Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
Dancing Skeleton scooter club co-founder- turned- Che Underground benefactor Elker deMello’s generous bequest of mod-themed photography continues to enrich our understanding of early-’80s San Diego’s scootering classes.
While the pictures are there in abundance — many of them shot at Ski Beach or Seaport Village — details are sketchy on some of them. Can you help fill in the blanks?
(Dave Fleminger recalls this performance from Noise 292’s April 25, 1984, appearance at UCSD’s Center for Music Experiment.)
I strongly remember this show, and especially this song. It was one of the last shows I saw before I left San Diego. Noise 292’s set was solid and focused, and unrelenting. This song, the last one in the set, struck me especially in its cold and alienating embrace.
The vocals and the high melody lock together into a single statement that shatters by the end into a mass of confusion and disjointed thought. Like so many great songs, it was easy to relate to it as a manifestation of my own mixed feelings — in this case about leaving home, my friends, this amazing music scene, everything familiar.
Set the controls for the heart of the sun: The Che Underground’s quarter-century reunion looms ever larger — so large, in fact, that one night just couldn’t contain it.
Now scheduled for May 29 and 30 at Tim Mays’ legendary Casbah Club in San Diego, the event will comprise:
(Joey Miller, a k a P Gargoyle, f k a Joanne Norris, drummer extraordinaire for the Injections as well as Noise 292 and Everybody Violet, shares scans and recollections of the legendary punk band, which also featured Lou Skum on vocals, Bruce Perreault on guitar and Lisa Acid on bass and helped propel the San Diego scene at the turn of the ’80s.)
Like fine wine, we have all aged, and here we are almost 30 years later on Che Underground: The Blog. I had some old flyers and other things left over, and the ones that I did not discard I scanned. (I never thought they would get their just due, but I was wrong.)
Some of the things I had were easier to scan than others. Some of them I have seen in other places on the Web, like Lou’s Facebook page, but I haven’t seen them all together. Not yet.
(Peripatetic Wallflower Dave Rinck extends the Che Underground to East Africa.)
Somebody called me on the phone … They said, “Hey! Is David home?” It was Gilbert Barthe, lead guitarist of my current band the Beathogs. “We’re all down at Dass. You wanna come down and play a show in about 45 minutes?” Well, sure, I thought. Why not? I was always under the impression that Dass was just this sort of funky Ethiopian restaurant located on the second floor of a grim concrete building on this crazy street of bars in Westlands (a part of Nairobi near where I live). But anyway, I was at this lame party, kinda bored, so I though well what the hell … it’d be more fun than staying here. So I grabbed my guitar and headed on down.
Next thing you know, I found myself climbing this narrow cement staircase up to the second floor of this dusty old building. I knew the place on the first floor was Havanas, a nightclub and restaurant that a friend of mine named Zelalem deejays at, attracting huge unruly mobs some nights that spill off the sidewalk out front and into the street until all hours. I myself had frequently held court over plates of fish almondine on linen tablecloths and huge carafes of wine in the backrooms of that place well after midnight. But I’d never made the haul up to the second floor. Well, that was all about to change …
(Here’s Part Three from Che stalwart Paul Kaufman on how his young self was Dead Wrong on some major issues of our time.)
In the comments following Dave Rinck’s recent “This We Dug: The Sex Pistols” post, Dave Ellison perfectly nailed how I felt about hearing those records for the first time: “the Sex Pistols album made all the rock music, clothes, hairstyles, etc. that were around at the time seem completely outdated.” It’s hard to cast your mind back to fully capture how revolutionary it felt.
It was so clear in 1977. The Ramones and Patti Smith at CBGB, the Sex Pistols, Clash, Wire, X-Ray Spex, 999 and all the rest in England. So vibrant, making commercial radio (and San Diego was ALL commercial radio) taste like a mouthful of ashes. As a 13-year-old, I envisioned all the old boring stuff would be swept away in a tide of cultural and political enlightenment in the US. The UK was actually having records in the Top 10 that you didn’t have to leave the room for — why not in the US, too?
Read moreNostradamus, I’m not. Part 3: Punk rock sweeps America!
Exactly one year ago Monday, I posted the first awkward entry to Che Underground: The Blog. This tiny corner of cyberspace was originally intended as a little online gathering point for a few old friends who’d been chatting on e-mail to swap MP3s and photos and maybe tell each other stories about our salad days. My statistics software shows me we had a total of 28 people look at the blog in February 2008.
Fast-forward precisely one revolution around the sun: Our audience grew to more than 8,500 people in January ’09 — but a much, much more important statistic is the sheer wattage of joy and love generated by being all together, All Grown Up. (A little jolt of pain here and there, perhaps … But that’s just part of the refining process, right?)
Here’s a space for Che birthday wishes and reflection: What have you given and received here this past year?
(Kristen Tobiason remembers when books came in stores, not chains.)
Literature was an influential element, a hot, voluptuous topic of conversation among our group, passionate, fueling argument or forging agreement. Who was reading what? Can I borrow that?
Fiction and poetry colored our expression, our ideas and our character. I remember loitering at the Florida Street apartment for hours listening to Pat and Jerry discuss pre-revolutionary Russian literature or the Illuminati chronicles. Or Eric Bacher smoking and reading a book by Bukowski or Celine. Jeff Lucas quoting Rimbaud. Borrowing Michael Moorcock from David Rinck. A thrift-store mission for H.P. Lovecraft titles with my boyfriend. The gloating happiness of having scored a stack of titles for a couple of dollars.
“Hi Matthew,” writes Greg S. “Maybe you remember me. … Toby Thunderbird/ Lifehater/ Gibson told me about your site.
“I’m visiting the US and thought I’d dig up some old photos to contribute, which have been sitting in a box in my mom’s garage. … Wasn’t sure how/where to post them, so here they are.”
(Dylan Rogers commemorates another painful loss to the rock-‘n’-roll underground and recognizes the Cramps’ California connection.)
“Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, passed away yesterday due to an existing heart condition at Glendale Memorial Hospital.”
Holy shit! Not again!
The Cramps are one of my fave bands. I have seen them more than any other band. They really got me through some lean musical times (late ’80s -mid ’90s); for a while, they were the only decent bands you could go see with ties to early punk.
Yes The Cramps are associated with New York, but the true beginnings of the band started in the early- to mid-1970s in Sacramento, Calif., in a small apartment on the corner of 21st and H, where Lux and Ivy first lived together. (Rumor has it Lux picked up Ivy hitchhiking, and they had been together ever since.)
