Such institutional bans were not uncommon: for instance, Germs lost one of the few remaining venues willing to host them after a Christmas ’79 show at the Whiskey turned into a hail of glass bottles-a far cry from a bunch of pink roses.Īmong the genres that Bessy deigns to deem legitimate in his monologue are “noise, punk, power pop, ska, rockabilly,” though he doesn’t drop another term that’s shortly to enter usage: hardcore. ![]() As a transcription fails to convey the particular pleasures of Bessy’s rhetoric, I recommend that you watch his entire monologue here:īessy is seen performing with his short-lived band, Catholic Discipline, at the Hong Kong Café, which at that time was embroiled in a booking war with Madame Wong’s, a neighboring venue in downtown Los Angeles Chinatown which had banned punk acts after a near riot at an X / The Bags show, and was now billing itself as the flagship venue for New Wave. This was when the term “New Wave” had only recently entered the vernacular, a phenomenon whose very existence is memorably rebutted by one of the films’ most memorable subjects, Slash Magazine writer Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face. Decline, which was released to Blu-ray and DVD for the first time a few weeks ago in a boxed set with its two sequels, came before any official narratives had fallen into place and was an eyewitness to an important juncture in the history of the scene (or scenes) that it documents. Such a point isn’t arrived at anywhere in Decline of Western Civilization, which was filmed, per its opening text, from “December 1979 through May 1980,” though one of the particular pleasures of the latter-day hardcore-scene-reminiscence documentary is watching subjects wax nostalgic about their former destitution in front of a background of material comfort, modular shelves full of carefully catalogued LPs and professionally framed flyers. ![]() I just paid six dollars to see this band. (Germs, another act on the Decline roster, had just gone into the studio with Joan Jett, and would shortly thereafter record songs for the soundtrack of William Friedkin’s 1980 Meatpacking District giallo Cruising.) Front woman Exene Cervenka shows off a bouquet of two dozen pink roses sent by the management of the Whiskey-A-Go-Go to the camera, a thank-you for the business brought in by X’s shows, and muses on the potential problem posed by “We’re Desperate,” one of their signature tunes: “At one point I started thinking: ‘There’s gonna come a point where we’re gonna keep performing this song, people are gonna be going, ‘Sure, they’re desperate. At the time of the film’s release, their debut album Los Angeles had just been released on Slash Records, garnering a favorable review from Rolling Stone magazine, something which would elude most of their contemporaries working in “punk” or “hardcore” idioms-having Doors keyboardist and certifiable Boomer icon Ray Manzarek as the producer can’t have hurt. The exception, in terms of reaping positive feedback from establishment sources, are the group X, who were already on their way to becoming critical darlings when they sat down with Spheeris. ![]() Most of the subjects of The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 boots-and-braces-on-the-ground documentary on Southern California hardcore, can’t have had much reason to think that posterity would care a tittle about what they had to say-though this probably didn’t prevent some of them from hoping it would anyway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |