Crime and PUNKishment: House of Punk, #1

By Brenda Perlin

When punk first burst into the public consciousness, it caused the establishment to take fright. Suddenly, anarchy was no longer crouching in the shadows, but out on the streets offering disempowered and disenfranchised youth a rallying flag and a new identity.
In 'Crime and Punkishment', Brenda Perlin and her collaborators catalog in words and pictures those days of hope and rebellion - sometimes in surprisingly touching ways. For black was not always bleak, representing as it did membership of a new family, a tribe who rejected the yoke of normality and blandness.
Read and remember!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brenda Perlin
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463302545

Brenda Perlin

Brenda Perlin is an independent contemporary fiction author of six titles and numerous short stories. Ever since she was a child, Brenda has been fascinated with the writing process. She draws her biggest inspiration from Judy Blume who sparked her obsession with pursuing personal expression through prose. Brenda has always lost herself in the world of literature. Her first series, Brooklyn and Bo Chronicles, captures the soul-wrenching conflicts of a couple struggling for emotional fulfillment against those who would keep them apart. Next, Brenda ventured into the realm of animal rescue, Alex the Mutt, which explores the journey of love and loss of a beloved dog. Her latest novel, PUNKS comes after Crime and PUNKishment as well as Punk Rocker and L.A. Punk Rocker, all four are anthologies where authors write about the music scene in the late seventies to the early eighties: a time when she was in Hollywood meeting famous bands and enjoying the new music scene. L.A. Punk Snapshots is her latest. There she shares quotes from famous and not famous music enthusiasts and old photographs from the early punk scene in Los Angeles. While Brenda is still listening to her favorite bands from the eighties, Billy Idol remains the ultimate King Rocker and music is just as important to her as ever.

Book preview

"When punk first burst into the public consciousness, it caused the establishment to take fright. Suddenly, anarchy was no longer crouching in the shadows, but out on the streets, offering disempowered and disenfranchised youth a rallying flag and a new identity.

In ‘Crime and Punkishment’, Brenda Perlin and her collaborators catalog in words and pictures those days of hope and rebellion - sometimes in surprisingly touching ways. For black was not always bleak, representing as it did membership of a new family, a tribe who rejected the yoke of normality and blandness.

Read and remember!"

John Dolan

Table of Contents

Mario Maglieri

Tales of Life with My Monster

Drugs and Booze and Cigarettes and Catholicism

Our Punk Circle

Public Image Limited

High School

Black Hole Kid

The Fleetwood

I Was NOT Stiv Bators’ Drug Dealer!

Silent Moments

Darby

Bomb in the Schoolyard

Hot Cars and Punk Rock

Wash This Out of Your Life

Vinyl

Last Night a DJ Changed My Life

A Life-Changing Moment

My Unsolicited Take on L.A. Slam Dancing

Stardust Memories

Backstage Pass and The Damned ‘77

Wiggy Walker Chronicles

Bollocks!

A Tale from The Mabuhay Gardens 1977

Walls Come Tumbling Down

The Day I Buried Punk Rock

Five Guidos Invade Max’s Kansas City

Punk Rock

Record Shopping

Second Time Around

Getting to Gigs

Punk Soul, Bonehead Brain

THE BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE

On Sunset

I’m a Punk, and I Don’t Care

Interview with Jack Grisham

Interview with Paloma McLardy

Interview with Linda Ramone

Interview with Captain Sensible of The Damned

Interview with Rodney Bingeheimer

Lisa Champeau Wittenberg

I’m very sad that Lorna is no longer with us. What I’ll always remember is she had the BEST smile in the world. I really respected the way she lived her life in privacy. I hope Lorna and Darby are singing together again.

Rodney Bingenheimer

They were the outcasts. We were the Gods. And anointed by their spit and their hate and their jeers we grew until we became the world around. Their muted colors and hang-ten shirts morphed into our leather and our spikes. Their soothing 70’s tones were enveloped by our noise, choked by our words. We became the immortals and now you worship our recklessness. Look deep you cowardly humans, you scum, you filth—your hate was the fuel to our fire and now we laugh as you yearn for lives unfettered by caution, untouched by fear. Look upon us. Look upon those who were not afraid to be different. Feast on our bravery. Revel in our sound.

Jack Grisham

Mario Maglieri

Owner of famed Sunset Strip clubs

Rainbow Bar and Grill, The Roxy Theatre and Whisky a Go Go

A Dedication

Jane Doe

© 2019

R.I.P. Mario!

Mario lived an amazingly long life. We were truly blessed to have known such a person, of whom a bad word was never said.

Mario was nothing but a gentleman. I never met anyone as calm in the middle of a fight, but he did have his boys break things up.

Steady, Tony, Big Bill.

I was bummed because as a great legend, the new kids in future generations would not have the pleasure of meeting him, but if they were lucky enough, he might have remembered their names.

I remember when he said, Hey, darling, how are ya? At that time, Big Bill was the bodyguard for Ronnie James Dio. He worked upstairs at the second door.

Big Bill saw my sister, Lisa, and was smitten at first sight. He let us go upstairs, brought us drinks, then told us to go to the coolest upper-level section. Pretty sure we might have been a little young. My memory is touch and go, but I could have been twenty-one, and I do remember showing Steady my license when I turned twenty-one.

It’s crazy how many lives The Rainbow has touched.

I met a boyfriend there. He was the longest relationship I have ever had, which lasted two and one-half years.

I encountered a lot of people that I never thought I would meet in a million years.

If not for Mario, Sr., Hollywood would never have had that place. It was kind of like Cheers, except for a much cooler clientele.

I am grateful because I had a family on Sunset Strip and all of our dads were Mario, Sr., Legend!

Johnny Ramone by Lucas David © Lucas David

Frank Reed by Doc Ivan

Tales of Life with My Monster

Frank Reed

© 2019

Shortly after leaving the Army, which I had joined out of financial desperation, I returned to L.A. where I stumbled upon a new version of rock ‘n roll. It was hard and fast and offered a stripped down, back-to-the-basics version of music. They called it Punk Hardcore. I was hooked instantly.

Once I saw The Adolescents and Black flag, I decided that I needed to set up a venue for this, and only this, kind of music. So, I found a disbanded bowling alley in an industrial part of the San Fernando Valley and worked out a deal with the leaseholder. I was on a legally shaky sublease, which could have crashed and burned any second, but, still, I went ahead with the project.

I named the place Godzilla’s...

...and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit from Soho Pictures, which turned out to be the least of my problems...

After the club was up and running, I noticed issues with people I had hired for tasks, which included the handling of ticket money at the door. In some cases, these were serious concerns.

Then, after the first weekend, I was summoned by the City Councilman and a lynch mob of angry neighbors’ intent on shutting me down. Police helicopters would show up in the skies above, and the cops were always invading the place, warning me about this and that.

And there was the fire department.

I found myself in court so often that I lived on valium.

I was focused and, on my game, which necessitated my firing the staff that was robbing me blind and only hiring the bands they liked (or were friends with), amongst an array of other unprofessional behavior.

One evening, I received a phone call asking if I would be interested in booking The Damned...

...OF COURSE! I couldn't believe my luck at being able to book this incredible band at Godzilla’s.

On the night of The Damned show, the place went mad. I was standing under an air vent when, suddenly, some dust-covered punk dropped on top of me and ran off into the crowd. It made me smile. I thought if you’re that crazy, you deserve to get in free...and that’s punk when you think about it!

In the meantime, there were millions of people milling around smoking dope, having sex in the old train wagons out front and running behind the club making an almighty racket, which brought out the cops in no time. The kerfuffle caused us to pick up the band late from their hotel.

The band arrived irritated. Captain Sensible was fuming, to say the least. But once we presented them with the case of Old English they requested for backstage, things calmed down. The band went onstage and as soon as they started, Captain Sensible’s amp blew up. That was all he needed!

He shouted into the mic; You Yanks know how to nuke the Russians, but you’re too fucking stupid to build an amplifier!

A posse of skinheads, feeling insulted, pushed their way forward to the front of the stage. I thought, this is it, they’re going to kill him! I jumped onstage, with my friends, Jeff, Opie, Mohawk Paul, Guthrie, and Ken. (Ken Weatherwax had played Pugsley on The Addams Family.) We used two folding picnic tables as shields to hold back the crowd while the crew quickly replaced the busted amp. Then, suddenly, as if nothing had ever happened, the band broke into Neat, Neat, Neat.

In a flash, ALL was forgiven, and the place exploded into sheer madness.

All you could see was a mass of legs, arms, and heads flying through the air as people experienced various stages of Rhapsody. The hits kept coming, and everyone in the audience had a blast. Halfway through the show, the cops came at me again and threatened to close us down if we didn't stop disturbing the neighbors. Godzilla’s didn’t need problems like that, but, somehow, we survived the night without any super disasters.

Afterward, we all went up to the Hollywood Hills to see Bernard, an Israeli friend of mine who had a large house overlooking Universal Studios. An after-gig party. Bernard personally chauffeured the band to his residence in his 1968 white Rolls Royce. We were sitting around a glass coffee table consuming an assortment of snacks. Captain Sensible was eating some cookies when he unexpectedly kicked the empty bowl all the way to the other end of the table. Bernard was a bit taken aback and asked, Want some more cookies?

The Captain smiled and started eating something else.

I noticed lead singer, Dave Vanian, sitting on an old barber chair, as if in deep thought. I went over to him and asked, "You see that guy sitting over there in the corner? Well, that’s Ken Weatherwax, the actor that played Pugsley on The Addams Family. Would you like to meet him?"

He was impressed with meeting someone from a show he enjoyed watching on the telly back in the day while living in England. Dave was very polite, if not a bit awed.

Here was the man that had hypnotized his audience a few hours before looking up at Ken, who was actually a shy, although fairly big, guy.

A few weeks later, we were kicked off the sublease because the actual leaseholder hadn’t paid the rent to the owner. The electricity had been disconnected, so our house manager, Opie, a jack-of-all-trades, climbed up the power pole to hijack the electricity! Punk rock at its finest! More calls came to shut us down, along with fines for overcrowding and another City Council meeting where they were baying for my blood.

At the end of it all, the leaseholder, who I had previously met, wanted thirty grand up front for us to continue while handing over the lease.

...Well, you can guess what happened next.

Tom DeSavia

Drugs and Booze and Cigarettes and Catholicism

Tom DeSavia

© 2019

Thirteen years old. My falling in love with punk rock happened the same year I tried drugs for the first time. Thirteen. Fuck. It still freaks me out and gives me anxiety when I see pictures of the child that I was...that kid who was forcing a silent rebelliousness by trying to accelerate his adolescence into something more interesting/alluring/stimulating – never mind that I really had no idea what interesting/alluring/stimulating was. I experimented early with drugs out of a combination of classic suburban boredom and weak self-restraint that was undoubtedly born out of a desire to fit in, to be accepted. No one really talked about drugs, we just started trying drugs when they became available; we stole booze, we inhaled cigarettes, we sniffed glue, we smoked things that were rumored to get you high (peanut skins, anyone?). I remember how scared and guilty I felt because of drugs and booze and cigarettes and Catholicism, but I was always able to hide it. I remember what a good kid I was until I wasn’t. Thirteen was way too young to be living a double life of drugs and alcohol, but so many of us did. Generation gaps were wider; honest communication with adults hadn’t really been invented yet. Yeah, let’s go with that. Maybe it’s the same today, I have no idea, I never had kids.

But seriously, I was a real good kid. If I must paint a visual, think of me as the classic all-American San Fernando Valley Boy Next Door...that is if the B.N.D. was a scrawny 80-pound pushover of a lad. I was far from a star athlete, not exactly brimming with self-confidence, I loved to read books, and had then-undiagnosed/often severe hand tremors that were fodder for the other kids to stare at/mock (a couple of decades later the tremors would be identified by the docs as a cosmetic condition called Benign Essential Tremors; people still stare/mock.) Around that time, my family had uprooted and moved to an even more suburban environment than the one I had been used to – one that would take my middle-class family from our home in the comparatively rough and tumble, slightly lower-class streets of Chatsworth, California, to the more prosperous/ethnically super-white neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, which existed about forty miles north of Los Angeles County. My folks found an apartment they could afford among the town’s more affluent mid-century tract homes; I would spend the next several years of existence not-so-successfully hiding my reality as the significantly poorer kid among my more well-to-do, better dressed fellow students and neighbors.

From as far back as I can remember – and thanks to my older siblings’ influence – music played the role of my best friend. Aside from the pure visceral joy of discovering that your brain is wired to melody, records basically took on the role of babysitter to my burgeoning quasi-latchkey kid existence. I could sit in front of the family console for what felt like hours, spinning any LP or 45 or 78 that resided in the house.

Everything was moving along smoothly: my beloved radio would lay out a buffet of songs that I would keep a list of, prioritizing what records to buy every time I could score a couple of bucks from saving my allowance and mowing lawns in the neighborhood. It seemed that I could usually afford one new single every couple of weeks, with the urgency placed on those that I would die unless I could listen to repeatedly. Albums really only came along as items gifted on holidays, and – unless specifically requested – usually turned out to be big disappointments. LPs really held little interest at that point in my life...too much filler.

Thanks to music – and every image and urban legend that came with it – I started to develop/ manufacture my own identity, or the identity my dumb kid brain thought I wanted. My own moral compass was just being formed, mostly by the rock stars I was digging and reading about in the pages of the music magazines