We Got the Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story of L.A. Punk

by Marc Spitz, Brendan Mullen

Taking us back to late ’70s and early ’80s Hollywood—pre-crack, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan— We Got the Neutron Bomb re-creates word for word the rage, intensity, and anarchic glory of the Los Angeles punk scene, straight from the mouths of the scenesters, zinesters, groupies, filmmakers, and musicians who were there.

“California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt.” —Kim Fowley

“The Runaways were rebels, all of us were. And a lot of people looked up to us. It helped a lot of kids who had very mediocre, uneventful, unhappy lives. It gave them something to hold on to.” —Cherie Currie

“The objective was to create something for our own personal satisfaction, because everything in our youthful and limited opinion sucked, and we knew better.” —John Doe

“The Masque was like Heaven and Hell all rolled into one. It was a bomb shelter, a basement. It was so amazing, such a dive ... but it was our dive.” —Hellin Killer

“At least fifty punks were living at the Canterbury. You’d walk into the courtyard and there’d be a dozen different punk songs all playing at the same time. It was an incredible environment.” —Belinda Carlisle

Assembled from exhaustive interviews, We Got the Neutron Bomb tells the authentically gritty stories of bands like the Runaways, the Germs, X, the Screamers, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks—their rise, their fall, and their undeniable influence on the rock ’n’ roll of today.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Punk, History, Memoir, Pop Culture, Rock N Roll

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Marc Spitz was a former senior writer at Spin magazine. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Maxim, Blender, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Nylon and the New York Post. Spitz is the co-author (with Brendan Mullen) of the 2001 LA punk oral history We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk. He has authored two novels, How Soon is Never (2003) and Too Much, Too Late (2006), as well as Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day. His biography of David Bowie, entitled God and Man was released in the Fall of 2009.

Several of his plays, including Retail Sluts (1998), The Rise And Fall of the Farewell Drugs (1998), ...Worry, Baby (1999), I Wanna Be Adored (1999), Shyness is Nice (2001), Gravity Always Wins (2003), The Name of This Play is Talking Heads (2005), and Your Face Is A Mess (2007) have been produced in New York City. 'His holiday short "Marshmallow World" was produced at The Brick Theatre in Brooklyn in December of 2007. Shyness is Nice was revived by the Alliance Repertory Theatre company in Los Angeles in 2003, and The Name of this Play is Talking Heads was produced in the summer of 2006 on Nantucket. A new play, 4, a one-act comedy will be produced in the spring of 2009.

Spitz has spoken at Columbia University (on playwrighting) and DePaul University (on journalism), and appeared as a "talking head" on MTV, VH1, MSNBC.

Reviews

[RandomAnthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

This list emerges when I play California punk rock word association:

Black Flag
SST records
X
Flipper
The Dead Kennedys
Some other bands
The Decline of Western Civilization
The Minutemen

I don't mean to be all name-droppy. I've learned my musical knowledge, of which I'm pathetically and unreasonably proud, is incomplete to the point of embarrassment. I was too young (yay!) for most of the classic punk years and have spent decades hearing grandma and granpa scenesters five or six years older than me drone on about how much better the “scene” (barf!) was before all us little hardcore kids ruined it. Whatever. We Got The Neutron Bomb is pretty good. I now can add, when playing California punk word association:

Tom Waits getting in a fistfight with some guy over Alice Bag (sp?).

The Screamers and The Weirdos. Both sound interesting on paper.

The idea that some people consider Jim Morrison a precursor of California punk. This disturbs me more than I can express. I fucking hate The Doors. Yes, I know their keyboard player is on X's “The World's A Mess It's In My Kiss”, one of my favorite songs ever, but...I don't care. Jim Morrison was lame.

Belinda Carlisle (sp?) in her fat, pre Go Gos days.

David Bowie's importance to both the NY and LA scenes. Were I completing a Venn diagram with LA punk on one side and NY punk on the other, Bowie would be in the middle.

The Runaways. I knew about them already, I guess, from the movie and Lita Ford videos, but I gained new respect for Joan Jett, especially.

This book utilizes the same chatty, “artfully cut and paste interview segments into a narrative” format perfected in this volume's NY predecessor, Please Kill Me. I'm from Chicago and maintain only a passing interest in most of these bands and their history but I liked the book well enough to stay up late Wednesday night so I could finish. I read Please Kill Me maybe four or five years ago, so my memory has faded, but this volume seemed more fun than that one. The California punks seemed less affected than the NY punks. The California punks embraced the theater and spectacle with less of a distant cool, from what I can tell, and with more of an ADD kid's enthusiastic spazziness. Except for the heroin, I guess. Heroin would land in the middle of the Venn diagram, too. And while some of the end-of-scene bands (DK, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, etc.) were seminal influences on my teenage years, this book glosses over that era. But I liked We Got The Neutron Bomb and you already, based on your background, can probably discern whether or not you'll like it, too.

(By the way, I filter my perceptions of California punk through my friend James, who grew up in the area back then. In turn, I assume all California punks 1) know James, and 2) are kind of like James. He now lives in Villa Park, Illinois, where he plays chess and camps in his living room with my godson, Milo. This conflation is fair to neither James nor California punk history. Sorry.)

[Liana Polimeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so hard to rate because on one hand, this book was incredibly fun to read, and on the other hand... I don't actually know how well it was done/how much of it I should be taking seriously. It is an oral history by way of snippets of past interviews pasted together to almost seem like a cohesive story and conversation. That alone makes you wonder how much is cut out and edited to just make the story flow better. As with any oral history there was obviously some conflicting information (and I did like seeing multiple sides to the stories) but there was also a section that had a quote (a section about playing at wong's and hong's) that was assigned to two different people. Unless they all just had the EXACT same words to say about the places (this seems unlikely?), the editors of this book messed up. At the very least they messed up in allowing the quote to be printed twice even if it was said by two different people in some interview in the 80s. It makes the rest seem messy and unreliable. Ah well, other than that I learned a ton of new information and it was like real housewives of LA punk - so basically it was great.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I'm all over this book I'm not going to review it (other than the five stars), however I just want to comment that some reviewers have gone into a New York vs. Los Angeles punk debate. That wasn't Brendan Mullen's intention: he simply wanted to document a brief period of time when the Hollywood punk scene was a strange, underground phenomenon.

I think Brendan should have put a time period in the title (1977-1980) as it would have been less disappointing for readers expecting SST and Orange County bands. The title is a little too sweeping, but that could have been attributable to the publishers, too. Who knows? At any rate, it's a decent book about the Hollywood punk scene, but even by my own admission not the most comprehensive one.

[teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is, The Untold Story of LA Punk. It is an oral history of the LA punk movement in the 70's and 80's--a parallel to the NY book Please Kill Me.

If you have seen the movie, The Mayor Sunset Strip, about Rodney Bingenheimer you will be familiar with some of the main characters at the beginning of the movement--Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley.

I think after reading this I should finally try and see The Decline of Western Civilization.

[Limey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It kind of makes sense to me in terms of music to make the 70s actually something like 1972 to 10 years later, and this book tells the story of LA punk over pretty much that timescale, from early beginnings in an underground yet open and accessible hard-partying, glitter-rock alternative to the more sedate singer-songwriter and country-rock mainstream of the day, through to around the 'point' at which the differing agenda of suburban kids eventually attracted to punk turns it towards what then becomes 80s American hardcore. It's inclusive, talking about the successful and the unsuccessful, the bands but also the club managers, the café owners, the audience, the neighbours, the landlords, the parents and siblings, the cops, the hustlers, the pimps, the serial killer, the passersby, the visiting bands, whoever is there or connected and whatever is going on there or around. It has that nice lack of clear boundaries both temporally and spatially that makes it seem credibly authentic. Where punk starts and ends is unclear, what exactly caused it and what it caused for those touched by it is unclear. And that was maybe what punk was all about, living by that which is real but not clearly manageable, there but not always convenient, being authentic, warts'n'all, so Brendan was arguably using his lessons from that experience to inform how he went about this. In terms of bands it maybe can't all be here, but with The Runaways, The Mau Maus, The Screamers, The Weirdos, The Germs, Black Randy, The Bags, X, The Blasters, The Gun Club, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, The Middle Class, The Adolescents, and more, it's hard to say the landscape isn't properly surveyed. I won't list all the clubs, or residences, or 'scenesters', but they're covered enough to seem equally as real and significant.

Brendan Mullen uses the same technique here as in Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs. He talked to as many people involved in the events as he could, using some older material, and some written, but all simply words from 'players' in the events relating their recollection and perception of it all. Then he's taken snippets of that and placed them in order to give a story that is mainly chronological, deviating from that occasionaly only to follow some thematic thread and/or add greater context, so you basically get told the whole story, people's first-hand view of events and developments, placed together, with the author's voice only being where he himself was there and has something to relate, putting himself in just like all the other 'characters'.

As the founder of the Masque, a basement in a building on the southwest corner of where North Cherokee Avenue crosses Hollywood Boulevard (here , the alley is now blocked with a gate), which he took over as rehearsal space and which mutated into an underground punk venue, Brendan Mullen was therefore not only close to all the people and events, but as much a 'mover' in all that occurred as maybe anyone else, and not just as an observing club proprietor, but actively engaged with the punks, socially, musically, practically, emotionally. I never met him but reading articles by him, reading obituaries of him, and watching him in some videos showed me that he was the kind of sharp, open and humanistic kind of person whose books would surely be worth reading. Incidentally the basement is still there and used to store records or media or something and the graffitti is still on the walls. There are photosets online and videos on YouTube showing it since, one with Brendan Mullen himself in the 80s, another very recently.

By the way, just across Hollywood Boulevard also still stands 'The Canterbury', the home of many of the 'scenesters' and another 'fermentation' spot for much of this culture (here), known now as I write this as 'Alexa Artiste' and apparently, according to yelp reviews, still not such a cosy place to live in Hollywood. I'm sure with time I could provide a veritable 'Google tour' of many of the locations talked about in this book, and that gives an indication of the feel of it: it's very much located in the physical reality of places and real-life interaction, real physicality, very far from the distance, virtuality and abstraction of our times. I think punk was even in part a reaction to a similar kind of 'abstraction via tv' (and media in general) over the previous decades, and maybe reading about it might awaken us a little from our dreams and inspire a return to reality in us. I went and looked at The Masque's loxcation when I was in Hollywood, but maybe I should have touched its walls. But then dirt is right here, under this very building, 2 continents and an ocean away, and real relationship is potentiated wherever you find people. Life is wherever you are: these people chose to open up to it where they were and something just as authentic and important can equally become reality where you are.

One interesting aspect of the technique used to put this together is how the stories don't fully tie up, how things are remembered and even more so how they are interpreted by those recounting the events, especially as concerns agency and motivation, i.e. who instigated what and why, or who did what precisely and how exactly it happened. The result actually solidifies the history and gives it at least 3 dimensions, being seen from various angles and becoming fuller and richer, and probably as true as could be when you paint in what sense you can from forming a picture of your own that might reconcile the contradictions, or filling in the gaps, or maybe a little reading between the lines. It also creates a nice space for standing back nonjudgmentally and starting to see all the people in context, all motivated by inner impulses and needs that elicit sympathy but also can all be seen as flawed in some way, and that is nicely left as not utterly clear; i.e. make up your own mind in what way, how much, etc. This is life in its gritty, messy, undefinable teeming beautiful mess, an openness to which was of course at the centre of that throwing away of norms and neatness that the arrival of punk embodied. It also points well to its own limitations and makes you aware that the actual reality is a far richer and enormous thing of infinite moments and interactions which can never be conveyed or unequivocally interpreted, many of which will never be told and/or are totally forgotten and lost to us all. This life was in the living and not the recounting, so the recounting should reflect that as best it can. And we're still alive. Or, if you're reading this after my death, you are at least. Life is now. These people lived in their now.

So, what you get out of reading this book and his other may vary enormously. It could seem like a pointless, nerdy fan thing about just knowing as many details as you can, maybe not much different to gossip, basically like reading celebrity mags but about the punks you love instead of the movie/tv/pops stars, the usefulness at best being to learn about a new band or two or more; it could seem like an entertaining yet rambling mess of a bunch of aimless and irresponsible kids running wild and having a blast; it could look like a bunch of losers fucking shit up and wasting their lives and kidding themselves so much of the validity of their little clique that they manage to get everyone else's attention and make it into a huge social phenomenon, loved by some, causing some to wade in to stop it with billy clubs; it could provide an interesting journey to see the impulses and developments of punk and to do your own thinking and feeling about what that means, why it mattered (or not), how much, and basically some insight into that eternal question of finding a balance between the orienting and protecting structure of the known and the safe and the definable and manageable on the one hand and the openness and unpredictability and joyride and danger and dirt and going with impulse on the other.

The book was mainly the latter for me, giving me cause to make comparisons with my own UK punk experience (there are surface differences, yet underlying similarities, particularly for me in how punk necessarily is taken from the sharper artistic forces that gave seed to it and appropriated by ordinary kids like myself with coarser issues who simultaneously undermine it while making it grow into something that will positively free up their space and broaden and deepen their boundaries in their own lives) as well as to look at the general broader humanity at the core of it beyond even that. In the end that that rejection of patterns of living is healthy, even essential, even while it might look irresponsible, is the point of view I already came to this book with, and others might need convincing, or disagree, but the process going on here under all the surface of the trivia of the day to day lives shown here gave me cause to focus on how that works, and where maybe it works 'from' in our human subjectivity. Whether I make something valuable out of that is down to me, and it's hard for me to say the book should have given me anything 'more'. That more would be less, as any punk understands.

[Hamish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was apparently meant as a sort of companion to the NYC-centric Please Kill Me, and if you’ve read that one then you know what you’re getting into here. It’s extremely decadent, with a very large portion dedicated to the wild comings-and-goings of folks that would have been (and probably still would be) considered by society to be absolute degenerates. I’d periodically stop and read portions out loud to my wife because what I was reading seemed so over-the-top that I wanted someone else to hear it too. A large portion of those sections were about Darby Crash. Confession: I like the Germs fine but never really saw what the Big Deal about them was. I still don’t, but Darby was a fascinating, borderline unbelievable guy. If the book’s report is accurate, he was literally trying to start a cult! Everything is bananas, but in an extremely entertaining, I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-reading kind of way.

If I have a complaint (and, really, I have a few), it’s the scope. At about 300 pages, it spends an awful lot of time on the pre-punk days, so I hope you’re really interested about the glam/glitter fandom in LA. Lots of pages spent on that, when I wish there was more dedicated to the specific bands. While the book largely decries suburban hardcore, the authors do go out of their way to recognize the unique genius of the Fullerton bands (Adolescents, Agent Orange, Social Distortion), and then dedicate all of FOUR pages to them. Speaking of hardcore, I’d heard more than a few older LA scenesters share their dislike of hardcore and state that it more or less caused them to leave the scene. I’d never really understood that point of view until reading this book. It’s possible there’s some sensationalism going on here, but yowza, that shit (largely focusing on TSOL) sounded wild, and something I probably would’ve shied away from too. Still love the music, though.

I also suspect this could have used some better editing; sections within chapters often have abrupt transitions, and, again, I want more detail on a lot of the key bands. But otherwise, this is an absolute blast and highly recommended if this is at all Your Thing.

Other random thoughts:
- Kim Fowley has long since been outed as a sex predator and many quotes in the book come this close to saying it, but no one quite comes out and states it. It’s impossible to not read between the lines and see it, though.
- X and Black Flag are two of the greatest bands of all time. I suspect the editors were maybe a touch anti-Flag, though.
- The members of X do not come off well as people here. Which maybe isn’t shocking (witness Exene’s current, horrific Trumpism), but still a bit disappointing.
- Mike Watt gets quoted a bunch, but there’s barely any coverage of the Minutemen as a band, sadly. Descendents neither.

[Deanna Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of three great oral histories of punk I've read. This one focuses on the L.A. scene, which is usually downplayed, if not completely disregarded altogether in punk histories. Overall, it supports the broad characterization of the NYC scene as artsy/intellectual (Patti Smith/Television), the London scene as political (The Clash), and the L.A. scene as fun (The Weirdos).

The really interesting thing about this book is that it reveals how the L.A. punk scene emerged from the glam (or “glitter”) scene. Glam was the major countercultural music current, given that L.A. in the 70s was centered around blues rock, country rock, or prog rock. Imported British stuff like Roxy Music, David Bowie, and Mott the Hoople offered a counterculture for the later-to-be-Punks when they were teenagers. They were beaten up for wearing glitter, make-up, and cross-dressing. By the time they formed bands, glam was all but over, and Raw Power-era Stooges and New York Dolls became the major influence.

Perhaps more so than London and NYC, the L.A. bands were super diverse—from the Americana of X to the violence of the Germs, from the electro-delinquent Screamers to the new wavers the Motels. This is because what began as the punk scene really was a “miscellaneous” category of bands that didn't fit into anything. It's not that there was a punk sound; it's that “punk” was a catch-all category. Many of the people involved were artists of other sorts as well, and were really into the performance aspect. Also distinct from the other scenes, few of the L.A. bands ever left California, signed to major labels, or even recorded albums at all! Especially for this reason, it is exciting to hear all the original scenesters tell their stories. The authors really did a tremendous job finding all the characters, and the oral history format causes everything to flow together the way a film might, making it easy to feel like you were actually there.

Unlike most music histories, those interviewed in this book don't romanticize the time period. Nonetheless, I can't help but romanticize a bit about a time when music could still shock, when a scene was open to all kinds of musical weirdness, and when the community had to be really tight because there was no Internet yet. But other aspects certainly aren't romantic. The scene seemed pretty shocking and extreme. L.A. wasn't about college kids starting bands like it is today: there were stories of 15 year olds taking LSD with strangers at a Taco Bell....

Nonetheless, the scene was definitely all about FUN. The focus on fun, along with the DIY spirit and the creation of alternative show spaces at house parties, and even restaurants, remind me of both Chicago's hardcore scene as well as today's more hipster-dominated indie rock scene that's focused on partying.

Much like the NYC scene, but for different reasons, L.A. punk was pretty fleeting. More aggressive or macho hardcore took over stylistically, and cops broke up some of the alternative spaces that were home to the scene. Perhaps one quote best sums it up: “Everything has its moments and then it doesn't anymore, especially in California” (29)

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing to understand about the punk counter culture is that it was a scene just as much as a musical movement. The shows and the records weren’t all there was; punk broke through the theatrical fourth wall so that the audience and the people you associated with were as much a part of the movement as anything else. Being in a scene meant being part of a community and punk communities were localized even though they tended to expand and merge with other scenes as bands toured and punks traveled from city to city in order to see whoever wasn’t passing through their hometowns. The self publication of zines and cassette mixtapes were an effective way of holding punk scenes together and communicating with punks farther afield. None of this would have happened if punk didn’t have epicenters to radiate outwards from. New York City and London were the original epicenters, but cities like Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and, most importantly, Los Angeles became secondary epicenters to smaller satellite scenes revolving around them. This isn’t meant to diminish the importance or the quality of those latter scenes; it is just to point out that punk had a timeline and in a pre-internet culture, information didn’t travel so quickly and it took time to build something like a punk community. The advantage is that if it takes more than a decade to establish a new musical style and movement, it takes on its own local flavors and idiosyncrasies and that results in diversity which makes the counter cultural movement richer and deeper than it would have been if everybody else were just imitating each other. We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen gives a broad overview of the development of the SoCal scene and gives indications of how it related to the punk movement as a whole.

The story of Los Angeles punk is told using the oral history technique popularized by Legs McNeil in his monumental Please Kill Me about the growth of punk in New York and The Other Hollywood which chronicles the rise of the porn industry from the 1960s on. It’s a roughly edited montage of wordage from interviews and articles, pasted together to make a coherent story about everything that took place. Some people might criticize this editorial system for being sloppy and rough, but those people don’t realize how it reflects the spirit of punk as a whole. Punk was never about technical perfection and it emphasized raw emotion over production values. People who want perfection can listen to crappy commercial rock like Styx, Rush, or Phil Collins. In fact this book makes it clear that the original L.A. punks were under-stimulated by the wimp rock of the early 1970s. They were hungry for something more real and exciting than Jackson Browne or James Taylor. They wanted a rock and roll experienced that reflected their indulgences in wild sex, alcohol, and amphetamines. So they turned to Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and British glitter rock in general. The writing style of this book reflects the rough and out of control lifestyle that made punk so alluring in its first two phases. Besides, punk scenes tended towards egalitarianism which meant everybody had a voice in some way and what they contributed to the scene was how they chose to express themselves be it through music or otherwise. That is why the oral history method works so well for a book on this subject since so many people give their own side of the story.

If I jump ahead here to the middle, it becomes clear that there is a hinge that joins L.A.’s first and second waves of punk. The hinge is the Germs sole lp GI, produced by Joan Jett no less, who was barely out of her teens at the time. This was the record that transitioned the style of first wave punk into the second wave of hardcore and thrash. Without the Germs and Darby Crash, it is possible that punk rock would have faded away into obscurity. But then again, maybe not since Bad Brains and the Dead Kenndys were going in a similar musical direction at almost the same time.

Having said that, there were really three people who catalyzed the whole L.A. scene. One was the band promoter Kim Fowley who put together The Runaways with Joan Jett and Lita Ford in 1975. Another was nightclub owner and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. The third was Iggy Pop who carried Jim Morrison’s bad attitude over into the proto punk and glam rock movements. David Bowie might have been more popular, but Iggy Pop had a more direct influence on the earliest of L.A. punk pioneers. You can say what you want about these three men in your self-righteous 21st century virtue signalling; after all they were creeps who preyed on underage girls just like everybody else in the entertainment industry at that time. But they were really the ones who got the whole thing moving. The 1970s were the peak of the Sexual Revolution and moral codes of conduct were loosening so much that that kind of predation was an unfortunate consequence. But if you know anything about groupies, you can’t say those girls were entirely innocent. Groupies lived their lives to seek out sexual experiences with rock stars and that is what they got. That doesn’t justify it but it does contextualize it so understand the difference before you go proclaiming yourself better than everybody else.

Anyhow, after some fights and small riots at music venues, punks in Hollywood took control and opened their own clubs. The Masque was one of the most prominent ones. Along with that came squatting, low life living in cheap apartment blocks, and the rise of punk houses. Hard drugs and alcohol were a big part of all this. So was sexual promiscuity and the aggressively intimidating clothing and hair styles of punk. Misfits and bohemians of all kinds were admitted as were artists, ethnic minorities, homeless people, runaways, the mentally ill, and LGBTQ people. Bands like the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, and the Germs grew in stature. Zines like Slash began circulating. Violence was not uncommon, especially in encounters with people outside the scene and the police. One punk female from Hollywood even got murdered by the Hillside Stranglers. From personal experience, I’d say you might not realize how unified a scene is until you attend a punk’s funeral, some of which can attract the same sized crowds as you would see at a show. It is times like that when you realize how extensive a social network a counter cultural scene can be and how valued every member of that scene is. Hell, I’ve been to funerals where some of the attendees didn’t even like the guy who died but they showed up to lend emotional support to the punk community in their time of emotional distress.

And the music industry wanted nothing to do with L.A. punk. Major record labels tried to market punk from New York and London. When the Sex Pistols broke up, Sid Vicoous and Nancy Spungen died, and very few records aside from the Ramones and The Clash ever sold, the record companies wrote punk off as just another passing fad. They did sign an L.A. band called The Dickies but they weren’t taken seriously in the punk community. In all honesty, for some poseurs punk was nothing but a fad, but the real punks with dedication soldiered on and kept the scenes going despite the snooty attitudes of the businessmen running the music industry. Independent record labels like Slash and SST came along to fill the void and release music that people wanted to hear, free from the rotten commercial values and bad production values that came along with major label contracts. A true musical underground scene was born.

Then the Germs released GI and their singer Darby Crash committed suicide. GI was a pivotal album because it took punk in a new, faster, angrier, dirtier direction that was more aggressive, more self-destructive, and more anti-establishment. The hyperactive crash and burn violence of hardcore and thrash were a middle finger stuck in the face of the mainstream music industry and mainstream American society as a whole.

Something else began happening in L.A. too. Los Angeles is a giant sprawling megalopolis with suburbs and sub-districts with sub-districts inside the sub-districts. There was a lot more to it than the Hollywood Boulevard punk house death trip. Rather than traveling long distances to see shows, punks played gigs in their local areas and developed colloquial styles that reflected those respective scenes. Eventually there were subgroups of surf punks, skateboarders, racist and anti-racist skinheads, straight edge and positive punks, anarchist punks, gangbanger punks, and whatever else you can imagine. Different styles emerged too like roots rock, rockabilly, synth punk, crossover/thrash metal, goth, horror rock, and Chicano punk. Punks flocked in to East L.A. when an art gallery began hosting shows for rent parties, crossing even more social boundaries and building more bridges than had ever been crossed or built before.

The end of this book was a little disappointing though. Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks complained because punk bands didn’t break into the mainstream with bigger crowds in bigger venues. I thought that was what was great about punk. Smaller shows in smaller clubs and halls meant more intimacy between the band and the audience. I got to see the Circle Jerks in a bar that probably held less than 1000 people. It wouldn’t have worked in an arena with 20,0000. Besides, if you wanted to see cock rock like Van Halen or Motley Crue back then there was plenty of it around. There was no social scene for that type of music though. Besides, being in an underground music scene meant anybody with the guts to get up on stage with an instrument was at least given a fair chance. You can’t say that about the corporate MTV rock that produced shitty bands like Pearl Jam or the Stone Temple Pilots.

But the thing that bothered me most about the later chapters, the ones about hardcore punk and punk adjacent styles, was that it goes so wide but not so deep. Those chapters are interesting and informative, but the authors were more concerned with covering and including the whole scope of the L.A. underground scene and not so concerned with giving extensive details about it. They could have extended the book by a hundred pages and taken a deeper dive into everything that was going on.

Overall, We Got the Neutron Bomb is a good, if incomplete, account of its subject matter. If you’re interested in the punk counter culture, rock music history, or even just the culture of Los Angeles, there is enough here to give you a good idea of what it was all about. For those of us who lived through punk in the 1980s, this is a reminder of how great a subculture can be when enough people who care get together and make an effort to make it work. For younger people who feel bored, alienated, lonely, or on the margins of society, maybe take a look at what the punks did and get the whole youth counter culture thing rolling again. It’s time for a new generation to rise and shake uo the world all over again. American culture has been stagnant and dead for the last thirty years. A new, viable counter culture is badly needed to renew the spirit of our society.

[Avis Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book does an unusually good job of documenting punk during this time and place. It's basically an oral history, and the editor managed to trim the interviews in a manner that kept everyone from wandering off into pointless blather. But there is one big problem with LA punk that kept it from becoming better known. Lack of talent. The only really good underground bands LA produced during this time period (and they weren't exactly punk, either) were the Gun Club and The Last, the latter being both then and now pretty obscure even by underground standards. As for the Gun Club, even they took several years to develop into a decent live act.

But LA was never as important a scene as New York or London because the LA bands weren't as good as the Ramones, and they weren't as good as the Sex Pistols. Heck, they weren't even as good as Sham 69. Instead, what Mullen documents are self-indulgent scenesters. Scenesters have never learned the most important rule about art. You can't serve two masters. Art comes first. It's more important than drugs. It's more important than alcohol. It's more important than money. It's more important than your ego. Finally, It's more important than your urge to be a self-destructive attention whore whining on stage.

There are three ancedotes I read a long time ago about Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club that really illustrate what a true musical fanatic is like. One, Pierce would show up at used record sale events the night before and stand in line all night to be first through the door. Second, when he went through a reggae craze, he traveled all the way to Jamaica just to buy his favorite reggae artist a drink. Third, when he got interested in Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing, he beat the bushes all over France and found the guy who worked on Hendrix's guitars just so the guy could customize Pierce's guitar the same way he did Hendrix's. Now those are examples of someone who put the art first.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an oral history, this could have been meatier. It's chopped up into small, focused chapters of a few pages each. For such a diverse and interesting scene, this book could definitely have been longer. But I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. The early LA punk scene was more open to women and queers than other punk scenes, and for better or worse it kinda arose in a vacuum unto itself. And then hardcore came around and white dudes from Orange County decided that they would vent their adolescent angst by alienating people with actual problems and making punk less fun and more aggressive. Boo!!!

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on the LA punk era, gives you the specific quality and the players in that small but seminal scene. this was invaluable to me as I worked on my novel Paint It Black. RIP Brendan Mullen, the co-author of the book and promoter and ringmaster of the Masque, the playpen Omphalos of the punk world in Los Angeles.

[catechism · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was some good stuff in here, but I was left feeling pretty frustrated and disappointed by most of it. I felt like it was just scratching the surface of what was going on, and found it very disjointed. It's no "Please Kill Me," I'll say that.

[Michael O · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could list a few complaints but seriously this book was just a blast to read and it gives me a reason to rewatch Decline of Western Civilization (from a new perspective based on the details revealed here) and X: The Unheard Music (unimpeachable coolness).

[patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insider on the LA punk scene would enjoy this book more than I did.

[sardonic · Rating 3 out of 5]

be forewarned this book might be a portal to hell...

I hope kim fowley, rodney bingenheimer, and all the other p*d*ph*l*c energy vampires who latched on to punk's tit DIE.NOW. fuck you glam rock p*d*ph*le r*p*sts. what's worst is that they know. they all know what these men are and continue to enable them. that's unforgiveable. after reading this i have to say fuck you joan jett, you're the biggest phony i never met. still swallowing your tongue at your big age?

it does get better and more dangerous but in a different way. it is interesting to watch the elementary efforts to push against the boundaries of race and gender. the hollywood scene was full of unethical, inauthentic knock offs. a bunch of people playing pretend. there's a lot of he said she said. you can tell that so many people in the book are trying to spin the story. or maybe the editing makes it seem that way. I think it was big of the authors to include the quotes about what massive fucking creeps the men who "brought the scene back from england" are. scene here actually meaning tactics to trap and traffick underage girls. I would have preferred some exposition, just a little putting the quotes into context, instead of expecting someone to flip to the back of the book for every page.

darby crash explicitly experimented with mind control techniques and seemed aware of the influence and power he had over the audiences at his shows. i don't think there are any quotes from him in this book, but it's refreshing getting a peek into the mind of an idol who, if nothing else, did seem to be a truth teller while he was alive. his ultimate downfall I think was the fact that his performance was dishonest, everyone said he was actually nothing like who he was on stage. he chose idolatry and the separation/elevation of the performer from/over the audience. the book tells a tale of a disagreement with another punk rocker over this issue that came to blows. the insinuation is that he got beat up by a girl. i think having to maintain an unchanging image like that would drive any growing person crazy.

if you like the mysic you'll probably want to read this. it is pretty gross, though.

[kory. · Rating 3 out of 5]

me, whenever kim fowley: 🤢🤮

content/trigger warnings; ableism, sanism, r slur, bi erasure, homophobia, f slur, physical violence, sex, sexual abuse, statutory rape, predatory men, child abuse, sexual harassment, rape, drug abuse, overdose, verbal abuse, racism, n word, antisemitism, police brutality, aids/hiv, suicide, torture, disordered eating, murder,

some reviewers are saying this book is no please kill me but i definitely enjoyed this one a bit more. while there’s plenty of gross/horrible behavior detailed here, it’s less overwhelming than in please kill me. overall, this is an interesting, engaging read. oral histories are definitely more my speed. i like the conversational vibe and seeing the conflicting stories. and idk why but i’m super drawn to punk, i like the vibe and sort of ideology of it, but man i wish so many of the people involved weren’t absolute trash humans.

random tidbits:

“we almost killed Kim Fowley when we were tripping on acid. We almost knifed him. Kari Krome was over and she said, ‘I just called Kim Fowley and told him to come over.’ And we were, ‘Oh, no, now you’ve done it! Now you’ve done it! Now what are we gonna do? Kim Fowley’s coming over, what can be absolutely worse than that?’ He came over and we opened the door with the chain on the door and we stuck some knives out and he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll leave.’” iconic shit

“This girl named Paula—we called her Stripes—was this feather-haired rock chick, but she came out and started fucking all the punk guys and she’d say, ‘I can’t stand the music, but the guys are hot.’” respect

“Bowie and Marc Bolan had it easy. Jobriath was the real thing. He really was gay. He wasn’t just wearing the clothes.” excuse me? bowie and bolan both said they were bisexual in the ’70s?? and clothing =/= sexuality???

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the time that I got interested in punk and the underground music scene, it was late 1980 or early '81 when the initial explosion had died down. So I listened to everything from the New York bands of the early '70s and the English bands of the mid-'70s as well as these L.A. bands all at once.
This oral history traces the L.A. scene from the Glam Rock of Bowie, Roxy Music, and T-Rex to it's morphing into the DIY movement that exploded on the West Coast, producing such bands as The Germs, The Go-Gos, The Runaways, to X and Black Flag.
Through first-hand accounts, Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen capture the filth, drugs, alcohol, and debauchery of the nascent punk movement in California that spread thoughout underground America at the end of the '70s and into the MTV decade of the '80s.
Well worth a look to all aficionados of the genre.

[David Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great read for fans of LA punk. If you want to learn about this music though this is not a good first stop. Dig into the records first or a more conventional written history of punk. Much of this book is he said, she said and an array of hang out spots, dingy clubs and eccentric personalities that blur into each other somewhat. Still there are good stories along the way and mentions of plenty of acts, both obscure and well known. If you pay attention there is a lot to learn from the book but can be fun just as a dive into a long gone slice of the world. Im not sure I'm the biggest fan of oral histories as a rule and I think the scene may have been better served by a more in depth, narrative approach. Still though this is absolutely a worthwhile read for fans of punk or people who want to learn more about a particularly rich scene.

[Greg Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

The oral history style of this book made it a little difficult for me to read. But the information is amazing and comes directly from the people who lived it.

My 2 biggest takeaways: I never realized how influential Rodney Bingenhimer was in the early days of LA Punk Rock. I mean he was hugely influential to me personally as I listened to and recorded his show religiously, but I never realized his greater reach.

I also never realized how much I dispise Kim Fowley. What a creep. :)

[DrimbleWedge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great primer for the west coast punk scene. Written in a similar style to "pleas kill me", it's an excellent introduction to the characters that litter the scene. It focuses mostly on the pre-hardcore era, but discusses its effect on the scene. I'm following it up by reading "American Hardcore".

[Amanda-Has-A-Bookcase · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a huge fan of LA Punk Rock this book is full of fun vignettes detailing the rise and fall of some of my favorite bands like X, Black Flag, Blasters, Germs and many more. So many thoughts and views from those who lived it.
And as a side note, if you haven't watched The Decline of Western Civilization you need to do so asap!

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

So you saw The Decline of Western Civilization...read this instead of pretending that's all LA punk was. It's almost 200 pages before Black Flag shows up and over 275 before Henry Rollins gets mentioned. There was soooooo much before them. Pre-hardcore, it was a unique scene with a musically diverse product.

[Brea Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book.
It does have a tendency to forget the "characters" as it moves through the years but that's what made it more impactful to me. Here are your people, in their own words, with their truths and mistakes and regrets, and you go on that with them. The chapters are in easy pieces so you can absorb the LA punk scene as fast or as slowly as you want without missing a beat.

[Ray Dunsmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the fascinating history of the Los Angeles punk scene, directly from the people who lived (and, all too often, died) in it. An important piece of history that I'm honestly thankful has been preserved in at least some way.

[Larry Holt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book covered one of my favorite music scenes-and goes in depth on X, Germs, Black Flag & the Go-Go's. It's no 'Please Kill Me', but a solid oral history nonetheless.

[Steven W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really incredible history!!

[Doug Birkitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining. Kim Fowley and Jack Grisham will never win a mr congeniality award that is for sure.

[Luz · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a punk living close to LA, this was an entertaining read. It was interesting to learn more about punk history and to think about how much it's changed and what hasn't changed.

[Doris Raines · Rating 4 out of 5]

A BOOK TO REMEMBER.