Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
Yet another Wallflowers signature returns from Canada after a 25-year hiatus.
Like the rest of this cache, “Walldrugs” features the original Wallflowers lineup of Dave Rinck (vocals), Paul Howland (bass), Tommy Clarke (guitar) and Aaron Daniels (drums).
“’Walldrugs’ and [Stooges cover] ‘TV Eye’ were recorded in a ’studio’ at Music Power,” Dave Rinck writes. “‘Raw Power’ [another Stooges cover] was, too, but not until a little later than the other two.
Punk goodfella-turned-celebrity chef Jason Seibert has donated a wonderful cache of flyers to the Che Underground archives. These artifacts span the late ’70s through the early ’80s and document events at the North Park Lions Club, the International Blend/Kings Road, the Zebra Club and the Skeleton Club.
It’s high time we take note of that last venue, which did so much to hone the cutting edge of San Diego music. (Full disclosure: Tucked away in North County, I missed out on the Skeleton Club during its brief but influential run at 202 Market St. and 921 Fourth Ave. under the management of rock-‘n’-roll nurse Laura Frasier and a young Tim Mays.)
(Roving correspondent/ photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits and documents the scenes of our youth. Today, Topsy’s becomes a bear sanctuary! Photos by Kristen Tobiason; text by Kristen Tobiason and Matthew Rothenberg.)
In the pantheon of 24-hour, Formica-countered restaurants of early-’80s San Diego, Topsy’s was the Rolling Stones to El Cajon Blvd. Denny’s’ Beatles: less-polished and slightly tougher than its competitor to the east.
But like “Gay Denny’s,” Topsy’s’ after-clubbing hours and proximity to San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood also put a queer spin on the mix of patrons.
Reborn as Brian’s American Eatery, the restaurant at 1451 Washington Ave. expands on Topsy’s’ tradition of diner fare and a mix of gay and straight clientele, with special affinities for the “bear” subculture of the former.
The Answers’ busy gigging schedule (at the Headquarters and other venues) between 1981 and 1984 generated myriad flyers by a variety of artists, many of them masterworks of psychedelic imagery. Much of the art was created by two towering figures: Jerry Cornelius and Answers guitarist/vocalist Dave Fleminger.
Of Jerry, Tom Ward writes, “Sooner or later, one way or another, we’ll have all of Jeremiah’s flyer illustrations. My junk is in storage on the other side of the country, but I made a point at the time of saving all the Cornelius flyers. You could see that each was an effort to top the previous one, and it was good work. I had the feeling a day would come when they’d be needed in an archival sense. … To me they were, after awhile, like the expressions of a local Aubrey Beardsley. … [T]hey added a real measure of class to the events they heralded, and were a distinct part of the flowering of our particular underground.
(Manual Scan/Lemons Are Yellow vet Paul Kaufman recalls a time when music shopping meant leaving the house.)
If you’re like me, you spent many hours flipping through records at stores, looking for treasures.
As a small kid, I started out locally, on Garnet Ave. in Pacific Beach. The Wherehouse and Licorice Pizza were a couple of blocks apart, so when I was just learning my history, I could spend hours looking at album covers and picking up magazines at those places.
As a 13-year-old, something commercially available was usually on the top of my list (early Badfinger fixation), and those sorts of places usually fit the bill. For a while, Licorice Pizza had a cut-out bin that had some real finds. They also carried imports, and I have distinct memories of saving up the princely sum of $2.50 each to buy the early Sex Pistols and Clash 45s (with real art sleeves! And no big hole in the middle!). It was a double thrill, because it was the closest thing to international travel I would experience until I was much older.
Another number from the Ho Hos, the mid-’90s San Francisco group of Che Underground transplants that included me on vocals and guitar; former Morlocks bassist Jeff Lucas; Robert Labbe (ex-3 Guys Called Jesus drummer); and Steve Lam on lead guitar.
“Creeping Vine (Love Is A … )” comes from the same 1993 demo session that generated “Snowball” and was written by Jeff. Getting to sing material penned by Mr. Lucas was always exciting to me, and I am crazy about the way the lead guitar and rhythm section work together on this song.
Another pillar of SD punk’s plastic arts (along with music, tattoos and flyers) were ‘zines, the samizdat publications created by luminaries such as Marc Rude, Harold Gee, Terry Marine and Clayton Colgin.
Over in the Che Underground forum (separate registration required), Dean Curtis and Toby Gibson, among others, have been bringing these treasures to light. One of Dean’s first contributions was Issue 2 of Quasi-Substitute, dating from 1980 and featuring the Crawdaddys on the cover.
Its reappearance prompted this wonderful response from David Klowden: “Seeing this issue of Q-Sub triggered an intense emotional stew of white hot longing for that place and time, deep black terror at the passage of the years & a kind of fatherly love for my younger self that is beyond description.
(Excerpts from the story of the pioneering late-’80s alt-country band by founder Ray Brandes. Read the full version in our Related Bands section!)
The Town Criers was a country-rock band that featured many of San Diego’s Che Underground musicians, including myself and Dave Klowden of the Tell-Tale Hearts, Peter Miesner and Mark Zadarnowski of the Crawdaddys, Tom Ward of the Gravedigger V, and Dave Ellison of the Rockin’ Dogs. The group predated the alt-country movement of the 1990s by several years.
The last few months of the Tell-Tale Hearts’ existence were contentious times. Eric Bacher had quit the band in 1986, and many of the original San Diego scenesters had either left town or simply moved on. By the time guitarist Peter Miesner of the Crawdaddys arrived to save the day, the rest of the band members had begun to feel the effects of nearly four years together, and relationships were further strained by meddling outsiders and substance abuse.
(Personal Conflict bassist Toby Gibson commemorates 8/8/08.)
Author’s note: My Ted O’Shea story has been floating around my desk through several houses, five dogs, a divorce and two kids over the past seventeen or so years.
Having the same birthday as someone close to you who has died tends to keep that feeling of loss pretty fresh in your memory at least once every year, and it’s funny how it will surface now and then on paper or on my computer and I stop for a second and relax, letting myself drift back to a time when life wasn’t lived from crisis to crisis and time was measured almost solely by the 90-odd days of summer.
At some point years ago my memories of Teddy changed from that painful ache that loss leaves you to memories of some great times and a little hope, which I suppose is how things should be. Anyhow — at this point in my life I could probably write something more about Teddy that might be a little more polished and maybe sum him up a little better, but I have come to like the early-20s version for the youthful perspective alone, if for nothing else — the lack of my latter-day cynicism and the fact that the loss wasn’t yet a distant memory — and so I think I’ll let things stay as they are. — T.G.
Read moreTed Avery O’Shea and the Mission Beach Ghetto Guerrillas
Here’s a very early artifact from the Rockin’ Dogs’ oeuvre: a flyer introducing the band to Pacific Beach’s Headquarters club in August 1982.
“This was when we just started out, when we were in high school,” guitarist/vocalist Dave Ellison writes. “What an embarrassing flyer … haha! For one thing, we spelled ‘Headquarters’ wrong.
“For another, we didn’t play rockabilly or r&b. We were probably trying to attract fans of the Paladins and Crawdaddys … and we probably didn’t care which, so long as someone showed up. (I can’t imagine anyone did on a Monday night!)
