Che Underground: The Blog

Ask not what Che Underground can do for you …

January 1, 2011October 18, 2008 by admin

If you were there, the Che Underground blog is your story, too. We’d love to hear and see your side of it.

Like PBS, we run on donations from viewers like you. This site is built on flyers, photos, audio and video from collectors including Kristen Tobiason, Toby Gibson, Cyndie Jaynes, Kristi Maddocks, Tom Goddard, Jason Seibert, Bruce Haemmerle, Mike McCarthy, Dean Curtis, Mark Mullen, Jeff Lucas, David Klowden, Cole Smithey, Bart Mendoza and Paul Allen. What rock-‘n’-roll treasures are growing crispy in your attic, your basement or your mom’s house?

If you can scan them or digitize them, great! If you need some help, operators are standing by … We’ll find you someone who can. Either way, raise a virtual hand here or drop a line to cheunderground@gmail.com, and we’ll get you started.

Mod match-up mania!

January 1, 2011October 17, 2008 by admin

It takes a virtual village to reconstruct an old-school San Diego scooter rally; this cache of photos from Mike McCarthy will require some heavy-duty forensics from the mod veterans among us.

“They look to be done at Mount Soledad, when you could climb up on the steps (can’t now),” writes Tony Suarez. “I have already recognized Cyndie Jaynes, Shawna Davis, James Kessler, Eric deMello, Dan Holsenback, Jay Wiseman, Karen Jagger, Dawn Edmundson, John Ryan and Kevin Ring.”

Then and now: the Chicken Pie Shop

January 1, 2011October 15, 2008 by admin

(Sweet bird of youth! Roving correspondent/photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our past glories. Today, the Chicken Pie Shop still serves the salt of the earth.)

The Chicken Pie Shop, known for its geriatric-variety comfort food, large portions and low prices. I recall scraping the bottom of my handbag for a couple of bucks in change and receiving an all-inclusive, starch-based feast: a chicken pie smothered in gravy; whipped potatoes; a “vegetable”; a roll with butter; and then, if you really felt like stuffing yourself, dessert (which was some kind of pie).

The Tell-Tale Hearts (and more) in flyers

January 1, 2011October 14, 2008 by admin

The latest showpieces from the Tom Goddard Collection of classic San Diego flyers.

Today’s batch includes additional Tell-Tale Hearts ephemera (Exhibit A, from a July 27, 1984, show at Studio 517, bears autographs dedicated to Tom’s sister Suzie); a very early appearance (probably August 18, 1984) by “the Morlochs” (sic) with the Hearts at the same venue; a Nashville Ramblers gig; Tell-Tale Hearts and Chesterfield Kings at SDSU’s Backdoor; and a Distillery East show with Manual Scan, the Untouchables and UXB, a band I’m afraid I’d forgotten completely before taking delivery of this cache.

The Ho Hos: “Gina Says/Infinite Prague”

January 1, 2011October 12, 2008 by admin

Here’s a first entry for the new Che Underground YouTube channel: a 1994 desktop-video experiment by the Ho Hos, the band of San Diego expats I co-founded in mid-’90s San Francisco.

This production portrays a shortened version of my song “Gina Says/Infinite Prague,” another recording from our 1993 Mr. Toad’s demo session. (The video was ostensibly prompted by a long-forgotten MTV contest that compelled audio producer Jason Brownell to trim one verse and the solo, bringing it below the requisite three-minute mark.)

Noise 292: “Eyesight”

January 1, 2011October 10, 2008 by admin

Noise 292 fan turned rock ‘n’ roll anthropologist Stefan Helmreich joins our ranks with a collection of tracks, including this late live performance of the band performing my early composition “Eyesight.”

“I recently stumbled across your Ché Underground site and was delighted to read such loving accounts of those long-ago days and nights,” Stefan writes. “I was still in high school — a year behind [Noise 292 percussionist] Wendell [Kling], then a senior at at San Dieguito — when I went to to the Nov. 17, 1983, Noise show, which stunned my then 17-year-old sensibilities and tracked me toward discovering Joy Division; the Velvets; and, soon enough, prompted me to start my own band.

Tech of our lives

December 13, 2017October 8, 2008 by admin

Here’s a fun and easy one: In the consumer society of post-World War II America, nothing helps date a community like its memories of technological innovation.

Our reminiscences about mimeographs and Dymo label printers and vinyl records have been powerful reminders of the lost world we grew up in. Spankin’-new San Diego in our youth was a land of early adoption, but I bet most of us can still remember the novelty of seeing our first:

Pocket calculator
Video game
Microwave oven
Cell phone
VHS system
CD player
Personal computer
Cable TV broadcast

And maybe even our first color TV show, photocopier or portable cassette recorder.

The Zeros: I Don’t Wanna Be a Hero, I Just Wanna Be a Zero

March 27, 2019October 6, 2008 by admin

(Excerpts from Tell-Tale Heart/Town Crier Ray Brandes’ account of San Diego’s punk originators. Read the full version in Che Underground’s Related Bands section.)

Javier Escovedo: vocals, guitar
Hector Penalosa: bass, vocals
Robert Lopez: guitar, vocals
Baba Chenelle: drums

The Zeros, often referred to affectionately as the “Mexican Ramones,” cannot only justifiably lay claim to being San Diego’s first “punk” rock group but also can brag about being one of the first punk groups in the United States.

In a brief but brilliant career highlighted by some classic recordings as well as shows with the Clash and Devo, the Zeros played the first big punk shows in both Los Angeles and in San Diego as early as 1977, when they were still high-school students. It is a testament to the drive and spirit of these pointy-toed revolutionaries that such a group was able to spring from the sleepy suburbs of National City and Chula Vista at a time when greater San Diego was both indifferent to and unimpressed by counterculture movements of any kind.

“Sister Heat”

August 2, 2017October 5, 2008 by admin

(Jeremiah Cornelius describes the genesis of one of the great lost collaborations of post-Che Underground San Francisco.)

“Sister Heat is on slow drip — Someone blew her fuses”

A critical, high-concept description of my input to “Sister Heat” is “The Damned cover Bauhaus” — both of which were inspirations and targets for satire. The resulting style is a sub-genre of Glam that I call “Mock Bombastic” – A hallmark of both Romulus Johnson’s Deep Six and King Therapy, which were to follow in the next years.

The words for this song were written during a whirlwind of confusion that seems temporally located in the first half of 1985. It was conceived of as one of a dozen or so songs that I’d penned for a vaguely imagined power-trio. The ingredients for this concoction were a rooted in my revulsion at the general idea of intravenous entertainment — and a specific dismay at the introduction of a couple of young ladies to the pastime. Add large doses of imagery from Michael Moorcock books, half-digested Nietzsche and a steady diet of histrionic rock performers, and you get the kind of song that Dave Rinck hates!

This We Dug: Iggy Pop

December 11, 2017October 3, 2008 by admin

(Wallflower Dave Rinck explains how an Iguana bested the Lizard King.)

Look, let’s talk about five words that loom large in the history of the Che Underground … Or OK, well … To be more precise, five words that loom enormous in the history of all underground: Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

I guess everyone knows this story, but it apparently goes something like this: Sometime in the late ’60s (as the legend goes), in some gritty-poor Detroit neighborhood, a bunch of really bad-ass white-trash dudes left their trailer-park homes one night and went down to the University of Michigan gym and caught a show by the Doors, who happened to be on tour at the time.

Well, as fate would have it, Jim Morrison was drunk, and most of the crowd didn’t get it, and they ended up pissing him off, and he ended up getting into a bit of a shouting match with the audience, and you know how those college jocks are. But apparently one guy in the audience did get it — one of those trailer-park bad asses — an upstart little punk by the name of James Osterberg.