Dead Punk Summer Is Over

RIP Robert Becerra of The Stains

San Diego in September is a tease.

We get days like yesterday when the skies are overcast all morning and the city feels dismal and gray. These are my favorite mornings, especially in late summer. Any day that warrants the wearing of a bathrobe is a good day.

Then the marine layer burns off and the sun comes out and even though it was a beautiful day yesterday that beauty comes with the promise of more scorching summer heat on the horizon.

I went to Bouchercon here in San Diego last weekend and didn’t get COVID like many of my fellow participants. Even though I was there for four straight days I think it probably helped that I was able to come home and sleep in my own bed every night. I also wore a mask whenever I was attending a panel (except when I was a panelist). I didn’t wear a mask when I was driving a friend to lunch and he got COVID so go figure.

Highlights include talking with Tod Goldberg over dinner about his new novel Gangsters Don’t Die for the LA Times. Getting a recommendation about a taco spot in Logan Heights from Ivy Pochoda and then seeing her there the next day. Having coffee and a long overdue chat with Sarah Tomlinson. Talking with Daniel Weizmann about the time he got death threats in high school for something in wrote in Flipside. Hanging out with JD O’Brien, Nolan Knight, Craig Clevenger, and the Starlite Pulp crew.

One of the stranger things that happened was I kept hearing people talk about a crime writer named Domenic Stansberry. His name kept coming up at panels and in conversations with other writers. He was there but I didn’t meet him or see him wandering around the conference hotel. One of the booksellers in the book room had signed copies of his work. I read the first page of The Big Boom and it grabbed me. Not the story or the character but the voice, that thing they say you can’t teach but you know it when you hear it.

"It was the time of the big boom and everyone said the prosperity would last forever. There had been other booms before, but those had always been followed by calamity—a bust that took away everything the good times had given, then kept on taking. This boom would be different, people said.”

It’s about a melancholic detective named Dante Mancuso and is set in the Italian community in North Beach. It was published in 2006 but is shockingly prescient and dark AF. I just finished it yesterday and there are scenes I can’t shake. Even though the mood is mournful from start to finish I’ve already ordered two more of Stansberry’s books. Just the kind of thing you want on a gloomy summer day.

The Stains outside The Vex. Photo by Wild Don Lewis

My mood has been in the shitter ever since I heard the news of Robert Becerra’s passing from liver cancer. When I talked to him in 2021 for Corporate Rock Sucks he was in very poor health and had been for some time. He wouldn’t tell me where he was living other than it was a place for low-income seniors and he had a roommate he didn’t know, a stranger. I thought about sharing the interview, and I still might, but it’s a real downer.

I don’t want to paint Becerra as a victim of an uncaring society. I think he was a proud, stubborn, talented musician and that can be a challenging combination. He didn’t make things easy for himself or for others, especially his bandmates. He hadn’t been able to play the guitar for several years and I can’t imagine what it would be like to be cut off from one’s art like that. Actually, I can imagine that: it would be hell.

On Monday I learned that Steve Harwell of Smash Mouth passed away, also from liver failure. It may surprise you to know that I interviewed Smash Mouth for Flipside back in 1997. What can I say? If you were interviewed by me you might want to get a check-up.

(When I interviewed Smash Mouth the band’s secret keyboard player got me super, duper high. How high? I tried to convince Harwell to let me write a script for their song “Padrino,” which would revolve around a mob wedding. Harwell took me backstage and passed me off to Damon Alban of Blur who sent me into the stratosphere during “This Is a Low.”)

It would be easy to turn this into a thought experiment and say that in a perfect world Becerra would have received the success that Harwell enjoyed but that’s not the way it works. The fact is Becerra and his crew, who started out as a band called Young Nazis, were never supposed to make it. They were never supposed to share the stage with X or Black Flag. They weren’t liked by their Eastside peers and were disrespected by their own label but here we are talking about them. I believe Becerra was at peace with that.

But it still hurts. It’s possible that for a brief window of time Robert Becerra was the greatest guitar player in LA. Unlike many of his punk rock peers Becerra knew how to play his instrument, was fluent in many styles of music, and had been in bands before he started to tear up the punk rock scene. He was flashy and flamboyant and he brought a harder edge to his guitar playing that people like Greg Ginn picked up on and paid attention to.

When I talked to Robert he told me about jam sessions he’d have at his mother’s house in Boyle Heights with Greg Ginn or John Doe or whomever wanted to come over. Becerra wasn’t hanging out with these guys, they were coming to him. Here’s what he told me back in 2021:

“When we used to play shows they would come over and watch. Greg Ginn and Chuck and all those guys would come by and see us. Everyone was shy except me. Now it's the opposite. Now you can't shut these guys up. I used to do all the talking, you know, and these guys would stand in the background afraid of everybody. I just went up to those guys. Hey you guys played pretty good. I just started talking. We're Black Flag. You want to do some shows with us? So they used to call me at my mom's house in the place we used to practice and write all the music and everything. That was my mom's house in Boyle Heights. That was the main headquarters--my mom's house. And so they would call me and we'd get some shows together and these guys would just be quiet. Now you can't shut these guys up. Now I'm kind of introverted now. I have a lot of stuff in my head. Missing my people. The older you get you start missing your family even more. So I just keep to myself these last years. Been kind of alone.”

I talked to Becerra a few weeks after my mother died. I was startled to hear about Becerra’s situation, which sounded precarious, but he was very vague about it. He didn’t want to go into details. Jack Rivera, who put me in touch with Becerra and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, told me he’d had a hard time keeping in touch with Becerra. He moved around a lot and didn’t always have a phone, which is why he urged me to reach out to Becerra right away when he had a working number for him.

Not long after I spoke with Becerra, I asked Jack if we could go pay Becerra visit. I was still processing my mother’s death and reflecting on what it meant to be there when she passed and didn’t like the thought of Becerra being sick and alone. Jack loved the idea but when we tried to set up something the number was no longer in service. I had been in touch with several people on Facebook who knew Becerra. Someone who claimed to be his niece, someone I’d been talking to for years, turned out to be a scam artist. Becerra was in the wind. Then Nuvia’s father got sick, and then SPOT passed away, and then John Albert died suddenly and I really hope dead punk summer is over because I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take.

Robert Becerra. Photo by Edward Colver

I’m getting back on my horse and doing some traveling this month. I’ll be at Printer’s Row in Chicago this weekend with an event on Saturday September 9 at 12:30pm:

Anarchy and Ink: Historians and Fiction Writers Talk Punk - Heather Augustyn, Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond, Kyle Decker, This Rancid Mill: An Alex Damage Novel, and Jen B. Larson, Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983, and Jim Ruland, Make It Stop in conversation with Tony Tavano.

I know it says Make It Stop but I’ll actually be talking about Corporate Rock Sucks. Make It Stop comes later that evening with a virtual reading that you can all attend at 6pm PST with Kyle Decker and Daniel Weizmann.

Then I’m off to the East Coast for a few weeks to spend some time with family, friends and lots of meetings. I’ll mostly be in New York and Northern Virginia but I’m always up for a cup of coffee or three.