Origin Stories

The Weirdos, The Masque & Brendan Mullen

First off, I want you all to know this newsletter is free of April Fools Day shenanigans. We’ve been blindsided enough this month. 

Today I want to talk about the complicated history of a song and why it is important to me and—since you’re reading this—of some importance to you as well, though you may not realize it.

The song is “Message from the Underworld” by the seminal Southern California punk band the Weirdos. Every band that released a 7” record in the late ‘70s can make some claim to this distinction, but the Weirdos truly were special. 

Although the Weirdos were part of the first wave of the Hollywood punk scene, the core of the group, John and Dix Denney, were from the Valley and attended North Hollywood High School.

The Denneys were no stranger to the bright lights of Hollywood. Their mother, Nora Denney, was an actress who appeared in a number of television shows and movies, sometimes under the name Dodo Denney. 

She got her start in Kansas City as the witchy host of late night horror movies, but she’s best remembered for her role as Mrs. Teevee in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. 

Remember her?

The Weirdos got their start in 1975 and singer John Denney insists they were a raucous rock band that formed before punk came into vogue. We all have our origin stories and this is his. But the band’s outlandish attire and high-energy sets on the Sunset Strip drew early punks to performances like brats to a chocolate factory.

One of those people was Al Flipside, founder of Flipside fanzine whose first issue featured a group review of Cheap Trick’s debut album. Energized by the Weirdos, Flipside began championing the band and documenting this strange new thing called punk.

Flipside wasn’t the only L.A. zine captivated by the Weirdos. John Denney was featured on the cover of the second issue of Slash, a magazine that helped codify L.A. punk style for generations to come. 

The Weirdos released two hugely influential singles: “Destroy All Music” on Bomp! Records in 1977 and “We Got the Neutron Bomb” on Dangerhouse in 1978. In spite of its outsized influence, the band didn’t sign a record deal, didn’t tour, and didn’t release an LP before breaking up in 1981. 

The band reformed many times over the years and I interviewed a few of the members in late 2003 or early 2004 for Razorcake #18. (By this time they were playing with former Circle Jerks bassist Zander Schloss.)

During their heyday, The Weirdos played many memorable gigs at The Masque, the underground club started by Brendan Mullen. (And when I say underground I mean that literally; today the property is maintained by RuPaul’s production company World of Wonder.) The Masque, The Weirdos, and the early L.A. punk scene are mythologized in Mullen’s oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb with Marc Spitz. 

Mullen followed this book up with Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey. I interviewed Mullen about the book in 2002 for 3 A.M. Magazine, and although the interview is mostly about Darby, Mullen drops some gems about L.A. punk:

JR: How did you come to be interested in The Germs and Darby Crash?

BM: I opened up a band rehearsal business off Hollywood Boulevard in June 1977, which gradually morphed into an illegal BYOB club space on weekends called the Masque, and met the Germs and Darby through Chris Ashford who was a clerk in one of the hip record stores at the time. He was their friend-manager who talked me into letting them play a gig there, and, of course, the night they did changed the entire direction my life would take.

JR: How would you define California punk?

BM: Somebody pointed out in Neutron Bomb that while Jimbo Morrison never put a needle in his arm onstage a la Uncle Lou ("Heroin") but he did say he wanted to fuck his mom and kill his dad ("The End")! Anybody who shot up junk in the New York version of punk gets to be a red-hot punk. So the difference between punk L.A. and NYC as defined in Please Kill Me is that New York was basically all about derelict heterosexuals who shoot up heroin and fall about the set; while the L.A. version, according to Neutron Bomb, is about killing your parents. Which is more anti-social, which is more dangerous? Which strikes more fear into the status quo than killing and fucking your parents? Awaking at dawn with a machete for your Dad and a boner for your Mom or “Waiting for the Man” on some stench-ridden street in uptown Manhattan? Which is more "punk"? Which will provoke and upset more people?

The fact remains, the California punk pre-dated the East Coast version. If you go back to the garage band era, and if you take L.A. proto-punk as far back as Arthur Lee, Sky Saxon, Jack Nitzsche, Phil Spector, Kim Fowley, and Jimbo Morrison -- even Zappa and Beefheart -- all weirdo iconoclasts with varying degrees of musical talent and influence, all of whom had varying degrees of psychopathic tendencies, all of whom were openly contemptuous if not downright hostile to Flower Power and the hippie scene on Sunset Strip. Some even put Charlie Manson in this category. It hardly took Lou Reed or the V.U. to show L.A. the way with rejecting Flower Power in favor of creepy teeth-gnashing methedrine ghoul music served up with a scowl. This is the thin ice on which the case is made for V.U. being the first "punk" band. Even Arthur Lee himself, the O.G. king of hippie-punk eventually concluded that the music scene in L.A. was for the birds with the tune "Bummer in the Summer" (from Forever Changes), a song written prior to the Velvet Underground's smacked-out abhorrence of West Coast get-back-to-the-garden LSD culture as depicted in Please Kill Me. Does Reed's psychopathic surliness apparently brought on by electro-shock treatment in his teens make him the first "punk rock archetype"? Dream on, New York! As for use of the word punk, everybody knows the term was used well before that silly comic book came out of the same name in late 1975...

Many people have tried to define punk, usually by what it is not, but I think Mullen nails it with “creepy teeth-gnashing methedrine ghoul music served up with a scowl.”

You can read the entire interview here. I go back and re-read it at least once a year (and cringe at some of my insensitive remarks). Mullen was such a good subject and his passion comes through in every response.

For a while, I considered doing a series of semi-regular interviews with 3 A.M., but it never got off the ground. It did, however, have a name. I was going to call it Message from the Underworld. 

So when I think about this humble newsletter and how it has evolved over the years from the occasional post on Medium, to an infrequent missive on Tiny Letter, to this, I consider my interview with Brendan Mullen as the beginning of it all.  

One more story about Mr. Mullen. Before his sudden passing, Brendan had just finished a project with the Red Hot Chili Peppers when he suggested to Keith Morris that it was his turn to collaborate on a book. 

When Brendan suffered a massive stroke in 2009, Keith assumed that his opportunity died with Brendan. Thankfully, that proved not to be the case, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Brendan for the strange direction my life has taken ever since. 

I’ll close with the opening verse to the Weirdos song “Message from the Underworld” that, like so many things these days, seems to speak directly to our current situation: 

Attention all you humans 
Who feel the overload 
A message from the underworld 
We finally broke the code 
There is no god in heaven 
There is no answer fit 
Just a phantom overlord 
Who says that this is it 

Going to Church

I had a chance to talk to Patrick Coleman about his fantastic debut novel, The Churchgoer, which is set in Oceanside and has been optioned by the team that created the HBO series True Detective. 

Patrick is a San Diegan and although I’d reviewed his poetry collection Fire Season in The Floating Library, we’d never met. Sometimes that remains true even after you interview someone, but I’m happy to say that’s no longer the case. 

Patrick is a very smart and thoughtful writer, which is obvious by his responses. Here he is riffing on Oceanside:

I love Oceanside. It’s such a bizarre, complicated place. It’s got a little bit of everything. I’ve been held up there twice. Almost drowned surfing at the harbor and at the pier. Had hands laid on me at a punk show, where later they invited us to speak in tongues. Had a spiritual encounter with a harbor seal. California is a state of transplants, at least outside the native communities, and the military presence amplifies that in Oceanside. It shapes the religious character, too. And the city is still trying to make itself into, I don’t know, Huntington Beach. (What a weird dream, right?) But it’s always going to be Oceanside. You could spend your whole life writing Oceanside stories. Did you know Murph the Surf is from Oceanside? I just found that out, and I keep thinking about it, saying to myself, “Of course.”

To read the rest of the interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, just click on the image below and, by all means, check out The Churchgoer. 

In Danger of Imminent Dissolution

I have a confession to make—two confessions actually—which I’ll follow with a question.

When it comes to the very best writers, the truly exceptional talents, I am inclined to be favorably biased toward the Irish.

Maybe it was the 12 years of Catholic education. 

Maybe it was waking up on Saturday mornings to the sound of Irish rebel songs blasting throughout the household. 

Maybe it was all those Irish step dancing lessons and Irish music instruction.

Maybe it’s James Joyce’s fault. 

All I know is that my ear is tuned to the Irish voice, Irish sympathies, the Irish inclination toward irreverence. I love it and I can’t get enough of it. 

Which is why it makes no sense that I don’t read more Irish writers. Every March I say to myself, I’m going read nothing but Irish writers this month, and without fail by the end of the month I’ve got very little to show for my efforts. 

For instance, the only Irish writer I read this month was Patrick C. Power’s translation of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, a scathing satire of the Gaelic revivalist movement, 66.6% of which is lost on English readers but is still better than most of the books I’ve read this year. 

O’Brien’s comic brilliance is accentuated by Ralph Steadman’s charcoal illustrations of the fictitious, and very wet, village of Corkadoragha. 

Flann O’Brien was the pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan, who also went by the handle Myles na gCopaleen. Although he is one of my favorite writers, I’d somehow never gotten around to reading The Poor Mouth. I’m a massive fan of The Third Policeman, which I wrote about for the L.A. Weekly way back in 2006. I even did a piece for NPR when The Third Policeman started flying off of bookshelves after it was briefly featured in Lost.

As luck would have it, today is the anniversary of the great man’s death. A fitting day for the departure of a comic genius who spent his entire life thumbing his nose at society.

So here’s my quiztune for you: Would you like to read an Irish novel together? A kind of informal Message from the Underworld reading group/book club? Yes? No? Maybe so? Let me know!

Lit Pics 

I’m going to dispense with the calendar section of this newsletter until I’m able to answer questions like: What is time? What is the weekend? Why am I wearing pajamas on a Wednesday afternoon? 

Instead, I’m going to offer some links to what passes for events that may or may not be of interest to you. Do what you want. 

The Virtual Book Channel features interviews with authors, many of whom have had their book tours scuttled by COVID-19. 

Every day at 5pm PT Ben Loory reads stories for an hour on Instagram.

Also on Instagram, every Tuesday and Thursday night at 7pm PT Sunny Rey hosts a live open mic. 

Beginning on April 2, Dolly Parton will read your kids a bedtime story. 

The American Shakespeare Center is streaming performances of the bard’s plays. (from Cliff Garstang)

That’s it for this week. I hope you and yours are doing as well as can be expected during these uncertain times.