Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
Important new additions to the visual record of San Diego’s mod movement, turn of the ’80s!
“Dean Curtis e-mailed me to inform me that you would like to use some of my mod pics that I have posted on Flickr,” writes San Diego mod pioneer Kirk Murray. “I am not sure how to upload them onto the Che Underground site, which, by the way, is very cool.
“Hi, Matt,” writes Che Underground contributor and veteran San Diego scenester Mathias Kuo to the Che Underground hotline. “Here are some scooter pics from the hallowed halls of SD history — taken from a South Bay perspective.”
“Set #1 — Chula, Bonita and Coronado mods before a rally.”
Dancing Skeleton scooter club co-founder- turned- Che Underground benefactor Elker deMello’s generous bequest of mod-themed photography continues to enrich our understanding of early-’80s San Diego’s scootering classes.
While the pictures are there in abundance — many of them shot at Ski Beach or Seaport Village — details are sketchy on some of them. Can you help fill in the blanks?
Veteran scooterist Elker deMello has answered Mike McCarthy’s recent contribution of scooter-rally cheesecake with his own trove of photographs from outdoor gatherings of the San Diego mod tribes, including his own Dancing Skeletons.
This batch from the Elker deMello Archives comprises photography from the very same Mount Soledad rally Mike documented along with some great shots of our mod friends congregating alongside the volleyball players at Ski Beach.
(Paul Kaufman of Manual Scan and Lemons Are Yellow reflects on the decline of empires.)
My favorite albums were always those that weren’t just a collection of songs but presented a unified picture of their time and place, a map to their own little world. Coming of musical age in the late ’70s, one notable example was the first Clash LP, which presented a rich portrait of London as a decayed and violent landscape where one struggled for survival. This echoed the theme of how the lost power and fortune of the British empire diminished the expectations of its current citizens; this was presented by many bands, from the Kinks to the Jam.
These were distant but clever and interesting voices, and very different from the “Morning in America” world view that pervaded the US in the ’80s. They seemed especially far from San Diego, where the nearly perpetual sunshine provides a completely different backdrop from London’s rain.