by Laura Garber
“We Got Power!” by David Markey and Jordan Schwartz, explores the gritty, moral panicking punk scene Hermosa helped propel onto the national stage in the early 1980s. The hard cover anthology named after the zine they published, includes photographs and essays from notable punk-musicians, among them Black Flag singers Dez Cadena, Keith Morris and Henry Rollins.
A panel discussion about the book, published in 2012 by Bazillion Points, will be hosted by the Hermosa Beach Museum on Thursday 29, starting at 6 p.m.
Panelists will include the authors, Cadena and Redd Kross drummer Janet Housden.
Punk photographer Kevin Salk will moderate the discussion.
“Hermosa has so many stories to tell about punk rock,” Schwartz said. “It’s cornered the market on weird hardcore.”
“There would have been no way punk music would get into a museum in the ‘80s. It took many years for this music to get respect,” Markey said.
Markey and Schwartz steered toward hardcore punk after feeling smothered by corporate rock and the New Wave scene during the late ‘70s.
“That X show at the Santa Monica Civic really got us moving towards hardcore,” Schwartz said of the October 1980 punk performance.
“I remember at that show getting handed a Black Flag flyer for a show at Baces Hall that had the Manson Girls on it,” Markey recalled. “You’re looking at this stuff, it’s darker, it’s heavier, and it quickly absorbed our consciousness and we were pulled into that.”
Markey and Schwartz met in Santa Monica during the 1979 pre-punk, ska-heavy haze. Markey was producing Super 8 films and a Xerox zine centered around the neighborhood kids.
With the help of Schwartz’s sister Jennifer, the team put together their first issue of “We Got Power!” in 1981, using Markey’s bedroom as their editorial office and Schwartz’s family bathroom as their dark room.
The first issue included an interview with the late John Macias, frontman of Circle One. Macias connected the punk-journalists with his father who ran an offset print shop.
“Rather than just producing maybe 50 copies of a Xerox zine, we did a thousand copies of the first issue of ‘We Got Power!,’” Schwartz said. “We had print runs of 2,000 for the second, third and fourth issues, and 2,500 for the final, fifth issue.”
Schwartz used his 35mm camera to capture the raw energy of punk bands like the Misfits, Saccharine Trust, and The Minutemen. The photographs and band interviews were then featured in their zine.
“We would see the Descendents play, and if there were 20 people there, it was great, because most of the time, those shows were so small,” Schwartz remembers. “The Descendents, of course, would go on to be legendary and massive. But in their early years, when we were clued into them, they struggled to fill even a small club.”
Instead of shying away from the 1970s consumerism, Markey’s film, “Desperate Teenage Lovedolls,” embraced references to hits such as the “Brady Bunch.”
“Humor and horror were both in the air,” Cameron Jamie wrote in his essay for “Punks Become the Media.” “They documented a punk attitude that was, strangely enough, beyond punk. It was something weird and beautiful.”
“We Got Power!” included punk-themed mazes like “Help the punk find the liquor store that sells to minors” and a “scam column” that described pickup lines used by punkers, written by Kim Pilkington.
Pilkington also contributed punk performance reviews, and Dear Abby-esque columns. Perhaps most importantly, she had a car.
The anthology is both an ode to punk and a cautionary tale. Pilkington’s heroic punk-arc ended, sadly, with addiction, a consequence of the punk scene’s dark side.
Her approach to life; living fast and furiously, was remembered in essays by Rollins and Jennifer Schwartz.
“She was extremely intelligent, and I believe she had the lowest fear quotient of anyone I have ever met,” Rollins wrote. “I guess she was a bit crazy, but I think it was more her zero tolerance for boredom.”
Rollins recalled an acid-filled night driving through a winding canyon road with Pilkington. Abruptly, Pilkington gave Rollins an ultimatum: list reasons to live or she would drive off the road and over the cliff.
“I yelled out, ‘I still have to finish the vocals on the My War album,” Rollins wrote.
Pilkington slowed down the car.
Schwartz met Housden in 1977 at Pier Avenue Middle School in Hermosa Beach.
The Redd Kross drummer contributed her essay “Me vs The Lord of Dogtown” to “We Got Power!” It recalls a 25 year-long mosh-pit mystery.
A sudden scuffle broke out and before she knew it, Housden was laid flat on the ground with an immediate shiner. A friend, Jeff McDonald, told Housden that skater Tony Alva had been the one to do it. Housden took a glass bottle and hit Alva over the head.
Decades later, a mutual friend revealed it was McDonald all along.
“Perhaps the moral of the story is, ‘Punk rock was the devil’s music and it made nice teenagers bludgeon each other. So maybe it’s a good thing it’s all corporate and lame now,” Housden wrote. “Nah, that’s definitely not it either. Let me know when you figure it out, okay?”
Markey’s contribution to the anthology recounts one of the many police raids on punk concerts.
“These so-called punk rock riots happened with such regularity that a gig did not seem complete unless the cops showed up and shut it down,” Markey writes.
Under the direction of old school police chiefs like Daryl Gates, police engaged in violent suppression, even targeting press photographers, according to Markey.
“Cops are cool in New York,” Glenn Danzing of the Misfits said in a 1982 interview with “We Got Power!” “They know they have better things to do than be bothering little kids. They’re assholes here!”
A “We Got Power!” interview with Redd Kross was interrupted by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs, as printed in their zine.
The Hermosa Police Department reportedly ran Black Flag out of town after a riotous gig at the old Baptist Church, which had become a craftsman hall, and musician’s studio known as The Church. The Manhattan Avenue location is now the Marlin Equities headquarters.
Cadena in his essay “Tales from the South Bay,” tells his side of the story.
“Easy Reader paper reported the Hermosa police had successfully kicked Black Flag out of Hermosa,” Cadena wrote. “But we had already moved out and relocated to Torrance.”
The town that once attempted to suppress punk, today, honors it with murals and museum exhibits showcasing how the music shaped the city. However, to pay tribute is to recognize an exiting impact.
Members of the punk band No Crisis were interviewed in the third, May 1982 issue of “We Got Power!” The zine asked band member Johnny Snot if he thought the punk scene was dying.
“No. It’ll go until 1990 and then there may be a need for a change as far as each individual is concerned.”
“Individuality,” Snot added. “That was the whole punk movement anyways, just stand up for yourself.”
Snot’s prophecy would ring true to the hardcore punkers as more radio-friendly punk would emerge. The snapshot of hardcore punk in Los Angeles in Markey and Schwartz’s anthology elicits memories of analog, violence and what it meant to be a suburban kid thrown into an exhilarating, budding counterculture.
The anthology also includes the unreleased, 6th issue of “We Got Power!,” originally planned for release in 1983.
“People want articles produced by the artists,” Markey said. “I think the reason why people now are so interested in fanzine culture is because it was this archaic form of media that was self-produced by kids outside of academia, outside of mainstream culture.”
For more information about the Hermosa Beach Museum event visit hermosabeachhistoricalsociety.org. ER
