Just got back from Seattle where I visited the Experience Music Project & I gotta say that it presents a distorted “history” of punk rock (American-style, anyway) in the “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses” section. I’m not sure who’s to blame but the so-called archivists that put this mess together present a shallow, mostly incoherent account of LA punk. They certainly botched the opportunity to document an important punk scene that pre-dates the “Grunge” phenomena that they mainly celebrate here. Before I continue this rave, let me quickly say it’s not possible to list all the LA punk, alt, whatever bands but some were overlooked & shouldnt have been: where’s Los Plugz, the first LA band, as I recall, that put out their own full-length album? But the fact that theres no mention in this supposed “Punk Archive” “Nirvana” of the Zero Zero Club & it’s importance to the LA scene is simply astounding. Most of you members of this group will no doubt attest to the importance of our little hole in the wall to not only sustaining the LA nightlife scene for as long as we did but also contributing to an emergence of a new, DIY, punk subculture in So-Cal. (First-ever art shows of Ray Pettibon and Jim Shaw; the “East-LA-meets-Hollywood Punk” Hecho En Atzlan/Richard Duardo show.) Yeah, you got your “legendary” luminaries such as John Doe and Brendan Mullen pontificating about this & that but neither of them relate on camera how many nights they spent at the Cahuenga Zero ‘til 5AM sucking up all that cheap “Generic” liquor & trying to pick up young punkette trim. Was it too much to ask for a brief acknowledgement of the Zero, our mythic afterhours hot-spot, where so many collaborations, associations, songs & bands were actively begun & helped shape the LA cultural landscape circa ‘78 thru 1981?
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:31:51 +0000
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