LAYTONVILLE-If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be a Vietnamese or Central American peasant, you could try spending a little time up here in the northern California mountains during the marijuana harvest season. Almost daily low-flying planes and helicopters come screaming over the horizon, and though they haven't started machine-gunning or napalming us (yet), it's a pretty terifying experience, even if you're not one of the farmers who the CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) terorists have targeted for extinction.
Now some of the more hardcore straight-edgers out there might say "so what, who cares about stupid dope growers, anyway?" Well, it's my opinion that no matter what you think about drugs, marijuana is not the real issue; freedom is what's at stake here. The anti-marijuana pogrom is really just part of a larger push to rid the hills of counterculture and alternative-type people and turn our land into merely another colonial preserve to feed the insatiable greed of Industiralized Amerika, Inc. We who live here, and who through great struggle and sacrifice have created for ourselves a way of life that no longer seems possible in most of this country, are regarded as an annoying obstacle standing in the way of "progress", the same position native peoples throughout the third world are constantly finding themselves in . Will the Amerikan governemnt go so far as to wage all-out warfare against ints own citizens? The feeling around here is that it's headed in that direction.
But there's more to the "Emerald Triangle" (the federal government's Vietnamstyle
nickname for our region) than hippies and marijuana. People come here from all over the world, and all kinds of artists and musicians have taken up residence in the mountains. But maybe because we're so remote from such so-called cultural centers as San Francisco and Los Angeles, or becasue so many hippies have a deep, built-in prejudice against anything originating after, say, 1969, punk has yet to make much of an impact here in the Redwood Empire (the old name for the Emerald Triangle).
That's finally starting to change, or at least we hope so . There are now two bands playing hardcore and/or thrash, both of which feature a good deal of political and topical material, and both of which carry on at least some parts of the spirit of the 60s while forging ahead with the music of the 80s. SHOT IN THE DARK come from Garberville, a somewhat larger town 40 miles north of here that is famous all over the world for being the center of the marijuana growing industry. But it also has a small but growing punk scene, and at a recent SHOT IN THE DARK show, there were about 30 thrashers (believe me, that's slot for around here) and about 50-75 interested spectators.
My band, THE LOOKOUTS, has a harder time of it; here in Laytonville, which is not really a town so much as an unsightly collection of gas stations and a couple of stores, there is no punk scene except for what we've been able to create. We've played mostly for hippie audiences so far, with real mixed results; our best show by far was stopped in the middle by some enormous pony-tailed bearded dude who barged up on stage and pulled the plug. I guess we weren't mellow enough.
But alot of hippie-types like us, too, especially the way we thrash up some 60s material like DYLAN, STONES, and VELVET UNDERGROUND. Also, our drummer and bassist go to elementary school and high school, and they've been playing our tape and making some fans for us among the younger, more open-minded crowd. SHOT IN THE DARK's main group of fans seems to range in age from about 8 to 20, though I met a woman at their show who was 40, and she loved them.. And the day after the LOOKOUTS got chased off stage, I got a letter from a woman of the same age who saw the show and said it was the first time she had ever heard any punk rock and it made her feel great! So I know we can reach people if we keep trying, and besides, judging from my last few trips to San Francisco, our scene up here isn't really that much more pathetic than what's left of that once great scene down there.
Anyhow, you can write to SHOT IN THE DARK, c/o Krissy (I'm not sure that's how she spells it, but she'll get it anyway), PO Box 233, Redway, CA 95560 and to THE LOOKOUTS at PO Box 1000, Laytonville, CA 95454 (send $4 or $2 plus a blank 46-minute cassette if you's like a copy of our tape) . I also publish a monthly zine which you can have a copy of if you send me a 22¢ stamp.