he was like, oh, that was him. And then the next week, he found out that Helen Keller was pregnant with their son. Which I thought was like kind of sweet, like the idea of like, maybe there was like, I don't know, that that was connected somehow. And a couple of people said that they were visited by his ghost, Rob Henley.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  I could see that happen, for sure.

• 2:39:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I believe in all that stuff because I've, I've seen all that.

• 2:39:57Yasi Salek?

  Sure, yeah. And that was, that's kind of the end of the Germs story. I mean, Bosco returned to New York. He was childhood friends with the Beastie Boys with Mike D and Adam MCA Yock. And he did some groups with them. And, you know, the punk scene did continue in LA. And obviously you were, you know, part of that. X went on, a lot of these bands went on, other bands came up, alternative started. You know, we all know what happened.

• 2:40:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, alternative, I know.

• 2:40:22Yasi Salek?

  But all of it wouldn't have happened.

• 2:40:23Speaker 03

  I remember we all thought alternative was the dumbest name ever.

• 2:40:27Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it's not a very good.

• 2:40:28Speaker 03

  Why the fuck?

• 2:40:29Yasi Salek?

  It's not a very good.

• 2:40:30Speaker 03

  Just call it rock and roll.

• 2:40:31Yasi Salek?

  Just call it rock and roll. It's not a very good name, but none of it would have existed without the Germs. And what we don't speak of here is the second round of the Germs that came after the movie because we don't recognize that here on this podcast.

• 2:40:41Speaker 03

  No, we don't.

• 2:40:44Yasi Salek?

  Pleasant, thank you so much for coming on this podcast and talking about the Germs and all of your experiences and just like painting such a vivid picture of just such a different and cool and vibrant LA that like I truly wish I had experienced.

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  It was very amazing. It was an amazing time to grow up, to be a young adult on the loose in the city of angels. It was incredible.

• 2:41:10Yasi Salek?

  Well, thanks again, and come back next week for a new episode of Bands Play.

• 2:41:23Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Pleasant Gaiman. You can follow her on Instagram at Princess of Hollywood. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderman and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production was by Jamie Yukic. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Delvack and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer Emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy, Alex Nelson, and The Goop Kitchen. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:42:11Speaker 03

  I found a quail lid in my house about probably like four or five years ago.

• 2:42:16Yasi Salek?

  Where did it go?

• 2:42:17Speaker 03

  My boyfriend put it in the loose site because it was already like thirty seven.

• 2:42:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, so funny.

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

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