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assumption, given Stiv Bators’s predilection for playing hangman’s noose), and the Damned matched them in depraved dynamism, their dueling sets heading for a draw with no clear victor until Dave Vanian outfoxed everybody. He announced that the Damned’s next set would be a tribute to boredom, and he performed not onstage with his bandmates but lounging at a table below, singing between bites of take-out pizza. It was a brilliant theatrical stroke, topping whatever tattered mischief the Dead Boys could do by adopting the pose of a slumming dandy who needn’t bother demonstrating his superiority to these nouveau pretenders—rather than exert himself, he’d simply sit back and enjoy his own show, with a nice snack. By unilaterally disarming, Vanian converted the contest into a punk parody of patrician put-on—so British, so Peter Cook, so disdainfully droll. Not that any of this inspired the Dead Boys to question their tactics and hang a Brechtian frame around their trash pickups, but neither did it alter the mise-en-scène in New York as much as it did elsewhere.

It was on the other coast that the darkness went monochromatic and transgressive with a vengeance. Rival bands and factions in the New York scene did little more than exchange the sorts of half sneers and scowls indistinguishable from the dirty looks thrown around at the average book party uptown, back when they still had book parties that didn’t look like Goodwill drives. But in Los Angeles in the punk seventies, the posturing ill will was enough to carve up a new Black Dahlia. “There’s something unsubtle in the LA psyche,” Valentine observes in New York Rocker. “Maybe it’s the perpetual sunshine, or maybe it’s living in a bunch of suburbs looking for a city. But the New York cool of Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell didn’t take. Safety pins, leather, chains and vomit—the whole UK thing—did.” Once again the Damned were the ambassadors of this dystopian swan dive. As Valentine writes:

In April 1977 with the Damned shows at the Starwood—a veteran rock club on Santa Monica Boulevard—life changed. Soon after, at a Punk Rock Invasion show at the Orpheum Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, the Dils played in front of a hammer and sickle flag, and the Germs’ Bobby Pyn—later the ill-fated Darby Crash—ended their set by winning the Iggy Pop lookalike contest, covering himself in peanut butter while being whipped with licorice … Darby was making a successful play to become LA’s comic version of Sid Vicious and Germs’ fans later identified each other by the self-inflicted cigarette burns on their arms.

Three months later a new club opened on Cherokee Avenue called the Masque (presumably an homage to Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”), where this converted basement rehearsal studio became a punk rec room—or perhaps wreck room is more apt. “Its house rules were ‘excess, excess, excess.’ Graffiti blared FAGS IS NOT COOL and KILL ALL HIPPIES. Dress code demanded swastikas.” By the time Blondie was playing the New York punk clubs again after months of touring, blight had set in. “The Dead Boys and the Damned had made an impact, and the audience at CBs and Max’s was mostly headbanging weekend punks, tumbling in from Long Island and Jersey. Excess and stupidity seemed on tap, and the whole scene started to take on a depressingly incestuous character.” The trash-compactor smart-dumb of the Ramones was one thing—their lyrics, set to an engine roar, drew upon a drive-in double-feature schlock force that once doodled inside the skulls of so many gifted, stunted young male American misfits—but this was the real item, with nowhere to go but further down.

So, when Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious took turns dying dismal deaths, she by a knife driven below her navel presumably by a zonked-out Sid in their first-floor room at the Hotel Chelsea, he by a heroin overdose following his release from Rikers Island, his ashes later scattered over her grave, it was only the Weegee garishness of the crime scenes that impressed. Their suicide-by-any-other-name obituary notices were already typed into their