Early Los Angeles punk wasn’t what you think it was. It didn’t take its cues from London or New York, nor was it just alienation, safety pins, and three-chord aggression.
That’s the argument at the heart of the latest episode of Soundings, our podcast hosted by San Pedro Today writer/photographer Aaron McKenzie. His guest is Tom DeSavia, a longtime music-industry figure who spent years convincing his friend John Doe of X to help set the record straight.
The result was two acclaimed oral histories—Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World—told by those who were actually in the room: Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, filmmaker Allison Anders, Mike Ness, San Pedro legend and Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, among dozens more. What emerges is a scene rooted not in imported rebellion but in older American soil: blues, country, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and Chicano folk music, all channeled through a city the rest of the country had written off as shallow.
The conversation explores how a Tower Records appearance accidentally reunited X after more than a decade, how the Go-Go’s stayed punk even after the scene said otherwise, and why the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime—made right here in San Pedro—is still being discovered by teenagers 40 years later. It’s the story of how a scene that produced X, the Blasters, Black Flag, Fishbone, and Dwight Yoakam spent decades as a footnote, and why it matters.
Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World are available wherever books are sold.
The episode is available below, on YouTube here, and wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also watch/listen to the previous episode of Soundings featuring economist Marc Levinson on how the shipping container remade the modern world. spt
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