‘Here lies Darby Crash’: How the Germs created most prophetically tragic song
Punk has always worn its chaos on its sleeve, standing as a furious collision of rebellion, art, and self-destruction, but behind the mohawks, leather jackets, and snarling riffs, the genre has been dogged by a long trail of tragedies, with lives cut short by addiction and violence or the relentless pressures of fame.
From Ian Curtis to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, there has always been a fragile line between brilliance and heartbreak in punk, and the Germs‘ Darby Crash was yet another victim who found himself on the wrong side of it.
In his early years, Crash was better known as Paul Beahm, and it’s fair to say the lad didn’t have the best start in life. In 1969, his older brother Bobby was found dead in a station wagon in Venice, LA, allegedly murdered by a heroin dealer who had deliberately given him a ‘hot shot’. Three years later, Paul suffered another devastating loss when his stepfather, Bob Baker, died suddenly of a heart attack at just 39. As the story goes, it was young Paul himself who invited the Baker to move in with him and his mother after he took her on a date, and it was also he who later encouraged him to propose to her, showing how deeply he was attached to the man.
The heartbreak didn’t stop there, as afterwards he learned that the man he had believed to be his biological father, Harold ‘Hal’ Beahm, who his mother had claimed left the family while Paul was a toddler, was not his father at all, but it was a Swedish sailor, William Björklund, whom he’d never meet.
By 1975, having dropped out of high school and carrying the weight of these losses, 17-year-old Beahm devised a plan which he thought would make him immortal. Inspired by the apocalyptic timeframe of his hero David Bowie’s anthem ‘Five Years’, the plan was audacious in its simplicity: form a band with his friends, spend a few years cultivating it into a cultishly outrageous live act, release one brilliant album, and then take his own life.
He adopted the name Darby Crash and set about carrying out his vision, at which he was successful from the outset, and his band, the Germs, became one of the most notorious punk acts on the West Coast, overseeing the birth of the LA punk scene in 1977. Their performances became increasingly heroin-fuelled, and their shows increasingly chaotic spectacles, such that by 1978, they were often being broken up by riot police and clubs in LA slowly began to slap their faces up on the banned list.
In 1979, the Germs released their only album, GI (Germs Incognito), peppered with producer Joan Jett’s magic touch, which was hailed as a brutal masterpiece, an “aural holocaust”, according to the LA Times, and remains to this day a searing punk classic. On track eight of 19, ‘Manimal’, Derby alluded to the feelings that had dogged him since childhood, ones of of always being out of step with life: “I came into this world like a puzzled panther / Waiting to be caged / But something stood in the way / I was never quite tamed / Evolution is a process too slow to save my soul / But I’ve got this creature on my back and it just won’t let go.”
On December 3rd, 1980, an oversold Starwood Hotel in West Hollywood hosted a final live show of the Germs. As Pat Smear recalled, Darby was very brusque in mentioning his five-year plan, but it seemed to have been taken with a pinch of salt: “Darby was very specific about how and when he was going to kill himself. When we were rehearsing for the reunion show, he said, ‘The only reason I’m doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with’. He’d said that so many times I just said, ‘Oh, right…’, and didn’t think about it any more.”
Yet as planned, on December 7th, 1980, Darby entered into a suicide pact with his then-girlfriend, Casey Cola, and together they lay in a back room and injected themselves with the $400 worth of heroin they had purchased with the last of their rent money; Darby died, but Cola survived. Shortly afterwards, rumours spread that he had lain in a cruciform position and written a sign on the wall reading: “Here lies Darby Crash”, as he overdosed, cementing the legend of the punk martyr. Fate, however, conspired to cloud his final act, as just 24 hours after his death, John Lennon was assassinated, and his attempt at self-mythologising was largely overshadowed.
Crash’s designs on immortality were later revisited in the 2007 biopic What We Do Is Secret, which retells the story of his ‘live fast, die young’ approach to life. Expectedly, the fact that the suicide of his longtime friend and bandmate often overshadows the work they created together is a rather sore subject for Pat Smear.
“The Germs’ contribution to history sucks as far as I’m concerned,” he once told Spin, explaining, “It’s about somebody committing suicide and becoming a legend because of it, and that’s disgusting. I think it’s sad that somebody had to be so sad to become a legend.”
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