Somewhere Between Rammstein and Twiggy

GEZA X: When Rene became involved, the artistic vision of the band got derailed. Rene brought in an acoustic piano and all this high-falutin monkey bullshit. He had them playing to loops run off of a tape recorder — an extremely interesting idea, granted, kind of an early industrial techno twist to that — but it really wasn’t the Screamers anymore. The Screamers’ magic, when they rocked out with those Tinkertoy synths, slowly turned into this low-budget multimedia non-extravaganza that wasn’t really that good, and the band started withering behind it. I sometimes looked at myself as the only buffer zone to keeping some of it the way it was . . . I’ll lament for the rest of my life that I never got to record the definitive Screamers album during their prime. I have some tapes, but they’re almost unlistenable.

K.K. BARRETT: We wanted to do something new and we stuck our necks out, otherwise we were just another band. We were enamored with the potential of rock fame and film stardom at the same time, but Trudie knew right away it wasn’t spontaneous, it was corrupt, it was gold-digging.

TOMATA DU PLENTY: I could tell you all the stupid things we didn’t do. Devo offered us a tour, and for some stupid reason we turned it down! Robert Fripp asked me to sing on his album, and I had to turn that down . . . oh please! I mean, these are just things . . . I was not in my right mind . . . but I was working damn hard, so it’s not that I have regrets. People say, “Well, you should have done a record.” I don’t have regrets about it. Maybe a record will come out. I don’t own the music. Tommy Gear wrote the music. It’s up to him.

Adapted fromWe Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Brendan Mullen and Marc Spitz. © 2001 Published by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

On Thursday, December 6, at 7 p.m., at Book Soup, Brendan Mullen reads from the book, along with Keith Morris and Cherie Currie. And on Sunday, December 9, at the El Rey Theater, several bands and members of bands from the late-’70s, including the Screamers’ K.K. Barrett and Paul Roessler, perform at a benefit for Flipside fanzine and My Friend’s Place, a drop-in resource center for homeless youth. See Scoring the Clubs for details.