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WORK TITLE: Under the Big Black Sun
WORK NOTES: with John Doe
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.songspub.com/Team/27 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/desavia
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Chicago, IL, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY, senior vice president of membership; then Notable Music, Los Angeles, CA, partner/vice president of Creative; then SONGS Music Publishing, Los Angeles, CA, head of creative services. Previously worked as a music journalist, including working for Cash Box trade magazine, West Coast editor. Serves on the West Coast board of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame; previously served on the board of directors for both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A former music journalist who went on to work as a publisher and for a music publishing company, Tom DeSavia has also served on the West Coast board of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. DeSavia is coauthor with John Doe, an actor and a West Coast punk music icon who cofounded the band X, of Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk. DeSavia, who grew up in California, became a fan of X at the age of fifteen and quickly struck up a friendship with Doe, which has continued for more than three decades. “The first real punk show I saw was X, who were also my favorite band at the time,” DeSavia told Night Flight Web site contributor Bryan Thomas.
Under the Big Black Sun focuses on the West Coast punk scene from 1977 to 1982 and includes personal essays about the scene from many of the musicians who played in various bands, including Henry Rollins of Black Flag and Exene Cervanka, Doe’s ex-wife and a member of X. Essays are also contributed by journalists Pleasant Gehman, Kristine McKenna, and Chris Morris. “The memories, some of them anyway, are here … for us to sort through and feel something akin to being there,” wrote Jedd Beaudoin in a review for the PopMatters Web site. Doe told Esquire Online contributor Jeff Slate that the book, which is named after the band X’s third album, was written to give the West Coast punk scene its due for contributions to punk music, noting: “I don’t really feel that what we all accomplished got its due credit. Some people still think the Sex Pistols were the first punk rock band.” Doe went on to add: “It’s nice to have this as a document, to tell the story of that time and place in the right way.”
Under the Big Black Sun does not present a linear look at the West Coast punk scene but rather features Doe’s, DeSavia’s, and other contributors’ essays in a haphazard fashion. “But what it lacks in tidy cohesion, it makes up for in you-had-to-be-there style storytelling, noted A.V. Club Web site contributor Ryan Bray, who added: “The varied voices and storytelling styles … give the book a loose, conversational feel that plays more like a documentary in words than a strict historical account.”
In addition to Doe’s reminisces and commentary interspersed throughout the book about the band X and the punk scene in general, coauthor DeSavia writes about his longtime friendship with Doe and his firsthand experiences in the punk scene. In their essays, Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s talk about their love of the punk scene even before they formed the Go-Go’s and became a renowned band featured on the early days of MTV cable television network. Robert Lopez, better known as El Vez, a Mexican American singer, songwriter, and musician, reports on the the East L.A. scene, out of which came the Zeros and Los Lobos, although the latter was not a punk band. Matt Wyatt, a Los Angeles-based writer, director, and producer, talks about meeting D. Boon, who was the guitarist and vocalist in the punk rock trio Minutemen. Henry Rollins recounts his early years in California in the music scene in an essay titled “The Stucco-Coated Killing Field,” which PopMatters Web site contributor Beaudoin called “a piece that burns as brightly as his best vocal performances.” Another essay by Chris Morris reveals how he became a music journalist and a major voice reporting on the Left Coast music scene.
“The authors hang on every sinewy detail like it all happened yesterday,” noted A.V. Club Web site contributor Ryan Bray, adding: “Hard as it can be to make history seem tangible and visceral, Under the Big Black Sun speaks of a genre that’s still young at heart.” PopMatters Web site contributor Beaudoin noted: “One of the best parts of reading the book: These aren’t Rolling Stone profiles that have been sanitized to protect us from the truth, they’re the real conversations that you’d have with this gang if any of them were your friends.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, April 15, 2016, Elizabeth D. Eisen, review of Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk, p. 89.
Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2016, review of Under the Big Black Sun, p. 76.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (April 25, 2016), Ryan Bray, “Under The Big Black Sun Opens Up L.A.’s Punk-Rock Underbelly.”
Esquire Online, http://www.esquire.com/ (April 26, 2016), Jeff Slate, “Under the Big Black Sun Chronicles the Often Forgotten Story of L.A. Punk.”
Night Flight, http://nightflight.com/ (May 3, 2016), Bryan Thomas, “Under the Big Black Sun: Night Flight Talks to Tom DeSavia about the Late 70s L.A. Punk Scene.”
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (April 25, 2016), Jedd Beaudoin, “Under the Big Black Sun Tells of an L.A. before the Kids from Orange County Arrived.”
Song Music Publishing Web site, http://www.songspub.com/ (February 21, 2017), author profile.
Tom DeSavia is currently head of creative services for SONGS Music Publishing and is based in Los Angeles, California. Prior to joining SONGS, DeSavia did lengthy stints as both a publisher and record label A&R man, as well as many years running pop membership for ASCAP. He currently serves on the West Coast board of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame and previously served on the board of directors for both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS). A native of Southern California, Tom began his career as a music journalist.
Under The Big Black Sun: Night Flight talks to Tom DeSavia about the late 70s L.A. punk scene
By Bryan Thomas on May 3, 2016
The recently-published Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk (Da Capo Press) — written by longtime friends John Doe (co-founder of the seminal L.A. punk band, X) and Tom DeSavia (Head of Creative Services at SONGS Music Publishing and co-host of the stellar podcast Live From High Fidelity) — explores the early days of L.A.’s punk scene, circa 1977-1982, before a new generation of young, hardcore punk rock bands came along and changed it forever.
Under The Big Black Sun (named for X’s third album, released in 1982) also features interstitial personal histories and anecdotal-heavy remembrances by many of their friends, including two of Night Flight’s contributors — Chris Morris and Chris D. (of the Flesh Eaters) — as well as some of the others who helped to make the L.A. punk scene what it was, including Exene Cervenka (X), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Mike Watt (The Minutemen), Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey (Go-Go’s), Dave Alvin (The Blasters), Robert Lopez (The Zeros, El Vez), Jack Grisham (TSOL), Teresa Covarrubias (The Brat), and scenesters and journalists Pleasant Gehman and Kristine McKenna.
Co-author Tom DeSavia recently gave Night Flight an exclusive interview about the book, which provides a behind-the-scenes look at a lot of the L.A. bands — like X, the Blasters, the Circle Jerks, and the Angry Samoans — who also appeared on “New Wave Theatre“ (watch our Best Of New Wave Theatre now on Night Flight Plus):
NIGHT FLIGHT: Let’s start at the very beginning. In the first few words of your Preface (“Post Apocalyptic Clowns”), you write: “I wasn’t there.” Where did you grow up?
TOM DESAVIA: I grew up in Chatsworth, California, and the family moved to Thousand Oaks in 1977 when I was ten. I only really got into punk because of a couple of friends I knew had some records: Circle Jerks, Black Flag, the Pistols, and X… then “darker” stuff like Christian Death and Angry Samoans. Those were the first records I really remember getting into. I started seeing shows when I was fifteen, mostly new wave stuff at the Country Club in Reseda.
The first real punk show I saw was X, who were also my favorite band at the time… that first show really freaked me out, I felt so out of place. That same year I ditched school with some friends to go see the Who at the L.A. Coliseum and the Clash opened – so, basically, 1982 was the year that my head completely exploded and changed everything I thought I knew about music and art.
NF: Towards the end of your Foreward, you write that you told John Doe that it was important for the “true story” of L.A. punk to be told in the book… assuming you think there have been “false” stories about L.A. punk that have been told, what are some of those stories that you correct or tell the truth about in this book?
DESAVIA: When I first met John in 1996, the fifteen year old in me had so many questions, but I was trying to be cool around him, so I would casually try to drag stories out of him in conversation. I slowly started to find out that most of the tales I’d thought I knew were bullshit, and that the real stories were way better and more interesting. That’s exactly when I started to bug him about writing a book, but he would have none of it.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 16
Authors Tom DeSavia and John Doe, taken on the street outside the Biltmore on May 1, 2016, after John Doe and Exene Cervenka made a special appearance at the Central Library for an afternoon honoring the past, present, and future of the Los Angeles punk rock music scene and its iconic artists. Photo by Chris Morris.
NF: During the SXSW conversation you had with John Doe and Mike Watt earlier this year, John prefaces his reading from Under The Big Black Sun by saying that he didn’t want to write a book about punk rock (“That’s bullshit”) and says he was uninterested in the project at first because “it sounds like discipline and work and everything else” until he had the idea, maybe from a dream, to have everyone write the book for him… Did the two of you discuss that early on, who should be involved? Were there any people you wanted to contribute to the book you couldn’t get? Do you think there are any stories you’d still like to hear about?
DESAVIA: That was all John. I only personally knew two of the folks involved: Chris Morris and Charlotte Caffey, both of whom I met when I was around nineteen or twenty… everyone else were just people I knew from their records. When we started to “outline” the book we came up with topics first, and then it was almost like word association with John: “The Canterbury Apartments”… Jane Wiedlin! “The East L.A. Scene”… Teresa Covarrubias! It really came together that easily… there were a couple of folks we wanted, who weren’t able to join the project because their schedules wouldn’t allow, etc.
We both really wanted Keith Morris, but he was busy writing his own book, and we share the same publisher (Da Capo/Hachette), so that didn’t really make sense. Keith’s book comes out in the fall, I think… I cannot wait to read that.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 5
Circle Jerks at the Country Club in Reseda, 1982 (from L-R): Keith Morris, Greg Hetson, Roger Rogerson. Photo by Ann Summa. Used with the publisher’s permission.
NF: Mike Watt makes a reference later on in the interview, about the original Hollywood scene having “a lot of ladies in bands, a lot of glitter and glam,” and that gives us a great chance to talk about the many contributions here from the women who were in bands, like Jane Wiedlin’s awesome memories about living at the Canterbury, and her bandmate Charlotte Caffey’s memories about the Go Go’s early days, and Pleasant Gehman, and Exene and others. Was that a conscious effort on your part, to make sure the women were well represented?
DESAVIA: It just worked out that way. There definitely wasn’t ever a conversation where we said “let’s try to get more women involved” or anything like that. It actually wasn’t until someone pointed out how many women were involved in the book, from the authors to photographers that we even noticed. Really. It’s pretty awesome, tho, the influence these women had on the scene. But in the end it’s just a book written by a bunch of humans, I guess.
NF: John talks about the L.A. punk scene being very collaborative, and the idea of having many contributors was conducive to telling the having a lot of people write chapters and having himself and you kind of being narrators fit into the feeling about how the L.A. scene was put together… what are some of your favorite parts of the book? Any particular stories that were new to you?
DESAVIA: The fact that all these cats LOVED the Screamers! I had no idea how much respect they received from everyone in the scene! NO idea. And we were just kind of blown away at how the chapters tied together, really telling a cohesive story. From my “fan boy” perspective, it certainly confirmed the sense of comradery that I believed they all had, especially in those early days.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 4
The Screamers on a bus bench, 1977 (from L-R): David Allen, K.K. Barnett, Tomata du Plenty, Tommy Gear, a little old lady, the photographer’s shadow at bottom left. Photo by Jenny Lens. Used with the publisher’s permission.
NF: John talks during your conversation about naming the band X’s first album Los Angeles as a way of letting other scenes know that their skid row was as bad as their skid row (“… and bohemians live on $200 a month, we felt pretty proud of L.A. and we were talking about Raymond Chandler, and Charles Bukowski, and film noir and all the more underbelly of elements of L.A. and not Farrah Fawcett and the Eagles, which is all kind of made up stuff.”). It sounds like he made a direct connection between the darker, seedier aspects about L.A. found in books by some of the city’s best writers, is that a connection that you’ve also made?
DESAVIA: As a kid? Absolutely! I unapologetically grew up on pop radio, TV, and all the rest of whatever mainstream media was back then. This music and the art and photography definitely beckoned you down this path – dared you to peek through the looking glass, you know? Some of it was really shocking… especially the Raymond Pettibon stuff, for example – as a kid those images really freaked me out and wonderfully fucked with my Catholic upbringing.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 15
NF: In the SXSW interview, Mike Watt talks about punk being a kind of “launching pad” into other interesting things — (“the stuff from Europe like Dada, or Oklahoma, like Woody Guthrie, or maybe out of New York, Walt Whitman, who put out his own book in 1855, talk about DIY… he writes twelve poems to try to stop the Civil War… I didn’t know about any of this stuff…”). What tangentially-related art and literature or music did you discover through punk?
DESAVIA: Mainly music, I guess. I was obsessed with records as a kid, and so many of these records and bands and songwriters were like treasure maps for a lot of us, I think – especially when it came to learning about early rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly, country and bluegrass, and Latin music.
I remember seeing Exene do a spoken word thing kind of early on and it definitely opened my mind up to what poetry was – you know, beyond just the textbook stuff you learn from school environments.
John Doe & Tom DeSavia - Scott Sherratt
John Doe & Tom DeSavia, photo by Scott Sherratt.
NF: What about what John says about the “made up” stuff about “Farrah Fawcett and the Eagles,” do you think that’s an impression people have about L.A. music when you talk about the 70s, particularly the late 70s, or have punk rock bands, like X, diluted that image people have? Do you think it’s something people still think of when they think L.A. in the 70s? Have music fans overlooked the less sunny aspects of L.A. rock bands from the 70s?
DESAVIA: Of course. I grew up in a slightly lower middle class home – when we moved in ‘77 we moved from a house to an apartment, we weren’t poor, but we definitely didn’t have much dough. So even growing up without, I thought L.A. was all glamour and glitz and we were the only family that didn’t have all the nice stuff. I did have a Ronstadt poster on my wall tho… I still love her… but I guess the carefree babe rollerskating in Venice was the impression the world had of L.A.
The punk bands definitely sang of another L.A.. That line in “This Town” by the Go-Go’s always slayed me: “We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores/Discarded stars like worn our cars/Litter the streets of this town.” That song and, obviously, X’s “Los Angeles” were my hometown “pride” songs for sure. What fucking great tunes.
NF: Mike Watt says the violence was brought about by jocks, and younger people (“A lot of testosterone. It got kinda male dominated… it wasn’t still people going to high school like Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. and having to deal with jocks.”). Did you ever experience problems at school because of your interest in punk?
DESAVIA: Nope, because I never dressed the part. I had a couple of punk friends who did for sure… I remember a girl I knew – a kid who played me a lot of those early records – getting hassled really bad. I remember one day we were walking down the hall in a group and some asshole jocks in their Rush shirts or whatever threw eggs at her. She was real resilient, but I know that stuff fucked with the kids who got harassed, it had to.
There were a bunch of kids in my high school tho that were into the music, a decent amount of us were listening to X and Black Flag, especially. I was more frightened and intimidated of other punks, to be honest.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 10
NF: So, let’s talk about some of the violence associated with some of the bands, or the violence caused by the band’s fans, who came to their shows looking to get into fights. I was actually at several L.A. and O.C. shows that were broken up by the police in riot gear, swinging nightsticks and crackin’ skulls (like an infamous Black Flag show at the Hideaway). Is that something you ever experienced yourself, ultra violence at shows, or the cops showing up in riot gear?
DESAVIA: Oh yeah, but I was as far from it as I could get! I remember my first hardcore gig at the Santa Monica Civic – a Black Flag show… I remember seeing a bloodied dude being dragged out by his friends. It freaked me the fuck out. I was a scrawny kid, I wasn’t going anywhere near that shit.
I actually avoided going to some hardcore gigs because I was scared shit would break out. I mostly remember the asshole jock types – those one who came in basically looking to fight… you could spot them a mile away.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 12
NF: Watt talks about how, in the book, Teresa Covarrubias of a great band from the east side called the Brat talks about how the end of the scene comes about when the hardcore kids gig went to a Black Flag gig at the Vex, and basically tore up the club, and she cited that as sort of the beginning of the end of what it was. We certainly remember the violence, and the bands being banned or breaking up — but what do you personally think brought about the “beginning of the end,” anything specific come to mind?
DESAVIA: How fucking great were the Brat? I just loved them so much. I bought the 10” EP as a kid because Exene did the hand lettering on the sleeve, and I just wound up wearing that record out. I got to talk to Teresa a bunch while we were doing the book… She had such fascinating insight into the whole scene, from the East L.A. bands, to the hardcore kids sort of invading, and, ultimately, the dickheads from the music industry who came in and fucked everything up.
It’s funny, because I realize – now more than ever – that when I came into the scene the beginning of the end had already started. I guess everything has a time frame to be “pure” – and that, in it’s own fucked up way – is what I think that this book is about.
UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN 7
L.A. Line-up, West Hollywood, 1977 (from L-R): unknown, Hellin Killer, Trudi, Pleasant Gehman, Bobby Pin, Nickey Beat, Alice Bag, Delphina, Lorna Doom, Pat Smear, Jena. Photo by Ruby Ray. Used with the publisher’s permission.
NF: Towards the end of your interview at SXSW, John Doe says this about asking the contributors who participated to remember what happened:
“There might be a little revisionist views, a little more romantic than it was at the time, that’s inevitable, but I think everybody was honest enough, and I realized after we got into it that that would be a benefit of it, then, it wouldn’t just be my perspective, there’d be all these different perspectives, there’d a lot of crossover, like we’re talking about certain bands… People were pretty honest. I’m surprised that it’s not more lurid than it is, it’s not really a sensationalized kind of book, these are the better parts of our artistic effort… I think people were still proud today that they were there.”
Do you agree? You seemed to disagree with him slightly that there are some lurid, sensationalized stories in the book, do you think it captures the “true” story you’d set out to tell?
DESAVIA: It’s definitely not a sensationalized story, that’s for sure… and we’re all real proud of that. The intention was never to produce some sort of salacious read, but more of an honest history. But, yeah, I disagreed with that statement a little, because there are some really gritty stories in here… no one sugar-coated reality. Jane Wiedlin’s chapter is one of my absolute favorites in it’s telling of some stark realities, and for the fact that she’s such a great writer. I want her, and pretty much everyone who contributed, to write their own books now.
I want the full story from everyone, now that I have a taste. Some of our authors – Chris D., Pleasant Gehman, Jack Grisham, Rollins – have great books out prior to this that I’d encourage everyone to seek out.
NF: Any final thoughts about the experience of working on the book?
DESAVIA: Corny as it sounds, I’m just honored to have been a part… and that these folks let me be a fly on the wall here while they told their stories. This was the book I always wanted to read, so I’m just really glad it exists.
(Incidentally, we recently learned that the IFC cable TV network have announced that they’re developing a new show, “Canterbury Tales,” based on the scene that takes place at the “the run-down, cockroach-infested Canterbury Apartments,” in addition to the 70s-era Hollywood punk scene described in Under The Big Black Sun. The show was created by Night Flight friend and contributor, screenwriter/director Allison Anders and Terry Graham, the drummer for seminal punk band The Bags, Gun Club and author of Punk Like Me. We hope to have an update on that project for you soon).
Tom DeSavia
Head of Creative Services
Prior to joining Songs, DeSavia was a partner/VP of Creative for the Los Angeles-based independent publishing company Notable Music. He came to Notable from a long career at ASCAP, where he served as SVP of Membership, heading up the PRO’s pop/rock staff, managing offices in LA, NYC, and Chicago. Earlier in his career, DeSavia spent six years in the A&R department at Elektra Entertainment where he both signed and developed talent and worked on projects with many iconic artists on the label’s historic roster. DeSavia began his career as a music journalist for the trade magazine Cash Box, where he served as West Coast Editor. He currently serves on the west coast board of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, previously he served on the board of directors for both the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS).
Twitter: @desavia
LC control no.: n 2016004383
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
DeSavia, Tom
Found in: Under the big black sun, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Tom DeSavia)
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Doe, John with Tom DeSavia. Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
Elizabeth D. Eisen
Library Journal. 141.7 (Apr. 15, 2016): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Doe, John with Tom DeSavia. Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. Da Capo. May 2016.320p. illus. index. ISBN 9780306824081. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780306824098. MUSIC
Doe (guitarist & bass player, X), fellow band members, and friends such as Doe's ex, Exene Cervenka and Henry Rollins, reminisce about the prime years of the Hollywood punk scene (1975-80) in this fascinating collection of essays. The punk movement was a subculture centered on art, creativity, rebellion, and anger. There were links to futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and the influences of Arthur Rimbaud, Fats Domino, Jim Morrison, R&B, and rockabilly. Prior music experience was not a prerequisite to form a punk band. The genre was meant to be performed live, because radio play was scarce to nonexistent. Violence in the mosh pits added fuel to the excitement at the events publicized in various fanzines and fliers. Many of the musicians lived in rat-infested apartments, wore vintage and thrift-store clothing, drove late-model cars from the 1950s and 1960s and rechristened themselves with glam rock names. Heroin became the drug of choice and sadly, many of the original punks succumbed and died. VERDICT This book will appeal to fans who want an inside look at the history of the punk lifestyle. For further exploration, check out Slash: A History of the Legendary L.A. Punk Magazine: 1977-1980, edited by J.C. Gabel and Brian Roettinger.--Elizabeth D. Eisen, Appleton P.L., WI
Eisen, Elizabeth D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eisen, Elizabeth D. "Doe, John with Tom DeSavia. Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk." Library Journal, 15 Apr. 2016, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449543005&it=r&asid=cc604bc9a0a9d83b800504465a390624. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449543005
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
Publishers Weekly. 263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p76.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
John Doe, with Tom DeSavia and friends. Da Capo, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-306-82408-1
Doe, frontman for X, has gathered the testimonies of punk's progenitors in L. A., a scene only rivaled by those of New York and London for fecundity and influence. Twenty-four chapters draw on the accounts of Mike Watt (the Minutemen), Jane Wiedlin (the Go-Gos), El Vez (aka Robert Lopez), and others to follow the genesis of punk beginning with glam, garage, and early punk abroad. Focused around the Masque club and the Canterbury Apartments, a few hundred outcasts exploited the low-rent environs of Hollywood and downtown L.A. to live in semi-communal squalor and make rock new again. The punk scene ultimately became fragmented by way of heroin, death, and migration to major labels, with the final blow coming from the brutal intrusion of Orange County musicians ("OC kids") who didn't share punk artists' art-school inclinations or gender ambiguity but embraced their confrontational rage to create hardcore metal. Chapters by older artists and members of the East L.A. contingent demonstrate punk's broad appeal. Even the despised OC kids get a say through Jack Grisham (TSOL), whose response to the original punks' contempt for the newcomers, while self-aggrandizing, is both savage and eloquent. In an essay on photographers and other visual artists, Doe's co-editor, talent scout DeSavia, traces an influence that transcended sound. L.A. punk's unique aesthetic, heir to Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, is filtered through "exhaust fumes, fumble, muscle and smoking tires" to reveal the darkness behind the sunglasses. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 76+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902751&it=r&asid=c7dcc5ef241370df4670376d9cb8cc7e. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A448902751
Under The Big Black Sun opens up L.A.’s punk-rock underbelly
By Ryan Bray
Apr 25, 2016 12:00 AM
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Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History Of L.A. Punk
Author: John Doe and Tom DeSavia
Publisher: Da Capo Press
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Forty years would seem to be plenty of time to canvass and document the history of punk rock, but as is the case with any genre, there are always some narrative holes that need filling. New York City and London dominate much of the discussion about punk’s nascent years, so much so that even the most casual music fans likely have some understanding of CBGB, The Clash, the Talking Heads, and other big-picture genre talking points. Those are important conversational pillars, of course, but there’s plenty of ground to cover between the two cities.
Los Angeles, for one, cultivated its own hugely influential punk rock scene. If New York and England helped lay the foundation for punk’s first wave, L.A. had a large hand in building the subculture that’s kept the genre going through the years. This is the story Tom DeSavia and X singer-bassist John Doe tell in Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History Of L.A. Punk. Culled from the personal remembrances of roughly a dozen of the city’s most prized punk-rock figures, the book digs deep into the ugly, dangerous, but nonetheless fraternal nature of the burgeoning L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. From Hollywood over to East L.A. and south to San Pedro and Huntington Beach, Under The Big Black Sun covers the scene’s considerable sprawl, from the sketchy clubs and apartment dwellings to the bands and the drug and booze-fueled chaos that followed them.
Considerable attention is given to many of the scene’s most enduring exports, and understandably so. Stories of X’s legendary stage presence, violent Black Flag shows, and the tragic self-destructiveness of the Germs’ Darby Crash are necessary parts of the story, even if they’re already well-told ones. But DeSavia and Doe’s collection shines when it digs deeper. Robert Lopez—a.k.a. El Vez, the Mexican Elvis—sheds fascinating light on an East L.A. scene that fostered the likes of The Zeros, Alice Bag, and even chicano roots rock heroes Los Lobos, pre-La Bamba. Many might be aware of The Go-Go’s origins in L.A. punk, but Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin go into incisive detail as to just how much the band was into that scene before becoming new wave hit-makers. The dirt dished on the bands and the music is great, but the book wisely casts a wider net to capture broader aspects of early L.A. punk culture. Other entries call attention to the documentation of the scene through ’zines including Bomp Magazine, Flipside, and Slash, the latter of which morphed into a label that released early records by The Blasters, The Gun Club, Fear, and others.
Fans seeking a linear, front-to-back telling of the scene’s early years might be thrown by the erratic structure of DeSavia and Doe’s narrative. Under The Big Black Sun spurns chronology in favor of personal anecdotes and reflections that dart all over the map. But what it lacks in tidy cohesion, it makes up for in you-had-to-be-there style storytelling. The varied voices and storytelling styles—from Mike Watt’s eclectic dude speak to Gentleman Jack Grisham’s vulgar-but-emotional gutter poetry—give the book a loose, conversational feel that plays more like a documentary in words than a strict historical account. Given punk rock’s innate wont to flaunt convention, the style fits the subject matter in its own roughshod sort of way.
Considerable time has lapsed since the book’s subjects inhabited the matinee shows and house parties they speak of. But the authors hang on every sinewy detail like it all happened yesterday. Hard as it can be to make history seem tangible and visceral, Under The Big Black Sun speaks of a genre that’s still young at heart.
Under the Big Black Sun Chronicles the Often Forgotten Story of L.A. Punk
The new book from punk icon John Doe offers a history of the overlooked music scene.
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"We never got ours," says John Doe, founding member of the seminal Los Angeles punk band X, when asked why he wrote the part-memoir, part-history book Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. Out today, the book (named for X's third album, released in 1982) chronicles the heyday of the punk scene in the late-'70s and early-'80s. "I don't really feel that what we all accomplished got its due credit," Doe says. "Some people still think the Sex Pistols were the first punk rock band. Whatever. I really couldn't care less. But it's nice to have this as a document, to tell the story of that time and place in the right way."
For anyone who thinks that punk rock was limited to the famed scenes in London and New York, Under the Big Black Sun offers hard evidence that the L.A. scene was just as important—and perhaps created an even greater, lasting impact. And with heartfelt, authentic, and sometimes differing contributions from fellow artists like Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's, Henry Rollins, Doe's X bandmate Exene Cervenka, and former Minuteman Mike Watt—plus an introduction from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, who adds a little historic perspective—it's hard to deny that this is a great story about the underappreciated music that came out of the City of Angels during that golden period of 1977-1982.
X's Exene Cervenka and John Doe
Jenny Lens
"We used five years because that was the point at which it really kind of fractured into a number of different scenes," Doe explains. "But I found that, looking back, that's about the longevity of most musical events— whether it's the Big Band era or Bakersfield. Those were short, too. A lot gets packed into one scene, but they generally burn bright and don't last."
Doe and Cervenka were the heart and soul of the L.A. punk, co-author Tom DeSavia says, while also underscoring the impact the music had on him as a young fan.
"They were the king and queen," DeSavia says. "John and Exene were the George and Tammy of L.A. punk, no question. They were the coolest fucking people. You went to a show and you knew what you were going to get. But it was funny for a kid who grew up on pop radio, which I did, because when L.A. punk came into the picture, it came barreling through like a Mack truck into my world, and to the worlds of a lot of kids just like me. And that story has sadly gotten lost."
As important and significant as Doe's voice is to Under the Big Black Sun, the book maintains the communal, supportive, and grassroots nature of the punk scene in L.A., where The Go-Go's would open for Black Flag and hardly anyone was chasing a major label deal. It's an undercurrent that was arguably missing from both London and New York in many ways.
"It wasn't just because of the good vibes," Doe says of that camaraderie. "It was out of necessity. Everyone had a part to play. Everyone did something. Everybody wanted to be a part of this crazy, bohemian experience. And there was nothing else that was as much fun going on at the time." That DIY, all-for-one ethos carried over to the writing of Under the Big Black Sun, which includes many points of view—even if those perspectives are conflicting.
The Go-Go's
Jenny Lens
"That was the point of the book," Doe says, flatly. "Getting different peoples' perspectives hopefully gives the reader a fuller picture. It's not like we were all keeping track of what was going on. I think we all had a sense that something important was happening, but we were too busy doing it. Plus, I think, L.A. had a pretty big chip on its shoulder, because it was a little later [than the scenes in London and New York], and because everybody who isn't from L.A. seemed to think, 'Well, when you move to L.A., you're immediately given the swimming pool and the Mercedes and given a place to live.' They had no idea there was 5th and Main and a really nasty Skid Row. Everybody lived in crappy apartments and dealt with rats and roaches just like everybody else." The West Coast's grit and grime, naively ignored by those on the East Coast, also influenced Doe's music. "That's one reason X called our first record Los Angeles, to kind of plant that flag," he says. "People were busy, and they had a sense that it was fun and crazy and something was going on, but none of us had time to dwell on that or put on any kind of air about it."
Esquire is pleased to present an exclusive clip from the superb audiobook of Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. (You can also read an excerpt here.)
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For DeSavia, who discovered X as a 15-year-old suburban kid and later came to know Doe and the band later when he worked in the music industry, the story of the L.A. punk scene was an untold one, and he made it his mission to earn the scene he loved so much its due. "John became a pal, and we'd go to dinner, but the 15-year-old in me still couldn't believe I was hanging out with John Doe," DeSavia says. "I couldn't help subtly asking questions, between appetizer and entree. I'd dig for little stories, and what I found out was that everything I thought knew was wrong. And, beyond that, the stories that John told me were much better."
But there was another reason he signed on to collaborate with Doe on the book beyond the chance to thrill his inner fan. "The other thing that was happening, simultaneously, which I understand and am not bitter about, was that L.A. punk was being left to revisionist history," he says. "It's not an East versus West versus U.K. thing, it's that the East and the U.K. had stars. They had full-on celebrities like the Sex Pistols and Blondie and the Talking Heads, these super-iconic figures. L.A. bore a lot of legends, but not as many stars or people who were seen as notable. The idea that L.A. was a footnote—if it was even mentioned, like it didn't even exist—really bothered me. So I pressured John. I kept telling him, 'You've got to write a book.'" But he admits Doe was adamant against writing a straightforward memoir—a determination upon Doe's part that ultimately allowed the pair to produce the book they both wanted to see in print. "[John] said, 'I don't want to write a John Doe book. I don't want it to just be my perspective on what this happened, because I don't want that to be the tale,'" DeSavia says. "That's when the concept came. 'Whoa, what if we got a bunch of voices?' And he loved the idea that it wouldn't be just his story, but everyone's story."
Billy Zoom of X
Michael Hyatt
"That was his driving force," Doe says of DeSavia. "He wanted to tell the L.A. story. It's not going to be like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway telling the story of Paris in the '20s, but in 15 or 20 years, I'm really glad that this will stand as [a record] of these people who were there telling the story of what we all experienced. I think that people who were part of that original Hollywood punk rock scene, and even the hardcore scene, are fiercely loyal and defensive of that, but that they realized that it was something in retrospect that was pretty special, and were glad to contribute, as a collaborative thing rather than an oral history."
And Doe makes it clear that he and DeSavia didn't take a strict journalist approach to writing the book, but rather maintained a punk-rock spirit. "There wasn't a lot of fact checking," he says. "This was more, 'We've got to write it down!' I wanted everybody's truth. If my memory is different from the other person's memory, so be it. That's their truth. Let the reader figure out what really happened."
For the Baltimore native, who, like so many before and since, ventured west in search of adventure and a new life, Doe still recalls the feeling he got when he first got to L.A. He admits he's still in love with his adopted hometown. "I came to Los Angeles for the distance. The distance and the light," Doe says. "I know people have written about it in the past, but as I stepped off the plane and out of the terminal and smelled the jet fuel and saw the pink light of Los Angeles, I knew I was in the right place. And that feeling still hits me. I think of it as fate, to meet Exene and Billy [Zoom] and D. J. [Bonebrake], and to become part of the whole scene that was happening, because there were a lot of things in play—a lot of angst and anger and ambition—but the freedom and openness of L.A. and the West really spoke to me. I don't think we realized what a naive time it was, but in retrospect, and after writing this book, I think we've come to realize how lucky we all really were."
'Under the Big Black Sun' Tells of an L.A. Before the Kids From Orange County Arrived
by Jedd Beaudoin
25 April 2016
They had the neutron bomb, The Masque, and all the youthful energy you'd ever want to muster. What became of the early L.A. punks, then?
cover art
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
John Doe with Tom DeSavia and Friends
(DaCapo)
US: Apr 2016
Amazon
When talk turns to the birth of punk, Los Angeles’ role often gets neglected. Come 1976, everyone must have been sipping fancy drinks poolside, hanging with Don Henley and Glenn Frey and working on that post-apocalyptic tan. The specter of the Manson Family and Roman Polanski must have lifted. No winter, no discontent.
But there was plenty of malaise to be had in the days leading up to 1980, and the suburbs surrounding the Left Coast’s capital were as fertile a breeding ground as any. There were freaks and outcasts by the score in and around the city. Nobody ever had to scrawl Keep Los Angeles weird on the side of a building. This was the home of the Black Dahlia and Philip Marlowe, of Superman’s murder, where Ronald Reagan ratted out Hollywood friends.
Indeed, L.A. has a forceful pull for the disenfranchised. Hollywood serves as an Ellis Island of the West and you can ditch your old identity, chose something that makes you sound less like a couple of kids whose families know your families via the town horseshoe tournament or because your old man owns the corner bar. It’s a place where you can make it, talent or no talent, bright or dim as the inside of a revival theater. New York has its intellectual hurdles, Detroit its endless revolutions and London’s too far to go for most kids born in Illinois, then cast to Maryland and Florida. Two bright transplants from those very places came together to form X, the band at the heart of this version of this story. Their names were John Doe and Exene Cervenka.
Christene Cervenka made herself sound more exotic, John Duchac of Baltimore less so. He picked something that would render him indistinguishable from the huddled masses. Their story isn’t that far removed from the others told in these pages. Co-author Tom DeSavia tries to reconcile the good life his parents raised him to live with the sheer excitement he felt as punk rock began to creep into his bones. His DNA became reconfigured at an X concert. Later he became friends with Doe and helped issue an important retrospective from the band.
X doesn’t seem like a group all that concerned with its legacy. Active since the ‘70s, there have been quiet hiatuses and no new music since just after Bill Clinton first took office. A glossy, retrospective documentary film about the quartet has yet to surface and frankly seems unlikely. Despite taking its name from the third X LP, this book isn’t an X biography. It’s really a story about L.A. punk and everything that went down in the days before those meddling kids from Orange County arrived.
Hasn’t some of this been told before? Mark Spitz and Brendan mulled issued a 2001 oral history titled We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk. But Under the Big Black Sun isn’t exactly an oral history. It’s presented as a series of essays in which each voice shines. There are sometimes charming, sometimes distracting elements of style. Mike Watt, up from San Pedro, delivers his spiel about meeting D. Boon and how they became the Minutemen. That he does this without care for capitalization will either make your smile or skip over his contribution.
Doe’s tendency to use the ampersand rather than all three letters that comprise the symbol’s corresponding conjunction gives his pages the feeling of having been culled from a zine. In fact, that’s one of the best parts of reading the book: These aren’t Rolling Stone profiles that have been sanitized to protect us from the truth, they’re the real conversations that you’d have with this gang if any of them were your friends.
Jane Wiedlin unravels the mysteries of how she went from being a middle class kid with parents from middle America who undersold her dreams to a Top 40 sensation. It’s all there: The deadbeat musician boyfriend, a cockroach-infested apartment and fast friendships with a fast crowd that routinely congregated at low-ceilinged dive, The Masque. That room was the early epicenter of a scene that would fall apart in the coming years, thanks to interlopers and police hassles.
There’s the reality, too, that scenes do themselves in faster than do external forces. X’s major label deal and Black Flag’s propensity for constant touring meant that both were from Los Angeles to the rest of the world but soon became tourists in their own town. Wiedlin’s bandmate Charlotte Caffey details her own climb from art rocker to punk rocker and the transformation proves more seamless than you might dream.
In “You Better Shut Up and Listen”, Chris Morris details how he left a less-than-ideal radio gig in Madison, Wisconsin, to become a central voice in Left Coast music journalism. Whereas others recall their fondness for the likes of Darby Crash and Black Randy, Morris sees the pair as troubled souls who were best not invited into his own. He writes about a particularly violent Black Flag show from early 1981 that left him with little desire to return. He also sheds light on the beauty of the Flesh Eaters’ classic A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die, which he calls “an astonishing amalgam of fiery punk, swamp blues, and jazz atonality”, and which remains among the best things to emerge from that time and place.
Central to the Flesh Eaters was Chris D. who chronicles how that album came to be and how he was transformed from a charter school teacher with a fidelity problem to an employee at the Slash label who had trouble believing in the future of something he’d had a hand in shaping. Dave Alvin recalls the night that Peter Case stuck up for him and his right to carry a bottle of milk into a venue. Pleasant Gehman’s prose is some of the most remarkable here while Henry Rollins delivers some of his best work to date via “The Stucco-Coated Killing Field”, a piece that burns as brightly as his best vocal performances.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about Rollins is that no matter how many times he tells stories of his early years in California, he always finds something new to reveal, a feat not many writers can claim. It’s not always easy to read Rollins’ diaries because there seems to be a strong disconnect between the man who preaches tolerance on the stage and man who grouses about the rest of humankind while banging out his thoughts of the day-to-day. But here he’s in fine form and we have to wonder why he hasn’t done more in this vein.
If Rollins is a hold out on the rock memoir cash-in, so be it. We can wait to get these stories piece by piece in the decades to come. Jack Grisham (TSOL) defends the Orange County kids and their like with a power that sets the pages aflame, concluding that he refuses to stand repentant “while the crimes of my past are read aloud in the court of post-punk history”.
Everyone in these pages seems to agree that Penelope Spheeris arrived too late with The Decline of Western Civilization, that much of the spirit had already floated away by that time, that there wasn’t as much to see after 1979 gave way to 1980. Slash Records, some would say, was only idealistic when idealism meant solid commerce.
Many dreams from that time went unfulfilled and others went up in ash and floated away over the L.A. skyline. What remains? The music. Some of it, at least. Like most scenes, the one written about here had those couple of good bands that never got around to making a proper album or changed in some radical way by the time they did.
The memories, some of them anyway, are here too for us to sort through and feel something akin to being there. What more could we want?
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk