Issue 03
Lee Ving
By Brendan MullenPhotos By Edward Colver
Portrait By Jeremy & Claire Weiss
The bustling punk scene that sprouted in Los Angeles during the late 1970s was never short of characters, including, to name a few: Darby Crash, the would-be apocalyptic cult leader of the Germs and the Circle One sect; Claude Bessey, a.k.a. Kickboy Face, an itinerant French-born poet, singer of Catholic Discipline, and chief writer for the cult punk ‘zine Slash; and Black Randy of the Metrosquad, legendary dope fiend, coprophile, telemarketer, and co-founder of Dangerhouse Records, who preached the sainthood of Ugandan cannibal dictator Idi Amin while satirizing 70’s “Afro-American” pop culture with crazed whiteboy raps.
In dingy venues like the Masque, the Whisky, BACES Hall, Larchmont Hall, the Stardust Ballroom, the Hong Kong Cafe, and the Polish Auditorium, punk bands were playing regularly, photocopied ‘zines like Flipside and Lobotomy were circulating, and DIY record labels were launching. An eclectic and creative scene independent of mainstream support was thriving.
In 1978, a rough-and-tough Philadelphia native calling himself Lee Ving helped change the face of punk itself by forming Fear, a band that stood out from the pack, distancing itself from the Sex Pistols and glam rock. Fear instead fused an aggressive, revved-up take on punk with unapologetic out-and-out heavy metal riffs pulled from the Unholy Book of Black Sabbath and Motšrhead. Lee’s angry, staccato, low-on-melody punk lyrics, barked out like a psycho military commandant, became the template for years to come for what became “hardcore” in punk and metal.
Ving came off as the menacing, snarling, SOB responsible for concocting the quartet’s agenda of beer, fighting, sex, Budweiser, war, crowd-baiting, beer. He refined the art of crowd baiting, with women, New Yorkers, liberals, and especially gays. Next time, don’t bite so hard when I come, okay? he once told an audience member. You only spit as good as you suck, shithead.
Some years later, Ving defended his toxic on-stage banter: Morons are made to be offended. Sometimes people are much more alert after they’ve been severely insulted. It wasn’t about fag-bashing or hurting anybody, for fuck’s sake. We just wanted to be entertaining and to play this music and maybe sell some fuckin’ records.
MOUTH DON’T STOP
I first encountered Lee Ving in March of ‘78, when he barged into my office at the Masque unannounced, demanding that I book sight unseen the world debut of this brand-new punk band he said he’d put together. We’re thinking of calling it Destroyer. What do you think? I said, “Sounds more heavy metal than punk to me…Isn’t that the name of a big Kiss album?”
Lee pulled out a fifth of exquisite Glenlivet and proceeded to get me so completely plastered, straight from the bottle, that I had to be scraped off the wall by the end of the night…after I made a verbal agreement, according to him (I had absolutely no recall), to promote this band through a series of low-ticket-price shows!
A few days later, he bounced back. The fellahs agree with you about the name. We changed it to Fear. “Fear?” I said. “Better, but still pretty creepy-sounding, like beyond punk, or something.”
Hallelujah, slowboy finally gets the picture, Lee replied, beaming triumphantly.
My sleaze-pit of a basement speakeasy punk club-cum-homeless shelter off Hollywood Boulevard, which had opened early summer ‘77, had just recently been busted for illegal city-defined “public assembly,” a gathering of more than 49 people without a fire permit, even though the LAFD had allowed me to continue with a rehearsal-room rental business where many new bands practiced, provided the occupancy restrictions were enforced.
Consequently, many of these bands were asking me to promote various “outside” shows in small clubs, ethnic enclave social halls, underground galleries, ballrooms, and auditoriums in the Hollywood area. Bands like the Weirdos, Flesheaters, Screamers, X, Germs, Dils, the Dickies, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, Alleycats, Plugz, Deadbeats, Go Go’s, Controllers, Skulls, the Zeros, the Eyes, the Bags, F-Word, and others, many of whom had recently played a huge two-day benefit to try to save the Masque. The event had raised $4,500, and I’d publicly pledged to the punk community that I’d re-invest this money in promoting shows to raise more capital, with hopes of re-opening the Masque as a legit venue.
Good timing for Lee, who offered to drive me around looking for new spaces. The two of us enjoyed an afternoon rollin’ conspicuously around Hollywood in some damned pickup, sucking Glenlivet through straws in soda cartons, and blasting a Damned tape while cooking up ideas for a good, diverse four-band bill that would, of course, include Fear. I ended up putting a deposit on tiny Larchmont Hall adjacent to Hancock Park, on the southernmost edge of old Hollywood to secure March 24, 1978.
We settled on three Masque regulars, the Deadbeats, the Skulls, and F-Word. However, come that night, my poor three-dollar show died the death. There was hardly anyone there. Now it was all about the actual drawing power of individual acts something none of these bands had at the time rather than people flocking to the basement of the Masque regardless of who was playing there. It was a tough lesson for an inexperienced concert promoter. You needed a legit “headliner” to pull it off, even in punk rock. But Fear sounded great…noticeably tight and well rehearsed. I booked Fear again into the Whisky in May, opening up a show with Black Randy and the Metro Squad with the Deadbeats; it completely sold out.
The third early Fear show I promoted was a whole lot crazier. I’d rented the now-demolished Bulgarian-American Center for Education, or BACES, Hall on Vermont for a four-wall one-nighter: October 6, 1978. The lineup included the Mutants and the Dils. Many in the front pit were spitting at Lee, shirtless with buffed-out pecs, since the media was reporting that’s what English punks had been doing at shows by the already-defunct Sex Pistols. That night it was like an ironic spitting, since “gobbing” (the U.K. name for it) never actually caught on much over here. Lee obviously reveled in baiting the audience, Don Rickles insult-style. I just shrugged and took it all as some sort of twisted convivial onstage jocularity.
But Fear’s intensity left it impossible for the Dils or any other band to follow. Everyone there knew it. Even if they’d hated the band, its caricatured, macho oafishness, and the juvie puerile lyrics, they had to admit that the music was super-tight and hard rockin’. When he ran off stage at the end, Lee was literally dripping from head to toe, looking like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. I wanted to throw up on the spot, but instead joined most of the drained crowd who’d either left or gone outside for air and other punk rock parking lot rituals. Local punkers that night had been forced to react one way or another, and so another punk star was born. Fear’s first notoriety stripe had been made…
MY BEACH (THE PUMP HOUSE GANG OF HB REVISITED)
By the turn of the decade, the original Hollywood punk scene was slowly giving way to the harder, more violent suburban punk scene in Huntington Beach, originally polarized by generic surfer-skinhead thrash bands, most, or all of whom, according to Redd Kross’s Jeff MacDonald, were coked-up rich kid jocks who “idolized Sid Vicious and sang with bad English accents.” Black Flag was one of the original intermediate South Bay connects between Hollywood and this new Huntington Beach scene. Like Fear before them, Black Flag was seen as going out of their way to curry favor with this new, feisty, ugly, predominantly male crowd that just wasn’t having Fear or Black Flag at all at first.
Black Flag noticed us early on. Keith Morris watched our shows for a year. When Black Flag came out a year after us, I thought it was very complimentary but derivative. We had started to catch on when Black Flag first kicked it (summer of ‘79). They played some gigs with us, and they turned into one hell of a band, I gotta say, but we were already headlining by the time they even started.
The ever-growing skinhead gang violence problem around the early hardcore scene was of no concern to either Ving or to Black Flag, despite many letters of protestation published in Flipside (the Koran of early west coast hardcore) in 1979, claiming that both bands, like the Germs before them, had been encouraging exuberant young male and female cretin behavior. By ‘81, females only made up probably 10% or less of hardcore crowds.
All were welcome, as far as I was concerned. If they listened to our music and enjoyed it, it was fine; if everybody had a good time and let off some sportsmanlike steam, we had done our job.
HAVE A BEER WITH FEAR
Not all of Fear’s lyrics had shock value; some dealt with more lighthearted fare. Beer was a definite mainstay, something all four of us loved. It was rare that I ran into someone that wasn’t a beer drinker. And so for the same reason we named the band Fear, because it was an emotion everyone could relate to, I wrote a lot of songs about beer, because that was something else that everybody could relate to and enjoy.
Like many other great iconoclasts of early punk, Ving was a wild card, even among his peers and the culture’s progeny. With his xenophobic, angry political views, Lee is a bizarre political conservative, much like the equally boorish Johnny Ramone. Offstage, Johnny and Lee decried “homosexual liberalism,” while at the same time profiting immensely from the freedom-of-expression culture that lib-left nuttiness had originally provided. But
Lee has always refuted claims that Fear has a political agenda. When asked point-blank during an interview in 1999 if he was a Nazi, he replied, Absolutely not. Nazis suck.
Lee has never been afraid to be a square peg in his adopted subculture, from which a fundamentalist hard-line strain would eventually spring that typically frowned upon non-conformity Ð what eventually came to be known as hardcore, an extremist sub-genre of punk with an authoritarian streak and a penchant for harshness.
WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE
Born on April 10th, 1950, Lee James Capellaro was raised in the roughneck neighborhood of Kensington in Philadelphia where many buildings were derelict and outsiders were not welcome. Raised in an Italian household alongside his brother and sister, Lee stumbled upon a mandolin in a closet at an early age. He was a quick learner, and, with encouragement from his parents, soon moved on to guitar.
In the mid ’60s, Lee served a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. He’s rumored to have served in Vietnam, though this chapter of his life remains an off-limits-for-discussion mystery.
Back in Philadelphia, Lee began playing the up-and-coming Philly garage/bar band circuit, from the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Jersey Shore, performing during the late ’60s and early ’70s in bands like the Nickelbags and Sweet Saving Chain, which once opened for Cream.
After the demise of Sweet Saving Chain, which achieved only minimal regional success, Capellaro had had enough of Philadelphia. He moved north to New York, where he bartended at Slug’s Jazz CafŽ (legendary spot of Sun Ra residency) and led his own jazz-fusion band, Daybreak. He also married and started a family. In 1972, after the demise of both Daybreak and Slug’s, Lee relocated his family to L.A. with hopes of finally getting a break in the music industry.
NO MORE NOTHING
I was not a homeless dreg sleeping under a rock. I had responsibilities.
Lee settled into domestic stability in the San Fernando Valley municipality of Van Nuys with his wife Barbara, son Deacon, and various pets (at one point a dog, a rabbit, and two 10-foot Burmese pythons) while making contacts in the music industry. Eventually, an associate told him about the punk scene that was emerging in Hollywood, with a new club called the Masque at its epicenter. Though not impressed with what he saw after going there one night, Lee saw potential in punk. I liked the attitude that you could play, do what you wanted, and didn’t have to kiss ass to the music business establishment.
He was also an unabashed opportunist. Whereas the scene was loosely built up around a grassroots DIY-ethic of separatist self-empowerment, Lee had a grander vision: a group of musicians who could blast with the heaviness of Black Sabbath and the fury of Motšrhead, playing at the speed of souped-up downstroke punk rock and even faster.
I saw punk as another platform, maybe something the music business would turn its eye to and something that I felt I could improve upon.
RANKLING PEOPLE
An L.A. Times op-ed piece once described slam dancers at a Fear show “with looks in their eyes that could have scared the Predator’s meaner brother…beating each others’ brains out in front of the stage.”
Rankling people wasn’t strange to us. It was definitely a part of what we wanted to do. We weren’t looking to just rankle straight bank workers; we were looking at the punk audience itself as a prime target. We had enemies everywhere we went. Promoters like Brendan Mullen got shit for booking us. Some people thought we were sayin’ shit for shock value, some thought it was for humor value; others bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
Shawn Stern, co-founder of Youth Brigade and the seminal West Coast skatecore label BYO Records recalled: “God, I hated Fear. The band I had before Youth Brigade did a show with them at the Rock Corporation in the Valley [in '78]. Maicol Sinatra booked the gig. We’d heard Fear’s 7-inch, and we thought it was just so fucking stupid. Maicol told us the club said Fear had already booked the opening slot because they were new and had no draw of their own, and wanted to get on a bill with bands that did. So we get there, and Lee Ving goes up to Maicol and says Look, we’re going on second and if you don’t like it, I’m gonna kick your fucking ass. And little Maicol Sinatra’s so small, a tiny fellow who’s like quaking in his boots. The entire audience was Canterbury people (a notorious punk colony apartment building in Hollywood), and when Fear came on everybody went out to the parking lot for their entire set. Only one fat biker chick they’d brought stayed with them.”
One of the funniest memories of my life is witnessing three drunken marines in San Francisco backing down after they’d been cooing at Lee Ving, “I smell pussy,” or some such shit. Lee, whose hair was Krazy-Kolored shocking pink, whipped his shirt off Jap-Action style right in the street and stared ‘em down, snarling, It’s my natural color, honey. Donchu li’l darlin’s just love it? They ran.
When those uppity hardcore beach mooks popped out of the sea, we decided to take those fuckers on, too. We decided it was our job to throw these hordes of bozo jocks into states of mass homosexual panic. So one night Derfie goes and picks on the wrong mook … and the dude gets his fuckin’ front teeth knocked down his throat at the Stardust Ballroom by some speed-crazed jarhead who’s pissed off with the “eat-my-fuck” faggot-baiting shtick. Poor ole Derfie never bounced back, he never really recovered; he was somehow never the same after that.