Mari “Marz” Fulton was an outcast punk at Mira Costa High in the late 1970s. Upon her recent death, her brother found photos she took of the seminal punk band, Descendents. Four decades after the photos were taken, the Descendents are scheduled to reunite for a performance at Saint Rocke
by Steve Fulton
Early one morning in 2021 my sister Marz texts me a “poop” emoji.
This is her “funny” way of saying there is a problem.
My original nuclear family’s dark sense of humor.
Even in the worst of times we try to make each other laugh.
Marz lives alone in a cramped house in Torrance.
Where she moved once we sold our parents’ old cracker box house in MB in 2018.
Her health has not been great.
In 2010, she had a large, mystery tumor removed at Harbor General.
She didn’t come home as the same person.
She took a turn for the worse during COVID.
She’s isolated.
No one wants to make her sick.
I text her back, telling her to call 911.
Then I rush to her house.
I arrive just in time to see the paramedics wheeling her to the driveway.
Tears flow down her eyes, I think because she is choking.
She can’t breathe sitting-up.
She can’t breathe lying down.
“Marz, don’t worry.”
“Let’s just get you to the hospital.”
Seconds later, with four paramedics around her, she is dead in her driveway.
She is 59 years old.
—
Over the next 6 weeks my brother and I clean out Marz’s house.
Most people don’t plan on dying of course.
No time to clean up or hide the things you hope no one ever knows.
There is a massive pile of fresh cigarette butts from the Larks she’s supposedly stopped smoking.
They fill an entire garbage bag.
There are also 100s of unopened cardboard boxes from the last move.
In one I find dozens of sets of photos and negatives.
Hardly any of them have markings.
I hope they are photos my mom took of our family.
I’ve been looking for those.
But when I sift through them, I realize they are rock bands on stage in the late ‘70s.
Most taken by Marz when she was still a teenager.
Her punk years.
I’m frustrated.
I wanted my mom’s photos.
Marz was an enigma in our family.
Nine years older than me, she was basically from a different generation.
Yet her presence dominated our house growing up.
The stand-out aspect of Marz, for the other five of us who lived in the small house on First Street in the Mira Costa section of Manhattan Beach, was that Marz was a punk rocker.
A “punker” to those not in the know.
A “punk.”
She, seemingly, was the first person any of us knew who could be called that.
This began sometime in 1976 or 1977.
Marz was always forward thinking about music.
She was into all the bands before many others.
First protopunk and glam Iggy Pop, The Sweet, T-Rex, Aerosmith, KISS and her favorite, Bowie.
She could play the lead of Ziggy Stardust almost perfectly on her acoustic guitar.
I sat in her room and watched her play it all day long.
Then came The Ramones.
All through the summer of 1976.
She taught my 6-year old brother and I to sing “Havana Affair” to her.
As she sang “Beat On The Brat” back to us.
While social and engaging, she never quite fit-in with the kids of Manhattan Beach.
There were many cruel words.
Friend groups ditched Marz.
So she found an alternative path of her own.
—
I find my mom’s photos in another box.
After scanning all of them, I return to the box of Marz’s photos.
One set of them in particular, catches my eye.
Photos of a band taken in what looks like an abandoned field.
Their name scrawled in various places in spray paint and masking tape.
I was a huge Descendents fan in the late ‘80s in high school.
(notice the “e” not the “a”)
But these don’t look like the guys I remember.
There can’t be two bands, can there?
Not two with nearly the identical name from the late ‘70s.
Right?
As I look closer,
I am more than intrigued by them.
They feel so raw.
The development date on the back says “1978.”
But when were they taken?
Marz kept them hidden away for over 40 years.
Why?
Did she want me to find them?
A mission from Marz?
A drowning sense of claustrophobia comes over me.
How do you realize the intentions of the dead?
—
Along with Marz’s photos I find much much more.
Nothing has been protected.
It’s been thrown in boxes, stored in the elements.
But still kept.
It was important to Marz in some way.
100s of things.
Fanzines, flyers, buttons, and records.
Much of it is covered in a layer of ash.
The end of the Lark cigarettes.
I can’t help thinking of Mount Vesuvius.
The ash that covered everything.
Like Pompeii.
Preserving a moment in time.
At once both beautiful and horrific.
—
I passed through Marz’s punk days as a little kid.
The late 1970s was an angry and sad time in our house.
Marz stayed out late until all hours.
Grades slipped.
Music got loud.
Arguments with parents, louder.
Yet the names of her friends who stopped-by the house on their way to or from clubs in Hollywood are familiar:
Randy, Ron, Dez.
The McDonald brothers (remembered because they were not twins but had the same names as my twin brother and I – Steve and Jeff), Janet, Janis, Jeannie.
The Nolte brothers.
Bits of information dropped into my subconscious.
And maybe clues to the photos.
—
I can’t get my mind off the photos.
I find myself looking through them when I should be doing other things.
I’m struck by the composition.
At 16 years old, my sister was a damned good photographer.
I sent sample photos to my other sister.
Maybe she can shed some light?
She’s bemused to see them.
She was younger, but was there too.
She sees a clue in the “Descendents” photos.
“That’s Frank and David.”
“David used to play ‘on-loan’ to bands connected to the Church in Hermosa.”
Of course.
David.
Marz’s ex-husband, David Nolte.
—
I know David Nolte as:
The bass player for The Last.
Marz’s longtime boyfriend.
A mainstay at our house for many years.
Someone I looked to for validation as a teenager.
He was also my short-time brother-in-law.
David and Marz were married.
But it ended quickly.
There were many cruel words.
Friend groups took sides.
She left it all behind and found peace with God.
Everything about that time in her life of the ‘70s and early ‘80s boxed-up.
Hidden away.
Under a layer of smoke and ash.
It was moved from shelf to closet.
Then from one crumbling outdoor shed to another.
Stored under tarps in backyards.
In cardboard boxes in spare rooms.
Eventually the only person who knew any of it existed was Marz.
Memories attached to deep, enduring wounds.
—
David Nolte accepted my Facebook friend request years ago.
We have not spoken since 1986.
But he is possibly the only person alive who might help sort all of these photos out.
I send him a message.
He replies.
He’s sorry about Marz’s death.
There is guardedness to our conversations.
We are both grown men now.
My teenage anger at him, muted by the decades.
By my own life of complexities.
The past is both far away and feels like last week.
Time piled on top of time all existing in the same headspace.
I don’t want to betray my sister’s memory.
Yet in 2021, I need his help to know Marz.
And I believe he needs closure.
—
An uneasy truce unfolds.
There are many photos.
100s of them.
A silent chat-only Facebook communication was established.
Cautiously, he helps sort what from what.
There are shots of X, 999, The Mumps, The Ramones, The Quick, The Urinals, Red Cross and others.
Marz also took 100s of photos of The Last.
“Your sister was a great photographer,” Nolte admits.
Finally, I get up the nerve to show him “The Descendents” photos.
Nolte is blown away.
He thought the photos were lost forever.
They may be some of the first photos of a South Bay punk band ever taken.
—
Over two years of sparsely guarded conversations, Nolte and I finally get down to the story of the photos.
Some time around November 1977, armed with my dad’s Konica 35mm camera, Marz, went out to some property near LAX to shoot band the Descendents.
“The photo session was the last thing the three of us did as a band. Frank followed me [from Loyola High] to Mira Costa in January 1978, and we started playing with Bill Stevenson who I met in my Spanish class. While Bill wasn’t into punk or much of anything except KISS, he had a very punk attitude and was a fellow outcast. We became friends and I made him tapes of my band and my brothers band and punk music he should like and he took to it. He loved Frank’s songs and gave me a cassette where he’d overdubbed harmonies on them,” Nolte recalled.
I want to hear more about my sister, but Nolte concentrates his memories on the band members and how things unfolded musically.
I afford him the space.
This is his musical origin story, captured on film he never thought existed.
And Marz, with her camera, made it possible.
That can’t be escaped.
Mission complete.
Finally, David unravels the mystery of the “a” vs “e” in the name of the band.
“I think the drummer misspelled the name before we arrived for the photo shoot. Frank come up with the name and unique spelling with ‘e’, it was never with an ‘a’,” he said
So the two “Decenda(e)nts were one and the same.
Nolte joined The Last, and eventually dated Marz.
Bill Stevenson and Frank Navetta continued as The Descendents.
Later, Nolte sends me some songs he and Marz wrote together.
He tells me how she discovered the folk singer “Phranc” and also helped them get a record deal.
“Your sister was right there”, Nolte tells me, “she was an important part of everything”.
I spend some time scanning and cataloging the ephemera Marz kept.
It’s such an overwhelming amount that I only get half way done before I have to stop.
“Did Marz really want me to find all this?”
The feelings are too raw.
The emotions are too new.
What strikes me most is that Marz’s punk-era items are not “a collection”.
Marz didn’t find and store these things after the fact as just a “fan”.
She didn’t search them out from ads in magazines, at thrift stores or flea markets.
Instead Marz documented her participation in the early punk years by living through them.
When it all imploded she tried to bury it.
A collection is curated, loved, cataloged.
This is nothing like that.
It’s all of her things, mashed together, frozen in a moment of time.
The life of an outcast teenager in the South Bay in the late 1970’s.
It’s not a collection by any means.
It’s a time capsule. ER
