Lorna Doom, the bassist of the seminal Los Angeles punk band Germs, died on Wednesday afternoon. Her passing was confirmed by former Germs drummer Don Bolles in a Facebook post. “She left this mortal coil today around 1,” he wrote in a Facebook comment. She was 61. On Friday, January 18, the band and Doom’s family released a statement explaining that she had died of cancer. Read the full statement below.
Born Teresa Ryan, Doom joined Germs in the mid-’70s. The lineup at the time included vocalist Jan Paul Beahm (Darby Crash), guitarist Georg Ruthenberg (Pat Smear), and Belinda Carlisle—who would later become the lead singer of the Go-Go’s—on drums. After a couple of personnel switch-ups, the band recruited drummer Don Bolles and released their lone full-length (GI) on Slash Records in 1979.
The group released only a handful of singles and live recordings during their brief lifespan. Germs’ multiple performances at storied Hollywood venues such as the Masque, the Roxy, and the Whiskey a Go Go were chronicled in oral histories by Brendan Mullen and Marc Spitz. They were prominently featured in Penelope Spheeris’ iconic 1981 punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.
Germs disbanded in 1980 after Darby Crash died by suicide at the age of 22. In 2005, Lorna Doom, Pat Smear, and Don Bolles were joined onstage by actor Shane West for a Germs reunion show, an idea spawned by West’s performance as Darby Crash in the Germs biopic What We Do Is Secret. The “new” Germs continued performed a handful of concerts with this lineup.
