A few streets of Los Angeles beachfront produced a scene in which skateboarding, hardcore, local gang affiliation and metal were not adjacent activities but one activity with several names, and the aesthetic that came out of it is still visible forty years later.
The place
Venice in the late 1970s and early 1980s was not the place it is now. It was cheap, run down and had a significant gang presence, and it had the empty swimming pools and the concrete that had already produced the Dogtown skateboarders.
The same teenagers skated, went to hardcore shows and were affiliated with local crews, and the overlap was total rather than partial. That is unusual: in most cities these were separate populations who occasionally met.
Suicidal Tendencies
The band that came out of it, and one of the strangest success stories in either genre. The 1983 debut is hardcore, fast and largely unpolished, and "Institutionalized" got onto MTV, which for a hardcore record in 1983 was close to impossible.
The reputation arrived with it. The band spent years being banned from venues on the strength of an association with gang violence that was partly real, partly exaggerated by the press and partly manufactured by the band, and it made them the most notorious act in Los Angeles hardcore.
By the end of the decade they had a virtuoso guitarist in Rocky George, a bass player in Robert Trujillo who would end up in Metallica, and a sound that was thrash metal in everything but self description.
No Mercy and Beowulf
No Mercy was Mike Muir's other band, on the label Suicidal ran, and it is heavier and more straightforwardly thrash than the parent group. Beowulf came from the same circle and made records that are hard to find and worth finding.
Excel are the other essential Venice band and are covered separately, and they are arguably the best of the lot.
| Band | Record | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suicidal Tendencies | Suicidal Tendencies | 1983 | Hardcore on television |
| Suicidal Tendencies | Join the Army | 1987 | The transition, in real time |
| Excel | Split Image | 1987 | The best Venice record |
| No Mercy | Widespread Bloodshed | 1987 | Muir's heavier project |
| Beowulf | Beowulf | 1986 | Hard to find, worth finding |
The aesthetic
Venice produced a look as distinctive as its sound, and it has outlasted the music by some distance.
The bandana worn low over the eyes, the flannel shirt, the long shorts, the high tops and the specific lettering style that Suicidal used on everything: all of that came out of these streets, and all of it is still in circulation through skate and streetwear brands that have no idea where it originated.
That is a substantial cultural export from a few blocks of a run down beach town, and it happened entirely without anybody planning it.
What Venice proved
That the crossover trade did not have to be a negotiation between two scenes, because in some places there was only ever one scene.
New York's version of the exchange involved two audiences discovering they liked each other. Venice never had two audiences. The kids who skated were the kids at the hardcore show were the kids who bought the Slayer record, and the music that came out reflects that: it does not sound like a compromise between genres because nobody involved experienced them as separate.
The technical question of where hardcore ends and thrash begins is dealt with in Hardcore vs Thrash, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
The label
Suicidal Records, run by Mike Muir, is a small part of this story that explains how the scene documented itself.
A band with a foothold starting a label to release the bands around it is the oldest mechanism in this history: Cogumelo in Belo Horizonte, Metal Blade in Los Angeles, No Core in North Carolina. Venice got its version, and No Mercy and several others exist on record because of it.
Without that, a scene this local leaves nothing behind except recollections, and half of what this article describes would be undocumented.
The Trujillo line
One connection worth following, because it links this beach town to the largest band in the genre.
Robert Trujillo played bass in Suicidal Tendencies through their heaviest period, then in Infectious Grooves, then with Ozzy Osbourne, and joined Metallica in 2003. A musician who came out of the Venice hardcore and skate scene has now spent two decades in the band that started the whole thing in a Los Angeles garage twenty miles away.
Rocky George, Suicidal's guitarist through the same period, later played in Fishbone. The Venice players scattered into places nobody would have predicted, which is a fair description of what happened to the scene itself.
Where to start
With Join the Army rather than the debut, because it is the record where the transition is happening in real time and it is the most representative thing Venice produced. Then Excel's Split Image, which is the best record from the scene by some distance.
Then, if the appetite holds, No Mercy and Beowulf, both of which are harder to find and neither of which will disappoint anybody who got that far.
What Venice was not
Worth saying plainly. The gang association was real in part and was also amplified enormously by a press that wanted a story and by a band who did not object to the reputation. Venues banned Suicidal Tendencies on the strength of reporting rather than of incidents.
The consequence was a self fulfilling one: a band unable to play in Los Angeles built its audience elsewhere, and the notoriety became the most widely known thing about a scene whose actual output was records.
The final thing Venice produced is harder to point at and probably the most durable: a demonstration that a scene does not need an industry, a press or a venue circuit if it has a neighbourhood. Everything described above happened inside a few streets, among people who saw each other every day, and it generated a band with a television hit, a label, a visual language that outlived the music and a bass player who ended up in Metallica. Almost none of that was planned and none of it required anybody's permission.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Accounts of the band's reputation and venue bans follow contemporary reporting and the members' published recollections.
