L.A.'s Punk History Comes to Light in 'Under the Big Black Sun'

In 1976, musician John Doe set out from his home in Baltimore, bound for Los Angeles. He was behind the wheel of “a yellow 1970 International Travelall with a 1960 Fender Jazz ass, a Traynor bass amp, records, stereo, clothes, a few pots, pans and dishes,” offers Doe. “No furniture that I can recall and probably $1,500, which seemed like a lot.”

It would prove to be an eventful move. Within the next year, he would meet Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake. Together they would form the band X, a group that would play an integral part in the germinating L.A. punk scene. Almost 40 years later, that vibrant, creative, influential period is the focus of "Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk," a book wrangled together by Doe and music industry veteran Tom DeSavia.

The chapters are written by the musicians, scene makers and music critics who populated the surprisingly small scene centered in Hollywood around a vortex of low-rent apartments, dingy clubs and discount liquor stores. It was the unholy union of fading L.A. noir and the kinetic, upstart world of punk.

“So these people had to talk about what the city looked like and what it felt like and what it smelled like,” says Doe of the contributors. And what did L.A. punk smell like in 1977?

“Sweat, beer, a little bit of throw up on the side. Just a smattering of vomit! You know what? Punk rock smelled like Los Angeles and that was dusty and there was sun and when it rained it was beautiful and it was the same kind of smell that you got from any good book.”

Named for the 1982 X song “Under the Big Black Sun,” the book was the brainchild of DeSavia, a self-confessed “record nerd” from the Valley.

“I was not in the punk scene,” he says. “I was a fan, I went with other kids to the shows, I bought the albums, I was a consumer.” He witnessed his first show in ’82. He was 15, he was wearing an argyle sweater and it changed his life.

“First time I saw X I was terrified,” recalls DeSavia. “I thought I was going to get pummeled. And then at some point everything refocused and I watched it and I got completely hypnotized by it and the poison seeped in. I remember standing out back and seeing John load some gear that night and thinking he was just the coolest guy on the planet."

Fast forward to 1996.

“I went to work for Elektra records and the first project I worked on there was something I begged to do, which was an X anthology called 'Beyond and Back.' ” While co-producing the album with the band, he became friends with the coolest guy on the planet.

He started asking questions about the golden years of the L.A. punk world, which was fast becoming a footnote to New York and London’s scenes.

“And I quickly found out 90 percent of what I thought I knew was wrong, and everything had a better story than I could have ever imagined,” DeSavia says. “So at that moment I was like, 'John, you got to write a book.' He had no interest.”

“I didn’t want to do the work,” admits Doe. “It's hard. It's discipline. I'm not the most disciplined person. So, in a bolt of inspiration, I thought, ‘I know, I'll get other people to write, 'cause I'm also not comfortable with being the authority and the historian. So everybody has their truth.”

Forty years ago, Hollywood was filthy, cheap, and dangerous, which made it the perfect spawning ground for punk rock. And in late ’70’s Los Angeles, the term “punk” threw a wide embrace that included the raw, edgy power of bands like Fear to the blues and rockabilly infusion of the Blasters to the Go-Go’s hooky power pop. The only rule was to be outside the mainstream.

Pleasant Gehman, who refers to herself as “an aging punk rock lady,” was a fixture on the scene. She published the fanzine Lobotomy, and wrote for most of the local publications that delved into the scene.

“In those days it felt really communal,” she says, “so whatever you did, you were doing it with a lot of people.” Gehman -- the only author in the book who still lives in Hollywood proper, in view of the iconic sign on the hill -- reveals a time travel glimpse of that communal scene.

“It's Saturday night in 1977, and I would be in a room either at somebody's apartment, like Joan Jett's apartment across the street from the Whisky, or at the Canterbury [an apartment building notorious for its punk tenants] with a bunch of other people,” she recalls. “We’d all be putting on makeup, all putting on different badges and primping and drinking and gossiping and screaming and yelling."

"There'd be the Clash or the Damned playing on the stereo and we'd all be getting ready to go out. The feeling of excitement was so insane that now, about 40 years later, I still can't differentiate whether it was my own adolescent excitement or if it really was that electric. It just felt different than any other time in my life.”

Fueled by all those yelling, primping, drinking people, bands and audiences were often interchangeable, something San Pedro’s Minutemen discovered when they first ventured north on the 110 freeway to investigate rumors of something happening.

“There's this scene up in Hollywood where people write their own songs. We're like, whoa!” bassist Mike Watt says.

"We go up there and the Bags and the Weirdos were playing four bands for four bucks at the Whisky. And you didn't sit, actually the guy playing could be standing next to you, they’re like taking turns. And you could tell dudes were just learning, too. And no fear! I looked at D. Boone and go, we can do this! You get something going with like-minded people who don't fit in, and you make a kind of parallel universe."

“Wasn't it a great time?!” says vocalist Teresa Covarrubias. “It really felt like something different was happening.”

Covarrubias and her group, The Brat, came from East L.A., an area of largely Mexican-American neighborhoods across the Los Angeles River from Hollywood, and a long way from punk rock.

“In East L.A. in Boyle Heights, that community is very isolated in a way, as far as what gets in there and popular culture, so I really felt alone,” says Covarrubias. “I was really the only person I knew who was aware of that type of music. It was a great epiphany, to know that this was a way for you to get your voice heard, and that punk vehicle -- which was very in your face and aggressive -- just seemed perfect for the situation I was in at that time.”

“It just seemed like there wasn't a lot of limits,” she continues. “It kind of blew the whole performance thing wide open and changed what it meant to be onstage. You didn't have to be a virtuoso on guitar, it was more like the spirit behind it and the heart behind what you wanted to do, and the expression. Just the act of expressing yourself, you know?"

Along with acts like Los Lobos and Robert “El Vez” Lopez, The Brat was redefining the East L.A. stereotype of what Covarrubias says was “all about gangs and violence.”

“When people would look at Chicano music or that culture, there was a certain thing that they expected to see,” she continues. “And I think us doing this music that was not as traditional was kind of invigorating because it wasn't what people expected.”

Hailing from the foreign land of blue-collar Downey, a whopping 20 miles from Hollywood and Vine, the roots-fueled Blasters at first found themselves stonewalled by unresponsive club bookers, says songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin.

“The nuts and bolts of breaking into Hollywood from Downey or wherever was difficult,” Alvin says. “In those days I was the guy driving around from club to club with a little demo cassette saying, 'Uh, we got a band, we sorta play blues and rockabilly, ya know ...' and I would get rejected constantly.”

The musicians, on the other hand, were a big supportive family.

“The scene was very, very diverse. It accepted women, it accepted gays, it accepted straights, you had a lot of phony anarchists and communists, you even had one or two Republicans. Every race, every gender, every political persuasion, every everything was united by the music and that was a great thing.”

Back to X, and back to John Doe.

“This is where I'm going to get a little spiritual on you,” he says, a dark and fancy beer at his elbow. “I think if you can envision something and see something and imagine it, you can do it. A lot of people saw themselves in the future doing stuff, saw themselves on stage doing stuff, saw themselves inhabiting this character that they invented. I wasn't born John Doe, but I created John Doe out of something. I think if you see it and you feel it and you just know it, you'll find a way to get there. And I think that's what we did.”

Singer-songwriter Exene Cervenka -- Doe’s partner in X for 39 years and counting -- sums it up in her chapter in the audio version of "Under the Big Black Sun":

We were a living spectacle that terrified and confused the traffic on Sunset and Vine, that broke the TV, replaced the radio, infiltrated the record companies, became the big stories the media was forced to tell, and maybe gave the government a bit of a scare. But the best thing we had going for us was originality. Nothing quite like L.A. punk had ever existed, or would, ever again.

It was a moment in time that began with a handful of bands on a handful of stages, and ended when those bands either fell apart or got bigger. But the voices in this book never let you forget one thing: It was all a hell of a lot of fun.