Middle Class is Mike Atta, Jeff Atta, Matt Simon and Mike Patton (no, not that Mike Patton). Depending on who you ask, you might be told they are the first ever hardcore band, or you might get kicked in the gut with a pre-scuffed Urban Outfitters combat boot. After a very long spell, the band reunited last year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Frontier Records—the label that put out Middle Class’ 1979 EP, “Out of Vogue.” Now they’re returning to the Echoplex to play a badass L.A. RECORD show with Kid Congo, the Urinals and Grant Hart. This interview by Jonny Bell.

Do you get confused with the other Mike Patton?
Mike Patton (bass): Yeah, when I was living in Santa Monica one time I got a phone call and it was a girl and she asked, ‘Is this Mike Patton?’ I go, ‘Yeah,’ and she just screamed. ‘Aahhhhhh!!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you must be thinking of that other guy …’
Mike Atta (guitar): Nobody’s ever screamed for me. People have screamed at me …
Do you ever get super fans coming into your vintage shop Out Of Vogue?
MA: I wouldn’t say super fans—they don’t scream or anything—but I get kids in here who will be standing over here by the records or by the guitars and they’ll be nudging each other and whispering, ‘That’s him.’ And I’m just like the slob behind the counter, and finally I’ll ask ’em, ‘Can I help you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Are you the guy?’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, that depends. What guy?’ ‘The Middle Class?’ ‘Yeah I’m the guy.’
So tell me about The Sound of Music club in San Francisco …
MA: The club I remember best of all was the Deaf Club.
Matt Simon (drums): I remember very distinctly playing there, like an afternoon show with the Toiling Midgets where we were going to leave right after and come home. And I started coming on to the acid and I remember seeing all these people—rolling drunks and stuff—this is my Sound of Music story—and I see this old black guy who comes walking up and I was like, ‘Hey, you should be careful. You’re all drunk and I just saw these people rob this guy.’ So I sat and talked to him for like five or ten minutes. Then he said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he opened his jacket and he had a badge and gun and everything, and I thought, Oh, Jesus Christ. I was just coming on to the acid.
MP: The Deaf Club was really cool, it was a club for deaf people and we played a show and the deaf people that were around were behind the amplifiers and a bunch of them were touching the bass amp and putting their heads against the walls to get into the vibrations. We played with the Bags and Patricia [Morrison] lost her bass after the show and I remember going into a room looking for it and asking if anyone had seen a bass. When no one turned around I yelled, ‘Hey! What are you all deaf?’
MA: I remember it being next door to a hotel where punk rockers lived and it was like one of those places where you walk in past the guy in the glass case and he hands you a towel. One of those kinds of places with heroin addicts and everything.
You guys were pretty interested in the San Francisco scene?
MA: I think we were more accepted up there by the scene and the kids and everything than we were in Los Angeles. I think at that time, when were playing with the Wounds and the Toiling Midgets—what would that have been 1980, 81?—I don’t think their scene was like the scene down here. The scene down here had become more hardcore with like the beach scene and everything, and they may have had hardcore elements up there but it wasn’t the same kind of thing. It seemed like they were open to more kinds of music.
Why do you think that the bands in San Francisco didn’t end up being quite so ‘legendary’ as a lot of the Southern California bands?
MA: Well, the Avengers and the Nuns and all those bands—they were all pretty big San Francisco bands and they could do pretty well in L.A., but I don’t think they did well with the crowd that was the crowd that liked TSOL and the Adolescents and all that kind of stuff.
MS: I think the L.A. punk scene was bigger too—there was more music industry stuff down here, more records put out.
MP: What was the Sound of Music’s or whatever’s fanzine? Oh, Search & Destroy. It was too intellectual —it was intellectual and party and L.A. was not.
MA: I would say San Francisco was more like the earlier parts of the L.A. scene, where you had a lot of people that were art school, you know like the Weirdos and X and all those bands that went to CalArts or whatever—poetry readings and all that.
What were some of your favorite bands growing up?
Jeff Atta (vocals): Leading up to the band, like before ’74-’75, me and Mike would go to Licorice Pizza in Santa Ana and they’d have all these weird imports and stuff like that, and we got into Eno and Roxy Music and stuff like that.
MP: When I was growing up, I didn’t listen to music. And when I met Jeff in high school he introduced me to Mott the Hoople and New York Dolls, and I kind of got introduced to rock ‘n’ roll when Jeff and I were hanging around. I remember Jeff had the English music magazines, and Creem magazine we used to read. Creem had this little article about this new thing in England called ‘punk rock,’ and they listed the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Buzzcocks—those three bands. And in high school people would ask you what bands you liked and I would say the Damned, and I didn’t even know what they sounded like.
MA: I think for me, at that time—I was about 14 when you guys were discovering all that other stuff—I was listening to stuff like Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, anything that would go along with my pot-smoking at the time. And then I remember when I was 15 and a half, almost 16, I started playing guitar and everybody else that was playing guitar was trying to learn Aerosmith and stuff like that, and you guys had gotten like the Dictators and the Ramones in like ’76, and you said, ‘You should try playing this.’
MS: You guys covered a lot of Ramones songs when you first started right?
MA: Yeah, when we first started and it was me and Mike and a couple other people. We were doing Stones songs, Ramones songs …
MP: ‘Cause it was easy.
You started off playing a lot of cover songs?
MA: Yeah, just in our studio. We had a storage unit that was converted into a place for us to rehearse and that’s where we started playing that, and then writing some of our own stuff. But we were into writing songs like Wire and the Ramones. We just didn’t know how fast it was going to end up.
I know it’s a simple question, but why did you start playing so fast?
MA: It wasn’t premeditated—that’s for sure.
JA: I think we thought, ‘OK, punk is loud and it’s fast,’ so we just played as loud and fast as we could. We weren’t intentionally trying to play any faster than anyone else …
MP: And it wasn’t something we really noticed until people started saying, ‘Wow, you guys are really fast!’
MA: We didn’t know anything about the ‘rules’ of music. You know, all those bands like X and everybody, they were all based in blues—they all still had that ‘thing.’ We didn’t know anything about that. We didn’t know about relative minors. I’ve had people say, ‘You know that song “Introductory Rights”? Did you know that song is only one chord?’ [Laughs] Rob Ritter from 45 Grave, Gun Club and all that—he always recorded bands early on. He had a cassette recorder with him all the time, and he goes, ‘I was trying to figure out how to play your songs. What kind of alternative tuning do you use?’ And I go, ‘Alternative? I just tune to Mike.’ … On the speed thing, we recorded on the record that Frontier put out there a version of a song ‘You Belong’ that’s a half a minute longer than the 45 version—and it was just a six-month period till we got to the speed of the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. And like I said, it wasn’t intentional. I don’t know how we got there; it was just a lot of Dr. Pepper and Suzy Q’s. … I remember consciously drinking Dr. Pepper and being kind of like straight-edge after reading in Trouser Press magazine where they were first talking about ‘the punks’ and that they’re against all rock ‘n’ roll conventions, all what’s supposed to be rock ‘n’ roll—the drugs and all that. So we took that to mean that we weren’t supposed to get high, we were just supposed to play this music. It didn’t take long to find out that wasn’t true.
MP: Well, that was one of the reasons I think the L.A. people liked us—we were cute. We were from Orange County, we were straight, we were VERY straight.
MA: I smoked pot before Middle Class, and I quit once we started because I thought you weren’t supposed to do dope or anything like that. It wasn’t until later that I really started smoking a lot of pot. [Laughs]
JA: At that time we were living in Santa Ana, and later in Fullerton. That’s why we got so big up in L.A., because as far as we knew we were the only people in Orange County playing punk rock. Later we found out there were people in Fullerton, Huntington Beach, recording around the same time, but were totally isolated.
MA: At that time there really wasn’t a lot of bands coming out of Orange County at all. When we got interviewed for the Masque when Brendan Mullen was writing his book, he asked, ‘Was it hard? People always said that people in the L.A. scene wouldn’t allow bands from the South Bay and Orange County to come up and play?’ Well for us, it’s because that didn’t exist yet. Everybody that was in those early bands—those first waver bands—they were all from someplace else anyways. How many people were really from Hollywood? They were all glitter kids from the Valley or the Dils and the Zeros were from Carlsbad or San Diego. … Our first show, I just met the guys from the Zeros and asked if we could play; told ’em we had a band and they said, ‘Yeah, you can play next week.’ It was that simple. It was with the Bags, the Controllers and Skulls or something like that. Kind of a different time—that’s for sure.
Do you think there’ll ever be a scene as vibrant as the scene back then?
MA: I talk to a lot of the kids coming in here today. I talk to Audacity, and I ask them how they keep up and everybody’s in a band now—it’s easy for everyone to get their content out there. Before it was like you had no choice—if you wanted to be part of punk rock you had to be part of a little scene. I mean there are little scenes still. Burger Records has their little thing—
MS: —but it’s not underground. You can’t keep anything underground anymore; it’s very difficult in the computer age.
MA: It gets co-opted or whatever, and I don’t know, it’s just like fashion today—it’s just all taking parts of other things. … We never dressed like punk rockers; we dressed pretty much like what you see now, but in high school everybody had long hair and it was still an outcast kind of thing. … Now, you can go to any high school in the United States and you can’t tell what people are into because everybody looks hip or indie or whatever. Before, you could identify a person and be like, ‘That guy’s a loadie, that guys a surfer, that guy’s a punk rocker.’ Now it’s like the guys that are in bands like Mumford & Sons or whatever, look the same as the guys in Audacity! They’re all wearing flannel cowboy shirts, and these guys are playing songs about squirrels?
MS: When I got into punk, I just cut my hair and started wearing ties, and older people would say, ‘You’re a very nice young man. You’re thinking of joining the military?’ And people my age were like, ‘You’re just an idiot.’
MA: I just saw this posting from a friend of my wife’s son’s band and it’s called ‘post-hardcore,’ but they all have haircuts like Disney channel kids. But I guess that it’s ‘post-hardcore metal’, not ‘post-hardcore punk’ or something. I don’t know! … You know it’s interesting because in the original punk rock scene from L.A.—and I think S.F was the same—when you look at bands that were involved like Weirdos, Screamers, Middle Class … when you listen to these bands individually, they kind of sound like they shouldn’t be playing together. You got the Middle Class playing with the Screamers and when you listen to the Screamers now you hear them doing like bloop-beep—all that kind of stuff. I think they all fit together because it was all outcast things. Later on, when you had your hardcore punk scene, you could put four hardcore bands together and it was kind of a blur of music.
MP: And the problem with the hardcore scene was that it became very regimented, and there was a certain way you were supposed to look and a certain way you were supposed to be and it was completely the opposite of what punk started as.
MS: It was not a friendly scene! If you weren’t connected or dressed right you were in danger of getting hurt bad.
MA: I just remember when you played shows up to 1980 or so, you could look out into the crowd and there would be a bunch of girls in the audience. By 1981 you looked down there and everyone had a shaved head and no shirt on! I saw this amazing picture on this Mabuhay thing: Black Flag playing at Mabuhay Gardens and it was Henry Rollins and he was just like all tense and flexed and tight and everything, and there’s like four guys in the front and they all looked exactly the same.
It became like a church …
MA: Yeah exactly. I read this thing about our band and our relationship with hardcore and they wrote that if we would have just done our first single and kept with that music, that we would’ve been as popular as Black Flag. But we changed the formula.
MP: I remember when we played the Fleetwood, some guy came in with long hair while we were playing and got pummeled by the crowd because he wasn’t supposed to be there, and there was a real visceral reaction. I remember Jeff refused to play the first singles. We wouldn’t play them and we broke from that.
MA: I just remember you would start playing and everybody’s back was turned and they’d be all ready to start throwing down and stuff.
MS: I think the ratio of being hit to throwing punches must’ve been 50 to 1. We’ve been beaten up a lot more than we’ve beaten. [Laughs] It’s not a TSOL kind of thing where there are these four big guys who were like ass-kickers.
MP: The original punks were not jocks, you know—they were all losers. But then the jocks got into it and saw about an inch deep of what punk rock was. Didn’t get the whole concept of it. Put on the uniform, and there were jocks and assholes coming in, and now that was hardcore.
MA: We’re going to get beat up again, aren’t we?
Do you think ‘Out of Vogue’ was the first hardcore single?
MA: Some people that were in the original scene, Alice Bag or something, they’ll say it was proto-punk or the beginning of thrash punk or whatever, and I’ll take it, because it’s what gets us known and stuff. And people say this led to that, or Black Flag was a heavy metal band till they heard the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. People will argue that thing with the Bad Brains: ‘Look at the two records—Middle Class was ’78, Bad Brains was ’79.’ You know, I think that the arguments are pretty funny. A blog I was just reading yesterday was saying Black Flag was the first hardcore band. ‘Their single came out in ’76.’ I’m like, ‘What? Where did you get that from?’
JA: All that stuff is just a record collector thing. You have to pick something, somebody always had to be the first one. It’s just like the argument about who was the first ‘punk’ band, and somebody will say, ‘Oh, Iggy was.’
MA: No—Sonics!
MS: It was Charlie Parker!
MA: Next thing you know people are saying it was the Carter Family or something. I think [‘Out of Vogue’] was influential to a lot of people, and I’ll take that.
What do you think about all the old punk bands re-uniting?
MA: I find the whole thing kind of interesting that bands like ours, or bands like TSOL or whatever the bands are can actually play these shows, and they’ll be a mixture of young people and old people. I just remember being 19-20 years old and having absolutely no desire to see bands that had existed 30 years prior, you know what I mean?
MS: Yeah—like going to see the Coasters!
MA: I remember one time when we were about 23-24, and we went to go see Eric Burdon. We were fed up with punk rock so we were looking back at some of the old stuff like the Animals, doing something different. So we went to Eric Burdon at the Roxy and he looked all Vegas! Had his shirt open and all these gold chains on. And he did a medley of the Animals’ hits and we were all like, ‘Uhhhh …’
MS: I remember that and we were—I hate to say this—a little bit famous at the time and the guy was like, ‘Here, we’ve got seats for you right up front.’ After like the third song we were like, ‘Let’s get outta here!’ It was terrible. It was unbearable!
MA: I think it’s interesting that kids and people find inspiration in going to see these old bands and everything. I mean, I’m completely thrilled by it. I’m flattered that a 15-year-old kid would come in here and actually value my opinion on music and stuff, cuz I could tell you that when I was their age I could give a fuck about what somebody that was 30 or 40 years old thought about music. People will bring CDs in for me and ask, ‘Can you listen to this?’ and I’ll say, ‘You know, there’s nothing I can really do for you.’ [Laughs] It’s kind of cool that they care. With the Audacity kids I was like, ‘You guys wanna play behind my store?’ Haha!
MP: The fact that anybody cares is fucking awesome.
Watching you guys play was great, as opposed to maybe the Germs or something. You heard about what they’re doing now?
MA: Yeah, of course. We were going to try and get a guy from ER to take Jeff’s place if he wasn’t going to do the show. .. An actor! But anyways … they tried to get us to do the Germs return show a couple years ago. They said, ‘We got the Minutemen, we got the Germs.’ And I was like, ‘D. Boon’s dead, Darby’s dead. How are you guys doing that?’ Didn’t make any sense to me. … Maybe the actor is good, but to me it’s like going to see Wild Child as the Doors or Atomic Punks doing Van Halen. But, believe me, more people go to see that than the Middle Class!
MS: You know, like I watched the Adolescents and TSOL and they’ve obviously practiced all the way through and they’re tight and perfect, but to me that’s not really the most important thing. They’ve been playing the same set over and over again like for 20 years, but for us it’s a lot different, you know, cuz we’ve just started playing this stuff again this year.
MA: It’s kind of like Middle Class was before … The way we play and the way it is, all it takes is just one little thing to go wrong to throw it into a complete mess. You never know when the wheels are going to fly off and that’s what makes it kind of exciting. And you know with some of these other bands you can tell that it can be done in their sleep.
What’d you guys do in the thirty or so years since the band broke up?
MA: I was in a band with Alice from the Bags called Cambridge Apostles; I did that for a little bit. For a very short time I had a band with Ward Dotson from Gun Club, and for a while I didn’t do anything except for play with Matt’s band—he was in a band called the Pontiac Brothers. They discovered the Doll Hut here in Anaheim and started that thing.
MP: I played in Trotsky Icepick with Jack Grisham [of TSOL], then I was going to college and was in a couple bands—Breathe and Young Caucasians.
MA: Wait, you were in Breathe?
MP: Yeah, when I was going to Fullerton college. A different Breathe.
MA: Oh, there was a band Breath—
MS: —Bad Breath! They were the first hardcore uhhh …
MA: —Gingivitis band! Then you took over the Eddie empire—Eddie and the Subtitles.
MP: Yeah, when Eddie bailed, I presided over the crumbling empire—produced China White, Adolescents, Christian Death …
MA: Oh, I thought that was the other Mike Patton!

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS THE MIDDLE CLASS WITH KID CONGO AND THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS, GRANT HART AND THE URINALS ON FRI., JUNE 24, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $16-$18 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE! VISIT THE MIDDLE CLASS AT FACEBOOK.COM/THEMIDDLECLASSOFFICIAL.

UPDATE: A memorial mass for Brendan Mullen this Sunday at 11:30 AM at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, 6657 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. Thanks to @DAHLIASBLOOD for the information.

UPDATE: Fishbowl now reporting Brendan Mullen has died. L.A. RECORD obviously takes much inspiration from the spirit and actions of the Masque generation, and on this sad day we can at least be glad for the opportunity to have talked to Mullen about the first days of L.A. punk and for the chance now to try to help independent musicians in the same ways. We send thanks to Mr. Mullen’s memory and condolences and best sympathetic wishes to his partner Kateri Butler. We will also be playing a short set of Masque bands at our release party tonight in honor.

L.A. RECORD is heartbroken and wrecked to pass on this info from our friend Pandora Young at Fishbowl L.A.: Masque founder and author and DJ at Part Time Punks fest Brendan Mullen has had a stroke and (says Fishbowl) is “not expected to survive.” Brief details here and we will pass on info as we get it. We interviewed Brendan two years ago for the Masque reunion at the Echoplex and the Live at the Masque book, excerpted below for a little inspiration today:

Brendan Mullen: Punk was saying anyone could come in at any moment at any time—it’s like the old Gnostics. No rules, no dogma, no timespan on it. I think that’s great—and the show kind of reflects it, too! Without being corny, I wanted it to be a family thing—a lot of our friends have teenage kids they wanna bring, and the Echoplex is great for that. So this thing can cross over a whole bunch of generations. The younger end is so reverent—that’s one of the reasons I did the book. It’s easy to be cynical, but if you meet punk rock fans, you can’t be cynical or jaded.
[...]
I didn’t come to Los Angeles to be famous or be rich—I didn’t come to reinvent myself or run away—well, maybe I ran away a little, but I wasn’t hiding! I wasn’t gonna take on some punk moniker and be another person. I wasn’t looking for fame, hence fame never came. You have to have the megaloid drive and maintain your ego all the time and it seemed like too much work—I was too lazy!
Thanks for being so candid.
Everybody was a star in the fanzines and I got written up, like everybody else—but I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself! All I was trying to do was INVENT!

The Dogs “Fed Up!”

The Dogs were born in Michigan in 1970 and made the White Panthers a little worried before they moved to New York (and drove Kiss around) and toured the midwest (where they were beaten onstage by cops in front of 9,000 Bob Seger fans) and finally settled in L.A., where they were instrumental in the Radio Free Hollywood scene that came just before the Masque. They have just received a 2XCD tribute comp despite only releasing five songs before they broke-up. They are now back together and are working on a new DVD.

What’s the most ridiculous exit you ever made from a stage?
Loren Molinare (guitar/vocals): We were opening for Bob Seger at the Toledo Sports Arena and we got charged with felony inciting a riot. We had moved back from New York to Detroit and were booked with Bob Seger before he really broke, and we were like right before Seger. We’d waited all day and we were already set up and Bob’s road manager said, ‘Bob is tired and he wants to go back to Ann Arbor. You guys will close the show.’ And there were 9,000 kids there to see Bob Seger who barely knew who we were—‘We can’t do that! We’re gonna go play!’ And they say, ‘If you go on stage, you’re going to jail.’ “Oh yeah? Well, rock ‘n’ roll, motherfucker!’ So we go out on stage in front of 9,000 kids and started to play, and they pull the plug and Ron [Wood] started doing a drum solo. And the next thing—Toledo city cops come onstage in front of 9,000 people and beat the hell out of the band with billy clubs! They hauled everybody off to jail but me—I was running around screaming ‘rock and fucking roll’ to the crowd! They threw one of our roadies through a plate-glass window and charged him with destruction of public property. Needless to say, the booking agency—who did the MC5, the Stooges, Brownsville Station and Bob Seger—refused to have the Dogs on any of their shows in the Midwest. Their bands would not play. We got blackballed for standing up for rock ‘n’ roll! This was before they called it punk rock. We were raising a lot of of hell standing up for whatever we thought was justice.
Where did you get your code of ethics?
There was a lot of change going on, and especially with John Sinclair and the MC5 mentality—it became White Panthers on steroids for us! But it was still the music business. We didn’t realize that. It’s all about justice and doing things for the right reasons. Someone called me a hopeless optimist, and I said, ‘Oh yeah? Put it on my fucking tombstone!’ A lot of great bands—Beatles to Stones to Hendrix—paved the way, and MC5 opened the door. From Chuck Berry to the Beach Boys to the MC5—you got me going on a roll, motherfucker!
When you first heard the MC5 on WILS, did they play the version that says ‘motherfucker’?
The MC5 corrupted me at such a young age, but I didn’t hear ‘Kick Out The Jams’ on the radio—it was AM radio in those days. But in high school I was in cadet band class—I played drums, but really it was a derelict class for all the losers in school to come and just play records.
Did you get a grade for that?
I took that class for three years—it helped me graduate! We’d listen to MC5—B.B. King I learned in that class—and I got into the MC5 so much. They were gonna play our high school but the band teacher heard ‘Kick out the jams, motherfucker!’ and went and told the principal! So early on I was corrupted by passion, honesty and power and the political kind of expression of just breaking out and kicking out the motherfucking jams! It set me free—total liberation.
What was it like to graduate into the world of 1970?
I had no fucking idea! Other than I knew I wasn’t gonna go to college—it was gonna be rock ‘n’ roll. I made that conscious attempt. The Dogs were still kind of kids playing with toys. We opened for the MC5 when I was in 11th grade. The Back In The USA days—it was the first time I got to see them and it was so amazing! Truck driver, hippies, rednecks, rockers—it was the first time I’d ever seen a band that transcended cultural barriers. I saw young girls melting in the front row. It was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen in my life. A freight train coming through the center of my brain.
How did John Sinclair feel about the song you wrote about him?
That song was kind of a sore spot for a while. When he got arrested, we wrote ‘John Rock ‘n’ Roll Sinclair’ as a tribute to get him outta jail, but after a while, we never got to play any benefits, and we felt a little put off by their organization. Maybe they thought we had cow shit on our shoes since we were from Lansing and not Detroit? We felt he got a bum rap from the government, and we wanted to free his soul with rock ‘n’ roll and get him out of jail. The C.I.A. was doing a lot of weird shit in those days. Freaking out about rock ‘n’ roll in Ann Arbor and Detroit—‘Ask the C.I.A., see what they gotta say…’
What were they doing?
That MC5 movie that never came out—Dave Thomas had footage of the MC5 playing the 1968 Democratic Convention, and they were filming that secretly. The Detroit area was a political hotbed—rock ‘n’ roll and Sinclair and the White Panthers. The government just freaked out about it. So ‘John Rock’ was kind of our ‘Johnny B. Goode’ but a political Michigan rock ‘n’ roll thing. I think John was a little put-off and didn’t understand, but when Detroit Jack put our tribute CD out and asked him to do the liners, it came full circle. He didn’t think we were these mutant kids from Lansing anymore. But we were like the mutant kind of result of the MC5 and the Stooges, and here we were making the Detroit psychedelic hipsters uptight—it was punk rock offending the original punk rockers! And when we were playing that song when we moved to L.A., no one even knew who he was! Our first single in 1976—we can laugh about it now!
Why were you so set on moving to L.A.?
We moved from Lansing to Detroit in 1973 to a big three-story Victorian house in the slums by Tiger Stadium. Every Dog house has been torn down now. The Hollywood house—which had a rehearsal studio—was High Time Studios, after the 5 record and the fact we liked to smoke a lot of weed! We moved to New York in 1974 and that was a real experience. We opened for Kiss, played with the Dictators and Television at Max’s Kansas City—back when Patti Smith was Tom Verlaine’s girlfriend.
Did Kiss have their make-up then?
Yes, they did! The first day in Manhattan when we got there, I saw all these posters on poles: KISS AT THE DIPLOMAT HOTEL! So we went up—so naïve, green behind the ears!—and I found Kiss and went up to Paul Stanley like, ‘Hi, I’m Loren from the Dogs! We just got in from Detroit. Can we play your show?’ And he was like, ‘Look, this is fuckin’ New York! You can’t come in and think you’re gonna play a Kiss show!’ And we’re like—oh, wow, welcome to fucking New York! Needless to say, New York was too hard to survive in, and we ended up booking a spring of ’75 tour down south to Florida to play spring break in Daytona Beach. We were getting fired in every city. That’s when disco was going—‘You’re too loud and too fast!’ Ron Wood our drummer quit in Orlando and left us stranded. His girlfriend had moved from Michigan to start stripping at some strip club by our motel: ‘Fuck you, I’m staying!’ So [bassist] Mary [Kay] and I and the road crew said, ‘Fuck it—we’re going to Hollywood!’ So we borrowed money from our parents and made it to Hollywood and stayed in the Starwood parking lot for a week. And then got our place on Gower. And then Ron came out.
They broke up, huh?
She threw him out.
It’s like a drummer joke come to life.
He came back and we met the Motels, the Pop, the Berlin Brats and we got started on the whole pre-punk thing. 1975—pre-Masque. No bands who were original could get booked. We partnered as Radio Free Hollywood with the Motels and the Pop and got written up in Billboard, and after that the Starwood and the Whisky started booking the so-called ‘new wave’ scene. And it started exploding then. And then the Masque thing. But Radio Free Hollywood was the beginning of the independent out-of-the-box anti-establishment music scene—Back Door Man magazine, Phast Phreddie and them were on that too, pushing things, and Greg Shaw out in Bomp! Different factions pushing to make it happen. That first wave from ’76 and ‘77—you had the Whisky, the Starwood, KROQ Cabaret, the Masque—it was pretty much on fire! And by ’78, the hardcore thing started happening and the punks were out of the Masque scene. We played our instruments too good and we were caught in a weird spot. Normal rock people—if you’re talking ‘70s rock, Journey or REO Speedwagon—thought we were a little too weird. And the punkers thought we played our instruments too good! We weren’t here or there. We lost it! We’d recorded at the Record Plant—the live ‘Slash Your Face’—and our manager who worked with Journey had recorded the stuff, and we ended up stealing the mixdowns of those tapes and bootlegging ourselves so we could go on tour.
So the ‘Slash Your Face’ EP is a bootleg of that live Mabuhay set?
We stole our own tapes and released it ourselves—total punk rock stuff!
Who was your best fan in L.A.?
Keith Morris—this was before the Circle Jerks. He was a surf kid. And Greg from Black Flag. Just beach kids from Torrance and Redondo. And that guy Kid Congo—and Jay Lansford who ended up in Channel 3. They were at all the shows. Keith Morris was always almost at every show, yelling, ‘Play “L.A. Times!”’ I think we had some sort of impact. They liked us because they knew we were from Detroit, and we did sound like the 5 and the Stooges a bit. I think we had a small part in influencing those guys to get the balls to kick out the jams!
What was the song ‘L.A. Times’ about?
That was one of the first songs we wrote when we got here. We had two L.A. songs—‘Sleaze City,’ about the bondage houses and people who come here like locusts to make it, and ‘L.A. Times’ was the first song. At that point, the Whisky was closed—‘The whiskey ran dry in the summer of ’75…’ and the L.A. Times newspaper and I thought ‘Right on time with the fucking L.A. Times.’ Just a song to document what I felt the scene was with the Motels and the Pop and how we met them and the beginning of Radio Free Hollywood. And just a song about if you lived in the Midwest and dreamt about coming to Hollywood like I did. Creem did an expose on Hollywood with Alice Cooper at Pink’s, and we had pulled it out and saved it and that was our road map when we got off the Hollywood freeway!
At one point or another were you the heaviest band in L.A.?
The scene was pretty vibrant, but we could hold our own with Van Halen headlining the Starwood or the Whisky—but it was rough opening for them because their crowd was die-hard. They’d be asleep while you were playing! But Dave Roth—the first Hollywood date the Dogs ever did was Van Halen, Quiet Riot and the Dogs at the Starwood in ’76!
How were you able to move between all these little scenes?
Because of that Midwest normal-rock background. The Dogs opened for AC / DC’s American debut at the Whisky. A three-night stand with two shows a night. And we did things that sabotaged our chance to get signed—you’ll love this. We had our code of ethics and it damaged our career! Our manager said, ‘Look, I’ll get you to open for AC / DC, and if you guys dress a little more punk, I can get you a record deal!’ We were wearing kind of tight jeans, pointed shoes—kind of Detroit—and we go, ‘We can’t do that! That’s not punk!’ So we come out our first night—we took baggy dress pants and white dress shirts and put ‘em in the mud and pissed on ‘em and put mud on our faces and we were just like bums on the Bowery, and we came out played! And Richard Cromelin—who still writes for the L.A. Times, and who was a really good supporter of the band—he didn’t get it! He said we came out with a pretentious look.
Pissing on your clothes seemed pretentious?
Yeah, yeah! Our hair had mud in it—we looked like derelicts from Skid Row, and we got a bad review in the L.A. Times. But the funny thing is Iggy showed up that night with mud on his face.
Independently?
Yeah, kind of a coincidence! Needless to say, we didn’t get signed.
How did someone get a broken foot and a broken hand at your Japan reunion shows last year?
I don’t know about the broken hand but the one night it got really wild and our roadie from Detroit had to do to mouth-to-mouth to a guy who got crushed in the front row!
What do you think about getting a 29-song tribute comp when the Dogs only released five songs during their lifetime?
It blew my mind. I didn’t think about it til they brought me one. Detroit Jack’s girlfriend Aruha came up and I met her and she gave me the CD and said, ‘Loren, you’re my Chuck Berry!’
Do you still have your old MC5 records?
My collection got stolen when we came back from England. All our gear was ripped off, too. We were really stupid—really crazy! No matter what happened, we kept going. You can’t stop the rock!

—Chris Ziegler

THE DOGS WITH THE CONTROLLERS, THE PISS POPS AND THE STITCHED LIPS ON FRI., JULY 18, AT RELAX BAR, 5517 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 9 PM / $10 / 21+. MYSPACE.COM/RELAXBAR. THE DOGS’ DOGGY STYLE TRIBUTE CD IS OUT NOW ON FUTURE NOW. THE DOGS’ PURITY NOT PERFECTION DVD WILL BE OUT SOON. VISIT THE DOGS AT MYSPACE.COM/THEDETROITDOGS.