Avengers - Penelope's Twenty Years

The Avengers were a proto-hardcore band: they took the sharpest, most powerful rock'n'roll of the 1950s and converted its rebellion - understood as hedonism - into one understood as the subversion of social and existential order - and it is this rebellion that defines the meaning of new wave, and within it, of punk. The band's mastermind was guitarist Greg Ingraham, who connected back to Chuck Berry via Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group. The face of the band, on the other hand, was punkette Penelope Houston. Not yet twenty, she possessed all the allure typical of the era's "damned women" (like Siouxsie Sioux, Exene Cervenka, Kat Arthur), though it should be noted that her thoroughly punk look, her extroversion, her zest and strength for life (things her voice mirrored) had little to do with the fixations and genuflections of the dark scene.

The "Avengers" debuted, as the opening act for the Nuns, on Saturday 11 June 1977 at the underground venue that would become San Francisco's most important club, the "Mabuhay Gardens" (where they became a fixture, playing there as often as twice a week); and after more than a hundred shows in two years, they bowed out on Friday 22 June 1979 at the "Geary St. Temple", playing alongside Tuxedomoon and Mutants - a fitting reminder of just how distorted the notion of punk was at the time, effectively overlapping with the whole new wave melting pot.

The shows - reserved for Saturday nights - followed a bill with three bands rotating on stage: Crime, Screamers, Nuns, Devo, Blondie, Weirdos, Richard Hell, Dils, Zeros, Talking Heads, Negative Trend, X all took their turn alongside the Avengers.

The Avengers also played the two most important venues in Los Angeles, the "Masque" and, above all, the "Whiskey a Go-Go". On Saturday 14 January 1978, at the "Winterland" in San Francisco, they opened the historic final show of the Sex Pistols' American tour.

The influences of the early Siouxsie And The Banshees and the more rock'n'roll side of Patti Smith on one hand, and the sheer rawness of the Ramones on the other, kept the Avengers from making the leap that separates classic punk from the new hardcore. It's no coincidence the band started out covering "C'Mon Everybody" (Eddie Cochran), "Paint It Black" (Rolling Stones), "Piss Factory" (Patti Smith), "Substitute" (The Who).

The programmatic lyrics of their songs are hardcore's statement of intent, which in its less aberrant forms was anything but nihilism and pessimism, but rather an incitement to life and to being human as the highest value. "White Nigger" states: “We are the leaders of tomorrow/ We are the ones to have the fun/ We want control. We want the power/ Not gonna stop until it comes/ We are not Jesus Christ/ We are not fascist pigs/ We are not capitalist industrialists/ We are not communists. We are the one/ We will build a better tomorrow”. And "Desperation" ("Nothing to do, nowhere to go/ No words to say, no thoughts to think") puts itself in the shoes of a depraved punk hoodlum, only to redeem that depravity through the rejection of despair.

The self takes the place of God (religion, state, family); the self must summon all its strength to bear life and indeed to found it, nourish it, give it meaning: the universe is the void, but the self can - if it wants, if it reacts, if it rebels - fill that void with itself, with its own values, at once absolute because they are enough to live by, and relative because they are conceived with respect for others, following the most classic and least respected rule of one's own freedom, which ends where another's begins. All that's left, then, is to provocatively declare: "I believe in me".

With "Fuck You" the Avengers were the first in rock to use a title that would later be recycled by about a hundred other songs. "Car Crash", on the other hand, is their most violent track (already present on their first single from '77) and one of their most noteworthy.

The Avengers' masterpiece, however, is an atypical song for them, and tellingly rarely played live: "The Good The Bad And The Kowalskis"; five very taut minutes in the vein of the New York Dolls gone more hard rock, with a fatalistic, droning, dark vocal befitting the gloomiest strain of English new wave; the male counterpart to this song could be the New York Dolls' own masterpiece from five years earlier: "Frankenstein".

Fully in keeping with the punk spirit, without ever releasing an album but only singles, the Avengers became San Francisco's most authoritative underground band (though not necessarily the best: the Crime could tell you something about that). Avengers (CdPresents, 1983) and Died For Your Sins (Lookout, 1999) are the compilations where their material can be found. The latter features a new recording of an old track, "The End Of The World". The heartache and bewilderment of people now in their forties runs deeper than that of teenagers not yet twenty, because it's fuelled not by rebellion but, by now, by failure (on every front: commercial, artistic, social, personal). From the fact that the world hasn't ended yet.

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