- - - I I k k I I is I i FIiHIR r" K I IIii Bruce Conner was born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933, and the stage, jumping off the stage, landing on the tables, grab- grew up in Wichita; working from San Francisco from 1957 on, bing drinks off the tables and tossing them on the floor." he soon had many simultaneous careers in motion: painter, "The first night [that] I'm there photographing the Avengers," sculptor, assemblage artist (with an emphasis on nylon stock- Conner says, speaking of San Francisco's most visionary punk ings), photo-collagist, experimental filmmaker.* In 1967 Conner band, and its most powerful, "I'm up there in the front with joined Ben Van Meter's North American Ibis Alchemical Light my knee pads, and the stage was shin high, so I was always Company to put on light shows for concerts at the Avalon Ball- damaged: I had to protect my camera! But Jimmy [Wilsey, the room: a regular home to the Doors, Country Joe and the Fish, Avengers' bassist] "would jam his guitar into my lens. He was Moby Grape, Van Morrison, and scores of other groups. More really coming close. I would move back-I would move forward, than a decade later, he began photographing bands at the he would head towards me, if I didn't move, he would have Mabuhay Gardens, the town's key venue for punk. smashed the lens. I did about eight or nine shots like that." At the Avalon, Conner said in 2005, conjuring up the long- "I had always liked the idea of action photos," Conner says, gone ambiance of the place, "when somebody stepped on grinning. "Like-sports events. Basketball. They're floating in your foot, it didn't hurt. Now, what was happening with punk, the air, part of this suspended sphere, and they've got these by contrast, was taking the whole hippie scene and turning it beatific looks on their faces, they're in anguish. Or combat upside-down-like Freud's way of turning his society upside- photography. I always thought, gosh, combat photography. down. People would be using negative language instead of Maybe I could work on that here." positive language, but it didn't necessarily mean-of course, You can see those ambitions realized. There is the strange it could, though-that they really said 'Fuck off or I'll beat the image The Situations, November 1978, where the teenage shit out of you.' You could just take it like, 'Well, man, same to singer Theresa Soder is being grabbed from behind, or carried you!' That's your greeting." forward. She seems to be made of light, and unaware of what Situated on Broadway, San Francisco's nightclub street, the is happening, whatever it is. "There's a mystery," Conner said, Mabuhay was a moribund Filipino cabaret spot flanked by strip looking into Soder's eyes in his print of the picture. "Some- joints. Local punk bands began playing there in late 1976. times you couldn't figure out what was going on. Is this really Soon a sometime TV producer and promoter named Dirk a drama some place, that's not onstage at the Mabuhay?" Dirksen was the booker-he'd put anybody on stage. One The look in Soder's eyes is a fairytale look: this is a woman night in late 1977, Conner got a call from a friend: "Hey! Come who used to be a swan. She's escaped from her swan body, over to the Mabuhay and hear the world's greatest new band! but she is about to be returned to it. There is Ricky Williams: Devo!" That night, Conner ran into the would-be avant-garde Sleepers, January 20, 1978, with, in Conner's description, publisher Vale-then an employee of the Beat poet Lawrence what appears to be "the flame of the lamp wrapped around Ferlinghetti's nearby City Lights bookstore, later publisher of his wrist" ("I did a series using the flash, but also an exposure the RE/Search library-who announced he was starting a new that's longer than the flash. I knew that I would have these punk magazine: Search & Destroy. He asked Conner to contrib- reflections-and I tried to put the camera down, from the pic- ute. "1guess I could take pictures," Conner said. He imagined ture, just as soon as I took it"). There is Will Shatter: Negative a project: "I'll start at the beginning of the year, and I'll photo- Trend, January 29, 1978, rising out of smoke as if he is being graph for a year. Do a document of what happened during that born from it, fully formed, all concentration, all focus, the world period of time, what changes take place: the geography of the around him fallen away. "This is not a show-biz effect," Conner Mabuhay Gardens, inside and out, the different transforma- remembers. "Somebody threw a smoke bomb on the stage. tions of people. An environment." The smoke came up, and Will walked through it. You can actu- On January 3, 1978, Conner was in the Mabuhay with a Canon ally see his shadow on the cloud." Reflex, watching as Roz of Negative Trend, at their first perfor- The best nights, for Conner, were those when he could catch mance, "started the whole show by running from the back of a band at its first show: "There would always be a certain amount of tension. Just because it's the first show at that or nothing of what they actually did on its stage. That silence is venue, perhaps-but it might be their first show ever. They most overwhelming in Conner's series of pictures of the singer were doing something new, so they hadn't codified it, hadn't De Detroit of UXA. got it rehearsed, weren't bored with it. Things would go off A small blond woman, she appears first standing straight in directions that perhaps they would never do again. Or the up, the microphone held to her mouth, wrapped in gauze. It band would disband! And they wouldn't be there anymore. And was July 10, 1978, one week after her boyfriend, Michael a performance could be great. There was this one group that Kowalsky, who wrote lyrics for UXA, died of a drug overdose. performed called Ointment-I thought they were wonderful." De Detroit's face is shrouded, her body almost completely Conner caught them on March 19, 1978, with the singer off erased. "She slowly became unveiled behind the gauze," his feet, his hair standing up, his tie so tight around his high Conner remembers, "and reborn, symbolically for her, her way collar he seems to be hanging himself. "He kept doing these of dealing with grieving and the view that there is a rebirth of guillotine-type things: hopping up and down and grabbing his some sort." But what you see in the pictures is nothing so neck. Vale said a few minutes later that he thought Ointment acceptable. As a drama it is a tragedy, a punk Oedipus at was the best punk band he'd ever seen. And they only per- Colonus, the guilty son and husband tearing out his eyes, formed that once." and as a tragedy it is a B-movie horror story: as Oedipus, De There's the drama of the ordinary in Conner's pictures, with Detroit is also Boris Karloff in The Mummy. two fans head-to-head in a corner of the club, tables shoved In the second photograph De Detroit's head is thrown back, together or blasted apart, a stage all but empty except for and the drama is doubled: she is Sarah Bernhardt in Phedre, tangled wires, broken glass, shattered sheetrock, a woman Theda Bara in Camille-and it's the perhaps subconscious dancing alone as if everyone else in the place has already realization that the way De Detroit holds herself is received, gone home, or never showed up in the first place. Penelope with a set of gestures that brings the whole weight of the past Houston, the teenage singer for the Avengers, is on stage in to bear, that freezes you as you look. And then, in the third her blond crew-cut in Pain and Pleasure:The Avengers, January picture, with the white cloth hanging over her left arm and 28, 1978, but she's everywhere in Conner's pictures simply as pulling against her legs as if it has its own will, De Detroit is part of the crowd: sitting right in front of the stage, the rest of less symbolically reborn than symbolically naked. Even though the floor empty, Roz of Negative Trend swinging from the ceil- her eyes, visible for the first time, look as if they no less than ing with the microphone in his mouth and Penelope acting as if Oedipus's have been gouged out-and as if you can see all he's brushing his teeth; her eyes smiling in a clutch of people the way into her, and out the other side-the past is gone. as Dim Wanker of F-Word hoists his guitar; in the background She is on her own. of Man Gestures at John Denny: Weirdos, June 16, 1978, with In some of Conner's photographs, you look and you say: I a Civil Defense sign on her head. know the language, even if the language is dead. Everything it The stage at the Mabuhay was a place for self-discovery, says is plain.