An Article by the Germs Manager.
In 1978, Darby Crash asked me to buy him
a beer. I told him to fuckhimself and the next thing I knew, I
was managing the Germs. I'd never had a conversation with Darby
before that point. It was like that with the Germs, you were
either in the car or you were at the side of the road throwing
stones at the car -- a lot of people really hated them. In a way,
that was understandable. I managed them from early '78 until
sometime in 1980 just before the band broke up, and no matter how
hard we tried, not once in that time did we have a live show come
off without some major disaster happening -- audience riots,
equipment breaking, limbs breaking, blood flowing, you name it.
Watching the Germs live, participants never knew what was going
to happen or where the pieces were going to fly. The Germs were a
lot like fractals, those impossibly beautiful geometric
representations of chaos -- gorgeous, hypnotic, broken,
intangible, charismatic, but always, always, chaotic. 
Things changed when "GI" came out.
People could hear songs, rather than distortion through duct
taped-together equipment and cheap p.a. systems. They were
shocked at the precocious literacy and sophistication of Darby's
lyrics. William Friedkin called and wanted to hire them to do
songs for his movie "Cruising". The legendary Jack
Nitzsche would produce. Friedkin pogoed around the studio when
they recorded. The sessions were awesome, the tape of the songs
that didn't go into the movie was lost somewhere in morass of
corporate mess. Fourteen years later, "GI" is still
available, never having gone out of print and "The Decline
of Western Civilization" is a midnight movie classic all
over the world. Three years ago, at a Gun Club show in North
England, a kid walked by me, the spitting image of Darby Crash,
down to to blue tail across his forehead and
the blue circle armband. Written on the back of his
jacket were the words: "The Germs Will Never Die". He
must have been about six the year Darby died. All I could do was
marvel -- 10 years down the road and 10,000 miles away, who would
have ever thought?
Nicole Panter
April 26, 1993
