Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
What have we got to work with?
“Hi, Matt,” writes Che Underground contributor and veteran San Diego scenester Mathias Kuo to the Che Underground hotline. “Here are some scooter pics from the hallowed halls of SD history — taken from a South Bay perspective.”
“Set #1 — Chula, Bonita and Coronado mods before a rally.”
Next stop for the Che Underground time machine: Nineteen sixty-eight, when the Brain Police was the hottest act in San Diego and opened for bands like the Who, Cream, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Like Ray Brandes’ recent homage to the Hitmakers, I hope a starter post here will attract some personal reminiscences of what appears to have been a very cool band indeed.
Maybe you assumed we’re the only ones thinking about the musical community we constructed in our youth. Perhaps you assumed our web of bands and venues and relationships was the only one to inspire a Web anthology and assorted reunions.
Now consider the unlikely musical incubator of Boone, N.C., which has inspired an eerily similar project focused on reassembling underground bands that played Appalachian State University between 1979 and 1990.
There’s “friends” and then there’s friends. Although the specifics of how Kevin and I met have been muddied by time, I’m now thinking it was early 1976, at a La Jolla Shores beach party.
My memory stems from the fact that I had wanted Kevin to go to Wings with me and that was June (rescheduled from May) 1976. He already had a guitar and amp and was taking lessons, but a lot of the connection was over a shared love of music, starting with The Beatles and later Cheap Trick, The Zombies and many others. Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” was always a particular favorite. He didn’t make it to Wings, but we did manage to catch Queen with Thin Lizzy soon after.
From almost the moment we began hanging out, we talked about starting a band.
And we did.
One of the most exciting revelations inspired by Che Underground: The Blog was the reintroduction to our circle of original Wallflowers drummer Cecil “P’Nut” Daniels.
His arrival from Texas in the early ’80s (under the name Aaron Daniels) and unlikely alliance with the nascent Wallflowers wrought a profound influence on the band and on other members of our crew, such as Kristen Tobiason and Patrick Works.
“Aaron elevated the proceedings,” writes Wallflowers bassist Paul Howland. “He showed me how to play slap-style bass, (which we called ‘Thumpin’ ’ or ‘Poppin’ ’); played me recordings of some of the best purveyors of that technique; and even showed me how to set up an amp properly to achieve the right sound to enhance the technique.
In the course of researching his his exhaustive biography of the Penetrators, Che Underground historian Ray Brandes referred to a seminal document that helped bring San Diego’s musical underground to a broader audience: San Diego Reader music critic Steve Esmedina’s diary of his six-day California tour with the Penetrators.
“Does anyone have a copy of that ‘Two Dollar Tour’ article from the Reader?” Rockin’ Dog Dave Ellison asks. ” When that was published, I thought it was the most glamorous, exciting thing I’d ever read … I saved it for years, but it’s gone now. I can still remember parts of it … like Dan McLain eating at Taco Bell and claiming that food with too many vitamins made him throw up!”
In honor of the pending 30th anniversary of this Oct. 18, 1979, article, I thought I’d share the copy Ray sent me (courtesy of Penetrators archivist Joe Piper). I’ve formatted it as printable PDF file and posted it for download here.
Read more‘Two Dollar Tour:
On the road with the Penetrators’
(Dean Curtis hails the return of a favorite Bay area band with deep San Diego roots.)
When I moved to the Bay area in ’92, I was pretty out of touch with the local music scene. One night, I was browsing through the Bay Guardian’s music listings, and I saw “Ron Silva & The Monarchs” listed.
“Naw, it can’t be the same Ron Silva from The Crawdaddys!” I thought. I went and checked it out anyway. Sure enough, it was the same Ron, fronting a new band of hip R&B cats from San Francisco, put together in ’93 by ex-Loved One Nick Rossi. Ron’s voice sounded better than ever, and the band was top notch!
A recent comment by Kristen Tobiason has me puzzling over how best to focus conversation on the Gravedigger V, a youthful San Diego band whose brief existence in 1983-1984 has inspired a quarter-century of notoriety.
There are plenty of online references to the band and its album “All Black and Hairy,” but many pieces are of questionable accuracy. What can we do to set the record straight?
In another selection from her collection of vintage San Diego flyers, Dawn Hill Waxon focuses on the Front, the mid-’80s post-punk outfit that featured Morgan Smith, Mark Baez, Kevin Chanel and Dan Mehlos.
These flyers date from 1984 and include the earliest show we’ve encountered so far at the short-lived but influential Rock Palace (a gig with the Tell-Tale Hearts to usher in 1985).
(Toby Gibson asks after our favorite filler.)
It’s fairly easy to guess that pretty much everyone who comes through this site is some pedigree of audiophile — many have already confirmed themselves as walking archives of music history and have shared some fantastic personal details and trivia.
It’s also fairly easy to imagine that I’m not the only person who keys in on tiny personal fragments (or funny quirks, or just neat bits) of songs that I wait for every time I hear them — someone talking in the background, either by design or unintentionally, funny melodic idiosyncrasies that stick in the mind to become that moment that you wait for.