t's kinda ironic that the untold story of the Los Angeles punk scene should be officially told at a time when New York City—L.A.'s age-old enemy-nemesis and pop-cultural obverse—is reconnecting with its own slumming punk rock roots via the Strokes and their ilk. El Lay suffered then from the nose-in-the-air disdain of Manhattan's junkie Rimbauds, and it may—NYC's recent devastation notwithstanding—still suffer now.

No one in 1977 accepted that L.A. could produce a valid, viable "punk" scene. Hell, not even Saint Cobain's late-'80s endorsements of the Germs and Black Flag fundamentally altered the belief that tanned '70s brats in the perma-sun had no business yelping and screeching about alienation over sloppy drumbeats and blitzed guitar chords.

And yet We Got the Neutron Bomb is actually the third book to address the scene directly—the first, Peter Belsito and Bob Davis's Hardcore California, was published as long ago as 1983. (The second, Don Snowden's Make the Music Go Bang!, appeared in 1997, and Michael Azerrad's recent Our Band Could Be Your Life includes chapters on both Black Flag and the Minutemen.) 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 great 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 Brendan Mullen, Scottish founder of Hollywood's seminal Masque club, Spin scribe Marc 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 Babble-on of voices—testimonies of survivors and victims, onlookers and theorists, some philosophical, others simply bitchy. 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 incendiary 45s by X and the Germs and the Dils, or later on from Black Flag's brutally great album, Damaged. The music—grating, often grimly funny—was L.A. noir to the max, James M. Cain via Morrison and Manson. It was the sound of screwed-up suburbia, of sexual misfits and art-terrorist runaways grokking Pistols and Siouxsie pix in the pages of imported NMEs. It was anti-denim, anti-sunshine, anti-everything. "Destroy All Music!" yelled the Weirdos.

But the voices—including those of mourned ghosts like 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 fuckups and sexual shenanigans, the tales of boys and girls who never dreamed their collective experience would amount to a "story" in the first place.

We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk By Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen Three Rivers Press, 304 pp., $13 paper Buy this book

Here's Kim Fowley spitting venom at the Dils ("two shit-assed rich-kid Marxist clown brothers"), and the Dils spitting back (Fowley was "repulsive and only on the punk scene to get laid"); there's Bibbe Hansen reminiscing about dragging a seven-year-old 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 is Devo hymning the genius of the unrecorded Screamers ("It's almost as if what they were after was like 'Firestarter' by Prodigy, but this was the summer of '77"); 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 straight to the Police, so the avant-sleaze of the L.A. scene climaxed with Belinda and the Go-Go's on the cover of Rolling Stone. No surprise that the naive debauchery and nihilistic posturing of the original Masque scene spewed up its share of eyes-on-the-prize sellouts. Heck, what scene-ster 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's The Decline of Western Civilization 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 '80s 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.

Barney Hoskyns is the author of Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles.

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