Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
(Tell-Tale Heart/Town Crier Ray Brandes lays the table for May’s audio feast.)
The Che Underground Weekend Showcase:
Celebrating more than 25 years of San Diego’s underground music history
An incredible opportunity to reconnect, reminisce and rediscover will unfold as 25 years and thousands of miles of distance disappear in a single weekend — May 29 and 30 at the Casbah in San Diego.
The lineups have been set, the bands are rehearsing, and the drinks are on ice. Here’s what to expect:
Attention all shutterbugs: The Che Underground’s quarter-century reunion weekend is on track for May 29-30 (advance tickets at the Casbah Web site). Besides the fun of getting the bands back together (not to mention our oldest, dearest friends), some of us are excited about do-overs for the historical record.
Between the primitive technologies of the early ’80s and a youthful lack of focus, many great performances went unrecorded. We’re hoping to capture some high points in May, and we’ve got videography and audio pretty much nailed for the events.
But we’re still hoping skilled photographers will volunteer for the Che Army.
(Answers and Mirrors co-founder Dave Fleminger talks transitions.)
Blue: The Mirrors live at the Che Cafe, Spring 1984
“This one’s called ‘Blue,’ and we’re gonna make it up … ”
Sometime in late May 1984 the Mirrors played our last performance in San Diego at UCSD’s Che Cafe. The band had formed in late ’83 after the fall of the Answers and in March recorded an as-yet-unreleased album of songs entitled “Have No Mercy.” In June I moved to NYC, but we would continue to record sporadically over the next couple years.
(A curious bit of ephemera: An author named Matt Rhodes stopped by the blog; added this evocatively written item and one other piece; then moved along, never to participate again. I appreciate it both as a historical touchpoint and a found object. If anyone is in touch with Mr. Rhodes, please thank him for the donation and invite him back.)
San Diego easily forgets. A perfect example is the City’s botched attempt to convert the old Naval Training Base (on Rosecrans) into yet another strip mall for tourists and transplants alike.
In 1993, the NTC was closed down by the Navy and sold to city developers for millions of dollars. The 361-acre development is in a good location: on the waterfront just west of the airport and only a couple miles from downtown San Diego. The project has been noted for its renovation of dozens of historical buildings that will be adapted for stores, offices, schools, and other purposes.
The base was gutted by developer/contractor Corky McMillan.
(Guest columnist Paul Kaufman picks his favorite late ’70s LP as part of the ongoing series originated by Wallflowers frontman David Rinck.)
Best album from 1977? There’s a lot of competition. Of course, a lot of press covered the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” and the first Clash album; deservedly so.
But if I had to choose just one from that year to take to a desert isle, it would be “Pink Flag” by Wire. This primitive collection of 20 very short songs (some under 1 minute) dramatically threw down the aesthetic gauntlet back then: all you boring, epic-writing, guitar soloing prog rockers are now obsolete. Without the overt political slogans of the time, they were nevertheless revolutionary in their sound and approach. Spare three chord music; spare imagery:
(Paul Kaufman describes the creative ferment behind a Lemons classic.)
This song was written in tribute to the delicious cheeses of Spain. I chose “Afuegal Pitu” as the title not because it’s my favorite (that would be the powerful blue Cabrales or the smoky sheep cheese Idiazabal, depending on the day) but because it has the best name. Afuegal Pitu has a lot of red pepper in it, and the name is a local-dialect version of “Fire in the Throat.” Indeed, all the lyrics (except for the spoken-word part in the middle) are simply the names of different Spanish cheeses.
I used to live near an excellent cheese shop (the Cheese Board in Berkeley, CA), and I was so enamoured of the Spanish Cheese Poster they had on display, I wrote to the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture to ask where I could get one. It now hangs in my kitchen.
(Tell-Tale Heart/Town Crier Ray Brandes highlights a San Diego Reader piece on the SD underground’s Iberian influence, and Manual Scanner/Shamble Bart Mendoza calls the tribe together in support of author Paul Williams.)
Big in Spain: San Diego Music Invades Spain
By Paul Williams
Featured in the San Diego Weekly Reader, March 9, 2006
“In the future,” Andy Warhol predicted, “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” But for a few San Diego musicians, it seems that the future’s arrived ahead of schedule and landed them halfway around the world. Take, for example, Bart Mendoza and Ray Brandes. In California, Mendoza is best known as a record store clerk and Brandes works as a schoolteacher. But in Spain, Mendoza and Brandes are bona fide rock stars. Both are members of Riot Act — a San Diego “supergroup” that records for Spain’s Snap record label.
But it was during a joint solo tour with Mendoza that Brandes summed up the Spanish experience a good many San Diego musicians have had: “Brandes gave me the greatest line ever on that tour,” Mendoza told me as we sat in his south-of-Hillcrest apartment. “We’re leaving a bar at 5:30 in the morning, on our way to get something to eat, when these people come up to compliment us. A few of them are beautiful women. And after they leave Ray looks at me and says, ‘This is the reality I would have created for myself.’ ”
Having known most of you best during one little window of our lives, in a scene focused on music, I really cherish the opportunity to learn about the before, after and sideways.
Over the past year, we’ve heard a lot of passing mentions of folks’ extracurricular activities — the stuff they loved as kids and the things they like to do now. I discovered that I wasn’t the only aspiring magician on the blog, we’ve learned about Patrick Works’ fascination with Russian in general and Rasputin in particular, Dean Curtis (and others) have shared their epicurean enthusiasms, Toby Gibson (and others) have cited their affinity for matters aquatic … The list goes on.
So, open question: Besides listening to and playing music, what did you like to do then? What do you like to do now? Do the dots connect, or would the kid you were then be surprised at the activities that amuse the grownup you’ve become?
(Wallflower Dave Rinck files an update from Africa.)
March 19 the Underground Express rolled on at Dass in Nairobi. We had a particularly awesome night out, largely due to a rare visit from my own very favorite Kenyan rock band, UETA.
Consisting of three brothers and a cousin, UETA is one of the hardest-rocking bands on the local scene. They mixed heavy metal with a mini-set of acoustic numbers to create a really dynamic show that left the audience (literally) screaming for more.
Read moreUETA and the Beathogs: Live at Underground Express at Dass, Nairobi
(Miss Kristi Maddocks goes from crayons to perfume.)
It is not quite as dramatic as turning from the living to the undead, but each of us hipsters had a point in our youth where we were bitten by the bug of the underground.
This photo is a time capsule. It was taken early in the summer of 1980 and captures me on the verge of change. By this time I was attending shows at thr Del Mar Fairgrounds and the Distillery East. I obviously still had long hair, which was deemed very uncool by the punk girls, who used to try to cut it when I was at the big shows.