This We Dug: K.C. and the Sunshine Band

(In this installment, Wallflower Dave Rinck revisits the bouncy side of the ’70s.)

K.C. and the Sunshine Band group shotWe used to have a great Halloween tradition in San Diego, which I am frankly surprised hasn’t been covered here yet. Anyway, I’m sure someone will get around to this one soon enough. Of course I’m talking about the Pink Panther Halloween Ball. Man, that was fun!

The deal is, one year I was attending this event, and I ran into Darren Grealish and Burt Huerta, and these guys had on these leisure suits with lapels out to their shoulders. (I think I was dressed as a gerbil or something equally stupid.) I mean, they looked great, almost as if they had just stepped out of Studio 54 in about 1978. And Darren says to me, “People think I’m dressed up for Halloween, but this is how I like to dress every day!”

And who wouldn’t? I mean, come on get real: Black leather biker jackets and torn jeans every day? How much of that stuff can you really stand before you need to cut your jive talkin’ and lighten up a bit? Yes, if punk rock can be summed up as the Mister Hyde of our angry rebellious youth, then Disco would be the happy Doctor Jekyll.

The Wallflowers: “Rubber Room”

Paul, Tommy, Dave and Aaron of the Wallflowers, ca. 1983While we’re all in a Wallflowers frame of mind, here’s another Phase One Wallflowers gem freshly excavated after a quarter-century beneath the Canadian permafrost. “Rubber Room” is essential Wallflowers material,” writes bassist Paul Howland. “This one and ‘Funland’ (along with any of the many Stooges cover tunes) encapsulate the Wallflowers sound nicely.

Read moreThe Wallflowers: “Rubber Room”

Related bands: Who’s your daddy?

Bruce “Skabz” Atwell of Social SpitA lovely aspect of the Che Underground scene was how cheerfully it blended San Diego genres and geographies. We all had our influences and constituencies, and any evening with our bands was sure to bring different crowds into new alignments.

We’ve started a new Related Bands section of the blog to celebrate our bushy family tree with profiles of the San Diego bands we sprang from, performed alongside and created down the road. Ray Brandes has continued his support of this site with a fine profile of the Tell-Tale Hearts; who else’s pictures and stories do you want to see here?

The Che Underground