Tequila Mockingbird remembers the exact night she became a punk historian. “Darby Crash asked me to do this,” she said, walking around the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles’ Westlake gallery, showing off rare show posters, Gothic Vivienne Westwood outfits, videos and photographs from grotty dives in the early days of the L.A. scene. She pointed to a picture of a snarling Crash, performing with the Germs at the Starwood on Aug. 27, 1980. “That’s the day he asked me to keep punk rock alive.”
Five decades later, Mockingbird’s done a comprehensive job of it. The musician, curator, TV producer, visual artist and collector has an ongoing exhibition from her personal catalog of L.A. punk artifacts and ephemera. (The rest is in the Tequila Mockingbird L.A. Punk Museum collection, at UCLA’s library.) She has bashed heads in pits with nearly everyone in the “Decline of Western Civilization” cinematic universe.
The Times spoke with Mockingbird about how a counterculture movement like punk has been co-opted and reclaimed, and if L.A.’s nihilistic feelings back then teach us about surviving today.
Back in the ’70s, were you aware that you were at the dawn of an important cultural movement?
For me, this is all from ’76 till ’86 roughly. Everything stems from that, the beginning of punk and the feelings that evokes. I love seeing the passage of time in a visual manner.
I always wanted to hang around rock stars. I had Mitch Mitchell in my band Trouble for Nora. I hung around with Timothy Leary, Bob Marley and the Bee Gees. I just grew up into the counterculture. I think it calls you, and you either follow it or you get a day job.
I was a jazz singer and a model, so I ended up in the glam movement because of the fashion, and glam became punk. The New York Dolls told me what punk was. Fashion is a very big part of punk that doesn’t get explored enough. In the early days, you dressed that way so you could be visually identified as part of the movement. Now you can just buy that stuff at Target, so you don’t know who you’re talking to.
As a model, I was the art. Andy Warhol and people would dress me up and put me out there. Everybody’s art to me, so I have pulled all the most interesting pieces that I see everywhere. The individuality of the person, of the art, the song, the poetry — it all works together in punk.
Artists like Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley were conversant in this world. How did the visual identity of the art help create punk’s subculture?
David Bowie used to put words in a jar and then pull them out and make a song from that. I think that’s how we envision our artwork — it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. You’re in the kitchen and you’re cooking and you put in these extra ingredients. You’ll find all different kinds of fonts and found art and fine art, and it’s all integrated in a blender for your mind to spit back out. It’s a kind of visual recycling. We saved everything. We used everything.
We didn’t buy what anybody was selling. You made it yourself. We used to dye our hair and use food color to make the colors. So you always make do, and I think punk rock is about making do with what you’ve got and making it spectacular.
How did you see a Southern California vein begin to appear in punk?
I saw the New York scene, where I got into punk with the Dolls, Klaus Nomi, Lydia Lunch. New York culture is completely different than California culture, because they’re kind of doom and gloom and druggy chic, whereas L.A. is all sunshine. It’s hard to be miserable in the sunshine, but I still wore my leather jacket no matter how hot it was.
I was the booking person for “New Wave Theatre”; it was myself and my boyfriend at the time, Richard Skidmore. We’d be out at nightclubs every day of the week, hitting three or four clubs a night to find the bands that would be on that show. You see the change from New York to L.A.
Our punk was about rejecting the corporate mindset. I feel like we were always rejecting the Republican state of mind. We remained stoic in the face of madness.
Punk emerged at the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s ascent from actor to president. Surely there are some parallels today.
Nothing’s really changed except the weather and the fact that more madmen have the keys to the kingdom. Back then, people were screaming at you, throwing things at you, because you wore a leather jacket, because your hair wasn’t the same color as theirs. People are intolerant, and they just don’t change. They’re not resilient at all, and I think that’s what I saw in the late ’70s. It was like it is now, only they don’t wear a red hat.
This is a fertile time for punk rock to come back because it’s a state of mind. It’s like everything sucks, and we know it. Punk music was a newspaper of our time, like how hip-hop was a newspaper for the Black community. Hip-hop and punk rock are like cousins. They’re the same form of music, just done in a different way.
Can those music scenes credibly speak to that disillusionment today?
I think as everybody got older, they started getting desperate to work and make money, and that normalizes you. Eventually you become everything you’re against.
You were also a pioneer of music media with your TV show ”New Wave Theatre.” That era of punk’s crossover into the L.A. film and TV industries was interesting — directors like Penelope Spheeris and Alex Cox, who did “Repo Man” and “Sid and Nancy”
For a lot of us punks, the only way we could survive was working in the movie business. All of us were extras, and I feel like people saw us in the films and started to emulate us. Basically, punk is like a blueprint for people to find their own individuality.
I think it was a love-hate thing. We loved getting paid for it, but we hated that they used actors to pretend they were us, when we were just as smart and talented as anybody that was being put on the screen. I think we were underestimated. I think punk was underestimated because, look, it’s 50 years later and we’re still here.
How did that start to change things when bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Go-Go’s, who had roots in the scene, found huge success?
It’s nice to be popular. I like to think of the Go-Go’s as “Belinda was in the Germs.” The trick with music is if you play it long enough, you learn how to play it. That’s the the real story. The more you are who you are, the better you get at playing the song.
It’s when you start to look for that dollar, when you just go, “I’ll just trim around the edges here, and I don’t have to be sincere. The record company told me not to be sincere right here. They want me to change the song this way for them.”
They call it critical mass. A lot of people liked the sound. We broke down the barriers — we got spit on. We got beat up. We got chased by the cops. We dyed our hair with food color and bleach and kept it straight with egg whites. Now you can just buy that stuff at the store. It’s easy for people now not to know what we went through to make it easy for them to live their life.
Is there anything in music happening currently that reminds you of those early days? I wrote about Dead City Punx recently and they feel akin to this era.
I tend to go backwards because I’m kind of a time-traveler type girl. I’m looking at the Weimar Republic, Kurt Weill. I kind of feel like most music isn’t addressing the problems today, and I think punk did. We addressed the problems in our life, not in a whining way, but in a way where we look for solutions and found them sometimes.
I listen to a lot of old stuff because it’s meaningful. I’m sure that there’s meaning in the new bands that are around, but I like to think that punk is bigger than just the four chords that made it. It is everything. It’s fashion, it’s music, it’s poetry, it’s dance, it’s bigger than all the things that made it seem so small. The best revenge is a great art life.
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