When Penelope Spheeris was making the first part of her landmark documentary The Decline of Western Civilization in 1979 and 1980, none of the people she was chronicling were known outside of Los Angeles’s dank punk scene. They played furious music in clubs that looked and smelled like bathrooms, and lived in squats that looked and smelled like squats. (Or, like bathrooms.) But The Decline of Western Civilization is the first and best film of what would become a loosely linked trilogy exploring different LA subcultures over three decades.
Featuring rough-ready footage shot at gigs and candid interviews with future punk stars, this film is a slim time capsule of a nascent music scene not yet exploited through commerce or destroyed by day jobs. Spheeris enters a world filled with runaways, drug addicts and squatters, where audience members spit on bands to signal some form of vile, violent appreciation, where Nazi regalia is worn and confused as being a symbol of anarchy. One memorable moment sees a young woman flippantly telling a story about a house painter who died in her backyard; before they called the cops, she and her friends posed for photos with the corpse.
We meet Pat Smear, some 15 years before he joined Nirvana as their second guitarist. We visit Black Flag at home, still a few months off meeting Henry Rollins; the band’s singer is sleeping in an overhead closet fit to store spare blankets. A young Exene Cervenka is charming and excitable, on the cusp of ascending with future LA punk legends X, and aware of the importance of what she is trying to achieve. Everyone seems tragic and hopeful.
The Germs’ charismatic young frontman, Darby Crash, is the film’s most magnetic force – and the most tragic, too. He’s type of sympathetic character you want to both slap and hug. Crash was the victim of a chaotic family situation that spat him into the caverns of LA: translucent, addicted to drugs and riddled with insecurities about his sexuality, looks and abilities. At gigs he gets so high that he forgets to sing into the microphone. He is scared of the violence that comes with his band’s shows, even though he is the drunken instigator of most of it.
In the film, Crash cooks eggs in a rundown kitchen and candidly explains how he needs to be bombed before performing and how he started hurting himself on stage due to boredom. A few months after these interviews, he scribbled a one-line note and killed himself with an intentional heroin overdose. It was too late to change the movie poster: a shot of Crash lying with his eyes closed, almost lifeless, on a stage floor.
The second and third films in this series are great too, but for different, lesser reasons. Part II: The Metal Years skews closer to a Spinal Tap experience, capturing what has since become known as “hair metal” or “cock rock”: tight leather, teased mullets, fingerless gloves, Jack Daniels chased with cocaine. Hair metal was rife in the late 1980s on LA’s Sunset Strip, and Spheeris was there to capture it all. This film came in 1988, seven years after the first, and by then Spheeris could attract the already famous – including Ozzy Osbourne, Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, Kiss and Lemmy – to give lengthy interviews. Thankfully she was savvy enough to balance these with the “almost famous”, like Randy O, frontman of a band whose major exposure would begin and end with this film. While being interviewed, O was convinced he would be a millionaire and his band “bigger than Zeppelin”. This film teeters between musicians who enjoy ridiculous wealth and success, and others who assume they will too, any day now. Each comes off as tragic and hilarious as the other.
The third installation came in 1998, with neither a subtitle nor any easy laughs. Spheeris intended to catalogue the same type of LA punk scene she encountered in 1979 but found the kids were no longer all right. She discovered clusters of teenage runaways, dubbed “gutter punks” – partly due to an anti-establishment stance and a shared aesthetic, but mainly because they often lived in the street. The resultant film was so bleak it was passed over for general release in the late 90s. Rewatching it now, it’s not hard to see why this was a hard sell in the popcorn era of American Pie. But you’d be remiss to skip over this final, necessary document; as with Spheeris’s first two films, you’ll find tragedy and hope in even doses.
