WILD WILD WEST
The Cramps, The Germs, The Go-Go’s... no one captured punk rock in LA like Slash magazine house snapperMELANIE NISSEN. As a vibrant new book of her work from 1977 to 1980 underlines, the rules were there were no rules. “There was no one to say, ‘Don’t do that,’” she tells DANNY ECCLESTON.
IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A CAREER. Melanie Nissen already had a job – managing a bookshop in Palos Verdes – and a child, when she and her then boyfriend, Steve Samiof, decided to start a music magazine. But when it debuted, in May 1977, with The Damned’s Dave Vanian on the cover, Los Angeles did not know what had hit it. “Ever yone thought it was a monster magazine,” remembers Nissen, cheerfully. “Because Dave Vanian looked like a vampire, and we’d called it Slash.”
Nissen’s new book, Hard + Fast, chronicles the dawn of punk in LA, drawing together her photographs from the Slash archives and others previously unpublished. Energy pours off its pages as The Germs, X, The Bags, The Go-Go’s and more are captured on and off-stage – exuding a goofy innocence you don’t see in the documentation of the London or New York punk scenes.
“I think there was a camaraderie here,” says Nissen. “Just a mix of artists and bands and musicians and illustrators and ever ybody, a great coming together with all this freedom and no one to say, ‘Don’t do that,’ or, ‘That’s ugly.’”