the early
eighties
L.A. new wave
& punk scene

Compiled
and annotated
by Number 36

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THE STORY BEHIND THE ARTICLES

In the early eighties, young people in Los Angeles were going to makeshift clubs in droves to see new up and coming bands. Live new music, not DJs, was what they wanted to hear. These writings provide a sketchy look at the underground club scene in Los Angeles during the time that bands like X, The Go-Go's, The Minutemen, Red Wedding, Missing Persons and Wall of Voodoo came into the public consciousness.

This unusual 'new music' column, co-written by Billy Eye and Judy Zee, was buried in the pages of a gay entertainment magazine called Data-Boy, which had a decades long publishing history in West Hollywood. The magazine was circulated free through the gay bars and clubs all over Southern California and San Francisco; these articles appeared bi-weekly for two years (and then very irregularly) beginning in October of 1980 and read like a diary of a time now long gone.

Typically, Billy Eye wrote the first half of the articles, then Judy Zee followed up with her comings and goings. Their world revolved around small, dark dives like The Brave Dog and Al's Bar downtown, in floating clubs like The Veil and in established Hollywood icons like The Whisky, The Starwood, The Roxy and The Odyssey. This was truly a golden age of live music in LA.

The emerging Downtown/East LA music scene was highlighted frequently in Billy Eye's articles, where he covered the growing punk underground club happenings in and around the downtown Los Angeles area - with pivotal groups like Nervous Gender, Los Illegals, 45 Grave, Red Wedding, Kommunity Fk, X, The Brat, The Fibinacci's, The Minutemen getting the most coverage.

Judy Zee reviewed performances by a number of artists including John Hiatt, John Cale and David Bowie in addition to the fringe of known musical styles that she was exploring on the west side of LA in clubs like Blackies and Club 88. Judy was especially fond of girl groups and took time to share her thoughts about life in general in early-eighties LA.

Judy Zee (real name Judy Zanders) was a friend of mine, she lived in Venice and was a typesetter for Data-Boy Magazine.

Judy looked to all the world like the last hippie in So Cal, with her waist length blond hair, loose fitting dresses and strong California accent. With a keen eclectic musical taste and a penchant for the bizarre, Judy often teamed up with ascerbic Venice artist/scenester Punkasso in some of her 1981 articles. The two rarely agreed with one another and this made for some entertaininig, if mildly confusing, reading. Judy Zee was trying to push the format - to her, that was what the era was all about.

I lost touch with Judy in 1984 but remember seeing a blurb in the LA Weekly in 1986 with Judy Zee's name on it. It was in a regular feature of the paper that listed a notable person's top ten favorite albums and, to my surprise, her picks were all heavy metal. Surprising to me, because in her columns, she never passed up an opportunity to savage the heavy metal poseurs of the early-eighties and referred to a short but bittersweet relationship with Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue (then called London).

Judy Zee stopped writing her portion of the column in late-1981 while Billy Eye continued to contribute only very sporadically over the next few years; that's because they both left the employ of Data-Boy magazine in 1981. Billy Eye is better known as Billy Ingram.

I remember attending a few of the same parties and club dates that are written about here. Those were great times, fond memories. I particularly enjoyed reading about the rise up through the clubs of two LA bands - one that made it (Missing Persons) and one that didn't (Red Wedding).

We would like to include updates on what the musicians and artists mentioned here are up to today, so if anyone knows the whereabouts of any of the people written about here please E-mail us.

This website was first created in 1994, updated in 2006.

CONTACT BILLY EYE