While on the one hand, I celebrated living in such a bizarre and open culture that was found in Los Angeles, there was also the dark side with decay and deviancy. Like all things in this city that I experienced in the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, everything was on view. You could choose to remain in the suburbs, living a Leave It To Beaver existence, or you could crawl through the cesspool of real life that was distributed throughout the downtown area. I chose the visceral and real.
The anger rising up out of the punk rock scene was the rebellion against a candy-coated alternate reality that didn’t reflect the sterile anonymity we teens and young adults were feeling. Music and art hinted at the decay we sensed, but at every step of the way, it felt like we were encouraged to shop our way out of the bleak scenes found in suburbia. When industrial music hit Los Angeles, it felt like the soundtrack to what a city might sound like as it dies.
German band Einstürzende Neubauten with their album Kollaps and Power Electronics group Whitehouse with Birthdeath Experience (introduced to me by this incredible woman at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose Avenue) let me fully understand that there were musicians who were not just channeling their anger against police and politicians as punk was doing. Instead, they showed me that the entire fake morality of society was trying to camouflage the intellectual and cultural decay that was vacuuming all manner of characters from our population.
In the ruins and back alleys of L.A. I could hear the echoes of people who thought they were building the future, but out on stage, we watched the Baby Boomers spiral without function.
Over the debris, I crawled into the abandoned carcass of the industrial machine, wondering why, in a city of millions nestled into a country of hundreds of millions could someone feel alone? The best answer I could come up with then was that it was due to the dominant culture desiring a homogeneously bland populace that would take inspiration from TV shows such as Dallas, Eight Is Enough, and Little House On The Prairie. Only the empty shell would remain, and the bones.
So, I took to scaling the walls following the stench emanating from this cultural slaughterhouse. Rotting bones from lives tossed away stared up at me. On the side of that railway car, I looked into death and wondered, “What do I have to do to escape this system from grinding me up and casting off my bones?”
