By the autumn of 1977, new bands were popping up all the time. Seemingly every week, someone who had been in the audience the week before was now onstage in their own band. The Masque reopened in mid-October with a gig featuring a band called the Controllers. The Controllers weren’t really a new band, in fact they had been one of the first bands to rehearse and play at the Masque from its inception, but they had never had a proper coming-out show, so I think of their October 15th show as their debut. Their music was tight, fast, and melodic, and some of their songs were almost poppy which was nicely balanced by the imposing figures of Johnny Stingray and Kidd Spike, who sang up front and played with a ferocity curiously incongruous with their lighthearted lyrics. The band would evolve and get even better over the next several months, with the addition of an old friend of mine named Karla Maddog on drums.
When punk came along, it was just the perfect vehicle to express who I was as an individual. It was something completely new and wide open. Just a couple of years later, that would change, and people would have to fit into preconceived notions of what punk rock was or wasn’t, but the early scene had no such limitations, because we were the ones creating and defining it. If you had been at the Masque in 1977, you would have seen very eclectic shows, ranging from the Screamers to Arthur J. and the Goldcups, from Backstage Pass to the Controllers. There was no clearly defined punk sound, no dress code; all you had to do was show up and make your presence known. The movement was one of individuals and individual expression, each of us bringing our heritage and formative experiences with us in an organic and, in my case, unplanned way.
In late October, Slash magazine held a benefit concert at Larchmont Hall. A band called X opened that show. I had met John Doe and Billy Zoom before, and I liked them both. I had only one memory of Exene, and it was a bad one. Exene had an obnoxious little friend known as Farrah Fawcett Minor, a nickname she shared with Cheryl Ladd, who had been given the moniker after being selected as Farrah Fawcett Majors’s replacement on the hit TV series Charlie’s Angels. Exene’s friend bore no resemblance to Cheryl Ladd; she was a short, dishwater blonde who dressed with no originality and showed up at par- ties to whisper about others. F. F. Minor was one those women who
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