I think the first time I ever saw Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” -- the 1983 “punksploitaion” epic about a gaggle of runaway hardcore kids living in a squat in the forbidding tract-housing district off of Southern California’s Interstate 605 -- was at the 8th Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village with my friend Spike (forever immortalized here), very possibly as a midnight double-feature with Alex Cox’s “Repo Man,” although I might be fudging that timeline. In any case, Spheeris’ rough-hewn and stiffly acted study of teen angst, familial dysfunction and youthful rebellion immediately left an impression on me, not least for its depictions of the Southern California punk scene and volatile performance footage of bands like D.I., T.S.O.L. and The Vandals. I believe I picked up the soundtrack to “Suburbia” the very next day.
While half of the record was taken up with composer Alex Gibson’s score of spartan, post-punky fragments and moody soundscapes, the other side was all of the live music featured in the film, namely “Richard Hung Himself” by D.I., “Wash Away” and “Darker My Love” by T.S.O.L. and a fittingly anarchic take on “The Legend of Pat Brown” by The Vandals. While all of these tracks immediately went into heavy home-stereo rotation and on many a mixtape, my hands-down favorite of the bunch was “Legend of Pat Brown,” which prompted me to seek out The Vandals’ debut album, Peace Through Vandalism. Here’s the live version from the movie:
It should go without saying that, in 1983, there was no internet, so no immediate access to any and all information. As such, I searched out and absorbed all the disparate ephemera about these bands that I could find. I picked up a VHS copy of “Suburbia” when it became available, replete with incongruous cover art that suggested more of an art-house movie like “Liquid Sky” than the comparatively gritty Spheeris opus.
Beyond finding that copy of Peace Through Vandalism, the only info I had to go on, about the Vandals, apart from what I’d hear in likely record shops and the bits and pieces I tracked down in zines like Flipside and MaximumRocknRoll, was threadbare at best. I remember studying the back cover of the “Suburbia” soundtrack (see below) and zeroing in on the photo of the band, standing in front of what looked like a prehistoric diorama of the same variety one might find here in New York at the American Museum of Natural History.
Ten or so years later, as floridly detailed in these two posts, my good friend Rob D. (the same Rob D. who’d later live in The Deuce in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, as detailed on this recent post), started living, for a spell, at his step-mother’s vacant bungalow in Costa Mesa, California – more or less in the same neck of the woods where these specific favorite movies like “Repo Man” and “Suburbia” were filmed. As such, when I went out to visit him, we spent lots of time trying to divine landmarks like the site of the deli Otto frequents in the former and the location of the legendary punk club, The Cuckoo’s Nest, which was informative to the latter. We never found either, but liked to kid ourselves that we were on the right track.
Unwittingly, we did sort of stumble upon a comparable site. Appropos of nothing, Rob decided that we should go check out the musuem at the La Brea Tar Pits, which is something of a revered local curiosity and geological anomaly, in the Los Angeles area. I quite enjoyed the lifelike models, out front, of the robustly tusked, prehistoric pacyderms incapacitated in the bubbling tar. When we walked inside, however, I was immediately struck by the notion that it must the origin of that photograph of the Vandals from the back cover on the “Suburbia” soundtrack.
But after circumnavigating the interior the museum, I couldn’t seem to pinpoint the mural in question. Rob immortalized my feverish quest with the photograph below. That’s me circa 1995, oblivious to the wooly mamoth about to trample me.
In later years, I learned that the Vandals photo in question was taken by Edward Colver, a crucial figures resonsible for iconic images of the SoCal hardcore scene. The photograph was indeed taken inside the La Brea Tar Pits museum. Maybe this particular exhibit was off limits that day,… or maybe I just walked right by it. Either way, here it is….along with Colver’s original.
Shortly after recording their follow-up to Peace Through Vandalism, the cheekily titled When In Rome, Do as The Vandals, lead singer Stevo Jensen left the band, and I sort of lost interest in them. Stevo sadly passed away in 2004 of a prescription medication overdose.
The rest of the “Suburbia” cast – a.k.a. T.R., or ‘The Rejected’ – didn’t really go on to big things, apart from “Razzle” (played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) and “Jack Diddley” (Chris Pederson), who later appeard in “Platoon” and “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” Wade Walston, the guy who played “Joe Schmo” ended up playing bass for the U.S. Bombs. Various iterations of D.I., T.S.O.L. and The Vandals all exist today. For a while the T.S.O.L. guys were acrimoniously estranged, leading to two separate versions of the band making the rounds. The Jack Grisham-led version continues to this day.
Invoke Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” today, and many might confuse it with the Richard Linklater film of the same name from 1994. Spheeris, who’d initially found renown via her preeminent L.A. punk documentary “Decline of Western Civilization,” went on to bigger and more successful fare like the “Wayne’s World” films, along with two more installments of the ”Decline” series, among other things. While frequently cited alongside her name, “Suburbia” isn’t widely considered her crowning achievement.
Be that as it may, the film does still have its champions. Beyond idiots like myself, other people have been simillarly fixated with its minutia. As evidence of same, check out the exploits of the gentleman below…
Recent Comments