Bandsplain - The Germs With Pleasant Gehman

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Yasi is joined by artist, author, and musician Pleasant Gehman to discuss the Germs and the chaotic birth of the Los Angeles punk scene, which she witnessed firsthand. They discuss the myth vs. the reality of Darby Crash, the DIY community that formed around the enigmatic singer, and how the Germs became one of the era’s most influential bands despite their short reign. Episode PlaylistListen to the Germs playlist here. CreditsHost: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Pleasant Gehman @princessofhollywoodProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into the episode, I just wanted to let you know that this one contains discussion about suicide. If you or someone you know are struggling, please know there's help out there. You can call or text the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988. What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like Bansplain? Hello and welcome to Bansplaine. I am your host, Yassie Sal. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist.

Today's episode is about the germs. My guest today, you guys, what a fucking treat I have for you guys. My guest today is author, musician, artist, coolest woman in all of Los Angeles and potentially the country and world. Pleasant, Gaman. Pleasant, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Now I'm blushing. I'm so excited to have you.

I mean, before we like dive in to unpacking the story of the germs and, you know, sadly a short one, but I just need people to understand that like there might only be five people on Earth that are like as qualified as you to be here to help me tell this story. And do you want to tell us why? Oh my goodness. Well, I knew the germs before they were the germs. and I was Pat Smear, before he was Pat Smear's girlfriend for a really long time, and I'm still in touch with him, and he's wonderful, and we're friends. But L.A. was very, very different there than, would you like me to tell you how I met them? Yes, please. I love this. I already know the story, but I want everyone to know because it's my favorite story.

I know. It's good. It's like it's pretty much my Los Angeles. origin story. How it all happened was I was living on the East Coast. I was going to avoiding school that I got a scholarship to and I wanted to be there. And then my mother told me we were moving and I got, I was so sad. I was just crushed because I was going to have to leave school and she wouldn't tell me where we were moving to and I thought it was going to be somewhere stupid, you know, like some Midwestern like town that I as an old lady would love to probably live in now, but, you know, it wasn't happening. And then she called me back a week later and said, okay, I know where we're moving.

We're moving to Los Angeles. And I was like, when are we going? And she said, well, we're going in two weeks, but you have to finish out the term. And I was like, why? Like, I want to come now. So as soon as I got there, I had seen that Queen was playing at the Santa Monica Civic. and I took the bus there, and I was wearing my old school in nobody's, like, genre, finery, which was, like, I would wear these, like, 1940s through, like, the Victorian Times, like, gowns I'd find at thrift stores when no one, or not even thrift stores.

There wasn't even thrift stores yet. It was, like, it was junk shops. Yeah, junk shops or just yard sales. Yeah. So I was wearing that with like combat boots. And this was very, I guess, fashion forward at the time, but no one looked like that in the 70s. What did I tell you guys? Coolest woman alive going.

Anyway. I sashed down the aisle wearing that looking for my ticket. And I sat down. And almost as soon as I sat down this person that I immediately identified as a hot old man. I handed a joint to me and said, Would you like some of this miss? And I said, yes, thank you. And then all of a sudden, four days in L.A.,

I realized I was getting high with Tony Curtis. Spartacus, babe. I don't know if you're familiar. Yes, Spartagus. That was Spartacus when he was a singer of songs, but also some like it hot. He was like my favorite actor, and my brain was bleeding.

I was like, how is this happening? So cool. And he was so nice. And then I was entranced with him and we were talking, but then I got distracted by these two guys that were striding down the aisle right before the lights went out. And the one was really, really tall and lanky and had no shirt on and billowing black satin bell bottoms.

And his hair was kind of like in this like Svinks kind of, I don't know if it was on purpose or not on purpose. Like it was sort of a pyramid-shaped crazy-ass sphinx scenario going on. And the other guy behind him was a little bit shorter, dressed all in white and had the most perfect red like bowie shag and a bowie lightning bolt on his face. And so I borrowed a pen from Tony Curtis and wrote on this matchbook that I had. It said, Aladdin sane, you cosmic orgasms, call me.

And I put my phone number, and then I stood up and threw it to where I hope they were. And the next morning, these two guys called me, and one was Paul Beam, and the other was George Ruthenberg, and they turned into Derby Crash and Pat Smear. I just want to tell. That's such a cool story. Also, I'm just, for anyone listening, who's, like, young and is like, I don't know how to meet friends. Take a cue here, babe. Like, you used to just go up to people.

You can throw a matchbook at someone. Be brave. Like, look what could happen. This was 1975, is that right? Yes. Okay. And you guys were like 14, 15 years old. Teenagers, yeah.

Yeah. So cool. So anyways, you guys, the point is that Pleasant was there since day zero, let alone day one. And she played a huge part in the original punk scene. in Los Angeles and honestly and a lot of the other important musical

things that happened in LA after which we'll also talk about because they're very interesting so don't ever say I didn't bring you a perfect and exquisite guest I know I'm like something I hear hey you know what I'm going to start

a little bit from the beginning of Paul's life but then when we get back to 975 I have some more questions about just sort of like the pre-punk music scene in L.A., but I want to get these, like, biographical details out of the way. So Paul Beam was born Yon Paul Beam or Jan Paul Bean. Yeah. I think it was Yon. September 26, 1958, a Libra, Los Angeles. His mother was named Faith Reynolds. Later, Faith Reynolds Baker. She had moved to L.A. from New Jersey with her first husband. She had two children with him, Bobby and Christine. She said that Paul was named after

their neighbor's baby that died of a congenital heart defect before Paul was born and asked her to name their baby the baby after him. I did not know that this was a thing. It's a very strange. I didn't realize that either. That's wild. It feels like a very like cursed. Do you know what I mean? Like it's such a, I understand the honoring of the child, but it's also like what like a kind of a dark namesake to have. It's like a baby that never even got to live. That never made it. I mean, it's just a tragic and dark thing. So I'm not trying to, like, editorialize, but I'm like, we're beginning with a bit of tragedy. Okay.

So when Paul was born, this family lived above a bar in Venice. They moved around a few times near the beach before they ended up in a house. A big one for $125 a month, babe. That was a different time in Los Angeles. And they moved to West L.A. So Paul Beam grew up thinking that his biological father was a man named Harold Beam, who had apparently left the family early in his life. But it turned out actually that his father was a Swedish sailor named William Burekland,

which kind of explains the name, Jan. Yeah. And he found this out, I guess, later in life. Like, one of his sisters, like, let it slip. And this, I thought was really interesting. A lot of this is all coming from the Lexicon Devil book, so it's an oral history and it's people's reportage of it. But his mother said that he had another sister named Faith Jr. that was closer to him in age.

And apparently Faith Jr.'s friend had thrown a rock at her when they were, like, playing in the street, but missed and hit Darby and chipped his tooth. And that's why his tooth was chipped like that. So that's the origin behind his teeth. He was basically raised by Faith's third husband, Bob Baker, who was a Korean War veteran. When Paul was 11, his older brother Bobby was murdered in Venice at 27. I guess he was, this is what Brendan Mullen said, that he was found dead in a station wagon, reputedly from a hot shot heroin OD passed to him by a burned dope man.

So this is like the drug dealer was mad that he didn't get paid and basically gave him an OD. Yeah. That's so crazy. I know. Stuff like that happened in those days. Yeah. There was a lot of dark stuff going on. The 70s is such a group.

Alex, my friend Alex Nelson, who's sitting here in the studio right now, we can't see her and I were just talking about this off mic that, like, as much as like whenever I read about this time, I'm so mad that I didn't get to live through it. Like, the LA of the 70s was so cool. I mean, even the LA of the 90s was much cooler than the LA of now, but then there was also stuff like this. So I guess it comes with a part and personal. There was all sorts of crazy.

There was, I was talking about like all the criminal stuff that you see. to happen all the time that was like just wide out in the open of, you know, like stuff that I was even privy to as like a 15 through 18 year old person just knowing stuff and knowing gangsters or hearing stuff at clubs I'd be like la la la like. Yeah, because like famously the mafia had ties to the whiskey, is that not? Or mobsters? I feel like I read that a couple of times. I mean, my favorite person that worked there was Jim La Pena.

And he always took care of the kids in a really great way. He'd let us all in. But we'd have to show him our report cards to make sure that we had at least a B average. Otherwise, he wouldn't let us in there. That's so sweet. I know. He was the one that let me do shows there when I was a teenager. That's how I started doing shows.

He's like, you guys can party here, but only if you're good at school. That's exactly true. That should be a rule going forward. That's a way better inspiration for kids to do well in school than whatever college, you know? I don't know if they even let, like, underage people into clubs anymore. Absolutely not. At one time at the whiskey, I'd been working there for ages, right? And at the, I went up and I said to the bartender,

It's my birthday. It's my birthday. You're going to give me a free drink. And he said, sure. How old are you turning? And I said, 21. And he said, bullshit. You've been drinking here for ages.

And then I shot him by ID card. And he was horrified. He was like, you're not even 21. You've been serving me for years. And you could have gone to jail. He's like, whoopsie. So Bob Baker, his sort of surrogate father, died very suddenly in 1970 to have a heart attack when Darby was 14. And it's kind of around this time, or maybe a little bit earlier, that he meets George Rutherberg, aka Pat Smir in junior high, a Leo, which makes total sense, I feel like, given what I know about Patrick's Mere, August 5, 1959.

So Pleasant, I want to ask you this, because it's kind of hard to find too much about his background. But from when I understand that his father was like an older German man and his mother was like a mix of African American and Native American and she was an opera singer. Yeah. I don't know about his father. I think so. But yes, his mom was like that. Yeah. Everything that you said, that makes it's total perfect sense.

Yeah. And also Ruthenberg, I guess that could be German. Yes. Oh, it's totally generous. Yeah. So he went to fourth grade with Willamato. Did you know where his friends? Yeah.

who would later write for Slash. He's heavily quoted in Lexicon Devil. And Will said in that book that there were maybe only like two other black kids in the school, which must have been an interesting way to grow up. Yeah, because they were going to uni high. Yeah. And then uni high, they had a thing called the IPS.

I have so many questions about the iPS for you. I used to cut school of my school to go to their school. And sometimes they would cut their school to go to my school. We did shit like that all the time too. I got to know. do again. So George collected exotic birds apparently and he said that he was 12

when he first met Paul Beam and then he had a dollar a day for lunch money and there was a 300 pound girl who sold whites for a dollar. What are whites? Whites? I mean, they're like little speeds. Okay. That's what I thought but I just wanted to confirm. I was just telling someone the other day about

loads and they had no idea what loads were. What are loads? Lodes were like, there was like a little drug concoction that was made on the street and it was with a two and all and some other kind of um you could either do it going up or down depending on what you did it with but it was you purchased it as what was called a load a load it was a combo a combo pack yeah yeah 70s drugs were wild as you know people are obsessed with the myth of quailudes and like they're still trying to hunt them down in the world all i

have to do is say you poor people that never had quailudes that's all i'm going to say I hear time and again that people, like, unearth really old ones. I could believe it and try to take it and see if the chemical compound is still working. But, yeah, that's the most mystical one. But this is very funny. So, George, sorry, I'm going to go back and forth with names a little bit until they fully change them, but just know George is Pat Smir and Paul is Darby Crash. I just call them George and Paul a lot and forget that I'm talking to people. Well, that's how you know that.

Yeah. But he said, George said he remembered laughing about how the speed dealer could weigh so much because speed makes you not eat. And she's actually the one that put them together, according to George, that she knew them both and was like, you guys would be really good friends. And he also said that he felt like he had a lot of sisters. And so he knew how to be friends with women. And he was raised more like a girl. And then he also said that Darby was always friends with girls too, especially girls that were like his mom. Did you know Paul's mom?

Faith, yeah. Yeah. What was she like? Well, I'm just, from the perspective of someone who is an adult that used to do crazy things. Right, right. Around her. Now you're like, oh, interesting. No, I mean, she did put up with a lot.

I got to give her that. Yeah. Because, like, one time I was getting held up upside down. with paint on the bottom of my sneakers so I could make footprints walking across the ceiling. Of their house. Of their house. And she, like, came home and saw that. Yeah.

Mom, someone's been walking on the ceiling again. Oh, my gosh. I mean, shit like that was going on constantly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, I'm very intrigued by her because you read a lot of mixed things about her. She's in the book as well. But what George said what I thought was really interesting was that Paul Darby was always, friends with and around women and girls that were very similar to his mom, big outspoken girls.

These are George's words. Yeah, like Michelle Bear and Dinky. These are friends that they met in high school. Yeah. So George was super into the dolls and Alice Cooper and the Stooges and obviously Ziggy Stardust. Bowie's Zardust. And he hated, in his own words, anything to do with 50s-based rock. He didn't like those chord changes.

Yeah, we were, I mean, we were all into that. Stephanie, I think it's worth mentioning to anyone that's listening is that those people that Yassi just mentioned were not famous in those days. Right. This was like all undergroundy stuff. They had albums out, but you had to really either search for them if you heard of them or find them by accident the way that I did because I saw the cover and was like, what is this? Like for Ziggy Stardust. You were in like a record store and you saw the cover and you were like, this looks cool. I need to buy it. Latin Sane and raw power and all of those things. I had no idea. I just thought if something was in a record store, those people were famous rock stars.

I didn't know what a cutout bin was because no one was buying it in this country. Right. And that's what the cutout bin was. It was basically the discount bin, right? Yeah, it was the discount bin. And then it was also those records that really inspired punk were kind of marginalized in the same way that punk rock was later. Because in this country, no one gave a fuck about punk.

Punk rock. In England, they did. That's how we knew it existed. I remember looking at pictures of Johnny Rotten that was like the size of a postage stamp going, what is this? This looks like the best thing ever. Yeah, I feel like people think in today, like in today's time, they think of David Bowie and they're like, oh, that is, that man has always been famous. That was a pop star. And it wasn't like that. And especially in the 70s, and again, I'm speaking like I was there, but you can correct me. It's not like there was MTV, right? It's not like you had only a few channels for music pop culture, which was the radio and maybe Rolling Stone, but they weren't covering too much. Yeah, you could watch the Midnight Special. The Midnight Special. It was like a music

show. Or John Pershinger's rock concert because sometimes they would have obscure English groups. Yeah. A lot on there. So culturally those things were quite underground. And I thought it was really interesting. So that's what George was into. But Paul wasn't. Paul hated it. He liked low-writer music. Oh, yeah. Because his sister was dating a cholo. Low-Writer music was great. I loved all of this music. You know what?

There used to be, there was a show on the radio that, you know, that movie and that song, Border Radio. Yeah. That's what this is about. It was the Mexican radio station that would just blast stuff. And all during punk rock, we would listen to that because there wasn't anything else decent on the radio except for Rodney. Bingenheimer's show because he would play punk.

Sure. I could sing you like so many du-op, classic do-op songs. Yeah, I mean, they're so great. From start to finish because they were incredible. And then also, in between that, there'd be like there'd be like three or five or ten punks at someone's house, like just listening to it because they'd have all the, the dedications, like from, you know, to Julio in whatever jail he was

And like, I still love you, baby. It's blah, blah, blah. You know, like all the dedications. It was incredible. It was so wonderful. Yeah. It was full on low-writer culture that was going on there. And that really influenced so many people in the punk scene,

maybe not by the way the music sounds. Right, right. But, I mean, I'm sure with, like, the bands, like the brat and stuff, when East L.A. started having a punk scene, you know, like that. The rest of us already, like, knew a lot about that. it wasn't segregated. I just, I love that detail so much just because the germs are such an LA band and this is such a thing. It's so specific to LA, right?

Well, not LA, but, you know, California and places around here. So the idea that, you know, young Darby Crash was, like, listening to, like, stuff like Angel Baby by Rosie and the original. Yeah, because of his sister and he was hanging around with this group of, you know, Cholas and Cholas. I love, I mean, I grew up going to school with Cholas and doing my makeup like them and, like, you know, that was the coolest thing in the world. I mean, I really, I really do think, I think that the germs burns and stuff came from that chola culture because, I mean, not exactly, but I think that's where the idea came from because of, like, the idea of being a gang, like, like, like, C.S. Like, everyone, all the cholas had Cs for consophos.

Yeah. And then that was like, it was located in the same place your germs burn would be. So interesting. I never thought about that. I thought of that, like, as soon as they started doing it, and everyone's like, people come up to me and go, do you have a germs burn if you're such a punk? And I was like, no, I didn't need one. Right.

You were like, trust me, I was in it. I was going to ask you, okay, so you don't have one. You were like, you're like, that's nice, Derby, but I don't want that. That looks painful. This is also another detail that I was obsessed with. George was so into Alice Cooper. Oh, yeah, we all were. Yeah, that he made an actual necklace of full.

like dead and alive flies for the song Halo flies and wore them to school. The dedication, the artistry. Well, okay, our favorites were like in no particular order. It was like Bowie, Alice Cooper. I'm trying to think pretty much like just those two were the top. Which, and I read this and I wanted to ask you, that in L.A. or in America, it was, they called it glitter rock, not glam rock. Yes, we called it glitter rock. Yeah. And when people, now I just call it glam rock because people call it that, but we called it glitter.

Yeah. And we just glitter, the word. If you were in it, you just called it glitter. That's glitter. Like, like, for example, Joan Jett was really into glitter. Yeah. We all were. And then one time when Joan and I started getting into punk, we went to this bar, the Odyssey that we all went to, it was only gay bars. that played good music that like punk people were going to before the mask. So there was this place called The Odyssey on Las Eugenica and one of those streets, a side street on it. And Joan and I, they wouldn't let us in because they said we looked trashy because we both had on leather jackets. Stop. Yes.

Yeah. Okay, I read about the Odyssey because that was like after Rodney's English disco closed. the places that people would go were kind of like gay bars that play disco but also play glitter. Ginos. That was where I had my, that was where I took my first clueludes. And that's where, for anyone that's listening that knows L.A., Gnos was the wrestling place that's right above where three of clubs is on Santa Monica. And Vine. Yeah. And Vine.

Yeah. So that was Gino's. And that Gino's, they played the best, best music. And took my first quailudes there. I was wearing sky-high silver glitter platforms. It were two weeks' worth of waitress pay and tips. And then as soon as I got on the dance floor, I fell on my ass because I was so high on quailutes.

And these people picked me up and carried me, drag carried me over. And I was laying across about five people, just making out with them. That is what the 70s clubs were like. It's not fair that I didn't get to me there, but we'll just... I know, sorry. We'll so...

You're like, I'm sorry. But that's also what punk rock came out of. It was just doing shit like that at places like there or at the whiskey, not as much, but pretty much. Yeah. Just before uni, George and Paul, thick as thieves, really into shoplifting, really into stealing stuff, stole some pot plants from a Mexican gang member. And according to George, they would not mess with Paul because of his sister Faith Jr.'s boyfriend, but George was getting beaten up every day and chased with knives.

And so he, in his words, ran away to a Jesus freak commune in Northern California. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That his sister Greta was at. This was so interesting to me. And he went there. It was first in Mendocino, then in Eureka, and he lived there for a year from 13 to 14,

came back home. Yeah. And then went back and stayed until he was 15. So you met him right after that. Yeah. At that point, because he said he was, was like when he came back, he was, like, kind of really into Christianity. Did he, like, talk about it? No, he didn't really talk. I mean, I don't remember it really coming up, but he told, he told me about being up there. And, um, you know, the other thing is really fun to that George and I used to write each other letters, which now would be, like, texting each other. Like, from your house and, yeah. Because you were in Beverly Hills and they were in West L.A.? Yeah. Yeah. And you were just right, like, in the post. Like, put it in the post. Yeah. I'm dead.

And it would come like what, like the next day probably, right? Yeah. That's so, you guys, you know, no idea. How's so romantic? Actually, I can't, I mean, I'll just say it now because I was obsessed with this detail. So in Lexicon Devil, I think her name was Jenna Cardwell. Was that Georgia's girlfriend after you? And she's like, I went to his house for the first time. And he had, his wall was covered with photos of Pleasant.

It was like a shrine to Pleasant. And I was like, I know that's right. I know my bitch. Left an impression. Can you imagine going to your new boyfriend's house and there's just like a wall clodged of photos? That must have been wild. I mean, sorry, Jenna. Sorry, Jenna.

First love is first love, man. Okay, so they start going to uni. Now, this is what I'm dying to talk about. So for those of you that don't know, uni, it's university high. It's still there. It's in mid-city. Actually, a lot of my family members went there like in the, I was like dying. I was like triangling.

I was like, please let my uncle and aunt have been there at the same time. And they were there in the same. 60s. So I was like, because Kim Fowley also went there in the 50s. What? Really? Yeah. And I was like, please God, let my uncle and aunt have been in school at the same time as the germs or Kim Fowley. And it was like, no, they were like a decade off from each of them. So I was like, dying, laughing, thinking about them, like, knowing the germs, but they did it because they were later. Or the administrators of that high school knowing how much rock and roll lineage was going on. And also apparently a lot of famous kids or famous people's kids would go there. Yeah, because it was West L.A. Yeah. So everyone's doing acid.

Now, we need to talk about IPS. We were doing acid a lot. You guys, IPS is one of the craziest things I've ever heard of. You want to talk about something that could only exist in the 70s? It's this. In the 70s in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles. Innovative program school.

So it was basically, like, we still have continuation schools. I had a continuation school in Torrance. I mean, I didn't go there respectfully. I was a good student. But they had continuation school for, like, you know, know, fuck-ups or people who were not good at school, people got pregnant. But this was almost like not exactly that because it was still within uni. And it was like based on est. Yeah, it was based on S. Which is Earhart's seminars training and Scientology. And so it was like

full woo-woo, full insane. There was no grades. They like... This would only happen in L.A. in the 70s. It was they were telling me about their school. I thought they were making it up. And then I started cutting my school to go there all the time. Because you got to check it out, right? They would come over to my school, but I'd much preferred going over to uni. Did Beverly already have the pool under the gym back then? Yeah, it was there for ages. But we never got used.

You know what the weirdest shit about Beverly was? When I, when I, we were just in the district of Beverly Hills High. And I was flabbergasted when I went there coming from the East Coast because no one, even though I was, you know, like cutting class already on the East Coast or like, you know, doing, pretending I was taking notes, but like writing stories or notes to people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But at Beverly High, people blatantly just didn't pay attention to the teacher.

And I was shocked. Like, they were just, they'd be like putting makeup on each other in the middle of class. And also the teacher wouldn't do anything. And the teacher parking lot was full of like fucked up old Dotsons. And the student parking lot was full of like Benz's and just like portions. Yeah, it was wild. Totally. So I know that really went like off the tangent.

But that was a lot of those kind of people, maybe not exactly the same, were also the people that were going to IPS because of all the rich people that lived in the Palisades. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah. And that was a really, like, that rich, like, French T-shirt wearing, you know, Shameda-Fair jeans. No one's going to know what I'm talking about. But these were, like, the status symbols for teenagers of the time. And everyone was so normal that when punk rock started or even started having its little tendrils come out. It was, like, shocking. Like, those people were horrified. I'm obsessed with this. So, IPS is like, okay, there's no grades. There's no grades. There's

There's like self-hypnosis. You can make your own classes. Everyone's doing acid. There's a math teacher that's doing acid with Paul Darby. Yeah. Because he thought he was a genius. And they would like make their own classes. There's actually an amazing story in the book where like Paul and George are like, we made our own class. It's a sewing class. And the rhetoric teacher, Fred Holby, was like, okay, so what are you going to what are you going to sew? And they were like, so? And he's like, well, how are you going to? this class and they were like, so? And he was like, I'm not understanding what you're saying. Like, what's the plan here? And they were like, so? Because it was a sewing class. Yes. I know.

And you can do stuff like that. And guess what? They gave themselves A's and everything was fine. They had a fruit eating class where they would just leave school, go to the grocery store, eat fruit, and come back. But actually, it sounds so insane hearing. No, but I mean, I know this. I know all this stuff.

stuff was going on. But, like, as I'm hearing it, God knows how many years later, like 40 years later and whatever the hell it is. But I do think besides being just absolutely insane, it's really important because Scientology and also specifically this rhetoric teacher, Fred. Yeah, I'm sorry. So Fred Holby was a Scientologist and he was the rhetoric teacher. And this really shapes kind of what will later be Darby crash as like, Philharmy. and creative output. Exactly, yeah.

And also the way that so many people, like, clustered around him because he knew all of that. He knew how to, he was, he had a mastery of rhetoric. He was obsessed with rhetoric and how it could control people, right? Because that was the whole thing of rhetoric. It was like this, if you can control the word, you can control anything. Yeah. It was kind of the message that the teacher was trying to get across. And Paul became very obsessed with that.

Paul Rossler, who, wait, what band was Paul Rossler in? He was in a bunch of bands. Yeah. But he was their friend from this time. And Keira Rossler famously played a black bag. Yeah, he met them both on the beach with George and Paul. Once offered to teach me bass, and I said no, because I was too scared to learn bass from Kira Rossler who was in Black Flag. But we all have our regrets.

So Paul Rossler said, the teachers either thought Paul was the coolest, and some were even in awe of him, or they hated him and were scared of him, didn't want anything to do with him. Fred called him a rhetoritian, which meant he controlled reality with his words. Thus was a major compliment. Apparently, once he changed the script for morning announcements to include a little news item that the members of Led Zeppelin had been killed in a horrible plane crash, and according to George, like half the class burst into tears. Yeah, that was crazy. So he was just like into this idea of the rhetoric. He also was really in, I think this is a thing that always strikes me as that everyone read books then, but like.

We all did, really. Yeah. It's not as common anymore. I know. It shocks me and I keep thinking of being an old lady about it. Well, I guess like, I guess it's, they have phones, you know? Yeah, but it's not the same. It's totally not the same.

But like, we read books because we, we, we. wanted an escape, right? And it's like, I couldn't escape into, I didn't have a phone. You couldn't really watch TV eight hours a day. Like, I mean, my parents wouldn't have let me, you know? So, like, what you could do is sit in your room and read a book or listen to music. Paul Darby was himself very into reading, particularly Nietzsche, Oswald Spangler, who was a German nationalist, but not a Nazi.

Bertrand Russell. Yeah, he read all the. Yeah, all, Brave New World. Yeah, Herman Hess, Machiavelli. He incorporated all of that. Yeah, into his later lyrics and stuff. He was also really into this book. I just thought it's really interesting,

if anyone's like a cinephile, called Twins, which was a bestseller at the time by Barry Wood and Jack Geisland. It's about twin gynaecologist who go crazy and end up killing each other. That was a wild book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And David Cronenberg made it into a movie

called Dead Ringers, so if you like that movie. And his mother said that he was also obsessed with the gossip papers, the star and the Enquirer. We all were. Oh, my God. We all were. And like when I started doing my fancy and lobotomy, there was always, like, cutouts from there. But it was so – those are the coolest places to take the art from. Yeah.

The Enquirer or any of those things. I loved the story. So apparently the lads, Darby, Paul Rossler, and Pat went down to the Scientology Center on Hollywood Boulevard. and Paul Rosser said, Pat scored zero on the personality test, and they told him that he was an utterly horrible person. I scored like a regular person. They said, yeah, we can help you for $500. Of course, Darby scored perfectly on everything, and they asked him to come teach there. Such an insane.

The idea of going into the Scientology Center and taking the test and then being like, wow. That's right in my neighborhood. Yeah, I mean, it's still there. It's the same one. It's still there. Okay. So this is around the time you met them, we just talked about it. I actually have a diary entry by you from November 18th, 1975.

I went to IPS today, mixed emotions, very mixed. I got feelings like, hell, I should be going here. Why am I submitting myself to Beverly Hills High? And then, God, this place is pretty fucked. One thing that bothered me was the self-righteousness and a self-consciousness, very self-conscious of being unself-conscious, uninhibited and free. People always spoke in IPS lingo, which, goes something like, I get that you acknowledge me as an asshole, but that doesn't mean you don't

have the space to play with me. I want you to get that. By the way, it's okay to be fucked to me. That seemed uncomfortable. This whole... No, that's how people talk there. It's okay for you to be fucked to me. Yeah. Because a lot of things were like, okay then, like... So you were there and just being like, this is so crazy. I was. I thought it was absolutely nuts. I mean, I wasn't, like, wild about my school or anything, but this was just, like, in a different level of craziness. It's really wild that they let that go on. So, apparently, I want to ask you since now you know them, I read that they had, like, a little group of followers at this school that that kind of, like, they did. They had, like, yes.

They were starting to, you could, you know, in hindsight, I realized that you could see the trajectory that Paul Darby was going on. You know, because he had so many people that were, I mean, starting with like getting germs burns. Yeah. Devotion and stuff. And then there was other people that would just like cater to like anything he wanted pretty much. Do you feel like it was like that he had like a special charisma? Like what do you think it was about him that drew people to want to like kind of follow him around?

He did. He had a very special charisma. I mean, he and George both did. but they were very different, you know? And his was he really wanted to do it, and he really, like, studied up on how to do it. Like what you just mentioned by reading all those things, you know? And, like, that was a goal of his.

And I think he really, like, hit his goals, you know. Yeah. In some ways, yes, and I think in some ways no, which we're... Well, in some ways, no. But I mean that, like, he got that kind of thing. like, you know, like psychologically influencing people. Totally. And, you know, just getting them to do things for you

and to feel like they were, you know, appreciating that they were being noticed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a classic thing of, like, someone who's a charismatic leader is like, they always say, like, oh, that person made me feel special. Yes.

There was something about the way they... He got that. And then he understood, like, all of those, the nuances of how to be a leader in that way, I really think, you know. But also at the same time, watching all this happen for me, myself, it was bizarre. I would just be like, you know, seeing someone else that just wanted to, like, cater to anything he was doing. And I was like, I'm not going to interfere in this, but this is just like another one.

It does. It's just wild to watch it happening. I'm very fascinated by it. And we're going to talk about there's a lot of people. people, particularly women, but not just women, that become part of this orbit and play an important role, I think, in like what happens with the germs. But it kind of starts here in high school. So the music thing comes into play a little bit, like later part of high school, because Pat said that while he was off at the Jesus commune, Darby then gets super into rock.

Because again, he was only listening to the lowrider music, and he gets really into David Bowie. As when you met him, he had the full haircut and the makeup. He had a Bowie shrine in his room. He called himself Astrid. A child from the stars would write, like, poetry and lyrics from that. Willamato said that Paul, Paul Darby, felt that Bowie was on to something that wasn't explicit. Bowie could give you surface suggestion, but that wasn't, but what he wasn't saying was what got him. Paul wanted that magic.

He wanted that mojo. He said Bowie was using language to physically affect people, and they didn't know it. Language was a cause, and all these Bowie kids were the effect. If he could learn to use language like that, he could harness the power of language to that degree, then he too could be the cause. I think that's exactly true. Yeah. In hindsight, I wasn't thinking it as it was happening in exactly those words, but yeah.

It's interesting, right? It's kind of like all the parts are coming together. So he's learning about rhetoric and, like, using language to, like, sort of have power and like control and then he's getting really into Bowie and seeing that in Bowie's art. And then they had befriended a guy who I'm sure you knew to called Chris Ashford. Oh yes, of course, Chris. Who worked at a record store on Walshirt that was called Music Odyssey. Yeah.

It doesn't exist anymore. He was into Iggy, so they all had that in common. They, the George and Paul had gotten into Iggy when they found raw power in the cutout bins, like you said, and they loved the cover. And they read stories about him, the peanut butter, cutting himself up. putting cigarettes out on himself. A lot of DNA of the germs here. It came from, it definitely came from Iggy.

Actually, one of the first times I went out with George and Paul, this is crazy because it started me on a whole other trajectory to me, was want to see where Iggy lives. And so we went to the building that he was living on on Sunset, and I'd been here for such a short time that I thought, because I had a record of his and he was a rock star, that the whole building was his house. And it was this crappy little...

Yeah, they were like squatting. The small... It was like a one-room apartment right next to the parking garage. And we walked into it and he said, does anyone have any drugs? And I was having a surreal moment because I loved the stooges.

Yeah. And I just couldn't even believe we were like at his house. And then also I was trying to figure out why he was in this horrible little hovel, you know? And then we wound up becoming friends and I was seeing him for a while. No big deal.

It's possible. No. You know, this is my life. It's crazy. But that whole thing happened. You were like, sorry, George. I have a new boyfriend. His name is a music.

You pop. Enjoy your shrine of me, but I've moved on. Shut up. Now I wound up living with him in Malibu for a whole summer. It was crazy. Was it? Yeah.

Oh, my God. There was lots of craziness going. I really lived quite alive. It's funny that you said you went over there. So this Hovell apartment was next door to the Riot Hyatt, right? Yeah. Yeah, that part was that. And the reason they knew him and were able to go there is, I guess Chris Ashford, who wasn't friends with him, just knew where he lived.

Right. And they were like, take us over there. And they just knocked on the door. Yeah. And we're, you know, Paul and George, we want to be friends. And Iggy Pop was like, okay. And I guess when it was, he was living with James Williamson, who was the guitar player of the Stoges. and they said that when they would go there

and Iggy wasn't home and it was just James, James would not let them in. He was like, absolutely not get the fuck out of here. But when Iggy was home, they would come in and just hang out. And then George also said something to echo what you said,

which I thought was very interesting, is that they would sit on the couch at the record store reading, you know, import British rock magazine. Yeah, we all did. Yeah, and none of us could believe the amazing stuff that was happening in the UK. Yeah, and learning about,

like you said, the Sex Pistols just by reading about them, Not even hearing the music or seeing them play. It was just the pictures. You would love this. Yeah. It's so interesting. And then he said the same thing you did.

There was Rodney on the Rock. So we would listen to Rodney religiously, which is so, which I just love so much because I also grew up listening to Rodney on the Rock religiously. I would sit and tape his show. Yeah, yeah. Because he would still, even through the 90s, he still played the best music and the coolest music. He played all the best stuff. He was so ahead. But in the 70s of Chila, I mean, he's been credited for.

like breaking the Ramones and blondeian stuff in LA. Oh, totally. He was. He was the only one that would play them. Like in this market, I'm saying that with air quotes. Yeah. I mean, because, you know, no one else was, people went, like, all the bands that are, like, so revered now, like, we're just not getting played anywhere.

Yeah. Rodney Bingenheimer are an absolute legend and icon, I got to say. Yeah, he was. If you guys, I mean, if you guys are interested, there's a documentary about him called Mare of the Sunset Strip. That's quite good. And also, I'm pretty sure you could see. still find him at the canters now and again.

Yeah, I'm sure he's probably there. Scott was on both. He has a plaque. So it's 1976. Rodney's English disco closed in late 75, and that's where, like, he would bring all the British bands to play and play that kind of music. And kind of the runaways started to come up through that. Now you guys were going to Odyssey and Gino's on the Sugar Shack.

Yes, the Sugar Shack all the time. The Sugar Shack was in North Hollywood on Magnolia. Oh, yeah. And like every Wednesday we'd go to the Sugar Shack, all of us. Okay, I wanted to ask you about Gerber. Is this around the time where Gerber, who I think, is her old name, Michelle? Yeah, it's Michelle Bell. Michelle Bell comes into the scene. Do you remember meeting her? Yeah, I met her on the beach with Paul Rossler and George and Paul. And she sort of becomes part of the crew around the germs.

Yes. Which are not the germs, yeah, because they're just two guys. But the runaways are the runaways. I've performed in 1975. I read that Pat and Darby were, like, pretty obsessed with them, like, as an idea. Like, oh, if they can do it, we can do it. And they, like, love their band and would hang out with them. Yeah, they loved their runaways.

And, I mean, I used to, I used to cut school to watch them, like, rehearse at SIR. So cool. I can totally see this, though, like, because they were very young. They're teenagers. That's the whole thing about the runaways. Yeah. So. I mean, we were, this is the crazy thing.

now that people don't realize we really were all teenagers. Yeah, literal teenagers. And teenagers that were sort of around. So, like, seeing teenagers that you were friends with sort of have this success of, like, being in a real band and playing real shows and, like, kind of doing this thing. Okay, now you're like, well, maybe I could do that, too. Yeah. Now, by the fall of 76, this is a little lesser-known Kim Fowley project,

because the runaways had sever ties with him for many reasons that we won't go into on this here podcast. But he formed a boy punk band in that same vein called Venus and the Razor blades. Yeah. And they were kind of lame, right? Yeah. Vicki Arnold was in them for a while. Okay. The singer, she was beautiful.

I didn't hear a lot about... She was the bartender at the Sugar Shack, and that's who Sheree stole her look from. Sheree Curry? Yeah. Ooh, teeth. For our purposes, importantly, Nikki Beat played drums in this band, and he will come to play into this drum story. Yeah. So the boys still named Paul and George at this time, form a band in 76 again.

Inspired by the Runeways, they love music, sex pistols, the whole thing. We're friends with Iggy. Wait, do you know how they got the name the germs? Well, first, their name was Sophistafuck and the Revlon Spam Queens, yes. Which is a crazy name. But do you know why it got changed to the germs? No, tell me. Because in those days, you could get banned t-shirts.

Right. saying this in big air quotes. But there was only a place in Westwood, and I think there might have been one other place that did it. And it was like these sort of soft letters that would. Like iron on letters kind of. Yeah, iron on or press on letters. But they charged by the letter. So sophisticated fuck and the Revlon Spam Queens was not working, but the germs worked.

They were broke, and that is not going to work. Yeah. I love that. That makes total sense. I also saw, I mean, number one, for sure, because they needed the money. And they were like a short name. And I saw that Darby had some idea of like the germ of an idea. It's like the start of everything.

They had no instruments at this point, just shirts. Yeah. But then also they would say, people would say, why are you called the germs? And Darby would always say, or Paul, as he was called then at that time, he'd say, because we make people sick. It's so good. They recruited their friends, Michelle Bear and Dinky, real name Diana Grant, to play with them. They played no shows. They did no practicing.

They wrote no music. Pat said, George Pat. With the germs, we went out of our way to say and do things most people would never say or do. It was a reaction to our disappointment in other rock stars, specifically finding out that Alice Cooper played golf. That really upset us. It really freaked us out. Alice Cooper does what? It was like, we're going to fucking start a band and we're going to change our names and we're going to be fucking doing this thing.

We're really going to be like that 24-7. We're not going to fake it. We're not going to be playing golf. Yeah. He said, whatever it is we're going to be, we're going to be the most. If we're going to be punk, then we're going to outpunk the sex pistols. If we're going to be the worst band ever, then we're going to be the fucking worst band ever. So this isn't around the time they do change their names, but Darby is first Bobby Pinn.

Yes. And Pat is Pat Smir. Yeah. Darby said later that the name Bobby Pinn was more of a joke. I just changed it because it was the easiest way to make people aware that we had changed, that we were doing something different. Now here's a story that you're a part of. At some point in early 77, Pat and Darby, Bobby, Penn, John, Paul,

and Pleasant go to try to meet Queen in the lobby of the hotel at the Beverly Hilton. Yes. Okay. Now, you guys did or did not meet Queen? Queen during this time. We didn't meet them during that time. Yeah. But you did meet two girls from the Valley.

Yes. Named. Belinda Calla Lill and Terry Ryan later to be known as Lorna Doom. What do you remember about meeting them? Oh, I mean, I just, Belinda and I locked the eyes immediately and just, we just loved each other. I mean, we're still friends, obviously. Yeah.

But, like, she looked like a 1940s movie star. Because she was so beautiful. those days. Yes, and because she was dressing like that too. Right. And they called them the poodle haircuts? What was that about? What did their haircuts look like? The 80s? She didn't have a poodle haircut. She had it. It looked

like, it looked like if you'd see like a 40s pinup girl. It was kind of bangs, but it was more styled up. It looked like you'd see it on a you know, for a visit Tahiti poster. Right, right.

It was very sort of 1940s, like, influenced. Makes sense that maybe a guy like George would not know how to term that. He'd call it poodle haircuts, but not have it right. Yeah, it was nothing like a poodle cut. But they were both blonde and... Yeah. Yeah. And they were from Thousand Oaks.

Yes, from T.O. T. That was far away. It's far, yeah. I know. It's really crazy the idea that you would just, I mean, first of all, there was much... That you'd drive to Hollywood to go to the... There was a much less traffic at that.

You could do that. There's half the population. But yeah, they would just go all the way to Hollywood to try to meet Queen. So they went to Newbury Park High. That's the high school they went to. Really, that's like an hour and a half away for people that don't know the greater Los Angeles area. But Queen, that was very powerful, the idea of meeting Queen. They just meet them here.

Belinda said in the oral history, we met Bobby, because he was going by Bobby time, and Pat in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton. They were like the weirdest guys we'd ever. met. They were great. Bobby had figured out what room Freddy was in, so he went up to his room and knocked on his door. We were pretty annoying. Bobby and Pat thought we were bizarre. These two little girls, these two girls with little hairdos from Thousand Oaks. They're 40s harddos. So after this, Pat and Darby started posting flyers around town looking for two untalented girls to play in their band. And Belinda and Terry saw those, and I think it was also in the recycler. And they called and they were

like, hey, were you those guys from the Beverly Hilton? This is how small L.A. was. It makes me crazy to think about this. Like, how that could just happen. Like, you meet some guys. Well, because it was the rock scene was small. Right, the L.A. was still as big as it was. Yeah. No, but the population in L.A. was half the size as it is now.

So even the rock scene was small, but all of L.A. was less people. They get rid of Michelle and Dinky, who I guess were only imaginary in the band because they never played anything. And Terry goes by Lorna Doom, plays bass. Belinda went by Doddy Dinger. Yeah, and she was meant to play drums but never did. She said it's because she got mono. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know.

Lorna said she never told me why she decided not to play drums. It seemed she always had something else to do when we had to meet. I read somewhere that she was ill, who knows. But I have my suspicions that Paul and George were just too much for her. But I thought it was really interesting as Pat said that actually when they first started the band, Darby was going to play guitar. and Pat was going to write the lyrics and sing, and Pat said, Paul's mom bought him a little Rickenbocker,

and we would sit in his backyard, and he'd laugh at me and make fun of my words and telling me they were shit. And the opposite happened. I could play guitar, and he couldn't. So we decided he'd write lyrics and I'd write music. He could sort of play like two chord ideas,

and he'd tell me play like this, and I'd make up progressions around them. Or sometimes I'd write a whole song, tape it and give it to him for the lyrics. I thought that was really interesting that it was meant to be the other way around. Yeah. It was also very interesting,

which Pat doesn't say because he's, I guess, humble, is that he was just, like, such a gifted, like, a naturally gifted guitar player. He would never say that. Yeah. But I'm like, because he talks about it. He's like, oh, I could, like, really play, like, any yes or queen song. And it's like, those are very complicated.

They were so into yes and queen. Yeah. They get another drummer to replace. Donorrhea. Yeah, Donorrhea, also known as Becky Barton, her real name. The best punk stage name. Donorrhea is so terrible. I'd be so bummed with that.

Like everyone has a cool punk name. Like, oh, Lauren in a gym. And I'm like, they're like, you're Donorrhea. Yeah, that's a good one and then Doneria. I know. Donorria, tough beat for her, honestly, because according to her boyfriend, her main purpose was using her credit card to rent equipment for them and drive it around. And she sucked at drums and could barely keep a beat.

But, you know, I got them that gig at the orphan. Yeah. Okay. We're about talking about this. It's literally right here. So they have this, like, little group of people around them, which, Again, Pleasant, just to be clear, is not really part of. Like, you were, like, an OG friend, but, like, you weren't part of this Circle One business.

No. No. I thought it was, I thought it was kind of stupid. Well, it was a little culty, right? It was a little... Yeah, it was too, they were two, like, the girls were just too, I don't even... Like, devoted. Yeah, too devoted. But it was like, okay, so we talked about Gerber, who was also maybe a sort of a different thing, but she was also around, Helen Killer, who was your friend as well, and Trudy, who had met Darby and Pat at the Capitol Records Swap Meet, which can't talk about that a little bit?

Oh, yeah, God, the Capitol. I was telling someone about it the other day. It was in the middle of the night? I don't understand. You go to three in the morning to buy records? Who's there selling records? What was happening? So the Capitol Records Swap Meet, every time I walk up or down from Hollywood Boulevard,

I see the Capitol, like, I see the Capitol Records parking lot, and I shut a little. little tear. The Capitol record swap meet was so wild. It would happen once a month, and it would open maybe around like midnight or one or something. Everyone would go there straight from the clubs because there was no such thing as after hours clubs. And you could just, you could pick up booze on the way there. So there's just like a big hangout. It was a big hangout, but originally it was just like a swap meet for serious record collectors. And why did they make a, at that time. No, the real time was seven in the morning.

We started, all the punk people started going there at night because they'd be setting stuff up and we could find good, weird records early and they, like, they didn't care if you were rifling through your, you know, their bands. So it was like, it was like the way like the Rose Bowl starts setting up at four, but like you can go early. Yeah, okay, got it. But so it just wound up because it was so near like any of the clubs. or people's houses that were on and off Hollywood Boulevard or anywhere in Hollywood.

You know, because a lot of us didn't have cars. A lot of people were living at the Canterbury or, you know, the other punk houses around actual Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard. And so it was just right there. And it was like, we turned it into an open air after hours club. It wasn't meant to be like that. But none of the vendors cared. I mean, why would they care seeing like drunk, cute girls in miniskirts? Like stumbling around going, what year is this record from?

Yeah, maybe even buying some. It's a dream come true. That was really a scene. It was so much fun. It was crazy. Cops never came to it because it was a record swap meet. We'd all be like sitting there drinking our hooch, wandering around. I was born too late.

Okay. April 1997. Okay, so the damned came to town. Yes. They were supposed to open for television, but television, and kicked them off the shows. So they were taken in by the screamers, is what I read. Yeah, I don't know about that.

That seems about right, though, because the damned were so high energy and incredible, like, seeing them in those days, it was, like, I wouldn't want them to be opening for me. I did read this a couple places, so I think it did happen. And they were, like, very actually bummed because they had used all their money to fly all the way from England. Yeah, and they stayed at the screamers. The screamer's house, the Wilton Hilton was always the, my God. They had everybody, all the coolest people from different places that they knew.

Like, because Tumeda had been in New York. He knew a ton of people from New York. He knew all the blondie people. He knew everyone, you know, that turned into the Ramones. And so did Fayette Houser, who lived there. K.K. and Rand McNally, you know, who ran Dangerhouse Records. And K.K., the drummer of the Screamers as well. They came from Oklahoma.

L.A. punk was like a beacon for everybody. Totally. You know, it was easier than New York, too. Sure. Because you didn't have to, like, worry about, you know, paying for heat all winter. And it wasn't as expensive as New York was. So there was just an influx of people coming to L.A. at that time in the 70s. And they were all geniuses, like almost all of them, like amazing.

And also amazing. Those of us who were still alive were still all friends with each other. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned tomato and KK and the screamers. So the screamers kind of predate the germs. The weirdos predate the germs, but a little bit. Like, it's not like they had been around for five years or whatever.

Although the screamers had a different name, and they were in Seattle before. In Seattle, yeah. They were called the Wiz Kids, and they were doing, like, shows that weren't necessarily banned stuff. It was more like the cockettes. Yeah, they did, like, drag shows and stuff. It was in the cockhats. She was one of the forming members, and she lived with the screamers. That's very cool.

Well, so there's this instro at Ball. You are there. The Damned is doing an instar. The screamers are there. There's a show. It was the same night. Yeah. So the Orphium, you guys, was not, like, it was not a venue.

It was a black box theater that actually is where Book Soup is right now. Yeah, 99-seat theater. Yeah. The guy from the nerves had. had been setting up shows for the weird, just punk shows. So he had set up this show with the screamers and the weirdos, I think there was another band. No, the screamers weren't playing there. Oh, it was just the weirdos?

Yeah. When the weirdos walked into bomb, my jaw just dropped because they were wearing like women's 1960s raincoats with like five weird belts and like just crazy like toys and keychings and stuff hanging off of them. and I just immediately went up to them. And I was like, hi, my name's pleasant. What's yours? What band are you in? And they said it. And I was like, where are you playing?

And they said, tonight at the Oafium. And then I just said, do you need another band? And that's how the terms wound up playing. You were like, I have one. I'm with them right now. Yeah. And so we wound up. They said yes.

I can't remember if Peter Case was there. I'm sure he was because everyone was at that in store. Yeah. All of us were. Yeah. Like, everybody went to that. That was like a pilgrimage, you know? I'm sure.

I mean, the damned have come to town. Like, it's such a big deal. I would go. Yeah. And even Angeline was there. Oh, yeah. I read that you said that was the first time you saw Angeline and she was wearing a baby blue corset. Corset.

Yeah. You guys, Angelian. This is my Los Angeles. This is my Los Angeles. Okay. I mean, you can still see Angeline around, honestly, if you're lucky. I always find it to be like a beautiful, like it's like a good omen when I see. It's not as much as I used to, but like when you see her little pink car on the highway, you know, it's going to be a good day.

Fun story about me that I was telling Alex off my actually, maybe like a year ago, I was at Bob's Big Boy, which I love near my house. And I was wearing my germs t-shirt. And I walk up to meet a friend and there was like an older gentleman sitting outside. And he goes, hey, amazing shirt. And I was like, oh, my God, thank you. And he was like, I booked their first show. And it was John Denny from the Weirdos. And I was like, oh.

Oh my God, this is a really cool moment. I was, like, so excited. I didn't know what to say. I was like, I love the weirdos. But the weirdos were an art school band. So to your point about their outfits, like, they were an actual, like, in art school at UCLA. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we didn't know that at the time.

I'm just telling you what it looked like, you know. Yeah, I'm sure you were just like, wow, like, because obviously you guys were getting a little weird, but that was, like, even further than what you had seen. This was incredible, you know? And, like, I didn't care if it was art school or not art school. I didn't care if they were in a bound or not. I was just like, I need to know these people. Yeah. Okay, so what was the show like?

Because obviously, I've read a lot about it, but I'd love to hear about it from you, and then I can say a couple of the details that I just read about. Okay, so the show at the Orpheum, we left Bomp Records immediately and went up to my mom's house. And we had to stop to get licorice whips for Derby. And it was, we were all drinking all afternoon. They were completely drunk. Chris was driving. So we were getting ready.

and I had to tie all these licorice whips all over Bobby Darby's body, you know, and that was gnarly and it was sticky and it was. Oh, my God. And as I said, we were just like, we were like kind of all shit-faced. So that was pretty wild. And then going up to the driving up there to the strip trying to figure, you know, like, like, Like, don't wave that bottle of booze around. I mean, it was, it was, when I think of memories like this, I wonder how we're still alive, all of us, because it was, it was just like that.

Yeah. Well, some. For all the 70s and the 80s. Some of you guys aren't. In the early 90s. I know. Talk about it. I mean, it was making me really sad going through, like, how many people that died haven't made it.

Yeah. Well, some people didn't make it. I mean, just out of natural causes. No, totally. And there's various, but. Okay, so the red licorice, whips, the pleasant, helpfully costume designed for Darby Crash, aka at that time Bobby Pin, basically melted into a red goo everywhere. They were, as you said, wasted. Donorrhea didn't know how to play anything.

Donorea doesn't know how to play. They don't really have songs. They had one song. I think they had forming already. Yeah. They just start playing, according to John Denny. They were snickering, massively intoxicated kids who were literally just playing random. them feedback and banging around and smearing mayonnaise and peanut butter all over themselves in the PA.

This is pretty much true. Okay. So, yes, the germs show is a bit of a disaster. They are escorted offstage within, I think, about five minutes. Yeah, within minutes. Yeah. They did get a write-up in Raw Power magazine the next, I think it was that month or the next month. And this is what it said.

The germs came on first and were the biggest joke of the year. None of the germs could play their instruments whatsoever. They took an hour to get set up and then played for two minutes. The lead singer smeared peanut butter all over his face and everybody in the group, and they were all spitting on each other until they were kicked off. Honestly, it sounds kind of amazing. According to Pat, Jack Lee of the Nerves, who had put on the show, called him after and said that they loved the band and wanted to put out a single.

And he said, so we got my mom's little cassette and a bottle of booze and did an awful version of forming, just me and Darby out of our minds. We mailed a tape to those guys. We never heard from them again. After that show, they did get rid of Narnaria because she sucked, respectfully. And they got a guy called Cliffhanger on drums. My mom named him that. Really?

Yeah. Was his real name? I can't remember right now. But my mom was the one that named him Cliffhanger. She also named Helen Killer. Your mom was good with these names. Well, I don't want to besmirch Cliffhanger's name. I just simply read that he was a low-level drug killer who sold quailos at the whiskey.

But, you know, maybe he was just trying to make... But everyone did shit like that in those days. I mean, to put it into perspective, that was like everyone's side hustle if you had... Right. So it wasn't like that was his like occupation. It was just... No, and it wasn't looked down on either because it was a very different time than we were all just getting fucked up.

It was the 70s, you know? Totally. And if you needed money, you know, you could... And you could get like quailudes or whatever, you know, quailudes are low. like I was talking about before, just some, you know, it's not like you were selling, like, heroin. It was just everybody was getting high. You're just, yeah, selling it to friends, totally. You know.

Chris Ashford said, as soon as they got cliffhanger, then everything changed. Pat would teach Lorna her baselines. They'd work on it together. Then they'd go to practice at Pat's mom's house. They became serious. So they needed a good drummer. Okay. Were you at the Cheech and Chong up in a shoot?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Can you tell me about this? Because this comes fairly soon after this. I don't have the exact. dates, but it was around this time, right? And it said the Roxy. So this was a film, I think the first Chechen Chong film called Up and Spoke. And they wanted to have like a punk scene.

So they got the dills, the Berlin Brats, and the germs to play, who are actually ultimately were cut from the movie. But tell me about that experience of being at the whiskey or the Roxy, sorry. It was a Roxy. Everyone that we knew pretty much was there. And one thing that I do remember was we were getting, a lot of us by that time we're getting jobs as punk rock extras in scenes.

Incredible. You know, like because it's Hollywood and because if people wanted punks, they would pick real punks, not try to... Yeah, because this is 97. So 76 is the year where it's like the big sex pistols year and now like punk is starting to make its way into media because there's so much magazine press and stuff

about all these crazy punks. So that makes so much sense. So you guys who are like the real punk kids and dress like that, they're like, oh, it's easy. We'll just go pay them X amount of money. I think Xen Servenka from X was also at this show. And she said that they paid you guys $50. Yeah, all of us went there. But they also, since we'd been doing other movies, I was disgusted because their fog was the kind of fog that would leave you with black snot coming out of your house.

That was probably not healthy. No, it wasn't the good kind of fog. which is probably equally as unhealthy. But everyone from the L.A. punk scene was there that day for Up and Smoke. It was really, really fun. And there's some pictures. I think I posted one. This sounds so nowadays.

I think I posted one on my Instagram, like a couple of months ago, that we were all sort of posing in front of the Roxy after Up in Smoke. And in those days, no one had cameras in their phones. no one had phones. Right, of course. You know, so, so it's rare to see those kind of pictures, like someone that was around all the time as a photographer. Yeah, had a camera and staffed it, you know. I mean, I thought it was.

People couldn't even afford like Polaroids, you know what I mean? Or something it was like, get film, buy drugs or get film, go to the show or, you know what I mean? Film or buy drugs? Yeah. It's a hard one. And a lot of people were like, I would prefer the drugs, thank you. Yeah, you can see the scene in Up and Smoke, but you can't see the germs because they were upset that they were being told what to do and they went crazy and broke a ton of shit. Yeah, they did.

The director and the AD were like, you need to get the fuck out of here. So that summer of 1977, this is when the whiskey starts doing punk shows presented by Kim Fowley, right? Yeah, or by me. Or by all the lobotomy magazine shows there. In 77? Oh, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, because I was the ticket taker there.

So cool. Oh, you were? Yeah, it was already working there. Kim Polly said that actually Elmer Valentine, the owner of the whiskey, had come to him and said, we need a gimmick to sell tickets. What do you have? And he was like, well, punk rock. Who knows if that's true?

A lot of, I mean, a lot of these stories are various people trying to take credit for stuff. Especially Kim Fully. But you know who was really the unsung hero of the whiskey was Michelle Myers. She booked a lot of shows. She booked them there. But she also booked other places. So she was Miss Pamela of the GTO's best friend. She knew everybody in town, everybody.

She was the one that when she found out I had a crush on Billy Idol. She got his actual number for me from, like, England and stuff. Did you call him? Well, I was going to, but then he came on Rodney's, and I had sent him a package because I made a generation extra because no one had merch then, not that we called it merch. Yeah. I was painting, like I painted. germ shirts like hand-painted. And so I made a Generation X-1.

And I went to Rodney's because you said, come here, Billy Idol's going to be on. You can, you know, you can talk to them when our interview's done and I'm playing music. So he said, Pleasant wants to talk to you. And I got on and I was like, hi, this is Pleasant. And Billy was like, I got your package last week.

And I mean, shit like that was happening in those days all the time, which was just crazy. Yeah. Something special. Well, I want to ask you about this one show. So in June of 977, the germs played with the screamers and the zippers at the whiskey. And this show A was actually recorded. They set up a live soundtrack with a portrait studio in the alley and recorded it.

So this is the germs live at the whiskey. But can you tell me about the food fight? Because I read that, yeah, I read that Darby asked everyone to bring food. from the grocery store to the show, and the whole thing turned into some insane food. The bouncers, the bouncers. Well, that was why he wanted everyone to bring stuff, but the bouncers and Jim Lepena, who was, you know,

the one that let all of us. Yeah, and he was nice, like, but that worked everyone's last nerve because there was, there was just, like, jars of mayonnaise being flung around. You know what I mean? There was, it was, like, pieces of hamburgers that someone didn't finish. from five days ago on the stage and it was just going around and Jim was

like he was walking around with the dustpan in a broom and like scrub marks and he grabbed someone by the scrub of their neck you get your ass up on stage and start cleaning up you get your ass up on stage

and get rid of this shit right now it must have smelled so disgusting it was well it didn't maybe at that point it just smelled like a weird salad but if it would have lasted any longer without like almost all the patrons of the club cleaning it up, it would have been horrifying. So funny. Yeah, that was wild.

They really were pushing it with these shows. I know, but nothing like that will ever happen again at shows. I know. Or not like the Wild West back then for real. It's like the true spirit of punk, right? To be like, we don't, we're not here to fucking social climb or climb the ladder of ambition. Like we don't care if they kick us out. We don't care if they don't book us again.

Yeah, nobody cared. I mean, that was the coolest part of it. No one cared. And everyone just did everything. And anyone that was in it, like we were all in it, like full on out. It was really great. So great. So Chris Ashford, our friend that we talked about before,

worked at the record store, put out the germ's first seven-inch. It was forming with the B-side being Sex-Boy Lott. a song that the screamers would cover live a bunch. This is still credited to Bobby Pinn because he was still using that name. I liked the story, apparently, that they would call Rodney all night every night and be like, you need a please play our single, can you play our single, please play our single, please play our single, can you play our single? And finally he was like, okay, fine, just stop calling me. And he played it.

And I'm like, this is a way to get things done. I believe in this dogged tenacity. It was reviewed by Claude Bessie, who at that time went by... Kick Boy Face. By the way, if you guys have a little time, and I implore you to please go on Claude Bessie's Wikipedia page because of the first paragraph, I'm like, this is the most interesting French man that's ever lived,

but I don't have time to talk about him right now, but just get into it. So he wrote about this single, Beyond Music, Mind Boggling, Inexplicably Brilliant in Bringing Monotony to New Heights. I don't think he liked it. No, but he was still... He could turn a phrase. He was such a great writer and such an interesting person. Okay, in August of 77, and you alluded to this earlier, but Brendan Mullen, a Scotsman, opens the mask.

Yeah. Can you tell me a little about the mask? Oh, my God. The mask was just, it was amazing. Where was it? It was in the alley behind the Pussy Cat Theater. Okay. Which is on, like, Hollywood and Cherokee.

But so it was in the basement there. We went back there not that long ago. It was about a year ago with Joe Pompeo from Vanity Fair. And it was just incredible because it's owned by Rupal's World of Wonder. Oh. And they preserved so much of the mask stuff. They didn't paint over any of the graffiti. Really?

Yeah. I just got goosebumps again thinking of it because, I guess, because they're doing drag, and drag has its own. crazy long-term underground life. They didn't want to do anything to mess up a subculture. And then it was wild being

down there, like walking around saying, I wrote that, I wrote this or like this was written by blah, blah, blah, who's not alive anymore and just bringing back all these memories. And then the queens were posing with us and that was so fun and they were just

great. That was a wild thing. So cool. Yeah, so it was this iconic kind of anything goes, art space nightclub hangout. Completely illegal. Completely illegal.

Not one single a shred of paperwork minted or stamped by the city. No permits. And it lasted for a long time. The graffiti was incredible. I think there was like all these walls

about like what it like poser stuff. My favorite was that you would call things trendy which I'm obsessed with now as like a dis. No one would think to do that anymore. like, oh, that's trendy. Oh, yeah, trendy. And it's like, now it's like people want to be trendy. I don't know.

No, no one wanted to be trendy. I sound like a hundred-year-old man. Okay, so the mask is iconic. I'm surprised. I'm still shocked that nobody ever tumble down the cement stairs and died. No, they did. No, they did. No, they did not.

The angels were protecting. We checked many times. The angels were protecting the mask. Yeah. Okay, so the Germs play a show there. They have the Allie Cats headline, Amanda, I've never heard of. They were really great. It was Diane Chai, the bassist, was this beautiful, like, Asian bassist goddess.

They had some really good songs. They're unsung of the LA punk scene. They never had anything major out. Right. They said that they had them play because they had played Gazari's, which was, like, in their words, a real club. It was a real club. I mean, not like the mask. Yeah.

Yeah. We had permits from the city. So the germs opened the show with a trash out cover of rock and roll all nightbikes. kiss. Brendan Mullen said, then Pat trashed a yes song, sacrilege. They were trying to get through these songs. It didn't matter if they finished them. It didn't matter if they were in key or in time.

Nobody cared what they sounded like. Neither did they, but everybody was going nuts anyways. People thought that they were into this like avant-garde shit and they were really into was David Bowie, Queen, and yes, you know? That show is also when Darby

officially starts going by Darby Crash, which, by the way, was reported by one pleasant gaman. He wrote it in your column for the New York rocker that he showed up on stage at a punk rock fashion show at the Palladium. Oh, my God. I don't even have these. Where did you get these?

It was in the books. Oh. And it said that you wrote it up. You announced it. So very cool. You were there reporting the news. Kickboy. Claude.

Claude. Yeah. He said the first day I was down in the mask when the germs were playing. I knew I was facing genius. I was amazed. This man, Bobby Penn didn't give a shit. Now Derby Crash. Okay, so in October of that year, this is not a long story.

So that's, I'm kind of trying to paint all the beats because, you know, this story is short, unfortunately. The Germans play their first San Francisco shows. They opened for the weirdos at Mabu Hay Gardens. Did you go up with them? Yeah, I read that everyone just hopped in the car away. We all went up there, yeah. Darby said everyone. We all stayed at Sam Wajon.

hotel, which was like the worst fucking flop house you can ever think of. Oh, my gosh. What? What? This is when Broadway up in San Francisco was not in any way glamorous. Yeah. It was, it was not the tourist part. It was like dangerous.

Yeah. Yeah. Jeff McDonald, who you said you met on the beach, who was famously in Red Cross with his brother, teenage band, great band. He said, the germs had all these Dracula's daughters, about 10 or so girls who were devotees. They were kind of like under the spell and they would do anything their leaders asked them to do. Again, not pleasant. And they paid for everything, right? Because Darby never had a job ever in his life. No. Okay. I want to read these three quotes about this sort of group, this circle one that

were like obsessed with Darby. And then I want to ask you about it. Okay. First was Helen Killer. She said people really like to be around Darby. Even the people who hated him. sort of gravitated to him. Everyone just wanted to be around him. I have no idea why. I really hated him, and then I turned around and then I turned around

and became his quote-unquote girlfriend slash surrogate mom. We were really comfortable together. It was cool. There was absolutely no weirdness between us. I really, really loved him. And then Brendan Mullen said, whereas Bobby Pinn seemed to be

much more innocent, goofy, and carefree, Darby Crash became much more demonic, complex, intense, intoxicated, as he gradually began to exude a much darker persona. Once he became Darby Crash, his compulsive manipulation and panhandling seemed to increase. The dreaded, give me $2, give me a beer, give me a ride home, was the dreaded sound around the scene,

which witnessed a series of socially ostracized, overweight women, many of them easy pickings, mind suggestibles with absent or disapproving father complexes, of more or less the same psychological type preyed upon by people like Charlie Manson. This sounds pretty, too. Such women openly competed for the attention of this emotionally unavailable alcohol. Basaudid LSD guru while picking up his tab for booze, drugs, gas, food, and clothing. And the last quote is from Alice Bagg, who was also your friend. Still.

It's still, who is also. It used to really bother me that Darby enjoyed trying to control people. I felt it was demeaning not only to his followers, but to himself. It used to bother Darby that I treated my fans as equals. He would lecture me on what people expected a leader. We had very, very different views on the subject. I want to ask you, since you were seeing it, too. But it sounds like the people within that circle, like Helen Keller, were like, oh, people just loved him.

We were around him. Like, you know, we just wanted to be around him. And the people outside it, like, Brendan Mullen or maybe Alice Bagg, were like, this is weird, you know. It kind of depends what exact time period it was. Like, I didn't like it when it was going on with, like, all those, all the girls and just all that, like, his, he was changing. He was getting to be very different than he had. had been. Yeah.

That was what bothered me the most. I didn't care if he had, like, legions of people serving him or anything. But it all... Do you think that is part of what changes personality, though? Like, that people were catering to him? I think that helped a lot. I think drugs were helping a lot with that. Sure. Yeah.

It was just... It was very different. It was... even though you could sort of see the steps leading up to it, when it became full-blown, it just seemed unexpected. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, you talked a little bit about the germs burns. Darby said about them, it has to do with circles.

You've seen our armbands and stuff. Everything works in circles. Sometimes you're doing something, and then, like, a year later, it seems like you're doing something else, but you're back at that same point. It's really hard to explain. She's really obsessed with, like, cycles. Yeah.

And also about creating this sort of, like, gang, the circle one, like the burns, the arms, like having a visual identity, having like, I thought it was very interesting that the music was important, but almost like equally as important, if not more important, was what was around the music and when he was kind of sort of trying to create around the music. Pat mentioned it too that he was intrigued by the concept of fascism. And Darby said, people associate us too much with the Nazi thing. Obviously, I think they were using some Nazi. They were, well, I mean, a lot of people were kind of interested in the whole Nazi thing,

because when you think about it, it was not that, it was between the Nazis and Parnkrak. Yeah. Time era was way less than between now. It was very short, yeah. Yeah, it was very short, and it was hard to comprehend how all that even happened in Europe, how people like joined the Nazis. And I mean, it was really dark, but it was really fascinating too. Especially for people like us that weren't into any kind of mainstream stuff.

Right. And we talk about this event in the Joy Division episode where like it's hard to like wrap your mind around now. But it's like A, it was like the time that had passed was so short. Yeah, no, like, gay. That had just happened pretty much. And we're talking about teenagers, A of all, you know. And, you know, they were, the idea of shock and, like, subversion was so strong that it's almost like that was what the thing was. And this is what Darby is saying.

He's like, yeah, we're fascists, but we're not Nazis. There's a difference. This is very interesting. This was so interesting because I was just having a conversation with a friend about what's happening now in our, like, political arena. And especially online, especially with young men. and young men being drawn towards fascist ideals. And I was just like, I was losing my mind. This is, I'm going to sound so insane.

Now some of you are not as heavily online as me. And when I say the word clavicular, you're not going to know what I'm saying. But it's okay. Clavicular, a looks maxer. We don't need to worry about it. But the point is that I was like, oh, my God, I, like, I just kept thinking. I was like, if this guy who is now, like, being quoted in the New York Times about, like, his philosophy of, of like wanting to like look the best,

but it's a very fascist sort of like narrow ideology. If he had been around the 70s, would he have been a punk? You know, like I really was just like, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Okay, but anyway, back to what Darby was saying. He said, yeah, we're fascist, but we're not Nazis. There's a difference. We don't believe in killing off races. I can respect Hitler for being a genius in doing what he did,

but not for killing off innocent people. His genius lies in his speech, what he could do with words. There's films of him giving speeches in Germany. A lot of it is just an emotion, the energy you can get up. Fascism, it's just that we've tried other forms of government and none of them are going to work. The only one that will work is complete fascism, a complete fascist state, but you have to have the right person to lead it. If you get everyone to believe in one person, then it'll work. Communism can never work.

There's a few problematic things in there, obviously. I don't think we have to hand it to Hitler. But he, regardless of if there's morality and what he's saying, or not, he was intrigued by how powerful Adolf Hitler was with just the power of his words. And then I noticed something that just the year before David Bowie had been quoted in Playboy saying, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberals and that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get over it as fast as possible. And then I was like, okay, now things are kind of making sense to me.

You know, Darby Crash being so obsessed with Bowie, there's no way he didn't read that, you know? As soon as you said that, I was like, yeah, he read that. And then putting it together with like all his reading. So I just, I found that. And again, he loved the idea of controlling a crowd, you know. I don't know. I just thought it was, I just, I think when we talk about the germs, a lot of people might say something to the effect of like, well, the germs weren't that important or the germs music, you know, I mean, they made basically one album.

But you got to take in the big picture here. Like how important they were in terms of punk culture, in terms of what they were able to accomplish in such a short time. And we're going to get into it a little bit later. But like, you cannot discredit how big of an impact they had on hardcore. There would be no hardcore without the germs. A lot of what you're saying is exactly true. And when people look at like subcultures and scenes, unless they're a sociologist or someone that's doing a dissertation or something, they usually don't get all parts of it right. They can't understand what the evolution was from like liking or being interested in something to then letting it influence you, to then you using it to influence others.

Yeah. That type of trajectory, like people just don't see it. Totally. Like they're very, very cut and dried about stuff, especially about punk. Like I've told you, I have people like trying to correct me on stuff that I lived through and they weren't even born yet. Yeah. And I think it's like punk in particular is like people have become so obsessed with it. It obviously changed.

It changed the course of music. We wouldn't all of the alternative music we have now is all rooted in punk. And I think like it's impossible. to understand unless you were there, like you were how big of a deal it was, like how people would throw shit at you guys on the streets. All the time. It was not like, they didn't have an urban outfit. It wasn't easy doing what we did.

Exactly. It wasn't easy doing what you did. I'll tell you, so I can't remember if I told this to you earlier because we've been talking so much, but I told my mom at one point, I said, mom, you don't understand. This is like Paris in the 20s. And she rolled her eyes And I said, no, really it is. And then now this many years later,

I realized it really was. I was true. I nailed it right on. It changed everything. And the same way that Paris and the 20s did with all the art movement that was going on. I think you're dead on. And I think it's, again, we just said about it's worth underlining.

This was not, to be in this scene and to be like this in the world was difficult. You know, like you really were going against the grain And it's not really possible to understand now where, like, alternative culture has been co-opted and resold to everyone. And there's no such, like, it's basically impossible to shock people without becoming, like, a full, all right. Yeah, and everyone's so into, like, whatever new little subculture pops up. But people are interested in it, not, not, like, feeling aggressive about it because it's the other. Yeah.

You know, people are just wanting to know where it came from it. It was so different in those days. Okay. So it's 1970. now. We're coming on the home stretch-ish. We're halfway through, I guess. Not through the podcast, but halfway through the story. Okay. So, 1978 in January, you mentioned this a little earlier, but I wanted to ask you a bit about it, the Canterbury Apartments, because this is around the time that people start moving in there. And Lorna lived there with Blinda Carlisle. Black Randy lived there.

Jane lived there. Jane Weedland. Yeah, Jane Weedlin. Black Randy of the Metro Squad. So it was just like a cheap apartment building. So many other people lived there, too, that, like, the listeners probably wouldn't know who they were. Yeah. I was actually, last night I was walking there. With my boyfriend around the Canterbury and stuff, we were just walking around Hollywood. And, like, I didn't know he lived right where the Canterbury was. And I was, like, it was crazy.

It was so wild. Yeah, because it was right by the mask and it was cheap. So that's where everyone lived there. What was the scene like there? The Canterbury was great. It had this big courtyard that's no longer open, but it used to be an old. open courtyard that had, it had windows around each side. And they were like, sort of like those dormer windows where you can open them up. And I remember walking into the Canterbury

before it was gated back in the day. And everyone would be like just sort of hanging around drinking a beer with their legs, like hanging over the side. And, you know, even the lobby was a party. There was always graffiti on the, on the elevators. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the guy that was the manager, I think he was like some kind of a drug dealer. It was just mayhem in the Canterbury. It was just wild. Such a cool thing to have like this space where everyone lived. You can just pop by and like see all your friends and go to a party. Although Darby said that, so what Darby crash said was I couldn't live there too much everything. Lorna lives there, but Pat lives down in my

neighborhood. The Canterbury is in a really horrible neighborhood. One of my friends got hit in the head with a champagne bottle thrown by somebody going by on a motorcycle and someone threw a knife at Belinda. Yeah, oh, there was knives going on, but I don't think it was probably at Belinda. Right. No, but, no, because the rebels, the gang of Hollywood, they had Westside story knife fights in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard in those days was so deserted that you could literally, and I did this, do cartwheels down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard after just what would be normal rush hour on any street. It was just like dead?

Derserted. There was nothing there until the Kodak Theater. Because there was no business is what you're saying. Yeah, it was a little tiny like a pet store on the north side. And then there was a store called the Orient on the south side that's like kind of right near the magic store. And I think only just got closed finally. But there was nothing on there. There wasn't restaurants or anything.

Not until the Kodak theater came. It was a dead zone. That's why it was even more insane because even a little bit later into the 80s when I had my punk house disgrace land. It was still like that. You could do whatever the fuck you wanted. There was no surveillance. Cops knew if you lived in the neighborhood. It was crazy.

So sad. It's fine. It's really fine. Everything's fine now. We love it. The world is perfect right now. I'm so happy to be here. Let's put it this way.

I was leaving the Apple store on something. See, no good story starts with I was leaving. No, this is good, but it is a good story. But I didn't even realize I was on my old block where my punk house disgrace land was because there was a 15-foot-high privacy wall. So I'm saying it's a bad story. This is a bad story. No, it's just like it was gentrified. It's a sad story.

It's brand new, yeah. But I didn't recognize that it was my street even. And that street was within walking place of all the clubs. I worked at a club called Kathy to Grand. Yeah, very famous. You booked the first Red Hot Chili Peppers show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys, no big deal.

It's not a big deal. I know, I've done a lot of crazy stuff. Closing game in. Just one of the most, literally the dos Ekes woman, the most interesting woman in the world. Okay, so the Canterbury is popping off. Cliff Hanger is out of the band. We don't know why. They get Nikki B to come play.

He was drumming for the weirdos, and he was kind of a punk rock session guy. They go back to San Francisco. It's so cool. So this is the night after the sex pistols played their famous last show at Winterland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Nikki Big said he remembered Sid Vicious watching from the wings. Yeah. And then he just gets on stage.

He's like, Darby gets on stage, grabs Lorna's beer off the amp, walks across the stage, drinks the beer, breaks the glass over his head, carves a gigantic bloody circle in his chest with a broken glass, then comes in right on cue with I'm Darby Crash, a social block. She got the chills. I'm not going to, we're not going to go into it later because I had to turn it off after 15 minutes because I forgot how fucking bad it is.

But there is like a version of that in the, what we do is secret movie. The wigs in that movie? I can't even talk about it. Oh, and they're a crime. In that movie? They should go to the Hague, the people that made those wigs. All the, all the fucking people that were being extras at that movie, like, because I wasn't in it, people that I didn't even know from like Riverside and stuff were calling me up,

going, you're not in this movie, why not? Why not? I don't even know how they found my phone numbers. You were like, because it's a horrible movie. I was glad I wasn't in it after that. You know what? We all, it's, there's something for everyone. And that one is not for me. Okay, so now in February, Don Bowles, babe. Don Bowles has moved L.A., real name Jimmy Michael Gersetti. I was the first person he met in L.A. He'll tell that to everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so he's a Leo from Phoenix, Arizona. Tell me how did you meet Don Boliv? I was walking down to Hollywood Boulevard, and he was parked in a car just south of Franklin,

and he looked cool or he had a cool bumper sticker or something, and we just started talking, and he gave me these wild sunglasses, like 50 sunglasses, and he said he had just moved to town. That's so cool. And he still tells everyone I'm the first person he met in L.A. Yeah, so he had actually moved to L.A. with his friend, Rob Graves, who I think has passed right now. He took his name from an Arizona journalist named Don Bowles, who was killed by a car bomb in 1976, investigating some mafia stuff. He had heard the germs forming single, and he said, I was transfixed. This was either the best or worst thing I'd ever heard. Now, this, I thought to myself, is punk. I'd heard that these guys needed a drummer. And even though I had only been playing drums for about two weeks and didn't even own a pair of sticks, let alone a drum kit, I was their man. So they like, him and Rob Grave just drove from Arizona, went to a dill show at the whiskey, met you, tried to find the germs.

Everyone called him Cactus Head. Is this true? Yeah. I forgot about Cactus Head. So good. We called him Cactus Head. Shut up Cactus Head. So he gets Darby and Pat's phone numbers, maybe from you.

and when he gets Pat on the phone, so this is what I was saying earlier, Don tells Pat, oh, like, you're all my favorite, like, cool avant-garde and punk bands, and Pat's like, oh, yeah, I don't know any of those bands I like Queen and David Bowie. And Don was like, I thought he was fucking with me. So Darby's like, look, the drums are playing a benefit for the mask

because the mask is not probably having some troubles. At the Elks Lodge, and Nikki Beat was going to be playing drums. So Don goes, and with Rob Graves, and then afterwards, they get rooms at the Canterbury. He's, like, getting into the whole scene. And Nikki B said he gave Don Bulls drum lessons. He's like, I taught him how to play all the songs. And then I stopped the lessons when he said punk rock is supposed to be sloppy and it's supposed to have mistakes. He was like, okay.

And so the germs auditioned Don at the mask in the bathroom. Don said, I set up my drums in three inches of beer and urine in the overflowing mass toilet and banded out some noise. Lorna Darby and Pat watched horrified but amused. Pat politely interrupted, Can you play like a song? I played Life of Crime, the weirdos song Nikki Beatt had taught me, and they went into the other room out of earshot. I don't know.

What do you think? Well, he did come all the way from Phoenix. A long tense moment later, imagine being turned down to drum for the biggest joke band in L.A. Darby came back in the bathroom and said, with a characteristic nod to some vague perceived audience somewhere just above his head, well, you're a germ. It's a really cinematic moment.

Someone in the book, and I can't remember who, pointed out that, like, it felt like almost overnight the germs went from, like, really being like this joke band to all of a sudden having, like, really good songs. Yeah. And they were like, what? Pat said the germs music changed just because we eventually got better. We couldn't help it. We started out with nothing, so we had no choice but to change.

Yeah, they just, that's exactly how I saw it. I mean, they weren't, a lot of the other bands. that came out here. Yeah. Or maybe lived here, but not right in L.A. and had been playing and, like, you know, down near the South Bay or something. Sure. They had a better start off.

You know, the Germans had to start off was in public. Yeah, the first show ever when they didn't know how to play anything. They're just like, I'm going to put some peanut butter on my face. That was my fault kind of. But it's a thing of legend. You know, they dived in the deep. Yeah, they weren't like X who were like, X were older. I've been doing it longer, and we're just like...

And they knew... They were really these musicians playing music, you know? It was a bit of a different thing. Yeah, they knew what they were doing. Yeah. So Slash, who loves, you know, loves the germs, offers to put out their first EP. I wanted to say this also that Darby said,

because I thought it was interesting. I never really did want to shock people, but you have to do something when there's all these bands. When we first started, we couldn't really play it, and neither could anybody else. So you have to do something to draw more attention to your band, and that was an easy way. But when people said, oh, let's go see the germs.

They'll probably bleed a little this time. We stopped doing that. That's when we started to learn how to play better. It wasn't enough to just bleed yourself. Bob Biggs, who is the publisher of Slash, he's also passed away, sadly. He said, I heard some germs recordings that Steve Samioff, who was the founder of the magazine, had. It might have been forming. And I wasn't sure whether I liked it at all, but then it stuck in my mind.

Then Samiof said, look, I'll do an EP. It asked if I'd finance it. So I said, sure, I'll put up because $600 didn't sound like such a big risk. This was the Lexicon Devil EP. They pressed 1,000 copies. May 1978. Produced by, I don't know how to pronounce this. Is it Geza X? Giza X. Did you know Giza X? Of course. Of course. So he did sound at the mask, right? Yeah. Okay. Nikki Beat, play drums on this. Gaza X said, Pat didn't even have an amp, so I just rigged this chain of pedals, and that's why it has this tubular guitar sound. Jeff McDonald's, of Red Cross said, I think the Lexicon Devil record has one of the most unique guitar sounds I've ever heard.

It kind of sounds like a banjo being played through a wah-wah pedal. Darby later said, I think the Lexicon Devil sessions could have been better. Things got screwed up and stuff. Like on Circle One, there's half of the vocals missing, and we just had to make it like a lead and turn up the guitar and stuff because we didn't know what had to happen, and it just disappeared. And Pat couldn't show up, and he's the one that knows the most about the music. And Lorna had to tell Geza what to do. And you can hardly hear the drums. So it was not up to Darby standards.

I liked what John Doe said about it. He said, you didn't know the words because when you'd see them live, it was all like, war, war, war, when Darby would sing. So everyone was just astounded when they got the first slash record and actually read the lyrics. And read the lyrics. I know. People were absolutely astounded. They were just like, what?

Because they didn't, I don't think they knew that the lyrics were going to sound so good, so, like, scholarly in a few cases. So impressive. His lyrics were off the chain. Really incredible. And you couldn't hear any of that because of the shit-ass equipment. Shit-ass equipment. Obviously played quite intoxicated.

Yeah, shit-ass. Not loving to hold the microphone close to his mouth when he performed. But yeah, I mean, Lexicon Devil, which God-Tier's song really goes so hard. It changed a lot when that record came out and people could hear it. I'm a Lexicon Devil with a battered brain searching for a future. the world's my aim is so good. And also, again, lexicon from going back to high school, going back to the rhetoric teacher.

Like, it's all really there, you know? The lyrics are incredible. And then give me this, give me that, very much his, give me a beer. Nikki Beat's said he stole the opening drum lick for Circle One from the Allman Brothers song in memory of Elizabeth Reed, which I was like, that's, again, really funny. Like, you would not associate the Allman Brothers with the germs.

That's what I'm laughing about. It's because I only just heard this myself, but shit like that was happening a lot in punk rock that people that weren't there don't know. Yeah, like they wouldn't, again. Like, we would just take from wherever you could. Like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like, look, oh, that sounds good. That works if it's in. No one will be any of the wiser than.

So, I mean, it's great. It's perfect. There's a review here in Lobotomy No. 6. Uh-huh. You're a fanzian by yourself. I'll read it for you. For anyone who dismissed the germs is crap, wake up. This is one hot record.

They not only play at the speed of light, they do it well. Pat smears lickety-split guitar work will have you going in two seconds, and Darby Crash practically vomits out the vocals. Lexicon Devil's great, but my favor is Circle One, musical poison. It'll have you shaking violently from the intro. Ready, aim, fire, down to the last chord. Be careful when you play this record. It may burn right through your turntable.

Wow, that's boiled. Good job, pleasant. Thank you. You know, journalistic integrity, you were dating the guitar player, but it's fine. I think you were still allowed to give it a good review. Well, it was a great record. Yeah, I mean, that's undeniable. So there's this place down in Hermosa Beach called the Church.

It was an actual former Baptist church. Kind of got started up just after the mass closed down. Bands would practice there, Black Flag practiced there. Ron Reyes and Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag famously lived there. I couldn't see that in the decline of Western Civil Civil Civilization. something we're going to talk about later. Red Cross would rehearse there. There'd be parties there.

Now, here's what X-Seen said about it. When the South Bay scene first started happening, I really liked the new bands like Black Flag. Then there was this divide between Hollywood and the beach scene. Greg Ginn said they wouldn't let those bands play in Hollywood, so they had to create their own scene, and it kind of became anti-Hollywood. I would reject this because everybody wanted to see those bands play.

Fuck Hollywood was what we were saying, too. Somehow, the South Bay punk scene opposed the old. Hollywood scene, and the audience started becoming anti-rockstar, anti-whatever. And if you were signed a slash, then you were a rock star traitor. The South Bay girls didn't like me very much. So I stopped going to the hardcore shows because I was threatened. They'd shove me and push me and tell me they hated me. They started calling these people the HBs. I think it was because of Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach. Yeah. Because the epicenter, I guess, according to the books I read, was a high school called Edison High in Huntington Beach.

Huntington Beach was a wild scene. Yeah. But I think Huntington Beach is different than the South Bay scene. It's very different. So you can't just lump it in to get, not you, but like. Totally. But I think it sounds like what was happening was like the South Bay scene was like black flag and Red Cross and it was like this like had this punk scene happening.

Yeah, but then there was also backdoor man from there with Fast Freddy. Oh, sure. Of course. And Don Waller and all of the. those older people. And the runaway's first show is in Fast Freddy's house. Yeah. And they were all, they were huge.

They were a little bit older than us, but they were, they were like always at the, you know, at the record swap meet and stuff. I mean, they would have been called punk if they had just appeared there, but they were already there doing punk stuff. Right. But a little bit earlier. It wasn't getting called punk. It sounds, like, from what I was piecing together, and I'm sure I'm missing, I think,

few things, but this is from everything I read. The Black Flag kind of courted these new hardcore punk kids from Huntington, from Orange County, right? Because they needed to up their numbers. This is not from my own heart and mind. This is something I read from I believe Brendan Mullen said it and a couple of other people said it. And so they, Jeff McDonald, they needed to sort of like increase their audience. Kind of the way Darby was increasing his audience through his own methodologies. Black Flag was like, oh, we can get these kids.

And these kids were a different kind of punk. These were kind of like, as I think Mike Watt put it, testo-driven jocks. Totally. Yeah. That's exactly. They were, this is a whole new thing, right? I could say that, but for Mike Watt to say it.

Right? Yeah. And it's like this was not, this was not what the punk scene in Hollywood was the punk scene of Hollywood was kind of what we associate with all the early things of punk. It was queer friendly, right? To a certain extent. It was very, very woman friendly, you know, like it was about being weird and it was being subversive, but it was about. Weirdos coming together. Whereas this new crop of suburban surfpunks. They were very homophobic, very anti-women. anti-women. It was like horrifying. Anti-Semitic. All parts of it. Extremely violent.

Like they, from what I was reading, they were like intrigued to come to these shows because they heard they were violent. And they were like, oh, we can be violent. We can fucking beat people up. That's what we want to do. So this influx kind of starts to change things, right? What was so interesting about the germs is that I feel like they straddled both worlds in a way, right? Yeah, they could straddle both worlds.

Because while they were from that, that punk world of like weirdos coming together and anything goes. They also did just crazy shit. They also did Darby's stuff was just like you, if you saw someone doing like the stuff that he did on stage, your first thing would be, well, what's he going to do offstage? Is this a loose cannon? Does he have a gun? Is he going to beat the fuck out of us?

Yeah. And then on top of it, actually musically that Don Bowles is drumming and Pat Smear's guitar riffs set the stage for what became hardcore music. You know, like, that was something really different. And I think they were in this kind of in-between place. But the crowds got really violent at these shows in Orange County and sometimes in the South Bay. Jane Weidland from the Go-Go's.

What was her punk name? Jane O'Drano. Jane Drano, yeah. She said the whole scene started to change. It started as a lot of us had multiple different things. It started as a scene of girls and gays and stuff. It had been taken over by all those really angry. young white boys, black flag.

We were like, what's this all about? It's really gross. We got lumped in with those bands, but we never knew those guys. And then Keith Morris said in the book, The Go-Gos were playing pop music. They weren't a punk band. It was a female vocal harmony group with rock guitars and drums. Of course, they're going to be taken aback playing a show

where it's 95% sweaty guys jumping around and a little blood flowing here and there. They absolutely were a punk band, though. They started as a punk band. They couldn't fucking play anything. thing. I think that's... The Gogo's first gig at the mask had three songs in it, and two of them were the same

song. I mean, it doesn't get much more punk than that. That's what's so interesting, right? This is sort of the difference between punk as like a countercultural sort of like movement, right? Or like punk is philosophy, right? Or community. Yeah. Which is under those terms, of course, the go-go-go.

was were punk. They came from the world, this community of punk. Whereas what Keith Morris seems to be describing is this whole other thing, punk as anarchy, as violence, as like this whole new crazy version, which kind of becomes hardcore. And it's like fascinating to me how like around 1979, it's sort of splits, you know, and you have these two branches of what's going on. And I read, I don't remember who said it, but they were like, once this sort of, oh, it was kickboy, he said once the hardcore scene kind of expanded, the germs kind of disappeared, like slowly eroded what they had. And everyone did kind of like go in different directions, right? I mean, the screamers and the weirdos sort of receded. X did really well, but they kind of went in a bit of a rockability direction, like,

with the blasters and stuff, it does feel like this kind of splintered everything. It kind of, yeah, it kind of splintered stuff, but, I mean, it did splinter it, but I don't know if I, having been in it, would think that it came exactly from that point. I think when people's, like, like X were better at playing than a lot of, like, teenagers that started up here because they, you know, they had, like John Doe had. bar band experience and played a lot and Billy Zoom had played with fucking Gene Vincent for God's sake. You know, I mean, that's just as an example.

And they were incredible. So they moved at a different pace than someone that just decided to pick up like a guitar. Adam Dar a peanut butter and called a day. Like three months ago or something, you know, yeah. But also in those days, anything that people were doing was okay. it wasn't as formally regimented as a lot of people look at it nowadays because things are all genre-based now.

Totally. The music is, and it wasn't like that. You could be in the suburban lawns and just like... What a great band. Tweeting. You just go to hell! That was just as punk as like,

I don't know, like the germs or, you know, or some other band. Yeah. You know, just like even, that Orthium gig was, if you look at it, people nowadays would say, that wasn't a punk bin because, you know, the plimsels or the whatever, you know, they were called that and I'm blanking it out right now. But I mean, it was a musical scene. So many people knew each other. So many people had very diverse kind of influences and or mentors or started off one way and

morphed into another scene, but it still is everything that made up the Hollywood punk scene. Yeah. You know, and that was, that was a, it was a huge scene, but it was also, you know, it had many different factors in it. Yeah. But no one was counting that kind of stuff. Right. Until people started counting it historically.

Yeah. And there was a lot of also misconception coming from a lot of areas. I remember, like, reading, reading things that people. People had written in books and be like, that wasn't right. And then I'd have to go back and check, was this just my perception of it wasn't right? And then I would start calling people that I knew it and say, I just read blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, what? Doesn't it right?

Right, right with you. They're like, no, that's crazy. I think a lot of it came from assumptions. Right. And the need to do a taxonomy after the fact and to look back and start to categorize things. I think you're so right. And even you can even see it in like that quote I read. from Maxine.

Like, she's not saying, like, oh, these were, like, completely different things, hardcore and what we were doing. But it does feel like the lived experience at the very least was that, like, some people in the Hollywood scene were put off by the vibe brought by these new suburban punk. Oh, yeah. I was one of them because this was, like, anti-everything that punk rock was standing for. Right, right. And then, like, I remember just thinking, like, with those people, you know, like, they're all probably fucking, like, privileged Orange County boys, you know? Like, they didn't, like, just, like, save all their money to move across the country. Right.

They lived in Orange County, and now they're thinking, like, they're such vague. Right. Totally. Rodney on The Rock interviewed Darby on the radio in 1980, and he said, you were there before Black Flag. You started it. And Darby said, someone's got to finish it. I thought was really great.

He also said in a different interview with Rodney. Records are only a medium to get something else done. I want to die when I'm done. And now it's time to make the first and only full-length record. Slash had shifted into a label. Basically, Steve Samyoff left to do the magazine stuff. And Bob Biggs was like, okay, well, the magazine doesn't really make money anyways. Let's really do this label.

And they start with the Jerms album. Penelope Spiris said in the lexicon devil book that the way Bob Biggs raised money for this was by dealing coke. Although he denies that. He says there was never any wholesale dealing going on. I love that he used the word wholesale. It's so amazing. It's like just a little hobby dealing. No wholesale dealing.

Retail dealing. Everybody did shit like that back then. That's basically what he said. He was like, I wasn't more deeply involved with cocaine than anyone else. It was the 70s. No, that's exactly true. I got to say. I was just talking about this with someone last night.

Everyone did a little retail dealing of cocaine. Yeah. Or just did it all the time, you know? That really was a 70s thing. So at this point, they had a manager named Nicole. Oh, Nicole. So what was the vibe on Nicole? Not a word.

Interesting. You got that a lot from what I've gathered. She was a little off. She was a little off. You can see her if you want. She's in the decline documentary. she didn't know a lot about business, and I don't feel like I'm doing any slandering here because I don't think she had a business background.

The germs contract was slashed, according to one journalist, was quite draconian, but sounded like she didn't really know what she was doing, so they signed that. But she did set up a publishing company for Darby and Pat called Crash Course Music, and I do think his mother, Darby's mother, still makes money from that. That's good. Yeah. So they make this first full-length. called GI, stood for germs incognito,

because they're not getting booked at this time. And it was produced by Joan Judd. Did you ever go by the studio when they were recording the album? I didn't. I don't think. I may be mixing it up with so many sessions. I was in and out of so many sessions

that if I did go in there, it didn't seem like it was like so great and giant and full-blood. You know what I mean? What do you remember about? this time in general. So I guess we're about a year out from the first show. Like, what was the general, like, in the scene? Like, what did people think of the germs? Were they getting kind of like bigger and bigger? Did they have like a big following? It was starting to get a following for sure.

You know, but a lot of the bands that started right around that time where we're, you know, where at first it was sort of limited to a couple of clubs and then people started getting interested and then people started touring, even if it was not like a giant, like, corporate-sponsored tour, even if it was just driving to different, you know, places like outside of the valley or in San Francisco or, you know, there wasn't, like, my band toured a little bit later and it was still very DIY. Like, you had to send stuff yourself to clubs in different towns that you found out about. There wasn't anywhere near the touring network. Yeah, like you would send your tapes.

No one had agents, you know? Yeah. You'd have to send, like, everything. Like, here's a poster, here's a tape. Right. Here's a, you know, so that just made it different. But people were starting to grow then, you know, it was going slowly. Right.

But by, you know, by around that time, everyone knew at least sort of a working knowledge of what punk rock was. Sure, yeah. Because now we're like, you know, three years in since the assumption. Yeah, because it was so early at first, nobody the fuck knew what was happening. Yeah. or where things were happening, you know. Well, and so much has happened. Like, the Ramones have come out.

Yeah. The talking heads have come out, Blondie. Everyone from New York started coming out here. And that was wild. Sire had really, like, marketed it as new wave. And we were starting to get English imports, too. You know, so it was really, it was exploding. And all of this was, like, and, you know, in not that long of a time.

for it to be going on, like in New York, L.A., in the U.K., and stuff. And there was enough people that were into it, either as consumers or as, like, band members and booking agents and rowdies and stuff to sustain a scene that was obviously going to be there for a little while, you know? Clubs like CBGBs, oh, yeah, like if we can get to New York, we could probably play there. Yeah. I wonder so much if they had. been able to stick around a little longer, like what would have happened to the germs. But they make this album. They wanted a big name producer.

Randomly Darby wanted Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders, who I had to look up because I'd never heard of them. They were like an Idaho rock band. Oh, really? You didn't know them? Popular in the 60s. Oh, my God. They were great.

I love them. But he was too expensive. So Pat said they were like, who's our most famous friend? And they were like, Joan Jett. So they got Joan Jett. By several accounts, Joan Jett did a lot of sleeping on the couch. and less producing, although she said that she, she said we were really on the ball most of the time,

not drinking and trying not to party while we were doing the record. There was one day I got drunk and probably did pass out. That was the day that recorded shutdown live in the studio, and Darby made that joke about me being passed out or whatever. There's a lyric in shutdown that's like, poor Joan, poor Joan Jett passed out on the fucking set. Well, Penelope Spiras did say in the book that she was there and actually Joan Jett was asleep. And Nicole Panter said the same thing.

But again, I wasn't there. I'm just reporting what people said. Nicole Panter tried to take a little credit here. I don't know if it's true or not, but she said she was the one saying Darby do this, Darby do that. Pat Smear, who I'm just inclined to trust, said if anyone was the producer, it was Pat Burnett, the engineer. He was really, really good, super nice. Yeah, Pat was great. Yeah, he was great.

And he says he just took over the role and didn't really ask for any credit afterwards. They recorded a place called Quadet, the film. on 6th and Western. It took about three weeks, cost about $6,000. There was a lot of rumors afterwards that Lorna Doom did not play on the album that Joan or Pat played her parts, which was incredibly sexist. Really? I never heard that. Yeah. I mean, this was, I just read about it in the book. I obviously wasn't around, but Don Bowles said that's absolute nonsense. Her bass sound was huge, like jaw wobble. Lorna's trademark wall of wump. She was the perfect basis for this music. Yeah, she was great. Yeah. And Pat said, I like the way Don Bowles played drums. It was the best part of the germs albums.

the drums and the lyrics. I love the lyrics. I always thought they were great. The cover art is obviously, it's iconic. You can see it behind Pleasant, the blue circle, and the black background. Bob Biggs of Slash Wanted the cover should be germs spelled out in rotting meat and jelly beans, which is such a not, like, I just can't imagine that being the artwork. And they were like, no, we're doing this. Good. This is so much better. I didn't know that about it.

I know. Rotting meat and jelly beans. I think everyone was like, and we have this like, I mean, it's like... That sounds like a tiger beat type of punk. Totally. And this is like so stark and iconic. Do you have any memories around when this album came out? Well, I remember my own thing and this,

I didn't only do this with the germs album, but when I get a record that a friend of mine made, I would just look at it and listen to it and just marvel at, wow, it really happened. It really fucking happened. It was exciting. Yeah. Because we were also invested in rock and roll and especially weird rock and roll and stuff like Bowie,

which was like we've said many times in this episode that wasn't mainstream. You know, it was incredible that someone you were closely made a record. What did you make of the actual music? Did you love it? Yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. I loved it. I was so proud of them.

Yeah. It's cool. I was listening to it the other day. It's funny. I read this quote. from Pat, which I thought was super funny, and it actually stopped me from wearing my germs t-shirt on this episode. But he said later, he was like, some people told me they were inspired by the guitar on the GI album, but I always thought of the germs as a T-shirt band. People have the T-shirts,

and they say they love the germs, but they don't listen to the record. Maybe they even have the record, but they don't play it. And I kind of get what he's saying. Like, I don't know if that's totally true. I don't throw on the germs record all the time. I mean, I'm 43 years old, and it's like kind of honestly a rough hang. But when I hear Ritchie Dogger's crime or Lexicon Devil, I have like so many like heartfelt feelings. I have so many memories. Like I remember DJing at punk nights in L.A.

Like, and now we're like well past, you know, that time. And these are still like classic iconic punk songs that have also a pop sensibility to them and are so catchy and so infectious and so visceral. And, like, on one hand, I get what he's saying. Like, this is not diamond dogs, you know? Like, this is not the Beatles. Like, people are not probably putting it on their house all the time. But to some people, it is.

But to some people, it is. Yeah, totally. He doesn't get it because he created it. Because he was in it, yeah. He doesn't understand it because, I mean, I'm sure there's, like, parts of hunky dory or whatever that Bowie had that he's like, oh, God. Yeah, I'm so embarrassed. You're right. You know what you're so right.

I think I actually know several people that probably put this album on all the time. and I know friend of the pot, Alex Nelson, definitely knows people and probably puts it on herself from time to time. Pat Smear said that, We Must Bleed was his favorite song. He said, it's the only one that if I were to listen to the record now, I would listen to, or if I was going to play someone a song, someone who had never heard of the germs,

I would put that on or forming, depending on how I wanted them to speak. I love forming. I remember forming when it just came out. It was just blown away. Because you couldn't hear it a lot, the lyrics in their live shows. Right.

But you could hear it on the record, and it was, holy fuck, what the hell is this? It's just so important, you know, I was talking to a Frenchian, and he was like, oh, I don't like their germs. He's young. And I was like, you can say that, but you, like, you don't understand, like, you can't understand how important it was. Like, how so much of what you love now came from that. Came from that. Wouldn't exist. You might not want to throw on GI, but, like, you can't.

not discount how important they were. A lot of people did discount this album, though. It did not really get much press or reviews. Don Bull said that Nicole should have gotten them a booking agent and she didn't. He also said something really funny, which was, we just didn't have that brutal Calvinist work attitude anyway. Black Flag had this Paleolithic work ethic thing happening. They worked their asses off night and day 24-7. No, they really did. That is really true. So the germs barely even liked getting up in the morning. And I was like, well, that's like the fundamental difference there. They got a write-up in the LA Weekly by Fast Ready, who we mentioned before, which was very positive. And they were written up in Melody Maker, which was very cool. They called them the cosmic soulmates of Sham 69.

But after the record comes out, from what I was reading, and I love to hear your take since you were there, the germ sort of went downhill after the album came up. particularly Darby. So Rick Elric said the germs were never the most together band to begin with, but they had a couple months during 79 where they were fairly tight. After the GI album, the germs practiced less and less. It was chaos. Darby was fucked up out of his mind every show. He wasn't even trying to present himself as an artist.

He was just trying to present his pain, and his pain had become this one long scream, one long, intoxicated primal scream of despair. It was obvious that nobody was ever going to get a real record deal. Nobody was going to be rich and famous, which is what I think everyone wanted, really, if they were honest. And so he got into drugs more and more, and the stage show just became like an evil-knevel spectacle.

Only Darby never made the canyon. Did you kind of experience that, like, in the late periods of my life? Yes, it was sort of sad, especially with him, you know. Like, I could see him struggling and how hard it was, you know, for like whatever, whether it was disillusioned. or, you know, just, like, just drug stuff. It was very, very difficult to watch. Well, we haven't really talked about it at all yet,

but I think it's worth bringing up now. Darby Crash was gay. But he wasn't totally out. Is that right? Or he was... He wasn't, but I don't think he was only totally men. I don't like to speculate on people's sexuality because I don't think it's like...

you know, important or interesting, except that there's a lot of the story of Darby Crash's life that people seem to refer back to that maybe he didn't feel comfortable to be, like, out and gay, or that he was rejected a lot by men that he was interested in because they weren't gay, and if that played into, like, sort of his, like, increasing drug use and despair. That, I mean, that definitely could have happened

because he was not what you'd call, like, you know, the model gay boy of the time. Right. The whole male gay scene, which I was part of, like, just through people I knew. Yeah. The ideals for looks and how partners were or how partners behaved and stuff were really, like, nothing that Darby was like or would have been like at the time. So I don't, I can't speculate on what he went through. but it was probably not like, you know, someone that looked like a muscle boy or something, you know.

Totally. It was very cut and dried in those days. Yeah. Because I was very interested because obviously there were gay punk men. I mean, there was Black Randy and... Yeah, and like Rick O'Rick. Nobody knew until the very end if they even did know then, you know. Yeah.

Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. There's a lot of stories in the book about various, like, love interests that he had. But in Luxe Con Devil. In Lexcon Devil. Like Donnie Rose, who I think was a young boy that, this is a whole other side thing about these, and I'm sure you knew them too, but these young, young gutter punk tricks, as they were called. Like, these young boys from broken homes who, like, sort of wore male prostitutes basically to make money. And Donnie Rose was actually. straight, but that was

like someone... That was his money. That was his money. There was a lot of that going on. Yeah. Not even only in the punk scene. Right, no, I'm sure. Like everywhere. And there was, yeah, so there's, just like these stories about Darby's sort of thwarted

romantic attempts that played, seemed to coincide with his increasing dissolution as a person and his like going deeper and drugs and sort of like, you know, wak waning as a person. So I was just curious if you had had any personal experience with that with him or had

talked to him about it or anything. I didn't really talk to him about it because at that point in his life, he was so sort of surrounded by the coterie of Darby devotees. Yeah. It was a really, really odd thing to witness, especially when it was someone that you've been really good friends with. You know, it was just such a drastic change. And it made me feel a number of emotions everywhere, anything from like annoyance to severe concern for his sanity or his life.

Yeah. Or for me to like feel rejected sometimes. Sure. You know, it was just like it was like a big melting pot of stuff. And it was really hard to watch. Yeah. Like him happening on the downhill spiral. Yeah.

You know, it was very sad. So this time that we're talking about, the tail end of 1979, Darby finally moves out of his mother's house into this guy, Tony the Hustler's house. Tony said that he thought Darby was attracted to him because he was a full-on walking, talking, in-your-face, leather-clad whore, and I had wealthy celebrity clients who paid me well. Darby lived with me for about four or five months during 1979 at 1775 Orchid Avenue behind Graumann's Chinese theater. Yeah. Yeah.

That was the first time he had ever lived away from his mom. Darby seemed pretty happy after he got out. But apparently, according to Tony, he just couldn't stand all the clients coming over. He, like, didn't want to live in that kind of environment. Tony also had some descriptive words about Darby's body and endowment, but this is not that kind of podcast, so I'm not going to go into that. But if you want to read about it, it's a Lexicon Devil. This is also around the time, from what I could piece together. There's no, obviously, date stamp in anyone's book.

but obviously Darby had, I mean, everyone's doing drugs, like you said, but this is when Darby starts doing heroin. Yeah. Which not everybody was doing. No. That, for me, that was a huge. A line too far. Yeah.

And Pat Smir said the same thing. So I think this starts to alienate Pat from Darby. Helen Killer said, once he started doing heroin, he became even more vulnerable than he already was. It became easy as kiddie play for more vampires and vultures to swoop in and circle him. This is when a woman called him. called Amber. Oh, God. Yeah, okay.

So it's very interesting, right? Because we talked about the original kind of circle around him. And it's like, you were friends with Helen Killer. You were friends with Melissa, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these women were like from all accounts. And again, I'm just piecing together from what I read, but you can tell me we're really

loved Darby Crash and were his real friends. Yeah, they did. Yes. And then they all in the book are like, fuck Amber. So who was this Amber woman? I don't know entirely where she came from, but she was terrible. She just sort of materialized into the scene, or maybe I just wasn't, you know, she wasn't on my radar. Yeah.

But you were the queen of the scene, so I feel like you would have known if she was already there, I'm just saying. Yeah, no, she just turned up one day and just sort of glommed onto him. And she was really strident and really bossy. And I mean, it's, again... She looked like a housewife to me. She was a housewife. So interestingly... Oh, she was?

I didn't know that. It's really fascinating. What you're saying is really fascinating. Because I do feel like a lot of this, and I totally get it. It's like... I did not know that. Yeah. She had a husband.

So it's very interesting to me because it makes total sense that Darby Crash was this like kind of enigmatic, charismatic, like, known figure in the punk scene. And, you know, everyone loved him. So if you wanted to kind of have some soul... social clout, yeah, you would glom on to him. Now, she's married. She has a husband. Darby moves in with her and her husband. And then eventually the husband's like, what the fuck? And moves out. I knew that he was living with her for well, but I didn't know there was a husband. A husband. According to Helen Keller and Paul Rossler, he would call them up and beg them to come over because he didn't want to be alone with her. With Amber. Yeah, with Amber. Gerber said,

I don't hold Amber responsible for his drug addiction, but I hold her responsible for not caring whether he lived or died. She had ulterior motives, man. She wanted to be the sugar mama. She wanted fucking Nicole's seat, Nicole Panter the Manor. Yeah. She lusted for his idle status and putting enough dope in him got it for her. That sounds about right?

Brendan Mullins talks about this show, December 22nd, 1979 at the Whiskey's Germ Show. He said, the final nail in the coffin of LA's punk naive period can be pinpointed to almost that day. The battle lines were drawn. The Hollywood and the new HB hardcore scenes were no longer the same people. Could no longer be the same people with the same outlook and perspective. The louder, faster, bonehead thrash aesthetic had arrived. And tonight was its coming out ball. This night, it was a packed house of suburban beach kids we had never seen before.

The vibe in the room was seething. This was a crazy night. Apparently Pat hit a bouncer with his guitar, like pretty hard. and had to, like, escape the cops. There was just, like, a whole, like, riotous thing that happened. Now we're in 1980. This is basically the last year of the germs. This is really important for those of you,

I guess for all of us who are kind of tracking the trajectory of the germs and maybe what could have been the cruising film soundtrack. Oh, yeah. So cruising is a 1980 crime thriller that was written and directed by William Friedkin starring Al Pacino and Paul Servino. It's loosely based on a 1970 novel by a New York Times report. about a serial killer targeting gay men, and it's, like, kind of set in the seedy underbelly of this, like, gay scene in New York. I thought that was a really good movie when it came out.

I haven't seen it since it did, but I was actually just thinking about it not that long ago. It had a lot of controversy, I guess, when it came out because of the way it portrayed, like, I guess, the cede gay scene or whatever, quote-unquote CD-gine. I kind of knew the CD-Gase scene in New York at that time, and that seemed pretty... The producer, Jack Nietzsche, is the one who invited the germs to be on it. And he was like this absolutely iconic musician, songwriter, producer. He had started his career working with Sunny Bono and then with Phil Specter. Yeah, he worked with everyone, Jack Nietzsche. Yeah, put together those wall of sound recordings, the stones, Neil Young.

Anyways, did all these incredible soundtracks. So they were like, yeah, of course we'll do this thing with Jack Niche. Nicole Panthers said before our very first meeting with Jack even began. He looked around the room and asked, anyone got any percadam? Darby said he knew that it would be okay because this guy was a real drug addict. That was kind of funny. So they do six new songs with Jack producing. Even William Friedkin comes by one day.

They only end up using one song in the film. It's called Lions Share. And according to Gerber, Darby was pissed because that's not the one he wanted. The other songs were, my tunnel, throw it away, not all right. Now I hear the laughter and going down. If you listen to these, which you can on YouTube, they're all there. You can kind of imagine what the second germs album would have been. And it's tighter.

And like you see the evolution of them as a bit. band and also how they benefited from like a fucking real deal world class producer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it really gives you like a sliding doors moment of like what could have been, you know? Yeah. I just wanted to point out because it's really interesting. Again, you said this earlier. It's like they started with nothing, you know, they didn't know how to do anything.

You thrust them on stage, basically. And of course, they were going to keep getting better, you know. It had only been two minutes. It had been two years. I just thought that was interesting and it's worth giving a listen to. After that, the Fleetwood opens. Did you ever go down there? Yeah, of course.

Yeah, in Redonda Beach. Yeah, played down there too. Yeah. Because it stayed open for a while. Yeah, that was a great club. This is where the Mike Walker came in. So he said, Darby had nothing against the South Bear, the OC. The germs would play the Fleetwood and stuff.

I think Darby was really influential, but they couldn't handle him as an individual. He was too scary. The Fleetwood crowds were young. They had a lot of testo. I could see how people would have a problem with them. Plus they drove all the chicks away. This is another thing that came up. Women stopped going to the shows because of these, like,

totally. Kind of meathead jock punks or whatever. Yeah, there was a time when punk shows were all male. All male, yeah, especially in these kind of hardcore arenas. Yeah, that's what I mean. All of us were just like, fuck the shit. Yeah. Don Wolls called them all football jocks drooling over each other.

They were aware that the germs were thought to be cool, but they didn't know why. It was like being at some Nuremberg rally. It was stupid chaos. as opposed to the dementia of a higher order concept of chaos that should be envisioned. I thought that was great. Okay, so in April, the germs shot their segment of the decline of Western civilization.

Do you remember that being shot around town at all? Were you at any of the... I didn't go to any of them. Yeah. You were like, no, thank you. So this film, this is April 1980. The film doesn't come out until July of 1981, but according to Casey Cola,

who we're going to talk about obviously later, he did see the film and he came home devastated by how he was portrayed as sloppy and stupid. It is interesting. I mean, it's an incredible document but, like, again, I wasn't there

so I don't know. I have no idea how accurate it was. I know, I do happen to know that like the scene that is at Darby's house is not Darby's house. I think it was Tony the Hustler's house. And he got Michelle there to just be with him.

They didn't live together. And they were kind of like doing this like playing house thing where he's like cooking. But that was, again, kind of theater. And then the tarantula that's in there was actually Tony the Hustlers because Darby had bought it for him for his birthday. Forgot about the tarantula. Yeah. So that is filmed then. And then right around here, Darby kicks Don Bowls out of the band.

Did you remember this at all? I don't know if I remember that exactly at the moment. So what happened was Don had started a side project called Voxpaw. Right. And according to Don Bulls, Darby said he felt betrayed by me being in a joke band. But I think from what I read in general, he didn't get along that well with Don. But even more importantly, according to other people, including Pat, and he tries to replace him with this guy Rob Henley, who was from Huntington Beach,

who had kind of a romantic entanglement with. and who definitely could not play drums. Pat Smear said, Don Bowles was the perfect drummer for us. With everyone else, even Nikki, who was a great drummer, it felt weird because of the songs. But with Don, it felt normal.

Anyways, Darby made Bill Bartell, who is known as Pat Fear, tell Don Bowles that he was out of the band. And then right after that, him and Amber went to London. So he's in London, and Darby basically tells Pat, like, I really want Robbie in the band.

And while he's in England, Pat has to like have a practice with Lorna and this new drummer who cannot play. And they were just like, this is not working, babe. Like we don't want to teach someone to play drums. And Lorna quits. She's like, you know what, that's enough. And she's out of the man. Meanwhile, Amber and Darby are in London.

They stay with Jordan. Legendary punk Pamela Rook was her real name who worked at the sex shop owned by Vivien Westwood and Malcolm McLaurin. in Seaford, which is outside of London. They spent all their time going to shows seeing their own friends from L.A., like X and the go-goes in Georgia, play in London. Amber said that Darby,

this was her experience of it, was kind of depressed in England because no one knew who he was, and he was so used to in L.A., walking into a record store and everyone being like, ooh, Darby Crash. But he got really into Adam Ant while he was there,

and he got a Mohawk, which he made sure. everyone called a Mohican. So he comes back with his mohican and his kind of bondage gear, and the germs have dissolved because Lorna quit and the whole thing. So he starts the Derby Crash Band. Do you remember the Darby Crash Band? Yeah. So he recruits this bassist named David Bosco Danford, who I think was his boyfriend, although not many people knew this. I think so. Yeah. And this guy Rob Garstang on drums, and he can't find a guitar player. So he goes back to Pat. Pat's just like, he could just never get his shit together with the Darby Crash Band. He was

really too into heroin. Two weeks before their first gig, Darby calls me, is like, we have a show at the Starwood and I don't have any new songs and I don't have anyone to play guitar. Can you just do it? And he's like, okay. And then at sound check of the show at the Starwood, they kick out the drummer, because he sucks, and they get Lucky Lairor from the Circle Jerks to Philan, who just happened to know the germ songs, because they don't have any new song. They're just playing germ songs. Pat said, We just played germ songs except slower and not as good because it was the wrong drummer and bass player. Jeff McDonald also said he saw them and that it was basically also weird and pathetic, and that he was, Darby was making all these cryptic statements on stage that wouldn't make sense until later after he'd passed away.

So soon after the Darby Crash Band makes their debut at the Starwood to little fanfare because everyone thinks it's weird and pathetic, Amber gets a new boyfriend and kicks Darby out. And this is around the time Casey Kola comes in. Did you know Casey Cola? Yes. Yeah. Casey said I was neither fat nor had money, and I wasn't some desperate hangar on. I'd been hanging out on the punk scene for more than two years already when I met Darby.

I'd always gone to germ shows long before we ever got together. Helen Killer said, nobody really wanted to be around him that much when he got back from England. Kind of like what you were saying earlier. Because he was so completely fucked up on heroin and booze. He was like this weird Mohawk feather guy. It wasn't him anymore. He was trying to be somebody else. And at the same time, all these surf punk kids were coming in.

It was all just falling apart. part. So he's living at Oxford House with Melissa and Maggie Erig, Rob Henley, not Don Henley, Rob Henley, Ella Black and Casey. And then on December 3rd, 1980, the last ever germ show happens at the Fleetwood. Were you there? I don't think so. Yeah. Because I was sad about them at that point. Yeah, you were like kind of over over them. Yeah, I can see that. Not over them, but yeah. Yeah, just like it was the whole thing had changed. And also, they hadn't, I mean, they hadn't really been a band for a while, and this was this, like, big reunion show. It was like a weird death circus to me.

Yeah, and when it really did end up happening, Pat said that Darby, they would rehearse for this show, right? And he said, Darby was very specific about when and how he was going to kill himself. When we were rehearsing for the reunion show, he said, the only reason I'm doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with. He'd said that so many times that I just said, oh, right, and didn't think. I did hear that too. Yeah. And it sounds like he was basically talking all the time about how he was going to die young and you're going to miss me when I'm gone and I'll be gone this time next year. And I guess he said it so much and you tell me that people kind of didn't. That started discounting it. Yeah. But he said he talked about it a lot.

The boy who cried wolf a little bit. Not like he cried wolf because he did do it, but it's like, and what were you guys meant to do, I guess? Yeah. It was, I mean, I don't think anybody had any any way of dealing with that type of behavior with someone because in those days we didn't know or have the type of support tools that we do today

like we have no idea like 22 years old huh you guys are only like 21 22 years old but also there was like I mean now you can see mental health right professionals stuff everywhere you know like like here are the symptoms of blah blah blah or if someone could be suicidal

fill in the blank, that stuff was nonexistent. And it was hard to figure out if your, you know, if your friend was being like just talking shit or really like was going to do something. Also, especially someone like Darby Crash, right, who was like such like a... The theatrical stuff all the time. All the time. And like it was always kind of like playing with reality, you know? So it's like, anyways.

I think besides the fact that he told Pat that he wanted to get the heroin, the money do the show to get money to get heroin with, I'm sure, like, and this is just me doing fan fiction, but like I have to imagine he also wanted to have one last germ show to, like, cement his legacy if he knew what he was going to do. I could think that too, yes. Right?

Like, you don't want to go out on the embarrassing Darby Crash Band show. They got Don Bowles back. Pat said that while they were rehearsing, it was scary. We had never played so fast, hard and tight. By the day of the show, nothing could touch us. Also, everyone that was there was like it was one of the best shows ever. Like, even Pat Smir said that was our best show ever. We played our best.

We were the most comfortable. The crowd totally loved us. It was sold out. John Doe said, when the germs played the last time, we didn't know anyone in the audience anymore. The club was filled of these strange characters you'd see in the decline. That's exactly true. That was wild. Who weren't in it for the art.

They were these damaged people who felt like this music was speaking to them. But the show was, by all accounts, insane. So good. Pat said, we thought maybe we should go back. This is really good. But it was one thing for me or Lorna or Don to go back. None of us had failed.

For him, it was like, oh, I have to go back and do the germs again because I failed with my solo band. I don't think I would have been very happy either. After the show, Darby, according to Pat, was begging him to come to the Okie Dog, like this wanted to have this big after party at the Okie Dog. Yeah. People would hang out there. Yeah.

And Pat said he was saying, please come. It's really important to me. And afterwards, I thought, oh shit, I didn't go to his goodbye party. My God, that was sort of rude. Because Darby and Lorna went, but not very many people went because it was pouring rain. Yeah. And I guess he was so depressed and despondent about that, that Lorna got worried.

And she hit up John Doe to ask him, like, oh, can you please talk to Darby? like I'm worried about him. And John Doe said later, like, by time he got around to doing it, it was too late. Because only four days later on December 7th of 1980 is when Darby Crash died by heroin overdose. That was on purpose. He left a note. The note was, my life, my leather, my love goes to Bosco, who was playing bass in the band. I don't want to go into, like, too much sort of detail here, but, like, basically,

He and Casey Cola together, according to her, and other people too because they were talking about it that night, decided, like, okay, tonight's the night. Before that, though, I just want to say that there was a couple other things that happened before it happened, which was that he had gone out to see Sexic, which was Gerber's band at Hong Kong Cafe. And Gerber said she begged him not to bring Robbie Huntley, because again, they had this sort of love triangle. and he came with Rob anyways, and Gerber was furious. She threw a drink in Rob's face, but she missed and she hit Darby in the face. And after the set she went to meet them, the three of them got into this screaming match, like a physical brawl. And Casey said that Darby was saying to Rob, well, are you staying over tonight or not? And Rob was like, just leave me alone, man, and pushed him away.

And so him and Casey Cole left, and on the way home, they got booze. And she said that they were, he was just like, should we just do it tonight? night because I guess they had been talking about it. A guy called Elliot Katz was there. Did you know him? Yeah. He apparently said that he knew what they were going to do, but he didn't know what to do because he didn't know if they were actually going to do it.

And he wanted to call the police, but he didn't want them to get, like, busted with drugs. They weren't actually going to do it. Darby went and bought $400 of China White, according to Casey. They went to Casey Cole's mom's house, which is on North Fuller. They both wrote their separate notes. And then according to her, he shot her up and then himself. And then she woke up in his arms and he did it. Yeah.

Do you remember, like, how you found out? Well, I remember that night, the night before. I mean, I remember them at the club. That was really tense and crazy. You were there at the sex sick show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then how I found out, I honestly don't remember the actual moment that I found out someone called me.

I'm not even remembering who it was right now. So that night before was like really tense and crazy. And at this point, is it fair to say like you were just like kind of not close with Darby anymore? Like maybe like. Yeah, I had pulled away because of all the craziness surrounding him. And that part made me really sad. You know, but I didn't want to be around those type of people or those type of. of like weird social games and energy and stuff like that.

Were you still close with Pat? I was pretty close with him, yeah. I mean, we were always on pretty fine terms and still are, you know. It was just such a hard, it was such a hard weird thing to do. It was something that you don't imagine happening, you know, like a, let alone like any kind of drug suicide or OD or anything. but you don't imagine your friends in this really good band, then the band breaks up. You know, it's just like a whole hard thing to negotiate emotionally

and figure out what am I doing? Am I sad? Am I angry? Should I let them have their space? Should I eat? It was just weird. And then I do remember that I was laying on my bed when I heard that he died.

That was just fucked. Did you feel like it had like an impact like on the punk scene in general? Like did you feel like things changed in any way after Darby's death? Yeah, I feel like they were starting to change anyway because it was just getting polarized. Like polarized. Yeah. Getting pulled in different directions, you know. And it was like one of those times when you have this little feeling like, oh, things are not.

going to be the same. And then you're like, am I making a big deal about this? Or is this just weird? Or is this actually really happening? But it was actually really happening. And I think a lot of people felt like that, especially after that show at the Starwood, that was just one thing. And then, like, everything else was just, it was just wild. I mean, we were, we were very young then, you know? It felt like this, like, kind of golden thing was dwindling or whatever. It did. That's what it felt like, you know? Like, there was, We were all very wild and very street savvy and stuff, but we were still young, you know. And it was just, it was a hard way of dealing with anything, you know.

It was just difficult. Any kind of a death is hard. A suicide from, you know, one of your best friends is really difficult. And it's hard to, there's no way you could be prepared for something like that, even if you thought you were. Yeah. It was very sad. There was some It was a really nice couple people said that the night he died

There was like an incredibly loud clap of thunder that night That was just like really unbelievable. And Paul Rossler in particular was like, what the fuck was that? And then the next day when he found out that Darby had died, he was like, oh, that was him. And then the next week he found out that Helen Keller was pregnant with their son, which I thought was kind of sweet, like the idea of like maybe there was like, I don't know that that was connected somehow.

And a couple people said that they were visited by his ghost, Rob Henley. I could see that happening for sure. Yeah. I mean, I believe in all that stuff because I've seen all that. Sure, yeah. And that's kind of the end of the germ story. I mean, Bosco returned to New York. He was childhood friends with the Beastie Boys with Mike D.

and Adam MCA Yock, and he did some groups with them. And, you know, the punk scene did continue in L.A. And obviously you were, you know, part of that X went on. A lot of these bands went on. other bands came up, alternative started. You know, we all know what happened.

Yeah, alternative, I know. But all of it wouldn't have happened. I thought alternative was the dumbest name ever. I mean, like, why the fuck? It's not a very good... Just call it rock and roll. It's not a very good name,

but none of it would have it existed without the germs. And what we don't speak of here is the second round of the germs that came after the movie because we don't recognize that here on this podcast. No, we don't.

Pleasant, thank you so much for coming on the first. podcast and talking about the germs and all of your experiences and just like painting such a vivid picture of just such a different and cool and vibrant L.A. that like I truly wish I had experienced. It was very amazing. It was an amazing time to grow up to be a young adult on the loose in the city of Angels. It was incredible. Well, thanks again and come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplaint.

Our guest today was Pleasant Gaiman. You can follow her on Instagram at Princess of Hollywood. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderman and edited by Adrian Bridges, with help from Justin Sales. Video production was by Jamie Ucic. Executive producers for Banspland are Gina Delvac and me, Yossi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Costantino and Jennifer Claven and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert,

and also Sean Fennessee, Alex Nelson, and The Goop Kitchen. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Vansplaine on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. I found a quailud in my house about probably like four or five years ago. Where did it go? My boyfriend put it in Lysite because it was already like 30. I mean. So funny. Yeah.