admin | The Che Underground

Salad days at the Che

September 4, 2011April 6, 2011 by admin

(A new perspective on our old stomping grounds. Any other readers from the Che collective want to chime in?)

So, I am flipping through the Reader, and I see the short article about your site and I go check it out because back in the day I belonged to several lefty campus organizations that put on benefit concerts at the Che.

I recognized the name of your band, Noise 292, because of all the shows we did. I had one flyer saved from back in the day, and it has your band’s name on it along with The Front and The Odds. It was for a Feb. 24, 1984, concert [to benefit draft resister Michael Marsh] sponsored by the UCSD Committee Against Registration and the Draft which was a part of the Progressive Student Organization at the Che.

Lemons Are Yellow play Che Games

September 4, 2011March 23, 2011 by admin

Che Games for May 2009 continues to pay dividends for aficionados of San Diego subculture, encapsulated here in two choice cuts from the reunited Lemons Are Yellow: “Thousand Island” and “America’s Finest City.”

The LAY lineup comprises Paul Kaufman (guitar, vocals); Dave Fleminger (guitar, vocals); Kristin Martin (bass, vocals); and Seth Affoumado (drums). Heather Vorwerck shot the performance, which opened the festivities May 29, 2009.

Gary Heffern: “Hand of the Devil”

December 11, 2017March 19, 2011 by admin

In time for his visit to San Diego’s Casbah April 3 and 6 to reunite with the Penetrators and celebrate the pending release of his “Gary Heffern & Beautiful People” CD, Gary Heffern shares this new video for his song “Hand of the Devil” and describes the process of its creation.

“The video was shot at the school Rovala, which I am attending to learn the Finnish language,” Gary writes. “While there it struck me that I was one of the only English-speaking people there, and how many refugees were in my class … And there were many moments when I felt so insecure about what I was doing and why I was here.

“When I began to learn more about these people it seemed that my circumstances were smaller, and I also saw very plainly that they really have no future here in Finland, simply because of not speaking the language, or the color of their skin.

Introducing Sceneroller

September 4, 2011March 11, 2011 by admin

We’ve spent the past three years here on Che Underground: The Blog talking about the bands, people, places and shows that made our scene. Now here’s a way to connect them to each other — and to other scenes around the world.

San Diego is my musical home, and our musical history is precious to me … So this is the right place for the first real public launch of Sceneroller, a software platform that lets users connect bands, people, venues and gigs to write a shared history of local music scenes.

Crawdaddys/Scan/GDV at the Syndicate

September 4, 2011March 6, 2011 by admin

This hitherto unpublished 1984 flyer from the Bruce Haemmerle Collection portrays the Crawdaddys, Manual Scan and the Gravedigger V at Point Loma’s Syndicate all-ages club.

I’m giving it pride of place for a few reasons:

Unknowns in France!

December 14, 2017March 1, 2011 by admin

(Unknowns bassist Dave Doyle recounts the band’s 1990 reunion and transatlantic travels, complete with video!)

The video embedded in this post came as a complete surprise to me; I knew that some must exist out there, but having never seen any footage back in the day I didn’t know what had become of the record of our time in France.

So in short form this is how this video came to be: Mark Neill, Craig Packham and I had recently moved to Georgia and were struggling to get a foothold. We decided to make a record with Bruce Joyner as The Unknowns and tour France. So out of this “Southern Decay” was produced, and a tour was set up to support the record. Making the record was a blur, as was getting to France!

The Answers at Lestat’s: ‘Color Notes’ b/w ‘History’

January 22, 2018February 24, 2011 by admin

(Answers guitarist David Fleminger tells the story behind two Answers classics from the early ’80s, which the reformed band — including bassist Tony Suarez and drummer Dave Anderson — performed Jan. 29 at Lestat’s.)

“Color Notes”
I’m not exactly sure what originally inspired the idea for “Color Notes.”

the song was written in 1982 and perhaps I had seen something somewhere about synesthesia, perhaps not. Often music creates clear images in my mind, but not the kind of visions seen by the synesthete, somebody who literally sees colors that correlate with specific notes.

Years later I did discover that once I might have been trained to equate notes with colors … a folded sheet that came with a favorite childhood toy, a Fisher-Price Pull-A-Tune, one of those rolling xylophones with differently-colored metal bars. Fisher-Price included some examples of melodies complete with ‘Color-Notes’ that correspond to the colors on the toy. Perhaps there was something in the simple melody of this song that reminded me of playing with the xylophone.

Darren Grealish in Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

December 14, 2017February 20, 2011 by admin

(On the heels of Mark Neill’s Grammy win, more news of national recognition for an old friend. Poster artist extraordinaire Darren Grealish describes his inclusion in the forthcoming Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s Library and Archives.)

I have been selected to join the permanent display with other rock artists, album artists and rock literature/book authors who made an important impact on rock-‘n’-roll history. I will have my own permanent exhibit that includes tons of my art framed in all its glory, along with a detailed biography, interviews, personal photos, and an in-depth look at my career with influential artists and performers.

Che Underground’s third birthday

September 4, 2011February 16, 2011 by admin

How much is that in blog years? Today marks three solar orbits since we launched Che Underground: The Blog and another opportunity to take stock of the ground we’ve covered in the interim.

We’ve grown a lot in the past year. Just in time for our second birthday, we broke a traffic record with 9,000 unique visitors in January 2010. This year, we came close to doubling that number; January 2011 was another record-breaker, with more than 16,000 visitors.