When the Sex Pistols took the stage for their final show with Sid Vicious at San Francisco’s Winterland on the 14 January 1978, it seemed the most unlikely place in the world for the most notorious punk band of all to play their not-so-grand finale. But at a time when many sizeable US towns didn’t even have a pair of punk bands within their city limits, the Bay Area was bubbling over with punk acts. Two of them, The Nuns and The Avengers, opened the Sex Pistols concert with scabrous album-length sets (now available to hear for free at wolfgangsvault. com). “Ask not what you can do for your country, what’s your country doing to you!” yelled lead singer Penelope Houston as The Avengers launched into the chorus of their classic opening number, The American In Me.
Outside of New York and perhaps Los Angeles, no metropolis in North America had a more active punk scene in the late 70s than the San Francisco Bay Area. No US punk scene, other than New York’s, was more diverse, with standard bash-it-out three-chord wonders sharing space with early synth-punk and post-punk pioneers, punkish power poppers, and proto-hardcore outfits. Yet the very uncompromising idiosyncrasy that was its distinguishing trademark limited its commercial and international impact. Virtually none of the bands landed major-label deals, and virtually none cut full-length albums. Quite a few barely recorded, or didn’t record at all. And with one exception, none made even a modest global impact, most of them not even surviving into the 80s.
“People put out their own singles, but of the people I knew, hardly anybody could afford to consider that, let alone bring out an album. Or even have enough songs to record on an album!” laughs Penelope Houston today. “We had no idea how you would approach a label or no idea how you’d release your own record. We were innocent of any sort of career plan or idea that we should put out more than a couple of songs at a time. I think it’s hard for people to imagine how perplexed we were at the thought of all the complication of getting vinyl made, and getting it in stores. We didn’t even get across the country in a car. We could barely keep a car together to go to LA!”
The very forces that worked against building San Francisco punk into a lasting phenomenon, however, are very much of part of what makes the discs that did emerge before 1980 so sought-after today. Original 7” and EPs with limited press runs by the likes of The Avengers, The Nuns, Crime, Negative Trend, The Sleepers, The Nerves, and The Dils are not just rare and pricey, but wildly different from both each other and much of the other punk getting issued in the US and UK. For those without deep pockets, many of those tracks (as well as much live and studio material that wasn’t issued at the time) have found release on archive compilations. But despite the welcome inclusion of a few cuts on the Jon Savage-compiled Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-80, there has yet to be a comprehensive or representative anthology of 1976-79 San Francisco punk, and getting the best of it under one roof still takes some scavenging.
Newcomers to the patchily documented 70s San Francisco punk scene can be forgiven for wondering how such a beehive of activity arose in this of all cities. San Francisco, after all, seemed to embody the very love-soaked psychedelic hippie culture that punk was counteracting. By the mid-70s, the San Francisco rock community, so revolutionary when it pioneered acid rock in the 60s, had become corporate. Famed concert promoter Bill Graham had a stranglehold over the Bay Area’s venues, and some of the most influential veterans of San Francisco psychedelic rock were playing massively popular MOR rock in bands like Jefferson Starship, Journey, and Steve Miller’s group.
Yet San Francisco has always attracted outsiders looking to rebel against the status quo. Its early punk musicians were rebelling against the self-satisfied mini-industry that San Francisco rock had become, and even against the peace-and-love image the city’s counterculture had propagated for a decade. It helped, too, that record stores such as the still-active Aquarius and (across the bay in Berkeley) Rather Ripped fed the appetites of young fans eager for something different with early punk and proto-punk indies and imports not easy to find in many areas of the country. As early as 1972, Ralph Records (primary a vehicle for avant-garde band The Residents) had set a precedent for small local labels issuing maverick rock far beyond anything a major or even a sizable indie would touch.
The emergence of the Sex Pistols (and their eventual controversial San Francisco concert) would do much to fan the flames of punk among the US underground. But the first San Francisco punk acts – even the first San Francisco punk vinyl – predated even the Pistols’ debut single. The first 7” was Crime’s Hot Wire My Heart/Baby You’re So Repulsive, recorded in mid-1976 and issued on their own label shortly after. Near the end of the year, it was joined by an EP by The Nerves, at a time when hardly anyone in the States was issuing EPs, let alone DIY punk ones.
Truth be told, The Nerves’ EP – most famous for including the original version of Hanging On The Telephone, written by singer/guitarist Jack Lee and covered by Blondie – sounds more like brittle power-pop than all-out punk. “Our music wasn’t really punk rock, because we had another kind of vision in mind,” admits Nerves bassist/singer Peter Case. “But we thought punk in terms of we hated Led Zeppelin, we hated guitar solos, hated satin jackets, huge bombastic rock shows. We liked two-minute songs. We hated the record industry.
“We were angry at the government,” continues Case, who’d formed The Nerves with Lee in late 1974 after they met when Peter was playing on the street. “We were angry at everything. Especially at the music business, which we felt was a club we weren’t allowed in. It was all run by old people. They didn’t know anything about rock and roll, and they didn’t know anything about what was good. The feeling was, ‘Where’s my generation? And why isn’t it being represented in music, like all the other generations who get to have their music?’”
Crime’s debut 45 was nonetheless more of a harbinger of the angry sound of Young America, right down to a song title – Baby You’re So Repulsive – guaranteed to deter commercial radio airplay. Recorded with the knobs turned as high as they could go by a disgusted engineer who left the room while the second track was laid down, the single has the blurry basement guitar, half-shouted vocals, and pissed-off attitude aplenty that would be a cliché by the end of the decade. Back in ’76 it was downright exotic, however, and a slightly altered line-up issued one of the next local punk singles in mid-’77 with the similarly lo-fi/high wattage blast Frustration/ My Guitar. Yet in spite of doing much recording in the next couple of years, they never issued another single in the 70s.
“Crime is recognized as having released the first punk rock single on the West Coast,” according to drummer Henry Rosenthal (who joined shortly after the singles were cut), known as Hank Rank when he was in Crime’s ranks. “We were so anti that we were even anti-punk. The stance of the band was to stand apart. We got into trouble when the movement began to get political, and everybody wanted to band together and support certain causes. Although we were lumped in with the punk movement, and we were considered part of it, we never adopted the punk scene’s classical punk aesthetic.”
Those who wanted more political rage and then some would be sated the following year by The Dils’ I Hate The Rich, a minute-and-a-half blast of power-chord fury rawer than the early Clash. Guitarist/ singer Chip Kinman maintains he had yet to hear The Clash or indeed much British punk at all at that point. But in a short lifetime that would see the release of only three singles, they’d unleash a knack for anthemic class-conscious tunes (their 1977 follow-up 45 was titled Class War) with more melody and pop song structure than most bands working the same territory. Chip and his bassist brother Tony had moved up to San Francisco from Southern California, and as they’d shifted back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles while The Dils were going, Chip’s in a position to compare the two most active punk scenes on the West Coast. “San Francisco was the more serious punk rock town, into punk revolution, whereas LA was more into the nihilistic punk rock vibe,” he feels. “It was kind of a constant battle with those two towns, and the philosophies, with some overlap of course.”
Also quick off the mark, and also investing their aggressive guitar-oriented punk with a political edge, were The Avengers, whose debut three-song 7” was issued by the Los Angeles label Dangerhouse in ’77. Formed by students at the San Francisco Art Institute – the closest parallel the city had to the art schools that have served as a breeding ground for innovative rock bands in the UK – they were fronted by Penelope Houston, whose venomous vocals delivered anthems of both frustration and self-determination. We Are The One, which lyrically repudiated fascism, communism, Jesus Christ, and capitalist industrialists – in the course of one verse – was the standout from their maiden release, though the equally impressive The American In Me would have to wait quite some time to make it onto vinyl.
“We were kind of more English-influenced than The Nuns and Crime,” says Houston when asked to compare the Avengers to other bands in the city. “The Dils were probably a little more political than The Avengers. But then they had those cool harmonies, the ‘kin and bro’ harmony thing. There weren’t many bands with female leads that were doing the same thing that we were at the time. X was around, but they had their own kind of LA thrift store kind of thing going on. You could say we sounded like [LA’s] The Weirdos, but their subject matter was always clowns painted on velvet or something.”
Though bands such as The Dils, Crime, and The Avengers were hardly abundant in the Bay Area as 1977 dawned, it was only a matter of time before kindred spirits sought each out. “We saw this poster for this band The Nuns, so we went to go see them because we thought the name was interesting,” remembers Kinman. “Apparently when they went to set up their gear, the owner of the club thought that they were too loud or weird-looking or something, and sent them away. The owner of the club said, ‘Well, they told us to tell anyone who’s going to come see them to go see them at their rehearsal hall,’ which was down south of Mission [a SF neighborhood]. We were the only ones who showed up, and that’s how we met The Nuns. We thought, ‘Hey, we’re simpatico,’ and all that sort of thing.”
Although bands were forming and meeting each other, with few venues willing to host them, “It was really hard to get any sort of following,” adds Case. “There was no focus on the scene at that point. So we tried to create one. We used to play at this place on 6th Street between Mission and Market called the Frisco. We did a residency like every Thursday, Friday, Saturday in this place. You could hardly even get winos in there with free drink tickets! Guys waiting for their drug score were the only people out there.”
Fortunately one club was willing to take a chance on the emerging punk bands and serve as the locus of the scene, much as CBGB’s did in New York or venues like Madame Wong’s and the Masque did in LA. Situated in the midst of strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood, one-time Filipino restaurant the Mabuhay Gardens booked countless local punk bands (as well as many major punk/new wave touring acts from out of town) under the aegis of promoter Dirk Dirksen. “The way he would book the Mabuhay, one day in the month was booking day,” remembers Sleepers guitarist Michael Belfer. “He’d have free chicken wings and beer, so that would get everybody down there. ’Cos we were all broke and starving, so it was a day that you knew you were gonna get fed. All the other bands would be there, so that’s how I met all the musicians in all the different bands.” The launch of local zine Search & Destroy, edited by V Vale (later to edit and publish the long-running series of RE/Search books devoted to all corners of cult popular culture), gave punk from both the Bay Area and around the world a regular media outlet. Eventually compiled into book form, these included of-the-moment Q&As with an astonishing array of cutting-edge SF punk bands, as well as other punk/new wave icons, both fringe and star.
As punk started to… if not thrive, at least proliferate, the sound started to diversify to some degree from the guitar-proud early pioneers who’d managed to issue vinyl in 76 and 1977. The Nuns would not get a record out until after their opening gig for the Sex Pistols, but are still among the most fondly remembered early bands. Their buzzing guitar rockers could be quite confrontational, particularly Decadent Jew (included on their debut 1978 seven-inch), which was bound to prove unpopular with Holocaust refugee Bill Graham, though it didn’t stop them playing it at the Graham-promoted Sex Pistols show at Winterland. Yet they also did rather gentler, poppier numbers featuring singer/keyboardist Jennifer Miro that drew some Blondie comparisons, though neither she nor the band had the glamour or material to compete with Blondie commercially.
Also in the femme punk-pop vein, though more of a novelty, was Mary Monday’s contrived but likable I Gave My Punk Jacket To Rickie. Enough of a John Peel favourite to make it into his fabled “record box” of 130 nuggets, it’s also one of the very first SF punk 45s, bearing a 1977 release date. The Mutants’ perky, darkly flippant pop-punk, with pleasing male-female vocal blends, is almost universally remembered with love by those fortunate enough to have seen them. The almost universal verdict by those same fans, however, has it that their records never came close to capturing the flamboyance of their live performances, featuring some of the silliest costumes ever to grace a punk stage.
As the 70s drew closer to the finish line, San Francisco punk took both grimmer and artier turns as commercial new wave threatened to assimilate the punk revolution. Though more obscure to some degree than most of the bands highlighted in this article, Negative Trend’s 1978 EP is highly regarded by local veterans for its monstrously ugly guitar sound and ominous lyrics. Guitarist Craig Gray puts it, “Our tempos were slower. More like the moment just before the chaos descends.” The Offs’ 1978 single 624803 was an indefinable blend of rattling rhythm, squashed guitar murk, and staring-into-the-jaws-of-hell defiant vocals, though the cover of The Slickers’ reggae hit Johnny Too Bad on the flip was a more accurate pointer to their future ska-oriented direction.
Given a boost in the collecting world by a plug in Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming discography, The Sleepers’ 1978 EP combines bristling punk energy with the kind of gloomy vocals and foreboding outlook associated with early post-punk pioneers like Joy Division. Singer Ricky Williams (formerly drummer in Crime) has a small cult following for his menacing delivery, and some Sleepers cuts can sound like stream-of-consciousness emissions from a most troubled psyche. Williams “was able to instantly break things up into song-form cadence”, notes Sleepers guitarist Michael Belfer. “We would just jam and make our songs up like that in the studio. We’d record everything we were doing, go back and listen to the tapes and pick out ideas that we liked, and then worked on putting them together as songs.”
Though not always categorised as “punk” (not that San Francisco was as concerned with rigid classification as many scenes), surely worth an honourable mention are a few of the rawer outings by acts more often placed in the art-rock or experimental rock camp. The title track of Tuxedomoon’s 1978 No Tears EP features impressive guitar blasts from Michael Belfer; the stiff punkish rhythm, squeaky keyboards, and histrionic vocal are an early marker for the art-punk genre. The Units’ jittery three-song 1979 seven-inch, meanwhile, was a prototype of synth-punk, if that could even be called a genre. While not usually lumped in with the punks, The Residents’ brutal deconstruction of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1976), as well as their irreverent mash-up of primitive Beatles samples on 1977’s Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life, trashed sacred cows of the classic rock generation with as much élan as any pure punk 45s.
The more vicious, still-less pop-friendly California hardcore of the early 80s, however, was showing its hand via early releases by two bands in particular. Flipper, who included ex-Negative Trender Will Shatter and, in their early days, Ricky Williams (who managed to give the band their name in his brief stint), stripped punk more bare of its melody than almost anyone else. Punk in their hands became a rumble of screech, distortion, and glum sardonic vocals, clear from the git-go on their 1980 debut single Love Canal/Ha Ha Ha (though they’d first issued a track on ’79’s SF Underground various-artists EP).
Also making their 1979 vinyl debut on a seven-inch with the first version of California Über Alles were the Dead Kennedys, whose siren-from-hell riffing was paced by Jello Biafra’s operatic warbling vocals. The most bleakly political of punk bands, they quickly rose to cult stardom on the punk circuit, even as their very band name, as well as the topics of songs like Holiday In Cambodia, ensured they’d never enter the mainstream. For all their bilious inaccessibility to the average Joe, however, they did crack the lower regions of the UK Top 50 in 1980 with their debut album Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, as well as the single Kill The Poor.
Yet somehow, by that time, most of the bands mentioned in this article had broken up, or were winding down, unable to secure either solid record deals or recognition. Why? “Of all the regional scenes, I think San Francisco bands were most successful at retaining the ‘we don’t care’ punk attitude,” feels Denise Sullivan, involved in the scene as a fan, journalist, college radio presenter, and eventually publicist with the San Francisco 80s new wave-oriented label 415. “San Francisco has a legacy of representing ‘uncommercial’ interests. The SF punk attitudes were uneasy bedfellows with the LA industry forces who represented all that was synthetic and fake about the culture. So the idea LA industry insiders would ‘discover’ SF bands and turn them into profitable commercial ventures was oxymoronic from the gate.”
A rather surprising array of heavyweight producers with mainstream credentials actually did try to record San Francisco punk bands, who nonetheless were not delivering what the industry felt it could sell. Crime did sessions for Neil Young producer Elliot Mazer, Sire Records’ Seymour Stein, and Huey Lewis, none of which saw release at the time. The Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones had a commercially unproductive crack at producing The Avengers. “When we saw all these bands getting deals, we thought our turn had to be next,” says Crime’s Henry Rosenthal. “The other records [by SF punk bands were on] Dangerhouse and all these kind of fly-by-night labels. We were waiting for something better. Then that better thing didn’t happen, and when heroin entered the band, that was the signal for me that it was never gonna happen.”
Drug problems helped other bands self-destruct, including The Sleepers. Before one particularly prestigious New York gig, Ricky Williams “overdosed on Tuinal that night, right before the show”, Michael Belfer recalls. “The band had to do an instrumental set. Ricky comes onstage, grabs the mike, and starts howling in it and saying, ‘My band is a bunch of fucking assholes!’ The band quit on me the next day.”
Though, as one musician remembers, the drug problems weren’t limited to the bands, with one high-profile producer regularly disappearing to ingest cocaine during sessions that didn’t see the light of day.
Luckily many unreleased session and concert tapes by almost all of the most significant San Francisco punk bands eventually found official release on archival compilations, even though quite a few of these are lo-fi or demo recordings.
As many SF acts rarely got out of California it’s also fortunate that many Bay Area punk acts of the era (as well as many from out of town) were filmed by Target Video, the oddest highlight being a clip of Crime playing at San Quentin Prison (closely trailed by a show by The Mutants at a school for deaf children).
“We shot several nights a week, sometimes in clubs around the Bay Area,” says Target’s Jackie Sharp. “Many shoots were held in our studio where we had a little more control. I don’t think there was anywhere on the planet at the time where a band, performer or artist could play a show, party, do a video shoot while partying, sleep, wake up and shoot some more… and play a second gig later that night. It was the perfect set-up for creative collaborative experiences.” Target even toured Europe to screen its videos in the early ’80s, giving overseas audiences their first (often only) chance to see San Francisco punk bands in action.
San Francisco 70s punk is fairly well represented in the CD era, but it’s the original vinyl, for all its, (and indeed often because of) funky sleeves and poor distribution that excites collectors the most. What follows over the page is a sampling of some of the best and rarest, with the caution that many yet-rarer releases – from the poppiest (The Readymades) to the goofiest (The Maggots’ (Let’s Get, Let’s Get) Tammy Wynette) – await wider rediscovery and, in many cases, reissue of any sort.
