Setting the record straight: The Spastics were not fire-hosed off the stage at the Masque because we were so awful, though we were... Kim Fowley was upset about some things I'd said to Gerber Bell about him. So Fowley got somebody (not Darby Crash, by the way) to spray me down, not with fire foam, which would have been bad enough, but with gallons and gallons of water, which given the iffy wiring of the Masque was potentially lethal. So, that is why I hit the poor sonofabitch with the base of a mike stand. Just clearing up a minor point.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Holy Grails and Forbidden Fruits

I fully admit that I’m completely obsessive when it comes to music collecting. I always want to find and listen to (and if possible, get a copy of in MP3 format) the weirdest, most obscure music imaginable. And at any given time I usually have some number of “holy grails” I’m searching for, songs or artists whom I’m trying to find. Obviously the internet in general and the digital music revolution in particular are what have made nearly all of this musical obsessiveness possible; without the ability to search nearly every topic or band or song or genre and be likely to find it, my holy grail searches wouldn’t get very far.

At present I have two big holy grails. The first is to hear anything by a legendary band called the Spastics. I first heard of this band while reading the book Hardcore California, which was written in the mid-80’s and which documents the early days of the LA and SF punk scenes. In the section written by Craig Lee (himself a pioneer of the LA punk scene who played with the Bags among many others) about the earliest days of LA punk, he mentions that the Dickies’ first concert at the Masque followed a punk band that was supposedly so awful that a bunch of punks turned a fire extinguisher on them, a contention that was confirmed by Dickies lead singer Leonard Philips in the Darby Crash biography Lexicon Devil; Leonard claims it was Darby himself or one of his Uni High pals who did this. This has always fascinated me; given how sloppy and amateurish most punk was back then, how bad did you have to be to have a fire extinguisher pointed at you?

For literally the better part of three decades, this is as much as I knew. But as always the internet provided some more information. Turns out one member of the Spastics was singer David Baerwald, an absolutely fascinating figure in rock music. David was born in Ohio to a German-born father who was an academic political scientist and a Midwest-born mother who eventually became a psychologist. When David was young his father moved his family to Japan for a period before moving back to accept a faculty position at UCLA in 1972. David grew up in the very affluent Westside suburb of Brentwood and spent his teenage years, in his own words, living the ‘Less Than Zero’ lifestyle of drugs, clubs, and excess.

David formed the Spastics in ’76 or ’77 from friends of his who also lived in Brentwood. David has claimed in interviews that the Spastics were less of a band and more of a gang or youthful clique. They played around LA a bit (including the now-legendary Masque show opening for the then-unknown Dickies). After the Spastics broke up he played around LA with a club band called Sensible Shoes.

In 1986 David hit the big time as part of the duo David + David with David Ricketts, another musician on the LA scene. David + David’s only album was Boomtown, a slickly produced but lyrically very dark look at the underside of the Reagan boom years. The song “Welcome to the Boomtown” was a top 40 hit that year and the album also went platinum. Musically the album reminds me of an amalgamation of Tonio K., Scarecrow era John Mellencamp, and Bruce Springsteen. It’s a little too slickly produced for my tastes but there’s no denying the passion and honesty of the lyrics.

After David + David broke up, Baerwald worked as a session musician and songwriter for a large number of artists, including Joni Mitchell, Waylon Jennings, and many others. In the early 90’s Baerwald began playing regularly on Tuesday nights with a large and revolving group of musicians, including a then-largely unknown female artist by the name of Sheryl Crow. Baerwald eventually played guitar and co-wrote 7 of the songs on Crow’s solo debut, which she appropriately titled Tuesday Night Music Club, including the smash hits “All I Wanna Do”, “Leaving Las Vegas”, and “Strong Enough”. David has continued to be a strongly-in-demand songwriter and has worked with a vast array of artists over the years.

But my main interest in him is in hearing about his work with the Spastics. Amazingly, considering their reputation as the worst punk band of all time, the Spastics actually DID record some songs. A few years back, Wondercap Records released a compilation album of early LA punk songs called What Is It. In addition to the usual Dangerhouse-era offerings by the Germs, the Dils, etc., it also featured previously unreleased recordings by the Spastics, “I’m a Spaz/Fuck the World” and “Baby, You String Me Up/You Head Exploding”. At present nobody seems to have digitized these and placed them online, though it is possible to order this album via the Wondercap web site. I may need to just bite the bullet and order it just for the sake of completeness.

However, the reviews I’ve read reveal little indication as to why this band was so hated. Supposedly their sound is pretty typical of the time; I’m picturing something along the generic lines of the Viletones. However, What? Records founder Chris Ashford did say in his commentary on this album is that one reason they may have been so detested was that they came off as rich snobs slumming it, an impression seconded by Baerwald himself, who described them in an interview on another web site as “twerpy nerds and rich kids”. At a time when the “Hollywood 100” ruled the punk scene with an iron fist, chasing away suburbanites and other poseurs, any band that came off as being from LA’s wealthy Westside was likely to not go over too well.