The Bags

The Bags were formed in 1977 by friends Alice Bag (Alicia Armendariz) and Patricia Morrison and the spark was witnessing a Weirdos gig. They had a narrow escape as both unsuccessfully auditioned for Kim Fowley’s new band Venus & The Amazorblades.

Alice Bag: It started out as a joke. We were going to play with bags on our heads and never reveal our identity, but at our first show (at the Masque) Bobby Pyn, later to become Darby Crash, ripped my bag off and ruined my plan. So, um, the songs that we had been writing up to that point were about bags. Like, you know, tying up your bag and whipping it and…not any great social significance.

Artifix Records Bags Bio Interview

The aim was to have an all girl band but despite advertising and auditioning Alice and Pat were unable to find the right people to join and stay in the band and the line in the main aprt from them was Terry Graham on Drums, Rob Ritter on guitar then bass (post Pat) and Craig Lee Guitar

Alice Bag: We started practicing with one of her (Patricia’s) friends, named Janet Koontz. I remember writing ‘Survive’ in her garage. Patricia and I were kind of in sync because we listened to the same music. Janet was a friend and she was playing guitar, but she was a little bit on a different wavelength. So we were kind of humming all the different parts for her. It’s kind of goofy and silly, but that’s how ‘Survive’ was written…by humming the parts to another person.

Pat Bag: I wrote the music and Alice and I both wrote the lyrics. Janet was odd. 

Artifix Records Bags Bio Interview

Being in the first wave of Los Angeles punk bands they played all the usual punk clubs like the Masque, Hong Kong, Deaf Club (San Francisco), Mabuhay Gardens and the attraction of punk for them was finding fellow misfits and being creative.

Pat Bag: It was exciting and it was a self-made scene. We took elements from N.Y. and London but gave it an L.A. slant. It was a lot of misfits gathering together and making sense of it all.

Alice Bag: My feeling about the early scene was that it was really sort of utopian for me. I felt that it was a bunch of people that were very creative and were coming from a similar background in that they were all outcasts. The fact that some person might be coming from a different income level, or different education level, or different ethnic background, all those things were secondary… We were all outcasts and had found a community of like-minded individuals who were very accepting and who truly valued creativity above all those other things that were keeping us from being able to relate to the mainstream.

Artifix Records Bags Bio Interview

In late 1978 the mighty Dangerhouse label took them into the studio to record Survive / Babylonian Gorgon and the produced by Geza X who to get the band over their nerves being in the studio didn’t tell them the tapes were rolling. This is a superb piece of punk riffing and invective vocals.

The Bags began to fall apart around about 1979 and Pat had been fired from the band by the time the band featured in Penelope Spheeris’s film ‘The Decline of Western Civilization’ in 1980 which focussed on the Los Angeles punk scene. Pat owned the band name and refused to rejoin the band for the appearance, so they appear in it as The Alice Bag Band.

Terry Graham and Rob Ritter would end up being the core of the mighty Gun Club with Jeffrey Lee Peirce, a Deborah Harry devotee. Pat would decamp to the UK and the music scene there and would also join the Gun Club courtesy of her Bags connections, before joining first the Sisters of Mercy then The Damned and marrying Dave Vanian of said band.

Alice would join a number of groups like Castration Squad, before pregnancy curtailed those activities. She’s now back and recording and releasing music – Alice Bag in 2016, Blueprint in 2018, and Sister Dynamite in 2020.

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