The Germs’ Pat Smear & Lorna Doom get touchy-feely with lead singer Darby Crash in The New Wave
 
“Not exactly wholesome, you might say,” notes slick & laid-back narrator Andrew Amador at the end of this weird and rather incomplete look at the burgeoning new music scene in Los Angeles.

Inexplicably opening up with the highly New York sounds of Patti Smith’s version of “Gloria,” The New Wave seems to have been a quick segment put together by erstwhile TV host Amador and shot by someone called Andre Champagne. I wonder if and where it actually aired. It’s an interesting enough artifact in that it features:

• The earliest footage of Rodney Bingenheimer outside of his biography Mayor of the Sunset Strip
• Footage of The Germs with Darby Crash in full feathered-and-waxed Bowie mode
• A Sunset Strip marquee within the first 30 seconds featuring Pasadena’s Van Halen!
• A bit too much footage of The Quick’s heartthrob lead singer Danny Wilde dreaming of stardom. He’d later do the music scene proud by forming the Rembrandts and recording “I’ll Be There For You,” the fittingly excruciating theme for the TV show Friends.

 
Originally posted on 10/26/2010.

 
Although I was too young to ever see them live, The Germs loomed large in my musical upbringing. They made deliciously evil sounding records that were irresistible to my friends and I. The legend of Darby Crash made its way out to us in the suburbs of Los Angeles and tales of “Germs burns” and other sordid activities titillated us as we blasted their sole LP and gazed at the spooky photos of the band members on the back cover. I tell you this because Rhino Handmade has just put out a limited edition CD of the final Germs show from December of 1980. Now here’s the thing: The Germs sucked live. The redoubtable Jonathan Gold does a wonderful job of describing what it was like to be there, but still I must ask: Has there ever in the history of music been a singer so utterly incapable of singing in time live as Darby Crash ? Have a listen to the clip below from said show and hear for yourself, then compare that to the truly wonderful contents of their classic first E.P. from ‘78 after the jump. I’m pretty sure all I missed out on by never seeing them live was a head injury !
 

(Germs from left to right: Pat Smear, Lorna Doom, Darby Crash and Don Bolles)
 
Back in 2000, I vaguely remember the documentary Rage: 20 Years of Punk Rock, West Coast Style coming out, but never caught up with it—my gut told me it wasn’t gonna be no Decline!  (plus, doesn’t the math seem off?  2000 - 20 only equals, like,  what…1980?)  Anyhoo, thanks to YouTube, I can now present to you a few of its highlights.

First up, here’s Germs drummer Don Bolles discussing singer Darby Crash’s well known fascination with both Nietzsche and Scientology:

 
Next up, here’s Dead Kennedy‘s frontman Jello Biafra discussing how it felt to be first a witness then a player in San Francisco’s exploding punk scene:

 
Bonus clips: The Circle Jerks’ Keith Morris, T.S.O.L.‘s Jack Grisham

Bonus Germs: Lexicon Devil, live @ The Whisky, 1979

 
Well, it might not have worked for Darby Crash, but mohawks do save lives.  Look what happened to 3-year-old Maddox Tallowin:

When father Ben, 32, and mother Barbie, 33, from Kirby Cross, Essex, took the scissors to their little boy’s hair they were shocked to discover strange-looking lumps on the back of his head.  They rushed him to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge where doctors told the shocked parents the bumps were a tell-tale sign of leukemia.  Mr. Tallowin, 32, said: ‘It was more luck than anything else that we found it.

‘Maddox had a Mohawk haircut.  He has really big blue eyes and bright blond hair and it was a cut chosen by him a few months before.  But it had got too long, about four or five inches, and it was beginning to flop so I decided to shave it off.  ‘The sides were short but when we touched the actual mohawk there were these bumps on either side of his neck at the bottom of his head.  It didn’t feel right so we took him to the doctor.’

The youngster is now in remission and the doctors have reduced the level of leukemia in his blood but he still has to make long trips to hospital several times a week and will need chemo and intensive steroid treatment for three years.

Boy, 3, Has Life Saved by Trendy ‘Beckham-style’ Mohawk Haircut