Desolation Center

Welcome to America.

Going out to the desert tomorrow.

That should be a lot of fun, eh?

Yeah, it will be.

- If you could step back, you're on camera.

Oh, okay.

This is your happening and I think a lot of people,

about 300, are gonna be out there.

- Yeah, we got like six buses going down there.

Six buses full of people.

- And you have a show tonight

at Perkins Palace?

Yeah, that's right.

And you've got two

wildly different environments performing,

are you cautious at all about playing in the desert?

Cautious?

What does cautious mean?

- In the early 80's, I think the rest of the world

saw LA as this brain dead, sun baked,

smoggy sprawl, which it actually kind of was.

For those of us that grew up here

the early 80's was actually a really vital

and interesting time.

It was a time of experimentation and rebellion.

In 1982, I was 21 years old.

I had dropped out of college and I was working for

a municipal bond broker doing phone sales.

I was very involved in the scene, which was punk rock,

but it was also a lot of really unusual

music and performance.

I was 19, 20 years old.

I was very much into punk rock

and going to shows all the time.

It felt just natural that it was just a part of our lives

that we would go up to Al's Bar and go to the Anti-Club

and go to the Whiskey to see shows all the time.

- You could go out every night of the week, pretty much,

there was live music, three amazing bands.

Raji's, The Whiskey, the Veil.

Hollywood as a scene was really small.

We knew everybody.

If you went to the Whiskey,

you knew everybody in the Whiskey.

If you went to the Starwood,

you knew everybody in the Starwood.

If you went to the Zero after hours,

you knew all those characters.

- We were very diverse and there were just as many

people of color up in it as there were white kids.

And so bands were multi-cultural

as well as the scene was multi-cultural.

It didn't matter, nobody cared.

Gay, straight, male, female, skinny, fat,

sober, not sober, it didn't matter.

It was about music and art.

- And there was a lot of really creative, unusual things

that were going on.

Not all of it was bands.

There was people like Johanna Went.

Johanna Went was a performance artist

who made these amazing costumes

and she would do these transformations

and probably was most notorious

for throwing a severed pig's head into the audience

at the Whiskey A Go-Go.

There was also The Screamers,

who was one of the most celebrated LA punk bands.

They never even put out a record.

They had no guitars.

It was just keyboards and Tomata du Plenty

had this really crazed stage presence that was captivating.

There was one group that really stood out to me.

I'm talking about the Minutemen.

To me they were an LA band that was doing

the really kind of interesting, experimental punk rock

that I appreciated coming out of England.

Bands like Wire that played really fast, concise,

telegraphic songs and the Minutemen

were even more out there.

- It is the individual statement

of a generation of youth expressing their own rebellion

in their own way in terms that most outside their world

don't understand.

We saw on the 11 o'clock news,

like punk rock shows, slamdancing,

and teenagers being hurt and sent to hospital.

Do you know where your children are tonight?

It was like.

- Punkers have been long at odds with police

and confrontations are not new.

It's our aim to let both sides tell their story

and then let you, the viewer, decide for your own self.

More than 1,000 fans paid $8 each to attend.

Most have gotten inside.

150 others crowded the door, hoping to get inside.

The doors were closed and trouble began.

Youth Brigade was on stage at the time.

Next to them, our producer and cameraman

when the police ordered the shutdown.

The thing with the LAPD was

you had this really rotten man called Chief Daryl Gates.

Ahh, he was like the Grand Wizard.

- And you know who's feeding and supporting the enemy?

The casual drug user.

- He was creepy and he was definitely racist

and didn't like women and he just didn't like

anybody of color at all.

He didn't like young people.

He didn't like young people having fun.

The police would show up en masse

and you didn't know why, what was going on.

We're at a punk show and seeing the band

and then there's a bunch of police

coming in the door at the Whiskey.

Like, what's up with that?

- Is the punk movement part of the Nazi movement?

- No, it's the police, that's the Nazi movement.

The police is the Nazi movement?

Yeah.

Well the effect of the news media was

that the LAPD freaked out about punk rock,

like it was the second coming of the Black Panthers

and they were just like, they were gonna squash that stuff.

It wasn't gonna get a foothold in their town.

Sometimes they would come in

and run everybody out of there.

Like with their sticks and stuff.

They just seemed like they were

going through the newspaper and finding band names

that sounded punk rock and trying to make sure they

didn't happen for some reason.

- Police Chief Daryl Gates did not want us there.

We would come out of the Anti Club,

there would be motorcycle cops in riot gear.

I remember my friends coming in from New York,

bands coming in from New York and they couldn't believe

how we didn't jaywalk in Hollywood.

Because we were given tickets, we were thrown in jail.

I grew up here, I didn't know any better

than living in a militarized police state.

I didn't expect anything else, I wasn't enlightened

that you could live in a non police state.

So you just figured out how to skirt around it.

- We did these little skits where we taunted the police.

Attention all units,

we have a major disturbance at the Stardust Ballroom,

5612 Sunset Boulevard.

- Hey this is unit 47, we got it,

10-four on that.

Hey Frank, is this that Black Flag group again?

Uh, yeah Joe, 10-four,

Chief Gates is in a real uproar.

- What are we waiting for then?

Let's go beat up some of them damn punk rockers.

So it was broadcast all over on KROQ.

- Minutemen, Black Flag opening for The Ramones

at the Hollywood Palladium.

After that show, everyone was leaving

and I just remember the police coming out

and just chasing after us.

- It would've been peaceful if they hadn't done anything.

The police showed no restraint.

The police were used to beating heads.

The cops always created the riot.

They were definitely the instigators of it.

I was there and I can tell you

there's no way that anybody in the place

did anything to provoke that level of

tactical violence on children.

I went to see Throbbing Gristle

at the Culver City Veterans Auditorium,

which was a place that never had any kind

of cool stuff going on, whatsoever.

Their whole sonic assault really changed the way

I thought about music and performance forever.

Soon after that, I met the promoter of that show,

Michael Sheppard,

and it was then that the idea of putting on shows

as a form of artistic expression really gelled in my brain.

So you want to say three then?

Alright, that sounds good, I'll put you down for three.

Back then, downtown LA was basically

a giant wasteland of abandoned warehouses.

But it was also a place with a lot of opportunity.

There were a few artists living down here.

The rent was cheap.

And some friends and I moved into

an abandoned warehouse called the Nate Starkman Building,

when it was about 25 cents a square foot.

- Downtown LA in the 80's, it was just a huge skid row.

There was nothing but a bunch of winos

hanging out on the sidewalk.

And bars like the Hard Rock Cafe, Jack's,

and the King Edward and all that, marvelous places.

- I knew I didn't want to put on shows in clubs and bars.

I really wanted to find spaces

like downtown warehouse spaces

rehearsal studios by the LA River.

I also thought that by finding these more remote spaces,