For many people, early LA punk rock was the stuff of movies- the climactic chaotic 'Rock Fight' in Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke", The first "Decline of Western Civilization' film, "Suburbia". Certainly not a glossy Hollywood fairy tale, but almost too cartoonishly violent and nihilistic to be real. Oh, but it was tragically real, motherfucker, and as that blue circle on black record in your dusty collection can attest to, the Germs were the epicenter of it all, the louder, meaner, faster, illegitimate sons of punk's dark prince, Iggy Stooge, the architects of rock and roll's imminent demise in an ugly cultural landscape rife with angry youth looking for a non-nuclear answer for their doomed existences. The Germ's singer and founder Darby Crash was that era's very own anti-christ Superstar, and Lexicon Devil is his strange and terrible story.

Of course, you already know what happens at the end- after almost single-handedly kick-starting LA punk rock in the late 70's, Darby Crash succumbed to his own manifest destiny in 1981 and killed himself with a lethal dose of heroin at the tender age of 22, just like he and David Bowie had planned on. But the real story of how he got to that awful state of premeditated suicide and where he came from has previously been the stuff of myth and mystery- personally, I had always heard that he died on his way to the stage, stabbed by a jealous girlfriend- and "Lexicon Devil" does a fantastic job of de-bunking all those ever spiraling rumors, and gets as close to the true story of the Germs as a bunch of aging, drug-fried punk rockers possibly can. Written much like that other seminal early punk tome "Please Kill Me", LD is an oral history, consisting of edited interviews with the surviving members of the band and the early Cali-punk scene, presented in chronological order, from the earliest Germs incarnation as 'T-shirt fantasy band' Sophistifuck & The Revlon Spam Queens, fueled by Bowie and Scientology and wild musical experimentation, to accidentally creating the ongoing tragedy that is hardcore punk a few years later.

Early LA punk was pretty much an ungodly racket practiced by freaked-out ex-glam rockers, and Darby's outfit was one of the harshest, an abrasive sort of thrash rock filled with seething rage and torment, the first of it's kind, all masterminded by a closeted young homosexual with messianic complex. With Pat Smear as his constant teenage companion, Darby went from bright but distracted student in a post-hippie experimental high school to drug ripping psycho baiting riot squads in record time. That's the most compelling part of "Lexicon Devil"- the overwhelming aura of sleaze that permeated that whole scene. The perils of rock and roll decadence championed by Motley Crue and Guns N' Roses a few years later were nothing, child's play, in comparison to the depths that the Germs plunged on their way to a brief flash of fame and lasting notoriety. From living with creepy pedophiles that hooked 14 year old boys onto smack so that they could keep them as somnambulant sex slaves to routinely ripping his chest open at early shows, Darby did his best to live up to the term 'punk' in every possible sense. LD doesn't candy-coat his evil ways at all, as both friends and enemies discuss his penchant for emotional violence, his manipulative mind games, his self-destructive habits both medicinal and rock and roll dangerous, his tragically confused sexuality, and his ultimate will to die young. Along the way, many oft-asked question are answered - The (GI) stands for "Germs, Incognito", Darby stole the mohawk from Adam Ant, Joan Jett spent more time sleeping on the couch than she did producing the Germs album... you name it, and someone in this shooting gallery of ex-punks is willing to tell the terrible true tale. Of all the participants, surprisingly Pat Smear, usually prone to avoiding a straight answer in interviews, provides most of the narration, and is both honest and candid throughout. Conversely, the seemingly endless array of wounded women that flowed in and out of Darby's life, enabling both his drug addiction and anti-social behavior, come off as a bunch of lying and scheming conspirators, contradicting one another and over-inflating their roles in the rock action as it unfurled. Everyone's at least entertaining though, and "Lexicon Devil" is a mesmerizing glimpse into one of rock and roll's most compelling super-villains.