Villains or heroes, those remembered in the pages of the Weekly made a difference. Some excerpts from 20 years of obituaries:
John Lennon, 1940–1980
(December 12, 1980)
In addition to being a great artist, he was a great man. He went the distance from a teenager who beat up on his girlfriends to a 40-year-old man who had the courage to register every vulnerability. For integrity, the pure heart-fire of integrity, the clarity that is the ultimate purpose and gift of integrity, the only public male who can stand with John Lennon is Malcolm X. (Malcolm X who, like John Lennon, was only shot after he had conquered the violence in himself, making speeches about ballots instead of bullets.) . . .
There is what used to be called a dialectic afoot in the country again. And the eulogies of Lennon — even from heads of state, I can’t get over it — the eulogies of Lennon have in a single night legitimized once again a mix of memories, emotions and ideals that have lately been disdainfully dumped as "the ’60s." There is a quiet fierceness to the mourning, and it is a celebration of discarded, discredited values. Values much needed, especially now. Right now. For our hearts have been wrenched, and the feeling is not all bad, not at all. We are coming together in a common memory — even people too young to remember are getting the memory through this, but really feeling it. We’re feeling like family again.
And it’s too late to worry about the price.
—Michael Ventura
Darby Crash, 1958–1980
(December 12, 1980)
The self-inflicted death of Darby Crash this past Sunday has sent major shock waves through the remnants of L.A.’s original punk community. In its effect, it is comparable to the shock people are feeling about John Lennon’s assassination. Though the comparison might seem preposterous to some, Darby was a definite figurehead, a symbol to a lot of kids in much the same way James Dean was a symbol to a generation of frustrated teenagers, a person who was struggling to find his way out of the void even as he fell deeper into it. Those who grieve for Lennon mourn the passing of a poet, the voice of a generation. Those who grieve for Darby mourn an anti-poet for an anti-scene, and the passing of a major writing talent that had only started to show its full potential.
Most of Darby’s friends don’t want to talk about him right now — it’s as if there’s an unspoken conspiracy of silence. Mainly, they don’t want him exploited or manipulated by a media they felt never understood him or his band, the Germs, in the first place. Some people are paranoid because his death did involve hard drugs, and they fear police interrogation. Whatever the reasons for silence — respect of privacy, paranoia, grief — the fact remains that 22-year-old Jan Paul Beahm alias Bobby Pyn alias Darby Crash has died, and that his death is symbolic of the passing of the initial L.A. punk rock scene.
—Craig Lee
Abbie Hoffman, 1936–1989
(April 21, 1989)
First, and most simply, Abbie was the one who was known. More than anyone else, he made the anti-war movement the TV show that everyone watched. If this sounds shallow, think of what might well have happened if the anti-war movement had not become a TV show. So long as politics is just politics, most people can avoid it. Abbie was the fusing figure who linked the New Left’s ideological principles with the counterculture’s pleasure principle — endowing one with imaginative expansiveness, and the other with unexpected purpose. But beyond that, Abbie the media-age native son, in love with the incongruities, shock effects and shared languages of democratic culture, also found for left politics a serendipitous paternity in pop culture in general, which is to say, in the Amercian mainstream.
—Tom Carson
Craig Lee, 1954–1991
(October 18, 1991)
Lee, a Weekly writer and music editor, and co-author of Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave, died of an AIDS-related illness.
He was a Hollywood kid whose office wall bore a movie still of his B-movie actress mother aiming a ray gun. Born in Ventura County, Craig was educated at Interlochen Academy in Michigan and later at CalArts. But his real education was in the world of punk bands and dark motives that once was the L.A. punk scene. The environment was one of an outrageous, pre-viral party of innocent decadence, of sex and drugs and rock & roll on a scale that makes today’s Strip rockers look like they’re out on a Sunday-school picnic showing their little tattoos and piercings to everyone in the park. In a milieu of dark clothes, dark humor, dark music and parking-lot parties — amid the sometimes poetic, more often crude and stupid shock of punk — Craig was a familiar sight, his expression one of bemused, furrowed puzzlement, like a punk cartoon of Charlie Brown.
—Brendan Mullen,
Stuart Timmons
and Geza X
Bette Davis, 1908–1989
(October 13, 1989)
Those huge, baggy, dark eyes, sullen lips and that moonlike face made Davis, along with Joan Crawford, the campiest of screen beauties (she’s been mimicked, quoted and lampooned endlessly over the years). And with her drawling, sardonic voice, she could easily tailor her screen persona to villainous roles, which she was far from reluctant to play. This Massachusetts Yankee, tart-tongued and imperious both on and off the screen, understood that evil women got the meatiest scripts, and she played them all with palpable appetite, from the brutal waitress Mildred in Of Human Bondage, to the manipulative matriarch in The Little Foxes, to the crazed Hollywood has-been in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She was the very embodiment of a woman with power and resources.
