Early LA Punk Rock: Something Older, Something More American (Soundings Podcast)

San Pedro claims Charles Bukowski, ballerina Misty Copeland, and Mike Watt and D. Boon of the Minutemen as its own. That particular group tells you something about how many different Los Angeleses can coexist in a single corner of the city. It is the punk rock thread, running through Watt and the Minutemen, that pulls us into the world Tom DeSavia has spent the better part of his adult life trying to preserve.

DeSavia is the co-author of two books with John Doe of X. Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World are oral histories built from first-person accounts by the people who were actually in the room: Jane Weidlin of the Go-Go's, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, Kristine McKenna, Pleasant Gehman, and dozens of others. Together they read less like music history than like a city finally telling the truth about itself.

The story of how the books came to exist is almost as good as the books themselves. DeSavia spent the mid-1990s as an A&R man at Elektra Records, assembling an X anthology that, unexpectedly, reunited the band's original four members for the first time in over a decade. A Tower Records in-store the band expected no one to attend turned into a three-hour signing with kids wrapped around the block. "I thought I was going to do an epitaph for the band," DeSavia says. "It turned into a reunion." He spent the next twenty years convincing Doe to write about it. Doe spent those same twenty years saying no, reluctant to be the sole author of a story that belonged to so many people. The solution was to invite those people to tell it themselves. Get everyone to help paint the fence. Mike Watt wrote his chapter exactly as you would hope — sprawling, idiosyncratic, punctuated and capitalized according to no known convention — and DeSavia nearly came to blows with his editor over the insistence that not a single comma or apparent error be touched.

https://youtu.be/xF9aGBg6ZuM?si=tQOTu-pw7At-uPxZ

What the books reveal, and what DeSavia discusses in a recent episode of Soundings, is how profoundly the standard account of LA punk misses the point. The scene is routinely filed alongside New York and London punk as a story about alienation, safety pins, and three-chord aggression. DeSavia argues otherwise. "The LA scene I fell in love with came from Gene Vincent. It came from traditional Mexican music. It came from traditional roots music. It came from everything." The real ancestors, as Doe writes in the books, were not the Ramones or the Clash. They were Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Wanda Jackson, and Sun Records.

That lineage explains how a single scene could be elastic enough to contain Los Lobos, the Blasters, X, Fishbone, Black Flag, the Go-Go's, the Minutemen, even Dwight Yoakam, within the same general orbit. "You'd go to a show," DeSavia says, "and it wouldn't be weird to see Los Lobos and X and the Minutemen on the same bill. And it made perfect sense." Punk, in his formulation, "was undefinable. And I think it will remain undefinable. But there's a home for everybody in that scene."

The books are also unusually honest about what the scene got wrong. The early years were, by most accounts, genuinely inclusive. Roughly half the participants were women, a fact DeSavia says the press praised him for documenting, much to his puzzlement. "It wasn't intentional," he says. "It was literally a snapshot of what it was." But the arrival of hardcore from Orange County and the South Bay changed the social atmosphere in ways the books don't flinch from. Weidlin describes mock fighting becoming real fighting. McKenna writes that women were the first to leave.

The Go-Go's chapter is among the most revealing in either book. DeSavia is emphatic on the point that tends to get lost in the band's pop mythology. "I can't stress this enough," he says. "They were punk rock." Their story, as Weidlin tells it, was as harsh and chaotic as anyone's in the scene. Yet Beauty and the Beat made them famous and the scene punished them for it. "What the Go-Go's did for LA punk music cannot be understated or overstated. They got these songs on the radio." History, slowly, is coming around.

So is the music itself. DeSavia notes that Double Nickels on the Dime, the Minutemen's sprawling 1984 double album, is still selling steadily, still being discovered by teenagers with no idea what they are walking into. "That record means the same thing," he says. "And it's going to prompt them to make their own art."

DeSavia wrote in his preface to Under the Big Black Sun about the first time he saw X as a fifteen-year-old, terrified in an argyle sweater at the back of a club, convinced he was about to be killed. He knew, watching Exene grip the microphone with both hands and lean into the crowd, that everything would be different after that night. Decades later, having assembled the anthology that reunited the band and co-written the history that may outlast all of them, he was asked what that kid would say if he could see what was coming.

"He wouldn't believe me," DeSavia says. "He'd kick me in the nuts."

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Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World are available wherever books are sold. The Soundings conversation with Tom Desavia is available now on all major podcast platforms.