History Lesson – Part III: This Bland Could Be Your Life
History Lesson – Part III: This Bland Could Be Your Life
Raymond Pettibon photographed by Hedi Slimane in 2011
Our band could be your life
Real names be proof
Me and Mike Watt played for years
Punk rock changed our lives
We learned punk rock in Hollywood
Drove up from Pedro
We were fucking corn dogs
We’d go drink and pogo
Minutemen, “History Lesson – Part II”
The missionary, proselytizing aspect of much of the music designated as “punk rock” is perfectly distilled in that first verse of “History Lesson – Part II.” So potent and poignant is the line “Our band could be your life”—at once a plea, a promise, and a veiled threat—that music writer Michael Azerrad cribbed it for the name of his 2001 essay collection subtitled “Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991,” whose profiled subjects, among others, include the Minutemen. Raymond Pettibon’s shot on video two-day wonder, the slapdash, sporadically hilarious counterculture comedy Sir Drone (1989), doesn’t reflect the fiery commitment of that opening verse. It reflects the verse that comes after.
Like D. Boon and Mike Watt of Minutemen, Pettibon—born Raymond Ginn—spent his formative years in the hardcore punk scene that blossomed like ditch weed in the unfashionable precincts of Los Angeles’s South Bay during the dying gasps of the Carter administration. Pettibon’s brother Greg Ginn was the founder of the massively influential independent record label SST Records—the initialism stands for Solid State Transmitters, a carry-over from a mail-order business selling modified World War II radio equipment that the elder Ginn started at age 12—and the lone continuous member, as lead guitarist, of SST mainstay Black Flag. Pettibon played bass in an early iteration of the band (then called Panic) but his enduring contribution to the group’s legacy comes via his design of the band’s “four bars” logo, and their album sleeve art: vignettes of mental breakdown, domestic horror, and blighted sexuality drawn with a scratchy line in India ink on paper, which (dis)graces the covers of almost all of their studio recordings. As with Roger Dean and Yes/Uriah Heep, or Pushead and Septic Death/Metallica/Integrity, Pettibon is one of a handful of visual artists whose work is inextricable from that of the musicians whose physical releases it accompanies. Try thinking about Black Flag’s 1981 Police Story without immediately seeing the cover of the EP in your mind’s eye. How’s that going?
As “History Lesson – Part II” states, “punk rock,” which New York City and London make continually contested claims to have been the birthplace of, had its initial Southern California landfall in Hollywood. Aspects of that Hollywood scene—the scene of Slash magazine and Kickboy Face, of venues like the Whisky a Go Go and Scottish expat Brendan Mullen’s short-lived The Masque, and of bands like the Dils, Bags/Alice Bag Band, the Weirdos, the Avengers, and the Screamers—are captured in Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. At the time that Spheeris was shooting, however, between December of 1979 and May of ’80, Hollywood had lost its exclusive franchise on punk, and one of the fascinating and fortuitous aspects of Decline is that it also catches the breaching of a new scrofulous, suspicious kind of punk starting to appear in blue-collar South Bay neighborhoods like Hermosa Beach, Hawthorne, and San Pedro, the last named the Minutemen’s home base.
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
The Hollywood scene presented in Spheeris’s film is, to a progressive-minded contemporary viewer, the more sympathetic and inclusive: there are places in it for women and gays (often closeted, granted) and even a Frenchman, and beneath the sartorial rattiness and provocative postures the basic tenets of middle-class art school kid propriety remain. Still huffing the last Anglophilic, glammy fumes lingering in the aftermath of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, Hollywood punk was flamboyant, dandyish, even a bit swishy. South Bay hardcore was, by comparison, a hotbed of unexamined lumpenproletariat prejudices, omnidirectional broken-brain hostility, and Cro-Magnon ex-jock machismo—the scenes in Decline of Black Flag members boasting about sexual conquests in their Redondo flop/practice space encapsulate the frattier aspects of the milieu, in which dressing like you were fresh off the loading dock was de rigueur. (Many of these kids, incidentally, were.) It should be easy to separate “good” punks from the bad here: complicating matters is the fact that when Exene Cervanka of X howls “We’re desperate!” it’s not quite believable—an issue that Viggo Mortensen’s ex-wife addresses, eloquently, in Spheeris’s film—but when one sees these South Bay trash expressing similar no-hoper sentiments, it’s bracingly credible. Hollywood punk might’ve given lip service to destruction; South Bay hardcore posed a credible threat of it.
Back to Sir Drone, subtitled A New Film About the New Beatles: it’s one of the four no-budget feature-length videos that Pettibon made with friends on a consumer grade half-inch VHS camcorder to be released in 1989 and ’90, just a few years after he’d made the leap from underground zine peddler to white box artist with early exhibitions at the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and the Semaphore Gallery in the East Village.
Sir Drone is technically a period piece, though there’s no reason that you would know that if you didn’t know that The Masque, much discussed in the film, closed in January, 1978, after a scant six months in operation. (But then, what person who’d never heard of The Masque would be watching Sir Drone in the first place?) At the center of the film is a lunkhead double act comprised of the characters Duane and Jinx, introduced onscreen together pogo-ing in their underwear—just as D. Boon recalls doing with Mike Watt in “History Lesson – Part II”—on the two soiled mattresses that constitute almost all the decoration in their desolate bachelor crash pad, where the majority of Pettibon’s film takes place. Like so many of the finest comic duos—Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson of Bottom—the two are sharply contrasted “types”: Duane, played by Minutemen and Firehose bassist/songwriter Watt, is husky, with close-cropped hair, and dresses like an accountant who hasn’t had a client in months, if not years; Jinx, played by artist and musician Mike Kelley, is weedy and bandy armed, wears a tattered T-shirt and jeans, and his hair is a dark, greasy cowl that hangs past his shoulders.
Sir Drone (1989)
Jinx’s mane is a topic of much debate in Sir Drone. He and Duane, new transplants to Hollywood fresh up from Pedro, are starting a punk rock band. Neither of them can play a lick, which isn’t regarded as an unsurpassable problem, but Jinx still looks like a hippie, and—though neither Duane nor Jinx could likely articulate why—punks are duty-bound to hate hippies, and so Duane is constantly hectoring Jinx to lose his locks. As it happens, Duane used to be a longhair himself; so did his cousin, Vince, played by Ricky Lee, a prospective frontman for their as-yet unnamed band, who now alternately goes by the freshly minted sobriquets of “Gun” and “Skooter”—Hollywood in ’77, we see, is a time and place of personal reinvention, where ex-surfer corn dogs who still have copies of Frampton Comes Alive! lying around, like our protagonists, commence to copping fashion tips from British music magazines in a desperate bid to catch the New Wave.
Skooter will become a part of the twosome’s shabby impromptu household, joined in time by a torpid, largely silent girl (Angela Taffe) who Jinx brings home, called Goo—also, not coincidentally, the title of a 1990 album by former SST artists Sonic Youth featuring cover art by Pettibon. Jinx introduces Goo as a girlfriend then, shortly after, confesses to his being a virgin, which leads to a memorable scene where Duane, almost certainly celibate himself, clumsily tries to walk Jinx through the mechanics of “doing it.” (“Well, what does it feel like?” “It feels like… sandpaper… like wet sandpaper.”)
Such moments of harmonious cooperation are few and far between. In the main, Sir Drone is a film of whingeing and petulant bickering, in which the storied scene is a kind of circular firing squad in which poseurs call other poseurs “poseur” and jeer at one another for indulging in un-punk transgressions like smoking grass, names are dropped by the megaton (“Do you know I’ve been playing with Eric Bloom’s guitar pick?” says Jinx, evidently a Blue Öyster Cult acolyte), and nothing much seems to get done aside from tuneless bashing of instruments, day drinking, and shit talking. Nonetheless, Duane and Jinx enjoy a happy endings of sorts: their band, now dubbed Sir Drone, are offered an opening slot at a Larchmont Hall gig featuring X, the Germs, and the Dils via a dude called “Vomit” (Pettibon, billed as Lance Pettibon) who’s hanging around backstage at The Masque—the only location outside their apartment in the film, which hardly registers onscreen as an actual venue—and Jinx cuts his hair with money earned from selling his surfboard, opening a path before our hapless heroes to punk legitimacy.
Album artwork for Sonic Youth’s Goo (1990) by Raymond Pettibon
That the surfboard is clearly visible in the background during the scene where Jinx announces its sale speaks volumes of Pettibon’s attitude towards such traditional niceties as “continuity.” The mise en scène of Sir Drone, such as it is, suggests that his approach to filmmaking is akin to Jinx’s approach to playing guitar; minimal consultation of the instruction manual, just plug ’er in and let ’er rip. The lighting is either flat or murky, the camerawork clumsy, the uneven sound obviously captured via in-camera mic. The resulting material, rough-and-ready and ragged as Richard Hell in his Sunday best, was then assembled by Pettibon and Dave Markey, director of music clips for Black Flag, Meat Puppets, and Sonic Youth, among other things, who would give the following memorable description of Pettibon’s video works some years after their making:
[The] videos were to mainly facilitate his dialogue, as there was not much else to grasp on to. Just people in a room reading from handwritten pages of Ray’s dialogue, line after line. It’s quite apparent when you watch them. I have yet to meet anyone who has been able to sit through them, although they are now in museums the world over. Raymond is a brilliant writer in addition to his graphic illustration; I have always wondered what could be done with his scripts if the proper production was available.
Markey is entirely correct in his estimation of Pettibon as a prose stylist; the fragmented, chicken scratchy texts and dialogue fragments that accompany and frequently narrativize so many of his ink-on-paper works are by turns evocative, ominous, and hilarious, and his grammatically eccentric posts on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter—to which he recently returned after a lengthy deactivation—are among the glories of 21st-century English-ish language literature. I disagree, however, with his assertion that higher budgets—which one supposes is what’s meant by “proper production”—would necessarily improve Pettibon’s video works any more than they would, say, the films of Giuseppe Andrews, whose anti-style style Pettibon’s anti-film films somewhat resembles. So many hardcore bands would go on to lose their wallop in the hands of professional producers who cleaned the sludge off their sounds and muffled their stomp; Pettibon’s orphan films never had a Daddy Warbucks to clean them up, and they’re just fine without one, thank you very much. What Sir Drone lacks in budget—I’d estimate the price of the picture as equivalent to that of a couple of VHS tapes and a case of Budweiser—it gains in disreputable charm. To paraphrase the Minutemen credo, it’s a movie that works precisely because its director Shoots Econo.
The dunderheaded, crude comedy of Sir Drone has an underpinning of melancholy; if Watt is playing a caricatured version of his younger self as described in “History Lessons – Part II,” it follows that Kelley is a stand-in for his friend since childhood and bandmate, D. Boon, killed in a van accident in the Arizona desert in 1985, only 27 years old. To this, another layer of tragedy is added by knowledge of the 2012 suicide of Kelley. On rewatching the film the following year, Pettibon would tell interviewer Kim Gordon: “It just broke my heart.” Punk rock may very well have changed a lot of lives, and maybe it still can, but that doesn’t mean it can save them. As memorial to a lost time, however, the irreverent Sir Drone is anything but a solemn, soppy, sacramental nostalgia piece, and its presiding air could be summed up in the scrawled text from one of Pettibon’s pen and ink works, a thickly cross-hatched picture of a Bible: “Remember the good times. They make me want to vomit.”
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, is currently playing selected US cinemas, and opens in wide release February 9.
Sir Drone (1989)
