Uh oh!

Avengers EP 12" (1979)
"It's the American in me that makes me say it's an honor to die / In a war that's just a politician's lie", rants Penelope Houston of San Francisco punk band the Avengers, in their song "The American in Me". The song is a declaration of culture war against American authority and the status quo that resonates today as loudly as it did in the band's brief career. The brevity of their time as a band feels now, over 25 years later, like a blistering short set by a band at the peak of the powers; over too fast, succinctly leaving listeners wanting more. To understand the full impact the Avengers had on the punk world (and its later offshoots of popular music at large) in their clipped two-year existence, one needs to place them first in the bilious music scene of West Coast USA, 1977. Punk was just beginning, in New York the Ramones were already at it nearly a year, and the Sex Pistols had come to the States for an abortive tour, ending at a show in San Francisco at the Winterlands. The Avengers opened for the Pistols at the Winterlands, after having played numerous clubs in the city area, like the legendary Mabuhay Gardens, alongside peers Dils, the Screamers, and better known West Coasters like the Dead Kennedys and X. The result of playing a huge concert rife with all the creeping influences of the music industry already getting their claws into the punk movement, they become disenchanted with what punk was becoming. It was the Sex Pistols' last show, signaling an end, to many outsiders, of punk's burning urgency in the demise of the Pistols as supposed torchbearers. Pistol guitarist Steve Jones would later produce some of the Avengers' music in a gesture of camaraderie with a band he felt important.
- popmatters.com