Hippies vs. Punks: Negative Trend

Negative Trend, a precursor band of Flipper, was on the bill of the famous January 14, 1978 Winterland show that spelled the end of first wave Punk and the Sex Pistols. Negative Trend was supposed to appear after the Sex Pistols, but they never made it on stage. The plan hatched by Malcolm McLaren was for Negative Trend to go on, perform using the Sex Pistols' equipment and then destroy everything -- the stage, guitars, amps, drums -- in a blaze of crowd-pleasing, media-tantalizing glory. The band was blocked from the stage by bikers employed by Bill Graham. The story is recounted by guitarist Craig Gray in a KALX interview from 2009:

Negative Trend had three different lead vocalists in the late 1970s -- Rozz Rezabek, Mikal Waters and Rik L. Rik. The Posh Boy Music November 1978 recording that I downloaded from Amazon and have been listening to all week features F-Word co-founder Rik L. Rik. He is the end of the line. While Rik is excellent, Mikal Waters, who appears on the Negative Trend EP (1978), I prefer; he has more of a Lee Ving vibe. The original singer, Rozz Rezabek, has a solo record titled Rozz and Negative Trend: The Pop Sessions (1978) which is quite good but apparently not accurate in its co-crediting of Negative Trend:

I think the name "Negative Trend" is the perfect name for a first wave Punk band. It says it all without irony and ostentation. 

This is what Punks represented after the Hippies vacated the cultural vanguard and the Age of Aquarius evaporated -- a negative trend. 

The Zeitgeist has grown progressively more negative ever since, to the point where we are at now, The End: culturally, suffocated by technology; politically, smothered by an extremely powerful plutocracy; ecologically, headed for -- if not already suffering from -- a planetary crisis.

The music of Negative Trend is an aural bridge between first wave UK Punk and what would become the dominant form of American Punk -- California Hardcore of the early and middle 1980s. One can also hear a proto-Goth sound in a song like "Black and Red":

It's good stuff. I particularly like "Mercenaries":

It takes me back to the late '70s when colonial Africa was collapsing and images of black national liberation wars were shown on the nightly network news through a white supremacist lens. The U.S. had just "cut and run" in Vietnam and here we were right back in a proxy war, this time in Angola. But the Hippies were no longer on the scene with their Magical Mystery Tour (1967). No, the Punks of 1977-1978 were about as far away from "All You Need is Love" as one can imagine.

To see the new face of the avant-garde and its celebration of drunken adolescent cynicism take a look at these videos from a Mabuhay Gardens show in early 1978, a couple of months after Negative Trend failed to make it to the stage of the Winterland Ballroom. The lead singer is Rozz Rezabek. The bass player is Will Shatter, who will go on to form Flipper with the second Negative Trend drummer, Steve DePace:

After three decades Negative Trend reformed  in 2009, performing also in 2010 when they disbanded. This is the group (the only original member is Craig Gray) doing "Meathouse" at a San Francisco show in February of 2009:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Nuns

World War III, usually associated with the Cold War and its many crises -- Suez, Berlin, Cuban Missile -- and proxy military conflicts -- Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua -- is back with a vengeance. The United States is banging its war drum. China is reportedly sending a warship to the Mediterranean. Russia, with an anti-submarine ship and a missile cruiser already there, is sending additional ships. They will be monitoring -- and who knows what else -- a U.S. submarine and the five U.S. destroyers loaded with cruise missiles meant for Syria. One mistake, a faulty guidance system on one of the Tomahawks, and a regional crisis becomes a global conflagration.

For the last several weeks I've been meaning to take a stab at a Hippies vs. Punks post devoted to The Nuns, a first wave Punk group from San Francisco. Along with Crime and Avengers they dominated the San Francisco Punk scene in the early years, 1976 through 1978. 

What captivated me at first about The Nuns was the realization that they are the band that kicked off the famous last show of the Sex Pistols, the moment when Punk died and Post-Punk began. The venue was Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom where The Last Waltz had been filmed a little over a year earlier. The line-up that January night in 1978 was The Nuns, Avengers, Sex Pistols, followed by Negative Trend.

None of The Nuns' recordings really jump out at you. The eponymous The Nuns, released in 1980, was minus guitarist, co-founder, song writer and present-day star Alejandro Escovedo. The band broke up in 1979 and reformed, except for Escovedo, for a single week in the spring of 1980 to quickly record the self-titled album. To hear the band in its prime with Escovedo on guitar you have to track down singles.

What does exist is video of The Nuns' performance at the Sex Pistols' Winterland show, January 14, 1978. (The web sites where one can find it, sadly, require membership.)

But what has stuck with me the past few weeks is not the music as much as the story of their keyboard player, Jennifer Miro, who, along with Jeff Olener and Richie Detrick, was a vocalist. (For Jennifer Miro's story check out the excellent SF Weekly piece by Jack Boulware.)

Miro died of breast and liver cancer in December of the year before last alone in hospice care at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center. Up until then she had been employed as a receptionist for celebrity divorce attorney Raoul Felder. Obits can be found at the SF Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Nuns put out five more albums after The Nuns (1980), all built around Jennifer Miro and her embrace of a cold, drum-track driven, synthesizer-based sound and a sexual fetishist persona. Not my cup of tea. But I am drawn to a woman, a fellow office worker, who, present at the creation of our current exhausted Zeitgeist, chose to die alone as quietly as possible. There is something to be learned here. 

Let's end with the last lines from Jack Boulware's appreciation:

On January 14, 1978, at the Winterland in San Francisco, what would be the final show ever for the Sex Pistols, the most talked-about punk show in history, before the mob of 5,000 roared to life and pelted the stage with spit and D-sized batteries, before anyone knew what to expect, before rock media anointed this night as the death of punk rock, before the voiceover introduction, "We're The Nuns, and we ain't from New York, and we ain't from England, we're from San Francisco!", the very first person to take the stage was Jennifer, walking out by herself in a single spotlight, scared to death and emotionally fragile from just having broken up with Crime drummer Brittley Black. She sat at her piano, began a closing-time saloon melody, leaned into the mic and sang, "I'm so lazy, so lazy...I'm too lazy to fall in love...It's such a bother, I'd much rather stay home and watch TV..." 

Jennifer remembered the moment clearly. "After that," she said, "you can't go back to a normal life."