Hi there!
I came of age in the late 80s and early 90s punk scenes, well after the beginnings of punk rock but still early enough that I met a lot of very interesting people who were involved in the early scene.
Even in the Midwest, we heard stories about how the police would show up at all-ages clubs in LA and NYC to break up shows- very often with unrestrained violence. I heard also about some shows locally that were legendary for the violence that would occur when the police showed up.
It was always my impression from the stories that the police violence was unsurprising to the people in the situations, and that it was egged on and often encouraged by the city councils and police chiefs in various areas who were afraid of the punks.
Is there much actual evidence of police misconduct or systematic violence around punk rock and clubs? Was it as remembered by the old punks, or was there evidence that it was caused by punks being punks and attacking law enforcement first? Or were the stories more on the level of urban legend?
Thanks all!
The early hardcore punk scene was fairly violent, both internally and externally. LA and its suburbs in particular featured some pretty spectacular confrontations between punks and cops. Black Flag was really ground zero for the new hardcore style crossing into the punk mainstream and catching the attention of the wider public. At the time, hardcore was confined mostly to the suburbs like Hermosa Beach and Orange County. The Hollywood clubs still focused on 70's style punk. Black Flag was the first big hardcore band from the suburbs to get booked into the Hollywood clubs and they brought their fans with them. The hardcore fans tended to be younger, bigger, and more violent (especially a particularly jock-like crew from Huntington Beach known as the HB'ers) than the older punks and the shows were markedly more violent. Henry Rollins said about the change, "All of a sudden you're dealing with thick-necked guys who were drunk and could go toe-to-toe with some cops, guys who will get in a cop's face. The sheer force of the numbers at the shows totally freaked the cops out to where they just said 'Don't try to understand it, we'll just squelch it. And how will we squelch it? We'll just smash the hell out of 'em - arrest 'em for no reason, smack 'em on the head, intimidate the shit out of them.' And boy it was intense."
According to Michael Azzerad's seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life, "between 1980 and 1981, at least a dozen Black Flag concerts ended in violent clashes between the police and the kids." The band and their fans certainly did nothing to lessen the tension though. An infamous show flyer made by the band featured a drawing of a hand jamming a gun in a cop's mouth over the caption "Make me come, faggot!" Eventually LA clubs started to ban hardcore bands and the attention surrounding the band began to attract a crowd that wanted violence. Again, the band certainly didn't mind. Rollins: "One of the main rallying war cries for us was 'What the fuck, fuck shit up!' Literally, that was one of our slogans." The band even made a series of radio ads promoting their shows which mocked the LAPD, even mentioning Police Chief Gates by name. Rollins for his part had no problem getting into fights on stage. His tour memoir Get In The Van is filled with accounts of fights and near riots.
Minor Threat may have actually been worse. The DC scene they helped build was violent from the get-go. In Our Band Could Be Your Life, Ian MacKaye attributes the violence to a show that his previous band The Teen Idles had played in San Francisco at the Mabuhay Gardens. At the show, they saw some of the Black Flag crew beating up anyone that crossed them and MacKaye said the DC kids immediately recognized the power of violence and began fighting all the people back home that would hassle them for being punks (apparently a more immediate concern in uptight DC than it was in laid back Southern California). MacKaye also said "When Minor Threat was on tour, I would get into fights every night." The DC kids took what had mostly been a drunken, violent mess and made it more militant and philosophical, especially with the rise of the straight edge movement that Minor Threat birthed.
So in short, yes, the early hardcore scene was very violent and did involve confrontations with the police. The police and communities didn't care much for the punks and were willing to crack down hard, but the punks were happy to oblige when confrontations happened.
A former LAPD cop from that era told me that a lot of Black Flag shows would sell too many tickets, which ended up with a bunch of angry kids who would be stuck on the sidewalk, ticket in hand, without being allowed in. That was how at least some of the incidents started.
This is a bit tangential, but I feel I should mention the 1970s London scene. Multiple sources (Rotten's autobiography, the oral history of Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) point out that in 1975 and for most of 1976, the London scene was regarded by the cops as just another random collection, negligible in number, of arty London bohemians. There were many such scenes in inner-city London at the time, as there had been for some time by then. By the mid 70s the London cops didn't regard such people as a threat, as long as they kept it to the seedier areas as opposed to the posher or more suburban districts, and weren't being publicly obnoxious or violent.
What changed all that was the Grundy Incident, in December of 1976, when the Sex Pistols went on national television (I think Grundy's show might've been just a London area thing, but it immediately became a national incident) and cursed out Bill Grundy. All the tabloids and major papers went nuts, generating a media furor that caused a genuine, classic Phil Cohen-style moral panic, and so on. This is a major reason why 1977, particularly the summer of, is regarded as the original 'Punk Explosion.'
What ended up happening, as a result of the Grundy Incident and the resultant moral panic, is that for every X number of decent citizens who were outraged, you had Y number of young teenagers from all over Britain who were attracted to this new, violent, foulmouthed phenomenon like moths to a flame. Phil Cohen mentions that the moral panic surrounding mods and rockers probably did more to recruit, if not outright construct, mods and rockers than anything else. I would say the same thing happened with punk in the UK. It took on a life of its own, above and beyond the intentions, nebulous though they were, of the original (pre-Grundy) participants.
The original participants of the London scene were quickly overwhelmed and outnumbered by teenage newcomers who came in with the very strong impression that the whole thing was about spitting, farting, and fighting, and looking and acting as outrageous as possible. Judging by the various interviews and oral histories, the more arty, avant-garde scene members complained the most bitterly about the massive influx, and how the whole thing became this gross adolescent trainwreck.
The cops definitely started paying attention from then on. As did all sorts of street-level reactionaries. What really did it was 'God Save the Queen', especially the defacing of the queen's portrait on the single cover. It got to the point where the Sex Pistols had to be escorted around publicly by Arsenal hooligans. I have the impression they (London punks) had more to worry about from reactionary hooligans and would-be vigilantes, especially after God Save the Queen, than they did from the cops. Although there was certainly official repression, quite likely deliberate.