April 18th, 1977. Hollywood, CA.
There was something foul and electric in the air that Monday night at the Starwood. The kind of charge you only find when the floor’s slick with beer and the crowd reeks of leather, cigarettes, and bad choices. The volatile energy of a live wire hissing on a wet dance floor—spitting, sparking, waiting to kill whoever got too close.
The room was a zoo of freaks—burnouts with thousand-yard stares, thrill junkies itching for damage, leather-clad criminals with joints glued to pierced lips, and the occasional college zombie dragging a terrified date into the pit.
The air was swamp-thick: sweat, stale PBR, clove smoke, and always weed. Heavy clouds slithered low across the crowd like cold glycerin—a false floor drenched in Blade Runner-neon—perfumed with Acapulco Gold, Thai Stick, Golden Voice.
Then The Damned hit. And whatever fragile order had been holding the room together dissolved into lawless beauty.
Captain Sensible hunched over his bass like Gollum rigging dynamite. Rat Scabies vanished behind a drum kit that looked ready to detonate. Brian James hacked his guitar like Norman Bates in a thrift-store suit, tie clinging on like a hostage.
And then Vanian. A ghoul from a Hammer Horror reel. He ripped off a vinyl mask to show the real mask beneath: hospital-white skin, slick black hair, eyes wide and vacant like possession. As though the dark itself was being torn inside out. His voice was an exorcism.
They tore into the Stooges’ “I Feel Alright” at double-time, guitars squealing like pigs on the block. Vanian stalked the stage in spasms—half epileptic fit, half black-mass sermon. The stage rattled like a runaway freight train.
You either surrendered to the blitzkrieg or fled to the bar.
Blood in the Pit
That was SoCal punk then. Step into the pit and you stumbled away bruised, soaked, bleeding from god-knows-where, but alive in a way suburbia could never manufacture.
A busted lip was simply proof of purchase. Cig burns on your jacket were rites of passage. Kids got concussed and came back swinging, arms pinwheeling in the pit like upturned helicopters.
Violence wasn’t the point, but it always came with the territory.
By the late ’70s, rock ’n roll had abandoned a generation. The kids who were left out did what the ignored always do: turned basements, ballrooms, and half-legal vet halls into sanctuaries.
And through every room drifted the same fog: weed smoke. Not a garnish, but an essential ingredient. A fifth band member with no name, hanging in the rafters.
Thai Stick joints smoldering to black nails. Acapulco Gold changing hands in parking lots like secret handshakes. Seeds and stems surgically removed with the reverence of an Itamae shaving toro.
Weed was the battery. The voltage in the circuit.
The Outlaw Benefactor
But punk didn’t pay. Five-dollar tickets and photocopied flyers couldn’t keep the lights on. The kids were broke, the bands broke, the clubs hostile. So who kept the ears ringing?
Behind the distortion stood a man most never saw: Gary Tovar—smuggler, outlaw businessman, and the unlikeliest patron saint SoCal punk would ever know.
Born in Los Angeles in 1952, carted off to Huntington Beach at twelve, and dropped into the sun-bleached sprawl where surfers, burnouts, and suburbanites collided, Tovar did the responsible, junior-college circuit—Golden West and Fullerton colleges, the polite conveyor belt of mediocrity—but the truth is he’d already been running his own education for years. By his teens he was a border hustler, smuggling fireworks out of Tijuana with the kind of nerve no textbook could teach.
Soon enough, those extracurricular activities were going to drag him into a new and legendary direction—the kind that starts with a boot on the gas and ends with sirens in the rearview. Where the border was a revolving door and authority was something to be toyed with.
Tovar’s first hit of punk came at Winterland in ’78, watching the Sex Pistols flame out in a blaze of piss and nihilism. But it was his kid sister, Bianca, who pulled back the curtain on what was happening closer to home. Cops were strangling SoCal shows in real time—raids, shutdowns, boots on kids’ necks—and the crackdown only made the bands louder.
To a 20-year-old pirate with cash to burn and an appetite for trouble, that was enough. Punk was worth fronting. Worth pouring gas on until the scene caught fire.
“I saw the culture. I wanted to push it as far as I could,” Tovar said later in an interview with OC Weekly. “Expose it to as many people as possible. There were a lot of good ideas getting a lot of resistance. And I think we won.”
Tovar funneled the money back into the scene. Booking bands no one else would touch. Renting halls respectable promoters wouldn’t risk. Setting fire to his own fortune for the cause.
Punk was the new sound. Weed was the currency. And with Tovar at the wheel, they were building a movement that would mutate into something nobody in that smoke-choked room could have ever imagined.
Zodiacs in the Dark
Gary never looked like a punk promoter. He looked like what he was: a hustler with a gambler’s grin and saltwater on his breath.
He didn’t begin as a kingpin. He began with fireworks—Roman candles smuggled past customs when he was a kid. If you can move rockets, why not reefer? Why not burlap sacks of fat buds hidden under cargo no one bothered to check?
After all, courage comes from the belly. All else is desperation.
By the late ’70s, he was one of California’s biggest cannabis free-traders. Freighters in Asia. Hand-offs at sea. Fishing boats ferrying the goods closer to shore. Zodiacs racing through salty marine layer to unload on deserted stretches of coast. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Something out of a Len Deighton Cold War novel, except the new enemies weren’t the Soviets—it was the DEA.
Smuggling weed back then was all about faith. Faith in timing, in loyalty, silence. You trusted the ocean to hide you, and your crew to keep their goddamn mouths shut.
Coast Guard spotlights sweeping the water like state-run eyes of Sauron. Helicopters thundering overhead. Smugglers crouched on a beach, sand clinging to sweat, praying the Zodiacs had already melted into the scenery. You learned to live with paranoia, because paranoia kept you breathing.
And yet Tovar kept running loads, more for purpose than for profit. Instead of burying his cash in condos or gold watches, he poured it into punk.
In 1981, when most promoters wouldn’t touch hardcore for fear of cops, fistfights, or trashed venues, Tovar leaned in. Put down deposits on the punk scene. He flew in British acts like GBH and The Adicts, backed Black Flag and Circle Jerks, rented hostile halls like the Olympic Auditorium.
He paid bands fair when others stiffed them. Punk bands didn’t care about the Top 40—they were after the new sound. And Tovar was the quiet backer with deep pockets who wanted to fund their wildest dreams.
Goldenvoice—Tovar’s promotion outfit, named after a Thai strain he claimed “sounded like angels singing in a golden voice”—became the crooked backbone of SoCal punk. Stamped on flyers, whispered about in backrooms.
On paper, Tovar lost millions. In practice, he bought a revolution.
Without his runs of Thai and Acapulco, there’s no TSOL and Shattered Faith at La Casa de la Raza. No Exploited and UK Subs at the Olympic. No Samhain and Necros tearing down the Stardust Ballroom. Nights that would have never made it past soundcheck.
Smoke was the receipt for every busted lip and burned dollar Tovar poured into punk.
The Bill Comes Due
It couldn’t last. Nothing gold does.
March ’91. Dawn. The DEA kicked his door in. Tovar’s double life snapped shut. It didn’t come as a surprise—the bootlegger circuit was already splintering—the war on drugs was at full tilt. Reagan’s mandatory minimums had crystallized the air everyone breathed. ‘Just Say No’ wallpapered over every school in the country, a moral branding iron for an entire generation.
Tovar had gotten too successful. Too visible. Too loud to ignore.
The bill came due.
He pled guilty to trafficking and spent seven years in federal prison. Seven years to replay the reels: fireworks as a teen, freighters in Asia, keeping punk alive one night at a time.
The Velvet Noose
The timing was especially cruel. Just as Goldenvoice was becoming legend—nights that left you bruised but smiling—Tovar lost it. The cuffs clicked, and he handed it over to Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen.
They kept the name alive. But by the late ’90s, Goldenvoice—the weed-fueled carnival Tovar built—created something its younger self would’ve puked on: Coachella.
The corporate, desert bacchanal of VIP tents and $40 cocktails. From Thai Stick in a Hollywood pit to influencers posing in Indio.
An evolution so cynical it could’ve been a joke.
At the Starwood, you risked a busted nose, maybe a knife fight. At Coachella, you risk sunburn and overpriced rosé. The grit has been scrubbed off, replaced by curated Instagram backdrops and brand activations. The kids once locked out of venues are now locked out by ticket prices.
Goldenvoice may be corporate now, but its roots are resin-soaked. Its name is written in the DNA of a crashing wave that was meant to break once it hit the California coast.
At the core of America’s biggest festival runs a deep current of punk weed lore.
Blood, Smoke & Feedback
Like the plant, Tovar thrived on the margins. Like the plant, he built community where there was none. And like the plant, he was punished for it—caged, stamped a criminal—even as the scene he funded bled ragged into the mainstream.
Now cannabis comes sealed in child-proof plastic. Punk is nostalgia on Spotify, repackaged as background noise for Taco Bell commercials. Coachella is a corporate sandbox of wristbands and influencers elbowing for the best Heineken-sponsored selfie.
But scratch the glossy veneer and Tovar’s fingerprint is still there. You can hear it in the rumble of a hardcore reunion. See it in growers still chasing landrace purity. Smell it in the blunt passed around at the edge of a Turnstile pit. The spirit didn’t die, but it’s forever mutated.
And that’s the pattern. Outlaw culture gets mined, sanitized, sold back to the masses. Jazz clubs. Punk pits. Cannabis farms. The cycle doesn’t stop. The only question is who keeps the spirit alive when the money men move in.
That’s why Gary’s story matters. Not as trivia, but as proof that any culture worth a damn is born underground, sustained by those reckless enough to bankroll it against all odds.
For SoCal punk, weed was the blood.
Music, the drug.
Coachella’s the hangover.
The rest is just smoke.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
