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boricuacherry-blog · 1 year

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Tall and slender with bright blue eyes and brown hair down to her shoulders, Jackie Fuchs could have passed for Mary Tyler Moore's daughter. She would spend time on the Sunset Strip, where she could dance and discover new bands and feel at home among all the free spirits and Ziggy Stardust wannabes. This was the Strip pre-paparazzi, pre-bodyguards era.

One night in the spring of 1975, Rodney Bingenheimer, a notorious hanger-on and the unofficial mayor of the Sunset Strip, caught sight of Jackie and her friends on the dance floor at the Starwood. He'd been going around the room asking every girl whether she played an instrument. Jackie didn't stand out. She was just next.

Jackie told him she played guitar, but when he wanted to know how old she was, she hesitated. Why would anyone be interested in a 15-year-old musician? she thought. But when she revealed her age, he squealed, "Oh, you're perfect!" He told her there was this producer she had to meet - right now, in an apartment a short drive away - who was putting together an all-girl rock band. She was giddy but dubious, bringing two friends with her.

It was around 9 p.m. when they knocked on the door to Kim Fowley's apartment, known as the Dog Palace. Fowley took one look at her and went straight into a stream-of-consciousness pitch about his vision for her in the band. No one listening to Fowley at that moment could have predicted that the band he was describing, The Runaways, would have a lasting influence on pop culture and feminism - that it would launch the careers of metal icon Lita Ford and Joan Jett, or that it would inspire the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s.

Within several months, she would have to decide whether to quit school to join the band. Jackie was a straight-A student who had scored in the 98th percentile on her SATs. He wanted her to play bass, convincing Jackie's mother that they would have a bodyguard and tutors with them.

The other girls in the band sensed she was a novice on bass and didn't like that she played with a pick. But Fowley wanted her in the band - which consisted of singer Cherrie Curie, lead guitarist Lita Ford, rhythm guitarist and singer Joan Jett, and drummer Sandy West - so she was in. Jackie Fuchs became Jackie Fox, and Fowley was their mentor, their boss and their provider.

As he would admit to anyone, Fowley was mostly after teenage girls. Steve Tetsch, a guitarist who was friend with Fowley, says they used to drive to high school looking for teen girls to hit on.

In early 1975, Fowley became enamoured with Kari Krome, a 13-year-old aspiring songwriter he'd met at Alice Cooper's birthday party. She was his type: a young girl who spent too much time dodging her violent stepdad and bouncing from apartment to apartment in various working-class neighborhoods. She sought refugee in the glam-rock scene, where her bisexuality was welcomed, and filled notebooks with songs.

It was Krome who discovered Joan Jett and convinced Fowley to start a band with her; she says he didn't see Jett's potential at first. Krome ended up being assaulted by Fowley. The next day when she tried to talk to Jett and West about him "abusing her," she says they both just looked at her like she was an idiot. "I remember getting really mad and just saying, 'You know what? Watch your ass, because you might be next.'"

One day after a final set, at around 1 a.m., Fowley took the band to a drab motel near the club, where they started celebrating with friends. Soon after Jackie arrived at the motel, a grown man she thinks was a roadie approached her with a Quaalude in his hand. He told her she needed to take it, no questions asked. And she did.

Most of the people at the party were teenagers, and they were spread out into different rooms. They smoked cigarettes and passed around beers. Jett played guitar while Krome smoked a joint with a guy outside. When Helen Roessler and Trudie Arguelles, two of Jackie's friends from the Sunset Strip showed up, they couldn't believe the state she was in. They had known her for a year and never once had they seen her intoxicated. "It didn't seem ok," said Roessler. "Jackie was always really in control."

At some point, Jackie said she had to lay down on the bed, because she was having trouble standing upright. When a roadie came to check and see if she was ok, Fowley asked him if he was interested in having sex with her. "She doesn't mind," Fowley said. "Do you?" Jackie tried to protest, but she was frozen.

"You don't know what terror is until you realize something bad is about to happen to you and you can't move a muscle," she said. "I can't move. I can't speak. All I can do is look him in the eye and do my best to communicate: please say no. I don't know what it looked like from the outside. But I know what was going on inside and it was horror." The roadie declined Fowley's offer, and soon after, Jackie says she started to slip in and out of consciousness.

According to Roessler, Fowley stood over Jackie and began to unbutton her blouse. Jackie wasn't wearing a bra. "Nobody seemed to really care," Roessler said. "It was really weird. Everybody was sitting in there alone with themselves. It felt like everyone was detached or trying to pretend like nothing was going on."

When Fowley started taking Jackie's pants off, Roessler couldn't bear it anymore. She got in her parents' car and left. Multiple witnesses say that Fowley began to penetrate Jackie with the handle of a hairbrush. Fowley invited other guys to have sex with Jackie before removing his own pants and climbing on top of her. Someone called others in to watch. Arguelles returned to the room to see if this was all a big joke.

"I remember opening my eyes, Kim Fowley was raping me, and there were people watching me," Jackie said. She looked out from the bed and noticed Currie and Jett staring at her. She says this was her last memory of the night. Jett has denied witnessing this event. Krome escaped to the adjoining room and began drinking. She said she was confused why nobody did anything to end the attack. She recalls that Jett and Currie were sitting off to the side of the room for part of the time, snickering. "I didn't know what to do," she says. "Go outside and drive and find a payphone and call the police? I didn't want to call the police on anyone, but at the same time I knew what was happening was wrong. At 14, I didn't know how to process it."

Nobody in the band acknowledged what had happened, which made Jackie feel she should keep quiet too, thinking it was somehow her fault. "That was the day the elephant joined the band," she said. She compartmentalized the rape so she could stay in the band. The distrust between her and the other girls in the band made her guarded. When she was about to leave, Jett got on her knees and begged her to stay. However, after another incident broke the straw on the camel's back, she finally did leave the band.

Shortly after Jackie returned to Los Angeles and the stories of her quitting the band hit the news, Brent Williams, who witnessed what happened to her that day in the hotel, says he received a call from Jett. She said that Jackie's parents might file a lawsuit. If lawyers ever contacted him, he needed to deny being in the motel room that night. (Jett's representative did not comment when asked about the phone call).

Victory Tischler-Blue was Jackie's replacement on bass, and one of her main memories from her time as a Runaway was how some of the other members made fun of what happened to Jackie.

Years later, Jackie thought she had come to terms with her rape or at least figured out how to live with it. "You develop mechanisms to compensate for what happened. You put it in a box. Except, she says now, the rape had warped her life in ways she failed to recognize, with intimacy being a constant struggle, and sleep being an issue. Her trauma intensified in 2000 when she learned that Currie wanted to write about the rape in a memoir, depicting the incident in lurid detail, but instead of Jackie, portraying the victim as a fictionalized groupie who encouraged it, and portraying Jackie as the passersby who was unmoved.

Her guard only started to come down when she read Krome's comments about the rape in a Runaways biography. She didn't mention Jackie by name, but she didn't need to. Krome's account perfectly matched her memory.

#jackie fox #joan jett #cherie currie #kari krome #kim fowley #the runaways #rock music

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bit4l-blog · 5 years

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Excene Cervenka, Trudie Arguelles - Los Angeles

1970´s

#LosAngeles #los angeles #Excene Cervenka #Trudie Arguelles #Punk #1970s #1970´s #ExceneCervenka #TrudieArguelles

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blondiepoodle13-blog · 6 years

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#hellin killer #sid vicious #trudie arguelles #sex pistols #the sex pistols

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iamdangerace · 4 years

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A post shared by Punks Berlin #punks_berlin (@punks_berlin) on Oct 7, 2020 at 7:11am PDT

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Actually Trudie Arguelles-Barrett of Trudie and the Plungers, childhood friend of Alice Bag.

#alice bag #the bags #Instagram #trudie arguelles-barrett #trudie and the plungers

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theunderestimator-2 · 4 years

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Joanna Spock Dean, bassist of all-girl early LA punk band Backstage Pass, teaching a thing or two on showing some attitude and personality and Cheri the Penguin taking pride in her individualism by wearing a layering of record albums that form a dress over fishnets and stilettos, during The Punk Rock Fashion Show in the fall of 1977 at the Hollywood Palladium, an early attempt at fashion punksploitation in Los Angeles by mainstream Hollywood entertainment promoters, as captured by Earl Leaf.

The show was billed as ‘A new wave of style and sound’, featuring Blondie, Devo, the Weirdos and the Avengers, even Bobby Pyn came out onstage wearing only a leopard fur jockstrap and announced to the crowd that his new name was Darby Crash, but despite plenty of local participation from actual members of the scene (Alice Bag, Pleasant Gehman, Hellin Killer, Trudie Arguelles and Backstage Pass, among others), it’s remembered as an ill-conceived fiasco.

“…Back in 1977, mainstream promoters were trying their best (and most of them failed) to bring punk rock into their offerings. A lot of them didn’t get it, or they didn’t get how to do it the right way… Local girls wore their own clothes and an announcer described what their fashion statement was supposed to mean.

I think the promoters just didn’t realize that the crowd was supporting their friends and bands they liked, and didn’t need to have their own culture explained to them…”

Theresa Kereakes, punk photographer.

(via)

#joanna spock dean #backstage pass #1977 #punk #early punk scene #punk rock #la punk scene #cheri the penguin #punk fashion #punk fashion show #punk rock fashion show #hollywood #people

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casbooks · 5 years

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Book Review: Under the Big Black Sun

I grew up constantly bouncing between the San Fernando Valley and Orange County in SoCal during the 80s and 90s at a time when punk, post punk, and new wave were deeply entrenched in the landscape thanks to the efforts of DJ Rodney Bingenheimer and KROQ. It was a time of change, with Alternative and Grunge coming onto the scene with Nirvana and Sonic Youth, but at the same time bands like X were held in a state of godlike reference.

This was before the internet, before spotify, before even cds! I would bum rides from anyone and everyone to go to all ages shows, even managing to convince a friends older brother to take us all the way up to Gilman st in the bay area!

But the thing is... there was another story ... a story about the scene before my experiences... the scene in the late 70s and early 80s where anything went, where art, and music, and style all merged and began. I’d heard people talk about those days, the days of the Masque club and Brendan Mullen, and the Canterbury Apartments... I was lucky enough to go to the Hong Kong Cafe a few times when it reopened in the 90s, and I heard tales of how it USED to be and we all watched The Decline of Western Civilization (on vhs!) which had been shot there!

I had bootlegs and tapes from bands that no longer existed, stuff from the Germs, The Screamers, and The Minutemen. I knew D.Boon was from Pedro and that he was dead, but that was all I knew... and yet I fucking LOVED their songs.

So when I grabbed this book, I sat down to read it hoping to find an enjoyable overview of who was who and what was what. Instead what I found was a history book, an academic primary source of how the LA Punk scene was, how it began, who the major players were, and how it changed over time thanks to the influx of violent OC punks and heroin.

Instead of a single author, you have differing experiences and viewpoints from the people who were there. People like John Doe and Exene Cervenka from X, Jane Wiedlin from the Go-Gos, Pleasant Gehman, El Vez, Henry Rollins, Mike Watt, and more.

Some chapters are better than others, Mike Watt’s is an homage to D.Boon in the most loving way, as well as a history of the scene from their San Pedro perspective. Jane Wiedlin’s chapter is probably the best written and most informative. Together with Charlotte Caffery, you get a real experience of what that time was like and how things all happened from the drugs, to the fashion, to just who was who. Jack Grisham’s chapter, in contrast is barely worth inclusion, and I’m saying that as someone who really does love a lot of T.S.O.L songs... he’s just a big piece of shit. Dave Alvin digs into Cowpunk and the Blasters experiences playing with bands like Black Flag which is really good, but I was disappointed in Henry Rollins addition to the book. I’ve heard him speak, and read his words elsewhere and expected a lot more.

If you have any interest in the bands, the music, the scene, or in Los Angeles culture at all, you’ll love this book, hands down. It’s the only book on the topic that really captures the geographical divides that exist here, and that punk overcame. Where you had bands from Chula Vista/San Diego, San Pedro, Hollywood, the Valley, the beach cities, as well as East L.A’s unique chicano/latino contributions to early punk.

The thing you hear over and over is how art and inclusion of all sorts of outcasts is how it began, but then it became corporate and overrun by violence and anger and exclusion. How women were a major force in the beginning, and how they became excluded and pushed out later.

This was not my generation... I came after.... but it is because of all of these people, the music they made, the clothes and style they created, and all that they did in a fuel of alcohol and drugs that laid the foundation for what I was able to experience. This is their history, this is their story, this is what happened from their own mouths. Too many of their friends and bandmates are dead, but they lived and thanks to this book, we have their stories.

5 out of 5 stars

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Title: Under the Big Black Sun

Authors: John Doe

ISBN: 9780306824098

Tags: Agent Orange (band), Alice Bag (musician), Alley Cats (band), Art, Avengers (band), Belinda Carlisle (musician), Bill Bateman, Billy Joe Armstrong (musician), Billy Zoom (musician), Black Flag (band), Black Randy and the Metro Squad(band), Blondie (Band), Bomp! Records, Brendan Mullen, Charlotte Caffey (musician), Chris Desjardins (musician), Chris Morris, Circle Jerks (band), Circus (Magazine), Claude Bessy (musician), Club 88, Crass (band), Creem (Magazine), Dangerhouse Records, Darby Crash (musician), Dead Kennedys (band), Dennes D. Boon (musician), Devo (band), DJ Bonebrake (musician), Dwight Yoakam (musician), Exene Cervenka (musician), Farrah Fawcett Minor (musician), Fear (band), Glitter Rock, Green Day (band), Greg Ginn (musician), Hal Negro and the Satin Tones (band), Hellin Killer (musician), Henry Rollins (musician), Hong Kong Cafe, Iggy Pop (musician), Jack Grisham (musician), Jane Wiedlin (musician), Jeffery Lee Pierce (Ranking Jeffery Lee) (musician), Jenny lens, Joan Jett (musician), John Belushi, John Doe (musician), K.K Barrett (musician), Kickboy Face (musician), Kid Congo Power (musician), KROQ, Lee Ving (musician), Lorna Doom (musician), Los Angeles, Los Illegals (band), Los Lobos (band), Matt Watt (musician), Max's Kansas City, Minutemen (band), Music, New York Dolls (band), Odd Squad (band), Orpheum Theater, Pat Smear (musician), Photography, Pleasant Gehman (musician), Punk Rock, Regan Youth (band), Rhino Records, Rik L Rik (musician), Roberto Lopez (El Vez) (musician), Rockabilly, Rodney Bingenheimer, Rolling Stone (Magazine), Ruby Records, Saccharine Trust (band), Self Help Graphics and Art, Sex Pistols (band), Slash (Magazine), Slash (records), SST Records, Stardust Ballroom, Stiff Records, Suburban Lawns (band), T.S.O.L (band), Teresa Covarrubias (musician), The Bags (band), The Blasters (band), The Brat (band), The Canterbury Apartments, The Clash (band), The Controllers (band), The Cramps (band), The Damned (band), The Deadbeats (band), The Dickies (band), The Dils (band), The Elks Lodge, The Eyes (band), The Flesh Eaters (band), The Germs (band), The Go-Go's (band), The Gun Club (band), The Masque, The Plugz (band), The Ramones (band), The Runaways (band), The Screamers (band), The Stains (band), The Starwood, The Stooges (band), The Subhumans (band), The Vex Club, The Weirdos (band), The Zeros (band), Tito Larriva (musician), Tom DeSavia, Tomata du Plenty (musician), Trudie Arguelles (musician), Upsetter Records, Velvet Underground (band), Whiskey A Go Go, Wilton Hilton (musician), X (band), Zero Zero Club

Subject: Books.General Non-Fiction.Music.Punk

Description: Under the Big Black Sun explores the nascent Los Angeles punk rock movement and its evolution to hardcore punk as it's never been told before. Authors John Doe and Tom DeSavia have woven together an enthralling story of the legendary West Coast scene from 1977 to 1982 by enlisting the voices of people who were there. The book shares chapter-length tales from the authors along with personal essays from famous (and infamous) players in the scene. Additional authors include: Exene Cervenka (X), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Mike Watt (The Minutemen), Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey (The Go-Go's), Dave Alvin (The Blasters), Chris D. (Flesh Eaters), Jack Grisham (T.S.O.L.), Teresa Covarrubias (The Brat), and Robert Lopez (The Zeros, El Vez) as well as scenesters and journalists Pleasant Gehman, Kristine McKenna, and Chris Morris. Through interstitial commentary, John Doe "narrates" this journey through the land of film noir sunshine, Hollywood back alleys, and suburban sprawl - the place where he met his artistic counterparts, Exene, DJ Bonebrake, and Billy Zoom - and formed X, the band that became synonymous with and in many ways defined L.A. punk. Under the Big Black Sun shares stories of friendship and love, ambition and feuds, grandiose dreams and cultural rage, all combined with the tattered, glossy sheen of pop culture weirdness that epitomized the operations of Hollywood's underbelly. Listeners will travel to the clubs that defined the scene as well as to the street corners, empty lots, apartment complexes, and squats that served as de facto salons for the musicians, artists, and fringe players that hashed out what would become punk rock in Los Angeles.

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