I sometimes have this thought where Charles Manson and Bill Clinton switch places. They start life more or less as they have done here only to take vastly alternate courses as they go. Manson sees it in himself to reject his criminal past—and to give up music—and dives into various reform causes through which he slyly crusades against counterculture excesses and appeals to its increasing number of burnouts. Though an outsider, his ability to draw crowds gains headway with the regional party officials. He runs a dark horse campaign for governor of California against Jerry Brown in 1974, and defeats him in 1978, serving two-and-a-half terms. His national prospects are narrowed against a scandal-surviving Gary Hart, so he spends the rest of his political career as a third-party washout but one with a Savonarola-like hold on his Boomer followers that, like Pat Buchanan here, sparks a populist moment in the Democratic Party. Donald Trump is elected President in 2016 and 2020 on the Democratic ticket.
Bill Clinton’s track is maybe a harder sell. Let’s say he didn’t make it to Oxford and even failed out of Georgetown. He gets drafted, serves in Europe, and pursues a less disciplined course of study in his off time. He returns to the United States filled with pseudoscience and mysticism. He lingers around Scientology enough to pick up auditing, but generally forms a more recognizably Christian-coded dogma that, like Manson, amasses a following, also made up of lapsed hippies but also older widows who all finance his lifestyle, which, as may not surprise you, is libertine in nature. He establishes a compound with a core of devotees and “wives” in Mexico. He becomes erratic, runs afoul of the local authorities and either gets arrested or dies extravagantly in a standoff. Three docuseries will air within months of each other on different streaming services in 2021.
As far-fetched as either of these seem, I think it is natural to wonder whether you or anyone you find interesting in some intangible way was displaced from what may have been a conceivably truer path than the one taken in reality. Of course it can’t be done without certain core understandings related to the mysteries of innate genius and the response to outside circumstances by the possessor of that genius. For instance, perhaps if my life had turned out differently, quite how I’m not sure, I might fund my alimony payments by writing alternate histories. But enough about me and my petty delusions. I’m here to invite you to consider the displacement of another individual (a genius certainly) from both of the above potentialities, and then some, by the most tempting and, in this case, the most destructive of life forces.
The first show the Germs played was at Hollywood’s Orpheum Theater in April of 1977. They were to open for the nascent Weirdoes, who picked the Germs because they were even more nascent, having only just formed that month with no rehearsals, no songs, and no knowledge of their instruments. Their set lasted 10 minutes before they were removed from the stage. The band, with guitarist Pat Smear, bassist Lorna Doom, and drummer Donna Rhia, blared feedback at the audience (which included The Damned) while singer Darby Crash wrapped himself in licorice whips, that soon melted, and slathered himself in salad dressing and peanut butter on top of that. For a later show, the band would tell their friends to bring food of their own; during a rendition of The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” they poured bags of sugar on the audience.
In every regional scene one was likely to know at least one band purely by reputation. Even if its members were not the most proficient musicians, and their songs were rudimentary at best, their shows were not to be missed. They were more social experiment or life sculpture than musical act, demolishing the invisible wall between spectator and spectacle, along with actual walls. Seattle had The Mentors (among others), San Francisco had Flipper, Detroit had The Meatmen, Austin had Scratch Acid (among others), and DC had No Trend. One band for my cohort was The Ultimate Warriors, from Nazareth, PA. When they played our town’s recreation center in 2000, they (or their entourage) donned luchador costumes and other wrestling-themed gear and wreaked havoc in the pit. I believe they also brought fruit as the venue smelled of bananas after they played. They are now Pissed Jeans.
The Germs were very much of this ilk; they were even perhaps its primordial ancestor. Even at their best they never played technically well. Slash writer Claude Bessy described their debut single “Forming” as “beyond music … inexplicably brilliant in bringing monotony to new heights.” But at the same time, the Germs were able to shake off their “joke band” status, in part because getting constantly banned from venues was a net negative, but also because something more powerful was at hand. By September 1977, the Germs were headlining shows with massive turnouts. As Geza X recalled later, “it was the buzz on the Germs as a social force more than a musical one that caused a line to form outside The Masque for the first time.” Three years later, Darby Crash was dead at 22.
It’s easy to see Darby Crash as a casualty. He is the perfect embodiment of the excesses of early punk that the subsequent wave of hardcore sought to obliterate. He relished chaos and destruction. He was a horrible singer and not a particularly committed or disciplined band member generally. The Germs never played outside of Los Angeles and broke up and reformed in different variations based on Darby’s moods, and made only slight technical improvements. I don’t believe he ever really knew a healthy or stable situation.
Someone who lives that way and for such a short time could hardly, in the most conventional understanding of the term, be thought a genius. Certainly not in the Elizabeth Hardwick sense that most pleases me, of that which “changes everything but can’t be imitated.” But a sober examination of the record, or even just Germs lyrics, is sufficient to save Darby from total dismissal as waste-case like characters in Suburbia or Smithereens. Darby’s example poses questions both as to the individual talent and punk as a potential incubator and platform of that talent.
Darby Crash (née Bobby Pyn, née Jan Paul Beahm)1 was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. His childhood was one of routine instability. He lost a brother to a heroin overdose. His mother struggled with minimum wage jobs, often working nights. The closest thing he had to a father figure was a stepfather who died when he was 13. His education, which he neglected, included an experimental program that combined Werner Erhard’s est with Scientology. Darby was precocious, however, with his mother carving out sections of her stringent budget to appease his voracious, if lowbrow intellectual appetite with books and a typewriter. He developed interests in Nietzsche, Charles Manson, Herman Hesse, Hitler, and Oswald Spengler. Typical interviews included the following: “Fascism is not a philosophy. It’s a way of life. Fascist is totally extreme right. We’re not extreme right. Maybe there’s a better word for it that I haven’t found yet, but I’m still going to have complete control.” And: “I can respect Hitler for being a genius in doing what he did, but not for killing off innocent people. [His genius] lies in his speech. What he could do with words.”
“Doing things” with words mattered to Darby Crash, even if proper vocal training didn't matter in equal proportion. Indeed, the quality of Darby’s lyrics is worthy of serious attention, even in reading independent of the music, something that can’t be said of more poetically inclined peers X and Black Flag. “Standing in the line we’re aberrations/Defects in a defect’s mirror/And we’ve been here all the time real fixations/Hidden deep in the furor,” goes the first verse of “What We Do is Secret.” But so, too, was the personal charisma into which chaos and music alike were subsumed.
“I completely control a number of people’s lives,” Darby Crash said. “Look around for the little girls wearing CRASH TRASH T-shirts and people like that.” Darby had a gift for branding. In a way, the Germs became a serious enterprise for him not with the refinement of their artistry but with the aesthetic identity he crafted around it. “Everything works in circles,” he said. “[L]ike something you’ve done maybe eight years ago, but all of a sudden it feels like you’re in the same place doing the exact same thing.” They adopted as a symbol of a clean blue circle, to match Darby’s eye color, which appeared on their merchandise, flyers, and recordings. Germs fans were collectively called “Circle One,” who wore “Germs burns” on their wrists, which came from a cigarette. “I think we should make a new shape for flags. Round flags.”
Darby’s proposals did not stop there. He dreamed of putting “allies in key positions,” in such places as the postal service and newspaper presses who, with little more than flicking a rubber band, could jam the gears of society and bring it to its knees. When appearing on a radio show, Darby rang off a series of satellite numbers that would allow anyone to make long distance calls for free. He became obsessed with L. Ron Hubbard and, according to the Screamers’ K.K. Barrett, “talked about how religion was just basically a funnel for lost souls.” “Darby Crash completely resocialized me,” F-Word singer Rik L. Rik recalled. “He taught me to question everything and how to make up my own mind by evaluating reality and drawing my own conclusions. … He did this for everybody he came in contact with. It was a whole retraining program.”
These ambitions were quickly derailed; first by Darby’s abrupt sabbatical in London, which broke up the band, and then by his death by intentional heroin overdose once he returned. It is on this morbid crux that Darby’s legacy is balanced. As he’d often voice his intention of dying young, sometimes at the exact age when he did, I can’t say it is altogether unfair—but it is also too simple.
Darby Crash’s decline was as much a result of cultural forces as it was by personal choices. He returned from London in 1980 sporting a Mohawk haircut and face paint. He’d met and become enamored with Adam and the Ants, much to the bewilderment of his friends. When Adam and the Ants were doing an in-store appearance at Tower Records around the same time, Black Flag disrupted the proceedings, throwing around their trademark flyers reading “BLACK FLAG KILLS ANTS ON CONTACT.” The Hermosa Beach-based band formed a year before the Germs, and promoted a stripped-down version of punk that favored brutality over—or rather, in addition to—chaos. They were more focused, less fun, and cast a sinister presence on the scene. Hollywood punks did not appreciate their talent for inviting more aggressive police response at shows while also driving away female fans. But like Darby Crash, Black Flag’s Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski had their own ambitions, involving hours-long daily practices, endless touring, and sustaining their own record label. Darby never even held a job. Ginn’s efforts helped make hardcore a national concern, eclipsing the more nuanced Hollywood scene. Ultimately the flag shape was to be deconstructed rather than changed outright.
Darby Crash is now imprisoned by a double tragedy: first as a fuck-up then as a failure, as someone who lost the plot between punk and indie rock. He was the opposite of a missing link: a hopeless, obsolete species; the dodo bird of the American underground. But this still casts him unfairly.
Darby Crash’s genius conveyed itself in two ways. First and most obviously was through his literary gifts. His facility with a phrase, even one lifted from his copious reading, went far above punk’s usual call. He has few equals among his contemporaries. Jello Biafra was conceptually gifted without being a stylist; Richard Hell and Patti Smith are better understood as poets who dabbled in punk. The most adequate point of comparison would be Ian Curtis. The Joy Division singer’s fame is wider, and his influence is more deeply rooted, owing largely to a musicianship that is both more technically proficient and more aesthetically distinct. But the two frontmen have stark overlap. Curtis was born two years before Darby and died seven months before him. Curtis and Darby both had literary aptitudes, and their tastes were largely self-directed. They both applied their aptitudes toward an impressionistic lyrical style, where they each break away again.
Curtis’s lyrics are abstract and internal; Darby’s are concrete and external. Curtis is chaste where Darby is virile. Curtis’s choruses are his weak point, to the extent that he avoided choruses altogether wherever possible. Darby’s verses tended to ripple outward from pivotal choruses and refrains (“That’s Richie Dagger’s crime”; “What we do is secret – secret”; “I’m a lexicon devil with a battered brain”; “I came into this world like a puzzled panther”). Curtis liked to show off his reading; Darby, his vocabulary. Curtis was formally controlled but substantially monotonal; Darby was formally chaotic but substantially flexible, covering urban alienation, character studies, social commentary, carnal laments, and philosophical exaltations. Curtis carried over the industrial dreamscapes of De Quincey while Darby swung between the more earthbound decadence of Baudelaire and Poe and one of the more interesting, even faithful, iterations of Nietzsche by way of Saturday detention:
I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc on this rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something even if I'm killed[…]
Empty out your pockets, you don't need their change
I'm giving you the power to rearrange
Together we'll run to the highest prop
Tear it down and let it drop
Second and more significantly, Darby was among the first to understand that punk was more than a temporal market demographic. He understood that its adherents’ idealism and energy could be concentrated into an overwhelming counterattack against the predominant culture, so long, of course, as their cry came from his voice. “Whatever it is people like that have in them that enables them to attract a following, he had it in him,” Pat Smear said. “I’m talking about some guy coming from a log cabin and ending up being president of the USA.”
Maybe it’s better to consider my opening framework in reverse. Not what Darby Crash would have become without punk, but what punk would have become if he’d extended his longevity by, let’s say, a decade. Darby Crash was the earliest, and perhaps the only, self-made cult of personality in punk, at least the cult that was focused on an individual. His vision of punk was, at best, transcendent and abstract. But beneath his licorice-and-ranch-slathered chaos was an authoritarianism far less equitable and far more centralized than punk could ever abide. It was explicitly imperious, and, more crucially, not ethical. Punks could reconcile itself with Great Men in time, once they knew it was the right thing to do and not out of some inborn urge or for its own sake.
More than unethical, Darby Crashism was isolate. The circle so beloved by him was a wall around a fiefdom that did not extend outside a section of Los Angeles. So constrictive was the enclosure that it threatened to leave punk mummified under a pile of newspapers. Under the grip of that mentality, the most off-road, triple-digit-population boondock surrounded by silos, empty mines, or hollowed out factories was freer than the freeway-wrapped metropolis. And it would be there and in places like it that punks extended their crusade against monotony, isolation, and petty tyranny. Having embraced Darby Crash’s transcendental call to greatness, punks were quite conclusive in assessing its limitations and moving on. Punks have travelled too many shapeless roads and found too many permutations of themselves along the way to abide by the dull logic of a circle.