EMP|SFM Oral History Videos

Category: American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music

Video Title: Bringing Punk From West to East LA

Watch Video: HI | LO

Who: Willie Herron of Los Illegals and Teresa Covarrubias of The Brat talk about the difficulty of bringing their bands into the West LA punk scene.

Read Transcript:

Willie Heron: When I actually put Los Illegals together, we were attempting to tap into performing in the West Side, performing in Hollywood, and we had a problem of getting booked, just because we weren't well known when we first got together, and also it seemed that we were stereotyped, which we kind of expected that we would be stereotyped because of the name of the band.

We decided with Sister Karen, who was at the time running Self Help Graphics, to have every other Thursday, to have a local concert and to bring in all the local teens and all the local bands to have their own venue.

Teresa Covarrubias: We started playing a lot of gigs on the East Side. And I remember it was really almost impossible for us to get any shows on the West Side, to play any of these clubs on the West Side. And I don't want to say that it was racist or anything but it might just be like every, I mean, every scene has a clique.

You know, there becomes like these cliques of people and they only kin-, I mean they see each others' shows. And I guess within the East L.A. scene, too, it was like a clique of bands from the East Side. But it really wasn't until we played a gig and I think Exene and John Doe came down to see a gig that we did in City Terrace, in like a backyard party type of thing.

And they really dug the band and it was really because they liked the band then all of a sudden, "Oh well if, uh, you know, John Doe and Exene like 'em, well". You know what I mean? It was kind of sad, you know, like it had to, we had to get our foot in through somebody that was already, you know, a part of that scene.

So it had already closed up to that point that unless you knew somebody that could get you in, you were not, people didn't really want to know.