Germs

Then came a generation of weary teenagers who wanted punk's fury without the art-school baggage of new wave. The seeds of hardcore had been sown

(Steven Blush, American Punk Hardcore)

In the beginning, toward the end of the Sixties, there was Detroit with the wild, violent and raw rock'n'roll of Stooges and MC5; then, around the mid-Seventies, it was New York's turn, with its gathering of coked-up drag queens (New York Dolls), outcasts (Richard Hell), and rebels without a cause (Ramones). What was sown on the new continent would bear its rottenest (and therefore finest) fruit in Great Britain, in 1977: Sex Pistols, Damned, Clash, Stiff Little Fingers. Anarchy, revolution, fire, damnation; in a word: punk!

Finally, from Los Angeles, came Germs, the last great punk band and the first true hardcore band at once. They lasted for the brief but intense span of "(GI)" and then vanished, but with their powerful, fast, dark and dramatic music - fittingly, given the emblematic name they'd chosen - they infected most of America's young punks, who would become the future hardcore kids. Sure, without this record the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Bad Brains and countless other American bands of the Eighties probably would have existed anyway, but it's just as certain that without "(GI)" hardcore wouldn't have been the same. What's more, their influence extends to other American underground scenes of the Eighties: from noise to grunge, from Sonic Youth to Melvins, from Big Black to Jesus Lizard, from Mudhoney to Nirvana. And perhaps there's a black, pitch-black thread linking Darby Crash's scream to Kurt Cobain's in a single tragic destiny.

Germs stripped punk of the intellectual, art-school aura that new wave bands had given it, laying the groundwork for hardcore. In their case these truly were terrible musicians, in perfect punk fashion. They weren't cultured art-school types fascinated by punk's expressive possibilities; they were something else entirely. In short, Germs went back to Sex Pistols, Ramones, MC5, but with rage multiplied a hundredfold, with unprecedented violence and an exasperated nihilism, perfectly embodied by singer Darby Crash, who left no room for the irony, the sarcasm, the Dadaist sneer that had instead allowed Johnny Rotten to stay alive.

If Rotten had proclaimed himself an antichrist to sweep away the values of puritanical English society, Crash was the anti-man who wanted only to erase himself. And he would succeed, killing himself with a fatal overdose at just twenty-two. Indeed, any yearning for social redress, political subversion or cultural change was foreign to Germs. That's why, despite the sonic power and rhythmic speed, Germs' punk is implosive, not explosive. It isn't liberation, release or exorcism; on the contrary, it's a fall into the void of solipsism, into the darkness of autism, into the blackness of alienation, into the apathy that leads to self-destruction. It's psychological drama made flesh, human tragedy in the form of art. Like Michelangelo. Like Francis Bacon.

It was precisely while watching a Sex Pistols TV performance that Crash understood what path he would take. His partners in crime were guitarist Pat Smear, bassist Lorena Doom and drummer Don Bolles. In other words: a cacophonous guitar, a powerful, gloomy bass and drums fast to the point of devastation. Towering over it all was Crash's voice, the archetype of hardcore singing, which in truth isn't singing at all: it's a desperate scream, a monstrous wail, a stray dog's bark, a final roar.

"Germs Incognito" - that's the meaning behind this album's cryptic title, because Germs had been banned from almost every venue in Los Angeles due to their chaotic performances, embarrassing even by punk standards, with a Crash so wasted as to seem unreal, often drunk and high, flailing pointlessly onstage while the rest of the band played out of time. It's no coincidence that contemporary accounts describe their shows as sparsely attended. But those who were there tell of performances that were nonetheless legendary (incidentally, those who were there were named Mike Watt or Dez Cadena).

"(GI)", produced by Joan Jett of the Runaways, is made up of sixteen lethal, minimal and often extremely short tracks. Among them we could mention "Communist Eye", "Land Of Treason" and "Strange Notes", which immediately make clear what hardcore is all about: superhuman screams, clattering guitars, a dark bass (you could even call it goth) and spasmodic, epileptic, ever-building drums. But the record's pivotal tracks are elsewhere: starting with the infernal chant of "Lexicon Devil" and continuing through the gunpowder-charged gallop of "Manimal", we arrive at the chilling "We Must Bleed". It's Munch's The Scream come off the canvas, an inner holocaust condensed into the scream of a twenty-year-old, the awareness of the inescapability of suffering. "We Must Bleed": a sentence, a compulsion, or perhaps, simply, the condition of human existence. It's even said that in the Eighties some fans of the band had it written on the backs of the leather jackets they habitually wore.

The peak of Germs' expressionism, however, is the closing "Shut Down (Annihilation Man)": barely ten minutes of desperate shipwreck into nothingness. The bass's grim pulses and the drums' wild pounding set up the noir scenery for Darby Crash's entrance. His is an aberrant vocal performance, underscored by Pat Smear's guitar, which, for the only time on the record, doles out dissonant concretions in the form of solos. "Shut Down" is the only track on "(GI)" recorded live in one take. In fact, it's a punk jam session, putrid and fetid, complete with an out-of-tune piano (played by Donnie Rose). But there's also a somewhat singable track, as much as a Germs song can be: it's "The Other Newest One", pervaded by a subtle, almost impalpable epic vein, as if a punk anthem by Adverts had been drained of its vital charge.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you". The music of Germs is that abyss, and if you don't have the guts to look into it (to listen to it, in this case), then stay well away from this record.

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12/11/2010