The Show I’ll Never Forget: Black Flag, Hong Kong Café
by John Albert
Published in the book — The Show I’ll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experiences.
The Los Angeles suburbs. It is a landscape of glaring sunlight filtered through brown, hazy smog. The streets are nearly always empty — a meandering maze of unending sameness lined with manicured lawns and identical box-like houses. The majority of kids at my school are tanned with feathered hair. They wear casual beachwear, though we are thirty miles from the ocean. The good kids listen to the somnambulistic sounds of Jackson Brown and The Eagles and campaign against nuclear power. The bad kids listen to Van Halen and what’s left of Led Zeppelin and worship all things weed. I despise it all (except the drugs). I have cut my hair short and can’t stop smashing windows.
I am not alone. A small, disgruntled cadre of us have embraced punk rock. We no longer even go to school, instead spending our days at the unsupervised homes of friends, getting wasted and listening to records. I have been in trouble since grade school — mainly vandalism, shoplifting and drugs. Recently the school board has sent a letter home informing my parents that I am to be expelled for chronic truancy. My father has stopped talking to me, and my mom wears the same shell-shocked expression as Ellen Burstyn playing the mother in The Exorcist. They consult a psychiatrist; I am given medication. I crush up a month’s supply of the pills and snort them with my friends. That night I stay awake grinding my teeth, listening to the dissonant new album by Public Image Ltd. and jerking off. As a diplomatic concession, I agree to attend a group for troubled adolescents in nearby Orange County. I befriend the other patients and we are soon getting stoned in a nearby vacant lot before therapy sessions. I manage to finger a blond-haired surfer girl in the restroom. Months later I see her at an Orange County punk festival. Her hair is blue and she is wearing a swastika armband.
I love punk rock, but know it is a fantasy. We are not in England. My family is not poor. It is not raining. I can relate to the rebellion and anger of the music, and sometimes try to imagine I am in London, but it’s difficult. The sun is too bright and there is silence all around. Each night I sit on the curb outside my parents’ house and listen to the sound of cars passing in the distance. There is a growing panic inside me. I can’t shake the thought that somewhere else there is something exciting and profound happening — and I am missing it all.
There is definitely something happening in nearby Hollywood. We hear about it every Sunday night on the radio. For two hours each week, an elfin little man named Rodney Bingenheimer plays the latest punk records and raves about all the cool shows happening in town. My friends and I occasionally make it into the city, usually to see bigger English bands like The Clash and The Damned. But none of us drive yet and our parents are no longer an option since we are all technically grounded forever. The only way is to find someone older and convince them to take us — which is difficult since we despise nearly everyone. There is a well-meaning student from the nearby Claremont Colleges who has driven us a few times. She has a punk radio show on the college station, but when she invites us to be on her show, we lock her out of the room, spray paint the walls, steal records and yell obscenities over the airwaves. She remains bitter.
My friend Roger and I are trying desperately to start a band, which we plan on calling Christian Death. So far it is just the two of us huddled in my parents’ musty garage plucking away on a cheap bass and guitar. Roger goes by the name Xerox Clone, though he will later call himself Rozz Williams and amass a worldwide following before hanging himself. But at this time he is just a pimply-faced punk rocker in engineer boots and studded wristbands. He tells me there’s a punk show he wants to see the following Sunday at a club called the Hong Kong Café in Chinatown. My initial thought is that going out on a Sunday just means a further escalation in the war with my parents. Then I think that things can’t possibly get any worse — so why not? We need a ride. The next day a few of us are sitting around when someone suggests we call Carol. Everyone sort of fidgets and then exhales in fatalistic resignation.
Carol works at a local record store and fancies herself punk. She is significantly older, in her early-twenties, and is considered by us to be new wave and a total skank. Several months later when The Ramones play the Garrison Theater on the campus of the Claremont Colleges, Carol confiscates her store’s promotional tickets and sits front row in a short skirt. When the band takes the stage, Carol promptly lifts her legs in the air and flashes her beaver. Even from my position towards the back, I can make out expressions of horror on Joey and Dee Dee’s faces. Nevertheless, Carol is our only candidate. So Roger, who even as a teenager possesses a subtle and powerful charisma, calls her and she agrees.
Sunday night, I exit my room wearing a tattered black suit and thick eyeliner and announce that I am simply “going out.” As I start for the door, my mom suddenly blocks my path and tells me, “No.” My dad walks out of the bathroom and pins me with a steely stare, jaw clenching and face reddening.
“You’re not going anywhere, goddammit,” he says, seething with controlled rage, disappointment and concern.
The three of us heatedly debate the topic. As if following some internal prime directive, my adolescent fury starts to build. Decades later, after extensive therapy both court motivated and elective, I can now explain the intricate forces that compelled me towards such destructive behavior. But for purposes of this story none of that really matters. What is important is that it was not a choice. It wasn’t done for effect or as a rebellious pose. If I could have been happy and well-adjusted, I would have done so in a heartbeat. But standing there in my parents’ kitchen with everyone shouting, I lose control, flail around and kick out a small window. Then I am out the door and gone.
As I walk through the darkness to meet up with my friends, I don’t feel good. Deep down I can sense my life heading somewhere unpleasant and dark. I feel lost and actually a bit scared. But I also know if I can get some alcohol in me things will feel significantly better, at least until the morning.
I wait at the designated street corner studying every approaching headlight. Being a punk in those years is a perilous endeavor. Besides traumatized parents and overly suspicious police, there is the constant possibility that grown men in pickup trucks will arbitrarily pull over and attack. Earlier that year a group of middle-aged tree trimmers attacked my friends in a local park. In a stunning upset, my young pals beat the rednecks until the men tearfully apologized and ran away. But on this night, I feel vulnerable and sincerely glad to hear my friends’ catcalls as they pull up in Carol’s dented-up little Toyota.
Carol is dressed as a punk schoolgirl. Roger rides shotgun with his hair freshly dyed black. In the backseat is my childhood friend Peter, an x carved into his forehead, and Dee — who is even further marginalized as a black punk rocker. Dee is undeniably tough, though. A few years later he will reunite with his pimp father, rob some banks and die trying to escape from jail. But on this night, packed into the little car speeding towards the city, the world seems filled with promise. The vodka and orange juice Carol has purchased doesn’t hurt, either.
A half hour later we are pulling off the freeway and cutting through the neon lit streets of Chinatown. We park, pile out into a narrow alleyway smelling of Chinese food and bum urine, and finish what remains of the vodka. The nearby Hong Kong Cafe is actually a converted Chinese banquet hall upstairs from a little bar. By the time we bound up the stairs, the four of us are brimming with drunken, youthful bravado. Carol, meanwhile, ducks into the downstairs bar for a few more drinks.
The punk rock scene in Los Angeles consists mainly of drugged-out art school types and ex-glam rock fans who have cut their hair upon hearing the Sex Pistols. Actual kids like us are still somewhat of a rarity, though the five members of Red Cross — the first band up — are even younger than we are. I have heard them on Rodney’s radio show. Their guitar player is an awkward-looking kid named Greg Hetson who will go on to form the Circle Jerks. The two of us will also play together in the band Bad Religion for a stint. I remember him on this night because some drunk bounces an empty beer can off his head as he plays and he never even glances up. As Red Cross finish, Carol reemerges from the downstairs bar looking significantly more inebriated and trailed by an equally drunk and quite smitten Chinese man.
None of us have heard of the next band, and as they set up their equipment, they certainly don’t look very punk. No spiky hair, bondage pants or leather jackets, they seem more like guys who would live in their parents’ garage and smoke a lot of weed. Eventually their singer strolls on to the stage. He is a small, nondescript guy wearing an oversized army jacket and holding a can of Budweiser. When he leans forward and speaks into the mic, it is with a distinctively SoCal drawl — just like every fucked up kid I have ever known.
“Heeey man, we’re Black Flag…”
They start playing, and it’s as if someone has jammed a syringe into my neck and injected the purest Crystal Methedrine. One minute we’re milling about checking out the Hollywood girls, next there’s this blistering wall of sound blasting from the small stage. Everyone is just stunned. It is punk rock, but not like before. This is faster and angrier. Over the next few years Black Flag will alter the American musical landscape. But what’s important this particular night is that it’s music made specifically for us. Keith Morris isn’t up there singing about political injustice or class oppression; he’s screaming about the exact kind of pain and frustration we are feeling.
I’m about to have a nervous breakdown,
My head really hurts.
And within seconds everyone is careening around the dance floor. Slam dancing (initially called “The Huntington Beach Strut” and later “moshing”) hasn’t been invented yet, but we’re not exactly pogo-ing either. We’re really just — going off. Everything after that is kind of a blur. Some guys attack a smaller guy and Dee jumps in and starts swinging. I soon have a black eye, but not from that particular melee. In my excitement, I turn and joyously hurl Carol across a nearby table. She promptly circles back and unleashes a solid haymaker into the side of my face.
After the show we stand bruised and elated outside the club in a little tourist square. The riotous music has somehow given our confused lives a fleeting sense of purpose. Carol, on the other hand, is so drunk she can hardly walk. Her Chinese suitor has at last given up and fallen asleep on a bench beside a koi pond. By the time we reach the car, Carol is unconscious. Thankfully, the transmission is automatic. Roger bravely volunteers to drive. We pile in and nervously watch as the fifteen-year-old future “King of Goth” tentatively merges the car on to the eastbound freeway and back towards the suburbs.
A half hour later I am standing outside my parents’ house. All the lights are off. There is a note taped to the back door. It reads simply, “Go away.” I try the door. It is locked. I trudge into the front yard and start calling my older brother’s name while tossing pebbles at his bedroom window. I am more than a little startled when he sheepishly pokes his head out of the shrub next to me.
“What do you want?”
It turns out he and his friends had taken some unexpectedly potent LSD and gone to see the new movie Alien. It was not the laugh fest they had anticipated, and he has been huddled in the bush for hours.
The next morning my family convenes at the breakfast table. It is an understandably tense affair. My parents don’t mention my black eye or the window I have broken the night before. In fact, they don’t say a word. We all just eat in silence — except for my brother, who stares at his food and coos softly like a pigeon. I quickly leave for school, but a few blocks away decide not to go. There doesn’t really seem any point. Instead I meet my friends at an abandoned baseball dugout where we drink beer and recount the previous night’s adventure. Weeks later I come across Black Flag’s first three-song EP at the local record store — and steal it.
