By Thom Fowler
February 7, 2003
The first thing I notice about Jim is that he drinks black tea with milk and he has a natural, jovial curiosity. Wearing jeans and a red t-shirt, he looks more like a fashionable skater-boy more than a 25-year veteran of the progressive vanguard. Jim was down to earth and was most afraid that now he would start being quoted as some kind of authority on the punk scene.
“You are an authority now, whether you see yourself like that or not just by virtue of being the one with the book,” I tell him. He is, at least, an authority as much as anyone is. The Punk scene in all its various incarnations is like outer space. There is no up or down, left or right. There is just motion.
I was running late and as I was pulling out my notebook, tape recorder and pen and spilling the contents of my portable office from my courier bag onto the tiny café table, he looks astonished. Like this is a real interview with a real journalist. I put him on pause, got a cup of coffee and we went at it for almost two hours talking about the legacy of punk, pop culture, music and youth movements and he shared some stories about his personal experiences with the GO-GOS, THE SEX PISTOLS, and Andy Warhol.
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WE’RE DESPERATE, Jim Jocoy’s collection of photographs of the punk scene in San Francisco and Los Angeles circa 1978 – 1980 was published just a few months ago and has already sold out the first printing.
The collection (what the press notes calls his “monograph” which doesn’t sound right to Jim) features a forward by fashion designer Marc Jacobs, an afterward by the lead singer of the band X and spoken-word artist, Exene Cervenka and an interview with Jim Jocoy by Thurston Moore of SONIC YOUTH. But you’ll want to print out this interview right here and stick it in the back of the book for posterity as part of the oral history of punk. Thank you MECHANICAL BRIDE for letting me know about the book.
Thom: What’s with the new fascination of first-wave punk among young people today?
Jim Jocoy: I think the whole fascination with punk right now is like when I was younger, I was really fascinated with the Beats, the Warhol group, the generation ahead of me that were doing the countercultural, alternative things. I think Punk has the same kind of legacy. Maybe you’d look at it in a similar way.
Thom: When I trace back in my mind the bohemian tradition that I jumped into as a teenager in San Francisco, there is a specific context so I could look at like, the punks, but then there was that specifically San Francisco thing that came out of the whole counter-cultural Haight-Ashbury scene, which came out of what the Beats, or whatever those people were before they were called that by the late SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE columnist Herb Caen, were doing. That whole active resistance against middle-American banality. You know, Allen Ginsburg was the first official hippy.
Jim Jocoy: I think every generation has their youth movement and culture and back in the late seventies punk was a direction some of the kids were taking. Each generation has their claim to what their scene is about. Lots of people in the scene were teenagers, but most were in their early twenties. They were reacting against the hippies and the mellowness of what the music was all about and just wanted to put new energy into the San Francisco underground counterculture and go in a different direction. That’s part of what I think that was all about it. I didn’t realize punk was going to get so big. I used to think this is just a little thing that is happening. By no means is it ever going to be as big as the Hippies and the Beats but now, as Thurston Moore of SONIC YOUTH said, Punk was one of more significant directions a youth movement went in the late twentieth century. I agree completely.
Thom: At the time, did it feel like a very small scene?
Jim Jocoy: It was. It was very concentrated. Ground zero was The Mabuhey [In San Francisco]. There were also all these little clubs happening that didn’t really catch. There was The Tattoo Lagoon in South of Market. And there was Tool and Die, The Geary Street Theatre, The Russian Community Center. There was the Deaf Club in the Mission which was great. It’s fascinating. It was right on Valencia and 16th and it was an actual club for deaf people. The atmosphere was surreal. There were the traditional people that would go there which were older deaf gentleman that did their signing at the bar and the punk rockers would go there and put a show on and it wouldn’t bother them because they couldn’t hear anything. So there were two cultures happening side by side. There’s a photo in the book of John Waters that I took in the bathroom in the Deaf Club.
Thom: What was John Waters doing in San Francisco at the time?
Jim Jocoy: At that period he had a big connection to San Francisco. He was living in Baltimore and putting out movies. He had a connection to The Cockettes and The Angels of Light through Divine. He would make his films and San Francisco was a great audience for him. He would show his films at the Presidio Theatre at the Midnight Movies. I saw PINK FLAMINGOS there when it first came out. It was part of the Midnight Movies series. He would come out with Divine and they’d do these performances. One other time, John and Divine came out when Divine was in THE HEARTBREAK OF PSORIASIS. When he’d come out here he’d go check out was happening. I’m just speculating.
Thom: Yeah, at the time he was so unknown. He was making movies and hitting theatres but its not like anyone outside a very small world knew about him.
Jim Jocoy: Everyone was tapping into the sensibility. I never met him outside of that picture but the publicist for the PowerHouse Books met him and he signed a copy of my book for me. Remember Edith Massey, the egg lady who was Divine’s mother. The dark-haired, short one. She’d be in the playpen and they would just feed her eggs.
Thom: She was really fat and had a screechy voice.
Jim Jocoy: Yeah. At that time she led a punk rock group from Baltimore. She came out here and played at the Mabuhey. They were aware of what was happening out here. At the Mabuhey, everyone would hang out in the girl’s bathroom. When Edith Massey’s band was there, the drummer, who was a girl, came in and we started talking. I asked her if she was in the band and she said yeah and we just talked for a while. It turned out that was Gina Shock. After the band broke up, Instead of going back to Baltimore, Gina went to L.A. and joined THE GO-GOS. Within a year after that, THE GO-GOS had a number one record. So that’s the John Waters, Baltimore, San Francisco, GO-GOS connection. I’m the master of associations, you’ll have to reel me in.
Thom: No, this is a great, I love it when the conversation winds around. None of my questions would have gotten me to this story. You’ve captured everyone else’s moments but what was it all about for you back then?
Jim Jocoy: I don’t like to be idle and I don’t know how to play music. When I went out I felt like I needed to do something. My friends were in bands and they were putting posters up all over town, they were part of being right in there. So I thought, “I’m going to do something too.” And I started taking pictures because I’ve always been interested in photography and that’s how it all started. I wanted to document what was happening and I didn’t really push it to magazines. Guys like Vale [V.Vale, founder of RE/SEARCH publications , and the proto-punk paper, SEARCH AND DESTROY, of which Vale recently sold me a stack of originals chock full of then unknowns who are now the mythic pillars of the “alternative” music scene – Thom] would publish a few of them, but they never had any commercial outlet. I did it mostly for myself and sharing with my friends.
Thom: Wasn’t that the point of everything in that scene? To do everything just for yourself and your friends?
Jim Jocoy: Exactly. There were tons of fanzines out. People were just generating their own media. They were starting bands, there was this creative energy and whatever your talents were you just plugged in and did it.
Thom: Why do you think people did that rather than watch TV or go to the Movies?
Jim Jocoy: This was all pre-MTV, so there wasn’t any kind of template for kids to look at and say, “Oh, this is a way to dress and act and behave.” There wasn’t anything that easy to identify with. A lot of my inspiration came from hearing about what was happening in New York. I’d read the music magazines and go the record stores. Aquarius Records used to be right on Castro Street [It has since moved to Valencia in The Mission District – Thom] and it used to be a regular place where we’d go to check out the latest releases. Patty Smyth was big back then and when THE RAMONES came out with their first album, that was a big deal. I remember seeing THE RAMONES when they first came out here. It was their first appearance in California. It was brilliant. I knew from that experience that there was something really real happening and it turns out I was right. It was a mind-blowing experience going into a room and seeing THE RAMONES. They played at this place called Sivoy Tivoli in North Beach three nights in a row. It’s a small little club, not much bigger than this room [which comfortably seated about 20 people – Thom].
I knew a lot of people in bands and they would ask me to take band shots. Mostly I did it to keep busy and to feel like I was doing something.
Thom: Is that how people got their ideas? You’d just be walking down the street and you’d see someone who looked interesting to you? How did people hear about bands?
Jim Jocoy: It’s similar to now. Most of it was word of mouth but people would also make Xeroxed flyers and put them up all over town. A lot of times when a band would come from out of town, they would headline and the local bands would open up for them. I remember when THE DAMNED and DEVO came out here. It was a community network. You’d all be going to the same clubs and you’d talk to each other and find out who’s touring, stuff like that.
Thom: I feel like we are still living in the shadow of that initial burst. People still listen to and talk about bands that hit their stride 15-20 years ago. I always thought SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES would be the LED ZEPPELIN of my peer group and the cool kids of the next generation would rediscover what to them would be their roots. There hasn’t been anything like a DEVO since then. They just played a free show on the Civic Center lawn and there was a crowd and the energy was palpable. It wasn’t about novelty or irony, but a living exchange of energy trading on songs that were created two decades ago – and they felt brand new all over again.
Jim Jocoy: It’s much much harder to get any kind of movement going now. If it gets on MTV then it gets co-opted so fast. It doesn’t have time to fester and get like a big fat boil and pop out to the world. People will jump right on board and deplete all its energy before it can become anything.
Thom: I call it the Madison Avenue Effect. You’ve all got all these so-called creatives sitting around a table and hammering out design ideas and developing an aesthetic. They get official approval and it gets pushed down towards the masses and we are all supposed to just thankfully receive our communion from the gods on high. I don’t see a lot of spiraling up of ideas or images. It seems like nothing is coming up out of the street anymore. Madison Avenue is giving people something to consume rather than the people developing their own thing. All the stuff coming out of Madison Ave comes from people who are creative and intelligent but it all comes out of nothing other than studying various styles and creating a marketable image and doing a bunch of sophisticated seeding to create the impression that what’s hip started somewhere other than a marketing meeting.
Jim Jocoy: I’m sure things will happen. It’s the nature of … I feel like .. the whole Electronica movement definitely has a place, like in the 80s, kids were wearing different things and that got co-opted and commercialized and still things were popping up. Right now, there is a lot of bands that have a connection to the punk sound like THE STROKES and THE HIVES, THE DONNAS.
Thom: Yeah, my friend is in this real good band that nobody knows about called THE CUTTERS. I think of them as having a late-seventies CBGBs [where THE RAMONES and BLONDIE among countless other bands first broke through into the underground and later … the world - Thom] filtered through people who are now in their late twenties and early thirties who lived through the second wave of punk slash British technopop new wave. They don’t sound like they are trying to recreate that sound. Its more like they are living their style through themselves without any irony or nostalgia. I like them a lot. I have lots of friends in bands and I am not as passionate about all of them as I am about THE CUTTERS. They just put out a new album but Angela Brown, the lead singer is pregnant so they are hanging it up for a year or so. And they just put a second CD and started getting some college airplay. All the other band members were trying to keep the momentum going but there are limits to what a Rock and Roll mom can do.
[Jim is nodding and agreeing.]
Thom: What was it like to grow older out of that time of concentrated rebellion against the very nature of our society, not simply your parents or an abstract idea of “authority.”
Jim Jocoy: Really, I feel like I’m just trapped. It’s funny. I’m an odd duck. I’m 50 years old but I still don’t behave like I’m 50. [Roseanne Barr is also 50 – Thom]. I still go see shows and I know I got older but interest-wise, there’s something wrong with me, I haven’t changed all that much. I go to shows regularly, I create as much as I did then and my lifestyle hasn’t changed that much. I don’t damage my body as much. I still am very curious about what’s happening in pop culture. I follow the arts. I follow music. Comparing myself now to twenty years ago I see very little difference in my attitude and sensibilities. I think that’s an honest answer unless I’m deluding myself.
Thom: You don’t look 50. You look more like 30, or a slightly weathered 23-year-old. How old is Vale?
Jim Jocoy: He must be in his mid-fifties. I was older in the scene. If you were over 23, you were older. A lot of kids were in their teens so even back then I felt like I wanted to experience this but I know that I’m a little older but it didn’t matter. That’s just the way I am. I feel a little aware that I’m from a different generation but I feel like I’m entitled to still go to shows and enjoy myself. I feel like it’s my job to go out and check out what’s happening. I love it.
Thom: Yeah, who says that things are supposed to happen in a prescribed manner along some kind of timeline from birth to death? Whatever came out of that late 60s, San Francisco Haight-Ashbury Beat paradigm was that people felt like life was there to be invented, not that there was this accepted routine that everyone had to go through. Now there aren’t any rules so you may as well make the game as interesting as possible for yourself.
Jim Jocoy: I did have role models and type-set icons. A lot of it was the whole Warhol scene in the Sixties. I was totally fascinated with the Factory scene and I still am.
Thom: I met Cherry Vanilla last summer in L.A. She put out a little ‘zine telling the story about the night she had sex with David Bowie and she read from that and then performed with her band. There weren’t very many people there.
[Here’s one of those moments that come back to connect other unusual moments. The month I saw Cherry Vanilla, Kevin Smith was in INTERVIEW magazine which was started by Andy Warhol. When Kevin was signing JAY AND SILENT BOB CDs at the video store in L.A. I took the ‘zine to him and had him sign next to Cherry Vanilla to memorialize the inter-generational crossing of the pop streams. It was like watching last night’s Conan O’Brian and seeing Roseanne Barr, Chuck Barris, Dave Attell and Conan in a row, having these intense internal moments of reflecting on how they’ve all influenced each other, participated in the same media, worked in the same genres and woven their strands into the pop cultural fabric in very significant ways. THAT was a great show.]
Jim Jocoy: I saw Taylor Mead in New York last summer.
Thom: I just recently figured out that Warhol was a big deal. I think he invented our modern concept of Pop Culture.
Jim Jocoy: I think you may be right about that. I get nostalgic thinking about Warhol. I was genuinely upset when Warhol died. I was like, “There’s no Oz to go to.” You know the writers Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein? In their day they were the same kind of architects of bohemia. When I was in High School, Warhol was in the thick of what he was doing and that’s what made the big impression on me and I’m realizing how significant his force was in music, art, fashion, all those things. He casts a huge shadow over American pop culture.
Thom: It’s like he would take this stuff that was totally inconsequential, bring it to himself, give it all this meaning and then send it back out again. So the most ordinary things, the most superficial things, became deeply meaningful.
Jim Jocoy: Warhol was a paradox in that way. He would always say that there is no depth, everything is all very superficial. Other people would interpret that and make much more profound connections. And when he would explain himself he would just say, “It’s just the surface of a painting. That’s all it’s about.” I don’t think anyone has stepped into his shoes. I can’t think of anyone who’s done what he’s done.
Thom: Maybe Ray Johnson. He knew Andy Warhol. He made a lot of post card art but he was more into the mind-fuck of life as performance. Johnson posited that his art was just what’s there in front you … and then would suggest that there is more going on than what you are looking at. There was no point in trying to point to it because everything is perceived as surface. If you are a visual artist there is no dialogue with people, you are just presenting images and all the dialogue happens around people interpreting your work amongst themselves.
Jim Jocoy: And then you have the critic coming in and explaining it all to the masses.
Thom: What was the thing that really attracted you to what Warhol was doing?
Jim Jocoy: He was a focal point for what I thought was the most hip, cool and wonderful things there were. Whoever was doing anything interesting, somehow had a Warhol connection. They wanted to be acknowledged by Warhol, Warhol liked them. It seemed like he was tapped into what was happening so if I looked in his direction and followed his gaze I would see that those were the same things I was interested in. I would read INTERVIEW all the time. He was hysterically funny. He’s so minimal in whatever he says but he was always very on and brilliant. I miss him very much. It’s a huge vacuum that he’s left.
Thom: I think you can only have one or two people like Warhol in a generation. Like, you’ll never have another mega-huge mythic female pop star until Madonna is dead. There’s not enough room on the stage.
Thom: Is there any kind of a counter-culture today?
Jim Jocoy: I’m sure there’s a dance scene that’s happening. In the late 80s I used to go to some of the raves that were happening. Maybe this sounds hokey, but there are bands that I get interested in and lo and behold, they become huge. I remember seeing Moby when he came to San Francisco to a little club. I remember seeing THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS when they were The Dust Brothers. They had a great show at the Trocadero. I think a lot of people think Punk and Electronica are so dissimilar, but there is a connection through bands like PIL and KRAFTWERK going in that direction.
Thom: What is the common thread between Punk and Electronica?
Jim Jocoy: It’s energetic, its fresh, its fun. That sounds so cliché, I’m really not a music critic. I have tons of Electronica. I love the British pop sound. I like a lot of the new rock groups that are young and influenced by the early punk scene. Sometimes I’ll say Electronica is another version of Disco and Disco was an anathema to Punk. How can you combine those two together? In my weird world, they fit together just fine.
Thom: I always think of Punk and Hip Hop and the early acid house scene as being subcultures of resistance, which were eventually co-opted and made into just another product, a brand-name identity but it all still points back to the original, basic critique of generic, commercial culture. I miss that there used to be an ideology intimately entwined with those musical subcultures. It’s all still there, the hardcore, but you have to dig a little harder to find it, or to recognize it. There are no guarantees anymore that meeting someone with the same musical interests will also share your basic outlook on life or share your values. It used to be such a convenient way to hook up with your tribe. Are you very optimistic?
Jim Jocoy: The whole punk thing was based on cynicism of the status quo. When you are young you are always questioning whether what’s presented to you is a direction you want to go in. I’m optimistic but I’m not naïve. I know it’s a harsh world but I do believe that great things happen. It’s so distorted for me now with the book coming out and I’ve been meeting wonderful people. I love what’s happening to me right now so why would I be pessimistic? I have hope for the future. I have to keep that hope.
Thom: What’s happened to your life since this book came out?
Jim Jocoy: It’s been dramatically fun. It’s been wonderful. Each week something unreal happens. Like meeting with you. Before the book I had an okay fun life but it’s not like I made appointments with people who think I might have something interesting to say. So it’s been terrific. I have to rein myself in because I have so much enthusiasm. I wonder if I should be more mysterious, a less-is-more kind of thing. I love this experience. I’m now in this group photo show. The opening reception is this Thursday so you should come. Cynthia Connelly will be there. She runs DISCHORD RECORDS in Washington DC. It’s going to be a huge event. When I was talking to a magazine editor back east the other day, he’s even heard about the show. There are so many people involved. It’ll be fun for me to go and discover new, fresh, talented people.
Thom: Was there ever a point when you thought you were selling out to the system?
Jim Jocoy: The answer to that is probably no. I knew I had to make sure I was going to be secure and pay my bills. I now have a very straight job. I have a schizoid life where I have a lot of strange, wild friends which is basically my lifestyle but then I have my work life which I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. It’s relevant and its real but it’s a whole different me there. I’m very professional in the hospital setting and working with patients. They have no idea that I have this other wild and colorful life.
Thom: How did this book come together?
Jim Jocoy: The whole story is in the interview Thurston Moore did with me in the back of the book. Basically, it was a dead project. Cynthia Connelly who had the prototype, couldn’t use it for anything. Thurston who is good friends with Cynthia was over at her house and she showed him the the book and he liked it enough that he shopped it around and PowerHouse Books decided to do it.
Thom: What’s the Marc Jacobs connection?
Jim Jocoy: Marc Jacobs is a good friend of Thurston’s wife, Kim Gordon. Kim was a fashion designer once. If SONIC YOUTH is playing in Europe, Marc will come to the show, they are very good friends. They showed Marc the book and they asked him to write something for it.
Thom: I read in the interview how Marc Jacobs was influenced by a friend of yours.
Jim Jocoy: Yeah, Robert Hawkins. I’ve known Robert for twenty-five years. Marc said he was beautiful but the photo in the book isn’t very flattering. When Marc was 15 he saw Robert in New York and thought he was totally wild. Robert was really a proto-type of the punk. Robert’s now a great, great artist who lives in London. He flew out to see me during my New York book signing.
Thom: Tell me about this picture of Sid Vicious.
Jim Jocoy: That was taken right after the last SEX PISTOLS show ever here in San Francisco. My friend Lamar, she and this girl, Helen Killer, drove their Volkswagen to the Longhorn Saloon in Dallas, Texas to intercept them before they got to the West Coast to hook up with them. When they came to perform here, Lamar asked them to come to her house at Masonic and Haight for a party after the show. I was standing outside on Masonic and Sid pulls up in a cab. First thing he did was whip out his dick and start pissing on the street. My friend was like, “Take a picture.” I knew who he was and I didn’t want to bother him. I saw him later in the hallway at the party and I asked if I could take a photo and he obliged me. I took one shot and that was it. The next day he flew back to New York and overdosed on his way to New York. He and Nancy were living at The Chelsea Hotel where they lived when Sid was accused of killing Nancy Spungen. [See SID AND NANCY starring GARY OLDMAN, or read the book.]
Thom: Did you see FILTH AND THE FURY?
Jim Jocoy: I saw it. I’m one of these people that it seems like I don’t have standards and I like everything but if anyone is doing anything fun or creative I can’t slag them. I can’t be too critical. I encourage people to do things. The only thing I’ll do is if someone has tons of money and they do something that is mediocre and I go, “Oh, God.” If you have the resources and it still comes out like crap, I don’t like that. Whatever your resources, if you put it together, I love it.
Thom: Yeah, I love when people pull things together on their own. I don’t have to love what they are doing but I love that spirit of making something out of nothing rather than just going to mall.
[At this point, Jim takes me on a little tour of the book.]
Jim Jocoy: There’s a picture of Ruby Ray who used to publish a lot of her photographs in SEARCH AND DESTROY. You recognize Jello Biafra?
Thom: Yeah. He’s got a little belly now but he was wearing that same belt when I saw him last year. Is that Nina Hagen?
Jim Jocoy: Yeah.
Thom: Everyone looks like they shopped at thrift stores.
Jim Jocoy: They did.
Thom: In my memory, everyone seemed so fresh and clean and these people are so ragged and thrown together. The counter-cultural look is so designed now and off-the-rack.
Jim Jocoy: Remember when Jello Biafra ran for Mayor of San Francisco? It was weird seeing him sitting with all the other Mayoral candidates at the same time he was in the DEAD KENNEDYS. I thought, “That’s so punk.”
WE’RE DESPERATE is available in book stores or online at www.powerhousebooks.com.
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