7/25/2023 0 Comments Devil daggers crashes on opening![]() ![]() "We convinced about half the kids that I was God and Georg was Jesus," Beahm said in one interview, "this one girl almost had a nervous breakdown." The duo were eventually expelled for initiating their own cult within the cult. “Meanwhile, we were taking tons of acid and acting up like wannabe rock stars.” “The teachers were attempting to brainwash us, while teaching us brainwashing techniques,” Ruthenberg recalled in Lexicon Devil, Brendan Mullen's involving oral history of The Germs' part in the LA punk scene. They identified with the killers inspiring them to bring their own brand of terror to the high school by roaming the hallways with X's scrawled on their foreheads with magic marker (in the vein of Manson Family members). Could rock'n'roll, he wondered, be used to program and control people just like religion?īeahm and Ruthenberg were also obsessed with The Family, Ed Sanders' largely fictional account of the Manson Family murders. Although utterly disinterested in learning during his time at IPS, Beahm became obsessed with the idea of using words to manipulate others, initially drawn to the connections between the Scientology mumbo-jumbo with the discombobulated cut-up phraseology he heard on his favourite album, David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. Language was used as a means to influence potential followers in subtle ways, implanting a strangulated grammar and lingo specific to members of the cult. ![]() Back then they were just two teenage tearaways from west LA who met through a mutual speed dealer and attended Santa Monica's University High.Īt the University, both Beahm and Ruthenberg were enrolled on the Innovative Program School (IPS), where the curriculum focused on understanding the psychology and training techniques of Scientology. Beahm would later rechristen himself as Darby Crash, while Ruthenberg styled himself as guitarist Pat Smear. The Germs started out as nothing more than a name scrawled on a ragged, self-made t-shirt worn by buck-toothed Bowie freak Jan Paul Beahm and his rangy mixed-blood sidekick Georg Ruthenberg. His was a vision of chaos that would never come to pass but left in its wake a legacy of destruction and one fiery punk classic, the Germs' 1979 Joan Jett-produced album, G.I. Darby Crash presided over the birth of the LA punk scene in 1977 and signalled its demise with his own self-inflicted death three years later. He was Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious rolled into one, a befuddled punk prophet with a brilliant mind. ![]()
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