User:IllaZilla/Darby Crash

Darby Crash
Birth name	Jan Paul Beahm
Also known as	Bobby Pyn
Born	(1958-09-26)September 26, 1958 Los Angeles, California
Died	December 7, 1980(1980-12-07) (aged 22) Los Angeles, California
Genres	Punk rock
Occupation(s)	Singer, songwriter
Years active	1977–1980
Labels	What?, Slash

Jan Paul Beahm (September 26, 1958 – December 7, 1980), known primarily by the pseudonym Darby Crash, was an American punk rock singer and songwriter who was the the founder and singer of the Germs from 1977 to 1980. The Germs' 1977 debut single "Forming" is regarded as the first record to emerge from the Los Angeles punk rock scene, and was followed by the 1978 single "Lexicon Devil" and 1979 album (GI). Crash developed a reputation for his charisma, theatricality, unpredictable behavior, and socially critical lyrics, while struggling with an increasing drug habit and his burgeoning homosexuality. The Germs disbanded in early 1980 and Crash spent time in London, after which he returned to Los Angeles and fronted the short-lived Darby Crash Band. Following a final Germs show in December 1980, Crash committed suicide by intentionally overdosing on heroin.

Posthumously, Crash gained cult popularity as a legendary figure in the Los Angeles punk scene. The Germs, and Crash in particular, were featured in the 1981 documentary film The Decline of Western Civilization. His life and career were documented in the books We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (2001) and Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs (2002) and portrayed in the 2008 biographical film What We Do Is Secret. Actor Shane West, who played Crash in the film, replaced him in a re-formed Germs lineup that performed sporadically for a few years.

Early life and family (1958–73)

Beahm met Georg Ruthenberg, aka Pat Smear (pictured in 2008), in junior high, and the two became fast friends.

Jan Paul Beahm was born September 26, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, the fourth child of mother Faith Baker (neé Reynolds). His older half siblings Bobby and Christine Lucas were from his mother's previous marriage to picture tube manufacturer Brainard Lucas, while his older sister Faith Jr. was fathered by a second husband, Hal Beahm. According to friend and biographer Brendan Mullen, Paul (who generally went by his middle name) believed for most of his childhood that Hal Beahm was his biological father as well. Hal Beahm was allegedly an alcoholic and prone to violent outbursts, which led Faith Sr. to divorce him when Paul was still very young. Later, during an argument, one of Paul's siblings let slip that his biological father was actually a Swedish sailor named William Bjorklund, who had left Faith Sr. before Paul was born. In his teens and early twenties Paul would sometimes claim in interviews and to friends that his father was actor Dean Stockwell, star of the 1948 film The Boy with Green Hair, and kept a photograph of Stockwell from the film on his bedroom wall.

In 1964 Faith Sr. married her third husband, Bob Baker, described by Mullen as "a kindly man and the only stable male figure in [Paul's] life". The young Paul had invited Baker to come home with him and his mother after the two adults had been on a date, and at age six asked Baker to marry his mother and become his new father. While his mother and Faith Jr. both adopted Baker's surname, Paul kept the surname Beahm until inventing a pseudonym at age eighteen. The family moved from the Venice district to West Los Angeles, where he attended Brockton Avenue School. At around age six he was struck by a rock thrown by one of the neighborhood children, which chipped his left maxillary central incisor; for the rest of his life he bore a distinctive chip in his front tooth. He demonstrated an interest in religion at an early age, attending a local church on his own. In 1969 his half brother Bobby Lucas, who Paul idolized, was found dead in his station wagon in Venice at age 27; a recurrent drug addict, he had reputedly been murdered by a local drug dealer who had given him an intentional overdose of heroin. In 1972, when Paul was thirteen, Bob Baker died of a heart attack at age 39, leaving the widowed Faith Baker to care for Faith Jr. and Paul.

Following his elementary education Beahm attended Daniel Webster Junior High School, where he became friends with Georg Ruthenberg after the two were introduced to each other by a local amphetamine dealer. With other friends they began experimenting with drugs including marijuana and secobarbital. Beahm's musical tastes were influenced by his sister Faith, who had a Mexican boyfriend and hung out with a Mexican lowrider crowd; Beahm was primarily a fan of 1950s rock and roll and doo-wop, and owned singles by the funk bands Sly and the Family Stone and the Winstons and by soul singer Paul Davis. Ruthenberg was a fan of glitter, progressive, and hard rock acts including the New York Dolls, the Stooges, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Yes, particularly Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Cooper's School's Out. The two friends' musical tastes conflicted: Ruthenberg hated the 1950s rock and roll and 1960s pop that Beahm preferred, while Beahm despised Ruthenberg's rock music, calling the artists "queers" and the albums "fag records".

At one point Beahm and Ruthenberg stole some marijuana plants from a Mexican gang member, and the gang retaliated against Ruthenberg with beatings and death threats. He fled to a "Jesus freak" commune to live with his sister, living in Mendocino and Eureka for over two years and becoming a Christian. He kept in touch with Beahm, and on returning permanently to Los Angeles found that Beahm had become a fan of the rock music he had previously denounced, in particular the lyrics of David Bowie. "I was a Christian who wasn't allowed to like any rock music—it was 'of the world'", recalled Ruthenberg. "I was taught to think of it as the Devil's music. And then Paul was suddenly into it. I was like, 'What the fuck!' ... it seemed like he had kind of co-opted my old life. Now he was into all the bands I was into". The two argued over Ruthenberg's beliefs, and Ruthenberg later became an atheist.

High school years (1974–76)

Mainly my reputation started in 10th or 11th grade. I just dyed my hair blue and lost all my friends in one day. I said I wanted to see what it's like being the only black kid in a white school, and my God, nobody would talk to me or anything. But then there's always the few people that see something different after a while, and then after a while it got to be normal because I'd dye it different colors all the time. In the end they all did, too.

–Paul Beahm

After junior high school Beahm and Ruthenberg attended University High School where they were admitted to the "Innovative Program School" (IPS), a "school within a school" program heavily based on Scientology and Erhard Seminars Training (est). Beahm and Ruthenberg enrolled in IPS with the aim of rebelling against the program and its instructors. The curriculum involved meditation, self-hypnosis, transactional analysis, the study of rhetoric, and "Body-Mind" exercises incorporating yoga and tai chi. Several other future Los Angeles punk musicians were also students in IPS, including Paul Roessler, Kira Roessler, and Keith "Lucky" Lehrer, as well as future artist and illustrator Will Amato. Beahm was particularly interested in rhetoric and the power of words; Amato recalled that Beahm would analyze David Bowie's song lyrics, trying to determine why the music had such an effect on him and his friends. According to Paul Roessler, the IPS teachings were a major influence on Beahm's fascination with lexicon and wordsmithing.

During high school Beahm and Ruthenberg experimented heavily with LSD (acid). "Acid took two years off of my life", Beahm later commented, "I don't remember anything." Ruthenberg recalled that "We'd either walk from [Paul's] house to my house, or from my house to his house, and spend the night together on acid. Then we'd walk back to my house to get a blanket and walk to the school with no shoes on, frying on acid. We were rarely separated—and if we were, we were on the phone." Their drug use compounded with their rebellion against the IPS teachers: The students were allowed to form their own classes and grade themselves, so Beahm and Ruthenberg formed a "So-ing" class (a pun on "sewing") which involved them replying "So?" to anything that was said to them, and a "Fruit Eating" class in which they would walk to the local market to eat fruit. "We, of course, gave ourselves A's", recalled Ruthenberg. Some of Beahm's other acts of rebellion included dyeing his hair blue and changing the script for the morning announcement to include a false news item about the members of Led Zeppelin being killed in an airplane crash. "Teachers got mad", he later remarked, "You were allowed to say anything to a teacher you wanted and so we'd tell 'em to go to hell, kill yourself, we don't care. And the parents got upset because we went to this other school and caused trouble. And one of the teachers' sons was hanging around with us and we were taking acid, so he was pretty upset." Some of Beahm's LSD-influenced high school drawings and poetry had homoerotic overtones, hinting at his burgeouning homosexuality.

Beahm was an avid reader, immersing himself in works on philosophy, politics, and Scientology. Among the books he read during his high school years were Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. D. Laing's Knots and The Politics of Experience, Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Having read Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, he took his friends to a Scientology center to take a personality test; according to Paul Roessler, Ruthenberg scored zero on the test and was told he was "an utterly horrible person", while Beahm scored perfectly and was asked to teach at the center. Beahm became interested in Charles Manson, reading The Family by Ed Sanders and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and seeing the accompanying film, and he and Ruthenberg began carrying copies of Helter Skelter around school and drawing Xs on their foreheads in order to "freak out" the administration and other students.

David Bowie

Iggy Pop

Bowie and Pop were two of Beahm's musical idols.

Beahm's interest in David Bowie continued to deepen; Will Amato recalls that Beahm was "a fanatically dedicated student of Bowie. He looked at Ziggy Stardust as the Mein Kampf of pop ... Bowie was to Paul what the Beatles were to Manson." He created a Ziggy Stardust-styled persona for himself named Astrid, posting his Astrid-themed poetry around school and claiming to be "a child from the stars", and would dye his hair and paint his face in imitation of Bowie's album covers. He and Ruthenberg also became fans of Iggy Pop after discovering Raw Power by The Stooges at the nearby Music Odyssey record store, where Chris Ashford worked as a clerk. Beahm was particularly intrigued by the stories of Pop's wild stage performances—including smearing peanut butter on himself, cutting himself with glass, and extinguishing cigarettes on himself—and vowed to be even more extreme in his own performances. He began to build a small group of close friends and followers, including Michelle Bell (aka Gerber), Pleasant Gehman, and Hellin Killer.

Germs (1977–80)

Main article: Germs (band)

I'm Darby Crash
A social blast
Chaotic master

I'm Darby Crash
Your Mecca's gash
Prophetic stature

–Lyrics to "Circle One"

Darby Crash Band and death (1980)

Crash's grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City