Punk Rock Moment
On January 14, 1978, only two weeks after archetypical Bay Area hippie band the Grateful Dead rang in the New Year at Bill Graham’s Winterland, the famous arena for music of the late-1960s hosted the first major punk rock event in San Francisco. The Avengers and the Nuns were opening for the Sex Pistols, and for the first time, San Francisco was the center of the punk rock universe. That concert quickly took on even greater meaning because it turned out to be the last Sex Pistols concert ever: Within a few weeks, Johnny Rotten announced he was leaving the band. A year later, in February 1979, lead singer Sid Vicious died of a drug overdose in a New York City hotel room.
The breakup of the Sex Pistols altered the punk rock world and left an opening for San Francisco’s punk rock movement to become more visible and significant. The band that quickly exploited that opening — and began to define Bay Area punk rock—was the Dead Kennedys, the distinctly Northern California band that helped put a Bay Area imprimatur on punk rock.
The Dead Kennedys played their first San Francisco concert at the Mabuhay Gardens — better known as the Mab or the Fab Mab — in July 1978. In the coming months and years, the band would become a regular fixture in the San Francisco punk scene, frequently appearing at free concerts, particularly those with a political agenda, like the Rock Against Reagan concerts in the…
