The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Avenging the Past
May 1999
The Avengers were San Francisco's best punk band, in moments the best in the republic: fabÂulous songs, a snarling, confrontational presence, a primitive sound that could go anywhere. Led by Penelope Houston, a teenage screamer with a blonde crew cut, they broke up two decades ago; when a reconstituted version of the group, the Scavengers, played shows in February to celebrate the release of the Avengers' Died for Your Sins (Lookout!), a collection of mostly 1977-79 tapes ("field recordings," Houston calls them), it was hard to know what you were looking at.
Since the '70s Houston has pursued a career as a solo folksinger; this night her long hair was dyed blue and she was the picture of happiness. Avengers guiÂtarist Greg Ingraham has a handsome, ordinary Midwestern face; he was taciÂturn, resolute, as if thinking back on a defeat only he remembered. Original bassist James Wilsey, later responsible for the ghost-riders-in-the-sky guitar on Chris Isaac's "You Owe Me Some Kind of Love," * was replaced by Joel Reader of the Mr. T Experience; Danny Panic of ScreechÂing Weasel sat in for original drummer Danny Furious. Despite the fact that Reader is young enough to be Houston and Ingraham's son, the four played like a true band—like the true band the ScavÂengers are on Died for Your Sins, on three tracks taking up unrecorded Avengers songs and nailing them shut.
The Scavengers opened with the Avengers' "Teenage Rebel." Houston is forty-one, and at first she seemed slightÂly embarrassed. As the song went on you could see a teenage rebel step right out of her, and from that point on the woman and her double shared the stage. Soon enough, with "Car Crash," the Avengers' greatest song—its gory imÂagery and girl-group ululations standing in for a chorus, the actual feeling of death and metal and blood orchestrated by a cool "ohÂah-ah-oh-oh"—a full sense of the adventure and danger you can feel on Died for Your Sins came through: black humor with the lights out.
On the record, that's Houston berating a crowd with such conviction that two decades collapse into the present like a cut in a film; it's the wild fervor of "Fuck You," the two words—pretty much the comÂplete lyric—running out in front of the singer like a creep she can't catch. It's the atmosphere of sweat, nervousness, boredom, ritualized hate, and most of all anticipation you can feel in the West Coast clubs where the live recordings were made—the same bad weather the boys in the Scavengers hail down on Houston for the title refrain of "Crazy Homicide," which they recorded just months ago.
"This next song is dedicated to all our friends who are hanging outside because they can't get inside here, 'cause they're under twenty-one—just like me," Houston says on Died for Your Sins. It's 1978, and it's as if her youth has just struck her as something that has already passed. The same feeling is there twenty years later in another of the Scavengers' numbers, "The End of the World." Doomy, deterÂmined, and unashamedly corny—all melodrama—the tune starts out as a near-rewrite of "The Shape of Things to Come," a plainly fake but nevertheless stirring teens-rule manifesto performed by the fictional band Max Frost and the Troopers in the 1968 film Wild in the Streets (you can hear it on the recent Nuggets box set). But then you begin to get the feeling that, not going back twenty years but bringing the last twenty years toward her like wind, Houston is not joking. Way back in her punk days, the notion of the end of the world was real, and appealing, and in some part of her it still is—the part that on her new solo album, Tongue (Reprise), makes "Scum" into something the forty-four-year-old homicide cop heroine of Martin Amis's novel Night Train would play all night. The version of "Car Crash" on Died for Your Sins—recorded in 1978 at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, the Avengers' home stage—ups the ante; it very nearly pays off the album title. The momentum of the performance is abstracted from the musicians; the song seems to have a will of its own, and its will is not to stop, for anything. If the musicians don't like it they can get out of the way. The noise that comes up sounds like Bill Pullman's face looks as it breaks up in the last shots of Lost Highway; he can't stop either.
Died for Your Sins is not the only Avengers album; the out-of-print Avengers appeared in 1983, marking the disappearance of an out-of-action band. At the time it was sobering—to hear what sounded like a bomb going off after the war had been all but forgotten. Along with the Avengers' queerly mystical, dreamlike political anthems—"We Are the One," "The Amerikan in Me," "Open Your Eyes," all of which can be found as live performances on the new record—the LP included a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black."
It must have seemed like a perfect choice to the band, an exact conceptual match: dark, brooding, and furious (the drummer's last name, after all). In fact the song completely defeated them. Stuck dead in the middle of a pure punk reperÂtoire, it revealed itself as pure antipunk. The ornamented melody forced the Avengers into a cheesy rhythmic slide, away from their own instincts; the band's pursuit of the song took them into another dimension, and for as long as they chased it their entire attack, their whole view of the world, was erased.
This weird little drama was a backward proof of just how complete—as music, as a form of aesÂthetics, a style of performance, a way of life, a view of the world—real punk was, and the Avengers were real punk. They had learned a language, where nearly everything that went into a song was broken down and made up again from as close to nothing as anyone could get, and for a long moment it seemed as if this new language could say everything—or anyÂthing worth saying. Try to speak another language, and you may find you can't talk at all.
*Wilsey died in 2018 at 61. Michael Goldberg’s biography Wicked Game is a hard story well told. Houston continues to tour with the Avengers. When I last saw them, at a small club in Minneapolis, she wore a ‘Punk Rock Sewing Circle’ t-shirt and made every song take place in the present.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, May 1999
Some years ago, our daughter (born January 15, 1978, relevance forthcoming) was talking about someone she had met recently that she thought I might have heard of. Our daughter thought this woman might have been a punk rocker once upon a time. Her name was Penelope. "Penelope Houston?", I asked. Yes, that's it. Well, I said, the next time you see Penelope, tell her that your father saw her at Winterland the night before our daughter was born, opening for the Sex Pistols. Ah, the pre-cellphone days ... between each act, I would go to a pay phone, call my wife, and see if she'd gone into labor. She held out until the next day.