Penelope Houston remembers the 1977 punk explosion very well. As the nineteen-year old lead singer of the Avengers in San Francisco, Houston was part of the first wave -- along with the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Richard Hell and whomever else you consider seminal. Their mission, she says, was nothing less than to change the face of popular music -- "Because the face of popular music was Journey."
At the height of their career, in 1979, the Avengers opened for the Sex Pistols in what would be the Pistols' last gig. Many soon-to-be-legendary groups, like the Go-Go's, X and the Dead Kennedys, opened for the Avengers too. And yet the band never became a household name. Several factors worked against them: They never made it to the East Coast, they disbanded by 1979, and they released just two albums -- both of which were discontinued.
Houston assumed she would leave her punk past behind and went on to establish a solo career, largely as a folky/acoustic singer. "I thought the band was pretty well represented by that one album [on the CD Presents label]," she says. "But then it went out of print. And I had a lot of wrangling with that label. And I was pretty frustrated. So when people used to mention the Avengers, it just made me mad."
It could have ended there. But now, surprisingly, Houston's releasing a new Avengers CD, Died for Your Sins (Lookout!, Feb. 23), which compiles live and unreleased recordings with three newly re-recorded tracks by the ScAvengers [original Avengers Houston and guitarist Greg Ingram, plus bassist Joel Reader (Mr. T Experience) and drummer Danny Panic (Screeching Weasel)].
Why this album and why now? Houston makes it sound like a fluke, a chain of events that piqued her interest in digging out old Avengers songs. But really, she's been slowly inching back to a louder, faster sound. Her acoustic band was becoming increasingly electric, she had been hanging out with members of bands in the Lookout posse, and she'd been inspired by recent work with Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong.
"When I was working on my Penelope Houston album," she explains, "Howie Klein, the president of Reprise, suggested I work with Billie Joe. So we ended up writing one song together and recording ['The Angel and the Jerk'], 'Corpus Christi,' and one of my songs, called 'New Day.' He's the one who introduced me to Danny and Joel. At that point, as a side project, it was a cool thing to do and I really enjoyed singing hard and getting back to my roots. That opened my eyes to doing that kind of thing again."
In addition to turning her thoughts back to the Avengers and sparking Died for Your Sins, Houston's work with Billie Joe also inspired her to turn up the voltage on her forthcoming solo album, Tongue (March 23). "The playing experience I had with Billie Joe happened two years ago," she says, "and it made me realize that I could do that, and it's been incorporated into my new album, although the music isn't quite punk or anything like that."
The story reverberates with irony: Punk pioneer inspires a generation of bands that ultimately spawns Green Day, whose lead singer returns the favor by re-inspiring the punk pioneer. But, as Houston notes, times sure have changed. "There's about 100 times more clubs now," she says. "And there's 100 times more bands. I don't think people can even imagine what it was like twenty-two years ago. The kinds of bands that were popular were huge arena bands: Kansas and UFO and Donna Summer. There was no new music, no music for kids. Nowhere to go. Nothing going on. No college radio stations. There was no alternative music. There were bar bands, and there were some garage rock bands, but basically the whole idea of being a shitty new band and playing originals was totally unheard of. If you were a shitty new band, and you lived in the suburbs, you played Top 40. Nobody was interested in hearing what some teenagers or twentysomethings had to play."
With the release of the Avengers' Died for Your Sins, Houston sure hopes someone will want to hear what teens had to play -- even twenty-two years later.
JAMES OLIVER CURY
(February 11, 1999)