Charles Young was not met with open arms in London. Initially, in fact, he was not met at all, for Malcolm McClaren, the Sex Pistols’ mischievous, maverick manager, simply ignored the writer’s phone calls during his first two days in the city. Though Rolling Stone took pride in its roots as a counter-cultural magazine, by the mid-seventies it was firmly part of the establishment, in thrall to Laurel Canyon songwriters and MOR superstars: cover stars in 1976 included Neil Diamond, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Peter Frampton, teen pinup Donny Osmond and Christian crooner Pat Boone. When McClaren finally deigned to receive Young at his central London flat, he regarded the journalist as one might regard a ball of phlegm hacked up in a porcelain sink.
‘This band hates you,’ he loftily informed Young. ‘It hates your culture. Why can’t you lethargic, complacent hippies understand that? You need to be smashed.’
When he finally met McClaren’s charges, Young was horrified and fascinated in equal measure by the ‘four proletarian kids’ who’d provoked such outrage and revulsion in the UK. In a beautifully written article, titled ‘Rock Is Sick and Living in London’, the writer sketched out pen portraits of the men behind the myths: in his eyes, guitarist Steve Jones was a brash, lairy Jack The Lad who revelled in his band’s ‘bad boy’ status, drummer Paul Cook was thoughtful and unassuming, while cartoon-like bassist Sid Vicious was a somewhat pitiful, childlike, self-abusing simpleton.
Young found the band’s witheringly sarcastic frontman Johnny Rotten a more complex character to categorise. Despite Rotten doing his level best to be as obnoxious as possible to the visiting scribe, Young was impressed by the singer’s passion and obvious intelligence, and found the 21-year-old a not entirely dislikeable character.
On 19 August Young travelled to Wolverhampton to see the Pistols in concert. When the band took to the stage of Club Lafayette at the stroke of midnight, the writer was transfixed by the chaotic, violent spectacle in front of him and by Rotten in particular, whom he later hailed as ‘perhaps the most captivating performer I’ve ever seen’. He was convinced that the Pistols could be just the wake-up call that the moribund US music scene was crying out for.
‘Kids destroyed schools to the tune of $600 million in the U.S. last year,’ he noted towards the end of his article. ‘That’s a lot of anger that the Southern-California-Cocaine-and-Unrequited-Love Axis isn’t capable of tapping.’
By the time the Sex Pistols finally hit America’s West Coast in January 1978, however, they were a very different band. Vicious was by now a full-blown heroin addict, Rotten was at loggerheads with McClaren over his manipulative managerial style and Jones and Cook were tiring of the self-destructive circus that had long since enveloped their band. With perverse, puckish logic, McClaren had shied away from booking the Pistols into America’s most Anglophile, punk-cognisant cities – New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit – opting instead to schedule dates in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Tulsa and San Francisco, gambling that America’s media would lap up the opportunity to see how the more conservative Bible Belt states would react to these delinquent scumbags pitching up in their towns. Hysterical television reports sensationalising the violence at the band’s English gigs duly followed: Atlanta’s Channel 2 news team upped the ante by claiming that the band routinely vomited and committed ‘sex acts’ upon one another as part of their stage show.
Those hoping to witness Caligulan frenzy on the Pistols’ début US tour would have been horribly disappointed: the shows were remarkable only for the sense of anti-climax which accompanied them. The biggest problem the Pistols faced lay in the yawning chasm between their terrifying reputation and the rather more prosaic reality: audiences expecting to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were confronted instead with little more than a workmanlike rock ’n’ roll band.
By the time the Pistols pitched up at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on 14 January it was all over bar the shouting. The Winterland show saw the quartet play to a crowd of over 5,000 people – more than they’d drawn in the previous six shows combined – but by now Rotten was sick to his cavities of the whole sorry pantomime. At the end of a perfunctory set the band returned for one encore, a ramshackle, seemingly interminable trawl through The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’. As the song limped to its climax, Rotten knelt at the lip of the stage, his arms folded across his chest, fixing his audience with a sullen glare.
‘Ah-ha-ha,’ he laughed joylessly. ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.’ His microphone clunked to the floor, and the Pistols’ great rock ’n’ roll swindle was over.
Among the audience at Winterland that night were 19-year-old Eric Boucher, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and two friends from Hermosa Beach, California, 22-year-old Keith Morris and 23-year-old Greg Ginn, who played together in a Stooges/MC5-influenced garage rock band called Panic. Far from feeling cheated, and unaware that the Pistols had just played their last show – Johnny Rotten would announce his exit from the group just four days later – all three young men walked out of Winterland feeling elated, energised and inspired by what they had seen. Six months later Boucher formed his own punk band, Dead Kennedys, and adopted the stage name Jello Biafra. Six months after that, Ginn and Morris changed the name of their band to the more militant, threatening-sounding Black Flag.
It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that the American hardcore movement was born, like a phoenix from the ashes, out of the death of the Sex Pistols’ punk rock dream. By the summer of 1977, while the Pistols were finishing up the recording of their début album Never Mind the Bollocks at Wessex Sound Studios in London, there was already a fertile, diverse punk rock scene in Los Angeles, centred around the Masque, a dingy basement club just off Hollywood Boulevard. Here bands such as the Weirdos, The Zeros, X, The Bags and The Germs – the latter fronted by charismatic, nihilistic Iggy/Bowie acolyte Darby Crash and his guitar-playing best friend Pat Smear – played short, riotous sets for messed-up Hollywood club kids.
Keith Morris and Greg Ginn were occasional visitors to the Masque but found themselves out of step with the self-absorbed, narcissistic, peacocking club regulars, who took one withering look at the suburban beach kids with their long hair, faded jeans and T-shirts, and slammed doors in their faces.
‘We weren’t in it for the fashion,’ Morris told Black Flag biographer Stevie Chick, ‘we were in it for the music, its intensity, and the volume.’ The cliquish snobbery they encountered in Hollywood only enhanced the alienation felt by Morris and his friends, and strengthened their desire to create a new noise, without waiting for anyone’s permission or acceptance.
Black Flag’s début EP then was a startling declaration of independence, in both content and form. Released on guitarist Greg Ginn’s own newly created SST label in January 1979, the Nervous Breakdown EP featured four taut, wired tales of caucasian psychosis, delivered at breakneck speed, with extreme aggression. From Keith Morris’s agitated delivery of Ginn’s tension-filled lyrics – ‘I’m about to have a nervous breakdown / My head really hurts / If I don’t find a way outta here / I’m gonna go berserk …’ – through to the pen-drawn cover art (contributed by Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon) which depicted a terrified-looking man holding up a chair to fend off another visibly distressed, aggravated individual with clenched fists raised, it was a record every bit as viciously confrontational as The Stooges’ 1969 début.
By the time filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began documenting the LA punk scene for her 1981 movie The Decline of Western Civilization, Morris and Ginn were no longer playing together (the singer having bailed out to form his own band, the more frantic but less threatening Circle Jerks) but the Nervous Breakdown EP had become one of the cornerstones of a new punk rock community.
Born in South Bay towns such as Hermosa Beach, San Pedro, Santa Ana and Huntingdon Beach, American hardcore was, in its earliest incarnation, the sound of California screaming.