The Avengers - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Penelope Houston’s face is as indelibly etched into west coast punk as Johnny Rotten’s is in the English variety and her voice seems to beckon from a strange new world. Though San Francisco’s Avengers are among the best American punk rock bands of the 1970s, the band is still not as widely known as it ought to be, owing to the relative scarcity of Avengers records over the years. The original band wrote, performed and recorded enough material for at least two albums, but The Avengers issued only one single during their initial, two-year existence. The Avengers’ first fans were mostly people who saw them play live and the band never toured beyond the west coast. Shows by Houston and Ingraham’s reunited Avengers and the availability of new compilation albums of unreleased material have spread the band’s renown in recent years. The classic, long out-of-print debut, Avengers (1983 CD Presents) is now available from Penelope Houston’s website.
Greg Ingraham and Danny Furious played together in bands growing up in Fullerton, California. Furious moved to San Francisco in 1976 to attend San Francisco Art Institute, where he met fellow student Penelope Houston, who had come to SFAI from Seattle. Inspired by the early San Francisco punk band Crime and New York’s Ramones, Houston and Furious formed a punk rock band in 1977 with Ingraham, who moved up from Orange County. Houston then suggested SFAI student Jonathan Postal as bassist. Though the band fired Postal after its first six shows, Furious said in his 2004 interview with Swedish webzine Summer of Hate that Postal named The Avengers. Before that, the band had been billed as The Refrigerators, Vomit or The Open Sores.
Houston and Furious ran into Jimmy Wilsey, who had also attended SFAI and local punk shows. On the street in North Beach, in front of City Lights Books, they asked him to play bass. Wilsey told Juice Magazine that Furious and Houston were dating when he joined The Avengers and that “Danny and Penelope used to live in a tent on top of the Art Institute to get free rent. It wasn’t a big hoity-toity art school. They were up there, living on the roof.” In the summer of 1977, The Avengers played with San Francisco’s Crime and Nuns, and LA’s Screamers and Dils. The Avengers headlined a September show at the Hollywood Palladium with Blondie, Devo and The Weirdos. LA’s early punk label Dangerhouse issued the “We Are the One/I Believe in me” b/w “Car Crash” single in December 1977. This single was the only record the Avengers released while the original band existed.
The Avengers opened for The Sex Pistols at that band’s famous last show at San Francisco’s Winterland in January, 1978. The Avengers toured the west coast and played in and around San Francisco for much of the next year and a half, playing with X, D.O.A., Dead Kennedys, Tuxedomoon and numerous other notable bands. Greg Ingraham quit in early 1979. Brad Kunt, who had just been shown the door by D.O.A., replaced Ingraham on guitar. This lineup lasted until June of 1979, when The Avengers decided to quit after playing the three last shows they had booked in San Francisco that month. Later that year, a 12” EP, Avengers (1979 White Noise) appeared with three songs produced by Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. Nothing further issued from The Avengers until Furious compiled and mixed an album out of surviving studio tracks in his possession, resulting in the band’s posthumous debut LP Avengers (1983 CD Presents), often called “the Pink Album.” Litigation between the Avengers and CD Presents made this classic pink punk album very difficult to find for long periods during the intervening years and bootlegs proliferated.
After the Avengers broke up, Houston collaborated with former Buzzcocks and Magazine leader Howard Devoto before she began performing and recording as an acoustic singer-songwriter. In 1998, while Houston was recording for Reprise as a solo artist, she compiled Died for Your Sins (1999 Lookout!), an album of unreleased Avengers studio material and live performances. Unable to find satisfactory performances of several songs, Houston assembled The Scavengers: herself, Ingraham, Mr. T Experience bassist Joel Reader and Screeching Weasel drummer Danny Panic. Together they recorded new versions of the lost songs and toured in 1999. Houston, Ingraham, Reader and drummer Luis Illades have been playing as The Avengers since 2004. The American in Me (2004 DBK Works) collects four 1978 studio tracks freshly remastered and the original band’s antepenultimate live show at San Francisco’s Old Waldorf in June 1979. That show also appears on the vinyl-only Zero Hour (2003 Get Back Italy).
