Here’s a potential source of mirth and mayhem: Most of us who played regularly in San Diego had opportunities to open for bigger acts passing through town on tour. David Klowden recounted two chances to open for the Cramps; Ray Brandes and I shared a laugh over the excesses of Specimen when the Tell-Tale Hearts and 3 Guys Called Jesus opened for them at North Park Lions’ Club.
Who were your favorite headliners to open for/hang out with/mock/pilfer from? Who, not so much?
Based on ability; etiquette; prima-donnahood; and general entertainment value (intentional or otherwise), let’s sort out the keepers from the discards! No brown M&Ms!
Moving this down to the comments space to leave more room for others to share stories … I had a lot of fun with Camper Van Beethoven and the Leaving Trains when 3 Guys opened for each. For years afterwards, Falling James from the Trains would pull me onstage to play Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner” whenever the band came through San Diego or SF.
I didn’t open for them (I was out of the band by that time but still around) but GBH were super nice, down to earth guys. Steve-o from the Vandals was pretty great to hang out with and crazier than myself, then or now. Minor Threat were pretty quiet and subdued, but I think Marc Rude maybe gave them a self-survival pep talk as soon as they arrived. Still they were really nice guys, and hung out at Cliff Cunningham’s place even though the debauchery was pretty much off the hook. TSOL were dicks- especially jack. And as much as I liked Mike Ness when I was an impressionable kid, he was pretty suspect as far as being a good guy.
Max needs to post his Ramones story.
I was 1/2 of the rap duo “Los” (Miserables), who opened for Mr. Bungle up in Arcata -- spring of ’86 I think. They were all good guys as well as energetic performers and strong musicians. I recall M. Patton visited us years later for a non-Los -- downtown Oakland warehouse show we produced in ’91. I knew Danny H. fairly well, who drummed with Bungle for a time and he also recorded some “Los” songs with us at Martin’s (Matmos) studio in SF. I had also done some Arcata performances with Martin in 85. During our opening act at the Bungle show, an unfortunate 1/2 full Pabst Pint can throwing incident by my partner David Bell, got us 86’d from further shows at than venue. The club owners wife caught the can with her forehead, but wasn’t badly injured. I have some super 8 film footage of our mildly scandalous but otherwise warmly received performance that night. I will have to digitize some day for complete youtube embarassment. I have seen bungle camcorder vids from that same night on youtube, so I think my film should supplement nicely.
David, what a story! I would have almost died if Johnny Thunders served me a martini! Did he get busted by the cops that night? I remember he did once in San Diego.
Never was in a band myself, but Leonard Graves Phillips came to our place after a Dickies show and partied with us -- he was a nice guy. Another time the guys from the Long Ryders partied with us at 35th and Meade after their show at the Spirit Club. Great bunch of guys. Met the guys from Wall of Voodoo after a show at the Adams Avenue Theater and they had a long drive ahead of them to their next gig in Arizona, so I gave them something to help keep them awake!
The most exciting for me though was when The Jam came to play Perkins Palace in Pasadena. We heard from a friend of Larry’s that they were doing a sound check in the daytime. So we went over to the theater and knocked on the stage door. Someone let us in and we got to watch the whole sound check from the best seats in the house. Afterward we chatted with the band and got their autographs.
I have a few stories, but this one is unforgettable: The Tell-Tale Hearts opened for “The Sky Sunlight Saxon Seeds Band”--at the always lame Spirit in, i think, 1986 or 7--featuring Sky Saxon, some hard rock hippies from Hawaii, and Sky’s dog. They had no drummer, so Sky asked me to play drums for them (“Mitch Mitchell was supposed to be here, man, but I don’t know what happened.”) I just had to play that Pushin’ Too Hard beat for an hour, the last 15 minutes of which was the song Love Dog, which Sky sang directly to his scruffy little dog, who roamed around on the stage. Whatever. For one night, I was in The Seeds! After the show, I invited Sky and his entourage over to my house on Tenth & Johnson in University Heights to hang out. The house became very smoky. SKy asked me for something to eat, so I gave him some carrot cake and a glass of milk. He was very grateful for the carrot cake, which i believe came from City Deli. So I showed him a rare video I had of The Seeds playing on a really obscure local Texas TV show in 1966 (Thank You, David Peck) and he got real close to the TV and watched. I asked him, “Do you remember that, SKY?” And he answered, “I remember those guys.” And then added, “There’s Darryl. He thought he was Beethoven. Maybe he was.” After a while, they left and he thanked me again for the carrot cake. It was a good night.
The Tell-ale Hearts opened up for a few name bands, among them the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cramps twice, etc. Dave Klowden´s got a really funny story about hanging out with Sky Saxon after we played the Spirit with them. They billed themselves as the original Seeds, but they spent the entire afternoon calling us, asking us to borrow equipment, band members etc.
I´ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the idols of my youth, either by playing with them, or going to shows and hanging out before or afterwards. I wrote a few articles for Ugly Things in its first few years, so sometimes I would use that as an opening. Every single one of them was approachable, patient with my youthful adoration and really cool. That includes Bo Diddley, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Gene Clark, Elvis Costello (twice), the aforementioned Ivy and Lux, and many more.
Jeez, Dave, you posted that just as I was writing mine.
What ever happened to David Peck? He was a totally unassuming young guy with one of the best collection of rock videos in the world…he’d gotten all of them just from trading with other collectors…rare videos that no one else had. He’d have famous rock stars calling him up looking for stuff.
Nowadays it’s probably all on youtube, of course.
What happened to him is that he became rich and famous as an archivist of music videos. Much of what you see on VH1 and MTV in the way of historical footage is supplied by David. Here is his website:
http://www.reelinintheyears.com/about.html
David Peck, are you on here? I’d like to license David Johansen’s torso from 1972, please. 🙂
Hey Dean, yeah JT did get arrested that night with his then girlfriend Stephanie, and so did I. But they just took me to a local police station and made me call my dad to take me home. So I didn’t get to do time with Jonnhy Thunders. Too bad…
I went to high school with David Peck. Does that count? Okay, Dave Dick and I along with forgotten others were fishing for someone of age to buy us booze before that first S.D. Cramps show when along came our idols and did just that. I gave Kid Congo Powers some leather cross I had gotten in Mexico that smelled like fish. I remember they got us some cheap vodka with our spare change. GBH were really cool, I used to see them a lot in the early ’80s. The guys in Samhain were cool. Probably my best experience was seeing the Clash at Red Rocks in Colorado in, like, ’84. Afterwards, a group of us huddled in the rain near the soundbooth, as we had heard Joe Strummer routinely invited fans backstage after the shows. Sure enough! Pretty damn cool for a 17 year-old. Paul Simonon was my hero and, true to form, he had his boombox blasting West Side Story or some such foolishness. A girl I knew hung out with him while they were in town. Bruce Loose from Flipper was not impressed with the Denver after-party scene. I remember a bandmate asking him “Well, what do you want to do? Where should we go?” to which he replied “the next town, anywhere else”. Great show tho’. I drove home FReakYING. I met DeeDee and Marky Ramone on the street in Amsterdam in ’86. They wer looking at switchblades in a store window. I later met Joey Ramone in NYC in, like, ’88 when I went to remix the Morlocks stuff with Ron Rimsite. I had one shot left in my Polaroid and got Joey to agree to stage a photo of him choking me (anyone remember the preppy murderer case?), Ron shot his load early, so I have a photo of Joey and I talking about this great photo we were gonna take…
Matt: E-mail me the Joey photo to post!!
Who was the girl who hung with Paul Simonon? I remember that someone we know had met up with the Clash in LA, and apparently the next night the band stopped in Carlsbad Denny’s to use the pay phone to call her. Me and Serg were at Denny’s a couple of nights later, and the waiter was still flipping out about the Clash coming to drop a dime there! It was funny to hear the story from both ends of the phone line.
I think her name was Deena. I haven’t kept in touch with any of the mid-eighties Colorado scenesters….
I spent a good part of the 1990’s in New York City playing in a band.
Once we got a gig opening for (no wave superstars) Von Elmo and James Chance at CBGB’s on Friday night. Von Elmo was cool. We had a nice chat about being from outer space and eating White Castle Burgers.
Now for James Chance….I have never met anyone so coked out of there mind, except maybe his wife.
James was great on stage. He was kinda like a white James Brown playing free jazz sax. A true wild man.
Hey Dylan, any idea what has become of James Chance? Man, that’s cool you met him. I really liked his music.
OK, Paul Allen, you’re dragging me right back to Milwaukee (home of my aforementioned mid-’70s magic group: Before he caught a contact high from the Violent Femmes, Sigmund Snopek III was leader of his own eponymous band and a large fish in the small but groovy Midwest collegiate pond of Milwaukee.
Besides the magic, I was also a member of the Milwaukee Children’s Theater Company out of the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, where Sig Snopek often accompanied us on piano. And pre-punk, my friends and I thought there was nothing badder-ass than Snopek’s version of “I Am the Walrus,” which he re-created faithfully with his four-piece band and a huge stack of synthesizers. (I believe my copy of “Thinking out Loud” is still with my other LPs in the collection of one David Fleminger, who took custody of my vinyl when I left San Francisco in 2001.)
Extending this Milwaukee name-check to the Violent Femmes: On a visit back to Milwaukee from San Diego in June 1981, my friend (and eventual Amazons collaborator/hidden technical hand on this site) Jason Brownell suggested we go see an evening of music with a little local band fronted by an 18-year-old named Gordon Gano, who was part of Jason’s extended musical circle. We went to this tiny club and watched the Femmes play a blistering set for their high-school friends and Gordon’s parents … precisely two months before their legendary discovery by the Pretenders when they were busking outside a Pretenders gig and more than a year before their debut album.
I came back to San Diego absolutely enraptured by this absolutely unknown band — I felt like John the Baptist, and I can say with complete confidence that I was the very first Violent Femmes fan in California.
I believe Jason still has a cassette of the first party that band ever played … Amazing how many of the songs were still in the set list when I went to see them in Atlantic City in 2006! 🙂
Don’t forget, you also met John Sinclair (Annie here, Paul’s S.O.) Quite a heavy weight really, even John and Yoko came out for him back in the day.
I think I can hear the influence of Add It Up on Chanson Dada, although the two are very different. I remember Steve Mackay playing this Snopek record that was very frantic and crazy but with a full chorale of female singers. Oh, and I sorta met Jerry Harrison, and yes John Sinclair, a very cool guy. He did a poetry reading at the Open Mind record store in S.F. with Steve playing sax behind him.
>>I think I can hear the influence of Add It Up on Chanson Dada, although the two are very different.
Paul Allen: Oh, you are a smarty, and the first person ever to articulate that connection!
Now it can be told: Musically, Noise 292’s “Chanson Dada” started with me welding a very bent version of Barrett’s “Lucifer Sam” to “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes.
I hear that now. Chord progression and beat respectively are similar but Vanilla Ice you ain’t.
Matt Johnson mentions Ron Rimsite, which reminds me that every six months or so I wonder out loud to someone like New Yorker Neala O’Rourke, “what d’you suppose happened to Ron Rimsite? Anyone seen him?” and no one seems to know anything. Maybe Mike Stax would…and is it just me or is Mike like the elephant that is not in the room here? Or have I missed him checking in? Mike, I love you and understand you’ve already got your own venue & forum, which of course the whole world adores. But if you have a line on Ron Rimsite, even news of an untimely demise or some such, do let us know. Now, to connect this to the topic at hand, Ron had a mag, of course, wrote liner notes for the Gravedigger V, dated Paula Pierce of the Pandoras. The two of them were at the GDV’s recording sessions--and must have been there I feel sure when we opened for headliners The Dickies in Spring 1984. I don’t remember interacting with them much if at all, but then again I was fairly bewildered just being onstage in LA. What was that club on West Pico? The Music Machine or something close to that? Couldn’t have had the same name as Sean Bonniwell’s band, could it?
Tom: that would be the Music Machine on Pico in Santa Monica. That was a real Guns ‘n’ Roses style joint, swarming with big haired LA aqua net types. I think that right around the time we played our last gig there with the Fuzztones, I think, it started to become a pay-to-play venue. Homie don’t play that. I even hated that Jerry Herrera Spirit scam where you had to have people bring in flyers in order to get paid, and he’d keep a phony tally sheet at the door. So before you played you had to stand in the parking lot handing out flyers when you could have been inside eating chips and salsa.
David I am sure James is still playing around New York, I’m not sure because I do not live there anymore.
When I saw him in the mid 90’s he was gig’n every now and then.
I am glad I met Jame and Elmo and fell very lucky I got to play on the CBGB’s stage once in my life.
New York was great because you could just run into your heros walking down the street.
Dylan: At this very moment, I’m watching Warhol Superstar Taylor Mead open a bingo game at the Bowery Poetry Club. (He opens for the bingo game every Monday at 6:30 sharp!) NY is great (and so’s blogging via Blackberry). 🙂
What? LOL!
Once in about 1985 I was sitting at the bar at CBGBs and I looked down the bar, and there was Joey Ramone having a beer all by himself (this was on a pilgrimage I made to NY to check out the scene there). A few days later I was sitting at that same bar next to Jeffry Lee Pierce. Then that same weekend, I saw Richard Hell and the Voidoids there, and he got Wayne Kramer (who just happened to be there) out of the audience to play with him.
David: Wow! Richard Hell and Wayne Kramer. How did it sound?
My friend, ex-bandmate and San Diego ex-patriot Scott Honnuar were walking up the Ave A once and coming our way was Richard Hell, He gave us the sup nod. I turned to Scott all stoked and said “that was Richard Hell” and he said ” So what”.
Hahaaa as in Richard who?
I wanna say I heard that Wayne Kramer was a taxi driver in NYC? Does that sound right? He had been playing with Johnny Thunders in Gang War about that time. He sounded great, but he just kinda strummed along, not the sonic guitar of the MC5 at all.
The Uptown Horns played at that show as well. They had backed Iggy on a couple of tunes, I think on the Zombie Birdhouse album.
Man, I would love to have seen James Chance in his prime. There’s great footage of him in the new(ish) Don Letts film “Punk: Attitude”.
David: Scott knew who Richard was, he had just been in New York longer than I and I guess was just used to seeing all those folk around the lower east side.
James was great in the mid 90’s. He still looked like he should have been in playing sax for CRIME.
For a short time I worked the door at a bar called 7A(7st & Ave A). Hansome Dick was the bartender there. He was cool. I even got to eat breakfast with after work twice. The bars close at 4am and after that the staff drinks till 6am, then you go to breakfast. Dick only went by the name Richard and he always talked about how much he loved The Beach Boys.
Richard has his own bar now on Ave. B and 2nd St. It’s called Manitoba’s.
A tip for anyone who buys a drink from Richard. Do not tip quaters. Well maybe 4 would be alright. but if ya leave him anything under a dollar he will flick back at you.
I guess he has his own bar
I heard that Dick Manitoba owns his onw bar. Is that really a good idea?
Dick seems to have his shit together. Do you get to to see any of The Dictators reunions. Not to bad, fun shit.
Jesus man! Did you get to see any of…. I need to learn to read and write or just maybe proof read.
No, I never saw the Dictators, and had no idea that they did reunions. Man, did you see those? I bet they were great fun!
I was listenting to “Go Girl Crazy” just last month. What a hilarious album.
Dave, this has nothing to do with the topic but i just sent Matt a copy of your “Sod The Sky Show”flier.
David: Yeah the dictators did some shows in the late 90’s. I saw them in New York and they came to the west coast about a year later, so i caught them in San Francisco also. The shows were great.
I don’t know if they played L.A. or San Diego.
Dick doesn’t have the afro anymore, but he does wear this sweet fringe leather jacket with U.S.A. on the back.
Ross the Boss was great, I just wish he would have worn his MANOWAR furr warrior gear.
>>Tom Ward Says:
“what d’you suppose happened to Ron Rimsite? Anyone seen him?” and no one seems to know anything. Maybe Mike Stax would…and is it just me or is Mike like the elephant that is not in the room here? Or have I missed him checking in?
The last time I saw Ron Rimsite is when I was with Mike and he came and visited.
I don’t see Mike on here either. I think his input would be great and I know he has some great pictures. I asked him about pictures etc. and he said ‘yeah’ he has them but he has to go through storage. Anyways I emailed him about this blog and He hasn’t replied. The last time we spoke he was expecting his baby to be born. So he may be busy being a dad.:)
I cant believe David Peck wow he was wise how he handled his collection. Even before it was always a trade to get a rare video from him.
I had the pleasure of dining with Liberace. The man was so genuine and unpretentious. He made me feel comfortable though I was in awe of this star enternainer. When we shook hands he had the grip of a Kung Fu master. All those rings, and he was wearing a 300k dollar cape. He was the guest of honor at the 50th anniversary celebration of the ice rink in Rockefeller Center where I worked in the mid 80’s. He was most sincere and I’ll always remember his kind words.
>>I had the pleasure of dining with Liberace.
I’m completely awed.
I just wish Liberace had incorporated “Prison Walls” into his set list.
let’s see…
since the days of having long conversations with ron silva and being tight with kevin i’ve been in and out of a few connections with rock stars.
i had a knock down drag out verbal fight with nick cave one night. all while mick harvey cheered ME on. and kim deal pulled me out of the fray to go drink with her. she was awesome. so were the women from l7. i ended up on the sf leg of the lollapalooza the year that johnny cash played. never met him though. i just enjoyed the scene and hung out until they blew town. it was fun. sat with nick while he noodled out the soundtrack for far away, so close. we made up after a while and parted on a good note.
i was tight with the members of poi dog pondering for a long time. still talk to a few of them. traveled with them a fair bit on the west coast. dated the trumpet man.
and when i won the mtv contest back in 1988 i met ozzy when at the studio filming the show. he was nice. really nice. not at all like he seemed back then and far more mellow than his persona on the “reality” show.
things have been quiet since i moved to “twin peaks” as cricket calls my town. but that’s just fine with me. although i have had some odd situations crop up. i live in a place where martha stewart randomly shows up midday at my favorite cafe, or johnny depp comes walking down the street during the day and cars are getting into accidents staring at him. i am not ever star struck. ever. so it’s interesting to see people fall all over themselves in these cases. i guess that comes from growing up backstage at the met and in sd at the opera house. a job is a job…
ok, i was starstruck once… when i met mark kozelek. red house painters front man. he had me tongue tied. but that’s it.
and man, to have had lunch with liberace would have been great. i heard he was a sweet and gracious man. his voice still makes me miss my grandfather (who was a huge fan).
The injections opened for bow wow wow at the adams avenue theater. It was the Injections, Red Wedding and Bow Wow Wow. It was a fun show but Bow Wow Wow was pissed at us as I recollect. Something about being posers..HAHA
One thing about us, Joanne, is we were UNABLE to be posers. We couldn’t even accomplish that!
God bless how real we were, good or bad.
bruce
>>Sky asked me to play drums for them (”Mitch Mitchell was supposed to be here, man, but I don’t know what happened.”) I just had to play that Pushin’ Too Hard beat for an hour, the last 15 minutes of which was the song Love Dog, which Sky sang directly to his scruffy little dog, who roamed around on the stage.
wow dave!!! so you sat in on drums for the seeds and men of clay!!!
Lux Interior is alive and well, and living in San Diego.