No Justice: L. A. Punk As Noir

No Justice:  L. A. Punk As Noir

For nearly a century, Los Angeles has constituted the outmost point of the United States, geographically and psychologically.  Moving down and out from America’s Northeast point of origin, it’s as far away as you can get.  Paradise at the end of the rainbow, bottom of the bottomless pit – it’s been all this and more to many Americans.

Even the environment evinces a certain extremism.  There’s the famous brilliance of the ocean and sun, of course, but eerier, more singular scenes as well – the blinding, salmon-tinted brightness of the late afternoon light, the sharp, dry air at three in the morning, when the smog is gone and you notice the scent of eucalyptus and wonder if you heard someone screaming across the street.

This is the city Raymond Chandler wrote about; its presence in the arts of Los Angeles has waxed and waned in the decades since the classic noir era.  Among its most striking and pronounced manifestations was L. A. punk and the music that came in its wake.  Here are a few personal favorites, in rough chronological order.

1. Germs, “Strange Notes.”  The version I have in mind here is the studio take from (GI) (1979); the live version from their final show at the Starwood (1980; finally issued complete by Rhino in 2012) outdoes it for sheer desperate abandon, but lacks the studio version’s precise and searing clarity of darkness.  Over breakneck punk rock on the verses, the rhythm section tumbling forward while Pat Smear’s guitar weaves between roaring chords and gnarled single-note swirls, Darby Crash snarls the tale of Billy Druid, on the run from his crimes, his desires, his friends, his enemies, himself.  On the wordless choruses, it all catches up and stares him right in the face – an immense, crystalline guitar chord hovers in mid-air while the bass and drums stairstep down in afterimage shock, then the chord crashes down in thunderous minor key shards.  Crash lived this kind of endless chase with his demons – and they caught him, too.
2. Go-Gos, “This Town.”   The perennial semi-competent little sisters of the early L. A. punk scene, the Go-Gos came roaring out of its ruins at the turn of the ‘80s with a sound just as sharp and desperate, but air-sprayed with a layer of pure-pop shimmer.  This track ends the first side of their ’81 debut L.P., “Beauty and the Beat”; it’s an anthem to the glamor of night life on the real Hollywood’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams – hookers, junkies, “catty girls and pretty boys,” “discarded stars like worn-out cars.”  Starting out with the rhythm section’s wound-tight stutter and junkyard surf-guitar, following Kathy Valentine’s winding bassline through side-streets and down along the Strip, it ascends to a luminous minor-key glide on the chorus, Belinda purring/sneering, “This town is so glamorous” up top.
3. The Adolescents, “Kids of the Black Hole.”  These guys were among the toughest and most tune-savvy of Orange County’s hardcore pioneers; this song, from their self-titled 1982 debut, is their epic statement, kind of like a cross between “Born to Run” and “A Clockwork Orange.”  Written by the great Rikk Agnew and driven by his visionary guitar harmonics, it tells the story of “Unit 2,” the prefab suburban housing block where the band and their friends lived out “the nights of careless drinking,” “the nights of violence,” “the nights of noise,” until it all came to an end and “no sound is heard from Unit 2, where there was once so much to do.”  After a spare, haunted intro, the band locks into an iron-fisted, skittering punk-rock soundscape that conjures the entire vast neon-lit grid of L. A. suburbia glittering in the darkness.  Ramping up the pressure on the bridge until it bursts into a chaotic scrawl of lead guitar, they bear down on one last mad ride through the chorus, then end cold, leaving vocalist Tony Cadena muttering “kids of the black hole” into the void.
4. Cheifs, “No Justice.”  The title of this song could serve to describe this band’s career.   The Cheifs [sic] were the one band ever produced by Darby Crash and had cuts on the earliest SST comps, yet they remained under-recorded by the time they broke up.  This song illustrates well what a loss that was.  A block-busting bassline, rumbling drums and guitar as thick as sewer smoke rushing up from an open manhole drive a classic noir narrative:  A stick-up kid gets in way over his head, walks out of a crime scene straight into an ambush by the cops.  The way the singer drawls, “You’re gonna die in a hail of lead, comin’ down on you from above,” right before the chorus goes far beyond snotty into some sort of apotheosis of dead-eyed cool.
5. Concrete Blonde, “Over Your Shoulder.”  From their self-titled 1986 debut; their later stuff is kind of aimless, but they started out a hot Hollywood gutter/bar-band rock and roll unit, with pointy postpunk and Paisley Underground accents.  This track is a fast freeway blaster, with vocalist Johnette as a beady-eyed stalker hiding in the shadows, always only a breath away.  There’s a great guitar break in the middle, where clashing waves of razor-edged, echoing jangle conjure a paranoid, white-knuckled hall of mirrors that projects Johnette’s Jodie Arias-esque threats into three hallucinatory dimensions.
6. L 7, “Can I Run.”   This one is kind of “Over Your Shoulder” seen from the other end of the binoculars.  From the legendary all-women grunge-scuzzrock pioneers’ 1994 “Hungry for Stink” LP, it paints a picture of life at the mercy of a nameless, anonymous but very personal “enemy” hiding in plain sight on the sun-blinded L.A. streets, waiting to strike at any moment.  The music takes the band’s signature steady, low-end fuzz piledriver and winds into a machine of teeth-gritting tension, only slightly attenuated when the guitarist lets off thin, piercing squalls of dirty feedback at the end of the chorus.  When Donita Sparks snarls, “I’m scared every fucking day,” you’ll swear you just saw someone moving furtively from the corner of your eye.
7. Dum Dum Girls, “Jail La La.”   From their 2010 self-titled debut, when they were still quite clangy and angular – ideally situated to reproducing in sound the experience of waking up locked in a cell.  The music is more straightforwardly girl-group/surf/garage-oriented than their later stuff, and Dee Dee invests her la-la-la-la-la’s with the mixture of giddiness and chagrin appropriate to this sort of situation.  The whole thing reminds me of Elliott Gould’s waking-up-in-jail scene in Altman’s great latter-day Chandler adaptation, “The Long Goodbye.”  See that one, and if you want ‘80s punk/post-punk/new-wave-inflected L. A. noir on celluloid, try “The Hidden,” “To Live And Die In L. A.,” Wim Wenders’ “The State of Things,” and “Repo Man,” definitely “Repo Man.” . . .