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The shocking and wholly unexpected death of Brendan Mullen after a massive stroke at the age of 60 prompted me to pull out this Village Voice review of We Got the Neutron Bomb, the great 2001 oral history of L.A.'s punk scene that he co-authored with Marc Spitz. Mullen's club the Masque--celebrated in a subsequent photographic collection published in 2007--was a key breeding ground for bands such as X and the Weirdos. The fiery Scotsman and adoptive Angeleno was a West Coast legend and will be deeply missed.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

No one in 1977 accepted that Los Angeles could produce a valid, viable "punk" scene. L.A. suffered then from the noses-in-the-air disdain of Manhattan's junkie Rimbauds and it may still suffer now. Not even Kurt Cobain's late Eighties endorsements of the Germs and Black Flag fundamentally altered the anti-Kalifornia belief that tanned Seventies brats in the perma-sun had no business yelping and screeching about alienation over sloppy drum beats and blitzed guitar chords.

And yet Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen's We Got the Neutron Bomb is actually the third book to address the scene directly--the first, Peter Belsito and Bob Davis' Hardcore California, was published as long ago as 1983. (The second, Don Snowden's Make the Music Go Bang!, appeared in 1997, while Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life includes chapters on both Black Flag and the Minutemen.) The truth is, L.A. punk is now almost as central to SoCal's rock heritage as the Beach Boys and the Eagles.

In the wake of Legs McNeil's Gotham-centric Please Kill Me!--a book that pointedly/snobbishly ignored Hollywood Babylon--it was surely only a matter of time before L.A. punk got its own "oral history." In partnership with Mullen, Scottish founder of Hollywood's seminal Masque club, Spin scribe Spitz has done a bang-up job of presenting the Calpunk story in bite-size thematic chunks. Like Please Kill Me!, Neutron Bomb is an irresistible Babel-on of voices--testimonies of survivors and victims, onlookers and theorists, some philosophical, others simply bitchy. Like Please Kill Me!, it's a silent-screen rockumentary that makes every last bit-part player sound wonderfully savvy and wise after the event.

True, the voices tell us little about what L.A. punk meant that we didn't already gauge from those snotty and incendiary 45s by X and the Germs and the Dils and the Weirdos, or later on from Black Flag's brutally great Damaged. The music--grating, often grimly funny--was L.A. noir to the max, James M. Cain via Jim Morrison and Charles Manson. It was the sound of screwed-up suburbia, of sexual misfits and art-terrorist runaways grokking on Pistols and Siouxsie pix in the pages of imported NMEs. It was anti-denim, anti-sunshine, anti-everything. "Destroy All Music!" screamed the Weirdos.

But the voices--including those of mourned ghosts like the Germs singer Darby Crash, prankster psycho Black Randy and Slash magazine banner-waver Claude "Kickboy Face" Bessy--give us the human meat on the bone, the aspirations and the resentments, the narcotic screwups and sexual shenanigans, the tales of boys and girls who never dreamt their collective experience would amount to a "story" in the first place.

Here's Kim Fowley spitting venom at the Dils ("these two s**t-assed rich-kid Marxist clown brothers"), and the Dils spitting back ("repulsive and only on the punk scene to get laid"); there's Bibbe Hansen reminiscing about dragging little Beck along to Controllers rehearsals ("the Masque probably wasn't a suitable place for a seven-year-old kid on a wild Friday or Saturday night"). Here are Devo hymning the genius of the unrecorded Screamers ("it's almost as if what they were after was like 'Firestarter' by the Prodigy"); there's Belinda Carlisle reliving the squalor of the notorious Canterbury apartments ("you'd walk into the courtyard and there'd be a dozen different punk songs all playing at the same time").

Of course, just as the Pistols led to the Police, so the avant-sleaze of L.A. scene climaxed with Belinda and the Go-Gos on the cover of the Rolling Stone. No surprise that the naïve debauchery and nihilistic noir posturing of the original Masque scene spewed up its share of eyes-on-the-prize sellouts. Heck, what scenester narrative would be complete without the winners who emerge as history's losers?

En route to "We Got the Beat," meanwhile, Spitz and Mullen chart the change from Hollywood to Huntington Beach, from radical art-punk to macho Orange County beachcore. Anti-suburban snobbery notwithstanding--unconsciously replaying New York's dismissal of L.A. itself--Neutron Bomb astutely sorts the visceral hardcore wheat (Black Flag) from the moshpit chaff (TSOL).

By 1980, when Darby Crash died and Penelope Spheeris' Decline Of Western Civilization (1980) was in the cinemas, the original L.A. punk scene was in its death throes, or leastways splintering into roots and rockabilly factions. And the long antiseptic nightmare of the Eighties was under way.

Many moons later, in the summer of 1993, genial Germs guitarist Pat Smear was working in the SST Superstore on the Sunset Strip--an absurd locale for the merchandising of Black Flag apparel--when Kurt Cobain called to ask if he would join Nirvana. The legacy of the Masque had finally been acknowledged.

The L.A. punk story goes on, and on. And now it's been told by the motley crew who lived it.

Read more pieces on the L.A. punk scene at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 15,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.