Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)

 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch coke straws and first canes; our weary eyes are trapped within withered faces atop middle-aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, livers shot are from Hep-C and whiskey, but hey hey hey! as the kid who sang for Black Flag (before Rollins - below left) would snarl...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X, and go home. Pogoing and slam-dancing (as it was called) around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a 'mosh pit' (far different scene than some friendly slam-dancing where you're just whirling around bumping into each other like pinballs rather than "helicoptering" your meaty fists). Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted, battered, and alive, triumphant, relieved it was over, we took our shoes off an watched NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network or my duped tapes of RUDE BOY, REPO MAN and GIMME SHELTER for the zillionth time while carefully marking the water lines on dad's liquor bottles, so we'd know just what we could reasonably get away with. We knew of--but never got a chance to see--THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981), Penelope Sheeris' ground-floor documentary about the early days of the LA punk scene. We heard it was far far tawdrier than any other concert film, so tawdry it had and has never been on DVD or tape.... until this week....

Finally America is ready. Spheeris' wrist-openingly grim post-op LA moldy-carpeted clang of a howl is here and man it lives up to its rep of sheer tawdriness. Onetwothree-GO! Our whole fucking life is a wreck! It seems we got so complacent, having no genuinely tawdry film live remotely close to our imaginations' now upscale, gated neighborhood, that now, when one finally busts in and pees on our mattress, we're at first so shocked we think it's raining. Dude, last time we were the ones peeing. Now somehow we're the ones holding the sheets? How'd that happen? Did Spheeris wait til we were too old to identify with these skeevy brats on purpose?

Darby, sings into 'the mic' 

Irregardless! The full skeevy glory of Ms. Spheeris's no-holds barred musical documentary can finally be seen and heard. Not only are music rights all aligned but the band's limpid corpses have grown so befouled from punk rock sell-out options no further degradation can e'er befoul them. From the apocalyptic audience-bashing and riot-starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos, this grotty full-frame 16mm film is never going to look like Kubrick or smell like Delmonicos, but the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway, from within that City Gardens nicotine coma. It was meant for those teenage Night Flight Saturdays, blurry from arial static and USA network watermarks, not Blu-ray.

I always needed to take an inch down my dad's Old Crow water line, and a Silkwood shower, after a trip to City Gardens. It wasn't a matter of punk rock energy but of feeling skeeved out. I'd forgotten about that ritual, til this 'film' came rushing up the televisual sleeve like a rough, unlubricated hand job. What a shitty bunch of human beings these punks are, after all! I, of course, presume they're putting on a bit of a show for Penelope's camera. After all, the real message of the film is to sell the anarchy and dirt of punk as a performance, as a kind of artistic anti-movement, to live up to the tawdry hype that so infected our early 80s poseur punk imagination.

Naturally, when disparaging the citizens on display in this film, I don't mean the artists from band X. To call them the most charismatic of the cast is to damage the word 'charisma' through comparison. Let's stay they are only the ones you'd want to rescue if the club was burning down. As for the rest, Slash writer Kickboy is the most coherent and 'forward-to-Goth'-looking, and Darby of the Germs is the most long-range offensive (just seeing his inward-twisting townie teeth near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room in concentric spewing arcs). Perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome mania, Spheeris gives us what feels like six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement where the carpet was has been subjected to at least one flood. The whole vibe seems to slow into a druggy time warp as Darby crawls atop speaker cabinets like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88. You think he gives a shit about how bad that carpet smells? If he does, he keeps it to himself. He's such a trouper. Even his teeth are straight, like a real gentlemen's.

In fact, Doe's such a presence he keeps Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop by association, and Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period, makes up the rest. It's an unusual and welcome touch, especially considering the snarling incoherence of the shouted vocals.

Then again, the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant (deliver us, Generallissimo Tso!). The 'Discipline' do what feels like 23 songs that plod so monotonously through the middle of the film they make the Swans seem like Matmos. What? Too 'Other Music' for you? Fuck you! Onetwothree-FOUR! By the time you read this, Other Music has probably long gone (PS - 2/16 - it has). And anyway, Billy Zoom wouldn't think so. Billy, why are you so serene? Even in the midst of skinheads bashing one another inches from his amp old Billy never seems like he's anywhere but on a peaceful hayride in the country. Good old Billy! But then... you left, didn't you, Billy! And X released "See How We Are," still chasing that AOR rainbow. 

At any rate, the most disturbing bits come towards the end, from some cute young boys giving black and white talking head interviews, utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking other kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet their own teeth are perfect --hmmm, are they just shining Penelope on?) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle combative-for-the-sake-of-combativeness of Fear's Lee Ving. Looking/acting like the unwanted child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn, Ving's hate speech might be just an act to get everyone's punk rage blood up for the camera. A girl declares herself a dyke and lunges at him, but it's never clear if she's just throwing down in the spirit of the thing, or is really gay and pissed).

That's the insidious thing about hate speech. Fox News, after all, uses it to sell air space. If they mean half of what they say, they'd probably be dead from the toxic fumes of their own vitriol. It's a show. If it's not, excuse me if I pretend it is so I don't die from the toxic fumes of my own vitriol. Whatever virtriol even means, it's a killer.

Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But again (or for the first time) it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is realy something to see. Even when they're at emotional odds, their music only flourishes from the friction. Singing as frankly and honestly as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric, theirs is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist. Aye, his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the band's old bassist during an all-night acid test. That very next night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw.

Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos before the show, there's no doubt Jon Doe is destined for stardom, or at least a future side gig as a supporting actor; and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth whose target isn't King Duncan but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember seeing X at City Gardens in 1984, right up against the stage, Exene smiling beaming above me as the shoving whirl of slam dancers careened around, knocking me forward and back, then I was about to get clocked by this giant skinhead, I saw her watching as this other skinhead, even bigger, gently moved me away and shoved his fist right into the guy's face, showering me in the skinhead's nose blood instead of vice versa. The bouncer grabbed them both and shoved them out the door and there I was, bloody and OK, and I looked up and Exene was beaming down at me with a huge smile, like the punk rock virgin Mary at my punk baptism.  (PS - See my lovingly detailed X discography "See How They War") Punk. It was a big tent.

That was a real moment - but there are moments in the footage when we wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns about the words, lingo and culture of the punk scene. Claude "Kickboy" (harumph!) Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of spokesperson for the punk movement. His sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine--he thinks. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras. When someone's a real brawler, they look like Mickey Rourke, or a toothless Glasgow soccer hooligan. They're certainly not all pretty and unmussed like these lads, at least not for long. So is this just say, 80% bullshit, just like most suburban punks themselves (i.e. me, in the early 80s) were?

X marks ze Monster

I dropped punk-poseur look from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' fan friends were gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being just naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies. When I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks. Slam-dancing and pogoing had become moshing. By then I was old enough for a wristband, so I drank in the back... sticking my head out only now and again to see what was going on. Eventually my band even played there, opening for the Spin Doctors. But that was the early 90s. Punk had split into a dozen warring factions by then and white boy punk-funk was the pre-grunge rage.

Well, either way in the early 80s I was too mellow to go full thrash, too uptight to be a squatter, too hetero to be what today would be called goth or emo, and too louche to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as one used to wear) punk was just being British. Now hardcore was called 'thrash' and then grunge splintered it still further, and today the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear would be considered deeply problematic. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" is just one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue, which is an insider Vice magazine way of saying white supremacist.

Then again, hearing of all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash).

That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched out everyone he knows

I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with new wave punk-approved but-soon-to-be-New-Wave-only oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery done by insecure teenager and at any rate you can't keep both your street cred AND a record contract, so let the worthless one former go. Street cred? Shit cred, mate. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive than now, even if the 'alive' part is mostly virtual. The sell-outs are enshrined and the hold-outs are dust in the wind. If that's all they wanted, bra-fuckin-vo.

Spheeris, still smokin'

Times have gone moldy as that punk show basement carpet but it's not just us or that long-tossed shag who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid of the film. These vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays-- throwing their coiled squatter angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing--seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into that all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Spheeris' 1981 film takes place four years earlier and they're like any other fresh-faced kids. Artistic, drug-addicted, boozed-up, bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under florescent lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos --they were playing every lousy gig like was the last show on earth--but boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!