The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome

Vaginal Davis talks about her cousin Carla DuPlantier who introduced her to the Los Angeles punk scene.

Vaginal Davis: Carla is a very interesting figure because people think of the LA punk scene, and they just think of it as being this white male scene. But in the early days of the punk rock scene in Los Angeles, it was more or less led by queers, women, people of colour, like Alice Bag of The Bags and Carla, and a lot of other people, you know, Trudie Arguelles.

There’s a lot of people of colour, women, queer women like Phranc, the Jewish lesbian folk singer, and this is an aspect of that history that gets erased.

And Carla was so talented. She died, recently. So sad. But she’s, I think, one of the people that kind of inspired me to investigate the punk world because she was already a part of that world. She was one of the, I guess, the first hundred punks in LA. And this was a very small scene.

And I didn’t really know so much about punk at that time because Carla and Alice Bag they were a few years older than I am. But I recognize the spirit behind punk, you know? And it was a place that let someone unusual like me… it gave me a platform to perform and to experiment and to just get up there and do things. Yeah.

She left Los Angeles and she moved to London, and she was part of a Malcolm McLaren-produced band called Jimmy The Hoover, who actually, you know, they performed on Top of the Pops. They had a hit single called Tantalise. She modeled for Vivienne Westwood. She became quite close to Vivienne Westwood – modeled for Vivienne Westwood.

She lived in London for a while, then she moved back to Los Angeles. And she also did some demos with Cholita, and then she also did a demo with my other band Black Fag, with Bibbe Hansen, Beck’s mom.