Glen E Friedman on BoingBoing
I always thought Xeni Jardin seemed cool with that spiky while hair. Turns out she’s actually a punk rock survivor. She does an interview with Glen Friedman on Boing Boing TV. Looks like Glen Friedman had a show at Shepard Fairey’s gallery in LA. Fairey’s interview last week was pretty great too. I was wondering about the skate photos in the background.
You tube version embedded after the jump.
i read an interview with friedman awhile back where he totally towed the barney party line, saying that street skating and such isn’t “real” skateboarding.
pretty disappointing. fuck you, “hero.”
That is disappointing. Do you have an idea of where you read it?
I think the Barney party line is that transition skating is the eventual outcome of the skateboarding disease.
Works for me.
Everything is street skating -tranny parks represent rarer street forms, street plazas duplicate common street features.
I have personally never come across a pool on the street, but I guess you could call it street skating??
I don’t recall women being represented in “fuck you heros”. I guess punk women and women who skate arnt as important as rebels like Ice-T.
maybe the book should have been called “guys I’d be gay with”.
I’ve followed friedman’s stuff for a long time, and i think you must have been a little to sensitive (speaking of gay) to his comments on street skating, look a little deeper and you’ll see you played yourself, he’s the real deal. and as far as no women in his Fuck You Heroes book , that’s not true either, and there are a few more in his Fuck You Too book. Besides any one who lived through those era’s know it was not the women who set the tone of the scenes the way the men did, that was just a fact, not to take anything away from the many women who did contribute, they just did not inspire him apparently as much as the men did.
yea I’m sensitive. and I have a bad memory, so please remind me of those women in “fuck you heros”. I think I remember one of Ice-t’s earlyer ultra hot wives being in the book, but I’m not sure. but one thing is for sure women still don’t set the tone of the “scenes”
I remember reading the same interview with GEF, where he essentially disrespects everything that came after him and his crew (including street skating). According to his ego, he was at the start of everything to do with punk, hip-hop and skateboarding and everything since is weak. Meanwhile, he’s busy snapping photos of bands on major labels.
And yep, the only women in his books are accessories and not a part of the scene, Maybe there is a token shot of Peggy Oki in one of them. I dig his stuff but GEF often comes across as an elitist narrow-minded tool.
But friendly and unassuming in person! At least when I met him. But then this was before the Dogtown movie blew up, so maybe he was just happy anyone cared at that point.
Maybe, I’m being too harsh. I mean, his photos wouldn’t be so good, if he didn’t think those images were so crucial. But maybe he should let the viewer come up with their own commentary.
anti HERO, ‘fuck you’ HEROES, I sense a thread. And a resentment toward genuine originators, who weren’t media pseudo-anti-heroes. Jim McCall, who Jake Phelps hates, pulled a frontside air in front of thousands of people (out of a four foot fiberglass bowl with vert) months before the dogtown media mafia even claims the frontside air was invented… and yet he freely allows that someone elsewhere had probably already been doing them without so many witnesses. (Instead of claiming that it took “four months” for it to reach the west coast.) And, though people had surely already been doing no hands airs, Gelfand probably did invent the pop ollie (or is it just that he gets credit cuz dogtown affiliated Peralta thinks so?), and Rodney’s the one who took it to flat ground, and if the backsmith had first been done in Cali, it would be KNOWN as a Nolder. And for Glen to think that California spawned ANYTHING (let alone everything) original to do with punk rock, other than jockism, is rich. Hell, even the Bad Brains, who were playing hardcore before any of the west coast bands, bit their guitar style from mid-70’s Philly band Pure Hell (and their reggae stylings from Mikey Dread). But anything that doesn’t fit neatly in Glen’s “I was a wide-eyed kook at the groundfloor” narrative isn’t “real”, because he didn’t document it….
Bad Brains? etc. wrong wrong and wrong.
in fall 1979 there were FOUR LA/OC/Valley punk bands that were doing ONE MINUTE SONGS. black flag, the crowd, red cross w/ron on drums, and our band the angry samoans. our own band’s setlist wound up being 20 songs /26 minutes by the next spring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igsAuZNJHM (14 songs in 18 minutes was the final recorded shorter version of it) , with surviving set lists having hndwritingon them showing that the tunes had been TIMED song by song in the practice to see how many we could get into less than a thirty mnute live stage slot.
the crowd and red cross had even tighter/shorter set lists, and their material got RECORDED in 1979. black flag ditto. etc. the Nervous Breakdown 7″ four song ep was a nuclear BOMB up and down the west coast in summer 1979, it’s fact not fiction. didn’t you see the DOA gig at the NYC Peppermint Lounge in 1981? if you were on the east coast. again, fucking bomb. but anyway —
the Bad Brains’ songs went on forEVER, imho. they were great musicians obviously but their songwriting was pfffffsht doobiehead whatever. when that Pay to Cum 45 they finally got out, go out to the west coast a couple of years down the road, a friend of our band (in 1982) played it for our band on his tape deck outside a club before some gig, and seriously two of three of us just snickered. at the song, y’know. it went on for what seemed like nine hours just doing the same chord change over and over and nine million times more. weak lazy songwriting — get that shit out of here.
so yeah “whoever played early hardcore first” is just a parlor game pissing match since a full handful of people had different ideas on different coasts about how to do it all on their own and on their own dime, and in different ways from each other but SUPER SHORT SONGS ISSUED ON RECORD came out of LA (what else was ever like that? the 1st Wire album,right?) and included relatively lesser known bands like the Urinals whose 2nd/3rdsingles were fanTAStic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R39gdl6kiVI and an orig pressing would cost anyone a small fortune (well, $300 to $500 anyway) forty five years later, right. 1979! and it’s 59 seconds! or the Rhino 39 single on dangerhouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIGhNvlM3Cs with No Compromise — 1979.
and the west coast took that shit worldWIDE. the Group Sex album by the Circle Jerks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z0ItETVv2Q — when keith and greg play that same material (with a really great drummer this past year) all around america (and europe ditto) to large crowds this past year (2023/2024), kids fifty/sixty years younger than them go BATSHIT. because most of the songs are great. etc etc etc. west coast bla bla bla.
hey mom can i have my coke zero six pack now?
metal mike
angry samoans jazz band
california
Though I don’t doubt he’s a nice guy. And, actually, on the punk front California DID originate genuinely great [Cali is a] Joke Bands, like the Angry Samoans, the Vandals, the Dickies, & the Feederz (whose album cover featured the second best use of grip tape ever).
yea metal mike here and looking for something else entirely, this page/thread came up via the always unpredictable innernet of googleworld.
i typed out a sufficiently totally-biased west coast answer (above) and uh oh, pulled out the “you probably don’t have these 45s do you” card by linking the URLs for youtube of the Rhino 39 single (xerox/no compromise) and the Urinals ‘ Ack Ack Ack 45 side. both issued in 1979 obviously.
there is randomly-filmed (who knows why or by whom, can’t remember) of an angry samoans “saturday afternoon rehearsal” (do the setlist once, before or after learning any “new material” for a short period of time, and then do the setlist a SECOND time like it was the actual next gig, which is what it was the setlist for) wherre the lyrics are dumb as fuck on purpose yeah, but the music is as serious as black death. just check on my Sgt in Arms pari todd/bass and PJ/guitar go nuts yelling at each other about whoever made a mistake (twice during the tape i believe). it was a musical paramilitary operating working up that kind of music (meaning fast, shorter, meaner) that WAS different from the LA punk rock of 1977 1978 that had preceded it.
the middle class 7″ was such a mess that i don’t think anyone took it (or the band) seriously outside of their pretty-southward neck of OC. never liked that band though, them and the putzes in the Plugz were the only LA/OC punk bands of the era that i never liked. well maybe came-and-went crap band like the Skuls (or the awful Mau Maus who never ever got a record out, just a different of berlin brats crap-band damage never getting it together, as the hippies at monterey used to say).
The Crowd were the one band that wound up sorely lacking video footage of them from 1979 into 1980. we played with them 2nd billed, at north county san diego Lions Club in jan 1980 and their Beach Blvd material played live was just a buzzsaw. their 1st guitarist jim whats his name could REALLY fucking play. i never knew that his brother was in the “Crayon World”(45) Flyboys until decades later.
metal mike
angry samoans jazz band
california
footnote —
the dickies had goofy lyrics too obviously, but when i saw them for the first time, at the whiskey march 1978 (two nights, both sets each night) stan’s guitar gear and the drummer were like an atomic bomb. plus or minus the vocals, they might have been the best band in the world at that point outside of AC/DC in their different areana and the Saints if they were still as intense as their playing was in the spring 1977 aussie footage, right. fwiw, the ramones SUCKED live even before train wreck marc bell on drums. guitar and bass and drumming — never in sync with each other even for ten seconds. just not good. it makes you wonder if they kept a “live guitar track” on the 2nd or 3rd albums. mr cummings totally INVENTED how to play loud rhythm guitar like had never been done before (the speed and the % of downstrokes) but he had tempo problems definitely and “not having a real drummer” didn’t help i don’t think. if the kick was steady (and not the snare drum) then how the fuck is a stage left guitarist supposed to play w/the kick drum and ignore the oddness of lots of the live back beats? thinking about it as a drummer but over in john’s position on stage. and THEN after 1976 they rushed the tempos compared to the recordings, forgett it. the 1975 “Arturo’s Loft” (really an empy unused TV soundstage, i read somewhere) 8 songs and 20 minutes with the mike mathrews freedom amp (guitar) is spot-on brutally good AND steady, and th esongs played at theire original tempos before they got played faster by the time a year later in the recording studio for the first time. so i dunno. for a band that didn’t have a “real drummer” just muso-vet borderline-genius idea guy tommy filling in, they reinvented rock music they overachived obviously but whatev.
but oh yeah — fuckk the live earlu wierdos, justpainful. terrible drummer who thankfullydidn’t fuck things up on the HOF amazing single of Solitary Confinement — the DICKIES had amazing sounding euqipment (guitar amp, bass rig, and drum kit) when they had a good soundman, and stan’s “rock god guitar gear” good gibson into a good sounding (stock unmodified?) marshall head just cut holes in any wall thirty feet away when he let a chord ring before the next chord change. uber dorktard weird attitude hufsteder (stan’s mentor/teacher more or less since no one else gave him advice) must have been proud or something like that. “stan…you don’t have what it takes to cut it in the big rock world like us guys in the Quick. but i think you could clean up doing punk rock!” haha valley culture to the max. (our band was put togeher at 14922 bassett st, van nuys in the back empty garage, and practiced for the entire first year in the garage turner famiy houses ‘gs garage at 4857 beeman ave, north hollywood. 91607. why he fuck do i rememer that? i listen to WAYU TOO MUCH 95.78-FM sportstalk like while i was typing thyis (and the comment abover telling the bad brains to jut fuck the fuckk off about dissing the west coast history etc).
this thread had gotten just silly, some of you just don’t know your history and the actual time line of skatboarding’s history, but that’s OK. And yeah it’s true the woman who is in his Fuck You Heroes is none other than Ice-T’s former wife, but in his fuck you too book there is Exene + a few others, and peggy Oki is in the DogTown book. If you don’t recognize this man’s work for what it really is in quality and importance to those cultures , then you really just don’t really know the cultures as well as you think, and what was actually going on at the time. Friedman doesn’t claim the beginning ever, but he does clim that he was their at crucial times with crucial people, it’s undeniable. (Bob your skate history regarding the frontside air is simply off time wise). And to deny the importance of Black Flag, the Circle jerks, Adolescents, and others from that era of american punk rock also denotes an ignorance of what was going on and the actual time lines, to give credit to those joke bands is just lame. I’ve met friedman as recently as at this show in the video, he’s still cool although he’d be happy to take any of his haters to task at any moment. go check out his website or books, you won’t be disappointed. and he CLEARLY does not disrespect everything that came after him (he says young people should be shooting their own cultures, those participating now, not people who are not involved in them like him) nor does he shoot any bands that he does not admire for major labels, if you’re going to disrespect the guy at least have the facts straight, read some recent interviews, he obviously has a tendency to go off during interviews, but you can’t expect the guy to not support what he grew up with, he’s lived through the golden ages of all that he shot, and he shared those moments with us like no other, i gotta respect that.
wait, the Dickies were a joke band?
not unless being ” the best live band in the entire world in early 1978″ outside of AC/DC in their own genre and the Saints if they were still playing like banshees — totals up to a joke. refernece point being the good acoustics at the whiskey a go go, and the two nights / four sets total that i saw in march 1978 (the first time that i had seen the Dickies, with my refernece points at that date all from “hard rock america” fandom from the yardbirds/who out through black sabbath BOC grand funk deep purple Mk 2 and thorugh Kiss Army 1976 and the great 1976 s/t nugnet 1st lp on CBS….and the dickies were equal to ANYthing worldwide on guitar/bass/drums, plus or minus the singing.
Updated this ancient post so the embedded video works again.