Violence Girl is not some sentimental look back at how great it all was.
Alice [
Bag], without exaggeration, allows the reader to understand how exciting and in-the-moment things could be–but also how quickly and easily things can go bad and come to an end.With The Bags in the middle of it, it was a time of incredible innovation, explosive creativity and recordings that stand the test of time.–
Henry Rollins for
LA Weekly The book's slices of punk life from thirty-five years ago also document a flashpoint for a city rich with talent and anger, erupting into something completely oppositional to the feel-good, pastoral, and often saccharine Laurel Canyon melodies and glistening surf music of the preceding decade. -
City Watch LA Now 52 years old and a lot less angry, Alice is an author. Last year she published her first book Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story (Feral House) which spawned from a blog she started for fun. Violence Girl details stories of the 70s punk scene, her complicated relationship with her parents, her father's rage, her nationality, drugs, growing up poor in East LA and rising into a punk icon. -
Vice After decades of dudes telling their stories of punk's formative years in memoir, we finally get one of L.A. punk's most crucial figures–Alice Bag, frontwoman of The Bags–telling her tale. Unsentimental and tough, she gets out from under her patriarchal family and finds her place among a crew of motley, misfit kids as they accidentally invented the American West Coast punk in bands like X, Black Flag, Germs and her own band, The Bags. –Jessica Hopper,
Rookie