Marc Spitz (1969–2017)

Presented in the same all-interview format as Please Kill Me (Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's history of the New York punk scene), We Got the Neutron Bomb is a far more interesting read. The former book is drearily shallow and, in places, flat-out stupid; Neutron Bomb actually imparts some of the joy of putting a band together, of playing for the sheer fun of it and not because you're a jaded poseur who just wants to have his picture taken. There's the excitement of L.A. punk's early formative period, when bands like the Weirdos and the Germs and the Screamers played their first gigs; the development of hardcore, which began with the Germs' tempo acceleration and was fine-tuned by Black Flag and the Middle Class; and the violence that ultimately destroyed the original scene just as X were almost (but not quite) achieving commercial success.

The format prevents the book from going into as much depth as it could have, but Spitz and Mullen do a pretty decent job of documenting a scene that was aesthetically diverse enough to spawn both the Go-Go's and Black Flag. Go-Go Jane Wiedlin bemoans the fact that the L.A. scene was "taken over by all these real angry, young white boys. Black Flag. We were like, 'What's this all about? It's really gross.' We were lumped in with all those stupid bands, but we never even knew those guys." Henry Rollins of Black Flag retorts: "The Go-Go's never really figured into my thinking. (...) They were playing pop music and it was a KROQ thing and we were on Mars with what we were doing." (Reminding the reader once again that life really is like high school, even when you're playing in a band.)… (mehr)