Punk rock entered the picture. If ever there was a style of music that reflected what I felt at the age of fifteen, it was punk. I didn’t know much about it, but I became obsessed with it. You have to remember that back then, there was no Internet, no cable TV with hundreds of channels, and no twenty-four-hour entertainment news cycle. If you followed music, you got your news through the radio or Rolling Stone and Creem magazines. Rolling Stone came out every other week, and Creem was a monthly publication. The quest to keep current had to be done from street level, so you combed the record stores and you tried to go to shows. At fifteen or sixteen I was in a record shop every day. I had enough musical sense to be able to draw parallels between Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan. I understood that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were like the Rolling Stones. I heard the Ramones and recognized they were a Phil Spector girl group at their core. The new music was not unfamiliar to my ears.
But I kept reading about these other bands in the music magazines. The Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, the Damned. What the fuck were they all about? The record stores I went into didn’t have any of that music yet. Being a completely obsessed music geek, I would go in and bug the clerks.
“You got the Sex Pistols yet?”
“No, kid. It’s on order.”
“What about the Damned?”
“Nope.”
“Dead Boys?”
“Who?”
“When’s the Sex Pistols’ record going to get here?”
“Soon. Look, kid, why don’t you check out the new Peter Frampton album?”
I was frustrated. But one day, a Sex Pistols record finally arrived. I walked out of the store with my latest purchase, a twelve-inch single of “Anarchy in the UK” backed with “I Wanna Be Me.” I hurried home and went straight to my room to put it on the turntable. I played the B-side first and was floored. This is it! This is fucking revolutionary! These guys are the new Beatles. I played the record a few more times. What I heard felt so important that I went into the bathroom and cut off my long hair with a pair of scissors. The hippie era was dead. Punk rock was here. I needed more.
The records began coming into the stores. Next came the robot-riot sound of Devo. That was followed by the Clash’s rock-meets-reggae underclass anthems. This stuff was like a tidal wave that washed over me. It even affected my musical heroes. I had recently seen Iggy Pop perform on The Dinah Shore Show, an afternoon talk and variety program hosted by the aging big-band singer. I couldn’t believe it. David Bowie played keyboards in Iggy’s band. I had been obsessed with Bowie since his ultra-flamboyant Ziggy Stardust days, and here he was looking subdued and anonymous as he pounded the keys while Iggy sang “Funtime.” When I saw that Iggy was scheduled to play some shows in Southern California, I had to go.
The Golden Bear was a tiny little club in Huntington Beach that sat across the street from the city’s famous pier on the Pacific Coast Highway. I pushed myself inside for the show. I was a little disappointed that the club was so small that Bowie had decided not to show for the gig. It didn’t matter. The energy was high wattage. You could feel it as soon as you were inside. There was an opening act. A punk rock band from right in town. I think they called themselves the Crowd. Huntington Beach boys. They probably had only been together for a few weeks, but their rough edges weren’t a drawback. With the first blast from the kick drum, the crowd exploded in this weird up-and-down dance I found out was called the pogo. The energy was unbelievable. Punk rock was great on records, but it couldn’t be fully understood unless it was heard live. Preferably as close to the stage as you could get while being slammed and jostled by dancing kids. I was amazed by the girls too. Punk rock girls were badass. They had wild haircuts and didn’t wear underwear. I was sold.
After that first show I saw at the Golden Bear, I couldn’t stay away. I saw the Ramones. It was the most energetic show I had ever seen. Bodies bounced and the music pulsed. Then I started to catch the Los Angeles bands: the Circle Jerks, the Plugz, and anyone else from the big city. The important thing was to be there. By my senior year of high school, after a steady diet of Los Angeles–bred punk rock, I knew that was the town for me. I just had to figure out a way to get there.
SCHOOL DAYS
By my senior year of high school, I was a smart-mouthed, music-obsessed kid who liked to read everything I could get my hands on. I also drank Bacardi rum for breakfast. Just your average, all-American teenager. I had left Palm Desert with Helen two years before and we shared an apartment in Huntington Beach, California, in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. I was already enrolled at Golden West, a local community college, and took some classes there along with the last of my course work at Marina High School. Because it was a community college, anyone could enroll, and as a student at Golden West, I was allowed a stipend from Social Security. Five hundred dollars a month was a solid chunk of change for a seventeen-year-old kid like me and all I had to do to ensure it arrived in the mail was to remain affiliated with a college. It was my main hustle in those days.
That was a busy year for me. Along with school and rock-and-roll shows at the different clubs that stretched all the way from Orange County to L.A., I had also discovered speed, weed, and
