Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)

 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch straws and first canes; our old hearts and puffy eyes trapped in middle aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray blobs, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, our livers shot from Hep-C and whiskey. But hey hey hey! In the words of this kid who sang for Black Flag before Rollins came along, below left...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X. Pogoing and slam dancing around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a war zone. Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted and alive, triumphant, to catch NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network. None of us ever got a chance to see Penelope Sheeris' punk-breaking ground anthem, DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981). It's never been on DVD or tape.... until this week.... Onetwothreego! Our whole fucking life is a wreck!

Darby, sings into 'the mic'

Now, at last the full tawdry skeevy glory of Spheeris' no-holds barred musical documentary can be seen and endured, from the apocalyptic audience bashing and riot starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos. Shot on full frame 16mm, the film's never going to look like Kubrick or anything, and the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway. I needed a Silkwood shower afterwards, especially post-the gaybaiting of Lee Ving, and so might you, Harvey. Are we kids or what?

Of all the interview subjects, X are the most charismatic, and Darby of the Germs the least, with terrible acne and townie teeth, playing with a tarantula at breakfast that is so normal and homey but just seeing this kid anywhere near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room. Spheeris seems to film about six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement, perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome druggy mania as he crawls atop speaker cabinets and crowds like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Fuck you! Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88.

What saves Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop is perhaps Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period. It's unusual and welcome considering the snarling incoherence. But the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant. Deliver us, Generallissimo Tso! The most disturbing bits come towards the end, with a couple of cute young boys utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet his own teeth are perfect!) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle hatreds of Lee Ving, a kind of undeclared child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn as the anti-Milk.

Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Even when they're at odds their music only flourishes, singing as frankly and honestly in one song as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist, which his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the old bassist. That very night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw. Not X, though. Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos Jon Doe is magnetic, a future side gig as a screen actor all but assured and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth who's target isn't the king but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember Exene smiling beaming down at me after one big dude clocked a skinhead who was about to knock my lights out - It was a baptism - I know now that was no fluke.


I don't even think there was the word skinhead yet - or thrash.

And that's another thing - we definitely wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns, Claude "Kickboy" Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of media maven whose sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras.

Fortunately this vast set includes both sequels (the second making real heavy metal into something funnier than Spinal Tap) and audio commentaries with Spheeris and more key interviews. And the third which takes a more runaway-squatter rights approach.

For me the punk-poseur scene dropped from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my (what today would be called Goth but then were just punk-poseur kids (back when 'poseur' wasn't necessarily bad - it just meant you weren't alienated from capital) in the 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' branch of the then-big tent punk family (near but not next to crossover-straight bands the more straight meat-eaters of us liked, such as REM and the Dream Syndicate) were all bi or gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being jut naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies, my camp's former enemy. And I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks, but slam-dancing and pogoing became moshing, where only big ugly skinheads (when they were still called 'baldheads') were really 'safe'. '

X marks ze Monster

Well, I was too mellow to go full thrash, my parents weren't divorced or uptight to be a squatter; and I was too straight to be (what today would be called goth, there was no emo yet) and too fucked-up to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as I used to wear) punk was just British, in America, hardcore was called 'thrash' and X, the Replacements, Violent Femmes, Husker Du, Clash, Ramones, Iggy, and Minutemen were all crossover artists, like the Clash, and then grunge splintered it still further, and the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" The kind of stuff one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue.

Then again, hearing all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash and The Slits providing the crossover bridge

That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched everyone he knows

I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with punk-approved oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery for Spheeris' camera, and at any rate you can't keep street cred and a record contract... and thanks god. Street cred is strictly poseur. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive, even if the 'alive' is mostly virtual.

Spheeris, still smokin'

But it's not us who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid, the vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays throwing their coiled angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing. Goddamned these kids seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into the all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Here they're like any other fresh-faced kids toughened up by being artistic, drug addicted, boozed-up, maybe bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under overhead lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos, and playing every lousy gig like it's the last show on Earth. Boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!