"Mad Marc Rude" was an artist and a punk rock icon. This documentary about Marc is told by the people who knew him throughout his life. Ever since I first heard about Marc in 1979, people have always talked about him very passionately, they either said he was one of the greatest people alive or that he was the biggest asshole they ever met, there was never an in-between. This passion that people had about Marc is the main reason I'm doing this documentary. Depending on where and when they knew Marc their comments can range from "He's a self centered prick who just likes to bully people and fight!", "He's a junky who ruins the lives of whoever he's around!" to "He was the most loyal friend a person could ever have!", "When fights broke out at shows, he would always save the guy who was being out numbered", "He gave me food, a place to stay and expected nothing in return". Marc was primarily known throughout the early punk scene for the artwork he created - bands like; The Misfits, Battalion Of Saints, Tex and the Horseheads, The Offspring, L.A. Guns, Legal Weapon, The Little Kings and many more, but within the communities where he lived he was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Before he became known as an artist, since 1978, Marc was putting out fanzines, putting on shows, managing bands, etc... whatever he could do to support a scene which he believed and at that time the community around him didn't. Marc died March 14th, 2002 from failed health and not a drug overdose as rumored - though I'm sure the failed health was from using drugs throughout his life.
August 2009 / Production Update I know a lot of people have been wondering about the status of the documentary and why it’s been taking so long to complete. When I first started working on this in 2002, I knew it would take at least three years to do, mainly for the fact that my time is limited because I work a full time job and because I can’t really afford to hire any type of staff and/or researchers to help out (things like locating people that Marc knew throughout his life requires a lot of time, let alone filming all the interviews, researching public and private records/ archives, etc...) WHY'S IT TAKING SO FUCKING LONG!?? Believe me... I want to finish this documentary as much as everyone else wants me too, but i want to do it right! But on the positive side, a lot of great stuff has been getting done too! Over all this time, the interviews and material I’ve been getting has been going extremely well and far beyond my expectations!!! Of the 350 names I’ve collected over all this time of people who may have known Marc and/or are linked to events in his life somehow, I’ve found over 300 of them!!! And almost all the key people from that list have been found. Filming is 95% complete, there are 2 interviews I’d really like to get if possible, but I do have enough (over 85 interviews!!!) to finish the documentary if I don’t get them. And recently I’ve been able to get the additional funding that I needed as well!!! MORE TIME NEEDED THOUGH!!! Carl Schneider
REST IN PEACE
David Jove - 9/24/2004
Tony Chico - 9/28/2004
Steve "Stevo" Jensen - 8/25/2005
Buddy Blue - 6/02/2006 - Carl
When the documentary started...
In 1998 I was putting together
some plans for my first "real" documentary
which was going to be about independent artists (artists
from all over the US as well as the ones involved with
Black Market Magazine). To
do the voiceover
narrative I thought Marc would be the
perfect choice, besides being an artist himself he had
this rough, fucked up, Tom Waits like voice that would
have been ideal for it, I just need to find him. My last
contact with Marc was in Los Angeles, late 1994, a week
before he moved to New York to stay with his sister. After some searching
around making phone calls, it turns out that Marc had
moved back to LA and I had just missed him -
he was now living in Seattle. So on that lead I
started calling what few people I knew in Seattle, by
the time I had found someone that had talked with him
(about two months later), I'm now told that he had moved
to Las Vegas. As time mounted, I sort of put off
looking for him, thinking I'll just try again later when
I'm ready to start filming, which by then I'll probably end up running into
him at a show, which is what usually happens. Then
in February 2002 I get a call from a friend who tells me
that he spoke with Marc and gives me his phone number,
Like
a dumbshit I put off calling him for a few About a month after Marc died I was talking with Iris Berry , Marc's ex-girlfriend whom I've gotten to know over the years through Marc (Marc and Iris were both a sort of this high profile couple in the Hollywood punk scene during the last half the of 1980's.), suggested doing a documentary on Marc. Since I only know the San Diego people he hung out with, Iris said she'd be more then happy to help out with what she could regarding names of his LA friends. Some words about the birth of the San Diego Punk Scene (and Marc)... When Punk Rock officially started in the extremely conservative city of San Diego back in late 1977, residents were scared to death of it (you know - idiots fear what they don't understand.) and according to the press "they weren't going to let it happen in their city" and with that came the beginning of San Diego Punk Rock's enemy #1 "The San Diego Police Department!" Meaning that if you were going to be promoting Punk Rock shows in San Diego you were going to need to have some pretty large gonads! In those days there were only two places having Punk shows on a somewhat regular basis back then, The Zebra Club and The Skeleton Club (The Skeleton Club was run by the ballsy Laura Fraser - if Marc was considered the Dad of the San Diego Punk Rock scene, then Laura should be the mom.). At this same time, after a long year of hitchhiking across the country from New York, Marc makes San Diego his new home. He immediately throws wood on the fire that is this "punk rock problem" and starts a Punk Rock fanzine called "Rude Situation" (with artist/girlfriend Shawn Kerri), and if the wood wasn't already enough go get the fire burning, he pours gasoline all over it, as Marc and his group of scary looking, punk rock friends cruise the streets of downtown San Diego wearing armbands which read "F.O.N.O." (Friends of No One).
However a few years
into the scene, instead of it growing it was starting to
die. This was due to the cops, the pussies that
they were, feeling threatened for no apparent reason
except for the way we looked started really going nuts
at every show, shutting them down and beating the shit
out of any of the leftover strays. Punks would now refer
to San Diego as "Slow Death". Fortunately in 1981, Marc rescued Slow Death and started putting on core punk shows as "Dead or Alive Presents" with bands like GBH, Discharge, Angelica Upstarts, U.K. Subs, Misfits, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, Black Flag, UXA, Subhumans, etc... In late 1983 Marc goes from promoting punk shows to running a club (along with Lisa, Don and Tom Tenoever) called "The Reptile House" every Sunday night featuring wide variety of bands such as "Howard Devoto" (Buzzcocks), "Alien Sex Fiend", "Hunters and Collectors", "Sex Gang Children", etc..
How I knew Rude...
(I wrote this
originally for another publication "Destroying Angels"
after Marc
died. - Carl)
1979 and the
San Diego Punk
Scene was barely walking having just come out of the
womb. I was 16, it was my first day of High School in my
math class I sat next to the only punk girl in the
entire school, Rachel. I thought this girl was really
fucking cool! Her blonde hair had a big ol' black ring
dyed in it that went around the top of her head, like
someone who destroyed a beautiful piece of art by
painting a black circle on it, she wore a leather jacket
with a bunch of safety pins in it and had the letters
F.O.N.O. stenciled in white on the sleeve (plus her being
a senior and me a freshman made her that much cooler).
At lunch time, the whole school would give her tons of
shit and as the bad ass she was gave it right back.
Though I was too nervous to even talk with her, it was
always the highlight of my day just sitting next to her
and checking her out. Then one day in class she asked
me if I wanted to hear a tape of the Clash, well need I
say more, from that moment on, my life had taken on a
whole new direction "Punk Rock"!.
She turned me onto all these cool bands, took me to what
few punk shows there were in those days, these were good
times for me!! Then after only two months she was
suddenly gone. Wasn't in school, her mom didn't know
what happened to her, she just vanished.
Anyway, later in the year, a
friend and I started a punk band and it was a party that
we were playing at when I first met Marc. Unknown to us,
the party turned out to be for a bunch of surfers, which
if we had known would have never done. Surfers and
punks were rivals at this time in San Diego. Needless
to say they hated us, every song we played made them
more and more hostile, things weren’t looking too good
for us, nor for our equipment if we didn’t get out fast,
suddenly these punks, about 8 of them, came bursting out
of nowhere, crashing the party! It was such a good
entrance that we stopped playing in the middle of a song
and didn’t even realize it. Silence fell upon the
surfer’s faces. I’m thinking, "There couldn’t be a more
perfect time for these guys to show up, now these surfer
assholes are gunna pay for fucking with us punks!,
however that’s not how it went. Immediately two of the
Punks went after our drummer, (Unfortunately for him he
looked like the "poster boy" for surfing), grabbing his
arms they dragged him towards the swimming pool. The
rest of the punks had started to pick fights with
whoever they could. As I ran over to stop these guys
from throwing our drummer in the pool, I noticed
stenciled on the back of their leather jackets those
familiar letters F.O.N.O., then behind me I hear a
female voice yell "Carl!", I looked back and it was
Rachel, running past me she tried
to stop her friends from throwing our drummer into the
pool but was too late. She explained to them who
we were and these two bad ass looking punks who I
thought were gunna kick my ass, came up to me and
apologized and then apologized to our drummer (as he
climb out of the pool). Meanwhile the party had become
a fight fest and getting more thrashed every minute,
then like clockwork, came those famous words "the cops
are on the way!" We loaded our
equipment into the truck as fast as we could and got the
hell out of there, as we were leaving the same two punks
who apologized to us had grabbed the keg from the party
and threw it in the back of our truck along with
themselves and asked us if we could drive them to their
house. On our way there I asked one of them what
F.O.N.O. meant, he said
"Friends of No One," and
introduced himself as Marc. Now you've got to really picture this, here’s this very impressionable 17 year old kid who just discovered this brand new thing called punk rock who meets this older punk who (after hanging out at their place drinking the keg) seems to know everything there is about punk and he had this deep rough, fucked up voice that made everything he said seem really important! Plus just how I meet him, he crashes a surfer party with 7 of his punk friends, and though out numbered 10 surfers to 1 punk, still manages to knock a bunch down scaring them to the point of calling the cops. Then he steals their keg, invites us - total strangers, over to his huge punk rock mansion (which it literally was), to drink the keg with his punk rock friends (which included my punk godmother Rachel), and just when it seemed it couldn’t get any cooler, his friends call him "Marc Rude"! Wow!! ------ I don't care who the fuck you are, at 17 years old, nobody can get any cooler then this! I looked up to this guy like Jesus looked up to God!! And it only grew from there as the years went by. Every punk rock show always had something to do with Marc. His main purpose it seemed was looking out for the punk scene, doing whatever he could to keep it together, which was hard to do in those days in a conservative San Diego. He was promoting the shows, getting the halls, permits, dealing with cops (who would always try to shut them down). As for the bands who played at these shows he always red carpeted them, giving them a place to stay at after the show. A cool example is when the Misfits came down, he had them stay at his house, served them spaghetti dinner then partied with them afterwards. A year later he did the cover of their "Earth A.D." album. That’s cool!! Wherever the shows were at he would always make sure that nobody was fucking up the place, which was a problem in those days because some idiots thought that it was punk to destroy property. I remember for a while at almost every show at some point I’d see Marc, who had caught somebody breaking something, yell at them at the top of his lungs "You hippies are gunna fuck the scene up for everybody else!" while punching them repeatedly in the face. At a Vandals show, Stevo (the singer) held up a hand grenade and threatened to blow everyone up if he didn't get more money, as everybody panicked, Marc goes up to him and takes it away. He also did the second fanzine in San Diego called "Rude Situation" which is how he got his name "Marc Rude" Managed bands like Battalion of Saints, Personal Conflict. The flyers he drew for the shows became legendary! They were punk rock masterpieces and "must haves" for any punk rock bedroom wall. In addition to the art, seeing a Marc Rude flyer meant that this was going to be a fucking real, punk rock event. So it didn't matter if you knew who the bands were or not, it was a guaranteed good show. Since the scene was so new then and so many bands were unheard of, sometimes it was a gamble going to a show so the flyer was all you had to go by. In 1983 he started his own club called "The Reptile House", featuring all the bands that previously couldn't play San Diego because they weren't big enough to fill a hall for ticket sales. So now Howard Devoto, Sex Gang Children, Hunters and Collectors, etc... bands whom normally you would have to drive up to Los Angeles to see, were now coming to San Diego.
My first real
conversation with Marc was In 1983.
I had thoughts about doing a
fanzine of my own, so one night, over at the "Reptile House",
I saw Marc bartending and thought this would be
a great way to actually meet Marc
as well as get some advice from
someone who's done a fanzine himself.
He was really cool and had tons of
input, we ended up talking
for hours and when I was leaving the last thing he said
to me was that when I’m ready to do my first issue let
him know and he’ll give me some artwork to put in it.
What was funny
though, later as I looked back at our
conversation was that, though it felt
like we we're both talking, I don’t think I said more then
one sentence the entire time we
talked. It was like everything he said was so important
that I didn’t want to miss anything.
Well eventually, in 1985 I started putting
together the first issue of Black Market Magazine
and of
course the most important piece of artwork for me to
have in it was something by "Mad Marc Rude",
it doesn't get any better then that!
Having Marc’s artwork in the magazine
would
be like giving it the official "Punk Rock Seal of Approval"!
However Marc had since moved to Los Angeles, after
being ripped off one too many times by the owners
of where "The Reptile House"
was at. I went up to
see him and was a little concerned that he might not
want to help me out since being involved with the LA
punk scene now. Well not only was he open arms to me
when I got there, but after being there less then a year
he was already well respected within the scene and was
setting me up with interviews with whatever L.A. band I
wanted to do. He just doesn’t quit! Now I could write a whole other article about all the good times we’ve had and a novel of all the advice he’s given me, but writing this article made it really obvious to me why I still looked up to him. Marc Rude was much more then a great punk rock artist, because he believed in the music and what it stood for so much, he gave the San Diego Punk Scene it’s life. He also taught us to respect it and to really appreciate it while it was happening. Though there are others that were key too, Marc was the one who was doing it all. He was one of the reasons why punks had shows to go to in back then. Photos from top to bottom
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