Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs

by Brendan Mullen (Editor), Don Bolles, Adam Parfrey

" Lexicon Devil is, pure and simple, the finest volume on punk to have seen the light of print. (Yes, that includes Please Kill Me .) Great book!"—Richard Meltzer Production has started on the documentary feature based on the book.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, Punk, Biography Memoir, History, Counter Culture

312 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Brendan Mullen was a Scottish nightclub owner, music promoter and writer, best known for founding the Los Angeles punk rock club The Masque. Through Mullen's support at various nightclubs in California, the scene gave birth to such bands as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Go-Go's, X, The Weirdos and the Germs.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a story about Darby Crash and the Germs that didn't make it in the book:

A band from Phoenix, Arizona moved into town and lived in the Masque. They were Brendan Mullen's staff there for a brief period of time. The band was called the Red Army, and just like the Police with blond hair they all had red hair.

They tried to make a name for themselves by threatening all over town to kick Darby's ass. They bragged about it in writing (grafitti at the Masque) and would brag about it verbally to anyone that cared enough to listen.

The Germs had a big show at the Kings Palace (soon to be Rajis) and the Red Army showed up and got in front of the stage. The biggest guy (bass player) punched Darby while he was singing and I think Pat Smear then hit the big guy in the face with his guitar. When the big oaf tried to hit back the Germs' cult of fans closed in on the Red Army and chased them out of the place.

The next and last time I saw the Red Army they traded in their regulation Ramones-style leather jackets and jeans for suits and ties. Their Sid-spiky hair was combed back neatly. They were all standing around Hollywood Boulevard clutching Bibles and preaching gospel to anyone who cared to listen. They traded in hardcore for Heaven. And that's the truth.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

So now I've read this from cover to cover. I stand by what I originally said, "a scarily in depth portrait of a rock musician who wanted to be a god (or the next beloved cult leader), who was really a drug abusing, sexually confused-fearful man child/bratty, obnoxious, idiotic moocher/nice, sweet guy who had an astonishing intellect and a voracious interest in books and philosophy-depending on who you talked to. What I learned anew was the tragedy of the scene-screwed up sex and drugs, runaway kids living by prostitution and suffering from pedophiles, who found a sort of escape from all of that, and sometimes family as well, in punk rock. There was an overall naivety/blissed out ignorance on the darker realities of the world they were in that astonished me. Although it seemed to be a really fantastical form of hope in life and creativity.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful not only for its look at the LA punk scene, but for its chapters focusing on Darby Crash's youth at a bizarre sort of school that existed back in the 70's, a strange byproduct of the burgeoning New Age pop psychology scene of its time, a scene characterized by the styles of group therapy represented by Esalen Institute, or its evil cousin "Synanon". (The high school I attended carried a much weaker strain of the same virus.) Mullen, unlike the usual rock biographer (are you listening, Danny Sugarman?), doesn't try to lionize Crash or mythologize him, only to give you as accurate a picture of a damaged human being as he can.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't review every book I read -- not all of them make an impact on me. I am not sure this will leave a large and lasting impression on me, but it did the three things I ask from a book (especially non-fiction). It informed me about people, an era, and an ethos about which I knew next to nothing. It aroused my pathos for complex and probably difficult to like people. And it caused me to rethink my relationship to an often contradictory and sometimes unsavory counter-culture.

An oral history arranged and presented much like Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me, Lexicon Devil chronicles the twenty two years of Jan Paul Beahm's life and mark on society. Better known to the world as Darby Crash, Beahm embodied Punk Rock's nihilism, dedication to excess in all facets of life, and theatrical flair. But he also represented its less-often touted fragility and tendency to mirror the dysfunction in the society around it. Punk may have sought to rebel against everything established, but in its homophobia, preponderance of abused and disaffected youth and self-destructive behavior patterns, a lot of punk culture (especially in the nascent scenes in LA, London, and even DC at times) resembled the world around it.

What I wondered as I read about this obviously intelligent, gullible, naive, and angry child that came to represent a community in the eyes of a lot of outsiders (but certainly not by his peers), was how much it mattered that he grew up in the sixties and seventies, surrounded by a macho culture that derided homosexuality; how much it mattered that the experimental approaches to educating exceptionally intelligent teenagers were monopolized by Scientologists and EST practitioners; and how much it mattered that Jan Paul Beahm grew up in Southern California, amid surfers, grifters, and fading rock stars. In short, how important is context, and does it rob an exceptional person of his intrinsic worth and contribution to the world at large. I don't know. I still can't tell.

Books like this, people like Beahm, and movements like Punk remain moving targets for anyone who cares about the music, the ideas, and the people involved. Stick a pin in any thought process and you lose a greater sense of the whole, but try to wrap your arms around the package deal, and you might miss the sad children who made Punk a hell of a lot more honest and resonant than the hippies.

[big · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is my favorite all time book ever i think

[Jack Knorps · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review opens up with an account of how quickly I finished this book after obtaining it, which was about 1.25 days. Some of the best books are not exactly "page-turners," and "page-turners" are not necessarily always the best books (sometimes they are guilty pleasures). Oral histories, however, tend to go quickly. Yet nothing (i.e. PLEASE KILL ME or MEET ME IN THE BATHROOM) went as quickly as this. Though there are "guilty pleasure" elements--Darby Crash's dissolute lifestyle--this is at bottom the sort of humanistic portrayal that nearly anyone would be honored to have written about them, even if some of the details are sordid, even if sometimes they do not come off as an angel. I didn't know very much about Darby Crash (a.k.a. Bobby Pyn, a.k.a. Jan Paul Beahm) going into this. I had listened to the Germs, and found them atonal and sloppy, and I didn't understand the appeal. I still don't, to an extent, but I also know they could have played well if they had wanted to (Pavement did a similar thing, with much more accessible results). Darby Crash was known as a legend, one of those unfortunate casualties of the excesses of the music industry, not unlike perhaps the recent example of L'il Peep, who died at a similar age, also by overdose. Yet here we learn about his Scientologist upbringing in L.A., his precocity (for someone so young, and who sang with such an indecipherable sneer, his lyrics betray a deeper intelligence), and the dozens of people around him that enabled him, tried to steer him right, and ultimately mourned his untimely demise. There is also the ironic timing of his death: the same day that John Lennon was murdered. And this is also a queer narrative: the one about being ashamed of one's own sexuality, and how that can lead to self-destruction. This book may be a relic of the past--it does not exactly double as a how-to guide, like Our Band Could Be Your Life--but some lessons in life ring true down throughout the ages. We can only learn from other people and what they say about the events of their lives that made them who they are. This is one of the gifts of the oral history genre, and there are few higher examples than this volume.

http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008...

[Cwn_annwn_13 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interview style book with personal recollections on The Germs, in particular Darby Crash and the socal punk and cultural scene circa late 70's early 80's.

I found this to be a fun entertaining read. Much of this book is a great look into not just the socal punk scene during that time period but a glimpse into the overall weirdness that was southern California during those days. The experimental Scientology based school that Pat Smear and Darby Crash attended together where part of the curriculim was doing acid with the teachers that was fully funded and sanctioned by the local public school system is really far out and you almost have to believe that it was some sort of covert government mind control experiment/program going on at that place. When talking about it Pat Smear seems genuinly baffled that a school like this was even allowed to exist. There are a lot of other examples of what an off the wall place southern California was then in this book too. The world sure has changed. You also get a lot of dirt on other people and bands that came out of this scene. It would probably shock a lot of people that a girly pop band like the Go Go's came out of this insanity.

One last thing I would like to add. I consider many of the groups that came out of the socal punk/hardcore scene during the late 70's up until maybe the mid 80's to be the best music that can be labeled as punk that was ever made but The Germs are absolutely, positively, one of, if not the, worst completely unlistenable bands ever. They were an interesting story but I'm sorry they made horrible music.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lexicon Devil provides a powerful, unflinching look at the life and times of Darby Crash of The Germs, using first person accounts to tell the story. And a tragic, but exciting story it is.

The reader gets a first-hand look at Punk’s west coast birth, its ascendancy, and decline. All this is embodied in the story of Darby Crash, a man (or kid, really, dying young at 22, not even close to the 27 Club) of great vision, recklessness, and inner torment. Darby Crash is neither sainted nor vilified, a tough balance to strike. At the end, one is struck with a sense of the lost potentials, the regrets of friends and acquaintances that wish they had done more to save him.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

is review is from: Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs (Paperback)
Adam Parfrey's Feral House gave us another fascinating biography with the same unique format: Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Rudolph Grey, 1992). These books present a chronologically arrayed series of short of paragraph-length quotes from those that knew or experienced the subject. No attempt is made to rectify contradictions. (Looking back, how often can the truth of biographical minutiae really be determined?) The result makes for easy reading and provides a kaleidoscopic view of the subject. In both these cases, that is a complex and controversial artist. Author/editor/publisher Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture, Extreme Islam) stakes a claim in the rich quarry of the violent and dark subcultures and countercultures. Through this lens, Germs vocalist and songwriter Darby Crash appears as both a taunting jester of the burgeoning West Coast punk scene as well as mischievous if not malevolent pied piper leading impressionable thrill seekers into would-be decadence of the type predicted by Oswald Spengler in The Decline Of The West. Through the remembrance quips, Crash also reveals a side as an extremely image-conscious and thus insecure youth struggling more to obscure his homosexuality rather than create a cohesive and worthy artistic legacy. Taken this way, it seems that songs that still reverberate in the global punk community, are only accidental revelations of writing genius whose suicide cut short a career that could have been even more defining on this music genre. Full of black and white pictures, this volume includes lyrics of songs by The Germs and discography as well as a time line of gigs and key events.

[Nicolas Gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in high school, about the same time as I was discovering G.I. for myself. The Germs were dissonant, sloppy, and raunchy in an inimitable way. Other early L.A. punk bands may have had more to brag about in terms of songwriting, looks, and polish but the Germs were special to me because they triumphed in their failures. They were clumsy and brash but they captured the tension of a sun casting down on an angry slab of concrete on Sunset Blvd.

Reading this book then, and again more recently, I found humanity in one of rock n' roll's more eccentric devotees. Darby Crash was die-hard rock fan, a young kid who found power in the sways and snarls of glam and wanted that swagger for himself- with a vengeance. The book captures a lot of L.A. "weirdness" I wouldn't really understand until I started making personal visits. Scientologists, psychedelics, and David Bowie left their mark on Darby; perhaps they were influences that carried him through sexual suppression and a broken family- and to a questionable degree of benefit. It's dubious that the Germs would have ever really had a "rock career". They were too extreme, too bluntly honest in their mayhem to really carry them through the pretenses of stardom. That's why they live on in legend, though. Darby might've lived on to a fuller potential, and maybe acceptance in a broader sense than the often cliquey and judgmental "scene"-paradigm. The truth is that there was a lot of lost youth and rage behind the sound and this book is at least a solid attempt at humanizing the participants of a damaged movement.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting story of not only Darby Crash's biography but a history of the punk rock scene as well. It took me a bit to get into the oral history format but then it was like hanging out with buddies, rehashing old times and talking trash about someone.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the early L.A. punk scene was a bit before my time, in high school I was into bands who were directly influenced by the Germs, so this was a fascinating read for me. I became aware of this book after I happened across the movie "What We Do Is Secret" one night and ended up watching the whole thing. As I often do, after the movie I searched for more information about Darby Crash and the Germs online, and came across this book title.

The authors interviewed lots of people from the L.A. scene in the 70's and early 80's, then arranged quotes in chronological and topical chapters, a narrative structure that worked surprisingly well (though I did have to flip back to the "Cast of Characters" a bazillion times to refresh my brain about who was who). Readers learn not only about the history of the Germs but about Crash's struggle as a closeted gay man. It's sad that the culture at the time was such that he felt the need to hide this part of himself from the world.

An interesting footnote to the Germs story is that they have done some touring in recent years with Shane West (who played Crash in the movie mentioned above) as their lead singer. Art imitating life, or something like that.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in the history of punk music or rock music in general.

[East Bay J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't quite agree with Richard Meltzer that this is, "the finest volume on punk to see the light of print," but it's pretty darned good. I guess it's almost impossible for an oral history to be bad, unless you were completely uninterested in the subject matter. The one thing is that the narrative is kind of all over the place at times. Weird interludes are inserted roughly into the Germs story, giving insight into the people and places of the time but oddly distracting all the same. Different interviewees have different takes on various events but that's more or less the way it goes.

Lexicon Devil, being the story of Darby Crash and his Germs, is incredibly sad. A bright talented young man, Darby Crash was also incredibly insecure and in a great deal of turmoil over his homosexuality. The insecurity may explain his fascination with fascism. Such a complex, interesting person who decided the time was now and it was time to go.

Anyone interested in the early L.A. scene, the beginning of punk or the Germs in particular will enjoy this book. There is a lot to be taken from it.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Germs where one of the irst and until today one of the best American punkrock bands. They didn't last too long but the few songs they've put out and their intense live shows earned them a place in the punkrock Hall of Fame. Mainly this book is focused on the life of lead singer Darby Crash, who died very young by an overdose. A very intelligent young man, fascinated by leadership cult figures such as Manson, Hitler and so on, philosophy and struggled with his own homosexuality.

The book consists of interview snips, commentating the story of Darby and the Germs in chronological order. Definitively a must-read for anyone who's into punkrock or just the biography of individualist people.

[Mickey Schulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an "oral" history of Darby Crash (Jan Paul Beahm) and the Germs. It's really good, and kind of entertaining reading the conflicting versions of what happened when, as it's primarily created from a series of interviews the authors of the book did, and then the sections of the interviews are arranged chronologically so that they follow the timeline of Darby's life.

By the time you reach the chapter of his suicide, you're surprised to realize that he crammed so much living and so much self-destruction into just 22 years of life.

I really enjoyed the book, but I think you're better off reading it like I did, in short bursts. I can see how it would be overwhelming trying to just sit and read it in long marathon sessions.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've read this book, I WANT TO MEET YOU. Shows the scummy side of LA punk with a bunch of accounts by people who were in or closely involved with THE GERMS, LA's premier punk band. Some of the details about DARBY CRASH's life pissed me off a bit. Mainly the parts about the touchy-feely school he and his friends attended. Only in LA, I guess. Not a bad read, but so-so written, which took away from the nostalgia I wanted to feel about the subject matter.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poignant, sad, heartbreaking disturbing human story and a great book about the birth of LA punk/hardcore and the diverse and contradictory community of social outcasts who composed the scene before 'punk' was even a word or a style. It does not glamorize the self-destructiveness or make you wish you had been there. A heartfelt ode to darby crash and the germs that is truthful and doesn't mythologize them.

[Sarah Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly fascinating and engrossing. I find it rather amusing that I went to no less than FIVE bookstores in the Oakland/Berkeley area and could not find myself a print copy of this. The Kindle edition is certainly lacking; it just doesn't do the photographs justice, and you can tell that it was hastily put together. I'm assuming there is less attention put to detail in smaller-press works like this.

[rutebega · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oral history of Darby Crash's short life. He was the lead singer of The Germs, an influential '80s punk band. He was also queer. Hard to get a sense of his apparently intense charisma on the paper -- it seems to be a "you had to be there" kind of thing. I'd be interested in a more conventional bio; oral histories leave a lot to be desired, even though they're The Done Thing in punk nonfiction. Interesting, though.

[Luke Alonso · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of the Germs and of Darby Crash. I lived in LA for 30 years, but not until after Darby was dead and punk had long since withered. This book brought the late 70s punk scene to vivid life for me. The editing of the oral history was excellently managed and showed both Darby's excess and also his growing depression. If you like the Germs, or even if you just want a full-color window into the punk underbelly of LA in the late 70s, I recommend Lexicon Devil very highly.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books ever!!!! I could read it over and over. There's just so much info in this book about the whole west coast punk scene and it's beginning. Ofcoarse it's based mainly on Darby and the Germs, but there is also a lot of people in this book such as Jello Biafra, Joan Jett, The Go-Go's, Hellin Killer, The Weirdos, etc.

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep picking up these punk themed books on whims and then they suck me in and I can't put them down. Mr. Crash had a genuinely unique and bizarre childhood. The picture of him painted via this oral history is of someone flawed, complex, and reaching. It's a fascinating read.

I think the people in this book are just my people.

[Arf Ortiyef · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great! This is how rock bios should be: unwritten. Just firsthand accounts and intelligent comments. It's great how there are many areas where nobody even agrees about things. Wonderful insights into an amazing time and one of the greatest bands of all time. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Germs or punk rock in general.

[Hillary Marek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the Germs, had no idea that they were so haunted. I kinda want to hug Darby and assure him everything would be ok and I want to punch him in the mouth and scream at him for his choices. No matter how you feel about the entertainer, he was still a young man with so much passion who left this world way to soon.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publisher's Note

The decision was made not to impede the flow of this oral history with authorial interruptions. Whenever possible, the over 100 speakers within introduce other players and contextualize events.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although Darby Crash is a fascinating personality to read about, this book is actually a good addendum to We Got the Neutron Bomb. It contains a lot of left over interviews and history from the first book.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gives good insight into what the hell happened to this guy. Germs are one of the most important punk bands to ever play. Darby Crash was an intense performer who unfortunately was looking toward fascism to forget that he was gay.

[Alohatiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

We saw the Germs movie the other week and decided to re-read this book. An interesting look at the early days of LA Punk and the making of cult icon.
Side effect of the book, have had Germ songs in my head for weeks.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the early Los Angeles punk scene, focusing on Darby Crash of the Germs. Told in an oral history format by those who were there. It made me dig out my old record collection and find my Germs albums!

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice collective from different people at that place and time, lots of insight into Darby's personality as told by those who knew him best. Luckily this was put together by Brendan Mullens, it didn't have the hero-worship feel of being written by fans.