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Brendan Mullen
By Jeff PenaltyPhoto By Adam Wallacavage
It’s easy for any punk rock fan to rattle off a list of musicians who have left an indelible mark on the genre, or for any hip-hop fan to explain the valuable contributions made by the oldest of the old-school artists. But neither genre would’ve progressed to the point we know it today if the artists involved didn’t have one simple thing: a stage to stand on.
For a long list of influential artists, Brendan Mullen provided that stage at very critical points in time, and in doing so, unwittingly secured himself a place in music history. He’s not one of the shining stars or the beloved martyrs of punk rock or hiphop that you’ve read about dozens of times. Rather, he’s an unassuming little Scotsman who made the careers of those stars and martyrs possible.
And all he really wanted was a place to bang on his vibraphone.
Known in punk circles as “the guy who ran the Masque,” an infamous nightclub in Hollywood that was the lynchpin of the early Los Angeles punk scene, Brendan booked nearly every L.A. punk band worth remembering. Numerous bands, including the Dickies, X, The Bags, The Skulls, the Go-Go’s, and Fear, can claim the honor of having played their very first show at the Masque.
Brendan found the Masque space in 1977 while looking for a place to practice on his varied collection of percussion instruments, which included bells, gongs, shakers, a vibraphone, two trap drum sets, and a timpani set. “After being thrown in jail following noise complaints from a neighbor who lived above me,” Brendan claims, “I was out looking for a storefront, a warehouse, a garage, or something, anything where me and my friends could be left alone to blast music really loud and have insane freeform jams.” His search landed him in the basement of an office building on Hollywood Boulevard. He rented out the space he wasn’t using “at such rock-bottom monthly prices, even punk bands could afford them. Within a month or so, the basement morphed into a performance space.”
Like punk rock itself, the Masque’s expiration date came around quickly. But before the doors closed for good in ‘79, the club became a focal point for the local scene, and a series of shows would occur there that would provide fodder for the punk rock myth machine for decades to come. Without Mullen and the Masque, it’s difficult to know whether or not the legend of L.A.’s punk scene would’ve ever grown past the city limits.
For two years after the closing of the Masque, Brendan tried his hand as an independent punk show promoter, which left him flat broke and homeless. He managed to beg, borrow, and literally steal his way into a DJing gig at L.A.’s Club Lingerie, during which time he discovered the effect that early hip-hop records had on the crowd. The amorphous nature of hip-hop’s history may allow dozens of people to lay claim to booking the first hip-hop show in L.A., but Brendan claims to have put on “the first full-spectrum, New Yorkstyle hip-hop event—including MCs, DJs, graffiti writers, and b-boy breakers, all of ‘em flown out specifically from the South Bronx—in Southern California.” The lineup included Grandmixer D.ST, Afrika Islam, Mr. Freeze, and Crazy Legs, among others. “The place was mobbed by curiosity seekers. I remember trying to explain that it was sorta like a Black version of punk rock, their own DIY thing. Nobody was dancing; instead, many at first stood with their arms folded watching Islam and D.ST DJing, looking at their watches for the first hour or so, saying, ‘So when’s something gonna happen?’ I had to go around literally explaining to all who’d listen that in New York hip-hop is a dance thing, but when they started scratching many people just lost their shit.” Among the audience that night was a skinny 17-year-old named Andre Williams. “To this day I’ll never know how he slipped by our door security,” Brendan says of the underage kid who would later become known to the world as Dr. Dre.
From ‘81 to ‘92, Brendan served as the in-house booker at Club Lingerie, and from ‘86 to ‘88 booked the Variety Arts Center, a five-story complex in downtown L.A. with “shit happening on every floor on weekends, including film fests, live theater, hip-hop/R&B, dance clubs, live rock ‘n’ roll, etc. One night, the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC jammed together during one of the weekend dance promotions on the ballroom floor—100 percent spontaneous. We didn’t know they were going to do it ahead of time, otherwise I’d have pulled together better production. Afrika Islam was DJing, hence there was only one mic from his mixer available, so they were just passing it around one at a time.” Between the two venues, Brendan certainly saw more than his share of magical moments in music, and he booked enough bands to compile the ultimate ‘80s college radio mixtape: Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, the Butthole Surfers, Lydia Lunch, Schoolly D, Sonic Youth, Redd Kross, Hole, Rudy Ray Moore, Jane’s Addiction, Ice-T, Blowfly, Guns N’ Roses, and a zillion more. The list even includes the L.A. premieres of The Replacements, R.E.M., Soundgarden, and the Flaming Lips. Brendan also had the pleasure of booking a Bad Brains opening act that had only played two previous gigs and had just changed their name—to Red Hot Chili Peppers.
With his place in L.A. music history firmly established, it fits, then, that Brendan has also put forth great efforts to document that history. Brendan has co-written several books: We Got the Neutron Bomb, an overview of early L.A. punk, Lexicon Devil, about L.A. punk icons the Germs, and Whore, a history of Jane’s Addiction.
You may not know his name, or his face, or the sound of his voice, but Brendan Mullen’s status as an icon was cemented long ago by one simple thing: his ability to be “in the wrong place at the right time. Or is it the other way around?”