The LA hardcore scene in the late 70s and the LA glam metal scene in the late 80s had a lot in common, much of it sad and disturbing.
Punk figures like Darby Crash, the doomed frontman for The Germs, and dimwitted headbangers like Chris Holmes, the WASP guitarist, regularly obliterated themselves with drugs and alcohol not caring at all for the consequences. Sobriety was too unbearable.
Both scenes had a hostility towards women. Punks beat them up. With some exceptions, metal musicians mocked and questioned their audacity to play alongside them, that is when they weren’t exploiting them for sex or depending on them for basic necessities.
Both rebelled against the tedious status quo out of boredom and determination. Both had ravenously passionate fans who slam danced and stage dived and packed clubs to see their up-and-coming favourites again and again. Both featured a slew of young, hungry bands just barely scrapping by. With nothing to lose and no real alternative job prospects, it was either cultural nirvana or the deserts of obscurity.
But that’s where the similiarities end. LA punks were the better musicians even if they rarely showcased any instrumental mastery. They also covered topics the metal guys would laugh at like mental health and left-wing politics. (A hair metal band would rather burn a Soviet flag than defend communism.) With notable exceptions, punks bemoaned their sexual isolation, their lack of success bonding with women, a precursor to the misguided incel movement. On the contrary, hair metal groups had an abundance of groupie conquests to brag about in their lyrics. The more degrading and submissive the experience, the better.
Glam metal bands put more effort into their ironically feminine presentations than they ever did into their songs. “Outrageous” showmanship was more important than connecting emotionally with an audience. (It’s easier to wear assless chaps than say something profound about the human condition.) Then again, fearless punks like Crash, took their cues from Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious. Despite having next to no budget and even less talent, they were the real showstoppers.
Before she directed the hilarious Wayne’s World, Penelope Spheeris covered both of these curious rock movements in two celebrated documentaries. The Decline Of Western Civilization covers hardcore while its more famous sequel, The Metal Years, infiltrates the Sunset Strip. Only one has held up all these decades later. The other is too depressing and repetitive.
Released in 1981, the original Decline follows several notable bands of the era at the end of 1979 and for almost half of 1980. Unlike the forgettables in The Metal Years, many of the LA hardcore outfits profiled have since become highly regarded cult legends.
Consider the notorious Fear. Clearly students of Iggy and The Doors’ Jim Morrison, they spend way more time deliberately antagonizing their live audiences than actually playing to them. Their heat-seeking songs are so tight and lightning quick. Unfortunately, their heel antics are extremely gross and offensive. When they’re not being horrifically homophobic or making painfully unfunny jokes (one audience member shouts out the bad punchlines before the guitarist does), they’re goading fans near the front of the stage to fight them.
After a brief spitting war, one ballsy lady takes the bait, charging after Fear’s frontman Lee Ving. He does not turn the other cheek. Thank God for security. It’s a fascinating car crash in real time.
The best of these bands is clearly X, led by then-couple John Doe and Siouxie Sioux doppelganger Exene Cervenka. Thanks to their multi-talented lead guitarist Billy Zoom, who has played so many different types of music and instruments since he was 6, there are welcome strains of rockabilly in their presentation which greatly differentiates them from their peers. For a scene filled with unrelenting dread and rage, Zoom is the only one having fun on stage. He can’t stop smiling. Oddly, he looks like a young Jigsaw.
The members of X are in a slightly higher economic class than the members of Black Flag who live in absolute squalor. Their frontman gives us a brief tour of their extremely confined quarters where they also rehearse. They live in an abandoned church that charges only $16 a month for room rentals, a bargain basement value for a dump. Their walls are completely covered in spray paint. One guy literally sleeps on a shelf closet. An actual bedroom is the size of a bathroom. Perhaps out of gallows humour, they have a few nooses dangling from the ceiling. I wonder how they decorated for Christmas.
There’s an enormous elephant in the room at various points in The Decline Of Western Civilization that goes disappointingly unmentioned by Spheeris or any of her interview subjects. Black Flag has a revealing song called White Minority. It sounds like it was written by a Men’s Rights Activist or a Nazi. It should be pointed out that their lead singer isn’t Henry Rollins. He hadn’t joined the band just yet.
No. The guy who sings it is Ron Reyes, who was born in Puerto Rico. The sentiments of the track just linger uncomfortably without any follow-up conversation.
Then there’s all the Nazi symbolism. Someone draws a swastika on Darby Crash’s back. Meanwhile, he’s wearing an eagle cross necklace. A fan on crutches has a Nazi armband on his leg cast.
A skinhead fan talks about being chased by “niggers”. Crash describes a dead Mexican as a “wetback”. An out there Catholic Discipline track about a guy in love with an actual Barbie doll that he uses as a sexual aide describes a moment where he gets on a bus with it in his pocket and purposefully avoids sitting next to Black passengers.
What’s with all the white supremacy? Spheeris never asks and the topic never comes up in conversation. A serious abdication of her duty as a documentarian and a journalist, especially when you consider what happened to her dad.
The Alice Bag Band, whose lead singer looks uncannily like a short-haired Lady Gaga, are almost as good as X. Before her band picks up the pace, the audience’s interaction with each other is actually friendly and mostly cordial. No slam dancing. Only one bird is flipped. She doesn’t put needless heat on herself by trashing the crowd which still doesn’t stop an overeager audience member from trying to get to her on stage.
Contrast all this with the pretentious glam metal acts in The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years who are far less interesting or honest. Or, at times, even coherent. (God knows they’re not funny, either, intentionally or otherwise.)
Say what you will about Darby Crash (who committed suicide before the first film’s release), but I understood everything he said and appreciated his soft-spoken candor. Good luck figuring out what Poison’s burnout guitarist C.C. Deville is trying to say sometimes, though. The rest of the time he’s full of shit like a lot of these dicks.
The big problem with The Metal Years is that most of the newbie bands who get to play live aren’t good at all (which explains why there’s constant cutting during the performances) and when you hear them talk, they’re all sleazy bores which greatly explains why their only claim to fame is appearing in this surprisingly underwhelming movie. Fear, X, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks have all been covered by many prominent performers. When’s the last time you heard a decent Seduce cover?
Far too much time is focused on mundane superficialities like the badly dated appearance of glam metal musicians, especially their make-up and those absurdly poofy haircuts. And how they attracted the wrong kind of attention. These terrible bands have been relentlessly mocked for so long that we’ve all run out of original jokes. At this point, they’re beyond self-parody.
Watching them act so hopeful about their nonexistent future success doesn’t inspire ridicule, just relief they never made it. The movie occasionally uses sound effects for comic emphasis. The problem is there are no jokes to laugh at.
At the start of the 80s, the scene was thriving as bands like Motley Crue jumped off the stage at the crammed Whiskey A Go-Go right into the startled homes of America through non-stop airplay on MTV. By the time Spheeris catches up with the new crop of crap starting in August 1987 right through until February 1988, it’s in a considerable state of decline which goes politely unmentioned, although there is a brief discussion about the new generation ripping off the old. And, of course, the frequent interruption of live performances. It should be noted that none of this happens to the hardcore bands in The Decline Of Western Civilization.
Many of the singers either sound like Ronnie James Dio or Axl Rose who was still many months away from becoming a household name in his own right. (He sings with Alice Cooper over the end credits but doesn’t otherwise appear.) None of the bands stand out as particularly thoughtful or exciting, another undeniable fact that no one wants to acknowledge. One band’s idea of being outrageous is doing an average Steppenwolf cover and emptying a big bag of popcorn into the front rows.
The decidedly unglamourous Megadeth, the only talented new group briefly interviewed who actually went on to deserved commercial and critical success, bullshit you almost as much as the glam glidiots, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the band delivers the only entertaining live performance here.
Spheeris doesn’t just interview wannabes, thank God. She also chats amiably with legends like Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead (who actually was the subject of a fine 2-hour doc), Aerosmith’s “toxic twins”, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, a fully made-up Alice Cooper and of course, Ozzy Osbourne. (By the way, the famous scene where he can’t properly pour a glass of orange juice wasn’t real. Not cool to make him look bad like that.) He’s far more honest and lucid than CC Deville, or at least he was during filming. These days, you need the closed captioning.
If only the movie had strictly focused on them. Their once chaotic lives and memorable careers are filled with dangerous life lessons this younger generation of metallers should’ve heeded, with the exception of one. No, it’s a really bad idea to encourage these crummy bands to keep going. No, they will not make it. There will be casualties and burnouts, lots of them. On the contrary, when asked what he would say to a kid who wants to be a rock star, Mustaine offers a succinct, “Don’t.” It’s the smartest thing he says in the entire film.
Paul Stanley, famously surrounded by three female admirers who look like they were hired to make him look more desirable, acts like a spoiled, obnoxious king in the royal bedroom as he, like Alice Cooper, unpersuasively asserts that glam metal saved rock ‘n’ roll in the 1980s. (College bands deserve that credit.) Three years after this film’s release, the more authentic Seattle bands, many of them inspired by Black Flag and X, would kick them all off the charts. Glam metal didn’t save shit. In fact, it delayed the emergence of better music.
The Metal Years is a shockingly gloomy watch, not at all the comedic cult film I was expecting. (I’d seen bits and pieces over the years but never the whole thing from start to finish. What a difference that makes.) The only genuinely funny moment involves three mooning fans in the opening credits which says it all. A second viewing solidified my darkened mood.
It’s not enjoyable watching WASP’s Chris Holmes, in the film’s most surreal sequence, guzzling bottle after bottle of vodka, sometimes dunking it on his stupid face, while lounging unashamedly in his swimming pool as his horrified, stoic mother watches on helplessly. (What the hell is she doing there?) Like a lot of these shitheads, he proclaims he’s living his best life. Then, the truth comes out. He wishes he was less famous. He’d rather be “broke and happy” then “rich and sad”. I’d rather listen to someone less pathetic. Spheeris tries to understand why he’s put himself in this state but it’s a waste of time.
Negative comments like that inspire derision by the ever charmless Gene Simmons, himself a giant knob, who is much wiser about avoiding the deathtrap of drugs than he ever is at respecting women. (In one scene, he’s easily distracted by a woman in lingerie which looks like another staged moment.)
Surprisingly, other musicians are more spiteful. One trucker hat-wearing singer calls groupies “fleas and ticks”. “Slut” shaming abounds. When asked if he’s ever fallen in love with a fan or could even imagine such a scenario, Stanley claims he couldn’t because he doesn’t want sloppy seconds. A wannabe recalls him saying you can’t have women in your life if you want to make it. At least Tyler and Perry are respectful.
A dirty old club owner runs a “dance contest” which consists of young women gyrating around for a measly thousand bucks, a sash, and a crown. Their moves aren’t sexy and the whole thing is lame. Even one of the glam rock guys, who serves as a judge, wonders what it has to do with heavy metal.
Spheeris asks some women, all of whom play in their own hard rock bands, if they can rock as hard as the men. Only one says it hasn’t been achieved yet. (Have they not heard of Lita Ford or Canada’s Lee Aaron?) Unfortunately, unlike the earlier hardcore film, no female-led acts appear in the concert footage which defeats the purpose of even asking the question in the first place. God knows they couldn’t have been any worse than the men. However, they are just as delusional.
Unlike its punk predecessor, The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II feels very impatient with its constant preference for quick, successive soundbites over longer, deeper conversations and its bad habit of cutting in and out of mostly pedestrian live performances. Also, there are too many uninspired talking heads that over time blend into each other with their derivative rhetoric.
I’m not a big fan of having someone start to tell a story, then cut to a different person starting a different story, then another doing the same, before cutting back to the first person, then the second, then the third, until all the stories are finished. I’ve never seen a film with such a short attention span.
The original film had a solid formula. Each band gets their own separate segment even though none of the members of the Circle Jerks, Fear or the Alice Bag Band, who all play live, are interviewed which isn’t explained. God knows what the contemptible Lee Ving would’ve had to say on camera off-stage. There’s even time allotted for fan comments which are shot in black and white, some more alarming than others. (Germs guitarist Pat Smear, now married with children, was such a misogynistic prick as a kid.)
The Metal Years mostly maintains that approach but then crams in rapid-shot responses by unrelated talking heads in between making the film feel distracted and annoyed by its own agenda. You don’t have time to digest anything substantial because another thought arrives just as quickly as the last one while we whip through the usual subjects like drugs, touring, and sex without any further enlightenment. Because these glam metal goons all think and act alike, the effect is monotonous. (Only the veterans are worth paying attention to, some of the time.) Like the music, little of what they say is real or revealing.
The fans are only slightly more intelligent. The music is bad, the musicians even worse. There’s nothing fun about their lives, even when they brag about frequent group sex. It all feels so empty, the opposite of a good time. Spheeris rarely makes a verbal judgment although her interview with Chris Holmes, the drunken WASP guitarist, feels more like an unproductive shrink session than a neutral interaction. It’s more shocking that the man is still alive decades later.
Ironically, despite singing about pain and self-destruction so often, there are more genuine laughs to be found from the unexpectedly cheerful hardcore bands in The Decline Of Western Civilization. They may be dirt poor and have ugly social views on certain subjects but the otherwise affable members of Black Flag and X like each other enough to joke around during casual on-screen conversations which makes us laugh, as well.
In a moment of unexpected domestic bliss, Darby Crash and his live-in girlfriend converse so easily and comfortably while making and eating breakfast, despite the morbid recounting of the painter story. (How come we don’t see Ozzy’s family when he’s making the same meal?) These ordinary scenes humanize these memorable, seriously flawed characters in ways you would never see in the more skeptical mainstream media, that is, when they were even covered at all. In those rare instances, they would otherwise be ruthlessly demonized as one-dimensional monsters, a threat to all that is well and good.
No one is more fascinating than the hippie-hating Kickboy Face. Imagine Keith Richards with a French accent. Besides fronting Catholic Discipline, he writes for the shortlived but highly influential Slash Magazine which led to the equally important Slash Records, a crucial lifeline for the LA hardcore scene.
The hair metal bands in Part II, however, reinforce all the moronic stereotypes of rock stars. The members of Poison are the only ones who attempt self-deprecation but they fail miserably. The banter feels forced and insincere. There’s far too many cringy dick jokes and sex jokes as these clueless douchenozzles embarrass themselves again and again. They puff themselves up so much they don’t even need fluffers. They’re full of enough hot air. Once in a while, you sense their insecurity but the phony façade they project mostly remains intact.
It says a lot that the almost non-singing, highly inebriated Darby Crash (his frustrated former manager compares him to a three-year-old), who seems to resent having to use a microphone and growls rather than enunciates while fronting The Germs, is a more intriguing performer and figure than all the hair metal bands in Part II put together. It also seems grossly unfair that his band had to be shot on a soundstage (because no club would book them again) while all these glam goons have no trouble stinking up every club they ever played for.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, January 4, 2019
3:12 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 