Punk Turns 30

Patti Smith - behind the scenes at her open air poetry reading at the erstwhile Licorice Pizza, Los Angeles, 1978 I've said it many times: Patti Smith is the one who punk'd me. Maybe it was that I discovered her while I was in college studying literature - French Imagist poetry, at that... and she too revered Arthur Rimbaud so much that she name-checked him in her own poetry and in her music... maybe it was Jay Dee Daugherty, the drummer in her band, a home-boy who left the warm California sun to be a pioneering NYC punk... whatever it was, Patti Smith touched a great many people around the world, and she left quite a mark on Los Angeles. Back in the mid-70s when Patti Smith and her band started playing regularly, there was a close-knit group of us who flocked to see her over and over again. We all became friends through our common bond of punk rock, which for Los Angeles began right along with the early Patti Smith shows. My friend, another photographer, Donna Santisi was a...

Lorna Doom, bass player for The Germs was Terri Ryan when we first met. Today, when I was perusing my statistics for this blog, I learned that the number one most searched term for the past few days was "Lorna Doom." She was Belinda Carlisle , nee Kurczeski's best gal pal from high school when we all first met. I graduated from high school before they did and was already living in Los Angeles... they came down on the weekends for some rock n roll and parking lot socials, and soon found an apartment on their own. Belinda with writer Don Waller Hollywood in the mid-to-late 70s was kind of wild and crazy. Los Angeles and all of her neighborhoods were destinations for people who wanted more out of life than their own hometowns could provide, whether that hometown was Podunkville, Middle of the USA, or simply a suburb of LA itself, which entailed a long sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Just like those masses, Belinda, Lorna and I migrated from the suburbs north of LA. We...

This Labor Day Weekend in Los Angeles, it will feel more like 1978 than 2008... LA's original underground, punk rock and local legends will rock Safari Sam's in a 3-night-long series of benefit concerts that will provide funds for medical assistance to the music community. Billed as a Music Festival and Art Auction in Memory of Chris Gaffney, the event is the culmination of hard work and love and concern among friends helping friends. You don't have to get any more involved than going to the show, paying at the door and if you feel like taking home any cool souvenirs, you can bid on some auction items donated by many people and their businesses, including Punk Turns 30. If you can't be there, Punk Turns 30 is offering many of the same photos that are available at the Dog & Pony Show auction at a 30% discount to distance buyers. A portion of the proceeds will go to the Medical Assistance fund - in your name and mine! Please visit the Punk Rock Gift Shop for de...

On Saturday, August 23, The Germs and Shane West in his movie and new rock n roll role as Darby Crash will perform at LA's Echo. If you buy two tickets to either Friday or Saturday screening of What We Do Is Secret which is at the NuArt Theatre in West Los Angeles (11272 Santa Monica Blvd.) - the part of LA that was home to both Darby Crash and Pat Smear during their forming years... you will get one free ticket to the Echo show. At both screenings, the movie's director, Rodger Grossman, all the actors and all the Germs will be there - to introduce the movie (late screenings) and to answer your questions (after the early screenings). ask Lorna Doom if she remembers this! What a deal. How can you pass that up? Here's another deal you can't pass up. Click on the photo of Darby, below to see what I mean...

Surrounded by friends here in this photo from the 70s, when she was just 19 or 20... Today is Belinda's birthday - so wish her a happy one. Belinda and the Go Gos infused pop music with their punk rock joie de vivre and cool, from-the-thrift-stores-vintage-It Girl-look. As a tip of the hat to them for still keeping their fans happy nearly 30 years later... have a piece of cake for Belinda today.

The flag is upside down. Its a reflection of the state of the world. The smartest guy I know was telling me about a local election in his town. It seems that the Republicans have run that place for more than 100 years; no Democrat has been elected in over 100 years! So, what happened there was that enough Democrats changed their party affiliation last week so that they could vote OUT the incumbent Republican... and the victor was the one less evil. Pretty sad state of affairs when the choice is the lesser of two evils. But what I have to applaud is the way people took to the polls and used their vote to fire a bad leader. For these so-called leaders are really just high profile civil servants. They work for us. Our tax dollars pay their salary. We are the boss. Clear? The political conventions are coming up very soon... America is thisclose to electing its first Black President. So many people can't wrap their head around that. If the Democrats had gone the other way, A...

It doesn't take a crystal ball to tell you that music is a visual medium and that punk rock is one of the more interesting visuals you can get. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, when I worked at VH1, we were not allowed to play videos by punk rock bands; we were not allowed to reference punk rock bands either. That was the domain of our sister channel, MTV. MTV also got to play heavy metal and hard rock. VH1 got as hard as Bon Jovi, and as punk rock as The Pretenders. The Original line up of the Pretenders....with the late Pete Farndon at Chrissie Hynde's left, as she gives the camera that punk rock glare. However, these days, VH1 does go there... well, even during my last year or so at the baby boomer music channel, as the likes of punk rock precursors such as The Velvet Underground were inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, the ceremonies which the channel broadcast, the punk rock influence began to show its face. Velvet Underground Co-Founder, Lou Reed Neither MTV n...

Egypt's queen, Cleopatra was among many other things, noted for her great beauty. In 1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast Elizabeth Taylor (at that point in time, considered possibly the most beautiful actress in the world) as the queen in his big screen version of this tragic historic tale. In the past couple of years, I saw a restored version of it, and I can see where people ranging from Gianni Versace and Michael Jackson were influenced by La Liz and the movie's production design. I bring this up for on this date in 30 BC, Cleopatra committed suicide after her lover, Mark Anthony was defeated at the Battle of Actium. If you go by Shakespeare's account of history, the lovers Antony and Cleopatra pulled that old Romeo and Juliet routine where one of them fakes her death, and the other, thinking his one true love is gone, despairs and really kills himself. They're briefly reunited in tombs and mausoleums... such is the stuff of drama - the history and its inheren...

Effective on this date in 1974, the 36th/37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon, resigned from the Office. He was the only American President ever to resign (and still is... much to my dismay). Also, as the night of August 8, 1969 turned into August 9th.... Charles Manson's followers were in the midst of "Helter Skelter," that is... committing the grisly mass murder of actress, Sharon Tate and her friends. That same night, Led Zeppelin performed at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California and on the 9th, they performed at the Anaheim Convention Center, which is situated in the shadow of Disneyland. What a juxtaposition. Although the Manson Murders were horrific, their toll on human life was not even a fraction of a fraction as great as the toll America took on the citizens of Japan on August 9, 1945 when they dropped the bomb known as Fatman on Nagasaki although "Hiroshima" is the name history remembers most readily... In the annals of ...

Who, of those of us in the Germs circle in Los Angeles in 1977, 1978 or 1979 would ever believe that (1) a motion picture would be made of their story, and (2) the story of the movie coming to be, and the story of the Germs themselves would be told in the paper of record, The New York Times? Back in 1977, not me. Probably only Bobby Pyn / Darby Crash would have believed in that... and well, he's been proven right. Prior to Sunday's considerable review in the New York Times, which more than being a film review actually addresses the culture of memory and postmodernism all wrapped up in punk rock, director Rodger Grossman gave a big shout out to his friends and Germs fans far and wide in cyberspace with an alert on opening dates and screening venues. Here (in mostly his words) is the info: What We Do Is Secret is opening in New York City the weekend of 8-8-08 at Landmark’s Sunshine Theater! Actors Shane West, Bijou Philips, Noah Segan, original Germs members Pat Smear, ...