What’s Up America was a newsmagazine show that ran on Showtime from 1978 to 1981, covering “topics such as BB guns; female boxers; urban cowboys; Elvis Presley impersonators; chariot racers in Pocatello, Idaho; and a couple who lived year-round on Liberty Island in New York Harbor,” as well as pay TV premiums like “pornographic film actors, strippers, prostitutes, and a nude beauty pageant.”

One segment, roughly contemporary with The Decline of Western Civilization, profiled the Los Angeles punk scene. There are not-so-familiar faces and voices, like those of Orange County’s Nu-Beams, and slightly more familiar ones, like those of Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy and Phranc of Catholic Discipline, BÖC lyricist and VOM singer Richard Meltzer, and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer.

Speaking of Rodney, the warm feelings showfolk used to pretend to have for one another are not much in evidence on this broadcast: the Angry Samoans name the former English Disco owner as one of the people they would like to murder, along with Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, and “Rockefeller” (Nelson?), who, as one member points out, is already dead. The report opens with the Samoans at Blackies (the club Black Flag’s then-singer Ron Reyes mentions during the introduction to “Revenge” in Decline), playing their love song “You Stupid Asshole.”
 

 
The Suburban Lawns are in there, performing their self-released first single “Gidget Goes to Hell,” then in its second pressing. (I think this dates the show to ‘79-‘80, or else the Lawns would be plugging “Janitor.”) Bassist Vex Billingsgate expresses the wish that a record company will soon relieve the band of its independence. The show saves the Dickies, the first L.A. punk band signed to a major label, for last. Singer Leonard Phillips spells out the Dickies’ ethic, or lack of same:

We’re not really aggravated about a producer taking our live sound and transforming it into a commercially successful product, because we’re capitalists, and if it’s going to help us sell more records, I certainly would make a compromise.

Watch it after the jump…

 
When Smegma first formed—I’m referring here to the avant garde improvisational free music noise group, not that other stuff—in Pasadena, California in 1973, the collective’s membership came together in the back room of the Poo-Bah record store. The Poo-Bah was located in a basement next door to a sleazy porno theatre and the owner encouraged some of the shop’s patrons (who coalesced around a shared love of Zappa, Beefheart and the Residents) to utilize his space. The Poo-Bah later merged with the Los Angeles Free Music Society or L.A.F.M.S., a parallel group of local freaks into the same things, to release records, cassettes, newsletters and a fanzine, and to promote live events and art happenings, including those of Smegma.
 

 
Smegma’s cast of characters took on goofy pre-punk pseudonyms such as “Ju Suk Reet Meate,” “Dennis Duck,” “Cheez-It Ritz,” “Amazon Bambi,” “Chucko Fats,” “Pizza Rioux,” “Iso,” “Dr. Id,” “Dr.Odd,” “Foon,” “Ace Farren Ford,” “Electric Bill,” “Borneo Jimmy,” “Burned Mind,” “Oblivia,” “Victor Sparks,” and “Harry Cess Poole” and members overlapped with L.A.F.M.S. which might be considered the loose umbrella organization representing a scene of freaky people who were into making freaky head music. Their sound incorporated tapes, free jazz, power electronics, the Ventures, drones, proto-Plunderphonics tape loops and encouraged inspired amateurism rather than musical prowess. “NO HIPPIE MUSIC” was their guiding motto. Their disgusting name is a pisstake on le nom de French prog-rockers Magma. It should come as no surprise that Smegma were included on the infamous “Nurse with Wound list.”
 

 
In 1975, Smegma’s loose center of operations moved to Portland, Oregon where they became an important part of that city’s musical history even if most of that burg’s residents were and are still blissfully unaware of this fact. Over the decades they’ve recorded with noted oddballs like Frank Zappa discovery Wild Man Fischer, Boyd Rice, and Japanese noise prankster Merzbow (on the dual release Smegma Plays Merzbow/Merzbow Plays Smegma.) During the late 1990s, the noted pioneer rock scribe and literary cult figure Richard Meltzer served as the group’s lyricist and frontman.

More Smegma after the jump…

 
Adam Ganderson who writes for Chips and Beer Magazine contributed this to Dangerous Minds.

Vom might be the weirdest punk band to ever exist. Made up of guitarist Phil Koehn, bassist Lisa Brenneis and rock writers Gregg Turner from Creem and “Metal” Mike Saunders, who is credited with being the first person to use the term “Heavy Metal” in a record review, the band was fronted by primary rock critic and Blue Oyster Cult lyricist Richard Meltzer.

It didn’t matter that in 1976 Blue Oyster Cult was one of the biggest heavy metal acts on the planet, by that time Meltzer claimed to be done with rock and especially rock writing, which was at that point already sagging with record label PR hacks trying to get their name “out there” in order to reap the socio economic benefits of being a music insider. Basically, what the music journalism game has become today, just on a different pay scale. 

Vom (vomit abbreviated) turned out to be the test model for Angry Samoans (minus Meltzer) and was there as punk was taking hold in Los Angeles, when it was a legitimate “thing” but not so much of a thing that it had been scooped up by corporate bozos. These guys were pranksters, not really a surprise in the case of Meltzer who would sometimes mail his garbage to addresses chosen at random from the phone book. They would drape barbed wire in front of the stage, release live crickets at shows, and at least once hit someone in the face with the mic stand. Musically, they kinda stunk. But they were also great. Nothing about this band made complete sense and it wasn’t supposed to. It was concussed. Damaged but not broken. Juvenile. All the things that once made rock ’n’ roll relevant. Vom only lasted a year, but in that time they got about as close as music can get to capturing the sound of what Meltzer once called “children throwing tinker toys at the wall.”

Below are the videos for Vom’s “Punk Mobile”, “I’m In Love With Your Mom”, “Animalistic” and the timeless classic “Electrocute Your Cock” all of which also turn up in Angry Samoans: True Documentary.
 

 
More after the jump…