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."

Hippies vs. Punks: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

Yesterday started out poorly. It could have been the big slice of chocolate cake eaten at 9 AM making me feel stoned. Add to that a general feeling of exhaustion that comes with the end of the work week; and then to top it off I listened to The Nuns' 4 Days in a Motel Room - Their Greatest Sins (1994) four times in a row from start to finish.

On the train home I was ready to fly the white flag of surrender. I needed something to wipe everything clean, to redeem myself, to give me the strength to carry on. On my post-work agenda I had the grocery store, a birthday gift for a coworker, dinner preparations. All minor mundane chores of a burdened bachelor made monumental by flagging spirits. Then I thumbed through my iPod and found the answer to my prayers. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978).

By the time I listened to all 11 tracks through "Shrivel-Up," I had stormed up the hill to the grocery store and was a man reborn by dint of Nietzschean self-overcoming -- thanks to Messrs. Casale, Mothersbaugh & Myers.

I'm running a 10K tomorrow. My first one of the year. So I'm cutting Hippies vs. Punks short tonight in order to avoid an evening hunched over the keyboard. Suffice it to say that I had high expectations for tonight following multiple posts devoted to The Last Waltz (1978). At first, I was going to focus on The Dicks' seminal SST Records release Kill From the Heart (1983). Then I thought, No, I've got to do MDC's super-historical Millions of Dead Cops (1982). I saw both bands at the Rock Against Reagan concert in front of Moscone Center where the Democratic National Convention was taking place in July of 1984. That was a big event in my 19-year-old life. Dead Kennedys headlined. I participated in the march on the Hall of Justice following the concert and the running game of hide and seek with San Francisco's Finest (about which I still dream 30 years later). Better to spend some quality time on that post.

Then I looked at the undercard of the famous Winterland show in January of 1978 when the Sex Pistols blew apart. Avengers and The Nuns were the warm-up acts. I listened to the eponymous Avengers (1983) all the time in college. I downloaded the Avengers' Live at Winterland 1978 (2010) album this week. It's good; it sounds a lot like the Avengers album. But I was intrigued by The Nuns, the only knowledge of whom I had was the name. And that brings us back to the top of this post.

We'll have to explore The Nuns another time. It's a thoroughly depressing tale. Next to Crime, they were the biggest San Francisco Punk band in the heady days of 1977, a group briefly courted by San Francsico Sound impresario Bill Graham.

As for Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, though some will scoff, I'd class it with Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), Horses (1975), Pink Flag (1977) and Entertainment! (1979) as one of the greatest Punk/Post-Punk albums of all time.