Features: As The World Burns

Another year, another biopic about another dead musician. Another myth set to celluloid (or whatever they are using these days).
We have been there the day the music died with both Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens (1978's The Buddy Holly Story and 1987's La Bamba respectively), have seen the images of life that Ray Charles could only feel, smell, and hear (2004's Oscar winning Ray), we have been in the dark places that the Man in Black walked (and sometimes stumbled) down (2005's Walk the Line), and have witnessed the short rise and guillotine-quick downfall of Ian Curtis of Joy Division in Anton Corbijn's 2007 film Control

As What We Do Is Secret finally makes it to the big screen this week, it marks the climax of a long and arduous road that director Rodger Grossman has navigated for almost 15 years to get the film released. The film is based on the short life of Darby Crash, singer of the LA punk band The Germs. In the large picture of punk rock's most infamous meltdowns, Crash (whose real name was Jan Paul Beahm, then changed to Bobby Pyn and later to the pseudonym he was best known for) stood beside both Sid Vicious and Iggy Pop as the most public performances of an art form hell bent on destruction and nihilism. Unlike his contemporaries, the life and times of Crash have been largely ignored.

Where Vicious succeeded as an example of almost pointless exhibition, and Iggy has survived and become somewhat of a celebrity these days, the life and death of Darby Crash seemed to have all been part of one great plan that could only be engineered by someone with the abundant amount of intelligence Crash possessed.

In both the Crash biography Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash (Don Bolles, 2002) and We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story Of L.A. Punk (Brenden Mullen and Marc Spitz, 2001), Crash and the band he fronted are considered more than just an exercise that reflected the concept of the Theater of Cruelty, but rather as an all out social experiment conducted by Crash, who reportedly held a Charlie Manson like psychological grip over a small army of followers. Using elements of Eastern philosophy and mysticism, Crash developed an obsession with the circle, manifested in the "Germs Burn", a small circle shaped scar left by a cigarette to show inclusion into (for lack of a better term) the Circle of Darby Crash. To wit: "Sometimes the [egg] is used for the circle or zero, for the egg combines the senses of fertility and sphericity (sic.) in one symbol. The egg with its central germ is the circle with the point...the egg was the symbol of life in immortality and eternity...".

Like the purported words and sermons by Manson, Jim Jones or any other well publicized "fringe" religious cult leaders, Darby's lyrics can be read as the words of a one who views themselves as a almost messianic figure.


From the song "Lexicon Devil":

"I'm a lexicon devil with a
battered brain
And I'm searchin' for a future-
the world's my aim
So gimme gimme your hands-
gimme gimme your minds"

And from the song "Circle One":

"I'm Darby Crash
A social blast
Chaotic master
I'm Darby Crash
Your meccas gash
Prophetic stature"


What Crash set out to accomplish in such a short scope of time might never be fully understood. Whether he was indeed a troubled genius, or a brilliant psychopath (and possibly a combination of both), Crash undoubtedly seemed to crave attention, and in the past few years, nothing has given that to a dead rock n' roller more than a biopic.

In what can only be seen as an odd twist of fate, as Grossman's homage hits theaters this week, one might think that Crash's dark existence will have finally garnered it's moment in the spotlight. But as his suicide on Dec. 7th 1980 was over-shadowed by the shocking murder of John Lennon a day later, one wonders whether Crash's legacy will once again be silently absorbed into the unending cycle of history with the world in the grip of Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight. After all, Crash's only ambition, like Ledger's Joker, may have been that he "just want(ed) to watch the world burn".

Watch: Darby Crash in The Decline of Western Civilization