Germs - Lexicon Devil

Quite a lot of people look at you a little funny if you say you like listening to the punk rock of the 60s and 70s. For them, it’s a little like saying you enjoy listening to a sinkhole that opened up under a pots and pans factory, all noise and chaos and shouting. But nobody in history ever went to a punk show and expected an orderly, structured affair – hell, the LAPD themselves were making sure of a ruckus at the turn of the 80s.

That late 70s punk scene turned up more than just middle-class noses. Fronted by Darby Crash and featuring a revolving door of musicians (including Smear of Foo Fighters fame and Belinda Carlisle, yes, that Belinda Carlisle), the Germs were… divisive, to put it lightly. If you’ve ever heard early recordings of the band, live or otherwise, it’s often like trying to listen to a spinning washing machine with a brick in the drum. Early shows often ended after ten minutes or less; not due to the length of most punk songs, but because the band were too busy breaking their equipment or dipping the microphones in peanut butter to play any. And when they did manage to scrape a sound together, the shows lasted even less time than that. 

For all that, though? The punk genre still couldn’t exist in the way it did then and does today without them. The band were an influence impossible to quantify, punk’s punk. After Crash’s untimely suicide in 1980 the band parted ways and re-united a few times, but the mark they had already left on the genre – and music as a whole – was indelible. The shining, enraptured faces of a thousand young fans looking up at a stage, hearing a song like “Lexicon Devil” playing while absolute chaos erupts all around them belong to people who have been imprinted on forever. And, given how many bands nowadays cite that mental heyday as their own blossoming? It’s demonstrably the case. I think most of them stuck to escapades outside of peanut butter and heroin, though.