The Avengers were, as their lone studio album testifies, the great West Coast punk band. In a better world (so to speak) they and the Screamers would have looked down on the Sunset Strip from enormous billboards.

It’s belatedly come to my attention that pro-shot footage of the Avengers’ entire January 14, 1978 set at Winterland, opening the Sex Pistols’ final (pre-90s-reunion) show, is up on YouTube. The only Avengers video I’d seen of this vintage before was the blurry and generally unsatisfying Target VHS. By comparison, this is like the color turning on in The Wizard of Oz. It’s a sharp recording of a killer performance, and if nineteen-year-old Penelope Houston’s fierce opener, “The American in Me,” doesn’t resonate with you in 2016, then like Magic 8-Ball says, “Outlook not so good.”
 

 
You can also watch the Nuns’ full set from that night and, of course, the Pistols’. What you won’t find on YouTube is a trace of the evening’s emcee, the legendary rock critic Richard Meltzer, who was thrown out before the show ended. He writes:

At the Sex Pistols show in San Francisco I was asked to emcee, and I went out and provoked the audience and they threw things at me and Bill Graham, who was promoting it, chucked me out of the building—what a rush.

 
See the Avengers in action after the jump…

The Avengers. Photo by James Stark.
 
Photographer James Stark got his start shooting photos for the band Crime in 1976 and thereafter began documenting the early punk scene in San Francisco. Many of his visually arresting photos of both local SF bands like Crime, the Nuns, the Dils and the Avengers, and national acts like Blondie, DEVO, and the Sex Pistols made their way into his 1992 self-published book Punk ‘77. The title was picked up and reissued by RE/Search publishing in 1999, and now exists in an expanded third edition.
 

First edition of Stark’s photobook. Click image to order the expanded third edition.
 
I bought the first edition when it came out, and it remains one of my favorite photo books documenting what is my personal favorite of the early American punk scenes.

Here are a few photos from Stark’s Punk ‘77:
 

The Screamers
 

 

Booji Boy, DEVO
 

 
What I didn’t realize until recently is that James Stark has a web presence with a lot more of his awesome photos of bands and show-goers from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. His website is a fun place to spend some time, and his Facebook page has a lot of neat stuff not in the book—including many color photographs of San Francisco scenesters.

As much fun as band photos are, I revel in seeing what people attending shows looked like. To me, the best part of live concert footage is always when the camera pans to the audience—just to see what regular people were looking like when they went to see their favorite bands.

Here’s a sampling of Stark’s work from his Facebook page which is not featured in his fantastic and recommended book:
 

The Mutants
 

The Avengers
 
More after the jump…

 
Ah, Avengers!  Led by art student Penelope Houston, the San Francisco-based band opened, of course, for The Sex Pistols during that final, disastrous show at Winterland.   And, yeah, maybe his band was imploding, but Steve Jones liked what he saw.  The Pistols guitarist went on to produce the band’s first EP, which, IMO sounds far more ferocious than their still glorious (and still out-of-print) full-length, Avengers.

The clarity of the following clips—both of them, gulp, 32-years-old—is absolutely astounding.  I’m assuming the first one’s from SF, but the second one takes place at LA’s legendary Masque.  Click play, watch, repeat!

Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman from The Avengers sing “Kinky Boots,” apparently a quick cash-in attempt at the time. Hot.