The Germs
Forming/Sex Boy

1977: in England, the Sex Pistols phenomenon is booming, a band born from an idea of manager Malcolm McLaren and his wife Vivienne Westwood. In the same year, the first single of Los Angeles band Germs, "Forming/Sex Boy," is released, pure low-fidelity raw punk. The back cover warns that the record may cause ear cancer. Well, like many smokers who routinely buy cigarette packs with alarming "smoking causes lung cancer" warnings and don’t care and smoke anyway, I am about to listen to and enjoy this single.

"Forming" was recorded on a two-track in guitarist Pat Smear's garage and is a lo-fi where Bobby Pyn's (later known as Darby Crash) voice is on one channel and is louder than the instruments. An essential drum, three-chords-three of guitar, and as many notes played by the bass, a melodic and hoarse voice, unaware and reluctant: an explosive mix of raw and rudimentary punk rock, in a word, irresistible. In the final mumbled speech, Pyn slurs, "the drums are too slow, the bass is too fast", almost foreshadowing characteristics of some of his future songs.

"Sex Boy" is a live recording where the screams and whistles of the few people who made up the audience prevail, unaware they were attending a live show that would one day be deemed historic. The track already has no-wave atmospheres, two years ahead of the genre initiators, Lydia Lunch's Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. Features such as these dark peculiarities are especially noticeable in bassist Lorna Doom, now in the way she dresses, now in her minimalist playing style. "Sex Boy" hence begins with a slow rhythm section, the sound of a glass bottle shattering, a barely touched drum, and a dark and claustrophobic guitar that as usual doesn’t include obvious technicalities, but maybe it’s much better this way. Pyn sings in a truly rambling, intoxicated manner, as if he regrets doing it. Anyway, the result is exciting, true, genuine, just like the final enthusiasm of the sparse audience.

Bobby Pyn is a great character, representing the quintessence of punk, the missed legend overshadowed by a more attractive personality like Sid Vicious. However, Pyn didn’t impose being transgressive at all costs; he wasn’t at all, he simply did whatever the hell he wanted and liked. He wanted to change his name and he did, wanted to change his look and he did, wanted to die and he did, revealing himself as a perfect nonconformist. He took what he desired: he experimented on all fronts; sex (he was bisexual), drugs, but above all music. These "germinal" Germs, in fact, have nothing to do with the Germs of '79, the ones who would release the masterpiece (GI), to put it simply, the first true example of hardcore punk, precursor of the sound of Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, and others. But in my view, this single could already be considered a masterpiece, in its brevity and intensity, in its sonic richness, encapsulating many elements that would foreshadow the musical genres that dominated the '80s, the aforementioned hardcore and no-wave.

A single therefore of immense significance to fully understand the alternative scene of the Eighties, but also of the Nineties.