"That's Stupid, Punk Rock!"

"That's stupid punk rock. I just think of it as rock 'n' roll, 'cause that's what it is. [...] I like that it's like something new and it's just like, reviving old rock 'n' roll style. And it's raw, and it's for real. And it's fun."

"Eugene"

"The air in utopia is poisoned. The final joke."

Brendan Mullen, owner of The Masque.

1992 was a seminal year for me.

(Heh, he said, "seminal"!)

But it truly was. While visiting my father in Baltimore, I came across (stop laughing, Mr. "I Think the Word Seminal is Just Naturally Hilarious") a VHS videocassette, so you know it was back in the dark ages. Actually two that were kind of alike. One was Rastaman Don Letts' little eight-millimeter documentary The Punk Rock Movie from England, which featured Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux and the early Banshees, Subway Sect, Clash, Slaughter and the Dogs, and other rousing but admittedly dinosaur-era punk rock bands all hailing from the U.K.

It was cool AF but didn't reach me quite like the OTHER film. That film was one I vaguely remembered from a couple years earlier. I had woken up really early in the wee hours one Saturday night going into Sunday morning, in maybe 1987, and seen a spike-haired and sinister-looking thug screaming some song over a warped and really rather jarring musical background, shouting stuff that sounded as if they should really have censored it—slurs and profanity that sort of slipped through because it was MUSIC. I stayed up, not going back to sleep because I knew "Night Flight" repeated on the USA cable network, and I wanted to see it. (Because "Night Flight" was one of the greatest programs network television ever produced.)

It took me a few years to remember that. And as I sat and watched The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris' iconic film documenting the L.A. punk scene of 1980, I caught The Germs, Black Flag, Alice Bag Band, X, Circle Jerks, Catholic Discipline, and, unmistakably, Fear, in their raw, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners early incarnations.

Back then punk was still considered the music of outcasts, weirdoes, lowlifes and was basically the music of the marginal misfits, who had been kicked to the curb by a society that was reeling from political and social corruption, anxieties of cold war devastation, and the increasing violence in the urban streets.

The interviews with the kids—such as the miniature skinhead "Eugene," quoted above—form an interesting counterpoint to the desperate lifestyles of struggling musicians such as X and Black Flag (living in a rundown church), the suicided Darby Crash, and the loquacious and misanthropic Claude Bessy, a.k.a. "Kickboy Face," a writer for early punk fanzine Slash Magazine, which became Slash Records (featured alongside unusually handsome and photogenic founder Bob Biggs); and, of course, Fear.

Fear was the favorite punk group of the late John Belushi, who got them on "Saturday Night Live." It was Fear—or rather their fans—that got them banned the same night. (Fans at that appearance included Ian McKaye from Minor Threat and Milo Auckerman from The Descendents.)

The film begins as an exposure, almost a ritualistic feeling of invocation—but not of anything mystical. Famous faces, such as Alan Vega and Darby Crash, Tim Yohannan from Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, emerge, while on stage X belt out "Nausea," and in the crowd, kids dance the slam. Girls pull painted faces and the audience in the theater must have been shaking their heads asking themselves, "Who the hell are these freaks?"

Today, the way they look (Spheeris asks John Doe from X if he ever gets hassled for his appearance) wouldn't bat an eyelash. Nobody is pierced or completely covered in tats. But they do look rough, and they flout the conventions of Reagan Era America.

We get Darby Crash cooking eggs. He and his girlfriend reminisce about finding a dead body in the backyard. We get concert footage of him drunk, abused by the audience, unable to sing anything coherently. We get Black Flag in a graffiti-festooned basement, describing how they live like squatters, make no money, and get attacked by the cops and banned from the clubs (The Whiskey, The Masque, Hong Kong Cafe, etc.)

John Doe and Exene Cervenka give jailhouse tats with a needle and India ink, while Exene shows off her collection of Bible pamphlets collected from Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip. And then, after an incredible performance by Alice Bag Band (Alice Bag, the pioneering First Chica of barrio punk songstresses, slammed elegance and beauty up against a scorching banshee shriek), we have Lee Ving.

Fear.

In a closing concert set that straddles the line between performance and riot.

Lee taunts the audience: "Who let in all you longhairs tonight, what's the problem? This is 1980, can't you afford a f*ckn' haircut?"

Fear exemplifies punk rock in this single set of three short songs: "Beef Baloney," the anthemic "I Don't Care About You," and the great finish "Let's Have a War." Lee intones:

"Let's have a war. The enemy is within." To which I reply:

Yeah.

None of this is threatening forty plus years on. But there was a time and place when it seemed dangerous. Punk has been co-opted by commercial, corporate interests, and watered down to pablum. At least, for the most part.

RAdio-friendly unit shifters.

But there was a time when punk rock was like, really, a threat.

The Decline Of Western Civilization | FULL MOVIE | Penelope Spheeris | Music Documentary

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