How Los Angeles punks dealt with neo Nazis in their midst

Robert Purcell, Los Angeles Magazine -Edward Colver, a prolific photographer of the punk and hardcore scenes, says that the willingness of punks of the era to speak up about injustice is something today’s society could learn from.

“There’s a lot we could learn from that period today. That probably won’t happen though,” Colver says. “You had a generation who grew up in the Cold War era, which caused a lot of nihilism. We thought the world was going to end at any moment, so we lived for today. And people weren’t going to ignore someone fucking up the scene they were in.”

There may have been a lot of angry kids in L.A.’s punk scene, but they knew how to channel their anger. Anti-authoritarianism was always at the root of the punk ethos.

“We might have just been kids back in the day, but we were kids who grew up in Los Angeles and realized something,” Spacone says. “The man behind the glass, the man pulling the strings? He doesn’t care about race. He cares about [socio-economic] class, and class knows no color. We need to realize that today: Don’t fight each other, fight the top. Fight those in power.”