Punk flyer blow out from the Seibert Collection

Detail: Dead Kennedys flyer (collection Jason Seibert)You asked for it, we’ve got it: The recent success of the PDF set of mod-themed flyers from the Ken Fugate Collection prompts a 31-page volume of punk classics from early ’80s San Diego, courtesy of our beloved Jason Seibert.

The Seibert flyers reference a variety of venues, including Fairmount Hall, North Park Lions Club and the Adams Avenue Theater (many of them organized by Marc Rude’s Dead or Alive). San Diego acts include Personal Conflict, Men of Clay, No Age Limit, the Skullbusters, Social Spit, Manifest Destiny, Catch-22, Moral Majority, V-5, 5051, the Nutrons, the Middle Class, Battalion of Saints, District Tradition, the Front, Sacred Lies, the Injections and Black Tango.

Then and now: Adams Avenue Theater

(Roving correspondent/ photographer Kristen Tobiason revisits and documents the scenes of our youth. Today, the Adams Avenue Theater meets “Project Runway”!)

Detail: Discount Fabrics marquee, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)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 …

Detail: Discount Fabrics balcony, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)Detail: Discount Fabrics entry, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)Detail: Discount Fabrics stairway, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)Detail: Discount Fabrics facade, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)Detail: Discount Fabrics stage area, August 2008 (photo by Kristen Tobiason)

Read moreThen and now: Adams Avenue Theater

The Che Underground