Happy Birthday, Alice Bag

Man, am I grateful that today is the birthday of Alice Bag (Alicia “Alice” Armendariz, b. 1958). This is an especially good time to celebrate a radical Mexican punk woman, not that there’s ever a bad one. I was especially jazzed to write about her when I learned that she was inspired to perform after seeing Mexican vaudeville performances as a girl.

As a Los Angeles teenager, Alicia had a taste for glam rock and ranchera. After graduating with a degree in Philosophy she became a schoolteacher, making use of her bilingual communication skills on the job. Meanwhile, with school friend Pat Bag (now Patricia Morrison) she performed in a sucession of bands starting in 1975. The group known as Bags were together from 1977 through 1981; Alice reformed them as The Alice Bag Band to appear in Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization, in which they were presented alongside Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, X, Germs, and others.

The group’s original gimmick was that they wore bags over their heads, much like Yoko Ono and The Unknown Comic. There was also a resonance related to sexist locker room jokes, and, for that matter, lookist slang for an ugly old woman. Initially, like The Residents they were faceless; and like the Ramones they were part of the same fictional family. The bags quickly became impractical however and so the Bags went without bags.

Like The Runaways (who preceded them), Bags were a very early L.A. hardcore punk band with female members, and were thus way ahead of their time. (Unlike the Runways, Bags had a couple of male members in the line-up). The group did very little recording while they were together. Alice Bag went on to Castration Squad and Cholita after the break up, before settling down to raise a family for a few years. Pat Bag became Patricia Morrison, and was in Gun Club, The Sisters of Mercy, and The Damned.

In 2011, Alice Bag published her memoir, Violence Girl, From East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage – A Chicana Punk Story. Since then she has released three solo albums.

Any post like this you see on this blog you should know is a deep reflection of the influence of my wife, who will always be much cooler than I am. I think it may have been her reading of Violence Girl which gave me the anecdote about Mexican vaudeville.

On a related topic, this is a good time to let you know that Circus Vazquez is returning to NYC for its annual run, opening November 15! Get tickets and info here.