Dave Markey is an underground legend. A filmmaker who started making Super 8 movies before he hit his teens, by the time he finished high school he and his best friend Jordan Schwartz were the unofficial chroniclers of LA's hardcore punk scene thanks to their 'zine We Got Power!.

We Got Power! only lasted for a few years, but after a long and totally awesome career documenting and making music videos for bands like Sonic Youth, Shonen Knife, The Circle Jerks, The Meat Puppets and Dinosaur Jr. as well as making the punk rock girl-gang classic Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984), its sequel Lovedolls Superstar (1986), and the award-winning documentary The Reinactors (2008), Dave teamed back up with his friend Jordan to re-visit their old 'zine.

The result is We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California, the new book from Bazillion Points that combines Markey and Schwartz's photographs with essays from the people who were there. Illuminating, impassioned, and essential reading for anyone in need of some inspiration, We Got Power! is the definitive document of LA hardcore in the early '80s.

We talked to Dave at home, where he told us about his movies, the LA scene then and now, and the indelible appeal of Russ Meyer:

SKIN CENTRAL: I really love [your movie]Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, so I wanted to ask you-- I sort ofread that movie as a parody ofSwitchblade Sisters(1975) or a girl gang movie. Is that something you were going for when you were writing it?

DAVE MARKEY: That was something that just sort of happened naturally, when I was making that film I had yet to see Switchblade Sisters or Teenage Gang Debs (1966) or any of those movies. What that was coming from was more or less a purging of the 70s culture that I and my friends grew up in, and it was just sort of a natural giving back of some of that stuff that was blasted through us as kids.

SC: And you were rebelling against [that] by being involved in the punk culture?

DM: Well it was just-- I don’t know if it was a conscious rebellion, or more just needing to purge the trash culture out of us. Sort of a reaction to it. It was decidedly a parody, but, you know, we did it pretty straight faced.

SC: You started filmmaking when you were real young right? Like 11?

markey 3DM: Yeah, I was a pre-teen. [I had an] 8mm camera at that point before I graduated to Super 8, which was a big step up at the time...just sort of learning how to operate a camera, splice, film, put stuff together. I started as a kid, choosing neighborhood friends and just sort of creating.

SC: So you kind of had the DIY spirit before you became involved in the music scene.

DM: Right, yeah. I didn’t even know what DIY was, I didn’t even hear the phrase until many years later, but I was definitely doing it all myself.

SC: And your 'zine, WE GOT POWER! was around from ’81 to-- 83 or 84?

DM: Yeah it was just a couple of years, which seems like a small blip in time at this point. But you know, back then, 2 years was really worth a decade [in terms of] stuff that was going on. [They were] incredibly dense times and an incredibly dense music scene.

SC: Is that why you wanted to write about it? Because there was so much going on and you felt that youneeded to document it?

DM: Absolutely. It was definitely a conscious decision as a teenager to get involved...I didn’t even have publication experience, if you want to call it that, prior to We Got Power, but of course getting involved in the punk scene in LA was good because it took me out of the neighborhood and brought me into this whole other world.

SC: Were you in touch with other people doing other zines in other cities? How were you finding out about this stuff?

DM: Everything was the US mail. Fan zines would circulate their 'zines around to other 'zines and that’s how you [find out about stuff]...That was how you would meet people, sort of like a pen pal type situation. And sometimes they would offer to write a zine report, and I found myself writing about Los Angeles for other publications such as Maximum Rock n' Roll.

There was just all sorts of activity going on, and it's funny how all this stuff happened organically before any concept of Internet. It was almost like a preview of what was to come in culture. But of course, it was a lot slower because it took a while to do these zines...People really, kids really had to be plugged into this, and they really had a lot of footwork to do if they were going to follow these bands because of lot of these records were hard to find. You really had seek this stuff out.

SC: Do you think that the internet makes it easier to get plugged into subcultures?

DM: Well yeah, you’re instantly plugged in. And it’s not like a real refined focus like it was then. But then again, when you go back and look at all the bands in LA at the time, you realize there really wasn’t one band or one sound.There were all sorts of sounds and styles, but it all fell under the [hardcore] moniker just of because of was going on in mainstream rock and roll at the time...I don’t think very many people had music industry on their minds at the time. In fact, they were probably out to destroy all that, create something else.

SC: In the WE GOT POWER! book, in one of the essays, there was a mention of a generation gap between [you and] the '77 punks who were like, “you weren’t there two years ago, you don’t know how it was”

DM: We were already 2nd generation LA punk. We were totally young. I was 12 years old during that first wave-- I was far too young to go up to Hollywood, to go to the Mask, which was a really small insular scene of about maybe 40 people. And they were all older, they had all graduated art school and were just coming from a different world. “It’s mine, you can’t have it,” there was a lot of that going on.

I think that’s the one thing that hardcore did to sort of differentiate itself from punk rock. It was just like embracing this [idea of] "yeah, we are different." But, of course, fully informed by all of that stuff, and loving all those bands-- The Dickies and X and all the bands coming out of the Mask.

A lot of interesting stuff was happening for the first time. A band like The Go-Gos came out of that scene, [and] all of a sudden became the number one band in the nation in 1982. It was kind of surprising to everybody. Meanwhile the rest of the bands were broken up or changed names, had moved on.

SC: It’s like you were saying before--that two years was forever.

DM: It was. I think we all remember being kids and we all remember what the summer was like. The summer was a world in and of itself, and three months seemed endless. A lot of that is just the brain of an adolescent...And of course culture was slower so it did take a while.

SC: Is that something that still happens, that people still say “you weren’t here two years ago, everything was so much better two years ago”?

DM: I think that some of that may be lost. Occasionally I’ll hear people say “things were better in the ‘90s, what’s up with this music now?” But nothing’s going to stop music or bands or things from happening, it's going to keep changing and evolving and there’s going to be new stuff coming out and there is going to be people who experienced things before and have strong ties to it.

SC: You and Penelope Spheeris have both done work documenting the LA punk scene. What do you think about her films?

DM: Well, the first The Decline of Western Civilization had everything to do with me getting involved in what was going on in LA at the time. I actually ended up using some footage from that on my new documentary for the Circle Jerks, My Career as a Jerk. I would speak to my friends...we would speak back and forth in dialogue from that film. That’s how into it we were.

SC: Can you tell me more about the Circle Jerks doc?

DM: Yeah, it just came out today actually. It's played a few festivals prior to the DVD release today. It’s a film I finished earlier this year. It tells the 30-year plus story of the band, from their origins to their many life changes to their eventual permanent hiatus. Between the [Dinosaur Jr. concert film Dinosaur Jr. Bug (Live) at 9:30], the Circle Jerks, the book, [and] my gallery show We Survived the Pit, it’s been a very busy year.

SC: How long has this book been brewing? Did somebody ask you if you wanted to do it, or how did that happen?

DM: The book was 8 years in the making. [We] started work on it in 2004, and originally it was going to be a different project. But that fell apart, and I just sort of stuck with it, and finally found Ian Christie at Bazillion Points and he got it, he was really into it. [So] we redid the work at that point from scratch, and I think it really helped the book.

SC: It's really cool, I was looking at it earlier today.

DM: Thank you, yeah I’m pretty proud of it. It’s a pretty solid cultural experience. That’s how I really wanted it to be. I wanted it to be not so much a nostalgic trip-- although I guess it is that for some people-- I wanted it to be a complete experience for someone that has no knowledge of it at all, [who] can pick it up and immerse himself in it and experience it as I experienced it as a teenager. That was the idea, and I think it came out very well.

SC: I just have one more question for you. Because this is for Mr.Skin-- do you remember the first time you ever saw a movie with nudity in it? Do you remember what it was?

DM: I don’t know-- maybe Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep (1977)? I don’t know, there was a ton of nudity in films [then], but I think the best nudity, of course, was in Russ Meyer’s films. I didn’t see [them] as a kid, I markey 11saw them when I was a little bit older, but I think [they are] definitely the best-- the breast-- movies that are out there.

SC: Yeah, I love Russ Meyer movies.

DM: '70s films were more...the PGs were more R rated, the vibe was more relaxed back then. There was a lot more gratuitous nudity. I think American culture was definitely at a peak back then, it got really uptight in the ' 80s and a lot of the fun of that was just taken away. The internet really changed things. I think [it's] definitely for the better, but it also took away so much of the fun of discovering this stuff and having to be patient with watching really crappy 20th generation dubbed VHS tapes. Now everything’s on the 'net, and you have an interest in something you just dial it in, and boom! there it is.

We Got Power! Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California is available NOW online or at a book store near you, and for all the latest on Dave and his exploits, be sure to check out the official We Got Power Films website!