As a pre-teenager, David Markey began making 8mm and Super-8 films while publishing neighborhood newspapers in Santa Monica in the mid 1970s. In 1979 he met fellow teenager Jordan Schwartz and by 1981 they founded We Got Power!, a fanzine dedicated to the first-generation hardcore punk music community in Los Angeles, and beyond. Armed with a typewriter, exacto-blades, Letraset rub-on lettering, and rubber cement they fashioned collaged spreads of their collected images and they reported on the burgeoning underground scene. Their text and cameras captured local bands; Black Flag, the Minutemen, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, Red Cross/Redd Kross, Suicidal Tendencies, Descendents, White Flag, the Last, the Gun Club, Saccharine Trust, Sin 34, Circle One, Firehose, and many others at the height of their creativity. In the process, the duo's photographs also captured the dilapidated storefronts, and dereliction of the early 1980s Reagan era Southern California landscape. We Got Power! also looked beyond its singular 213 area code, giving attention to emerging national acts such as Minor Threat, The Necros, Husker Du, The Misfits, M.D.C., Big Boys, D.R.I., the Butthole Surfers, & Flipper.
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