Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
(Graphic artist extraordinaire and “Then and Now” documentarian Kristen Tobiason describes how Buffalo Springfield pushed us beyond the fringe.)
In the early ’80s, American hardcore punk rock was at its peak. New Wave was also flourishing amidst Studio 9 dance crowds. Bi-curious, lipstick boys. Giant shelves of sprayed hair in several shades of Clairol color.
What better way to rebel against your peers than to emulate a ’60s folk-rock band …
Buffalo Springfield. seriously?
(Roving correspondent Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our past glories. Today, we find out where the bodies are buried — or not.)
“You moved the headstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!” In the Stephen Spielberg film “Poltergeist,” a suburban family is attacked by malevolent spirits provoked by a relocated graveyard.
Calvary Cemetery, a k a “Pioneer Park,” (1501 Washington Place in Mission Hills) shares a similar history (tho’ the only spirits I’ve heard of there are those of the bottled variety). Historically, the area served as a Catholic graveyard “between 1875 and 1919, with burials continuing up until 1960.” In 1970 the cemetery was converted into a public park, and “the grave markers (but not the people) were removed. A group of some of the gravestones were clustered together and a central memorial was placed in the southeast corner of the park. The exact number of people buried there isn’t known, but research alludes to possibly 4,000 burials which have occured there.”
(Roving correspondent Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our past glories. Today, we take a cup of — non-alcoholic — kindness yet for auld lang syne.)
Making a list and checking it twice. … It’s that time again. Time to make the list we never keep — Empty promises to our inner selves: To get on the wagon; quit smoking; lose 10 pounds; leave the ball and chain; or finally quit the job at the factory and become a rock star, for real this time!
Having already quit smoking, I am finding that my resolutions this year are not groundbreaking attempts at reform but just some small quality-life tweakings. It’s pretty tame.
Here’s what my current list looks like:
1. Return to 5x/week yoga.
2. Get the turntable fixed.
3. Write more and maybe even get out the drawing pencils.
4. Remember to send out b’day cards and thank-you notes.
5. Quit freaking out about getting older.
6. Meditate regularly.
I can imagine what my resolutions would have been when I was younger! (Yipes.)
Maybe something like this:
(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).
(Roving correspondent/photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our youth. Today, Off the Record’s original location is roadkill.)
It takes my breath away that the candy store of my youth has been diminished to something as unsavory as a used-tire store. Off the Record has had a history, migrating from its origin on 6130 El Cajon Blvd. to the heart of the Hillcrest shopping district, where a much larger store thrived in the ’90s and early 21st century with San Diego’s indie rock scene and the DJ phemenon. The in-store concerts were memorable and yielded huge turnouts for bands such as The Misfits, Husker Du, Mudhoney and Nirvana. (Check out Nirvana at OTR in October 1991.)
After the original owner Phil Galloway sold the store, it downsized its stock considerably and in 2005 moved to a small storefront on University Avenue in North Park. The end of an era: Music stores can’t compete nowadays with the instant accessibility of MP3s and shareware. Record stores are reserved for the discriminating vinyl collectors who will never sell out completely to technology, no matter how clever those gizmos are!
Records will always be cooler.
(Roving correspondent/photographer Kristen Tobiason surveys the remains of Rock Palace, which enjoyed a brief mid-’80s run of all-ages fun. “The stretch of El Cajon Boulevard sandwiched between I-805 and the I-15 is a desert of boarded-up, abandoned buildings dotted with a few small neighborhood repair shops or used-car lots. The Rock Palace structure has been dead since the ’80s, when completion of I-15 isolated the neighborhood.” Wallflowers frontman Dave Rinck recalls its heyday.)
Someone, somehow, sometime about 1984 or 1985 discovered what must have been an old ballroom above some dingy retail shops on El Cajon Boulevard. [Editor’s note: Contemporary flyers tell us the address was 3465 El Cajon Blvd.] In its day, it must have been a grand olde place, for it had a really high ceiling; wonderful wooden floors; and this really huge, creaky old stage at one end.
And what? Yes, we also noticed that a couple of guys were starting to promote rock-‘n’-roll concerts there in that grand old ballroom. Dubious? Yes, it reeked of money laundering. Manuel Noriega, the Cali Cartel, some Burmese generals, and the Taliban were probably running the place jointly. Of course before you could say “Lose sleep, baby, and stay away from bed,” these dudes had demo tapes of various Che Underground bands in their hot little hands, and the era of the Rock Palace was on!!!
(Roving correspondent/ photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits and documents the scenes of our youth. Today, the Ken Cinema keeps it real!)
The Ken is the last of its kind. Most neighborhood theaters couldn’t cut the mustard as costs to run a neighborhood movie house skyrocketed in the early ’90s with the encroachment of digital projection and a hostile takeover by corporate multiplex theaters.
“The Ken opened in 1912,” the Cinema Treasures Web site tells us. “The theater was remodeled in 1947 by S. Charles Lee in Art Moderne style, and was restored in 1975 after being taken over by the Landmark chain as a showcase for foreign features.”
The first time I saw a film at the Ken (4061 Adams Ave.) was in 1981. In those years, the format was free-form and eclectic, serving foreign-language enthusiasts and cult-film buffs alike. The feature changed frequently, every day or so, from “8 1/2” to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to “Rear Window.” The Ken gave me my cinematic education and formed my tastes and preferences in film. Often it was like a big party, rowdy and interactive — I remember the row of scooters parked out front for “Quadrophenia.”
(Roving correspondent/ photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits and documents the scenes of our youth. Today, the Adams Avenue Theater meets “Project Runway”!)
No one could have imagined that this hallmark of our glory days, the Adams Avenue Theater (3325 Adams Ave.), would metamorphose into something so random as Discount Fabrics. I don’t think it’s as humiliating as it is simply bizarre.
The humiliation occurred in the late ’80s, during the venue’s brief reincarnation as the Purple Rain Club. The transforming of a theater into a fabric store has a thread of irony that keeps San Diego “weird.” Frankly, I prefer it to the gentrification that has sucked the charm out of other neighborhoods.
Discount Fabrics never remodeled. Outside of the merchandise, everything looks the same as it did. A quarter-century later, there is still a reflection of the building’s punk-rock roots. Shadows still linger, and I can imagine an entryway streaked with the scuff of Doc Martens and cigarette butts; blood, sweat and spit in the hall; the pit, a cluster of motion, like hornets, swinging fists and bodies, a stage bomb, a swan dive from the balcony …
(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.
(Roving correspondent/ photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits and documents the scenes of our youth. Today, Greenwich Village West learns Tagalog.)
Time has reduced my memory of the Greenwich Village basement to a hot cement pit: the flickering yellow light and a stairwell descending to a gully that had possibly the worst acoustics I’ve ever experienced!
I remember Morlocks guitarist Ted Friedman’s reverb hitting the wall — flat and nowhere to go, just like the smoke from our cigarettes. But we all had a good time. … Everybody who was anybody was there, right? (Maybe I’m harboring band-girlfriend resentment from schlepping equipment up and down those stairs.)
