#gezax

First published 2012

Can you put into words what is different about California punk and punk from other cities?

YES!!! The West Coast scene has always had two culturally-significant influences: Dada and Surf. You can’t get them out of the atmosphere here in California. This is one of only four places in the world that have a Mediterranean climate. That created Pool Skating with the Alva Brothers, two early Punks. And the ominous WEIGHT of Hollywood and its unholy industries is ubiquitous here. So it’s natural for Art Nerds to spoof their home town. And the art that comes Out of that kind of lowbrow folk-satire is called Dada

Hollywood = Dada. That’s the prevailing equation and the humor shows in the music. West Coast songs are fucking funny as hell, just diabolically so, and can rarely be taken at face value. And the music is more aggressive too, more like English punk than NY. Even when it’s jazzy or arty it’s aggressive and bad and deliberately self-satirical

Was Darby Crash a sweet kid?

Darby was genuinely sweet. There was something lovable about him and thats what was eerie. He was curious and intelligent. He was very smiley. He was focused on the future in a way that would puzzle you. But he was also a toxic mindfuck artist. He started a REAL cult in the punk scene. It hung over us all like a wet cloud. It was all based on his endless threats of suicide. He played that game like a drunk kid with a lit stick of dynamite in his hand. He was way too powerful for his own good cause he had an IQ of 180 and no faith in anything. So he lived pure nihilism and sucked everyone into his soap opera

Don Bolles and I are making a documentary about the early punk scene. We have been talking about Darby a lot. It will probably never be properly explained. You have a young kid with a big problem. He’s too smart for his own good. He creates a rock star character. And he kills himself for it, because he’s not really a goodnuf singer performer but he IS an amazing writer. One who wrote a poetic legend about himself. I think he took the easy way out but Don can explain it in Art terms

How do you feel about your production of the Dead Kennedys single Holiday in Cambodia. I think the second version – rerecorded for Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables – loses the urgency of the first recording

The first one was done at Tewksbury Recording in SF. The 16 track tape machine was so old I had to stop the reels with my hands between takes or it would just spill the giant two-inch tape onto the floor. That’s the secret of my Big Sound. My hands had battle scars for weeks

I recorded it just like a Top 40 Song. Most punks would be appalled! We doubled the guitars and QUADRUPLED the vocals on the chorus of the song. Yeah there are four Biafras screaming there got mad cause I dragged his guitar amp into the studio’s LIVE ECHO CHAMBER. He already uses an effect called an Echoplex, which is a tape echo unit that makes everything huge. I said lets just TRY it, pretty please. It sounded colossal!! We were all shocked when we put the mikes up and listened on little speakers

I put a wallet on the snare drum like you do in Disco songs to get that THUD. That was a carry-over from my mid 70s Funk sessions. If I had it to do over I would have used a more bouncy sounding snare

So basically EVERYone had something to complain about. I think Jello and I did the final mix together because there were a lot of switches to flip and there was no automation for poor punx in those days. But then Ray remixed it cause my mix didn’t have enough bass. I hadn’t recorded any hip-hop yet and was as white as a saltine cracker

Another single you produced around that time was the Bags Survive/Babylonian Gorgon. That record has a great atmosphere about it. How did you approach making that record; they were a very inexperienced band at the time they made it weren’t they? And you were a Bag for a while yourself

The Bags were a good band in those days but the playing was borderline awkward. They had a peculiar mix of strengths and weaknesses and they knew it. So they would rehearse a lot. Alice Bag is a good bandleader, everything she does has a reason. The songs showed a real sense of style. Alice and Patricia were always looking for something original, even inside punk. They would mix older experienced players with young naive ones. I always thought that was daring and supported it, but it also created internal pressure and mixed musicianship. It was democratic like all of punk

The band used to wear real bags at gigs but the girls HATED my bag which had bloody tampons on it and fired me! Thats how I came to produce the record. Dangerhouse had just started as a label. Craig Lee (RIP) had just replaced me on guitar. He and I were friends since junior high so it was good vibes. And I still loved the girls too so the session was mellow. They knew I was an engineer already. I recall things moving very smoothly. I knew the songs so it was easy to take it to the next step of recording them

Alice and I decided to take a minimalist approach and go for clean open sounds and sort of anti-glamour. I always found her to be intelligent and pleasant to work with. She was one of the coolest women in the scene and should get more credit for inventing the front girl look Exene and Madonna used so effectively

Craig had a radically different guitar style from me, more folk-rock. So their music had variety. That single has a particularly warm intimate sound. It really brings out the the “primitive” playing in a way that complements the originality of the songs. I was always rooting for my old bandmates. One of my favorite productions

Brendan Mullen played drums on You Goddam Kids!, and I know you spent a lot of time at his club the Masque. What sort of relationship did you have with him, with both of you having been right there at the birth of the LA punk scene?

I rented a small room from Brendan right when the Masque was opening. It was upstairs, where the alley entrance to the club was. I think he was bootlegging it to me cause it wasn’t technically part of the basement! So that was was my squat the whole time the Masque was active, about 2 years

Brendan, Spazz Attack, Bruce Barf and I WERE the Masque. We did EVERYthing – scrub the vomit out of toilets, mop the beer off the floors, setup my scrawny PA and even hook up a tape recorder now and then. Bruce Barf and I setup the PA for nearly every show and we would take turns running it. He was a hilarious, easygoing cat, very FUN to work with. That whole gang was great, as nuts as you can get while still doing the work. We were obsessed, just DRIVEN to make a scene happen and we lived that every minute. Bands shared equipment but since I always had guitars amps recorders and a PA, my shit would take a lot of abuse. It’s fucking AMAZING that NOT ONE PIECE of valuable gear ever got broken or stolen from me at the Masque. It was a club house and more like our living room than a commercial bar

My guitar is what Pat Smear is playing on Decline of Western Civilization. He frequently used my most valuable, irreplaceable guitars for Germs shows and somehow returned them without a scratch. He didnt have a guitar of his own for a long time cause his was stolen, so he had to borrow mine. The scene was good natured like that. People tended to NOT fuck each other over

The music business as it was when you started out making records doesn’t exist anymore. And it seems that at the moment music execs are a bit stumped, and they’re relying on smoke and mirrors and dirty tricks to get them through to the next phase. Can you envisage what might be next for the record industry?

I saw it dying in 1975, when I first started engineering. There was hope of a new style of commercial music when New Wave grew out of punk. But it was all a scam, cause the dice had already been cast. Jimmy Carter, Reagan, the record execs, they all contributed in various ways. Punk was seen as too threatening for mainstream and got BLACKBALLED

I was a few years older and could see inside the Hollywood recording studio scene. Nobody was signing anything. The tax breaks were weird, something unholy was going on. You could make more money by WASTING it than on a serious investment. Which is why I started recording independently and producing as much Punk as possible

It was sort of an emergency and I went at it like a documentary film maker. I would record ANYTHING, just to get it archived. Cause I KNEW it would never see the light of day any other way. I took whatever money they gave me, usually a hundred bux or less

You Goddam Kids. It’s really a wild record. Did you just go into the studio to make a record for yourself, with no concern for what people might think?

Well, we had the Mommymen playing live all up and down the coast for about two years at that point. Actually, that period is a blur to everyone in the all-star band! We were playing our other gigs and then RACING to Mommymen shows! It was the cream of the crop of LA punk musicians. Don Bonebrake, X’s drummer; Pat Delaney, Deadbeats sax; Kira Roessler, future Black Flag bass.. she was my girlfriend at the time

Ironically nearly ALL of my girlfriends went on to become rock stars. I love artists. I dated Charlotte Caffey, Suzy Gardner, Josie Cotton, Kira, before they made it. ALL those girls were SHY AS FUCK when I first met them. Hahaha

Brendan Mullen was the only wild card in the Mommymen. He was an awkward, STRANGE drummer. I kept him in there cause he loved it and he was the Soul of the Masque. It simply HAD to be him. He had great taste in music and art alike and we would both just RAIL about Dada and the role it had in Holywood street culture. He influenced the band so much I would call him the other Mommyman

What a smart and charming dude too – I miss him SO much! He gave ALL OF US a place to play, the whole scene, and that was why I would support him however I could. I was his right hand man when he was running the Masque and he was my loyal, witty drummer and best friend

Ironically, he was irreplaceable. There was something about the “off” way he would play, something amazing. Other drummers are TOO in the groove, too hip sounding, to get the koo-koo clock feel of the songs but Brendan always nailed it even though he’d forget every fill and every change, the whole arrangement. When I tried I later with other drummers it was never the same

Was that album written in the studio as it was being recorded?

NOOOOO, every note and sound on that album is contrived and produced and pored over and memorized. It’s an excersise in behavioral psychology and cult marketing. I only pressed 1000 OG Vinyl copies and still have about 100. Time will prove me right

We tuned the drums to EACH song with a guitar tuner, so they were part of the melody. You cant imagine how HARD that was! In some cases Brendan and I would play the song alone first to get the right bounce. On other songs we recorded the whole band. Then I would go in and edit the tapes. In those days we recorded on tape and I had a small demo studio I had reconditioned, with an 8-track recorder. So I assembled all the band’s parts on those 8-track tapes, till we had the overall music right but no solos or vocals or percussion or sound effects recorded yet

Then I made a new 8-track, like George Martin used to do on the Beatles, approx white album period. (You had to copy the tapes in those days to get more tracks). Finally, we added all my vocals and guitar solos and I had the musicians add weird noises too onto those fresh empty tracks

When it was all surgically assembled like that, I mixed it and took it to the pressing plant by hand. Its an old-school vinyl factory. I had $1000 that Peter Ivers (RIP, New Wave Theatre) had scammed from Warner Bros as “demo money” for me. God bless him, that’s how I paid for the whole pressing. So it was released as a limited edition fine art thing first in 1980 by my own hands. I let the records collect cult “value” for 20 years before licensing it to DIONYSIS in 2002. The real vinyl is worth $100/ea these days

The DIONYSIS “reissue” is the true CD version and I love, love, LOVE the packaging. It’s true to the original while offering a lot more goodies. They are such a great label!

You worked with the Mau Maus on last years release of Scorched Earth Policies. They have been around since the early days too. Were you familiar with their material before you went into the studio with them, and are you happy with the results?

I auditioned for Rick Wilder and Berlin Brats on guitar at the Masque before I even lived there! That would be 1976. He looked like a scarecrow THEN, and I ran screaming! Next thing, he reappears a few years later with the Mau-Mau’s, a TOTALLY GREAT band in every way

No, Rick can’t sing on time. Yes, it’s derivative of Rolling Stones and New York Dolls. Yes, I had to fix all that inside the computer for the recording. But somehow, Valor wins out over everything. Rick Wilder is an ICON, a leathery survivor and a ROCKER. He’s an institution cause he’s LA’s Keith Richards. There is NO WAY he could have survived all this time but he did

Ray Manzarek produced some of the tracks and I produced about half of the vocals. The record SMOKES by the way