Review: Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Review of John Doe’s Under the Big Black Sun

I know a music memoir is working for me when I find myself streaming songs I didn’t know or listening in new ways to things I thought I knew. The gold standard is Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I always enjoyed her music (her music, not her spoken word stuff which I still feel is mostly self-indulgent) but hearing her tell her story made me love it all the more. I was too late to catch her the first time around, and I had a couple periods later where it meant a lot to me, but I don’t think I became a real Patti Smith fan until I read the way she described what she’d been trying to do as part of it.

In this case, I admire that John Doe, in his history of the L.A. punk scene, refuses to let it be a story told from one perspective. Instead of writing it himself – he was, after all, a key member of one of the top bands of the time – he invited a bunch of his old pals to share their memories as he weaves his own around them. His basic thesis is that the scene was so broad and so welcoming that no one story can tell the whole of it, so it makes sense to let it be a memoir told in mayhem-style, several voices doing their own thing in each other’s neighborhood rather than in lock step.

The result, though, is a tangled, repetitive narrative. I’d never heard of Darby Crash, for instance, and barely knew The Germs. We get pieces of his story from seven or eight different people who remember him, but we never get it in full. We get an early chapter from Jane Wiedlin about her move from wannabe fashion designer to co-founder of The Go-Gos. Then, most of the book later, we get a chapter from Charlotte Caffey about her early Go-Go years. The stories don’t quite talk to each other, though, and there’s an unsatisfying open-endedness to it all.

At the same time as the stories don’t amplify each other, though, there’s the mood that Doe sets in curating the whole experience. Tough as he is, he wraps much of this in a nostalgia that I suspect his younger self would have found weak and clichéd. He and others recall an early scene that had room for punks as hard-edged as Black Flag as roots-rock as The Blasters and Los Lobos, and as proto-pop as The Go-Gos and the Plimsouls. Then, many of the narrators lament the way that space hardened into an angry, masculine, mosh-pit scene.

In Doe’s wake, too many of these speakers talk about a “meaningful” time that was somehow “special.” Sure, there were some good bands that came out of it. I was a big Blasters fan, and my roommates and I were particular fans of Chicago’s local answer to them in Hi-Fi and the Roadburners, and I admire Los Lobos as well. But, really, the self-congratulation of the larger feel of this, starts to sound too much like the way any middle-aged guy looking back would talk about his youth.

But the biggest problem for me here is that, for much of this collection, the speakers all acknowledge the centrality of X – Doe’s band – and note time and again how it depended on the electricity of its lead singer, Exene Cervenka. Doe talks about her often, warmly, without quite exploring what it means that they were once famously a couple and are now split.

As far as I’m concerned, Cervenka’s brief chapter – one of the shortest in the collection and one that deals with her sense of herself as an artist rather than in what might seem like the gossip of the scene – is the best part of the whole. In one brief reflection, she gets at what may be the fittest skeleton key to understanding the L.A. scene. New York punk, she said, grew out of the art scene. (She doesn’t say it, because she’s cool enough to assume we’ll get it, but she’s talking Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Television, and the New York Dolls.) London’s had a great and feisty reggae influence. But L.A.’s had only rock and roll. In its way, because it was finding itself from the rock that had come before, it had a purity of focus. And then, because it was so self-taught, it had a broad range of possibilities.

I’m not doing Cervenka justice in that paraphrase, but I end with it because she – and perhaps she alone – accomplishes what I most want in a rock memoir. She makes me want to go back to X, a band I’ve enjoyed sometimes but never fully appreciated. Because of what she says, because of the voice that Doe finds a too-small place for here, I think I’ll be able to hear that music in a new way.

In that small way, too small to make me recommend the whole of this, mission accomplished.




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