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This We Dug: The Sex Pistols

December 17, 2017January 29, 2009 by admin

(In this installment, Wallflowers vocalist Dave Rinck commemorates the Sex Pistols’ cycle of self-consumption.)
I love Ziggy Stardust and Marc Bolan and all that ’70s stuff. I mean, I even wanted to cover “Metal Guru” with Fleminger at an open-mic night in San Diego last month. But given the vast sea of discontent that summed up the bloated musical mainstream of the ’70s, it was inevitable that a band would eventually appear that would challenge the very concept that pop music can or should have any meaning. “Nihilism” is a great word that gets used very loosely, but if you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find that it has a very specific and useful meaning:

“Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history.

Then and now: Graveyard Park

January 1, 2011January 26, 2009 by admin

(Roving correspondent Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our past glories. Today, we find out where the bodies are buried — or not.)

“You moved the headstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!” In the Stephen Spielberg film “Poltergeist,” a suburban family is attacked by malevolent spirits provoked by a relocated graveyard.

Calvary Cemetery, a k a “Pioneer Park,” (1501 Washington Place in Mission Hills) shares a similar history (tho’ the only spirits I’ve heard of there are those of the bottled variety). Historically, the area served as a Catholic graveyard “between 1875 and 1919, with burials continuing up until 1960.” In 1970 the cemetery was converted into a public park, and “the grave markers (but not the people) were removed. A group of some of the gravestones were clustered together and a central memorial was placed in the southeast corner of the park. The exact number of people buried there isn’t known, but research alludes to possibly 4,000 burials which have occured there.”

Mid-’80s flyers from the Bill Starling Collection

June 30, 2009January 24, 2009 by admin

“I stumbled across your site while checking out the Casbah page,” Bill Starling writes. “I really dig what’s on your site. I went to many shows in the early and mid ’80s. I recognize a lot of the flyers but I was also blown away by all the flyers I have never seen.

“I have quite a few flyers that are all in great shape. They are all originals from the day and I’ve saved them over the years. Many are from the Adams Ave. / Wabash Hall / Fairmount Hall days.”

Like recent contributions from Ken Fugate and Jason Seibert, the Starling Collection appears here in downloadable PDF format, about 80 flyers in four files spanning approximately 1981 to 1986 and beyond:

Noise 292 gets into gear

January 1, 2011January 23, 2009 by admin

Preparations for the May 30 Che Underground reunion at San Diego’s Casbah are picking up steam and uniting musical collaborators separated by miles and decades.

Last weekend marked the first studio reunion of the Northern California contingent of Noise 292, comprising four of the five musicians who played together at the Che Cafe in July 1983: vocalist/ bassist/ guitarist Kristin Martin; vocalist/ guitarist David “Kavika” Rives; percussionist Hobie Hodge; and the Answers’ Dave Fleminger, who reprised his historical role as substitute drummer. (The San Diego faction — drummer Joanne Norris and percussionist Wendell Kling — are on deck to join the festivities in time for the May performance.)

Che Underground: Virus-free since ’83!

June 30, 2009January 21, 2009 by admin

Thank you to our members who wrote in yesterday that their antivirus packages were reporting suspicious activity on the blog. And a special note of thanks to one of our resident security experts (who may choose to chime in here): His screening indicates a “false positive”; his diagnosis, that we’re virus-free.

(The alerts seem to have stopped for those who were getting them. You can now resume normal relations with your blogging partners; if redness, discharge or other symptoms recur, please contact our anonymous clinic at cheunderground@gmail.com.)

While we’re talking health and hygiene, a couple of other reminders about safe Che play:

Dream Sequence: The history of the Unknowns

December 11, 2017January 18, 2009 by admin

(Excerpts from Ray Brandes’ epic account of San Diego’s first major-label band since Iron Butterfly. Read the full version in Che Underground’s Related Bands section.)

Anyone who had the opportunity to see the Unknowns play had an unforgettable experience. Crisp, staccato drumming and the dripping-wet reverberation of Mosrite guitars through Fender amplifiers was punctuated by the yips and howls of the legendary melodramatic lead singer, Bruce Joyner, who sang from a chair or aided by a cane, looking every bit like a down-home Barnabas Collins in search of fresh blood.

Their tight and powerful act upstaged every band with whom they played, including the Go-Gos, Madness, the Blasters, the Plimsouls, Wall Of Voodoo, the Romantics, Joe King Carrasco, Romeo Void, the Textones, the Suburban Lawns, Missing Persons and scores of others.

At times the band members themselves have lamented that their place amongst their peers seems to have been forgotten over the years, yet they were the first San Diego band signed to a major label since the Iron Butterfly in 1967. They were named one of the top four bands in California by the Los Angeles Times in the early ‘80s. They were the first band from the San Diego scene to perform live on a major syndicated television show, Peter Ivers’ “New Wave Theater,” which was picked up by Armed Forces Television and the USA Network’s “Night Flight.” And their Sire album “Dream Sequence” has sold nearly 100,000 copies to date.

Kick out the jams, open your doors

March 29, 2019January 14, 2009 by admin

(A quick Che Underground public-service announcement: Manual Scan/Shambles guitarist Kevin Donaker-Ring files an update on a very rewarding career and issues a call to action for a worthy cause.)

What I have been doing, lo, these many years: high school student exchange. In late 1982, I got a job running the copy machine and performing odd jobs at a high school exchange program located in La Jolla, Calif. I devoted almost my entire adult life to that organization, learning most everything there is to know about student exchange at the high-school level. Yet after 21 years, everyone at our head office was suddenly out. The Board of Directors had decided to move operations to one of the satellite offices. In Arkansas.

After a day or so of panic, I realized that I had the opportunity to start my own program and founded AFICE, the Academic Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, in December 2003. We are a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization. (Yes, donations are tax-deductible, so if you’re feeling generous, please think of us.) We operate all across the country, with local representatives from California to Maine, from Washington to Florida, and we even added a rep in Alaska recently.

Right now (and always, it seems), we are in serious need of host families. Our deadline (imposed by the US Department of State) is almost here and two of our families backed out at the last minute. Two kids from Poland, a girl and a boy, are suddenly without a place to stay.

Tracing Structural Fracture

January 1, 2011January 13, 2009 by admin

(Co-founder Stefan Helmreich discusses Structural Fracture’s San Diego roots and national branches.)

Structural Fracture was a psychedelically minded garage-punk trio from San Diego’s North County, active from 1984 to 1986. Stefan Helmreich, Chris Henry and David Derrick played house parties in Encinitas (once with Noise 292) and often offered themselves as guinea pigs to budding recording engineers at Mira Costa College in Oceanside.

In 1985, Structural Fracture won San Dieguito High School’s Battle of the Bands in a performance many remember for the band’s bent rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and for the moment when Stefan used a blender to mangle a microphone.

“Delirium” was recorded in June 1985 at Mira Costa and features Stefan Helmreich on bass and vocals, Chris Henry on guitar and David Derrick on drums. Simon Cheffins, of future Crash Worship fame, engineered the recording.

Report from The Front

June 30, 2009January 11, 2009 by admin

(Morgan Smith describes the birth of The Front and the growth of the San Diego scene.)

Many moons ago I started a band in San Diego called The Front with Mark Baez. I guess you could say we were surfer dudes from Coronado bored with the beach and inspired by the raw energy of the new rock and roll.

The next thing I knew, we had a band with a virtuoso bass player (Kevin Chanel) and a speedster drummer (Dan Mehlos, who also played with Personal Conflict); formed our own record label (Scheming Intelligentsia); recorded an album (Man, You Gotta Move); and were playing shows with Battalion of Saints, Black Flag, Misfits, Social Distortion, TSOL, Stiff Little Fingers (fill in your favorite punk band) and the coup de grace in my book, Johnny Thunders. We haunted the usual San Diego spaces: Fairmount Hall; North Park Lions Club; Adams Avenue Theater; and yes, the Che Cafe.

This We Dug: Laurie Partridge

March 29, 2019January 9, 2009 by admin

(Editor’s note: When asked whether guest columnist Patrick Works could add this submission to the “This We Dug” franchise, series founder Dave Rinck wrote, “Of course! Anything Pat says is automatically cool.” And so it is.)

Or were you secretly in love with Keith? Or perhaps you were a wannabe Reuben Kincaid just like me?

For some strange reason amidst the caca-phone of 60s/70s TV the Monkees begat all kinds of media attempts at duplicating pop super-stardom, and the rest is of course TV history.