A Crash Course in the Germs

THE GERMS

“M.I.A.”

Slash

* * * *

The Germs were to the Los Angeles punk scene what Brian Jones was to the Stones or Syd Barrett to Pink Floyd: the primal creative force that was both too flatulent to live with and too vital to have thrived at first without.

It was the Germs who set the standards of anti-musicianship that made such bands as X and the Go-Go’s seem positively polished by comparison, and it was the Germs’ reflexive suburban nihilism that set the stage for the poetic anarchism of the Minutemen and Black Flag, the Germs who smeared themselves with peanut butter onstage while their peers were delving into German Expressionism--and the Germs whose lead singer, Darby Crash, lived fast and died way too young.

Check out the essential Germs track “No God.” A pretty guitar flourish, blatantly ripped from a Yes song, breaks down into a tinny, wild, one-chord riff that even now seems too random to duplicate, the drums come in with all the subtle finesse of a set of tom-toms kicked down a flight of stairs, and Crash howls, howls with all the-- rage isn’t the word--the torment really of a 6-month-old baby plucked too soon from the breast, and he mumbles, screams, swallows his words until finally, with a hiccup, the song runs out of air.

Crash was no prophet--he was a 17-year-old Westside kid who had read a little too much Nietzsche--but in his inarticulate thrashing about was all the yearning, all the frustration, all the hot tears of California’s teen-age wasteland, of which he was poet laureate.

Until now, the Germs have perhaps suffered from being at once the best-documented and worst-represented of American punk bands, the stuff available being mostly bootlegs of live performances or the single 1979 album “GI,” which was produced in a cruddy studio by a teen-age Joan Jett, who had never to anyone’s knowledge stepped behind a mixing board before, and which sounds as if the microphones had been swaddled in a yard of diapers.

“M.I.A.” has most of the stuff you want to listen to--including the entire “GI” album and a coruscating studio version of “Lion’s Share” that has never been available before--with none of the atonal versions of “Sugar Sugar” and the like. A beautiful corpse.

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