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Thanks to Bruce Haemmerle, Cole Smithey and Eric Rife, among others, we’re starting to compile a good sampling of flyers from our scene. Here are a couple that resonate for me; tell me what you’ve got and what you’d like to see.

The first show here took place July 29, 1983, and featured the Answers and Noise 292. I’m pretty sure the “special guest” referred to on the flyer was Hair Theatre, making their Che debut. (Lacking the graphics skills of a Jerry Cornelius, a Dave Fleminger or a Sergio, I created this flyer by Xeroxing my shirt!)

The second performance happened Halloween 1984 at Greenwich Village West, with the Morlocks, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Wallflowers and Noise 292. It was the last performance of Noise 292 (and the first time Dave West joined us on guitar, poor guy!) I tried to organize a scheme to have us dress like Buffalo Springfield for Halloween and do “For What It’s Worth,” but I don’t think it came off very well.

(Help! I need some HTML pointers on how to build a tabular gallery of flyers in this blog format.)

Remember this issue of MRR? I remember its cover, but I didn’t recall that it advertised the aforementioned Mystic sampler with the Wallflowers.

Thanks to Wallflowers front man Dave Rinck for sending the file all this way from his current post in Nairobi, Kenya. He’s promised to scan and send the contents of a mysterious metal box containing a variety of Wallflowers artifacts … A scenario worthy of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”! I’m excited to share the denouement.

We didn’t spring from the San Diego soil sui generis, and I’m finding plenty of resources online to gather the musical fringes we latched onto:

• Toby Lifehater’s forum for early-’80s punk survivors. (Dave Ellison tells me there’s at least one shout-out in there to the Rockin’ Dogs as a cornerstone of that era’s Poway underground.)
• A guide to old-school San Diego punk bands with some useful links (including a link to the Social Spit site, where Mirrors/Answers co-founder Dave Fleminger is credited as the band’s first guitarist, and one to an online history of the Injections, pre-Noise 292 band of drummer Joanne Norris, a k a Madame Gargoyle).
• The official Web site for the current incarnation of Carlsbad’s Spent Idol, former band of original Hair Theatre drummer Howard Palmer and an erstwhile rallying point for the Carlsbad crowd I was to meet through Hair Theatre.
• And a recent release by a very old collaboration: Twenty years later, Dave Fleminger, Paul Kaufman and Kristin Martin reformed their early-’80s joint, Lemons Are Yellow, and released an amazing CD. (Buy this disc! Os Mutantes have nothing on LAY’s “Afuegal Pitu”!)

Where else were we before we were what we were?

Here’s a shot from within the Headquarters club in Pacific Beach, where many of us had the honor of playing. This is presumably during an Answers gig … What do you recall from the Headquarters? I remember the sound system was decent; I liked the pinball and video games out front; and I spent many evenings after shows at Sheldon’s restaurant next door, home of thick ‘n’ creamy shakes and individual loaves of bread.

I believe Leighton played his first rock-‘n’-roll gig with us there when Noise 292 opened for the Pandoras and the Answers in August 1983: electric violin on our cover of “Heroin.” I’ve always worried that he took the song too seriously!

That snot-nosed punk Jakob Dylan has made it almost impossible to Google up our own beloved Wallflowers, but I’m starting to sift out some Web references to the superior and original model.

Here’s a citation of their cut on that Mystic Records compilation disk, which I believe came out in ’84:
“V/A – Mystic Sampler #2
“Record Label: Mystic Records
“Review: The second (in the series of three or was it four?) sampler. There are 2 versions of this out there. The 7″ has the likes of Dr. Know, Wallflowers (no, not the Jacob Dyllan band), Insolence, NOFX (their old stuff was good), Doggy Style, Rat Pack and Party Doll. The LP (blue vinyl – probably a later release) has Agression, Rat Pack, Ill repute, Flower Lepers, Corpus Deleti, RKL, Dr. Know, Doggy Style and a couple more (all the songs from the original 7″ are on here). I’m guessing both are out of pring or at least hard to find. 9 stars (out of 10)”

And over here, somebody’s selling that record for $50!

Finally, this band (also Mystic artists) counts the Wallflowers among its peers.

Don’t I remember something about how the Wallflowers were huge on Yugoslav pirate radio?

Somebody loves those old Hair Theatre fliers: I’ve located three of them on eBay for $10 a pop! If I can sell all the fliers in my attic, I’ll be rich.

Two things I dearly wish we’d had back in the day:

1. A great photographer with a keen interest in documenting the scene; and

2. A systematic plan for creating and archiving high-quality audio of studio and live performances.

We’d have karmic bonus points today if we’d had:

3. A forward-thinking videographer who realized the importance of video documentation 25 years after the fact.

Lacking all that, we’re going to have to do some serious forensic archaeology to reconstruct our sights and sounds.

Let’s start comparing notes on what audiovisual resources we’ve got … I’ll start with the archive of fliers to back up this gig list I posted on my personal blog, plus about 20 crappy snapshots of Noise 292 in performance. Ante up: What have you got?