Penelope Houston:
It was sold out. There were between 5 and 6,000 people. The biggest show we’d ever played, and it was the biggest show the Sex Pistols had ever played at that point.
Insane Jane:
Me and my foster brother Mike Munoz showed up at 10:30 in the morning in our ripped-up army jackets with Vaseline in our hair. There were two girls already in line, one of them was wearing a yellow, Devo-style jumpsuit. This punk dude strides up and says, “So, you’re gonna be first in line, eh?” The two girls jumped up and squealed, “Sid! Sid!” and had him sign a copy of
Never Mind the Bollocks
, which he deeply gouged his signature into. He seemed very happy when my brother told him he was ten years old. Then some dude jumped out of a car and said, “Anybody have an extra ticket for sale?” Sid mockingly repeated what the guy said, then snatched off the dude’s wraparound shades and threw them into the street. Sid then took off, saying, “See ya later inside.”
Jennifer Blowdryer:
I definitely put on my “Anarchy” T-shirt and some horrible off-suede lace-up open-toe boots I’d found in a thrift store, and a slip. A woman on BART called me “sister,” thinking I was a whore or something. I was so offended.
Jennifer Miro:
Johnny Rotten was hanging around, it was nerve-wracking but it was just
so
cool. There was no punk in L.A. yet. It was so behind San Francisco.
Danny Furious:
I remember John onstage alone after their sound check, while I was setting up my kit for ours. He looked like the unhappiest, angriest person in the world. And then in bounced Sid, trying to con me out of the hammer/sickle T-shirt the Dils had loaned me for the show. When I looked up, Rotten had fucked off, so I never had the chance to have my head tore off by him by saying hello.
Bruce Loose:
I found thousands of pairs of those glasses that the doctor gives you when they put drops in your eyes to keep the light out. At Goodwill, for like a nickel, I bought 100 dollars’ worth, and I scratched “Sex” in one lens, “Pistols” in the other. Filled them in with DayGlo paint, and tried to hand them out. I had a little past shoulder-length hair. These English punks that came along with the Sex Pistols would take them from my hand, throw them on the ground and step on them. Push me on the shoulder. Give me all this attitude.
James Stark:
It was one of the most intense, chaotic shows I’ve ever been to. It was just mayhem. Everybody was jumping and yelling, a constant barrage of flying projectiles. I tried to get up close to take some photographs and it was just impossible. People came from L.A. and up north and from all over. You had a lot of kids from the suburbs.
Gary Floyd:
It was a real opportunity for people to strut their punk-ness. “The Sex Pistols are here, and here we are in San Francisco and we’re punks, too, and we have weird hair and we’re going to do our shit tonight!” Everybody was just strutting like it was a little parade. It was very surreal.
Sheriff Mike Hennessey:
I remember sitting up in the balcony with Beverly. The crowd was loud and obnoxious and yelling. And when the Sex Pistols came on, a lot of people were heaving spit. I knew the music already, because I’d had the album. It was loud, and hard to understand.
Steve Tupper:
Up at the stage, you couldn’t move at all, crushed in from all sides. As an experiment, first I raised one foot, and then the other off the floor. And just hung there for a couple seconds.
Jennifer Miro:
I was dating Brittley Black, who was in Crime, and he broke up with me the night before the show. So I was crying the whole night. I went on first, all by myself, the very first person on the stage, and I was wearing this green taffeta vampire-collared mini-dress with black spike-heeled boots. I was terrified, in the spotlight, and I just stood there, and they cheered. After that, you can’t go back to a normal life.
Penelope Houston:
There were only maybe 500 punks between L.A. and San Francisco. So who were the other 5,500 people? The crowd was frightening, that’s what I really remember about it most. The stage was covered in spit when the Nuns were done. And I walked out and slipped on a big gob. I didn’t hit the ground but almost. I was scared. “Everybody, um, take a couple steps back because the people in the front here are turning blue.”
Danny Furious:
We were nervous. We’d never played for more than a couple hundred, at best. When I hit my snare, the volume from the drum monitor behind me literally knocked me off my stool. I’d never had a drum monitor.
Jennifer Blowdryer:
The Sex Pistols didn’t play very long. I didn’t pay too much attention, ’cause they didn’t seem that serious or engaging, so why would I be? I went to the ladies room and there was this woman, Blondine, who had like part dark blond, part light blond hair, and some kind of silver short trench coat, and bright blue eye shadow. I was attracted to that. Really, the stripper in the bathroom made the biggest impression on me.
Penelope Houston:
Sid was really not a good bass player. The other members of the band were holding it together. And Johnny Rotten probably knew it was their last show.
Dennis Kernohan:
The Avengers blew them away. The Avengers
killed
the Sex Pistols that night. So much so that Malcolm McLaren wanted to produce them.
Howie Klein:
I was on the stage for the whole show. People were throwing coins, which Bill Graham and I picked up afterwards. I was going for the quarters, he was going for everything. Penelope Houston: The Sex Pistols went off to a dressing room up in some offices. We were backstage, hanging out with Negative Trend and some of the Nuns.
Howie Klein:
I was watching the Sex Pistols’ equipment coming off the stage and it was just a circus. Everyone started leaving except for the same 25 people that would have seen Negative Trend anyway. I felt bad for them.
Rozz Rezabek:
We thought we were going to go on. These guys were leadin’ us, then the next thing I knew, they were shoving us out a side door. And then we were let back in. Immediately. But our instruments had mysteriously disappeared, and the house lights were up, “Greensleeves” was playing. They said, “Go ahead. You’re on!” I was like, “Where are our instruments?”
There was a huge backstage area and we just started destroying stuff. There was like 60 garbage cans full of little Olympia beers, we knocked every single one over. These little six-ounce cans, we were throwin’ ’em like snowballs. There was ice about two inches deep through the back area.
There was a hot dog cart, so I asked for two hot dogs with relish and threw them at the first person that had a camera light. There was all the major networks there: ABC, CBS, NBC, doing a live-for-TV thing. Britt Ekland was there, Rod Stewart’s girlfriend at the time, so I fuckin’ slammed hot dogs right in her face! We were completely rioting, and nobody seemed to stop us.
Ginger Coyote:
The Sex Pistols were staying over at the Miyako Hotel and I remember going by there. Rumor had it that Zsa Zsa Gabor was also staying at the hotel and had been partying with Steve Jones.
Jennifer Miro:
We were whisked away in a limousine to a party. Sid Vicious kissed me on the head and he invited us all to stay with him in London. He was very polite. There was this long line of people shooting heroin.
Rozz Rezabek:
I remember bits and pieces of the after-parties. This one place in the Haight, they were just like knocking down the walls, to the drywall. And Sid occupying the bathroom. He peed his pants a bunch. He was drinking peppermint schnapps. We were like, “Why are all these girls all over him?”
Danny Furious:
Sid fucked off with Lamar and other punk junkies to the Haight where he OD’d. The Avengers went to the Mabuhay to very little fanfare. I went home to bed, wondering just what had happened.
Rozz Rezabek:
I don’t remember anything ’til a couple days later, waking up with really chapped lips on the beach.
7
You Are One of Our Lesser Audiences
Al Ennis:
It was a very exciting time historically. You had the assassinations of Moscone and Harvey Milk, then later on after the Dan White trial you had the White Night riots, and all the punks were out there rioting and burning cop cars. You had the Golden Dragon massacre in Chinatown. Tuxedomoon had a song about the Joe Boys, one of the big San Francisco Chinese gangs at the time. You had the People’s Temple based here. That was all during the heyday of punk.
It was also the golden age of the serial killer. You had Gacy killing all the kids, you had the Hillside Strangler down in L.A. You had the Son of Sam in New York. There were
songs
about this stuff. A Texas band did a song called “People’s Temple.” There were bands that did songs about the Hillside Strangler, about Gacy, about Son of Sam.
In retrospect, I think of punk as folk music of the time. Because if you go back to old blues music, old calypso music, Mexican border music, if there was a hurricane, or an assassination, people would put out songs by the next week. This is how fast things were moving. People would come out with songs about all this kind of stuff.
Danny Furious:
Beyond a doubt the Dils were and remain my favorite S.F. band. Although originally from Carlsbad they were nauseated by the shallowness of the L.A. scene, and moved to a much more receptive San Francisco. Tony was the smart guy, Chip the pothead. Together with various drummers, they were perhaps the best band in the world.
Chip Kinman:
The Dils were one of the few punk rock bands that would play ballads. Most bands wouldn’t do it. We thought slowing down was as radical as playing really fast. At that point, it probably was, because everyone was getting faster and faster.
Dave Chavez:
Chrome was a band that a lot of people don’t remember. It was very influential on bands like the Swans and stuff later. I got to see ’em once and they did the best show. It was like a total magic act. There were puffs of smoke and tin foil wrapped on everything. They disappeared and appeared. There was a lot more multimedia in the early first wave of punk, a lot more ingenuity.
Steve Tupper:
The Liars were really great live. They were about halfway between ’77 punk and power pop. Very energetic and very poppy and melodic. They would get everybody in the room pogoing every time.
Dennis Kernohan:
We had the most requested song on KSAN, “Sudden Fun.” It was a minute and a half long. Later, we changed the band’s name to Sudden Fun. ’Cause it was our favorite song. We never were trying to get a record. We never tried to do anything, actually.
Al Ennis:
Don Vinil was one of the first scene-makers at Mabuhay Gardens. I used to always see him around, and next thing you know, he was up onstage with his band. A lot of the songs the Offs did had a big reggae influence. Later on they brought in a sax player. Very punky.
James Stark:
Don worked at a record store in the Castro. You’d go there, and when he was working you could steal all the records you wanted. He’d cover for you.
Jello Biafra:
There was a good-natured competition between me and Don Vinil when we were living together. Who would come up with the next new song, and how different would it be from our other songs.
Klaus Flouride:
There was a guy that played in the scene, and he had a song called “On the Ward Again.” Ralph Pheno.
Dirk Dirksen:
Ralph did a record chart, the “Rotten Record Chart,” to give the punk scene in San Francisco some legitimacy. It gave the area a real cohesiveness. Ralph at the time was heavily doing ecstasy. Later on, Ralph went outside and took a can of gas and set himself on fire. It was an unfortunate loss.
Jimmy Crucifix:
We started a band called the Next. With Brittley Black, who had been in the Readymades and Crime, and me on guitar. Our first gig was with Crime, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, and Dead Kennedys. We actually brought chickens with top hats and bow ties. Just put ’em on with little rubber bands. We let ’em loose onstage. And we destroyed all our equipment.
Brittley put so much flash powder in his drums and around the stage, it fucking burnt everybody’s eyelashes and eyebrows off in the front row. The Mabuhay was full of smoke and chickens running around,
bockbock bockbockbock
, with bow ties and top hats. They closed Broadway Street down.
Sheriff Mike Hennessey:
Some groups were just hilarious to go watch. Jennifer Blowdryer. They had great names.
Jennifer Blowdryer:
Legionnaire’s Disease were kind of funny ’cause they were a couple of Vietnam vets.
Jello Biafra:
Part of what made the Mabuhay succeed was, there was none of this standard ’70s-bar-band, three-sets-a-night crap. You played your 20 minutes and got off the stage. You just had to play your best material. Or in many cases, your only material.
It was all so new that there wasn’t a set regulation way to do things. You couldn’t decide how you wanted your punk band to sound by listening to a million other punk or hardcore bands. There weren’t enough of them. It wasn’t “every band should sound the same ’cause then your friends will like you and you’ll instantly get an audience.” No. It was, “Every band must sound different from every other band, or none of us are gonna be interested.”
Dirk Dirksen:
DOA was a bunch of really dedicated Canadians who hitchhiked down for their first gig.
Joey Shithead:
It was in 1979, and “Disco Sucks” was getting some play on the local college stations, so we organized this trip down there. Sort of organized. I took the train down, Brad the guitar player hitchhiked down, Chuck and Randy took the bus down. I arrived first ’cause the train was on time.
I met Dirk Dirksen: “Hey, we’re DOA.” He said, “Okay, where’s your band?” “Well, ah, they should be here anytime.” He went, “Oh yeah, where’s your equipment?” “Well, we don’t have any.” He said, “You don’t have any equipment?” “No. No equipment. Was hoping that we could borrow some.” He said, “Are all you fucking Canadians this stupid?” I was like, “Ahhhhh.” I didn’t know what to say. I was a young puke.
So we played one night with the Avengers, and it went great. The next night we opened for this great old band, Ray Campi and the Rockabilly Rebels. We were like second on the bill, and the place was packed again.
I’d been hanging out with Will Shatter all day. Drinking beer all day long. We went down to Fisherman’s Wharf, we’d piss in flower pots in front of tourists. We had a laugh about that. We’d get more beer, blah blah blah.
We got to the gig, and I can’t remember what spurred this on, but people were just kinda looking at us like we were from Mars, type thing. Personified the slack-jawed gawker.