Punk77 The Complete Interviews

By James Stark

    An oral history of the beginnings of Punk Rock in San Francisco from the people who made it happen with interviews by James Stark a early influential visual artist of the San Francisco Punk Scene. Interviews with V. Vale publisher ReSearch, Dirk Dirksen Mabuhay Promoter, Penelope Houston singer The Avengers, Tommy Gear The Screamers and Seventeen more from the people who were there,

    His first photos of the band Crime were published in Rock Scene magazine in September 1977.
    His early photographs influenced a generation of Rock and Roll Photographers.
    A Search and Destroy contributing photographer
    These words from the past are as relevant today as they were in 1977

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Stark
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224672523

James Stark

James Stark is known for the gritty street approach to photography he developed while living in New York City in the late 1960s. A decade later in San Francisco, James designed posters for the bands and shot photos of the people who made up the nascent punk rock scene. Contemporaneously, his photos were published in New York Rocker, Search & Destroy, and Slash, among others; more recently, his photos and posters were published in Hardcore California, Street Art, The Art of Rock, and Fucked Up and Photocopied. In October 2013, James participated in Punk: Chaos to Couture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which included his photographs in the exhibition and catalog. His posters for the band Crime are considered classics, and are highly-prized collector's items. In 1992, James published Punk '77: An inside look at the San Francisco rock 'n roll scene, a history of the early days of the San Francisco punk scene and is still in print. Along with James' photos, the book relied on interviews conducted circa 1990 with punk's musicians and scene-makers, many of whom are no longer living. To complete the historical record, those interviews are published here in complete form.

Book preview

Introduction

In mid-1976, James Stark received a call from San Francisco musician Ron Greco, asking if he would be interested in taking some photos of Ron’s new band. James had met Ron a few years earlier and had taken photos of his band at that time, Hell and High Water. They kept in touch and for a while shared a space at the Alameda Flea Market where they sold posters and other ephemera. Ron’s new band, Crime, had tried several other photographers, but none had been able to get across what they were about. Like all great rock and roll bands, Crime meticulously crafted their image even before they began playing live shows.

James arranged a meeting at their rehearsal space in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, in a warehouse on Howard Street near Sixth that also housed the rehearsal space used by The Nuns. When James arrived, he found two guys in gay leather drag standing in front of Marshall stacks, with Ron in street clothes along with Chris, the drummer. The scene reminded him of the Velvet Underground shows he’d seen at the Dom in New York City, where he’d lived a decade earlier. Crime’s music was loud and dissonant, a wall of noise backed by a solid beat. It appealed to him immediately, and they arranged for a photo shoot a few days later.

James had always preferred shooting on the street, taking locations as they come. He found that it tended to keep his subjects loose, making for more interesting photos. He showed up at Crime’s rehearsal space with an old Nikon S2 and a couple of lights.

Communication was good, and the shoot went well. James returned a couple of days later with proof sheets, and Frankie and Johnny liked what they saw. One of the photos was sent to Rock Scene magazine, which would publish photos of unknown and unsigned bands. The photo was published in Rock Scene’s January 1977 issue, and James became embedded in the band as Crime’s photographer.

A month earlier, in December 1976, The Ramones had played their first San Francisco show at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach, giving the local scene some fertilizer and direction. Shortly thereafter, The Nuns played their first show at the Mabuhay Gardens on Broadway, and Crime did the same in January 1977. After that, James would design the band’s posters, which would be plastered onto walls and telephone poles as advertisements for the shows.

As Crime was gathering a following, James noticed that something else was happening, and he began documenting it. Soon he was contributing photographs to publications like Search & Destroy, New York Rocker, New Diseases, and several others that came into existence alongside the nascent punk movement, though it wasn’t called that at the time. James became more involved, developing relationships with members of several local punk bands before the scene disintegrated.

In the early 1990s, James produced Punk ’77, a book that drew upon his experiences within the scene as well as extensive interviews with those who’d survived it. While conducting the interviews, James began by asking questions about the punk scene, then showed photographs to jog the subjects’ memories. Only a small portion of that material was used in Punk ’77, but it remains an important artifact of its time and is presented here in its entirety.

Where this book is concerned, James wants to thank Jackie Jouret for her editing skills and helpful input for making this a better and more interesting publication.

Table of Contents/Interviews

Vale

Bob Moselle and Bob Banks

Ness Aquino

Dirk Dirksen

Joey Swails

Jeff Olener

Jeff Raphael

Jennifer Miro

Penelope Houston

Greg Ingraham

Jimmy Wilsey

LaMar Saint James

DeDe Troit

Tommy Gear

Chip and Tony Kinman

Jeff Scott

Ginger Coyote

Michael Belfer

Ron Greco

Pat Ryan

Brittley Black

John SanFilippo & Brittley Black

Letter

V. Vale: Editor/Publisher, Search & Destroy, RE/Search

James: How did the punk scene in San Francisco get started?

Vale: In the early days at the Mabuhay, nobody ever thought of themselves as punks. I don’t ever remember using the word. To reduce a comprehensive social youth rebellion to music is a typical kind of co-optation which is an accommodation. Society machinery of cooperation again showed this kind of infinite capacity to assimilate all rebellious spirits and impulses—just to reduce it to music, which was just a small part of it. The previous youth rebellion had been ten years earlier, the Summer of Love. The Sixties, with all the proliferation of the commodities that were spawned, Levi’s and whatever, this so-called peace and love epoch. I don’t really want to put down the Sixties, because to me the Sixties were an incredible time. It’s not like life is better now, because it’s not. Now everyone I know has to work for a living. In the Sixties and during punk rock, nobody I knew had to work 40 hours a week just to pay the fucking rent. I mean, my rent was $37.50 a month during punk rock. I worked two six-hour-a-night shifts at City Lights Bookstore and was able to survive. Life was great. We stayed up all night. You didn’t have money, but you just didn’t need much money.

In order to have any kind of youth rebellion, you have to have some free time and you have to have a meeting place. Today young people meet in places where you can’t even talk. The music is so loud you can’t possibly have any kind of conversation. You can’t possibly have any kind of extended arguments or any kind of new group social theory being spawned because nobody talks, because you can’t hear yourself talk. It’s really alienating. In clubs today, it’s a paradox: Music is playing at a thousand decibels. People are coming together in a group situation, but they are really alienated.

The very first so-called punk event I ever attended was in August ’76, when The Ramones played the Savoy Tivoli. There were about twenty-five people in the audience for each show, including members of The Nuns, who were sitting behind me.

I knew something was happening and I was into Patti Smith. This was around 1973. I knew something was going on in New York, but I didn’t know what, and then in 1975 there was a center spread in New Musical Express all about this new movement starting at CBGBs in New York. It listed The Ramones, Dictators, Blondie and all of the bands which didn’t have records out yet: Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine and all these people. I was really interested but I couldn’t afford to go to New York and check it out, but I knew something was going on.

The Seventies were a dreadful period in which you had Emerson, Lake and Palmer and the proliferation of jazz-rock, which to me was a horrible perversion. Nothing was going on that anyone could relate to culturally, or I could relate to. So when you had so-called punk rock starting, what you had was a whole cultural rebellion against all of the status quo values that were being marketed by Rolling Stone magazine, etc. You had young people discovering all kinds of neglected culture. I remember going over to Alejandro Escovedo’s home; he was the guitarist for The Nuns. I looked at his library, and he had a bunch of William Burroughs books, but he also had a bunch of hardcore pornography. There were books about sleazy movies among other subjects—all of the manifestations of culture that aren’t thought of as culture. More or less delving into the forbidden: crime books, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard...writers like this. There were a few people who knew about them, but not everyone did.

There was like an unconscious theory that hadn’t been codified, but I think all over the planet people were sick of lies and they wanted to come to terms with the worst impulses in human nature and face them and delve into them. In middle-class culture, you are not encouraged to delve into any of this. You pretend it doesn’t exist, but then people are fascinated by murders, sex crimes, and things like that, but they never want to delve into the motivations. They themselves think they are not capable of these so-called horrific acts, but that is not true. A lot of the people who commit these crimes are, on the surface, are very respectful, such as John Wayne Gacy—there is the famous photograph of him with Rosalynn Carter—and someone like Charles Whitman, the, Texas Tower sniper. Some of these people can be so middle-class conforming, but look at what they do! This is fascinating.      For the first time, you had a whole generation of people more or less actively questing after a certain kind of self-knowledge, and knowledge of the darker side of human nature. This is not exactly sanctioned by middle-class culture values.

When I first heard The Ramones, they did a song called Commando, and it was the first time I had heard a rock song dealing with Vietnam War atrocities. At that time, people still didn’t want to deal with the hardcore realities of Vietnam, so the subject matter and presentation of The Ramones was a real shock. This was the age of the 30-minute, horrible, masturbatory guitar solo. There was all this contrivance and artiness in rock music, and The Ramones brought in a blast of something totally opposite, minimalist, just really intense and driving, with all the fat trimmed away. Twenty songs in twenty minutes. This was basically challenging all established aesthetic values, and not only in music.

The rise of the so-called punk poster: A lot of graphics were lifted from porno magazines and other not-socially-sanctioned sources. The clothes were a hit in the face to the fashion designers, when the fashion trend was total thrift store recycling and recombining, with people coming up with wonderful clothes. The ripped jeans and T-shirts challenged the aesthetic of the expensive designer rock star outfit, challenging all established aesthetic values, and not only in music. Then you had the rise of black. Black is a wonderfully symbolic color: the color of negation, the color of darkness. I always thought I started wearing black for the society that could have been. The Ramones presented the archetype for the black leather jacket look and the really ripped-up jeans. I assume they got the idea from Iggy Pop, who was wearing them seven years earlier.

The point was the thumbing of the nose in the face of a society which just exists to promote spanking-new merchandise. It was a true kind of comprehensive underground of rebellion which doesn’t seem like it is going to happen again, mainly because of real estate and the real estate conspiracy. You can never afford to have a punk club again that charged so little money to get in and let some people in free every night.

James: In 1977, there were no outlets for anything alternative, there were no college radio stations, there were no publications. People didn’t think about doing their own publications.

Vale: There was no reason to do this until the collective Zeitgeist exerted itself.

James: Today you have college radio stations that play anything, and you still have a lot of small clubs to play in. There are thousands of Xeroxed publications. All of these things came out of the punk thing. There is so much these days there is nothing to rebel against. There still is an established music business, but there are a lot of alternatives.

Vale: There are too many alternatives. There is a postmodern information overload and everything is, has, and continues to be recycled. There doesn’t seem to be much discrimination. It takes so much time to process all of these little creative offerings out there. There might be somebody saying something which is really original and relevant and more importantly impacts far into the future. If it is indeed happening, it is certainly difficult to identify it because it is lost in the information overload. Now it’s a process you go through.

I think there is no higher purpose to live for than to foment social rebellion as well as individual expression. Creativity and imagination are the unleashing and development of those. In a way, it is the highest form of human activity. These are also solitary activities, and they seem to be more solitary now than ever before. There doesn’t seem to be any circle matrix which is very productive. There isn’t one I know of, and it certainly isn’t the format of a club anymore. I like my entertainment to be challenging for the mind as well the body, and it is rare when I feel that has happened these days.

Punk rock started as kind of a rebellion against rock, what rock music and pop music had turned into. I realized that the Dadaists and Futurists had tried to completely overturn every musical value and musical value system. I became interested in that when I became interested in so-called industrial music. Those kinds of experiments in which you challenge every assumption about music: structure, tonality, the scale system, everything! You try to destroy it all, and that is what industrial music was all about. It was kind of like reviving the experiments from the Teens and Twenties, which of course didn’t become popular because most people didn’t understand it and it was too much of an assault on their aesthetics. There is a musical establishment, there is a system of concert halls and the musicians union, and they don’t want noise anyone can make to be propagated as entertainment because they would all be out of a job. At the heart of this is the fact that everybody has the right and everyone is born with the equipment to be a creative expressive person in all mediums. In a better society or in more so-called primitive societies, every person in the society is an artist—like Bali, for example.

The [Earth’s] population has doubled from two and half billion to over five billion people in 25 years. There were these people in the Sixties who were saying that when the earth hit five billion the shit was going to hit the fan and it’s over that now. I think it is starting to hit the fan and people don’t realize it. The media don’t want to cause a panic by emphasizing it. It’s amazing how you never hear a word in the press about overpopulation and population control. With the abortion issue, people want more babies on the planet.  Please...

In a lot of ways, it is beyond the point of turning back as far as pollution is concerned. We would have to stop everything tomorrow to recover, no cars, everything. There seems to be media control and it seems so perfect to have an ex-CIA head [George H.W. Bush] president. A total actor as president of the United States, and Bush is far more of a better actor than [Ronald] Reagan.

Before the Mabuhay, there was pretty much a monopoly on so-called youth culture [in San Francisco] perpetrated by Bill Graham. There was also a club on Bush Street called The Boarding House