Requirements: .PDF reader, 10.1 MB
Overview: The fast, furious and enigmatic career of late-’70s punk rocker Darby Crash, who died of a heroin overdose Dec. 7, 1980, at the age of 22, remains a half-buried L.A. legend. His demise was overshadowed by another rock death the next day — the shooting of John Lennon 3,000 miles east.
Since his heroin overdose in 1980, Darby Crash has become a symbol of punk irreverence, but his posthumous fame has tended to overshadow the seminal work of the punk band he fronted, the Germs. Mullen (who coauthored We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk), along with ex-Germs drummer Don Bolles and writer Adam Parfrey, quickly deconstructs the myth of Crash (born Jan Paul Beahm) to reveal an embattled and confused soul who struggled with drug use and his homosexuality.
Featuring raw quotations from Crash’s peers in the burgeoning 1970s West Coast punk scene, the book offers both positive and negative views of the singer and the scene that raised him. Crash’s fans were known for their cultish reverence, and Crash himself is shown to be a self-conscious misfit who used psychological ploys to enlist followers. It is unlikely that this book will reach a wide audience and thus imbue Crash’s legacy with more humanity and, in turn, the Germs with more respectability, but it does strengthen the growing literature on American punk music. Recommended for popular music collections, especially as a complement to We Got the Neutron Bomb, which covers similar ground and whose oral history format this book replicates.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
Download Instructions:
https://ouo.io/3bq2QA
https://ouo.io/KboMKc.
