'Phantoms: the rise of Deathrock from the LA punk scene' by Mikey Bean (2019)

At long last, I’ve finally made my way through this monumental volume. My friend Ms GothPotter put me on to it and knowing remarkably little about the development of Goth anywhere outside the UK I had to send off for a copy.

I’ll get into some of the meat of the text soon, but knowing where to begin with that is a struggle – there is such a huge amount to grapple with. Many books are labours of love, but author Mikey Bean has redefined the term. Over a decade or so he conducted more than 200 interviews with people who’d been around in the Los Angeles punk and post-punk scene of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and then, rather than present each interview sequentially, he cut them up into sentences and built the bits into histories of bands, clubs, and individuals, decorated with the odd photograph from someone’s shoebox collection and masses of reproduced flyers, gradually growing more sophisticated from their cut-and-paste punk origins. How he managed to keep track of all this is beyond me, speaking as someone who enjoys writing but loathes research. Some of his interviewees were no longer living when the book finally came out.

I confess that for a little while I was almost distressingly bewildered, until I worked out what the format was, and that the sections didn’t represent group interviews as I originally thought, but assembled fragments of individual encounters. Sometimes they do read like actual conversations as Bean makes his interlocutors comment on each other from a distance, as it were. Once you discover what’s going on, it becomes more relaxing to read! You begin by admiring the sheer industry, the overwhelming work, involved in Phantoms, but then realise how much Bean has rescued from the oblivion of memory. There is so very, very much in the book’s six hundred close-printed A4 pages (what a lot of text that is!) that I had to have a pencil at hand to mark the passages I most wanted to remember, and even extracting a summary is a challenge. But, well, how could we not try?

The thing that strikes me most, and which I didn’t know clearly before, is that what becomes Goth in the US – or least in California – was a parallel but independent movement from what happened in Britain. It quickly made connections, but had a different flavour from the start because of the materials it was working with (Natasha Scharf’s Worldwide Gothic gives a summary of what was happening but necessarily only in a couple of pages). Deathrock grew from the alienation some felt as a result of what was happening to punk – as Mikey Bean puts it in an interview from a few years ago, ‘the jocks who used to beat up the punks becoming punks themselves’. LA punk wasn’t exactly a tolerant landscape: punks referred to Christian Death as ‘fag music’ and Michael Ely of Red Wedding described the whole scene as ‘very very anti-gay’. Thrown out of seminal LA punk band Germs by its lead Darby Crash, Don Bolles joined girlfriend Mary Sims (who’d been in a radical all-female horror-punk group called Castration Squad and whose inspired stage name was, and is, Dinah Cancer) to form a band called 45 Grave; they, and other outfits, drew on horror-movie imagery (‘more Plan 9 from Outer Space than Hammer’, said Sims, though she also modelled herself on Ingrid Pitt and Barbara Steele) and became more obviously what could be recognised as ‘deathrock’. The more arty and less campy the music and the fashion grew, the more it could be thought of as ‘goth’, even though the term didn’t arise until at least 1983 or so.

In theory all these genres were separate and people on the ground could tell the difference. Bruce Duff of 45 Grave described how Mary Sims and Paul Cutler ‘went to the Roxy to see Bauhaus, which would have been the descent of straight-up Goth on LA as opposed to the harder-driving deathrock we were playing’. They were impressed by ‘how they looked all regal in tuxedos and whatnot’ while Don Bolles was scathing in terms I’m not going to repeat. When Bolles went to a club called Séance a couple of years later, ‘I felt really old [in his late twenties!] coz these were the younger kids who were more like modern Goths than deathrockers proper’. Goth – once people recognised what it was – was felt to be something foreign. One of the best lines in the book is Scott Maxson’s reaction on meeting Patrik Mata: ‘his face was white and he had lipstick on and this long jacket. He looked like he was British or something’! Steve Darrow succinctly defined the difference by stating that Siouxsie & the Banshees' music went better with acid than punk did.

In practice, though, the individuals involved moved around fairly freely from one band and genre to another. Mary Sims says ‘most of my friends kind of ricocheted between five scenes’ and there was even a significant overlap with metal – Steve Darrow states ‘we were all really into Alice Cooper and Sabbath’ (he left Eva O’s band Super Heroines to join Guns ‘n’ Roses so there you go) while Michael Ely remembers that Red Wedding ‘associated deathrock with lame heavy metal music masquerading as punk’. Mary Sims described 45 Grave’s outlook as not really deathrock at all but ‘existential nihilism with a comedic edge’, but look at images of her from the mid-1980s and you won’t see any difference from self-identified Goths. Pompeii 99, who joined Rozz Williams in 1983 to make up the second version of Christian Death, look in a photo more like Bow Wow Wow rather than anything identifiably ‘dark’.

Phantoms makes very clear a point I’ve always stressed, that Gothic is an extensive cultural tradition and once you make contact with it, it will start to draw you into its pre-existing world of references and identifications. In LA, there were local and universal aspects to this. You can see individuals responding to the same set of influences that European proto-Goths were discovering: Shannon Wilhelm of Castration Squad and Cloudia Wintermute of Die Schlaflosen both modelled their look on Theda Bara (‘I was a sort of Cleopatra vampire’, said Wintermute) while Margaret Arana of Kommunity FK ‘just loved Louise Brooks and the 1920s’ and in 1978 was the only person in the area with her hair bobbed. Red Wedding ‘often dressed up in vintage wedding attire … inspired by the Victorian-like vampires in The Fearless Vampire Killers’. The flyers and posters included in the book often ‘quote’ imagery from artists such as Harry Clarke and Aubrey Beardsley, from Weird Tales and religious tracts (as well as S&M pornography, which is another matter). All this is ‘universal’ Gothic, if you like, but living in California added other elements: the decaying glamour of Hollywood, memories of the Universal horror films of the 1930s, the great cemeteries, even locations such as the old Bela Lugosi estate with Lugosi’s spider-shaped swimming pool where scene photographer Edward Colver took 45 Grave for a photoshoot. This meant that the LA scene could develop its own distinctive flavour quite apart from anything that might have been happening in the UK: there was a history here which Europe didn’t have.

One of the very pleasing elements of the book is the way it draws attention not just to bands and their kaleidoscopic interactions but also to the clubs where people saw them and the shops where their stuff was sold. In Pomona, where Rozz Williams came from, there was an influential store called Toxic Records, run by Bill Sassenberger whose acidic commentary Bean very sensibly tends to let luxuriate down the page rather than chop it up. The store found ‘a niche catering to the local malcontents’, says Sassenberger. Williams and Ron Athey lived in one of his back rooms for a while but he tired of their challenging behaviour and ended up organising his own band in a parody of Christian Death, Moslem Birth. Along Melrose in Hollywood there were a number of businesses which catered to the scene such as the clothing store Poseur. Jwlhyfer de Winter summarised the problems for anyone trying to look good: ‘if you thrift-stored for black clothes you were as likely to find some horrific polyester night-gown as anything else and a lot of people ended up taking that kind of stuff and fiddling around with it, because … you couldn’t go to Hot Topic and buy a Goth dress’. Clare Glidden set up a club called Brave Dog ‘to make a safe place for some of the people to perform and hang out … It was a pivotal time in my life and it changed my whole life’. Other clubs included Fetish whose owners eventually tired of the scene, held a ‘Death of Deathrock’ funeral event and turned it into a glam-rock club. Lhasa had an angular, Cabinet of Dr Caligari aesthetic and a black and white epoxy floor, and projected silent movies on the walls (and sometimes the bands). This all makes the important point that creativity isn’t only found in musical form.

I learned less salubrious stories: about Radio Werewolf’s totalitarian-themed Satanism which may or may not have been that tongue-in-cheek after all, or Mephisto Walz’s awful experience in Europe in the early 1990s which led to two band members being unable to get home and subsisting on bread and alcohol for weeks; about Rozz Williams and Ron Athey crucifying a cat at one of their art performances, which they always claimed was dead when they found it, though not everyone believed them. ‘I, for one, failed to see what the artistic statement was in this exhibition of depravity’ remarked Bill Sassenberger icily. I was glad to discover ‘lesbian Jewish deathrock artist’ Phranc writing a song called ‘Take off your Swastika’ after she got fed up with every second punk in town wearing one (Siouxsie did that, remember). I marvelled at the description of the mid-teenage Rozz Williams: ‘there was this guy with peg safety-pinned pants, a clear Mickey Mouse children’s raincoat, and thrift store men’s pointed slip-on shoes, one painted pink and the other black’. And I noted, sadly, the pervasive influence of hard drugs on the scene and the shocking number of times Bean notes in the text that somebody referred to has died.

And most of all I was glad to meet the late Jwlhyfer de Winter, arguably the most creative individual in the whole book. De Winter’s mother was, Gothically enough, a medical illustrator who was often mistaken for Carolyn Jones, the actor who played Morticia in The Addams Family, but that didn’t necessarily make for a comfortable home life and as soon as she could de Winter ran away to live with her grandmother. Influenced by Caroline Coon’s 1977 book 1988: the New Wave Punk Rock Explosion which covered UK punk (including Siouxsie & the Banshees), she began absorbing elements of universal Gothic culture – art, movies, poetry and literature, Salome, Beardsley, Bara, Nosferatu. She began showing silent movies at home with partner Vaughn Thorpe, and wearing veils, antique gear, crucifixes: friends accused her of emulating Rozz Williams but she’d reached her Gothic identity independently. She became a regular performer at club nights, not in a band, but reading poetry and dramatic monologues, and devising a vampire character who had been a Sibyl in ancient Rome, presenting her experiences in a theatrical piece called ‘Theosomorphia’. The band Die Schlaflosen, who had a similar range of interests, provided the musical accompaniment for that, and for ‘Masque of the Sirens’, a tribute to Theda Bara. Jwlhyfer de Winter’s Gothic creative work never stopped, though the rest of it falls outside the scope of this particular book.

In years to come – should life ever resume! – Phantoms will provide enough jumping-off points to keep writers in this area busy for ages. And they will need to keep returning to what is an unchallengeable sourcebook for a dramatic, creative, and not always comfortable moment in subcultural history. Now it can go back on my bookshelf and add to the weight considerably!

One final fun quote, from Magie Song about Eva O of Super Heroines and other projects: ‘Eva became a Goth for Christ. I reckon the only adjustment to the costume was to turn the crucifix the right way up’.

You can buy the book via Lulu.com, here.