(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.
The funny thing was, it wasn’t really punk rock that inspired me initially; it was mods and the psychedelic underground. One day my sister came down from L.A. and told me she was in this new band called The Dream Syndicate, and oh by the way, “Listen to these records”: The Velvet Underground; The Fall (Live At The Witch Trials); The Stooges (Raw Power); The Jam (This Is The Modern World). As a neophyte guitarist, I was all in and experimenting with drone tones, raw chords and pumped-up riffs. A few weeks later, she came down with The Sex Pistols and The Clash, which sealed the deal.
Somehow Mark and I got together and realized we both shared the same musical interests and started writing songs. Although I really enjoyed the raw energy of straight punk and the fear of life and death diving into the pit, we didn’t want to be a 1-2-F-U punk band.
Although we played mostly punk shows, we didn’t wholly identify with that scene and as a consequence hung out and played with a lot of the great mod and psychedelic-underground bands as well. To me, that was the most positive aspect of the scene and my experience was this feeling in San Diego at the time, that not everyone had to stay in their cliques defined by dress code or musical preferences, at least initially.
The Front plays “Throw Away Your Youth”: Listen now!
In the beginning, there was a feeling of something new and a shared energy. Everyone looked cool and thankfully the look was backed up by a lot of very cool, talented and energetic musicians.
It was a great feeling to play at a punk show one night, then go see the Tell-Tale Hearts another night. I not only dug those guys because they sounded great but they also looked like the The Rolling Stones from their “Big Hits High Tide and Green Grass” album which was the first album I bought at age seven and I thought they were the coolest looking guys I’d ever seen. Then the mods would pull up in their Vespas at the coffee shop on India street (the only coffee shop in town at that time), making me smile after having just seen The Jam at the Santa Monica Civic Theater (1980 or ’81?, they had just released “This Is The Modern World”)
That’s not to say that there weren’t those who could not break out of whatever mold they were in at that time and retained the option of a fist in the face if you looked out of place. Things started getting violent at shows, and the SDSH wolves were out in force at the punk shows and would eventually bare their teeth and attack. But that’s what happens when you mix testosterone and whiskey, and after a few broken teeth and bloody noses, usually everyone was sharing a beer afterward. But, I did start sensing a change in the wind and it felt like the scene became a little more fractured at some point.
Check out more Front on MySpace!
But the energy was still there. We played a show in Oakland at The Warehouse with the Ugly Americans. San Diego band hitting the road for the home town. Our album was out, and I was surprised that people actually came to see us and knew our songs. There was one crazy-looking guy at the front of the stage going nuts and singing all the lyrics to our songs. After our set, Kevin (bass) asked me if I had seen him. I said, “Yes, how could you miss him? I wonder who he was?” Kevin smirked, “That was Jello Biafra.”
One night after finishing our set before Social Distortion at Adams Avenue Theater, I walked off stage to the “dressing room.” It was just me and Mike Ness in the room. I was winding down with a beer, trying to get a few minutes of peace before I ventured back out into the crowd. It was a diseased sanctuary from the storm I had just retreated from. The room smelled like stale beer, moldy cigarettes, leather and a hint of vomit. Mike was nodding off while trying to put his makeup on in the mirror. As I watched and took it all in, something like the antithesis of nirvana hit me. That’s when some of the stoke left me, not for the music, but for the “scene.”
Our last show that I remember was with Johnny Thunders at The Spirit, who at the time was my guitar hero. I had his album “So Alone” on the turn table constantly. After we got off stage, a ghost of a man with a cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth, and a whiskey in his hand, plugged his Les Paul into a stack of Marshall’s and proceeded to blow the roof off. For my money, not a bad place to end it.
(Note: We played a lot of shows with Social D., and Mike was always a true Rock & Roller, and bless him for sticking it out and turning things around for the long run.)
— Morgan Smith
The Front always were always one of my favorite bands to see live.
That was a nice ending. Mike WAS a mess! I hung out with him six months after he got sober and he was a different person almost entirely.
This is such a great story. Toby, thanks for your comment, that brought it back to the top of my feed.
I remember the scene like this in ’80 and ’81, and have personal intersections. I’d been going to NPLC and Fairmont, with my hair past my shoulders -- grown out for some costume thing at the ’80 ComicCon, of all things. I remember guys like Jeff “The Mod” Mummert ribbing me a bit, in my black wool suits and goldielocks. There wasn’t ever any malice in that. Most of those were older guys, and hell, I was 16. More contempt and push-back came out of the scattering of early Mod kids showing up, who all knew each other from school.
When I got my hair cut off like Sting in Quadrophenia, I drove on the back of Pat Works’ Lambretta, out to Mark Baez’s parents house in Coronado. We’d had a couple of huge thrashing parties out there in the previous months, which are another whole bunch of stories. Mark was a “party hair cutter”, and had given my younger brother a head like Joe Strummer’s a couple weeks before. So there we were, me with a bath-towel in his mom’s kitchen at 11 AM on a Saturday, everyone with an open Corona. I can’t remember who else was over. It may have been Morgan. Mark was a completely cool guy. “Yeah, come over”. There was a volatile and sometimes dangerous edge to this scene at the time, but there was also a welcoming aspect. If “grudging inclusiveness” can be a thing, maybe that also serves as description. Mark was an easy-going part of that, and it’s a fond memory.
Jello Biafra was WAY into The Tell-Tale Hearts, The Morlocks, Thee Forgiven, The Miracle Workers and the lot. By 1985, when The Morlocks and I moved to San Francisco, he was much as Morgan recalls — an unrestrained fan of bands that he liked. My second night in town was Sept 28, and I’d already drawn the poster for a show at the Swedish-American hall on Market St. I put the image for this in-line here, along with a picture that surfaced a couple years back, of Jello with Lee Joseph of Thee Forgiven on that night. Leighton of The Morlocks is in the middle there, and I’m grinning in full Oscar Wilde kit, hair hitting my shoulders again. Jello had just turned me on to my first hit of MDMA, Ha ha!
Incidentally, I still see Jeff Mummert every few weeks. He’s a regular at the San Francisco bar where Jeff Lucas of The Answers and The Morlocks tends bar on 16th St. That we are all almost 45 years down the road from that night seeing The Trowsers play at NPLC is still a bit boggling.
The period that we ran shows at The Che Cafe is remarkable for the incredibly compressed time period in which this occurred, mostly 3 short years, where I think the scene spirit of inclusiveness across sub-groups and aesthetic cliquishness was pretty fully expressed. From these shows some relationships between bands formed that would go on for a while. You wouldn’t think of The Miracle Workers and Hair Theatre in the same breath without the Che shows -- especially The Dave Fest. They ended up touring together, and flyers from that time are elsewhere on this site. I was talking quite a bit with Robert Butler from The Miracle Workers a while ago, and he was very warm in his memories of those times on the road with Sergio and the Castillo brothers.