Fear: the punks that John Belushi inadvertently got banned from TV
In the 1981 American punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilisation, LA punk band Fear spent half their set baiting and goading the braying crowd with a slew of unrelenting abuse, gleefully spitting homophobic and sexist slurs to a confrontational audience, throwing F-bombs and giving the finger back. Burning through a blistering set including ‘Beef Bologna’ and ‘I Don’t Care About You’, at one point, a young girl takes a break from slam-dancing to take a swing at frontman Lee Ving directly, Ving having no compunction with throwing her to the ground and his fist connecting with her face with shocking force.
“Fear always insulted people to piss them off. But I had never seen (singer Lee Ving) punch out a chick before, and that was kind of brutal. Today, I think Lee kind of regrets it a bit,” the documentary director Penelope Spheeris told Rolling Stone in 2015.
She added: “I know that he has changed his attitude on a lot of subjects. My daughter, Anna, still goes to these shows and tells me about how some guy will jump up onstage and do a Hitler ‘Sieg Heil’ thing — and Lee will stop the show and get him the hell out of there. So with age comes wisdom, I suppose.”
Ving was always an agent of chaos. Fear’s founding and constant member, their early albums The Record and More Beer are replete with cartoonish provocation, proactively seeking to offend liberal sensibilities with tracks like ‘Fresh Flesh’ or ‘The Trouble With Woman Today (The Mouth Don’t Stop)’. The pointless nihilism of Fear’s heydey endeared them to a sub-section of punk which didn’t care for thinking about much at all and was contemptuous of the left’s encroachment on the scene, the many comments on any of Fear’s YouTube videos filled with reactionary nostalgia for their trollish theatre.
Just like swastika armbands were always dumb, Fear’s beer-soaked misogyny wasn’t clever or impressive, and the charitable justification that it was all some sort of arch-subversive performance often deployed by their fans doesn’t wash when viewing The Decline of Western Civilisation‘s abuse. Artists are allowed to grow, and if Steve Albini is applauded for his Twitter mea culpa, then Ving’s efforts to route out Sieg Heiling idiots from his shows are to be commended.
Initially a rhythm and blues guitarist before discovering punk in his mid-20s, it was the crowd’s reaction to punk rather than the amateurish musicianship which caught his attention, influencing Fear’s audience incitement for effect. “People called us musos,” Ving told Louder in 2016. “But I welcomed that; I took it as a compliment. If they didn’t like music, then let them go and see professional wrestling or something!”
Routinely playing Whiskey a Go Go and numerous other LA clubs, by the early 1980s, Fear had amassed a dedicated following. One significant fan of Fear’s antagonistic affrontery was Saturday Night Live star John Belushi. Successfully convincing the production team to feature Fear for their 1981 Halloween special, Fear tore through a typically combative set, which triggered chaos on the set, Belushi having bussed in loads of genuine punks from DC, including Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye.
Press hysteria inevitably ensued, with the New York Post alleging $200,000 worth of damage had been caused to the SNL studio, across supposed damage to the green room, viewing too, and multiple high-end cameras. Ving downplayed the purported damage, telling the LA Times in 1992: “Some piece of equipment worth 50 bucks got broken. Then someone from the audience said a four-letter word over the microphone that they couldn’t bleep out. We didn’t have anything to do with that. We were just trying to give a good performance. I guess it was a historical event.” The incident resulted in their being banned from SNL but afforded Fear a legendary piece of punk lore.
