On Sunday, Oct. 19, 2014, I sat down with Alice Bag and Jimmy Alvarado for a talk at Vroman’s Hastings Ranch.
Alice and Jimmy are lifers—two articulate, engaged punk musicians with mutual friends—but they had never talked with one another at length. I wanted to change that, so we had a public talk and recorded it. This podcast is a live recording of that event, with audience Q and A at the end.
This talk was inspired by Alice approaching Razorcake about conducting a roundtable article on the first wave of punk in L.A. She interviewed ten people who were “in the room” at the very beginning because the predominant story told by larger outlets and “official histories” were wrong, harmful, and counter to what actually happened. The article is titled “We Were There” and is available here.
–Todd Taylor (Razorcake co-founder, editor-in-chief)
Special thanks go out to Ashley Ravelo for reaching out to Razorcake and being a liaison.
Short, incomplete bios:
Alice Bag – first generation L.A. punk rocker and an icon – The Bags, Castration Squad, Las Tres, Cambridge Apostles, Cholita!, She Riffs, Stay At Home Bomb, author of Violence Girl.
Jimmy Alvarado – second generation, ELA punk rocker – Butt Acne, Black Jax, Ollin, Plain Agony, Our Band Sucks. He’s reviewed well over five thousand records for Razorcake and has been chronicling ELA bands for the past fifteen years, amassing well over 600 pages of oral histories.