Behind The LA Punk Scene and Divine Horsemen’s ‘Hot Rise of an Ice Cream Phoenix’ with Chris D. (INTERVIEW)

Chris D., otherwise known as Chris Desjardins, is best known for being a founding member of the LA Punk band, The Flesh Eaters, whose origins go back to 1970 but who released a new album in 2019, I Used To Be Pretty. A spin-off band from The Flesh Eaters that included Julie Christensen, Divine Horsemen, has also been busy doing new work, resulting in the recent release of their first new album in over 30 years, Hot Rise of an Ice Cream Phoenix. If you’re a film buff, you also might know Chris D. from his many years of writing about cinema, particularly about Yakuza films, or from his stints teaching film. 

As you might suspect, all of Chris D.’s musical projects stand at a crossroads of visual and performance culture in very interesting ways, and the new album from Divine Horsemen is no different, bringing in a wealth of cultural references of both the modern and the timeless variety. Both Chris D. and Julie Christensen wrote the new songs and they deliver plenty of Punk verve and that most foundational of Punk values, the willingness to experiment and include disparate elements in the creative process. I spoke with Chris D. about how, as a film student, he came to the Punk scene and how Divine Horsemen have approached this new collection of original songs and powerful cover versions. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: When I look at the different projects you’ve worked on, including Divine Horsemen, I’m aware that you seem to bring many different aspects of culture to the work, whether written, visual, or sonic. How far back does that thinking go for you?

Chris D.: I think it probably goes back to the time I was a teenager, but I didn’t really have a clear picture of how things were going to get mashed up together when I was that age. I originally went to college to study filmmaking and I went to film school here in LA in 1970. I did that and got an MA in screenwriting and made some student film. It was impossible at that point to get into the film industry. There were people making exploitation or action films but trying to raise money even for a low budget movie was just not in the cards for me. But, coincidentally, a lot of people I was meeting around 1976 and 1977 were from the Punk Rock world. I was going to The Mask, which was a Punk Rock club in LA, and to a lot of other shows. I had played a little bit of music in high school, but the band I was in only lasted a couple of weeks. But I was really into music around the time I started a band, The Flesh Eaters. There were a lot of people who I knew from that scene, though music was the second thing that I wanted to do. 

I’ve kind of been ping-ponging back and forth between music and film in my life. Between 1999 and 2009, I was a programmer at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, which had the Egyptian Theatre. Between 2009 and 2013, I was flown up for two days a week to San Francisco to teach film classes. But in 2015, I decided to call John Doe and Dave Alvin and the rest of the guys to see if they wanted to do some reunion shows for The Flesh Eaters, and they did. We did more in 2018. We were sounding so great, I convinced them to go into a studio afterwards, and we recorded I Used to Be Pretty. Julie [Christensen], my ex-wife who I’d been in Divine Horsemen with, had been talking with me about regrouping Divine Horsemen for a few years. 

After The Flesh Eaters touring was done, Peter [Andrus] and I started working on new material for Hot Rise of an Ice Cream Phoenix. We recorded that in October 2019. We mastered it in February 2020, but right after that the pandemic hit and trying to get a deal for that was like wading through molasses. By the end of the summer, though, In the Red Records wanted to do the album. We were actually delayed by the vinyl pressing plant crisis that was going on even before the pandemic. 

HMS: Are you surprised that The Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen have been a big part of your life again post-2015? It seems like The Flesh Eaters never totally stopped, though…

CD: I’d had other lineups, too. In the early 90s, I did a few things with The Flesh Eaters. In 1995, I did a solo album, and in 1996, I finally got off alcohol and drugs completely. I wasn’t even going to do music anymore, I thought. Then, six months later, I was forming a new lineup of The Flesh Eaters in 1997 to 1999. We played live through 2000. I was putting more money into The Flesh Eaters than I was getting back, so I broke up the live band and just did an album in the studio that came out in 2004. 

The Flesh Eaters were asked to do a big festival in the UK, All Tommorow’s Parties, and we also did three reunion shows in California to warm up. We made a pact to do The Flesh Eaters for a couple weeks every year, but everyone was always too busy. I kind of gave up on it in 2009. But in 2015, that’s when I got in touch with John and miraculously, everyone was into the idea and had a window of time. Anytime I think the music stuff is over, it will prove me wrong a few years later.

HMS: It’s got a will of its own! So how did this album come about? Did you get some rough material together and then take it to Peter?

CD: Yes, in April of 2018 when Peter and I started working again, we started working on the new songs. I think the first one was “Mystery Writers”, which is the lead track. Julie also had a song that she had written with a friend of hers, Lathan McKay. We all thought it was a good idea. But I also had covers that I wanted to do already. I had a couple of original songs that I did on my mid-90s solo album, but everything on that album was acoustic. I’d been wanting to do electric versions of a couple of those songs, and we may do one on the next album as well. We came up with the other original songs and put the pieces together on this album. 

I’m also really into Gypsy Flamenco music, particularly the raw stuff. I’ve been listening to it since the late 70s, concurrent to Punk Rock, and I never really introduced that into any of my music until a song on I Used to Be Pretty with the Flesh Eaters, which is very long, called “Ghost Cave Lament”. On this album, I wanted to do something a little more fast-paced, which came out on “Stony Path”. The acoustic song right before that on the album is kind of a prequel to that song, “Barefoot in the Streets”. Julie wrote it and the music isn’t Flamenco, but we wrote the lyrics together and it’s kind of a prequel to the “Stony Path” song. There’s all that mash-up of different things.

HMS: Why do you think that you kept your interest in Flamenco and in Punk separate for so long, but finally crossed over so recently?

CD: It hadn’t really occurred to me before, until a few years ago, to try to incorporate it. Back when I did the second Flesh Eaters album, I’d been listening to a lot of African music and I incorporated a lot of that, as well as more traditional stuff like Bo Diddley-type riffs. When Julie and I were in Divine Horsemen in the mid-80s, I was very influenced by a lot of murder ballads. A lot of people in LA in the mid-80s who were formerly Punk or still playing Punk Rock started doing more rootsy side-projects. People were incorporating a lot of Blues and R&B into Psychobilly Punk. Those were all people I was hanging with. I was already listening to old school Country, from the late 70s. By late 1983, I was more in the mood to do that. I was really burned out with how loud The Flesh Eaters had gotten. 

It’s always been there that I’ve been open to other influences. I’m very influenced by a lot of the Psychedelic Garage bands from the late 60s, especially Jefferson Airplane. Hence the Jefferson Airplane cover on this record, “Ice Cream Phoenix”, which is probably one of their more obscure songs. They didn’t have a top 10 hit with that, but I think it’s one of their best songs from that era. A lot of the Punk stuff that was starting to happen in the 80s was that branches were splitting off. Hardcore and Thrash stuff was happening. Then the Punk Rock that was more eclectic with R&B, Country, and Psychobilly influences, split off into another realm. That early 80s time was very transformative for the scene in LA. 

HMS: During that earlier period, did you think of Punk as being an ethos rather than a particular sound? 

CD: From the late 60s, I’d been into Garage band stuff, which was the precursor of Punk. I hadn’t heard of the Sonics yet, but I was very into the Standells. I was super into all of the Stones music, from the beginning, up until Goats Head Soup when they started to lose me. But all the stuff they were doing had a lot of Blues influences, of course, but also Country, and the stuff they were doing sounded like it was from the street. They were pretty raw at the beginning and they had a lot of dark themes in their lyrics. I love the first ten years of the Stones, but especially Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers, which are, to me, very Punk. I had that Stones influence, and also The Stooges. I saw The Stooges at The Whisky in 1973 and 1974, since they played there a lot. 

I was also a big fan of Glam from that era, like Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, which was definitely a Punk precursor. I was already a fan of Mot the Hoople and Velvet Underground. The Doors were also very proto-Punk. When the British Punk started to come out in the mid-70s, the Ramones had started playing. But the mid-70s were really a watershed, because by 1976, you could see that, “Hey, you don’t have to wait for a record company to tell you that you can do this. You can go out and do this on your own.” That do it yourself ethos was really the impetus for everybody I had become friends with at that time. Everybody brought a lot of different influences to their style of Punk Rock. 

HMS: On the new record, the newly recorded version of “Handful of Sand” feels so relevant right now. Does that strike you at all? There’s so much in there about feeling powerless. 

CD: I don’t want to sound too egocentric, but to me, the hallmark of really good art, whether visual or musical, is that it’ll have relevance over a long period of time. Sometimes you feel a synchronicity that happens that is undeniable. I really believe in synchronicity in the world, and in art and culture, though I’m not a hand to fate kind of person. There’s a lot of manifestation of the same truths about being a human being on this planet. 

My songs are always about desperate straits and dark times. That’s always been where my inspiration comes from, trying to get rid of those demons, or at least to become friends with. The pandemic is unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetimes, though it always seems like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. There’s a lot of polarization right now. I’m very much on the progressive, liberal side, but you have people behaving like it’s the Middle Ages with the anti-mask, anti-vax thing. 

The funny thing is, all of that is mistrust of government. I don’t trust the government, but I don’t trust them about other stuff. I trust them about the vaccine and the pandemic, but I don’t trust them about a lot of economic things like the hope of ever having universal healthcare. But with all this stuff about personal freedom, if you don’t take care of your brother and sister in the streets, all your personal freedom isn’t going to make any difference anyway. 

HMS: There’s another funny thing about this that people seem wary of saying out loud: Sometimes it’s okay to help other people for selfish reasons. 

CD: Right! There’s a long-term objective to your survival and it depends on a lot of other peoples’ survival. 

Band photograph by FRANK LEE DRENNEN

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2 Responses

  1. Hi, the Mask is actually the Masque and Mott the Hoople has two Ts. In case you want to edit for accuracy.

    Yours truly,

    The Proofreader

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