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.
