The US pioneer from The Avengers on opening for the Pistols, women in punk, hardcore, queercore, riot grrrl, record labels, art schools, and maintaining her teenage punk identity!
Recently, a 44-page booklet was published in the USA. It is the record of a conversation between Maria Elena Buszek, Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado, Denver, and Penelope Houston, singer of Californian punk band The Avengers, founded in June 1977 and still playing. In this book, Ms Houston tells us much about her life, her music and her visual art.
The chapbook contains ten portrait drawings by Penelope Houston of herself and members of The Avengers, as well as other San Francisco punk bands like The Dils, Pink Section, and The Screamers. It serves as a personal and artistic reflection on the era.
When The Avengers started, Penelope and drummer Danny Furious (Danny O’Brien) both had an art school background. According to Professor Buszek, that was rare in the USA, compared to the UK punk scene (An article about Dutch early punk and art schools is here)
Buszek remarked that for some people, “punk brought out some kind of thing in you that you even didn’t know existed”. Houston replied: “We were making it up as it came along, and there were no rules like, “Oh, you want to be a rock star? Well, here are all the rules about how you do that.” It was just like: we’re making noise, we’re gonna look any way we want, and we’re gonna write music any way we want. A really freeing time. Nobody expected to have records out or to get signed to a label or anything like that.”
Of the 1970s US West Coast punk bands, only one, The Dickies, got a big record company contract. That was very much less than UK punk bands did. And even less than the four out of hundreds Dutch early punk bands which got major label deals (the labels dumped three of them after their first album and one after their second album).
After playing for six months, The Avengers were booked to open for the Sex Pistols at Winterland in San Francisco. According to Penelope, maybe 800 of the over 5000 audience had ever been at a punk gig before. Many of them decided to start their own punk bands there and then!
This video features Penelope Houston with the Avengers at Winterland on January 14th, 1978, opening for the Sex Pistols‘ final concert tour date:
Buszek remarks, and Houston agrees (as does Siouxsie Sioux in the UK and other first-wave punk women); “That punk from its origins really had a huge female presence – especially in places like San Francisco, where a queer presence was also really visible from the get-go – which has disappeared from punk history in the years since.” Buszek says that something similar happened in the history of women in art movements, like Dada and Surrealism.
When the hardcore punk tendency started, Penelope went to shows in Los Angeles in 1979-1980. She asked herself: “Where are the girls?” It even caused her to then temporarily lose interest in punk, moving on to playing folk music solo, and recording several albums.
There’s nothing wrong with hardcore (in the US sense) if it is one of the tendencies in multiform punk. It is wrong when it is perceived as the only punk, squeezing out the women, LGBTQ people, and people of colour, unlike the original punk first wave.
According to Buszek and Houston, the rise in the 1990s of queercore punk and riot grrrl punk was a reaction to that: “Wait, you pushed us out, so now we’re gonna make it a thing” (more explicitly than in the 1970s first punk wave).
Penelope worked at the San Francisco Public Library. There was material there about hippie history. She persuaded the library to start a punk archive as well. Now, an archivist is cataloguing the punk stuff there to make it accessible to people.
Penelope Houston re-founded The Avengers in 2004. Playing both their 1970s and new songs in North America and Europe. Several times, they have played the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool, England. At the 2025 edition, Penelope not only sang, but was behind the merch table as well. It was there I bought her chapbook.
Penelope says: “I have that teenage rebel live on inside me … that inner punk will always live on.”
This video shows The Avengers playing at Rebellion Festival on August 7, 2022:
Main Photo Credit: PENELOPE HOUSTON
Follow Penelope Houston on Her Socials:
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